These predictions were made in late 2019 and look approximately a lifetime ahead, up to 2100. Human systems will come under increasing strain, and while remedies will be available, it's hard to be confident that people will adopt these remedies.
What sorts of factors need to be considered? What dimensions of human (and other) life do we need to think about?
As a starting point, I suggest seven broad domains:
The human psyche, beliefs, culture, religion
Health, physical wellbeing, effects of climate change, loss of biodiversity
Means for living, wealth and its distribution
Relationships in families, communities and societies and across the globe, government
Science, growth of information and knowledge, education
Work, creativity, technology, new human-engineered life forms
Leisure, use of discretionary time, reorientation through recreation
A SWOT analysis would suggest the following:
Strengths
Rise in ethics as a human norm
Better health and longer lives
Higher living standards in most countries
Widespread acceptance of the rule of law
Education and research being organised
Diverse opportunities to be productive
New appreciation of and forms of leisure
Weaknesses
Loss of confidence and trust (and spirituality)
Increased pollution in various forms
Socio-economic inequality
Geopolitical and other divides
Weakening of cultural diversity
Bureaucratisation of everything
Escapism through trivialisation
Opportunities
Rapprochement of belief systems
Better care for the environment and self
More thoughtful, economical living
Strengthened, refined political institutions
More wisdom growing out of knowledge
More focus on people in work
More purposeful and recreative use of leisure
Threats
Loss of sense of personal responsibility
Climate change and associated losses
Increasing divide between rich and poor
More weaponisation and dangerous conflict
Information overload and unbearable complexity
Loss of jobs through technology
Leisure/pleasure taking over people's lives
Realistically what does all this mean for the bulk of people in the 21st century, balancing all the competing factors? Here are some possible scenarios:
Loss of confidence and trust in people and things will produce a realisation that some sort of spiritual realignment is necessary to cope with contemporary challenges (but alignment to what?). More movement of people may lead to more interchange between cultures and thereby more wisdom and understanding.
Changes in standard of living will lead to lives that are longer but in some ways less productive, unless a compact is made whereby older people are supported in return for an enhanced role in education, wisdom and transmission of culture.
Climate change and loss of resources will produce an increasingly anguished and socio-economically unjust world, with more displacement and loss of means for living.
Urbanisation will produce more crowded but less cohesive communities and societies. There will be more tension between structured and unstructured living as the few seek to increase their control over the many.
Globalisation and atomisation in world politics and economics will lead to increasing conflict, as democracy comes under increasing challenge from authoritarianism and separatism. The risk of catastrophe through increasing weaponisation will increase massively.
Politics will become less ideological and more pragmatic, focused on the management of change. There will be massive challenges to democratisation as it is realised that this, as currently constituted, has failed.
Research will produce growth in overall knowledge but there will be plateauing in individual levels of capability and achievement. Simultaneously there will be awareness that we need more generalists, more people who can join-up and interpret knowledge, and more people who can extract wisdom from the morass of complexity.
Computing/AI will lead to huge inequities whereby some will experience massive benefits but others will be driven to unemployment or low paid jobs in human services which will grow in scale but remain low wage.
Complexity will produce an increasing divide between lifters and leaners as people become more discouraged by the “task” of living and retreat into escapism, to the point where this becomes a massive social issue.
Humankind will become increasingly desperate for escape, whether through colonisation of another planet, sea change or tree change, more embrace of the “soft” disciplines like religion or arts - or simply more materialism.
All this is very broad-brush and contestable. Accuracy or otherwise is not, however, the point, in this kind of discussion. The point is maintaining at least a broad awareness of where our current trends might lead, unless we are more careful. How we exercise this care is a topic for debate elsewhere. The usual virtues of truth, goodwill, kindness, courage and so on would be a good starting point.
There are plenty of reasons to think the world might become a better place over the next few generations. Advances in generations past have set us well, for example the radical changes in technology of all kinds, the spread in education, new ways of organising our work lives, and the establishment of global forums to address global issues. Not only this, but we humans have built into the success stories systems for their continuation. These systems may not always work – we still have reverses like the Global Financial Crisis and COVID 19 – but there is sufficient resilience within them to recover the lost ground. Eventually.
At the same time, we are more aware now how, to use old-time Christian terminology, the Devil can play tricks and disrupt everything, making us lose any confidence in the illusion of progress, the supposed march of civilisation. The Devil, so it seems, lurks within chance; or perhaps she inhabits the less obvious parts of our existence – the changes that happen while we’re not watching. Chance played a part when a number of leaders of tyrannical bent surfaced in different countries around the globe – and not just small countries but ones with huge reach and influence, like Russia, China, America and Iran. As for the less obvious parts of our existence, the ones where we assume all is well, we need only look to the availability of choice, which has given rise to all sorts of horrors by way of (for example) social media.
Making predictions of the kinds ventured here is a risky business, but it’s useful if only as a way of sounding a warning. This essay tries to be balanced but produces a lot of predictions that are on the gloomy side. To take just one area as a case for consideration, climate change, we’ve seen how technology has been used to good effect, keeping us alive (if less comfortable) to this point. Technology, however, or any other single remedy, can’t should the burden alone. Likewise, artificial intelligence can’t be controlled by more artificial intelligence or more law. If we’re to manage the future effectively, we human beings have to change ourselves. We have to become more truthful, more giving, more prepared to work for goals long-term and less obsessed with our short-term interests – staying in power, keeping our shareholders happy, and the like.
The more things change, the more they remain the same, so said Alphonse Karr in 1849. Where then might circuit-breakers be found? Within the human heart and mind or some set of external circumstances, like the displacement of humans by artificial intelligence and/or the smothering of life by global warming?
Time will tell.