Not the only path, but indeed the trends as I see them. Depressing if I think about it too much. I see great hope still in technology keeping humanity going but at the same time I see governments and corporations growing more controlling across the world. I cannot even seriously hope for a real third party in the US though I keep on hoping despite knowing better.
Actually, I handed you a trick question. The political ideology of The Future is, of course, “Bob”'s surrealvolutionary doctrine of Patrio-Psychotic Anarcho-Materialism: “Every yard a kingdom, every child and dog a serf!” 
Actually, the current trend seems to be the other way – the rich moving into the inner cities, gentrifying them, and displacing the poor. (Who, presumably, eventually will be pushed out to the 'burbs – where to their other problems will be added those of personal transportation, as they can’t easily afford cars and gasoline and associated costs, and there’s no mass transit out there, and nobody can get anywhere by walking.)
Not necessarily. They could move to the rural areas. Small towns, farms, etc. where living is cheaper and jobs for people of lower education are more available. In many ways, the problem of the poor is that they’re in the wrong place for where they have options.
It’s all about stem cells atm. Renewal. Transformation. Realising what was impossible 5 years ago.
Stem cells can be good for treating some diseases and infirmities, but . . .
“transformation”? 
At this point, nanotechnology does not appear it’s going to yield anything like the Singularity-level transformation of the human condition some have speculated. That is, it’s not going to be like The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson). There are too many practical obstacles – chiefly, power supply. Certainly there could be such things as carbon-fiber nanotubes, which might ultimately be an essential structural material in a space elevator. But that kind of industrial advance is not going to dramatically change our daily lives the way the steam-engine did – is it?
I think you are focusing are the sky-high Sci-Fi dreams of Nanotech. There is a huge potential explosion of new tech in this field but more mundane than what you linked to. Medical is pretty exciting too with new tools that will go directly after cancer cells rather then our current methods that cause so much damage in curing people.
Allwalker wrote a fairly concise article about the potential of Nanotech here.
There was also a democracy revolution in the 70s, 80s and 90s where many authoritarian states and ex-colonies transformed into liberal democracies.
However nations stopped transferring to ‘free’ status around the end of the 1990s. I think the number of ‘free’ states went from about 40 up to around 90 from 1975-1997, but has been stable at 90 ever since.
I really don’t know if fascism is the same as some of the other ideas. I thought fascism was a response to the trauma of WW1 and the great depression. Communism seems like a natural response to growing wealth and income inequality. I assume since the world is constantly becoming more and more unequal within national borders (the US, China, India, Brazil, Russia, etc. all have issues with domestic income inequality) another form of economic egalitarianism similar to the economic revolutions of the 19th & 20th centuries will start to become popular. However I don’t know if it’ll be as extreme as communism. My impression, which could be wrong, is that extreme ideologies like communism come about because more moderate ideas and policies are suppressed. So if you allow people to have socialism, they never ask for communism. Whereas if you suppress socialism, it goes underground and eventually becomes communism. I don’t know if that is true, but since most of the nations in question have at least some democratic infrastructure, I assume the economic agenda will be more socialistic and less communistic because more moderate ideas will be allowed to flourish rather than be brutally repressed until they come out again in a more radical form.
According to Bernard Lewis, Islamism is actually a 2nd incarnation of a mideastern attempt to gain prestige and power. The first was Pan arabism, popular in the 60s, and that failed. Islamist terrorism is likely a failure too. But will another radical ideology replace it? I don’t know.
I hope there is a singularity, but I don’t know what I think anymore about it. I really don’t know what the next big thing is.
You do have to wonder what the loss of prestige in the US will do to us. We went from being ‘best at everything’ to a debtor nation that can barely take care of itself. Bernard Lewis claims this lack of prestige and having to watch the world pass it by was what drove so many mideast muslims to support radical ideologies. Will the US start to undergo similar transformations?
As time goes on we are going to lose our scientific edge. It used to be that the best and brightest came here, stayed, and set up companies. Now they come, then go home and set up companies. Soon they won’t come at all. And not long after that, the best and brightest born in the united states will seriously consider moving to India or China for a career in R&D.
The best economic and scientific years are behind the US (IMO), but they are just coming up in places like India or China. So I wonder if that is going to lead to a neofascist, nationalistic movement in the US.
Either way, I have no idea.
Next big economic idea - probably some kind of effort to reduce income inequality and maintain sustainable economic growth (green technology, renewables, alternative energies), vs our current trajectories of using up natural resources at a clip and doing nothing while income inequality grows.
next big political idea - no idea. Maybe Fukuyama was right and liberal democracy is the end point.
next big technological advance - no idea. Kurzweil says biotechnology, robotics and nanotech will converge. I really don’t know myself. I have read within 30-50 years we will have bipedal robots that can perform most human tasks. That is going to dramatically revolutionize life and the economy. But that could be 50 years from now.
It’ll make a pretty kick ass drop zone ride at minimum.
Well… we could be past ‘peak oil’ and still discover new reserves. New reserves aren’t the point- total global production is.
The book ‘The Long Emergency’ cited in the OP states that we are currently near or past peak oil already.
The data on total world oil production support this hypothesis, though I suppose they could be interpreted to mean other things.
Actually, they are. Well, part of it.
Which is in part regulated by the cartel that is OPEC.
But it’s all a question of economics. The Canadian shales dwarf the Saudi fields, for instance. So do world-wide coal reserves.
And should anyone learn how to synthesise petrol…
Sure, if you discover new reserves faster than you deplete old ones. It isn’t clear that is happening.
I am told Russia surpassed Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer, and that OPEC production is declining. But again, that can be interpreted either way.
How many gallons of water does it take to produce a gallon of shale-oil? I think shale might be of some use, but I would really like you to convince me that shale-oil can replace drilled crude overall, all things considered. Please continue 
As for coal, let me toss out some quotes from ‘The Long Emergency’ cited by the OP, starting at page 131:
Sure it is more quote than you need, but it makes some good points about your suggestions. The US consumes about 20 times the fuel the Nazis did. They produced this fuel in industrial quantities only because of wartime- and not market- conditions. It looks like the bottom will fall out of the oil infrastructure before the world will be prepared to mass-produce synfuel. Once the price of oil skyrockets, it could be an impossible challenge to stage projects like this.
And we haven’t even asked the question of whether we want to continue burning so many fossil-fuels in a Global Warming world. Quick answer: probably not.
For all this I think it would be nice if you were right
If you are the ruling class ,the world looks rosy. The concentration of wealth and power is unprecedented. You will have it made.
If you are a average American worker , you are fucked. Wages and security will be dropping every year. The programs that help the poor will be cut. Nope ,not much to look forward to.
Pollution will climb. Wars will not stop as long as they are money making propositions.
No, but on what other fuel can we run an automobile-centered industrial civilization? Natural gas presents the same carbon-emissions problem as coal or oil, ethanol only slightly less. Trucks and cars and airplanes can’t run on nuclear power. (Well, they can, but there are all kinds of obvious reasons not to go there.) Building lots and lots of stationary nuclear power plants and using the electricity to generate hydrogen for fuel cells, or to charge up electric-battery-powered cars, might be the best bet; but there are all kinds of practical obstacles to either, and no guarantee we can get there from here before the fossil fuels become so cost-prohibitive that industrial civilization simply breaks down.
Exploration and economic exploitation of space is about the only thing that gives me a little hope for the future of the human race. Well, maybe some biotech, too. Other than that, I got nothin’.
Careful with that, or you’ll get as cynical as me. :eek:
But, what is there in space to economically exploit, that can’t be done more cheaply with resources available on Earth’s surface?
Well . . . India did pretty well out of decolonization (after that messy, bloody divorce from Pakistan was over and done with). But the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia, not so much.
Genomics, baby, genomics.
We have already made DNA from scratch that codes for a synthetic bacterium.
Complex organisms modified or made from scratch are Real Soon Now, to an even greater extent than today.
I think genomics is going to live up to its hype. I hope it will be the good hype but I will not fall over in surprise if it’s the bad hype and we manage to do something that dooms us all.
But the quest for the best and brightest, along with the practical necessity of fighting disease and feeding the hungry is gonna drive genomics pretty hard, pretty fast. All living things are their genes more than any other influence and there’s no way we’ll be able to keep our fingers out of the gene lab.