Think gated community more than city walls and siege warfare.
There’s already been a massive exodus of the moderately well-to-do to protected enclaves away from Those People. The drive for that will only get bigger as inequality increases. This economic apartheid is bog standard practice among the wealthy in generally poor countries such as in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
War between functioning democracies will be rare in a world of one-child parents. As you suggest.
OTOH authoritarians will launch wars against whomever they please whenever they please; the interests of their slave-citizens simply don’t matter. And authoritarians may well find that single-child functioning democracies are the best prey since they’re bad at fighting back.
Remember it takes both parties to make peace, but only one to make war.
You do have a point that I very much agree with. Having read Work by James Suzman I think it’s not that easy, even apart from wealth inequality. Among many excellent points he makes is the fact that assembly lines, automation, computers and what have you, have made it possible to work fewer hours every week. This has been increasingly possible during a large part of the 20th century.
And yet - we still grind (at least) 40 hrs/week. His whole book looks into why we’re stuck with this model.
Me, too. But I got into grammar school, then university (all free in those days, for people like me with no income). Education was very egalitarian in the sixties and seventies, unlike now, when almost everyone in power is ex-public school.
Well, this is what was predicted in the 30s too, but while the prediction that we’d become vastly more productive came true, we just found more work to do to fill the hours the old tasks took up rather than plowing that saved time into vastly increased leisure time…
My understanding is that the research is somewhat mixed, however what we do know is that teens are experiencing a mental health crisis that has intensified over the last ten years.
I think it used to be worse in the 90s, but it’s not great now, as rates of depression and anxiety among youth, particularly young women, have skyrocketed. Suicide rates have tripled.
Why is this? I suspect social media has something to do with it. A lot of experts are arguing that life is just more stressful for kids than it used to be, as they may be experiencing greater economic instability. It’s also possible that their well-meaning parents haven’t been teaching them the skills they need to cope in today’s complex world (perhaps later generations, traumatized by their abusive upbringings, have erred on the side of indulgence. Anecdotally, I have seen a lot of parents unwittingly make their child’s anxiety worse by reinforcing it/allowing their child to avoid the stressor rather than teaching the child to tolerate anxiety and work through it.)
This combined with the drive from social media to keep up appearances and to compare one’s life to one’s peers’ highlight reel, and to be sexualized from an earlier age, and to be subject to online harassment and bullying, have all created a sort of toxic cocktail that is bad for youth.
That’s my best understanding of the situation.
Tru dat. You’re saying (and I agree!) that this drastic shortage of jobs on account of automation and robotics is unlikely to happen, as more jobs naturally get created.
I’m saying that if it were to happen anyway, it would be a good rather than a bad thing. So we’re not in disagreement, just coming at it from different angles.
I’ll predict that the big crisis in 25 years is something we don’t even know about yet, or don’t currently see as a problem. The future is unpredictable and change is accelerating.
If I had to guess at the big problems in 25 years:
I don’t know where you came to the conclusion that “functioning democracies are bad at fighting back”. Historical evidence seems to point to authoritarian regimes having weaker economies and less motivated militaries with more inept and corrupt leadership.
Good point - kinda.
The single-child part of my assertion that you left out is really the key; there is no historical data on democracies where almost everyone is an only child and the parents are assumed to be hyper-protective and therefore war-averse. But it’s a good bet they would be. As well these would be societies with little latent capability to up their baby production, at least in the immediately next generation.
But overall your point is well-taken about functioning democracies being pretty good at defending themselves since they have a population motivated by something more than just a bayonet in their backside.
I suppose I could have said that better as something about like:
And authoritarians like to believe that functioning democracies are the best prey since they’re assumed to be weak and decadent and therefore bad at fighting back. So they’re more likely to be attacked than are more prickly bellicose authoritarian states. As well, for those democracies with mostly-only-child demographics, hyperprotective parents will be particularly anti-war during peacetime which will further embolden their authoritarian would-be attackers.
3 reasons why:
The internet, including social media, may be the single greatest vector of mental disorder triggers invented by the hand of man. The amount of information, the violence (yes) of it, the dopamine addiction, hell, just the sheer noise of the internet can overwhelm. We are seeing it now, people who commit crimes based upon things they saw on the internet, things which literally are not true.
The nature of the internet is fracturing the consensual realities which, until now, has bound societies together. The use of likes, blocks, follows, shares, and more allow each of us to create our own mental landscape of what the world is. America, for better and worse, is an idea, and one which could be reliably molded in the Age of Print and even in the Age of Electronics… as long as the electronic voices were all top-down, as they were pre-1994 (which is when I date the beginning of the “popular” internet, the Netscape IPO. Others have their own opinions.)
But now? Now everyone has their own idea of what America means, all molded by their chosen electronic communities (like us), the voices of dissent tuned down (unshared), even out (blocked). Instead of one reality, we now have thousands. Millions. More, and this is a problem for a country which is a shared illusion.
So we have a machine we created which allows the United States to be a target for nation-states wishing to psychologically destabilize our population via means which we have already seen as effective (trucker convoy. J6. All the Russian Trump support on FB in 2016). We are especially vulnerable because much of our system of government relies on the belief in that government, and the structure of our government allows for maximum impediment by bad-faith actors who themselves may be under the sway of foreign propaganda, and, of course, the first amendment gives broad powers to those who want to spread the airways and internet with lies.
And, the worst thing?
It is profitable to do this.
War. Big wars.
The world is headed for huge, huge reorganization, and major countries are going to fall apart. China is going to lose 400 million people out of its population - maybe more, I’ve seen estimates of 700 million. Russia is probably doomed as a state as we currently think of it; it will lose a third of its population and is headed to economic catastrophe. Most Western countries have demographic problems but not as bad as they do, and many Western countries can mitigate the issue through immigration. Between that and major upcoming food problems, the liklelihood of more war as the world finds new equilibrium is very high. There is real possibility of nuclear war; I believe it’s much more likely in the next 25 years than it ever was during the Cold War.
War with China is very possibly, albeit likely as a proxy, but they’re completely fucked. Absolutely, totally fucked. In 20 years, China will be so demographically old their economy will have long cratered. Their economy as it is is wholly dependent on energy imports that they could never protect the supply lines of in a real war with the West. They are boned. The danger to us is nuclear war as their state dies.
China has no rational reason to go to war with the Allies, but dying empires sometimes do irrational things.
Our ignornace of, and unwillingness to study, sex (and by extension, human reproduction) in space. No, really. We’re going to have to figure this out sooner rather than later if we’re going to send people to Mars, or populate a space colony, or whatever. So far the space community is acting like the whole concept is beneath even talking about.
For Pete’s sake, send married (hetero) astronauts up into the Vomit Comet, give them some measure of privacy, and figure out what bridges need to be crossed to make this happen.
Just because they don’t talk about it…
Truly. There have been some studies and a couple solutions, one being a wide belt with handles and another an assistant.
This aircraft is used to train astronauts in zero-g maneuvers, giving them about 25 seconds of weightlessness out of 65 seconds of flight in each parabola.
Soooooo…your solution to the “sex in space” problem is all quickies, all the time? 
Play the hand you’re dealt, as the old saying goes.
If there are to be any issues with reproduction in space or on another moon/planet, the getting pregnant part is not the long pole in the tent.
It will be gestating a fetus into a normal healthy baby in a zero G and relatively high radiation environment. Animal experiments suggest that’ll be fine. Or at least fine enough for a pioneer / frontier situation.
The rest doesn’t need research as much as it just needs long term space or exo-planet habitats where having and raising kids is part of the normal course. I don’t see that happening for a century or more. Even if we assume all the other apocalyptic shit in this thread magically disappears.
I would be more concerned with the amount of radiation exposure pregnant mothers and new babies will experience in space. Background radiation on Mars is 40-50 times higher than on earth, and radiation can be even worse in interplanetary space. Fast-growing fetal and infant tissue is especially vulnerable to radiation exposure, you’re gonna end up with a lot of birth defects and pediatric cancer cases unless steps are taken to keep their exposure as low as reasonably achievable.
In any case, I seriously doubt off-planet human reproduction is going to be a problem in the next 25 years. I suspect we’ll have our hands full with on-planet human reproduction, though.
I’m confident we on Earth can close the difference.