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The 21st century: FAQ

Q: What can we expect?

A: Pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week. Climate change, dust bowls caused by over-cultivation necessitated by over-population, resource depletion in obscure and irritatingly mission-critical sectors (never mind oil; we've only got 60 years of easily exploitable phosphates left — if we run out of phosphates, our agricultural fertilizer base goes away), the great population overshoot (as developing countries transition to the low population growth model of developed countries) leading to happy fun economic side-effects (deflation, house prices crash, stagnation in cutting-edge research sectors due to not enough workers, aging populations), and general bad-tempered overcrowded primate bickering.

Oh, and the unknown unknowns.

Q: Unknown unknowns? Are you talking about Donald Rumsfeld?

A: No, but I'm stealing his term for unprecedented and unpredictable events (sometimes also known as black swans). From the point of view of an observer in 1909, the modern consumer electronics industry (not to mention computing and internetworking) is a black swan, a radical departure from the then-predictable revolutionary enabling technologies (automobiles and aeroplanes). Planes, trains and automobiles were already present, and progressed remarkably well — and a smart mind in 1909 would have predicted this. But antibiotics, communication satellites, and nuclear weapons were another matter. Some of these items were mentioned, in very approximate form, by 1909-era futurists, but for the most part they took the world by surprise.

We're certainly going to see unknown unknowns in the 21st century. Possible sources of existential surprise include (but are not limited to) biotechnology, nanotechnology, AI, climate change, supply chain/logistics breakthroughs to rival the shipping container, fork lift pallet, bar code, and RFID chip — and politics. But there'll be other stuff so weird and strange I can't even guess at it.

Q: Eh? But what's the big picture?

A: The big picture is that since around 2005, the human species has — for the first time ever — become a predominantly urban species. Prior to that time, the majority of humans lived in rural/agricultural lifestyles. Since then, just over 50% of us now live in cities; the move to urbanization is accelerating. If it continues at the current pace, then some time after 2100 the human population will tend towards the condition of the UK — in which roughly 99% of the population live in cities or suburbia.

This is going to affect everything.

It's going to affect epidemiology. It's going to affect wealth production. It's going to affect agriculture (possibly for the better, if it means a global shift towards concentrated high-intensity food production, possibly in vertical farms, and a re-wilding/return to nature of depopulated and underutilized former rural areas). It's going to affect the design and layout of our power, transport, and information grids. It's going to affect our demographics (urban populations tend to grow by immigration, and tend to feature lower birth rates than agricultural communities).

There's a gigantic difference between the sustainability of a year 2109 with 6.5 billion humans living a first world standard of living in creative cities, and a year 2109 with 3.3 billion humans living in cities and 3.2 billion humans still practicing slash'n'burn subsistence farming all over the map.

Q: Space colonization?

A: Forget it.

Assuming we avoid a systemic collapse, there'll probably be a moon base, by and by. Whether it's American, Chinese, Indian, or Indonesian is anybody's guess, and probably doesn't matter as far as the 99.999% of the human species who will never get off the planet are concerned. There'll probably be a Mars expedition too. But barring fundamental biomedical breakthroughs, or physics/engineering breakthroughs that play hell with the laws of physics as currently understood, canned monkeys aren't going to Jupiter any time soon, never mind colonizing the universe. (See also Saturn's Children for a somewhat snarky look at this.)

Q: The Singularity?

A: Forget it.

The rapture of the nerds, like space colonization, is likely to be a non-participatory event for 99.999% of humanity — unless we're very unlucky. If it happens and it's interested in us, all our plans go out the window. If it doesn't happen, sitting around waiting for the AIs to save us from the rising sea level/oil shortage/intelligent bioengineered termites looks like being a Real Bad Idea. The best approach to the singularity is to apply Pascal's Wager — in reverse — and plan on the assumption that it ain't going to happen, much less save us from ourselves.

Q: Politics? Which of (Socialism | Capitalism | Libertarianism | Fascism | Democracy) is going to save us?

A: Probably none of the above.

These are all political ideologies that emerged out of the Westphalian settlement and the subsequent European Enlightenment. This settlement was typified by the ascendancy of the nation state as an atomic administrative entity with relatively non-porous boundaries and legal and trade systems. We seem (at present) to be moving towards a much more globalized, diffused model of sovereignty and legal systems. Currently 70% of primary legislation in the UK originates in the EU (via the European Parliament, European Commission, or Council of Ministers); even in the USA, a country noteworthy for its sense of exclusive legislative independence, a surprisingly high proportion of US federal law originates as a result of WTO treaty processes. Autarky is already difficult to achieve and maintain without extreme privation, as witness the state of North Korea (deliberately isolationist and self-sufficient) or Zimbabwe (wilting under international trade sanctions.

We're still waiting for the definitive ideological polarity of the internet era to emerge, although Bruce Schneier has opined that the key political hot potato of the 21st century will be the question, "how do we maintain the concept of privacy in an age of ubiquitous communications and surveillance", and some believe that privacy is already dead. Given the way Moore's Law is taking us towards an essentially unlimited ability to record everything, I'm not able to argue with the inevitability of surveillance: what I'd dispute is the morality of it.)

Q: What about religion?

A: Doctrinaire religious beliefs that prescribe a specific way of life and ban certain technologies may be a major threat to our ability to adapt to a changing world — but as long as they are confined to their practitioners the rest of us can probably survive them. However, if religious beliefs erupt onto the larger stage (for example, when believers acquire the levers of power and legislate their taboos into the code by which entire nations run) we may have problems. Example #1: The US federal ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research badly damaged the pursuit of medical treatments for a number of conditions (such as Parkinson's Disease). Example #2: a Saudi judge has issued a ruling banning the use of alcohol as a fuel: "the prophet has cursed not only who drinks it but also those who use it for other purposes". These are relatively minor examples of doctrine colliding with the modern technosphere; if nothing worse happens in the 21st century, we'll be lucky. Possible example of something worse: the Vatican has just muddled into the global debate on illegal drugs by denouncing harm reduction strategies — and risks making things that much worse, just as their principled anti-condom stance poured gasoline on the African AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.

Q: Are we going to survive?

A: No — in the long run, we are all dead. That goes for us as individuals and as a species. On the other hand, I hope to have a comfortable, long and pleasant life first, and I wish you the same!

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