J_ wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 4:32 am
Jacob, I think your conclusions here are a little bit...too general to be of much help.
Well, okay, I guess I asked for that...
2) Weather events that are now considered extreme [historic] will become an every other year thing by 2040(*). The world will pass 2C in 2035 or so. (Currently at 1.4-1.5). Winter sports in the Alps will be gone or replaced by articificial snow. The Med will be haunted by drought and wildfires and people will spend their summers in 45C smelling smoke and watching brownish skies. If you seen it once, just shift your mindset where this is normal and blue skies are unusual. In Northern Europe, the problem will be water. The waterscape will change. The lowlands will see flat fields becoming lakes on occasion and unsuitable for farming in general. Lots of flood damage. Again, this will become a regular thing. Some places will become uninsureable.
(*) And even crazier events will setting new records in 2040. Like, category 6 hurricanes will become a thing.
TL;DR The extreme weather events now will become normalized. Think about that. People on the US west coast might have to travel to see a blue sky. However, that's not much different than how people are currently traveling to experience snow which used to fall in quantity from the sky where they live but which hasn't really for the past 20-40 years.
3) The world is getting older and fatter with all its associated [lifestyle] diseases. Twenty years ago diabetes medicine was a sure [demographic] bet. This will continue. There may be occasional regional food shortages due to (2), but the world is currently feeding 8 billion humans and the equivalent of 16 billion similarly sized farm animals.
4) The current inflation was mainly due to mismanaging the pandemic in the main economic powerhouses (China and US). This caused supply chain issues. Due to lack of social security needs, consumers (who otherwise don't have money), were simply given handouts even if they didn't need it. (In contrast, welfare states had a system in place) This money was in some cases spent frivolously on NFTs, memestocks, etc. and otherwise just plowed into the stock market which would otherwise have gone down more. As the world opened up again, there was a labor shortage because the uncoordinated lockdowns had broken the production systems. Wages went up (more than inflation). This gave people more money and in turn this drove retail prices up---catching up with the previous inflation of financial assets(*). In reality, most people's wages have increased more than inflation itself.
(*) Governments ended up holding the debt. This completes the triangle of inflation.
Consider this a hiccup and a return to a more normal economy (pre-2009) where real interest rates are actually positive and cash has value. This will be new to anyone who got into finances after 2009 ... but a return to normal for everyone else, except maybe governments whose debt exceed their GDP. They're now stuck between a financial rock and a political hard place.
5) Many developed nations have fallen below reproduction rates. However, there's a huge demographic bulge that ensures that population will keep going for several more decades albeit not as fast. The world will peak out around 9-10 billion at the end of this century. Demographics is the most predictable trend of them all. It would take nothing short of a massive pandemic to make a dent in this. Incidentally, COVID was not the last pandemic. Not even the worst possible case. I predict another one and that it will go pretty much like the last one with initial denial followed by bungling that makes it worse than it needed to be... because humans gotta human. It'll happen when it happens this way because people will have forgotten just how bad it was. Human memories are incredibly short and tends to discount bad experiences in the past.
However, you will see A LOT more refugees thanks to (2) above. The estimates are some 600 million global refuges by 2060 compared to about 60-100 million currently. These will be both internal and external as "bad places" get depopulated.
This requires building up the "good places" as they currently have too few roads, houses, ... the value of these places will go up as the "bad places" lose their value (and perhaps their existence as a going concern). Basically, the valuation migrates too.
6) This one is kinda tricky. e-bikes on a mass scale are kinda new and people are still working out the appropriate culture/behavior---right now they think of ebikes as bicycles, whereas a better model would be slow scooters.
Kinda like when cars first met horses. Fortunately, we do have models to copy. In the more progressive cities, cars are getting shut out of inner cities or charged very high parking fees. Fewer cars means more bikes on existing roads. Even in the US, I've seen one city where certain residential streets had been converted from car lanes to full bike lanes.
7) The "End of History" (Francis Fukuyama's declaration that democratic capitalism had won and declared the best political system) only lasted about 25 years with one hegemon to rule them all---turned out to be harder than it looked. My guess is that people who still remember the alternative government forms are dying of old age and young people are growing up unsatisfied with "the winning system" and are willing to try new systems, using "illiberal democracies" to transition into "authoritarianism-light" or "authoritarianism-heavy" (you can already see how politicians are "friending up" with like-minded souls in other countries rather than with politicians within their own country). These transitions move at a generational speed. First the culture must be ready to accept change ... and that happens like Kuhn's paradigms. It's not like people suddenly decide that "hey, there's a better idea, Imma change my mind" but rather that "these new ideas look way more fun than those old ideas that clearly don't work currently"/"what could possibly go wrong that's worse than this". (The historic answer is of course: plenty)
I would absolutely expect that the world will be repeating the lessons of history here. Not WWIII, but more like the proxy-conflicts between 1950 and 1990. Much of this will be focused on resources (parts of countries) rather than entire countries since the nationality framework is decreasing in importance. The trend in the US with individual states "going their own ways" in terms of laws are a good example.
Bonus: I would not be entirely surprised if EU fractures into an EU-North and an EU-South to stop climate-induced internal migration from the burning countries in the south and their collapsing agricultural/tourist situation. Likely there will be some "deal" in the form of the north sending money (they already do) and food in return for closing the borders. If so, expect a certain brain drain from the south to the more prosperous north.
8) I agree that it's easiest to go with the flow. One of the things I've done in the past 2 years is actually to get a smartphone and a windows [gaming] computer. If I had to admit to one surprise it was just how easy it was to figure it out compared to my old baseline of ~1999, when I last owned a windows computer. All the technical issues have been hidden under layers of abstraction. I know a lot of seniors struggle with computers. They always use age as an excuse and claim that young people have some natural talent that makes it easier. I'm convinced the senior problem is more of a near total lack of interest in learning insofar they can avoid it by just asking someone else to "fix their computer" for them. This being something that has become so easy that a 12yo nerd can do it.
I bet the two things that will become more ubiquitous in terms of interfacing are VR headsets and AI. Over the past 30 years, we've gone from
1990) Use a desktop computer and buy software from the store.
2000) Use a desktop computer and install software from the internet; get accounts on different sites and interact with your bank, government, favorite forum, ...
2010) Use a smartphone and install an app for everything you want to do.
2020) Use a smartphone and talk to it/using video to interact.
I don't see the idea of popping on a VR headset to talk with an AI avatar to do your banking business as being that far off. Artists will be complaining about the lack of human interaction sooner rather than later. Give it 10 years for headsets and personal AI to make the move from nerd-grade to consumer-grade.
Also note that while the 1990 solution is nearly dead, 2000 is still valid but is now dominated by the 2010 solution. (And this makes me---an old guy---complain that my favorite 2000 world is going to shit. This is of course just makes me oh so predictable
)
9) Banks go bust all the time (mostly small ones). Way more than hit the news. But yeah, on a personal note, I don't expect to be able to use the same bank or business for more than a decade before it gets merged/relocated/...
Like with computers, the better strategy here is to stay one generation behind the bleeding edge. Dealing with the newest generation or older generations of doing things is just harder. It's easy to settle and anchor into something that has worked for 10-20 years. However, this makes it hard to transition when the change does come.
10) There are now more Chinese millionaires than American millionaires. The world is running out of places to produce cheap goods. (I don't think it's ever going to happen in Africa.) I'd expect China and India to ramp up their price and quality much like Japan did it before them.
The main thing here is that everybody (except the homeless) in the west have been used to being in the 90%+ percentile of global wealth with average spending around the mid-five figures. We'll be getting used to the idea that developed countries basically don't have much development runway left. Americans (and Europeans) in 2050 will not be substantially materially richer than they are now. They'll be competing with a few billion people from South East Asia in terms of fancy goods and tourism. The relatively poor in the west (say a household making under $40000/year) will not just be falling behind locally but also globally. This is part of what drives (7). Consider that the median global educational level is now somewhere around an 11th grade education. Someone with a HS degree essentially has 4 billion competitors, most of which are willing to work for $1/hour.
Thrifting (not just stores) is a trend that will continue. Repairing instead of throwing away or "recycling" to a dump in Indonesia will also trend up.
11) The perception of time mainly has to do with "#novel impressions"/"#stored novel impressions" in the brain. As we get older, the denominator is cumulative. If people start doing the same _kind_ of thing over and over, the brain doesn't need to make new connections as it's only experiencing, not learning. So, for example, if you're going on your 10th trip to a different place, it's practically routine and therefore not as memorable is your first trip.
Time speeds up if you're not learning materially new things.
This is kinda hard to explain because of how "new" is commonly defined. Perhaps, the best (but also vague) definition of new in this regard is "a difference that makes a difference". Basically, the experience has to change how you think. If you came back from the experience without changing how you see the world, time went fast.
In nerd speak, what matters for the perception of time is installing new software into the brain, not adding more pictures to the Picture folder.
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To summarize and generalize. Predictions can often be very general and therefore sound vague. The trick to turn general observations and trends into specific practical actions is to remember Gibson's adage that "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed". So, for example, if the graph tells you that flooding chances are going from a 1000-year event to a 2-year event where you currently live, you look at other places where flooding is a 2-year event. Then consider how your current place will transition into that. This avoids the extremely common trap of "I'm well aware of this problem, I just never thought it would happen to me."