The Future: after the industrial age

Great Debates
1

We are currently living in the most abnormal time in human history. For better and for worse, the era we live in is unique in the annals of time. Never before have so many humans lived (7.7 billion, growing by 80 million a year), and the advances in science, technology and industry would have been considered miraculous only a few centuries ago.

Most of this progress began with the industrial revolution 250 years ago, and has been continuously accelerating ever since. The changes have been so profound that I believe the average person in 1760 would feel more at home in 2000 B.C than in 2000 A.D. After WWII, the “great acceleration” ushered in an age of unprecedented prosperity that spread from the west to the rest of the world. People observing the rate of change at the time and extrapolating forwards into the future naturally predicted that soon humanity would leave earth and expand to the stars. 2001: Space Odyssey is a good example of this idea.

Half a century later, this view of the future looks a lot less realistic. The world population growth rate peaked in 1968 and has been falling ever since, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. 23 countries have declining populations, and many more will join them in the coming decades. Excluding Africa, world population will peak sometime around 2050 and then slowly decline. Counter intuitively, this slowdown has taken place voluntarily, due to rising wealth and education across the globe.

On a different front, the growth of our man-made world has begun to bump into some hard global limits recently. Humans have modified the biosphere so extensively that some geologists have proposed a new geological era: The Anthropocene. We have caused the extinction of enough species to allow scientists to declare us responsible for the sixth mass extinction (The last mass extinction occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid killed off the dinosaurs).

Our incessant burning of fossil fuels has destabilized the climate, and the IPCC’s warnings are becoming increasingly apocalyptic in tone. Respected scientists are now predicting “the irreversible collapse of industrial civilization” before the end of this century.

In light of these two seemingly unconnected issues, both of which seem set to halt the march of progress that has been going on since the renaissance, what might our future look like? I don’t take the apocalyptic “mad max” view championed by people like Guy Mcpherson (who predicts imminent human extinction) seriously, but the techno-utopian future seen in mainstream culture seems outdated by now.

What do you think? Are we inevitably headed for a kurzweillian-superhuman-techno-wonderland, in an unstoppable march of progress? Or will climate change bring down our civilization and begin a new dark age?
Personally, I like to imagine future generations centuries from now gazing in wonder at the ruins of our cities, marveling at the ancient people who constructed them. The idea of a trillion humans spreading exponentially through the galaxy has never appealed to me.

2

Good questions and good OP. It’s going to be a balancing act, really, between our expansion and the collapse of the climate. I recall (I think it was from the 1732 series) a line that, to paraphrase went something like ‘if you are falling down on a road of glass, is it better to put a hand out…or run faster…?’. That always struck me as, at it’s root, the different world views on how things can pan out. Do we stick a hand out, try and stop our civilization, put the brakes on wrt our industries and in the 1st world especially our lifestyles, try and balance within our means, go sustainable…or do we try and go as quickly as possible, to make the breakthroughs that will enable us to directly mitigate or even control the climate, to explore and exploit the vast resources in our solar system, to basically continue the upward trend wrt lowering poverty and enabling everyone, every human, to lead a good, solid life, to give everyone something like a 1st world lifestyle? It’s hard to say. I’m not sure we CAN run fast enough. My gut feeling though is if we put a hand out, we will probably put the brakes on our upward trajectory, perhaps for a very, very long time…perhaps indefinitely. We are so close to your ‘kurzweillian-superhuman-techno-wonderland’…and so close to the edge at the same time. Not just wrt climate, but politically as well. We are dancing on the razors edge, IMHO, and we could go either way…we could basically be a species that, essentially, lives forever (our species or it’s decedents)…or we could go extinct in the next 100-200 years. Or we could go into a slow decline, where we inevitably go extinct down the road because we just never got off this rock, and that leads to eventual extinction for not just us but for every living thing on the planet.

Myself, I think we will make it. What I think will happen (my WAG if you will) is that we won’t get that ‘kurzweillian-superhuman-techno-wonderland’, we’ll get something less. It’s going to be hard times for many humans, and, as noted, many species have already died out and more will as well. But I think eventually we’ll get it under control. I think we are already starting to see how that could happen, in fact, though we also see the seeds our own destruction at the same time.

3

If strong AI is a possibility I see a good chance of humanity being replaced by cyborgs or robots.

4

Beware issuing predictions; you may be right. But how to tell? :smack:

A Malthusian projection ignores that greater population means more smart people finding ways to extend technologies. A hopeful projection ignores that more evil people will find ways to destroy the planet; maybe they’ll start launching nukes willy-nilly. Or maybe we’ll hit a Vingean singularity where humanity transcends and vanishes, godlike.

Humanity hasn’t achieved self-destruction yet. Give us time. Has anyone set up a betting market for long-term outcomes?

5

I think the argument that more people means more geniuses, while seeming to be trivially true arithmetic, is a very bad prescription — though it’s difficult to articulate the reasons.

Note that Archimedes is often called the greatest genius who ever lived, but in his day the world population was only 1% or 2% what it is now. Note that there were few scientists in Europe when its population peaked in the 13th century; it was in the aftermath of the Black Death’s decimations circa 1350 that steps toward the Renaissance began. And note that today’s frantic American culture pushes our brightest toward Wall St., not toward science.

6

Here’s one prediction I’m sure is completely correct. Most predictions made today will be highly inaccurate. :slight_smile:

In a few decades, people will look back on our predictions in the same way as we look back on 1950’s predictions of the future.

7

No it isn’t. The reason is pretty simple.

a. A genius human and a human of median intelligence have brains about the same size, made of the same type of components. There are limits to how much nature can even possibly increase the intelligence of a genius (presumably with mutations that make the myelin sheaths thicker or increase the density of synapses or similar change)

Maxed out, is a genius perhaps twice as intelligent as a median person? Difficult to measure but say, for the sake of argument, that’s the best nature can do.

b. In the days since Archimedes, the N+1 step for advancing technology means you need to make something that is immensely complex even more complex and/or better. So even if a genius is twice as smart, the technology they are trying to improve is hundreds of times more complex. Twice won’t cut it.

It is taking the work of millions of people working together to keep technology advancing. Behind the scenes, all the latest gadgets tend to be made by huge teams of thousands of people in total. (not just the teams that made the product, but the teams that designed the latest SOC, and the teams that developed the Xnm silicon fabrication process, and so on)

c. AI of course has the potential to change all of this. We can trivially build AIs today that solve mentally complex but well defined problems (Go, Starcraft 2, etc) and they beat every human alive. This implies it is possible to build AIs that are able to aid in R&D and thus accelerate the process of making more advanced AIs.

And so on in a Kurzeweilian acceleration until humanity and their AI successors hit an assymptope limited by physics.

8

I have a hard time even imagining what vastly superior technology will be like. I wouldn’t lay odds on the “techno-wonderland” future.

Yeah, the climate change will have a huge impact. But it won’t mean that humans won’t be able to grow food, or live on the planet. We just won’t be able to grow the foods we are used to growing where we are used to growing them, and live as we have where we have. So how well will we adapt? Will we keep growing monoculture crops of beans and corn, and feed them to animals? Or will we move to something more sustainable?

And how do we envision this wonderworld? Maybe everyone can have their pocket computers - but will they be able to live in American megamansions driving SUVs at the same time? What will we do for energy? A great many technological and industrial advances depend on cheap energy. Of course, most energy is cheap only if you don’t acknowledge all of the associated costs…

So I have a hard time envisioning a future where EVERYTHING is cheap and ubiquitous - technology, travel, healthcare, luxury goods, food, fuel… What will we give up? And will the world community ever get to the point where we can scale down military spending?

I would hope at some point future generation wise up to cooperating towards a more sustainable, widely scaleable lifestyle. I think it might take quite a but of pain before that option is forced on us, as Americans at least, don’t impress me as eagerly sacrificing their privileged and internationally subsidized status.

9

Ok, in terms of hard science and grounded extrapolation of the things that we know are possible.

Numbers correspond to paragraphs

  1.  We **know** robots, of the kind that are similar in form factor to humans and smart enough to do most well defined tasks (with specific machine types for each task, obviously) are possible.  Proof : we already have prototypes
  2.  We can *already* freely move genes between plants and animals.  Finding out how to make the designer plants and animals to compensate for any biodiversity loss is possible.  This might take thousands or millions of separate experiments to brute force a deeper understanding of the role of each gene, but it's absolutely possible.
  3.  This is already solvable, we have all the solutions sitting right here.  Sure, we can't have everyone living exactly like Americans do now because of the air pollution.  But if pollution isn't free for end users, but quite expensive, the "invisible hand" pushes towards other solutions.  It's entirely possible for every human living on earth now to have a large apartment or condo in some 30 story concrete building, with the energy coming from solar and wind and buffered by batteries.  Transport would be autonomous cars and buses and scooters.  Long distance air transport would be pretty expensive as it requires emitting carbon, but high speed vacuum trains (now called "hyperloops") solve most of that.
 4.  Now you are talking about social and political problems.  A technological "utopia" is **possible**.  We have, already, extremely well developed prototypes of all the things that would make this possible.  From AI systems that show the potential to do most drudgery, to advanced robotics, to solar, wind, and batteries and autonomous cars - we already *have* all these things and none of them are developed to their maximum potential.

But yes, in terms of social and political, perhaps we are fucked. The two biggest problems:

 a.  These advanced machine learning driven robots I am describing mean that most humans alive won't have anything to offer anyone else in terms of valuable labor.  Almost all the economic rents go to the owners of these machines, the land they need to mine and collect energy from, and the owners of the intellectual property that make such AI systems possible.  
 b.  CO2 pollution is a tragedy of the commons problem.  Each nation has a strong economic incentive to pollute heavily while making other countries strangle their heavy industries reducing pollution.  China would love it if the US stopped manufacturing anything at all because it's too expensive to pay for the energy, because all of that business would go to Chinese factories.  (contrary to popular belief, the USA manufacturers more in tonnage today than it ever did in any previous year.)
10

We’ll all end up jacked to the Matrix.

11

From the OP:

No. We are currently living in the most abnormal time in human history thus far. Thirty or fifty or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years ago, people of that time were also living in the most abnormal time in human history to that point, and our ancestors will also live in the most abnormal point up to then. At every moment in history, the amount of advances and progress in the past generation has been greater than that in all generations prior to that point. The “singularity” that some armchair philosophers like to talk about isn’t a singularity at all, but a horizon, that nobody ever notices crossing, because there’s always a new horizon, always the same distance ahead of you.

12

When, pray tell, was the most normal time in human history?

13

The early to mid 90s felt pretty normal, from an American perspective. A decent world economy that wasn’t yet completely rigged, a stable political system that wasn’t yet irredeemably broken, relative peace across the world except in a few nations most people have never heard of, and a culture that had not yet been perverted by the likes of reality tv or the Internet…

Then the Clinton impeachment happened with all its hyper partisanship, followed shortly by 9/11 as well as the birth of surveillance capitalism, and we all began our slow descent into dystopia.

Years from now, politicians and voters will be pining for a return to the 90s, just as many look upon the 50s with nostalgia now.

14

So why are a bunch of descendents reduced to going back to 16th century standards of living superior to trillions of human descendants spreading throughout the galaxy. Also if humans spread through the galaxy, they won’t be humans. Our bodies and brains will be manufactured to be vastly superior to the fragile, intensively needy biological bodies and brains we have now.

I subscribe to the theory that humanity undergoes massive technological revolutions at certain set intervals.

The first one was the neolithic around 10,000 years ago. The second was the industrial revolution about 250 years ago. The third is the one we are in the early stages of now, the machine intelligence revolution (what people like Kurzweil call the singularity when it reaches maturity).

Each revolution led to massive changes in how humans lived their lives. Population exploded. The speed at which math and science developed grew dramatically. World GDP grew dramatically and rates of GDP growth grew dramatically with each one (supposedly world GDP only grew by 0.1% a year during the agricultural years, but compare that to something like 0.001% during our hunter gatherer years. And compare both to the 3-6% global GDP growth rates we have now).

Anyway, yeah humanity has problems. But most of our problems are due to resource depletion and pollution. Will we overcome them? I think so, at the very least I think if we become an interplanetary species we will be able to overcome these limitations. And I think that will be feasible within a century. Asteroid mining is another method of obtaining raw materials from space.

One thing that may happen is a cyberpunk future, at least for a while. A world where due to pollution and resource depletion, we have advanced technology and technological regression side by side. So maybe MRI machines won’t work since we ran out of helium, but we will have AI in our earbuds and electric cars. Maybe there won’t be anymore beef since we ran out of phosphorus for farming, but we will have surgeries to give people bionic limbs and organs if they lose a limb or an organ due to an accident or aging.

I just don’t forsee how anything short of a massive meteor or gammy ray burst can cause human extinction. Humans are fairly easy to keep alive. As long as we have water, food, protection from microbes, protection from physical trauma (violence, accidents, predators), protection from the elements, basic health care, oxygen, etc. humans are pretty easy to keep alive and most of us will live to at least 70 with those things.

Our standard of living may decline in the coming decades, but only temporarily because that’ll create market incentives to find new sources of raw materials, alternative raw materials to replace the ones that we ran out of or new technologies that are sustainable. Peak oil keeps getting pushed back because we keep finding new reserves of oil, while at the same time we develop more and better alternatives to oil. Either cars run on electricity, hydrogen, compressed air, etc. or ways to convert things like coal into oil.

15

I know you meant these as examples, but :

a. MRI machines will work fine with liquid nitrogen if you use "high temperature" superconductors instead.
b. How do we run out of an element? Running out of grazing land because we made the latitudes near the equator uninhabitable, sure, but with the notable exception of helium gas and spacecraft the Earth is a closed system.

I do concede we may see regressions. USA suburbia is somewhat unsustainable and of course is very inefficient.

16

Realistically we aren’t going to run out of phosphorus either. Its abundant, and we will just find new sources of it. By ‘run out’ I more mean we run out of easy to access sources that are affordable. But as those resources run out we look for harder to find, less affordable sources.

I’m not sure in what areas we will see regression, but I think due to pollution and resource depletion we will see regression in some areas. But it won’t end civilization. Civilization is honestly pretty hardy and sustainable.

European civilizations withstood the black plague which killed 30-50% of people and this was before we understood anything about medicine.

From roughly the years 1900 until 1955, Russia withstood a civil war, WW1, the spanish flu, the stalinist purges, famines, WW2. And their civilization still survived.

The idea that civilization will collapse because ‘maybe’ we won’t be able to drive our SUVs cross country anytime we want anymore is kind of silly when you consider that civilization has withstood plagues and wars before.

17

Also, I just checked, you can buy in Texas pure wind/solar power for 8-10 cents a kwh or so. It’s not as cheap as fossil fuel generated power but it’s really, really close now. (I remember when it was 15 cents)

That gives you plenty of energy to condition the air in your mcmansion and keep the electric SUV charged up.

Really the only remaining inconvenience is electric SUVs are expensive and somewhat beta products, and you have to wait to recharge a few hours total on that cross country trip. Or stop for overnight recharging in SUVs without supercharger support like Hyundai’s offering.

18

I didn’t say it was superior, just that I personally prefered it. And, for the people living in this future world, they won’t feel unhappy about their situation because they’ll have nothing to compare it too.

Also, If you are turned into an immortal robot travelling through space, are you still “you”? Why is abandoning humanity considered progress?

I think this is the most likely outcome. One idea: If genetic editing becomes advanced enough, normal people could start creating new species to make up for all the extinct ones.

I agree, humans aren’t going away anytime soon.

My hope/fear is that the decline will continue long enough to end this era. If we fall down now, it will very diffcult for future generations to get back up as easily as we did the first time around. Without a cheap source of concentrated energy (fossil fuels), a stable climate, a diverse biosphere, etc…, it will be a very difficult undertaking.

19

I rather doubt we’ll be all watched over by machines of loving grace but who knows? Maybe our AI s will be sweet and protective as Golden Retriever doggies… after they dump their current racist, sexist, classist training datasets and learn that people are people.

What happens after the industrial age? A post-industrial age, duh. A human future we build as we go along. A human future that can be disrupted by catastrophes so we really have no idea WTF anything will be like next year or beyond. We can hope; lay out truth-table consequence matrices; receive inspiration; foment heinous plots; or just muddle along. I vote for ‘muddling’.

20

Fair enough. Its a matter of personal opinion then. To me, I couldn’t forsee any situation where life before the industrial revolution was better than life after it. However in many ways life as a hunter gatherer was probably better than life as a farmer in 3000 BC.

For me, I view where we are now as the embryonic stage for real life. The universe will exist forever, even if heat death occurs. Life has only existed for 4 billion years, which is almost nothing on universal timescales. Moving from biological consciousness, biological intelligence, and natural selection over to intelligently designed consciousness, super intelligence and intelligent design will be a massive step forward in all areas. It’ll be a blossoming of quality of life, science, technology and culture we can’t fathom and I look forward to it even if I’m dead before it begins (and I will be).

I just don’t think it’ll happen. I know the phrase that we are all 9 meals away from anarchy, but humans love civilization. I don’t see us giving that up anytime soon. Humans would rather live under a brutal military dictatorship if it meant civilization was maintained rather than just splinter off into mad max tribes.

And civilization is very resilient. Kill half the people in a plague before medicine existed and civilization survives. Some civilizations have failed (the native American ones for example) but you had to kill almost everyone for that to happen.

Also all the knowledge of how we built civilization is still there. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, all the info we had is stored on computers, books, microfilm, etc and we can use it to restart things. And even if the internet shuts down, you can store thousands of ebooks and scientific papers on a thumb drive and share those to disseminate knowledge. A physical library worth of books and scientific papers of knowledge needed to survive and rebuilt can be stored on a flash drive and shared between all the tablets and laptops out there (which can be recharged with solar power).

We could dramatically cut our energy usage and still survive. But even then, theres nothing stopping us from moving away from fossil fuels. 100 nuclear plants provide 20% of Americas grid energy. Build another 400 and grid energy goes back to where it is now. It’ll cost a lot of money (if you assume $10 billion per plant, thats 4 trillion. Which is a very high estimate but still doable.

We spent 40% of GDP on military expenses during WW2 and civilization survived. Japan was spending closer to 80% and their civilization survived. In a true survival scenario I could see the US and the world spending 50%+ of GDP on rebuilding and sustainability.

Also biodiversity may reduce what foods we have, but it shouldn’t kill us all. You don’t need bees to pollinate rice, wheat, corn or soybeans. A future where we all live on cornbread and vitamin capsules may not be ideal, but it won’t kill us.