by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
With 2022 zooming towards its end, I find myself thinking about the future and wanting to make some long-term predictions. These are fast and loose, decided upon by simply using existing macrotrends.
A New World Order
In the immediate future, the biggest thing for us to see coming is the existential choice in the United States of autocracy or civil war. Pretty much at any point from now until, maybe spring 2025, the United States might collapse into civil war directly or indirectly because of Trump. But, more likely, we’re just going to slip into autocracy and that will be that. Either way, the liberal order that has kept Pax Americana together is going to finally collapse and something new is going to take its place. What that is, I don’t know. But what’s going on in the United States right now can’t keep going. Something’s gotta give. We’re just too unstable and too divided. Whatever happens, we’re probably going to have something akin to WW3 in the process, with several regional wars happening at the same time because the United States will either be out of commission or now aligned with fellow autocracies.
A Return To Physical Media
This is may seem rather mundane, but I think it’s possible that given how streaming services are removing a lot of titles for economic reasons, that we may see a renewed interest in DVDs, just as vinyl has become very popular in recent years.
Hard AI & Robotics
This sounds like scifi, but it definitely seems like there’s a chance that sooner rather than later, advancements in AI will be combined with advancements in robotics and there will be a rather severe change in the lives of everyday people. It could be just as huge as the Internet. The reason why I say this is, a lot of menial tasks — some of them more complex than you might think — may be replaced by androids. I mean, what would be more jarring, more an example of future shock than walking into a fast food place and your order is taken and prepared not by a human, but a humanoid robot? The labor shortage would be solved, but then, of course there would also be a huge amount of unemployment, which might cause its own problems. I have no idea when this might happen, but maybe within the next 10 years?
The Rise of Environmental Terrorism
As it becomes more and more obvious that global climate change is real, I think the next type of terrorism we’re going to face will be environmental in nature. One such terrorist group exists already, I think, and it’s only going to get worse. The nightmare scenario is, of course, a 12 Monkeys-type situation where they release a virus in an effort to significantly reduce the human population and put humanity back “in tune” with nature.
The Rise of Neo-Luddites
This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. It seems as though the conditions are ripe for the Far Left and the Far Right, for economic reasons, to fuse together into a Neo-Luddite movement. This would upend everything as the world would be more about who embraced things like our new robot overlords and who didn’t.
Soft First Contact
It is almost inevitable that the James Webb Space Telescope is going to discover evidence of extraterrestrial life at some point in the near, near future. While this will freak out the UFO community and a bunch of space nerds, I think the general public will lulz it. But we will, at last, know that we are not alone in the universe.
Wild card:
Digital Telepathy
I still think it’s possible that we may learn at some point in the future that Big Tech has figured out a way to read our minds and they’re hiding it from us. Either this will be a huge scandal and, like most things like this, it will be huge news for a few days then the average person will shrug and move along with their lives.
