The World in 2076

The World in 2076(newscientist.com)

57 points by fitzwatermellow 9 years ago | 66 comments

eliben 9 years ago |

It's curious how these predictions always turn out to be based on the current technology, pushed to its limits. Kinda like sci-fi from the 1950s predicts advanced space travel but barely any computers in the early 21st century.

partisan 9 years ago | |

This is a great observation. I grew up reading books that said we would be living in torus shaped space stations and shuttling back and forth to the moon. As you pointed out, there was never any emphasis on computers in these predictions, just video conferencing at best.

The present is disappointing when taken from that perspective, but fortunately Elon Musk probably grew up reading the same books and dreaming about the same future.

simonh 9 years ago | |

I'm reading 'The Stainless Steel Rat' to my daughters as bedtime reading right now. They're loving it, but I can't help noticing how dated much of the technology is. I remember even reading it back in the late 80s it was beginning to show it's age a bit, but then it's 5 years older than I am. Truly great story though, lots of fun.

Cyph0n 9 years ago | |

I could have sworn that Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov both had computers in their sci-fi universes, but now that I try to think about it, you're probably right. The closest thing I can think of to a computer is HAL from 2001.

zardo 9 years ago | | |

They had computers, but they usually remained gigantic expensive machines. They could forsee supercomputing, but not personal computing.

bwindels 9 years ago |

I feel it's unfortunate articles like these don't put more emphasis on climate change, and instead still keep up the narrative that we will innovate ourselves out of the problem. There is not reason to believe we will, and I expect society as a whole to already be heavily impacted by climate change by 2076.

The more people are talking about the fact that human civilization won't survive 4 degrees of warming in a 100 year time span (current projection by 2100), maybe the more society will see that although innovation is important, it's even more important is that we all accept to give up things deemed indispensable today.

Since that might not happen, 60 years time from now the future might look a lot more dystopian than this article would suggest.

cowl 9 years ago | |

I feel it's unfortunate that comments like this continue to spread the naive idea that anything but innovation will resolve the climate issue. Human nature is what it is. There is plenty of historic evidence to believe that innovation is our way out. Like we innovated ourselves out of material scarcity during the industrial revolution. Like we innovated ourselves out of the coal Industrial era using other carbon fuels. Like we have already started to innovate ourselves out of the hydrocarbon era with other energetic sources which by the way will need to be out-innovated again by our grandchildren because they are not perfect too.

marssaxman 9 years ago | | |

Innovation is not magic; it is the product of investment. The time to innovate was 20 years ago; now it's effectively too late. The climate has already changed and the rate of change is not slowing. We will "innovate", all right, by necessity, and ride it out as best we can; but we can't innovate our way back to the climate we had before.

jly 9 years ago | |

My first thought before reading the link was that the world of 2076 would be one in which we have utterly devastated the Earth's biosphere, and we are using all of our technological resources to sustain a human-survivable planet while simultaneously looking for other homes.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that and we figure this out sooner rather than later.

wlll 9 years ago | |

This is the thing that has me utterly scared. I've got young daughters who may potentially live to 2100 and the state of the world in the years leading up that point has me incredibly worried. I wish I was thinking more positively about their future rather than wondering where will be the best place to grow food given climate change, how will they protect themselves, or where is the best place to shelter in my house if a nuke hits the local city.

To paraphrase a 70 year old man I talked to "I'm glad I have been alive in the time period I have", and that was before Trump and everything that stands for too.

bluetomcat 9 years ago | | |

Media plays an unforgivable role in convincing people that the world is becoming more unsafe. In fact, cars, equipment and most public places are safer than ever, but the media is able to reach an ever bigger audience with every sensationalist title about an exceptional event.

I come from a formerly communist eastern European country where, before the fall of communism, media was tightly controlled and censored. We had more road fatalities than now with only 1/10 the amount of cars, much more work-related injuries, a significantly worse and lower-tech medical care, political prisoners tortured in God knows what ways. Yet, most people who are old enough to remember it feel nostalgic about that period and constantly say "look at the news nowadays".

hbt 9 years ago |

The anti-innovation backlash is the most likely thing to happen.

Today, politicians are winning the populace by lamenting on unfair trade deals, globalism and foreigners taking jobs. Those jobs are not coming back, if they are, certainly not to humans.

We will see a growing class of people who are economically useless. (read Professor Yuval Noah Harari new book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_... ) And, no, the answer is not basic income. It's intelligence augmentation.

Intelligence is the only valuable currency nowadays and we are not acquiring enough of it fast enough compared to the machines.

Our only tool for intelligence augmentation is still education. Not good enough at all. It's already impossible to keep up; let alone learn something from scratch at a late stage in life and be expected to contribute something significant enough to derive long term economic advantage that can't be taken by a machine or globalists.

I think all other issues will fix themselves or reach a natural equilibrium (overpopulation, climate change etc.). But lack of intelligence is our doom.

drinchev 9 years ago |

As older as I get ( 30 now ) I feel more and more the world is going to dystopia, rather than utopia.

Instead of having a world-wide federation, we will most probably have a period of dissonance around the nations where people will close more and more inside their borders, until they feel they have the power of their lives in their hands again.

I know you won't like it, but I will blame unregulated capitalism for this one. Media is so sensational, because they know nobody will watch / read anything that has a boring title. Social networks are becoming click-junky. Advertisement is fraudulent on a lot of levels. Globalization, instead of making poorest people not so poor has made rich people richer and so on. And no wonder this tendency is going worse with such a high-priced education.

knz 9 years ago | |

I'm not sure capitalism deserves the entire blame - some of it is just human nature (it's harder to care about something that happens in a distant location or time).

The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in the institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.

I often see the "Pass it on" billboards (http://www.values.com/inspirational-sayings-billboards) - perhaps we need something for science and education? ("Clean air regulations save x lives a year in your community", "Every $1 spent on education saves $x on welfare down the road". I hate billboards but at least they would break through the media bubble many of us live in.

eli_gottlieb 9 years ago | | |

>The question is what can we do about it? How do we rebuild public trust in the institutions (science and education) that should guide the country in the right path even if the people are asleep at the wheel? Trust in experts is at an all time low. Fact checking appears to have failed = "The fact checkers are biased!". And people are retreating into their media bubbles.

Experts and institutions need to care about the people and stand up against the malign parts of the capitalist establishment.

sapphireblue 9 years ago | |

The unpleasant truth is that this dystopia isn't coming out of nowhere, it is being built with our own hands. Our everyday desires, decisions, actions and inaction decide what will be built (more apps) and what won't (nextgen cures).

tsaprailis 9 years ago |

Though it's always fun to read/watch such predictions, chaos theory suggests we have absolutely no clue as to what the future will look like. The black swan is a nice book explaining why predictions generally fail.

mason240 9 years ago | |

When I was a middle schooler in the 90s my grandpa would bring over stacks of old Popular Mechanics magazines from the 50s-70s that were predicting what life would be like in future decades.

I think it gave me a good perspective when reading these same kinds of predictions made today. For the most part, they complely missed on the existence, much less the impact, on things like social media.

It was easy to predict the physical nature of small, hand-held computing devices, but their actual impact on how society functions was missed.

Even watching "realistic" contemporary sc-fi like The Expanse, they focus on the physical aspect of how realistic space colonization would work with slow space travel, but completely ignore the role of AI and drones. Will we even need real people to live on an asteroid city, even if Mars is colonized?

ant6n 9 years ago | |

"...The way our statistical analysis works, the farther into the future you go, the more accurate the projection. It's based on a kind of non-linear dynamics, whereby small fluctuations tend to factor out over time." - Julien Bashir

kbutler 9 years ago |

How long until this feels dated?

Maybe I'm getting too jaded.

gagege 9 years ago | |

You aren't. Look at predictions about the future from 1916. They're the definition of quaint.

unethical_ban 9 years ago | | |

I've gotten the opposite impression. There was a set of drawings from 1910 predicting Paris in 2010. There were some obvious whiffs, but it broadly predicted automation, remote audio/video communications, and other things.

mhurron 9 years ago | |

None of the things listed will happen by 2076. Unfortunately I will be too dead by 2076 to say I told you so, so I have to say it now.

None of this will happen by 2076. If someone finds this comment then, I told you so.

AnimalMuppet 9 years ago | | |

I think this is a very important point. If you want to think wisely about the future, remember this: You're dead.

I'm not trying to be morbid. That's the one thing about the future that you can be sure of. If your approach for thinking about the future doesn't include that, you're not being very wise.

guard-of-terra 9 years ago |

Right now I'm more concerned about society changes than technology changes.

Will we make democracy work for the average citizen? Will they have control of their data? Do we get to preserve our culture and the rights deriving from it given the continuing mass migration? Will we figure out basic income? If not, what's the job all those people are going to hold? Will we stop concentrating people in a few attractive megacities surrounded by population desert? Will we stop preying on young like we do today? Perhaps when there'll be no young to speak of? What'll happen to religions? To parenting?

mobiuscog 9 years ago | |

You'll have to decide what an 'average' citizen is, first.

mikeash 9 years ago | | |

Well, they have approximately one testicle and one ovary, slightly under ten fingers, and live some hundreds or thousands of miles beneath southeast Asia.

guard-of-terra 9 years ago | | |

What's the average citizen will be like? Will we be homogenous on the scale of the world? One contry? One region? Will there be classes? How they will interact? Will they consider themself one society after all? Will there be large groups of outcasts or lowlives?

Will the illusion of "middle class" finally evaporate? Will it then be a standoff between several equally powerful society sides? Or is it winner takes all, not having to consider any losers anymore?

bbctol 9 years ago | | |

Or if that's even the right question. Do we have an obligation to raise the minimum standard in our society, so that no decent citizen is starving or in pain, even if that doesn't optimize the average? How much should we count future generations? There's tons of philosophy that must be included in any practical discussion.

mason240 9 years ago | | |

I think the "average" person on earth is 35 year old Indian male.

lordnacho 9 years ago |

Some of these are science predictions, and some are economics predictions.

Here's my take:

- Replicator is unlikely. The machine that makes everything is like the drug that cures everything and the man who knows everything. We already have specialist replicators, specialist drugs, and specialist professors. For the same reason, we won't get a generalist AI, just a bunch of very good specialists.

- James Webb will tell us within a few years whether there's lots of life or none. Some realisation about just how likely life is will happen as we use the JWT to scan various planets.

- Similarly with superconductivity, we'll either find a way to do it, or a reason why it can't be done.

- Economics: the revolution here is how society changes when there's a bunch of old people around, mostly healthy and mostly skilled. I suspect people will want to be able to retrain, and so the old model where there was only time (opportunity cost) to go to school when you were young will change. It probably already has for some people.

- Tech/Econ: society will have thought hard about giving everyone a decent living while the tech people build just about everything.

EwanG 9 years ago |

Link to a page about their special issue, though it does have a TL;DR of each article. Seems that they are almost equally split between utopia (energy is free and we can make everything) and dystopia (everyone is becoming anti-science and oh about that nuclear war...)

EGreg 9 years ago |

One of the best ways to get me to sign up for a magazine I've ever seen! Great tantalizing content list all in one place followed by an article with a paywall a bit beyond the fold.

guard-of-terra 9 years ago |

This one is funny:

> The world in 2076: The anti-science backlash has begun

Science is like fashion. We (as a society) might be pro-science in 2025, anti-science in 2040, pro-science again in 2055 and finally begin to recover from anti-science in 2076. In other words, this one might change very very fast. There might be much more options, like "everybody likes science but it grinds to halt" and "science is loudly disapproved but a lot of fruitful private research goes on"

acqq 9 years ago | |

> Science is like fashion

And the claim is based on... which proofs or sources? Or is it "just a fashion" that some people actually want proofs or sources for some claims?

My claim is that, at least in Europe, what we today call "science" was something that wasn't unfashionable at least the last 350 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science

goalieca 9 years ago | |

Countries that turn their back on science will fall behind.

acqq 9 years ago | | |

Exactly. "What has happened in these nations to support these discoveries and what has happened when they ended?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&t=22m47s

Around 10 minutes on that subject, that part of the presentation is called the "Naming Rights."

guard-of-terra 9 years ago | | |

Will there still be competition for progress?

kkotak 9 years ago |

Every decade brings a technology movement that steers the path of humanity in a certain direction. Nobody would've predicted the rise of social media (yes, including Snapchat, Instagram, Pokemon Go)and how much of the humanity gets consumed by it, thereby derailing us from the track we were on the decade prior to it.

komali2 9 years ago |

Why did this website want to have notifications enabled for it?

amelius 9 years ago |

No singularity?

simonh 9 years ago | |

We don't even have a vague outline of a guiding principle of a theory for what general purpose 'strong' intelligence actually is, let alone a road map to achieving anything like it. So no, probably not.

I have a theory that on a long-term universal scale of general intelligence, humans are unbelievably stupid. What is the absolute minimum, basement level of general intelligence necessary to develop a material technology? That's what we have, because we've only just managed it. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Yet why doesn't everybody intuitively realize this? Why did it take me 50 years to work it out? ...Exactly.

sgift 9 years ago | |

Would be a pretty short and boring prediction. Individual predictions for specific areas are far more interesting.

ivraatiems 9 years ago | |

It's always 20 years away.

notahacker 9 years ago | | |

And will be 20 years away in 2076, like it was in 1976 and (in its previous incarnation as millenialist religious beliefs) 1876 and 76BC

At least human predictions about the future are relatively predictable.