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We are heading towards the unknown, seemingly with no brakes. Our fate now more than ever truly is up in the air. What do you think life will be like in the future?
I think we are a lot more like Brave New world than Fahrenheit 451. The sad thing is we never had to burn the books. Nobody will be left who can read them.
The way things are going right now? Cyberpunk dystopia, but with fewer neon lights.
Neon lights? Sorry, that's only covered by the Premium Plus Elite membership.
The free neon lights only emit ads.
Billionaires have finally achieved attaining 100% of the world wealth. Everyone not a billionaire is homeless. Although destitute, every citizen owns a pair of Meta glasses whose latest version allows the corporation to harvest brainpower through the ocular socket, powering the entire BillionaireVerse where they can SA virtual children in the event they don't find any of the local children sexy enough. In exchange for their brainpower, the glasses will convert the user's cardboard box home into visual representations of expensive homes. The economy is driven solely by billionaires selling to other billionaires. Epstein Island has been made a historical landmark where the billionaires come every year to pray in front of the lifesize statue of Donald Trump blowing Clinton.
You had every chance to say Bubba.
A mix between Cyberpunk 2077 without the cool tech, Black Mirror, and 1984.
don't forget the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.
I hate how I'm not the only one predicting this
The rise of fascism will continue in the West, to the benefit of billionaire techbros. The very rich wil live in unimaginable luxury and technology. The rest will fall increasingly into third world poverty, leading a very low-tech existence when out of the office. Most employment will be of a gig nature; those who have a regular position will sign themselves into what amounts to indentured servitude. Education will be work oriented and provided through long apprenticeship.
Following a string of economic disasters, the United States will abolish all social services. These will be available from the private sector at very high prices. The use of highways, police and fire, will all follow a subscription model.
Retirement will be death; the existing elderly will be killed off through systematic denial of health care. As public trust in science dies, modern medicine will become unavailable to most. Traditional practices like "healing women" will be all most workers can access. Diseases such as diphtheria, polio, measles will be endemic. Viral outbreaks such as COVID-19 and H5N1 will regularly decimate the non-wealthy population.
Women will be second class citizens, with strong legal barriers to independence. Arranged marriage will be common, and young girls will be exploited by rule of law. No birth control will mean a skyrocketing birth rate, but childhood death will.be endemic. Evangelical Christianity will be the instrument of social control.
In a fascist society, a constant state of war is necessary. The United States and Europe will be subject to Russia, and war with China is inevitable, probably in the form of small brush fire wars all over the world. Eventually, manpower and natural resources will begin to diminish. Widespread incompetence will hamper the military. As the war machine weakens and can't hold us together by force, countries like the United States may become balkanized, dividing by language or culture.
The Expanse minus the sci-fi-y alien stuff.
But every city is a Baltimore
Every politician is Admiral Nguyen
Every rebel group is Marco Inaros (accelerationism)
Every doctor is a mad scientist with the empathy completely deleted from their brain
Also the UN Government cuts your UBI if you criticize then. You have to shill for the Secretary General to keep your UBI.
Also we get EPSTEIN drive powered by the labor of abused children (that name did not age will lmfao)
SOLOMON EPSTEIN DID NOT KILL HIMSELF
I’ll keep it short and simple. ASI is finally turned on and is now the apex predator. There will only be two classes the Billionaires and us the poor people. So millionaires that are out there will fall even more substantially and harder, to where a lot might (pew pew) themselves. No surprise. You are a billionaire and part of the boys club or you are on the streets starving to death because you don’t have enough social credits to sleep at a hotel and your water balance just got cut off until next month as you slave away in a robotic suit somewhere at Amazon or Walmart. The pay is barely to where you can even purchase a piece of bread. And you die at the end of the next month because you didn’t work hard enough and meet quota at Amazon warehouse so no oxygen for you. Plus the inflation just made it to where you can subscribe for 100$ a month to breathe. So to all of the managers, CEOs and those that are pathetic narco greedy losers (net worth is in the mil)… your time has ended. It will be hell on earth.
Well I used to think it was this:
But looks like it's gonna be more like this:
I’m hopeful. Short term, maybe not, but to quote Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator “To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…”
We should already be a quarter of the way into this by now.
We're not because we have corrupt dinosaurs holding us back from it.
The longest period the world has seen without a great power conflict was 99 years, between 1815 and 1914. The second longest is since WWII.
I have my doubts we will break the record.
That is factually incorrect, there have been many wars between the 1815 and 1914 that would qualify.
See the Crimean war 1853 or the German-French war 1870. With two or more great powers involved.
Or what is your definition?
I guess I should have qualified it as no significant conflicts. They were all small regional conflicts, deliberately contained in scope and duration.
I mean, still what is significant? It seems you see the Napoleonic wars as such. Considering involvement of countries, the Crimean war had 4 great and 2 minor powers involved and lasted for 3 years. Granted the Crimean war was shorter and had less than the 6 great powers involved as were during the different coalition wars, with 1/4 the of the dead, but politically it was very significant and certainly not small nor regional in its effects.
What a great question!
I think the future is going to be pretty fucken awful. I'm sorry, but everything is just so bleak.
Like if you think about how things were 10 years ago in February 2016, and compare it to now, and then extrapolate into the future, it's not really easy to find things that are going in the right direction.
We're supposed to be addressing Climate Change and Plastic waste, but populations the world over are lurching to the right and choosing instead to be mean to poor people.
That said, apparently we're really terrible at predicting the future. "If You're Listening" podcast did a short series about this. There was some audio messages recorded in the 1950s (?) that were intended to be listened to in the distant future, like now. The things they predicted were just bonkers really.
Dead. Life on Earth will be nothing more complex then algae.
Heh. My answer was gonna be "missing".
[off topic?]
The science fiction novel "Stand On Zanzibar" won the 1969 Hugo award.
It's set in the early 21st century and it's scary how many things the author got right.
I think someone will get fed up enough to engineer a virus that removes greed and psychopathy from the entire human genome so that we can finally stop being ruled by greedy psychopaths. This will usher in a golden age of humanity
The world has less and less resources, and it’s more and more polluted… it’s not looking good.
More cancer, more crazy weather, more fires.
You will own nothing, and rent everything…
I’m just hopeful for FOSS software and devices, buying less junk we don’t need, and hopefully I can get a little garden going and collect rainwater soon.
Looks more like inside the walls of Escape from NY or LA
Fragmentation of society. Can't decide whether closer to Stephenson's Snow Crash or Palmer's Terra Ignota.
Ads in your dreams.
Why stop at ads when you can achieve inception?
So the can still annoy you while they peddle their garbage.
I can see black mirror happening where the entire room is a screen, and you have to keep your eyes open on the ads.
I have an exciting investment opportunity for anyone that thinks this picture is going to be the future. Climate change is further fueling instability politically, as plutocracy has rotted our liberal democracies to the point of fascists permanently seizing control and fixing elections.
Which is to say nothing of systematic pollution on a thousand other fronts, insect populations down 90 percent in the last 30 years, sperm counts crashed, frogs crashed. Those are indicative of systematic pollution, effecting us, affecting our behavior, and I think affecting our trust and fear centers in our brains, making us more docile I would bet in at least one of these systematic toxins.
The political collapse into fascism is accompanied by computers able to record everything everyone ever said or did and making social scores, with peter thiel's palantir deciding social scores to determine winners and losers, secretly promulgated to business and government to affect everything about how you are treated with no way of you knowing let alone challenging it. With authorities able to slip people they don't like into the bad score territory. And half baked metrics and assumptions and bad information to begin with.
We could go on, but we are on the cusp of a multi level collapse. Our fascist one party state will max out borrowing, ruin trust, then start dispossessing people and companies when the economy crashes.
Their oligarch allies will one by one fall and be replaced, which is a small consolation for us to know the ones pushing this new government will themselves fall to it, or their kids at least as half of them are like 80.
Sincere question:
While I don't think frogs deserve to die or anything, if they do so, what impact are they likely to have on our lives? Also, what's killing them?
I'm so excited to have another reason to worry!
Well looking for more reasons to worry, you are in for a treat(s)! The main problem is pollution, especially endocrine disruptors, chemicals that play on the receptors that steroids work on. A main source of them is herbicides, atrazine for instance, the second most popular herbicide, is one, and in concentrations as low as around 6 or so parts per billion makes the frogs sterile, and hermathroditic. That is one of many, but it's widespread, in independeant testing of water it's found in near all municipal water systems, to say nothing of ponds and wetlands with houses and business and farms bordering them. Or even roads as they will spray herbicides everywhere there is no thought given to minimizing use. Any concern expressed is met with contempt, and industry pressure to label the concerned as a deluded crank. Despite irrefutable evidence of the harms.
Reality has lost to monied interests, the public no longer is ruled by reality by and large, only fighting a rearguard and guerilla actions. Corporate interests have their own mercenary science outfits that start backwards from the conclusion and design studies to get there, science journals and media to publish it, and question independant reality based studies, lobbyists, and lawmakers themselves to put their names on model legislation those corporations write for them, simply filling in the blanks and boom, 1,000 pages of legislation. Then the other lawmakers add riders on unrelated pet issues they couldn't pass otherwise because they are unpopular bullshit, and boom, new laws. Or pressure on regulators, and whatever else.
Back to the frogs in particular, there is also a fungal infection they first noticed in south america that is spreading worldwide killing them. Often weakened by the chemial pollution to, all amphibians are more vulnerable to pollution. Insects likely are too. In the 90s after a drive on a summer night, the entire car would be covered in bug splatters, you would have to use windshield wipers and fluid to see several times even. Now there are a handful of splatters if that. I don't remember exactly when they disappeared en masse, except for 1996 and 1997 I saw massive hatches, fireflies covering fields, mayflies so thick on the ground it looked like snow, and never again to that degree. Something around that time, 1998, happened. The swamp behind my house was a cacophany of frogs in 97 and before, and after was silent as well. This is in the country too, not in the city, or particularly near farmland. Mosquitoes got worse too. Frogs eat the larvae as tadpoles and the insects as adults. They are important.
But Mother Jones did a couple of articles on the scientist who proved the atrazine hermathrodizing frogs link, Syngenta, evil swiss company, probably connected to nazi money, went after him personally, cancelled his funding, tried to get his girl to leave him, all sorts of stuff. Tyrone Hayes there wasn't one to back down to bullies though, it's a good story and there is a follow up, The Frog of War. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/02/tyrone-hayes-atrazine-syngenta-feud-frog-endangered/
I'm severely tempted not to read this comment ... But I probably will.
Sorry, I'm trying to be less wordy, it's a problem.
It's not a problem from my perspective. I don't mind essays.
I'm tempted not to read it because I don't like worrying (and I already do a lot of it), not because I don't like reading.
I can see it going two ways.
If nothing changes, techno feudalism. A small number of people living long lives in obscene luxury while the masses work themselves to death to afford a pathetic life.
Or, we do a big system reset. Tear down old systems that no longer suit us and replace them with new ones, shifting the focus away from money and "the economy".
These are my predictions, it doesn't look hopeful, unfortunately:
More division between people, like these labels: immigrant, christian, terrorist, Arab, Indian, pakistani. Why? Because we are stronger together, united, but the elites, or the devils, dont like that.
Starvation becomes more common, due to food waste, climate change, and the economy.
Freedom is non existent, unless you are very wealthy.
Its awful, but I hope things go better.
A thousand years of trying to heal the planet from the explosion of humans. Maybe a few extinct species engineered back into existence. AI-governed cities and highly regulated non-AI-governed human settlements (settlements will be left alone by AI as long as the humans do not abuse the natural ecosystem of the planet).
Brain organoid computers, some with consciousness and some without.
Bio-engineered conscious beings that will explore the universe in warp drive craft. If a few humans prove worthy or necessary, they will be allowed to participate.
Everyone will be allowed to get off the inevitable evolution-of-life-into-machine-guided train whenever they want and move into the settlements. Still, the machines will continue on without you. You are also welcome to join the endeavor with the bio-machines in the cities, but the rules are mandatory. Break the rules and be put on notice. Continue to break the rules, and the punishment is zap, instant death.
Without humans in the driver's seat, contact will be made, and Earth's dominant consciousness will take its place among the drama of the stars.
There's potential for biological eternal life, but I'm not sure it will be prominent, since pure organic consciousness will not be making the decisions, since we can't be trusted not to abuse it. Tumors are not allowed to grow unchecked in this new paradigm.
Resistance to any of this will be treated as a threat to the evolution of universe-capable life and will be terminated instantly. If we/AI (Earth) don't piss off the other (alien) dominant life forms and just explore, they will leave the planet alone.
No money, no hunger, no disease. Settlement life will be mostly free, healthy, and fulfilling. Machine-regulated life will be deterministic and focused. The primary focus will be on exploring the universe and the nature of reality.
All in all, it won't be heaven, but it won't be hell.
The only thing I feel could be different is who is at the helm. If we, as a species, can mature our culture into something much, much more responsible, then we can explore strange new worlds and new civilizations, boldly go where no one has gone before, as captains of our own ship. If not, well, then a lucky few will be allowed to tag along.
I can see no further. The vision is fading. I will diminish and go into the west, and remain Mojo McJojo.
Deranged take:
People will see each other in each other and the personal benefit in that. There will be more compassion, beaming of truth, still twisted people be left to their devices, without much power, as the rest are beaming and ruling the world. So there's no fear, no harm that can be done, just inner strength, equanimity, and community, while their twisted ways wither away, in this life or the next. Life and the world will become cherished. Everyone will have all they need, and can flourish. There will be a constant harnessing of this genuine kind and compassionate way.
Doom might come first, but at some point the aforementioned is gonna happen, I believe. Maybe we won't be humans then, but w/e.
Yes! After winter comes spring, and who knows what that may bring. It is the belief in a better world that brightens my days. Even if hope can't heal everything it might heal some and that is enough for me.
We are not powerless agents! Use your free will to shape a better world. Unironically: live laugh love.
We will all have learned to control our emotions, use our brains instead of our feelings, and not waste our time on stupid things and mindless activities. Thx to that, we will stop arguing about endless bullshit issues and focus all our energy and attention on the real big problem (the climate, if there is anyone left wondering) and we will have narrowly managed to escape the sad fate that was waiting for us. Or maybe not?
My bold prediction for the near future: I will soon have my second cup of tea for the day.
A lot of people will vanish, the good thing is I will be very old or dead at that point so who cares.
It wont!
