You’re right.
It will hardly be worth living then. I am only hanging on waiting for my jetpack.
Well … there is a flying "hoverboard".
Any other takers?
The Presidential election between Ivanka Trump ® and Miley Cyrus (D) will be a real doozy.
And even trying to design an android maid (with, um, extracurricular options) will have been outlawed outright.
By 2060, President Trump will have ceased public appearances 40 years ago and only dictates to his subjects via statements published by the last remaining news agency, NBC (National Breitbart Consortium).
Didn’t really see a hellscape option, but I don’t think the US will be recognizable. We’ll probably be fighting a low level civil war with random acts of terrorism pretty common. With the end of pax Americana, China will become much more aggressive militarily. I expect there will have been at least one nuclear exchange (maybe nuclear terrorism). Most wild animals will be dead, the seas will be dead. The middle east will continue to destabilize, finally pulling Israel under as it loses US support (just unable to prop it up anymore). Most people will be on some kind of dole. There really won’t be much place for the individual: institutions will keep getting bigger and the individual will keep getting smaller. The divide between rich and poor will be starker.
Yeah, folks never seem to get it. If anything, the change in technology across the board is increasing, not some sort of flat. People just don’t notice it because they are in the middle of it…and they don’t pay attention to what is changing or how it’s changing. They think ‘well, my cell phone is only slightly better than last years model, so things aren’t really changing much’ and that’s about as far as they go. Me, I think we are on the cusp of some really momentous changes and I can’t imagine what things will be like in 2060. Of course, as others have noted, unless there are some radical changes in life longevity and aging along with some other things along those lines I probably won’t be here to see them (I’d be over 100 in 2060), or if I am I most likely won’t be in a great position to notice them. 
Plus for many people issues of form vs. content dominate perception, as well as misunderstanding of economic considerations and the limits of theory vs. application (e.g. an airliner today is technologically far superior to one from 50 years ago but it still looks like a tube with an engine under each wing, and it’s not profitable to fly SSTs or suborbital spacelanes, so people think “no progress”; similarly there’s no moonbase or space colonies because where’s the ROI on that).
That’s 47 years. I was in my mid-30s 47 years ago, and I doubt if it ever occurred to me to wonder what life would be like 47 years later. The fact is, very little has changed. A few aspects of life involve a different hands-on technology, but yielded the same end result. Otherwise, everything was pretty much the same. Hot and cold water came out of chrome-plateed faucets. I drove a car to work, and got stuck when it snowed. Big Mac for lunch. Watched NFL games on Sunday. Had one wife, who was female. If I had to go someplace far away, I flew there in a big airplane with lots of other people, seat belt fastened for takeoff and landing, no smoking. What was on TV was nearly all shit. People said Please and Thank you. Very little has changed.
[QUOTE=jtur88]
That’s 47 years. I was in my mid-30s 47 years ago, and I doubt if it ever occurred to me to wonder what life would be like 47 years later. The fact is, very little has changed. A few aspects of life involve a different hands-on technology, but yielded the same end result. Otherwise, everything was pretty much the same. Hot and cold water came out of chrome-plateed faucets. I drove a car to work, and got stuck when it snowed. Big Mac for lunch. Watched NFL games on Sunday. Had one wife, who was female. If I had to go someplace far away, I flew there in a big airplane with lots of other people, seat belt fastened for takeoff and landing, no smoking. People said Please and Thank you. Very little has changed.
[/QUOTE]
This is a text book example of what JRDelirious is saying. Couldn’t have asked for a better post after his. It’s funny, but all of the things you talk about here (plus the irony of you posting your thoughts about how little things have changed on a message board that can be viewed by billions across a planet connected via a global network and data communications system instantly) have all changed profoundly in those 47 years (well, except the wife thingy I guess…tech will never change that I shouldn’t think). It only seems the same (to you) because you haven’t noticed how much things have changed in those day to day things you take for granted…and much of the change is totally opaque to anyone who isn’t involved in how they work. Others, however, are. Consider just two small things from your list. How do you pay for gas today as opposed to how you paid for it 47 years ago? When you get stuck in the snow now, how do you call for assistance or to tell your wife you are stuck? Think about just those two things and recall how it was 47 years ago and try and filter out all of the changes that you take for granted that can change your perceptions of the differences.
Besides technology and economics I don’t think most of the human race will make it 10 years from now.
There was article saying the government, economic advisors and media are doing mass media blackout!! Saying not only is the US and most of the world is still in recession but have been in recession for over 20 years!! And there are signs we are on way to depression worse than the 30’s !!
Well it true US unemployment is lowest it been and unemployment have astronomically gone down now. And in over 100 years you could not pick best time for employment.
The problem is production is lowest it ever been, job shifting to retail and service sector economy, people swimming in debt, industrial and manufacturing gone to China, middle class disappearing, low pay, owning home is now becoming outreach for the middle class now and getting worse every year and are now a luxury.
Unstable bank loans and also many banks may go under. The financial sector not doing well.
Wait, there’s some kind of economic disaster going on right now that’s being hidden from us by the government? English does not appear to be your first language, could you find someone to help you repair your observation about unemployment so that it’s understandable?
But how many people thoughtfully read what I wrote? Maybe 2 or 3 – I might have said none, but at least you did. But in the 1970s, I could have written that with a manual Underwood and mailed it with a stamp to the editor of my local newspaper, and it would have been read by dozens or hundreds.
In the 1920s, a school child could have written a letter to Henry Ford complimenting him on on the quality of his dad’s new car, and a couple of weeks later, he’d have received a hand-written letter from Henry Ford thanking him for his comment. What are the chances in 2017 of establishing that kind of correspondence through the miraculous channels of the instant global network of data communications systems?
My dad was born in 1900, and in 1912, as the oldest child, had to quit school when his father died, to work to support his family. There was no radio or telephone, electric lights or automobiles in his world and world wars hadn’t been thought of yet. Fast forward 47 years, to 1959, and ponder how his world changed in that time span.
We all think our times re changing, but in comparison with a century ago, we are in an age of stagnation.
I think people had the same general perception in 1972, just with different specifics - cars, TVs, jet planes.
And they were pretty much right, too: the world of 1992 wasn’t all that different from 1972. Then things changed in a hurry.
But your examples (of paying for gas and calling a tow truck )are minor, compared the 47 years previous.
That’s when there was real change.
That is–, instead of comparing 2017 to 1970, let’s compare 47 years earlier–1970 to 1923.
In 1923 you didnt pay for gas at all, and if your horse did stuck in the snow, there was nobody to call to tow you.
Obviously, the one huuuuge change has been the internet and smartphones. But those are now 10 years old, well-established technologies,and not likely to change much in the next 20 years.
I 'm gonna guess that 2060 will be less different from 2017 than 1970 was from 1920.
Then, after 2080, there will be another huuuuuge change–in genetics and biology.
Why after 2080?—because doing genetic research will take a full human lifetime. It won’t be quick and easy, like switching from DOS to Windows95. After all, if you change a babies genes so that he lives to be 150 years old, you’ll have to wait till he is 60 or 70 to know if you have succeeded.
[QUOTE=chappachula]
But your examples (of paying for gas and calling a tow truck )are minor, compared the 47 years previous.
[/QUOTE]
They SEEM minor…but really, they are fundamental shifts. Cell phones today (which is what I meant by the second one) seems pretty minor. But consider how you’d have had to do those simple things 47 years ago…and implications of the tech today.
Cars were available in 1923…something like half a million IIRC. And phones were also available. There were certainly great changes between 1923 and 1970, but the changes we are talking about between then and 2016 have been profound and wide-ranging. Using a telephone in the 1920’s and in the 1970’s was fundamentally the same…just a progression of technologies (manual switching as opposed to electro-mechanical). But using a telephone today, while it SEEMS the same is fundamentally different. The signal isn’t analog anymore and the signal itself has embedded information in it as well as your voice communications. Call 9/11 today from a land line and the operator can see a host of information about the caller that wasn’t available in 1970 because the system wasn’t built that way.
Oh, you have no idea. Not likely to change much? I think you are way off the mark there. The internet is going to become much faster and much more pervasive. We haven’t even started touching on the internet of things yet, where basically every device and appliance in your house/work/where ever is connected and sharing data. Your light bulb of today could be a LiFi system, giving you a huge mobility increase both in speed and access…anywhere there is a light you could have network. And that network bandwidth will almost certainly be orders of magnitude more than today…which has it’s own profound impact, though as with the others above it’s subtle and something most people will probably not even notice. As for smartphones, personally I see a convergence between all your devices into one ubiquitous device that connects to and controls everything.
And this is just two things and don’t even cover all of the aspects of even those two that are likely to change. Quantum computing, DNA storage systems, graphine battery system…we are on the cusp of so many things in a 47 year time frame it’s impossible to even go into a fraction of them. There are a host of other technologies and lines of scientific research that are almost certainly going to have an even more profound impact.
Well, assuming you are my age or older we will probably never know, but I think you are dead wrong. I can see why you and some others feel that way…it doesn’t look like things are progressing that much because we are in the middle of an upward curve but you need more perspective to see the upward trend. You look at the difference between the 20’s and the 70’s today through the lens of history and you can really see the rapid progression. But we are in it here and it’s not as noticable.
Assuming we aren’t facing the appocolypse on Friday, I think that the ‘huuuuuuge’ change you see here is going to happen much earlier than 2080…we are going to see very large changes in genetics and biology in the next 10 years. Cloning is now old hat…hell, there is a company in South Korea who will clone your dog today if you have the money. They are also closing in on cloning a wooly mammoth and I expect to see that happen in my lifetime. There are folks researching all sorts of uses for CRISPR-Cas9 and we are at the very beginning of that. The changes in science are almost across the board and a lot of research vectors and whole categories are converging. Just think of the cosmology and astronomy discoveries that have happened in the last few years and consider what will be discovered next.
Since there are more ways to screw up this world than there are ways to improve it, the odds are it will be screwed up.
Although it’s been touched on I think the real “upset the apple cart” change will be in biological science. There will come a point not too far down the line in the future where genomic science and the ability to regrow body parts will yield hugely extended hypothetical lifespans and (potentially) insane concentrations of wealth.
The human genome will be able to be manipulated far more than today. People can and will opt for “designer” children.
On a social level I think there will be a middle class and sub middle class revolt against the super-rich in industrialized nations. There will be blood.
I really think it remains to be seen if multi party democracy is going to win as a political system. If the Chinese can maintain power and superior economic growth it will be interesting to see what happens.
yes US unemployment is at 4.7% and going down every year and was at 10% in 2009.