# Speculating about the next fifty years



## Harpo (Apr 29, 2013)

Fifty years ago we had a few satellites such as Telstar, we had new words & concepts such as 'clone' and 'the butterfly effect'.
Telstar is still in orbit, though no longer functional.

I wonder what scientific marvels the world will have fifty years from now, and what things newly discovered/created in 2013 will turn out to be important in the longterm.

I hereby invite you to speculate.


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## Vertigo (Apr 29, 2013)

I think genetics and nano-technology will dominate and probably something that combines the two; bio-tech maybe. If we finally crack nuclear fusion (we'd better!) then that will also be hugely significant.


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## Gumboot (May 6, 2013)

I think there will be technological stagnation as I am anticipating the collapse of liberal western civilisation in the next 100 years.

My prediction is that China's increasing demand for resources will draw it into conflict with the west, and that this conflict will undermine western civilisation and end the USA's economic and political dominance. Conflict will result in a sudden explosion of modernisation in China (much as happened to the USA during WW2) which will result in their ascendary as the global super power, and an explosion in their already impressive population. These post-war Chinese "baby boomers" will drive social and technological advancements over their lifetime in the same way that the post WW2 baby boomers of the USA have driven social and technological development over the last 60 years.


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## BetaWolf (May 6, 2013)

Volcanic winter or five-meter-high sealevel rise. Flip a coin.


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## Bick (May 10, 2013)

I'm with Gumboot:

Collapse of the "West", climate change and subsequent increased levels of war and famine, along with deteriorating educational standards (reliance on the www and "smart"phones to immediately tell us everything we could want to know without ever having to learn anything - the next generation will know even less than the current one, and I despair at the ignorance of the current batch tbh) - all of which means I also think there's going to be a stagnation except in those areas we really don't need it, i.e. smaller faster computers. 

I've heard people say, "oh technology will come to the rescue" regards climate change and other problems.  But I don't think it will actually.  I think the world's going to hell in a handcart.


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## Ted Cross (Jun 25, 2013)

Harpo said:


> Fifty years ago we had a few satellites such as Telstar, we had new words & concepts such as 'clone' and 'the butterfly effect'.
> Telstar is still in orbit, though no longer functional.
> 
> I wonder what scientific marvels the world will have fifty years from now, and what things newly discovered/created in 2013 will turn out to be important in the longterm.
> ...



We see the very beginnings of mind/data interfaces these days, and I expect that to be the single biggest explosion of technological change (perhaps along with nanobots) in the near future. That's why my WIP directly relates to this issue.


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## Ted Cross (Jun 25, 2013)

Gumboot said:


> I think there will be technological stagnation as I am anticipating the collapse of liberal western civilisation in the next 100 years.
> 
> My prediction is that China's increasing demand for resources will draw it into conflict with the west, and that this conflict will undermine western civilisation and end the USA's economic and political dominance. Conflict will result in a sudden explosion of modernisation in China (much as happened to the USA during WW2) which will result in their ascendary as the global super power, and an explosion in their already impressive population. These post-war Chinese "baby boomers" will drive social and technological advancements over their lifetime in the same way that the post WW2 baby boomers of the USA have driven social and technological development over the last 60 years.



Interesting that you say that, because I call my WIP 'near future' even though it is set in 2138 precisely because I first have civilization collapse later this century and have to begin rebuilding itself.


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## AMB (Jun 25, 2013)

Ted, next to quote is the multi-quote button. Press it for each post you want to quote, then hit the quote button. You should be able to respond to multiple people in one post.


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## Ted Cross (Jun 25, 2013)

AMB said:


> Ted, next to quote is the multi-quote button. Press it for each post you want to quote, then hit the quote button. You should be able to respond to multiple people in one post.



Thanks. I haven't come across that option before, and obviously I'm new here!


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## clovis-man (Jun 30, 2013)

Gumboot said:


> These post-war Chinese "baby boomers" will drive social and technological advancements over their lifetime in the same way that the post WW2 baby boomers of the USA have driven social and technological development over the last 60 years.


 
Oh, I just thought they'd move on to destroying the Earth as we know it without any bothersome messing around with socio-technical factors.


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## Gramm838 (Jun 30, 2013)

Gumboot said:


> I think there will be technological stagnation as I am anticipating the collapse of liberal western civilisation in the next 100 years.
> 
> My prediction is that China's increasing demand for resources will draw it into conflict with the west, and that this conflict will undermine western civilisation and end the USA's economic and political dominance. Conflict will result in a sudden explosion of modernisation in China (much as happened to the USA during WW2) which will result in their ascendary as the global super power, and an explosion in their already impressive population. These post-war Chinese "baby boomers" will drive social and technological advancements over their lifetime in the same way that the post WW2 baby boomers of the USA have driven social and technological development over the last 60 years.



I would partially agree with this but I'm not sure about the use of the word collapse...and I see religion having a baleful effect on western life.

I suspect that it might take 100 years rather than 50 but I see England at least (assuming the UK breaks up in the coming decades), but maybe France and Spain also as becoming an Islamic states simply through demographics/birthrate and the use of democracy; and increasing Islamic influence in Europe will drive the US further towards fundamental Christianity.

So if that happens I don't see a collapse as such, but a major paradigm shift in world views; and until _*all*_ religions are ridiculed out of existence, I can't see any way to deal with the coming dark age.

As for China, I think it will implode at some stage but the implosion will suck in a large part of the pacific rim and SE Asia will become more isolated and inward looking.

And as for Russia? Well, your guess is as good as mine...


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## JoanDrake (Jul 5, 2013)

Gramm838 said:


> I would partially agree with this but I'm not sure about the use of the word collapse...and I see religion having a baleful effect on western life.
> 
> I suspect that it might take 100 years rather than 50 but I see England at least (assuming the UK breaks up in the coming decades), but maybe France and Spain also as becoming an Islamic states simply through demographics/birthrate and the use of democracy; and increasing Islamic influence in Europe will drive the US further towards fundamental Christianity.
> 
> ...


 
I don't think you'll ever get to the point where all religions will be ridiculed out of existence. Religion, like it or not, serves a primordial need in people and that's not just from the fear of death, since some don't have an afterlife.

Religions can and do change and sometimes religion can have good effects as well. Most sociologists admit that the East Asian Religions, (Taoism, Buddhism, Shinto etc ) have much less of a bent towards authoritarianism than do most others. And all religions nowadays are evolving towards a Taoist model as this is most in keeping with the viewpoint of modern science, which effects us all, religious or not.

I might advise you to read Jared Diamond's*  Collapse* and pay particular attention to the chapter on Tokugawa Japan. They took the most warring nation on Earth and gave it 250 years of peace while staving off foreign conquest the whole time. They did this while accumulating enough wealth to modernize completely in 30 years. Think of what they might have accomplished had they had mechanisms to prevent authoritarianism.

As for the next 50 years remember that progress is not monolithic. I've read somewhere that if aviation had progressed as much as computers in the last 50 years we could all now buy a Boeing 747 for fifty bucks


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## Gramm838 (Jul 5, 2013)

JoanDrake said:


> I don't think you'll ever get to the point where all religions will be ridiculed out of existence. Religion, like it or not, serves a primordial need in people and that's not just from the fear of death, since some don't have an afterlife.
> 
> Religions can and do change and sometimes religion can have good effects as well. Most sociologists admit that the East Asian Religions, (Taoism, Buddhism, Shinto etc ) have much less of a bent towards authoritarianism than do most others. And all religions nowadays are evolving towards a Taoist model as this is most in keeping with the viewpoint of modern science, which effects us all, religious or not.
> 
> ...



I don't see the point in further discussing religion since there will never be an end to it...as for religion doing good things, name one that isn't something a reasonable, secular person wouldn't do.

As for medieval Japan; without having read the book you're  quoting from, I think to call Japan 'the most warring nation on earth' is, I think, stretching  a point; yes they had wars against the Mongols and Korea and so on, but a lot of their wars were internecine family feuds in order to control the Shogunate, and Japanese warfare could be quite ritualised as well - not like the wars the European nations got themselves into. European (as we recognise it now) warfare could be traced back almost without stop to the time of the Romans, up until the time of Spanish Armada and the 7 Years War; and the wars fought in Europe in that period were in many ways a total war of a type that the Japanese rarely, if ever, fought.


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## JoanDrake (Jul 6, 2013)

Gramm838 said:


> I don't see the point in further discussing religion since there will never be an end to it...as for religion doing good things, name one that isn't something a reasonable, secular person wouldn't do.
> 
> As for medieval Japan; without having read the book you're  quoting from, I think to call Japan 'the most warring nation on earth' is, I think, stretching  a point; yes they had wars against the Mongols and Korea and so on, but a lot of their wars were internecine family feuds in order to control the Shogunate, and Japanese warfare could be quite ritualised as well - not like the wars the European nations got themselves into. European (as we recognise it now) warfare could be traced back almost without stop to the time of the Romans, up until the time of Spanish Armada and the 7 Years War; and the wars fought in Europe in that period were in many ways a total war of a type that the Japanese rarely, if ever, fought.


 
The internecine family feuds were mainly what I was referring to. The conflicts with the Mongols were centuries before and the war with the Koreans was almost like a break for them. It was probably not the most warring nation on Earth, I guess, but over a century of almost constant conflict seems seem to amply justify its name of Sengoku or the Warring States period. 

The wars may have started in a ritualistic way but they became less and less so as time went on and in any case this misses my point. Diamond's chapter is trying to show that collapse may be averted and even used as a starting point for recovery if the society and government are assiduous in their efforts


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## StormSeeker (Aug 27, 2013)

I wish I could post links but I cant just yet. If anyone has the time please visit FutureTimeLine (.net) its an amazing log of what people have predicted we will be able to do in the next centuries, and beyond! 

Once I start reading it I read it all day. haha!


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## RCynic (Mar 26, 2014)

I don't know what will happen but I'd love to see some of these things become reality.

Quantum computing and true AI
Zero point energy
Nano and genetic RX for whatever ails us


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## Toby Frost (Mar 27, 2014)

I think any sort of speculation is nigh-on impossible. I've no idea what will happen to China, nobody ever discusses India and Brazil, Russia will continue to grovel before whichever thug beats it the hardest, Europe will presumably remain feeble and reliant on American firepower, the Middle East will, er, probably have a war with someone, quite possibly itself... and goodness knows about Britain.

I can think of four major problems about predicting the future:

1) a very small event could have enormous and unforeseen consequences - and a range of consequences, not just one;

2) it is wrong to simply extrapolate the most dynamic force of the time as being inevitable in its conquest of the world (which is why I'm not writing this from a slave labour camp, in German or Japanese). Three years ago, UKIP was a joke. Now it's a joke that gets column inches, and is pretty much admitted as speaking for a reasonable section of the population. I didn't see that coming.

3) more controversially, a lot of commentators on the intellectual/liberal side of things instinctively consider any culture other than their own to be stronger, more vibrant, dominant, powerful, etc. and are pessimistic to the point of masochism (I'm not aiming this at any earlier posts). This is not to say that there are no dangers to democracy, but that it is wrong to assume that a fight-back is impossible. 

4) technology. I can't even guess what will happen there.

Whatever happens, it will be a tough time.


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## RCynic (Mar 27, 2014)

Toby, I agree. I remember seeing one of my very old science fiction book covers showing an astronaut on a space walk. The ship, his suit, etc. were all believable but the thing that got me is he had a slide rule hanging from his utility belt....I guess digital anything that small wasn't imaginable then.


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## Stephen Palmer (Mar 27, 2014)

David Langford and Brian Stableford's _The Third Millennium_ had the Soviet Union hanging on into the 2900's...

You can't predict anything - the best you can do is guess. Who was it who said, all literature about the future is disguised comment about the present? (William Gibson?)


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## tinkerdan (Mar 31, 2014)

Predicting the future of technology and in essence the continued intellectual capacity of man have long been discussed even without the technology we see today. So far the only clear evidence is that man moves forward more often than backward.

So to say we would go backward technologically would have to be supported by something so catastrophic that we have no other record of such an occurrence except maybe that great flood a little while back.  

So yes if there is some disaster that wipes out all the adults and leaves only a handful of children to survive as best they can-think lord of the flies-it might take an extended period of time to bring back technology.

Otherwise no matter who is in charge things will go forward-they might slow down and maybe even take a few detours but I can't see backsliding without some major break in the line to cause enough loss of knowledge.

We could stop all space flight right now but I don't think that would cause everyone to abandon the search for knowledge of what is out there. You can try to choke all of technology for some better purpose but if you don't advance your technology while doing that then the people who escape the choke hold will eventually show up on your doorstep to let you know how big a mistake that was.

And yes, of course, go ahead and believe you have choked everyone that counts.


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## Nick B (Apr 1, 2014)

I think stagnation since it appears we are being witheld actual advancement. We had the technology and resources to stop using fossil fuels in the 70's. Have we stopped 40 years later? No. 

Technology will be trickled into normal society at a rate that still allows the big boys to stay in charge and decide what we are allowed to have.
Sorry to be a downer, but that is the conclusion I have come to.


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## Mirannan (Apr 1, 2014)

Trying to hold back technological advancement, and avoid the problems it causes thereby, is a dangerous game. Why? Because your opposition might not agree.

I think it was Drexler, High Priest of nanotech, who came up with this one:

All the major Western powers, most especially the USA, have agreed to a moratorium on nanoassembler technology while studies are done of its various effects. In the year 20??, unusual seismic signals are detected in the Pacific.

And one fine morning off the Malayan peninsula, a million tons of semi-autonomous military hardware breaks surface - and Singapore is now the world's newest superpower.

(Some details may be misquoted.)


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## michaelhall2007 (Mar 25, 2016)

I'd like to think they'd have ironed out the kink of the artificial leaf which is expected to generate 10X more hydrogen from sunlight. Basically almost FREE energy.


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## DrMclony (Mar 25, 2016)

that would be good. Also, hopefully they will perfect the art of necroing threads, which will be fun to watch  Thank you for resurrecting this one, an interesting read. The greatest necro I have seen recently was on a gaming forum. It was a fifteen year old thread, revived earlier this year by somebody who had to do some impressively deep forum diving to dig it up. I'm thinking of it like a form of time travel. We have all these snap shots of moments in time, scattered across the net. Some of them fade away, as sites are closed etc, but many are still there. Think about it. In fifty years time, we will be looking at those old threads like we look at grainy tapes of the Ed Sullivan show. That gives us a decision to make. Do we preserve those threads as they were? or do we keep them alive, for our future selves to revisit and add comment to? Would that sully the historical significance? or would it be our new form of time travelling virtual tourism, skipping around the virtual landscape digging for golden nuggets of history? And what form will that take? Virtual Reality representations of the world wide web, with avatars running around and digging into those old repositories of data? Finding out what your great grandfather posted about the prime minister of Japan on November 3rd, 1999?

We think the Internet has changed the world now? We ain't seen nuthin yet!


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## Richard Thomas (May 14, 2016)

We will NOT have technological stagnation. The last 20 years have been amazing by themselves and there's really not indication that we are on the verge of any kind of stagnation. Artificial intelligence and robotics will definitely advance at a fairly fast pace over the next 50 years. That's going to happen. As is massive adoption of virtual reality. 

We focus so much on advances in energy production but I see the huge potential of energy saving. Light bulbs alone have advanced a ton in the past 5 years. If we can get those kind of energy advancements in other things we'll be moving in the right direction. We won't need huge energy sources if we simply don't need as much energy.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 14, 2016)

Gumboot said:


> I think there will be technological stagnation as I am anticipating the collapse of liberal western civilisation in the next 100 years.
> 
> My prediction is that China's increasing demand for resources will draw it into conflict with the west, and that this conflict will undermine western civilisation and end the USA's economic and political dominance. Conflict will result in a sudden explosion of modernisation in China (much as happened to the USA during WW2) which will result in their ascendary as the global super power, and an explosion in their already impressive population. These post-war Chinese "baby boomers" will drive social and technological advancements over their lifetime in the same way that the post WW2 baby boomers of the USA have driven social and technological development over the last 60 years.


That certainly doesn't sound like "technological stagnation". It just sounds like the center of greatest activity moving. That's happened before. Mid-E > Egypt > Crete > Greece > Italy > Constantinople > Italy (hey, you've had 2 turns!) > Pretanic Isles > U. S. or something rather like that. Hasn't been a catastrophe yet. It doesn't even sound like "the collapse of . . . western civilization" in any but a narrow, literal, and rather unimportant geographical sense. Now "the collapse of liberal western civilization" - that's already happened. Democracy, demagoguery, and electorates too irresponsible to educate themselves, have all but killed liberalism. The vestiges shrink alarmingly in the West. As a classic liberal (no, not a leftist - Newspeak be darned, the left isn't liberal, and neither is the right) I regret it, but it is true. If liberalism has a future, and the world is not to become "a boot stamping on a human face - forever" ATM it looks just as likely to be in China or Russia as it is in the U.S. or U.K. I actually think the best hope for liberalism is for some of us to get away from Earth before the boot is totally inescapable.
--------------
Since Harpo's opening is explicitly about future technology, and since this IS an SF (ok, and F, but that seems less relevant here) forum I'm surprised how many of the answers seem mainly or entirely about politics.

Well, Bick my be right that "the world's going to hell in a handcart" - I see 2 major problems that could indeed be show stoppers:

--unrestrained population growth
--the prevailing superstition that democracy will give us good public policy despite electorates that are either too ignorant to realize their ignorance, too stupid to realize the importance of it, or too irresponsible to care, in conjunction with the abundance of demagogues to exploit them.

This could easily lead to near universal poverty and a society too poor to afford science or much of anything but a desperate struggle for food. Or to nuclear or biological war or its equivalent.

But ASSUMING we manage to avoid all that, and civilization chugs right along and government doesn't impede progress much more than it already is (all of which I do think is quite plausible) I'm optimistic. In 50 years:

- Biological immortality and the end of disease. It is a lot closer than most people think.

- AI will have been achieved. It may have even begun to snowball.

- Useful von Neuman machines will have been deployed and will be reproducing.

- Really powerful computers embedded in our bodies able to talk to us silently or to project print or a HUD in our visual field. STDIN may be more of prob than STDOUT. Voice and speech recognition at the very least though. Let's hope they run totally open source software.

- Vitrified cryonicly suspended animals will have been reanimated with some degree of success, but maybe not enough yet to justify risking thawing out our human corpsicles. We'll let them chill until we have it down cold, so to speak.
------------------------------------------


JoanDrake said:


> if aviation had progressed as much as computers in the last 50 years we could all now buy a Boeing 747 for fifty bucks


OMG. Think of the parking problem.  And women drivers.
----------------------------------
Oops.  Wow 2 intervening posts while I was slooooooooooowly typing. Didn't notice how old the posts I was quoting were.
[Chagrin]

And in case anybody is looking at their stop watch, I insist that my 50 years begins at the time of my post, not when the thread started.


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## Harpo (May 17, 2016)

My fifty years starts when I come back



from wherever I end up


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## MWagner (May 17, 2016)

We can't separate the technological from the social. What has been changed most dramatically by our most powerful technological innovations of the last 20 years? How we socialize. Smart phones, for better or worse, are dramatically changing society, and their development was not driven by any great existential problem or military application - just the desire for people to be in constant contact with one another and share information.

I'm not as pessimistic as a lot of people here. The material conditions that the average person on this planet lives under have improved dramatically in the last 50 years. Access to fresh water, availability of toilets, caloric intake, access to motorized transportation, housing, electricity, heating. We forget how awful daily existence can be without those things. The stagnation in living standards some in the West have experienced in the last 50 years has blinded us to the enormous gains made elsewhere in the world. The average Indian, Chinese, or Brazilian is in no doubt about whether they're better off than their grandparents. And there's no reason to think this is a zero-sum game, and their prosperity has come at the cost of ours.

Violence is also trending relentlessly down. Not only are there fewer wars and fewer casualties in those wars, but the endemic low-level violence that has been with us since we travelled in bands of hunter-gatherers is decreasing everywhere. Fewer neighbours getting their heads smashed in disputes over cattle. Fewer women murdered by their husbands. Fewer drunken stabbings of friends.

I see two threats to this trend of progress:

1) The efficiencies unlocked by automation and AI making most human labour unnecessary. How do we structure economies when we need the labour of only a quarter of the people on the planet? I think some kind of guaranteed basic income will become necessary, not only to stave off political violence and disorder, but to keep the wheels of the market economy turning. The question is how bad the cleavages in society will get before we implement a guaranteed income.

2) The anomie of modern lifestyles. If we don't have to struggle to meet our material needs (see above), will we become little more than glassy-eyed vessels for enervating pleasure? Or perhaps we'll turn away in disgust from libertine self-indulgence, and join religious or social movements that command self-denial and flinty judgement of the Other.

The wildcard in all this is genetic manipulation. The new splicing tool CRISPR looks like the kind of breakthrough that will accelerate innovation and practical application in this realm. How will it be used? The standard assumption is to cleanse the human genome of inheritable disease. Which will no doubt be part of it. But like the remarkable innovations in computing and communication technology, genetic manipulation will be harnessed to meet social and leisure appetites. I think within a 50 year time frame, micro-bioengineering will be carried out by individuals for all sorts of frivolous reasons, and change society in ways we can't anticipate.


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## Ray McCarthy (May 17, 2016)

MWagner said:


> Smart phones, for better or worse, are dramatically changing society, and their development was not driven by any great existential problem or military application - just the desire for people to be in constant contact with one another and share information.


Yet they are killing meals, family time and direct socialisation for self indulgent instant gratification and also exploitation of people by Silicon Valley type corporations.


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## MWagner (May 17, 2016)

Ray McCarthy said:


> Yet they are killing meals, family time and direct socialisation for self indulgent instant gratification and also exploitation of people by Silicon Valley type corporations.



I'm not a fan of smart phones and unrelenting connectivity. But I don't blame the people who make them. They're simply meeting a demand (a largely unexpected demand) for the technology. In general, I don't believe powerful people run the world. I believe that, more than any time in history, we live in a world shaped by the appetites of the great mass of people. The powerful aren't in charge; they're just trying to anticipate and meet wants in order to make money. The problem is how we rein in the worst of those appetites without treating people like children.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 17, 2016)

Phones provide those classic characters, "grouchy old men", something new to dog* about. I mean, if it weren't for things like that, we'd be bored to tears having to listen all the time to how tatoos proved the world was going to hell.

* my nod to PCness. After all, it is rather unfair that the female of the species should get all  the blame.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 17, 2016)

MWagner said:


> Violence is also trending relentlessly down. Not only are there fewer wars and fewer casualties in those wars, but the endemic low-level violence that has been with us since we travelled in bands of hunter-gatherers is decreasing everywhere.


Like a lot of statements about trends in almost anything (climate comes to mind), what time scale and where you are looking makes a big diff.

On the whole, for policeman's-scale violence, this doesn't seem to be true of the UK over the last 30 years. Study the graphs and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cjusew96.pdf
It does seem to be true of the US over the same period however, and since that is a larger population, taken together, these graphs support your summary if we average these with appropriate weights. I haven't looked for figures on this. This pub came to my attention somewhat randomly in the pursuit of other info, so I have no idea how the rest of the world stacks up. Figures for China would be interesting since they darn near constitute the majority of us all by themselves.

For military-international scale violence, your statement is almost certainly true if we are looking at the past century, but the 20th c isn't a very representative baseline, being probably the most violent in human history. But if you were to look at the last 500 or 1000 years, I suspect it would NOT be true. I have no stats, just guessing.


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## MWagner (May 17, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> Like a lot of statements about trends in almost anything (climate comes to mind), what time scale and where you are looking makes a big diff.
> 
> On the whole, for policeman's-scale violence, this doesn't seem to be true of the UK over the last 30 years. Study the graphs and you'll see what I mean:
> http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cjusew96.pdf
> ...



Trending down since the first states appeared (life in traditional bands and tribes was brutally violent), and then trending down even more steeply since the Enlightenment. London in the Middle Ages was about 25 times more violent than today.

Source: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker

Here's a New Yorker article reviewing the book. An excerpt:

An examination of English court records showed that in the fourteenth century London’s homicide rate was around fifty-five per hundred thousand, and Oxford’s a hundred per hundred thousand. A study of coroners’ records found that in the fifteenth century the homicide rate in Amsterdam hovered around fifty per hundred thousand, and a recent survey of medical records from Italy suggests that in the late sixteenth century Rome’s homicide rate ran to between thirty and seventy per hundred thousand. To put this in a contemporary perspective, Oslo’s murder rate is typically around two per hundred thousand. (Even Breivik’s shooting spree this year will probably bring it to no more than sixteen per hundred thousand.) London’s homicide rate is also normally around two per hundred thousand, and Rome’s around one per hundred thousand...​


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 18, 2016)

MWagner said:


> Trending down since the first states appeared (life in traditional bands and tribes was brutally violent), and then trending down even more steeply since the Enlightenment. London in the Middle Ages was about 25 times more violent than today.
> 
> Source: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker


Looks like an interesting book, but I'm not surprised it has caused so much controversy. It is being attacked from both the left and right, and also by people who claim his nurture over nature claims are ill founded. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

For individual violence, an overall trend downward would seem the logical thing to expect. For state sponsored violence it would be more surprising and much more contrary to what most historians have claimed (not that you'll find me arguing that a high degree of faith is to be placed in "consensus" historiography). It is a very slippery subject, since you can get about any answer you want by choosing what periods to sum for (hourly, daily, annual, or decadal deaths for example) and what period to look at (from 100,000 BP to now or 1950 to now, for example), what parts of the world to look at, and whether to consider individual violence, group violence, or totals, the devilish details of how to define all those things, and what data to consider reliable. That is, when there IS any real data. And all those choices have their honest uses, although they can be used misleadingly as well.

Regarding group violence in the distant past Pinker's claims have been severely criticized by Prof. Douglas Fry. Fry is an anthropologist whose career has been largely focused on this sort of thing. Here is an abstract of a paper he pub'd in Science:
Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War | Science

At the other end of the scale, if you look at the last cent, trends look really rosy, but you're starting misleadingly with an historically abnormal (but what's "normal" depends on scale also) baseline since the first half of the period includes WWs I & II.

This graph, covering 1400 to 2000:
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-conte...military-civilian-fatalities-from-brecke1.png
from here:
War and Peace before 1945 - Our World In Data
seems to be made by people who are at least making some attempt to think logically about this sort of thing, and does at least make clear that the data is still pretty noisy, even at this larger scale. It SEEMS to show:
- pretty quiet from 1400 to about 1625
- pretty violent from about 1625 until roughly 1960
- returning to the earlier norm for 30 years or so
- a radical drop over the last decade or so covered
This isn't what I'd call a clear long term trend. The graph seems to me a little suspect though, because despite including circles labeled "Armenian Genocide", "Genocide of the Jews", and "Cambodian Genocide", all of which were largely mass murders conducted by states against their own subjects, with the third not even associated with a "war" as normally defined at all AFAIK, it doesn't have circles for either of Stalin's or Mao's massacres which would seem to qualify under any criteria that covered the other 3, and are virtually universally conceded to be of magnitudes at least comparable to (most authorities say larger than) Hitler's and certainly greater than Pol Pot's.

I can't find anything similar for earlier times. I've always read that earlier wars involved a much smaller fraction of the population in actual combat and that a great deal of prisoner taking for ransom occurred, both resulting in lower fatalities per capita but though I've seen the claim made many times, I've never seen anybody put real numbers on it, and I suspect the data may not exist.

This guy may be a kook, but his remarks on this subject seem pretty cogent and he does address the earlier period, which by trad accounts should have been (and he claims were) pretty peaceful as far as state sponsored violence goes:
Steve Pinker’s bogus statistics: A critique of The Better Angels of Our Nature (Part Two) | Uncommon Descent

So, definitely maybe I dunno. If anybody will loan me a time machine, I'll be glad to take a look and let you know.


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## J Riff (May 18, 2016)

You can't allow various technologies loose on Earth, there's too many loose cannons, dangerous self-interested types. Tis is old news and will continue forever, as the big 'We' people continue a stranglehold on as much turf as they can sit on. S'true. They can owe you millions, and simply sit and jeer at ya publically now. Don't theorize about this stuff unless you have lived it. I read some of Rays comments for ex. - about the world of computing and whatnot, and it's all true, at a certain level. A big mistake to assume that the masses, or the middle class, or anyone! is running things, or that they make the decisions for the elite types. Reconditioning the masses is a high priority. Overpopulation can work to the advantage of the smaller group. Really the worst, they are, too bad 'we' can't find them and level the field a bit, huh?


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## key13 (May 28, 2016)

While technology, whether it be rapid advancements, or being withheld and spoon fed to the public (after governments, military utilize it?) can be an issue, as well as violence, climate change, etc. Somehow, I think the fragmentation of societies around the world will be a major factor in sending this world, as it has been stated earlier, to hell. We have more and more fragmented groups completely against and unhappy with every other group in the world. The US right now is more divided than ever before in it's history, and ripe for major changes, both good and horrific, in the coming years.
Have one or two major countries fall into economic meltdowns and it affects the whole planet, and in catastrophic ways that could take decades, or longer to recover from. A collapsed world economy can throw technology into the back seat in a heartbeat.
As the economy fails, heath care follows, and maybe even new diseases or mutations rise to take advantage of new micro ecosystems created. It could snowball out of control very quickly.


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## J Riff (May 28, 2016)

Everything is getting better all the time, slowly. Think of the odds of being born in a 100 yr. blip of time... on Earth... and fluking out and being there for ET contact and all this other great stuff. All up from here. Can't say enough about the future. Wow, huh? Unreal, just.... really great yknow? Now, let's &@!^!^ get on with it!


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## Ray McCarthy (May 28, 2016)

key13 said:


> or being withheld and spoon fed to the public (after governments, military utilize it?)


It's mostly driven by ordinary economics*. Exceptions are designer babies, genetic engineer plants, space exploration, nuclear power.

[* pretty much glasses production took off due to mass printing. Steam power was known about a long time before there was economic pressure to develop it.]


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 28, 2016)

key13 said:


> The US right now is more divided than ever before in it's history


I'm thinking there was a spot of trouble in the 1860s. Also, the kind of general survey history books that cover long periods of time, almost all gloss over past internal conflict, with its what-if implications. Most historians are intellectually lazy chaps who don't like to think about cause and effect but see history as a play they are describing for entertainment. The 1830s, the 00s and teens, the 1930s, 1960s all were pretty turbulent.

Not that I regard that as a "there, there, everything is ok" statement. I actually think both US subjects and the world as a whole would be better off if we fragmented into smaller polities.


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## J Riff (May 28, 2016)

On the flip side - World Govt. or nothing. Then, when stable, re-split into sensible zones. Dump all the ancient nonsense and get on with it, Earth-types.
IS the USA more divided, or just a little more awake to the important issues? Making people pay attention to politics is not so easy anymore, with all these distractions going on.


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## psikeyhackr (May 29, 2016)

MWagner said:


> I see two threats to this trend of progress:
> 
> 1) The efficiencies unlocked by automation and AI making most human labour unnecessary.
> 
> 2) The anomie of modern lifestyles. If we don't have to struggle to meet our material needs (see above), will we become little more than glassy-eyed vessels for enervating pleasure? Or perhaps we'll turn away in disgust from libertine self-indulgence, and join religious or social movements that command self-denial and flinty judgement of the Other.



The future is a victim of European thinking.  

We are all supposed to have our egos wrapped up in our jobs and the junk we buy.

50 years ago, 1966.  The year I graduated from grade school.  Star Trek debuted that September.  I had been reading science fiction since 1961.

I didn't know Telstar was still in orbit.  But what happened to turbine cars?  I don't know.  I remember hearing a radio annoucer saying they were banned from the Indy 500 because they were too fast.  There was even a movie made about them.






We should have had a 3-day workweek by 1990 and accounting should have been mandatory in high school by 1960.  Instead we are supposed to buy junk designed to become obsolete to play status games with our neighbors.

"The under-engineered antiquated technology sitting in my drive way is newer and more expensive than the under-engineered junk sitting in your drive way."

Can you really believe it makes sense to keep redesigning cars 47 years after the Moon landing.

So the measured increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was occurring in the 60s but it was not on television.  I think the consequences of doing stupid things with technology for the last 50 years will overshadow the new advances but some people will use the advances as an excuse to ignore problems.

Swords are cool, light sabres are stupid, but I'll take a machine gun to kill the cool dudes with the swords.

psik


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## BAYLOR (May 30, 2016)

In 50 years , there will be  self aware hologram selfies and they will be given the right to vote.


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## psikeyhackr (May 30, 2016)

That was the wrong video, it's just an ad.






psik


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## galanx (May 30, 2016)

Book review of "Age of of Em" by Robin Hanson

 Somewhat more than fifty years in the future, definitely twisted, and long (the review).



> According to Hanson, AI is really hard and won’t be invented in time to shape the posthuman future. But sometime a century or so from now, scanning technology, neuroscience, and computer hardware will advance enough to allow emulated humans, or “ems”. Take somebody’s brain, scan it on a microscopic level, and use this information to simulate it neuron-by-neuron on a computer. A good enough simulation will map inputs to outputs in exactly the same way as the brain itself, effectively uploading the person to a computer. Uploaded humans will be much the same as biological humans. Given suitable sense-organs, effectuators, virtual avatars, or even robot bodies, they can think, talk, work, play, love, and build in much the same way as their “parent”. But ems have three very important differences from biological humans.Book review of "Age of of Em" by Robin Hanson
> 
> [they don't have bodies; they can be copied almost infinitely; they can live at different speeds]
> .....
> ...



And then it gets weird

Slate Star Codex


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## BAYLOR (May 31, 2016)

In 50 years we will have self aware AIs running the world and making all decisions and tucking us in at night. The world got that way because at the time decided that it was a good idea.


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## Lew Rockwell Fan (May 31, 2016)

BAYLOR said:


> In 50 years we will have self aware AIs running the world and making all decisions and tucking us in at night. The world got that way because at the time decided that it was a good idea.


Ok, Daneel.


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## BAYLOR (Jun 9, 2016)

Lew Rockwell Fan said:


> Ok, Daneel.



Its conceivable  that machines in 50 will  be a hell of lot more powerful and sophisticated to the point where they will be making their own  decisions without human input or intervention.


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## ThomasG (Jul 3, 2016)

This topic is useful to me. I am a newbie as a writer.
Frankly, I have been unable to accompany the fast changes , technological and social. 
Yet I am trying to write a book, hard scifi I guess it would be, that takes place in the not too distant future (30 to 50 years) and need to make it reasonably real so that the story is not stale in 5 years!
In the story There is AI, driverless cars, nanotechnology, fusion cells, but not, for example, human-computer interface. The story will at least need to make mention of such novelties in passing, even if they are not the focus.


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