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During a time with one of the lowest levels of trust in our politicians and news media, it’s easy to get lost in the constant barrage of “newsworthy” information that is negatively exaggerated, gives only one perspective, and adds very little value to enrich our lives. This often leads us to feel that the world is unfair or that the state of the world is at a low point right now.

This line of thinking creates a downward spiral, especially when it originates from a point of authority or perpetuity like the media and politics. It’s also infectious like a virus. It spreads to the rest of our life, affects our friendships, relationships, and sense of loyalty to our country or nation. There is a way to escape it: by appreciating a different level of reality.

Reality is full of layers of generalizations and specializations that fuse into each other at different topics or categories. It’s like an ocean. While the top layers of politics and media that we are exposed to may be stormy and readily apparent — if we take the effort to go underneath the surface, the waves are warmer and provide a consistent picture of a brighter future ahead, especially in areas of health, freedom, creativity, and innovation.

We are Healthier than Ever

The average life expectancy of the healthiest countries in the world has continued to increase at about three months per year for over the past 100 years. Combine this trend with the fact that most countries are not in a major war right now except a few in the Middle East and Africa — which are at great risk. Then add new health innovations like gene therapy and genome profiling reaching critical points of affordability, and it becomes evident that this linear trend of increase will likely continue, if not accelerate.

Despite the US’s open opposition to climate change agreements under the current administration, the electric grid has been becoming cleaner and the production of electric cars has continued to increase with demand, curbing the two biggest pollution sources and reversing their growth over the past couple of hundred years. Make no mistake, global climate change is still one of the largest existential threats to humanity that we can face in our lifetimes. However, being able to live longer will give us a little bit more time to come up with a solution, relying less on the whole tedious and embarrassing process of educating the next generation about how their previous generations failed them. That conversation is sooo overrated!

The best part is that this steady increase in life expectancy isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon. With large investments being made in cutting edge medicines, plus gene therapy and nanotechnology on the horizon, there’s enough potential innovation there to continue well into the next century. There are a couple of risks like the growing costs of healthcare and education, although they are currently manageable.

We have more Freedoms than ever Before

Owing to several “perfect storm” events of the past decade, including the rise of the Internet and smartphones, we have gained more ways of expressing ourselves politically, socially, and creatively — especially through new mediums that never existed before, like pictures, videos, and messaging. These freedoms have toppled entire governments and exposed unethical practices at large corporations, forcing them to rethink their policies. These freedoms and the ease of communication through the Internet have led to greater levels of transparency at almost all levels of governance. While they have come at the cost of privacy, most of us have been gladly willing to make the trade-off!

Having more freedom also exposes conflicting opinion and ignites debate. This is fine because it leads to greater long-term unity when all parties have their voice heard. Our differences being shared so openly gives everyone a perspective that there can be shades of gray, allowing us to be more accepting of others.

Another freedom that has been unique for only the past 50 years is affordable air travel to different countries. This has enhanced migration patterns across the world and helped make it a smaller place. This has provided another very realistic way for people to experience different cultures throughout the rest of the world. We now have a more international sense of belonging. While the Internet showed us we don’t have to belong in one place, travel shows us that we can integrate into any place that would welcome us.

We have more ways to Express Creativity

Society has a persistent stereotype of art going away, spreading the stereotype of the poor artist who can’t feed himself or herself. Yet, today, the spread of digital technology has created opportunities for art in game design, web platforms, mobile apps, and even in artistic endeavors that didn’t exist before, like video editing, User Interface design, animation, and even programming — all of which are very creative work. Thanks to the knowledge economy and the scale given by technology, we now have more artists and engineers today than ever before. The spread of information combined with access to nearly infinite knowledge has created millions of artists, scientists, and engineers, each one about as skilled as the ninja turtles of the Renaissance.

Arts that already existed before — like music, painting, and architecture — are also seeing a resurgence and benefit from more ways of expression and better tooling enhanced by portable computers and smartphones. This time, the scale is grander than ever before, and stakes are higher than ever before! Over half of the world has access to the Internet during a time when more people have been alive than at any point in history. Today there are more people who can appreciate art and instantly connect with anything that has ever been created by anyone and distributed through the Internet.

This also means the definition of creativity is evolving and becoming broader in scope than it has been before. As newly creative activities like software development, web design, and animation become accessible to more and more people, this trend of a continuous increase in creative work will continue and create masterpieces that will be remembered for centuries.

We have the best tools in history

The Internet has started to emerge as the most significant invention since our ability to harness electricity. Let that sink in. We haven’t seen an innovative force this powerful in almost 150 years. Nobody remembers what it was like when all of the candles and lamps in the world became replaced by electric lights, or the point at which silence could now be filled with free music from the radio. The phone, refrigeration, and cars were all created as a result of the Industrial Revolution started by electricity. The Internet has now started the Information Revolution and we are barely even halfway through it. Let’s use the Industrial Revolution with its foundations in electricity as an analogy for what’s to come in the Information Revolution with its foundations in the Internet.

The 20th century gave us large-scale manufacturing and infrastructure for the physical world. Adoption of new technologies was much slower back then. It took almost 50 years for homes to be lit with light bulbs instead of lamps. The 21st century will expand on the foundation laid by the 20th century by driving down costs and increasing accessibility. It will also enhance all industries, especially transportation and communication, with tools that already exist like computers and smartphones. Although the Internet was invented decades ago, only in the last ten years did it get fast enough to stream video without having to take a snack break for them to stop buffering. This led to an almost instantaneous (10 years is pretty instantaneous from the perspective of history) rise in the popularity of services like YouTube and Netflix. This is a very common pattern with technological innovation. Lenin describes it best: “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”

Towards the end of the 21st century — after we overcome some major challenges along the way — these digital and physical worlds will merge seamlessly between each other. We would see the physical world and immediately access digital information about things of interest in the physical world, like the new restaurant that opened down the street, directions to a friend’s house, and events happening nearby. This would most likely be through some form of Augmented Reality (AR) combined with intelligent voice assistance. Anything beyond that is pure speculation and hard to predict. However, there is one pattern that will stay the same: building on the work of previous generations.

A Perfect Storm of Synergy

It’s not exaggeration to say that with the rapid enhancement in our tools, combined with the synergy in the way we use these tools and how they help improve each other, we will soon get to a point where a future human will almost be a different species. In fact, if we want to prevent ourselves from being overtaken by robots or AI, we need to combine their strengths with ours. Imagine a cyborg that looks, acts, and feels human, but has metal pieces or even a metal skeleton (think Ghost in the Shell). Freud will probably turn in his grave at this statement, but it’s likely that we will have already dethroned the super-ego as the main decision maker and given it a companion, a digital meta-ego.

This digital meta-ego would be able to access all of the information on the Internet and feed it directly to our brain, adjusting our thoughts, giving us more expansive viewpoints and encouraging us to behave more ethically in our actions. Although there is danger involved in making sure it has appropriate security, it may be one of our few tools against a rogue Artificial Intelligence (AI) or a Terminator bent on human extinction. Thankfully, we won’t have to deal with these problems for likely another 100 years, but I’d love to know who wins the war: humans or robots.