What will the next decade be like?

[Chloe88]

The last decade, we've had a lot of change and people say there has been more change to lifestyles and technology in the last 10 years than the previous 50. The internet, iPhones, the apps, how we book taxis, AirBnB, disappearing shops, better equality but at the same time rise in the far right and I could go on.

 

I'm guessing these will happen in the next decade:

 

1. Many jobs killed off by automation or technology

2. Gap between rich and poor widen much more

3. People suffering ill health due to social media

4. More nastiness and bullying on-line

5. More people in open relationships, less marriage

6. Many small businesses like dry cleaners, bakers, nanny agencies being killed off by technology

7. Self-driving cars

8. Some kind of automated parcel delivery

9. More loneliness

10. More childishness and stupidity in politics.

 

What do you think?

 

 

[twetzel59]

Well to start, I'll reflect on what you've predicted:

 

1. Agreed

2. Agreed

3. Agreed - especially if you mean emotional health

4. Probably, sadly

5. Eh, I don't think so. I expect more unmarried relationships, but not necessarily open, non-exclusive ones.

6. Potentially

7. Hard to say. Tesla is already pretty automated, so maybe.

8. Wouldn't be surprised to see partial automation of delivery. We already have Starship delivering food here.

9. Definitely.

10. Probably. Civility is being defeated by haste and extremism.

 

And for my own predictions:

 

11. Artificial intelligence will continue to deliver more personalized technology, at the expense of privacy.

12. Governments in the developing world will become more repressive and less democratic.

13. Energy usage will increase.

14. Climate change will prove a grand challenge for humankind.

[Nick2]

Climate crisis will move beyond our ability to do anything about it.

 

The "haves" and "have nots" world wide will cause people to move to find relief.

 

Leaders with authoritarian ways will increase.

 

People will continue to live within their clicks.

[lazypanda]

Hopefully, self driving cars powered by renewable energy without any emissions.

Am i asking for too much ? 

[the great acescape]

It will be hell, I think. In my opinion, the 2020s are going to make the 2010s look as bright and carefree as a Thomas Kincaid painting.

 

The window on a democratic and mutually beneficial solution to climate change is rapidly closing, and the estimate of a 10-year window to reverse the worst effects already appears unjustifiably optimistic. In an absolute worst case scenario, I imagine that we will witness a transition from climate denialism on the U.S. right to a full embrace of climate nationalism and eco-fascism, especially since collective action problems, and the solutions they require, don’t sit well with the reactionary mind. Why focus on equity and actually caring for human beings when you can simply let them die in floods, storms, and droughts?

 

I remember in June when researchers in the Canadian Arctic discovered that permafrost was melting 70 years earlier than expected. That same week, Republican politicians in Oregon fled the capital in order to deny Democrats quorum on a bill that aimed to only modestly curb emissions. One politician threatened to shoot police who came to retrieve him – I believe his specific words were, “send bachelors, and come heavily armed”. Right wing militias promised to converge on Salem during the day of the vote, forcing police to close the capitol building. The bill died. 

 

At any rate we probably won't be able to realize that anything is seriously wrong until it's too late, because we as a society are incapable of imagining apocalyptic scenarios as anything but a sudden, obvious event, with a clearly defined beginning. 

 

The end of the world isn’t what we see in The Walking Dead, or Independence Day, or Terminator. It is Children of Men. It is public spaces abandoned to time and the wilds while corporations privatize what’s left, chasing ever narrowing profit margins. It’s migrants, baking in the desert and dying like animals. It’s the last of us, in a cold and lonely waiting room, staring hollowly at the wall and wondering what the point of any of this even was – after all, what is art, or music, or literature, if no one will be left to claim it? But hey, what we loved was not enough, I guess. And we get inhabit the terrifying dead space between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap!

 

Happy New Year!

 

 

[Alawyn-Aebt]

I do feel there are reasons to be optimistic in some cases, in spite of the obvious failings in others.

 

Will we solve climate change in a decade? Absolutely no, but we might make progress as opposed to our recent attempts which seemed to do nothing.

 

I think nastiness online will remain, but people will be better in dealing with it. The world wide web was only invented in 1990. I'm 19 now but I remember having to get off the internet anytime my parents needed to make a phone call (from a land line, also something that will continue to be disappearing). The fact the internet became so much more accessible since then I think allowed people to spread their nastiness online and we collectively weren't ready for that. I suspect those who are 10 or younger now will be much better at handling online nastiness, since they will have grow up with accessible internet more so than even I did just 10 years older than them.

 

The decline of small businesses is sad and will continue, but things survive. My nearest hobby shop can somehow undercut online dealers. Will more close? Yes, and those in very small towns and rural areas will be particularly hard-hit, but there will not be a retail Apocalypse. Interestingly it might open up opportunities for small independent shops to flourish, maybe in a sort of continuously repeating Kuznet's Curve of retail.

 

Increasing urbanization everywhere will probably happen too. Whether this is good or bad is up to you, but cities will gain in importance. The power of cities economically and demographically is astounding, even politics has failed to realize just how dependent we are on cities. Even the cities themselves do not always realize it. This trend will continue. Interestingly it might be good for the environment, as people move towards urban areas it leaves open other areas, maybe the idea of setting aside a large portion of the earth for the environment will be feasible without massive deportations.

 

Populations growth will slow to next to nothing. The present population growth is shockingly low, Even without forced draconian measures like the one-child policy (China and Brazil each have the same population growth rate, despite starting from similar growth-rates and one undertaking brutal measures while the other did practically nothing beyond spreading knowledge on how to prevent pregnancies) world population has slowed dramatically from the 1950s. Also, a decreasing population growth rate coupled with our already well-above necessity food production worldwide would allow us to give up some farmland for the environment, helping it too just as urbanization might.

 

Globally authoritarianism does seem to be flourishing, but we also thought the USSR was flourishing in the 1970s and 1980s (just listen to how Reagan et. al. discussed the USSR if you need evidence to jog your memory). Then suddenly it collapsed. Looking back it makes sense why it would collapse and obvious, but at the time we did not realize it and instead panicked. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.

 

There are plenty of other things, but all-in-all the world will be okay. Probably it won't get substantially better but reading history tells you it never does get better, but neither does it get much worse. Now for the USA... Hold on tight I'm much less optimistic about it.

 

And self-driving cars, I don't trust a machine to be ethical but I hate to drive. I hope they actually work reasonably well.

[RoseGoesToYale]

Pretty much agree with all except #7, and by extension #8. I think the number horrific crashes and accidents exhibited by self-driving cars has made people wary of them. Really, no form of transit should be automated (exceptions being small closed systems, like people movers, where the risk of accident variables is a lot lower) because cameras and robots will never be able to act on survival-driven instinct that often saves lives in a dangerous situation.

 

18 minutes ago, Aebt-Ætheling said:

Populations growth will slow to next to nothing.

I actually agree. In European countries, populations are already seriously aging and there aren't enough babies to make up for it. I can see some of these countries adopting semi-open border policies and offering language and culture transition resources to entice immigrants to move there to make up the depleted workforces, because, e.g. as is the case in Nordic countries, people are having less babies, waiting til later, or having none at all.

 

I believe within the generations after me American nationalism is going to reach all-time lows, compounded with diminishing job opportunities, poor labor laws and the formidable cost of higher ed compared to other countries, to the point where the number of young expats is going to increase. They've already seen the shit show that is the current administration, and if my peers and I have little faith in my government to fix any of the social problems or its own failings, I imaging the young'uns would have even less. More than anything, they've been exposed to the Divided States of America than the United States of America. There's not much national identity left to hold onto.

 

Inftrastructure in the US is going to start failing catastrophically, and there won't be enough workers in skilled trades to even begin to rectify the problem. There's also going to be a nursing/geriatric worker shortage.

 

Ironically, I see nuclear power making a comeback, namely because I think we'll be forced to use it. Fallout from peak oil is possible. Problem is, my country can't mitigate or dispose of waste, much less deadly nuclear waste, to save its own behind.

 

I don't even want to speculate on the rest. Too horrifying.

 

But my country is going to have to go through a very painful cultural shift. The attitude of everything's-gonna-be-fine, capitalism-fueled optimism is going to come to a grinding halt.

[Acing It]

3 hours ago, Chloe88 said:

Many small businesses like dry cleaners, bakers, nanny agencies being killed off by technology

add supermarkets to technology (I suppose you include shopping online in this0 as a cause of the decline of the high street shop, especially bakeries and the like.

 

2 hours ago, Nick2 said:

People will continue to live within their clicks.

I read this as 'will continue to live with their chicks', thinking that's a bold machosimo statement! 🤣

 

1 hour ago, the great acescape said:

I remember in June when researchers in the Canadian Arctic discovered that permafrost was melting 70 years earlier than expected.

 

46 minutes ago, Aebt-Ætheling said:

Will we solve climate change in a decade? Absolutely no, but we might make progress as opposed to our recent attempts which seemed to do nothing.

 I've just come back from visiting family over Christmas. Both my parents (forgivable as they are well into their older age) and my brother (far less forgivable) strongly feel that no one should protest but leave it to politicians to make decisions when ready and should put their heads together to come up with solutions to propose to said politicians, even if they don't have the skills the do so. They can't seem to see the function of public pressure at all. They also quote the hypocrisy of school children protesting as an excuse not to go to school while at the same time demanding new phones and littering trains to and from the protests (partly justified) while not seeing that even this is better than letting politicians to it. The husband of a niece of mine pulled the big one by saying that there is no such thing as global warming (let alone the human contribution to this) quoting that scientists claimed wrongly there would be a new ice age decades ago, ignoring the mountains of evidence in favour of there being global warming and of the human contribution to this. Most people where they live seem to be of the same opinion (and this is just the tip of the iceberg, there were discussions about muslims taking over the world as well, on the flimsiest of evidence, hearsay and a lot of exagerration) I came back anxious, despondent and depressed and I've been feeling sad since. If that is how many people feel, nothing at all is going to happen. 😥 I fear for the future with all the ignorance, slimplistic thinking and nastiness. I can't even be myself around those people. anything outside the binary is subject to ridicule by them, especially my brother.

The paradox is that they are basically kind people prepared to help where possible.

[Purple Wanderer]

1. Hundred percent my first thought. Economic stress due to less and less of the populace working.

[thyristor]

34 minutes ago, Aebt-Ætheling said:

Globally authoritarianism does seem to be flourishing, but we also thought the USSR was flourishing in the 1970s and 1980s (just listen to how Reagan et. al. discussed the USSR if you need evidence to jog your memory). Then suddenly it collapsed. Looking back it makes sense why it would collapse and obvious, but at the time we did not realize it and instead panicked. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.

It collapsed into chaos, wars and renewed dictatorships. I think I know the reason why:

 

People far too often focus on the bad stuff and how to get rid of that particular bad stuff. No one seems to pay much attention towards the idea of a method for preventing any progress becoming beyond acceptable. As for your example on retail apocalypse: the bad thing is not that retailers dissappear. The cultural atmosphere of people walking through neighbourhood shops is an era and if it is at its end, it's at its end, no use being sorry for that. The problem lies in the reasons why retail is suddenly dissapearing: because some people make a fortune by it, and the bulk of people follows along without making room for thought in their brains. They see/hear: "convenient, cheap, large choice.", and this is what they make of it: "good, good, good", instead of "good for me, good for me, good for me, so, what's it to others?", and if you tell them to think that second way, they complain: "But I have to look after my own family first!". That was true in the caveman days, and I despise that it is still true, although we have all the technologies, philosophies and resources at hand to make it obsolete.

 

So, here's my take at the next decade:

 

{ It will be horrible in eighty-twelve various ways }

unless we / which is why we have to

{ realize that we must drop what we have at our hands and work on solutions of living in distributed peace }

 

No climate change can kill us if we know how to live together and share what ever little we have.

 

Human rights and children's  rights can never be expressed in actual amounts of money or clothing or temperature or whatever. Sometimes life gives less, sometimes life gives more. Yes, sometimes mankind itself it the jerk responsible for earth giving less. But I will continue to spend my time on working out how to put this puzzle together, where to find that missing link that keeps humanity from living in paradies.

 

We can practice and actually live this in those small communities that we all live in and try to carry it upwards in our respective systems.

 

And, one more thing: this year, it's finally all rhyming and metrically groovy again! *sings* "... what lies waiting down the line, in the end ooooooffff.... twenty-nine!" HNY y'all!

[the great acescape]

Quote

There are plenty of other things, but all-in-all the world will be okay. Probably it won't get substantially better but reading history tells you it never does get better, but neither does it get much worse. Now for the USA... Hold on tight I'm much less optimistic about it.

I definitely think that the planet earth will be "okay" in the long run, a la a "Life After People" deal, but while that's a very zen thought I'm still honestly concerned about the potential for human suffering, and I do think there's a capacity for things to get far, far worse. Also curious what you mean about the bolded part - I'm not picking a fight, to be clear, and I'm not one of those Steven Pinker type optimists either (which might be obvious, lol) but I'm interested in knowing more about what you mean here, if you feel like explaining. 

 

Quote

I believe within the generations after me American nationalism is going to reach all-time lows, compounded with diminishing job opportunities, poor labor laws and the formidable cost of higher ed compared to other countries, to the point where the number of young expats is going to increase. They've already seen the shit show that is the current administration, and if my peers and I have little faith in my government to fix any of the social problems or its own failings, I imaging the young'uns would have even less. More than anything, they've been exposed to the Divided States of America than the United States of America. There's not much national identity left to hold onto.

I really, really would like to see this outcome in the next decade and will fight like hell to build sustainable communities based on mutual aid and compassion in this country. I'm fortified by some small victories I've witnessed in the past 5 years, and I can remember as far back as the early part of this decade that new conversations were emerging about a "New American Dream". Given how hashtag bleak my first post was in this thread, it'd be easy to assume I'm a fatalist (or god forbid, an accelerationist - blech) but I would love to read my post in another 10 years and be forced to eat crow about how wrong I was. 

 

Also if any politicians are reading this, I'd be super embarrassed and Owned for the rest of my life if you gave up even a portion of your power to build an amazing, sustainable society that meets the needs of its people without degrading ecosystems, and allows for everyone to flourish beyond what we thought was even possible, and might just never stop crying about it, ever. Just saying.

[Lord Jade Cross]

I think of the next decade and Im reminded of this

 

 

[Alawyn-Aebt]

1 hour ago, elisabeth_II said:

The problem lies in the reasons why retail is suddenly dissapearing: because some people make a fortune by it, and the bulk of people follows along without making room for thought in their brains.

Exactly, sorry if my point didn't come across clearly. I sometimes work out my justifications or examples for my thinking and accidentally forget to accentuate the actual arguments of my thinking leaving my point muddled. The reason why I specifically discussed my locally-owned shops was that a locally-owned shop is better for the local economy (particularly in non-highly-urbanized areas). I don't care if (fill in any big retailer) goes under due to internet competition, but I care if the locally-owned pharmacy does, or hobby shop, or etc. because that directly harms my local economy much more than say losing a big national retailer. 

 

1 hour ago, the great acescape said:

I'm interested in knowing more about what you mean here, if you feel like explaining. 

I can a bit, to preface I am not strictly an optimist either, my family describes me as a pessimist, but I really take a very middle-of-the-road approach to the optimistic-pessimistic debates.

 

Often I hear people say how bad things are now, I talked to a 75-ish year old librarian and he was talking about how dangerous the world seems now. Yet the era he was describing as great was the middle of the Cold War... He went on and on about how terrorism scares him yet the fact that we had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over and set to launch at a moments notice (and almost did multiple times) of the Cold War did not appear to frighten him at all. Now the threat is nuclear war is still there, but much less. Or when people talk about how extremist religions are on the rise. At least we are not burning people at the sake as much as we did, or accusing people of witchcraft, or openly declaring war solely on religious justification. Same thing when people bemoan the lack of bipartisanship in news. Read newspapers from the 1800 election and bipartisanship is no where to be found, instead outright libel, mudslinging, threats, whataboutisms, etc. proliferate. 

 

Yet on the flip side we didn't banish the threats, be they nuclear, terrorist, or conventional, to people. We didn't end religious justification for horrendous acts. We didn't solve partisanship and demagoguery. Rather the bad just changes, rather than expands or contracts (what might be different than this cycle of relative consistency is climate change). Baring climate change most problems just morph rather than are completely solved, and those that are solved often give rise to new problems: the ever-morphing cycle of problems. 

 

Nostalgia often plays into this all and colours people's lenses; I read a paper by a Cuban political refugee saying how great Batista compared to Castro and while he might have been better Batista was far from democratic or open or just - just as Castro was.

Hope that was what you wanted.

[DuskFire]

Enough Said

[Chloe88]

13 hours ago, twetzel59 said:

 

11. Artificial intelligence will continue to deliver more personalized technology, at the expense of privacy.

Yes, privacy will be gone. I actually don't use faecesbook and never have because I always suspected they were sneaky, and I was proved right. A lot of companies harvest and sell on your data.

 

 

13 hours ago, Nick2 said:

Leaders with authoritarian ways will increase.

That's true and also those who are incapable will stand for committees, mayorships, prime ministers and presidents. Today, there are incapable people who put themselves forward knowing well that they are incapable,

 

 

 

[the great acescape]

4 hours ago, Chloe88 said:

Yes, privacy will be gone. I actually don't use faecesbook and never have because I always suspected they were sneaky, and I was proved right. A lot of companies harvest and sell on your data

I ended up deleted facebook permanently this year, along with most social media, and my mental health personally has been much better off for it. I try not to use any smart devices in my home, but I do have a smart phone so unfortunately there's not much to do about that.