Pori

I feel like the biggest difference between growing up in the 90’s/early 2000’s compared to now is the sense of optimism about the future. Everybody felt hopeful that the future would be better than the past, that technological advancement would elevate the quality of life for everybody, that science would achieve great things beyond our imagination. What is there to be hopeful about the future of humanity today?

We are facing, on multiple fronts, at best a question-mark about our future, and at worst, a near total collapse of civilization (omnishambles is a word that should really make a comeback).

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Climate catastrophe

• Temperature extremes
  
  • Climate change will drive some places to become too hot to live, while others become too cold. Or, in the case of Western Europe, some sort of superposition of the two depending on the effects of the weakening AMOC.
• Natural disasters – fire/water/wind
  
  • Storms, floods, droughts, wildfires, mudslides; extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and intensity, causing death, destruction, and mass migration events. This will continue to get worse.
• Rising sea level
  
  • As polar ice, glacial melt, and other factors cause global sea-level rise, coastal populations will suffer. Currently habited areas will become uninhabitable, entire island nations will cease to exist, causing again, mass migration events.
• Depletion of fresh/drinking water
  
  • Global freshwater levels continue to decline, either as a result of climate change, or over-extraction. Without investment in alternate sources such as desalination technology, there will not be enough available to sustain the current water usage of the world.
• Depletion of topsoil
  
  • While claims on the timespan for total degradation of topsoil might be overblown, it is clear that intensive farming practices, combined with other factors, are degrading topsoil worldwide. This will reduce food yields, food security, and again could lead to famines, death, and mass migration events.
• Collapse of biodiversity – particularly pollinators
  
  • Biodiversity is reducing everywhere, be it coral bleaching, animal extinction, or the alarming decline in global insect populations. Linked to the previous item, a lack of pollinators has a direct impact on food production for humanity.
• Pollution – air, water, plastics, forever chemicals
  
  • Despite the feel-good effort of individuals sorting their waste into different coloured bins for collection in developed nations, recycling is not meeting global waste production; pollution is ever increasing. Plastic and other waste is increasingly shipped to poorer nations for disposal (out of sight, out of mind I guess!) and often ends up in the sea. Forever chemicals (PFAS) and microplastic are now ubiquitous in our drinking water, food, and other life. Air pollution continues to be a problem, and is getting worse. All of these cause illness, reduce lifespans, and are likely contributing to collapse in biodiversity.

Economic collapse

• Wealth inequality
  
  • After decades of decline, wealth inequality is rising again in western nations. We are showered with tales of how the rich keep getting richer while everybody else suffers. Given this trend, what is the end goal, the billionaire class own everything, and everybody below is in functional slavery?
• The façade of eternal growth
  
  • Companies are driven by eternal growth, economies rely on growth. What is the end state when there are diminishing returns in a world with finite resources?
• Subscriptions everywhere, the cost of living worsening
  
  • Perhaps as a result of the problem with eternal growth, companies are turning to ever more desperate ways to squeeze more money out of people. Either the price goes up, the size goes down, or subscriptions are added to products or services that didn’t have one before. Everything is increasing in cost everywhere, from food, to utilities, to rent, and wages are not keeping up. Again, what is the end state here? What happens when people simply can’t afford the cost of living? Food banks will not supply us all.
• Reduction in workers rights
  
  • While some countries are increasing some rights for some workers, globally the rights of workers has been under attack or declining for the past decade. In rich developed nations, corporations and the rich are relentlessly pushing for reductions in rights, return to office mandates, restrictions on union activity and other similar rights losses. Is the future for workers a return to feudal serfdom, but run by corporations?
• Aging populations testing the economic limits of social security
  
  • Western countries face long-term population decline due to falling birth rates. While this alone may not necessarily be bad, the impact of a disproportionately aged population is negative. There is growing pressure on public health services, growing pressure on social security such as national pension funds. If there are not enough working people to fund (via tax) the increase in aged people using these services, then they will simply not function at all. Is the future of social security a world where retirement age is pushed ever further back, or simply no longer exists until you’re physically incapable of working anymore?
• Key jobs (teachers, nurses, care workers) not paid well relative to other industries
  
  • Across western nations in both Europe and America, key worker salaries such as those of nurses/care workers and teachers have neither kept up with inflation, nor with jobs outside of those sectors. For such key jobs (especially taking into account the aforementioned aging population, and the yet to be discussed decline in education) there is no incentive for anybody today to choose those professions over for example, a career in a safe office job that often pays double, triple, or more, and has less of the stressful downsides. If we don’t incentivise or value these jobs, what will happen to society when nobody (not even migrant workers) wants to do them?

Social degradation

• Algorithm induced polarisation and fractal social bubbles
  
  • Social media is causing a massive detrimental impact on society through its polarisation effects. It is a mutually reinforcing feedback loop of algorithms recommending content driving people into bubbles or echo-chambers that only consist of that content, which subsequently leads people to seek out such content driving further algorithmic polarisation. The effects of this are being felt everywhere socially. The obvious example in political elections and the inability for one side to even be able to have a productive conversation with the other, let alone reach bi-partisan agreement or compromise. The other obvious example is radicalisation into terror groups (either domestically or otherwise).
  • However, it also has more insidious consequences: as people are driven into ever more niche social bubbles, the very social cohesion of physical societies fall apart. The social norms in one group may not be social norms in another. The social topics or hobbies in one group may not be in another. If everybody has their own unique social bubble that predominantly socialises online and likely is not geographically located together, how can people that are geographically located together be expected to interact in a socially cohesive way if they share no overlap? The social makeup and shared culture of people is shifting to shared online spaces rather than in-person, yet we physically are not. It is, therefore, inevitable, that there will be gaps in offline social cohesion (or the social cohesion of “countries”) as a result.
  • As an aside (and this is probably a topic for an entire essay), I use “fractal social bubbles” here to refer to the ever reducing size, or increasing niche-ness of such bubbles. For example, if we compare social overlap with regard to tv shows over time. In the era of terrestrial TV where only a handful of stations existed, a particular show could be expected to enter the national social awareness, allowing for shared conversations (whether positive or negative). Then, with satellite/cable TV and the early days of online streaming, we could still see this on occasion with shows like Game of Thrones entering widespread global social awareness. However, fast-forward to today, and the proliferation of channels, platforms, and quantity of content is vast, and the fandoms smaller, such that even having conversations about something watched on a streaming platform is increasingly likely to be met with “I’ve not seen/heard of that” from those outside of your own social bubble. This may be one cause of increasing feelings of social isolation (that end up mutually reinforcing online social bubbles).
• The post-truth era
  
  • It is clear we are entering into an era of post-truth, whereby the truth or actual facts spoken by our media, politicians, and even everyday people have become unimportant. Some are deceptive and outright lie or say things they know are false, but they don’t care, and the people that listen to them also don’t think truth is important. Where does this lead? What becomes of a society that shuns facts, science, and truth, and instead listens to only those that say what people want to hear, or say it in a way that makes people feel good?
• Decreasing attention spans in a world trying to capture an ever slimmer chunk of your time
  
  • Everything wants your attention. Notifications, short-form content, endlessly scrolling feeds, recommended content, gamification, adverts everywhere, and all the other predatory tactics being used to keep you engaged. All of this is resulting in attention being divided into smaller chunks across more things, and ultimately a measurable decline in attention spans. How many books do you, personally, fully read (not listen to in audiobook form) today compared to 10 or more years ago? Who even knows what the long-term consequences of this will be, but it can’t be good to have an entire population of people struggle to digest long or deep content. How can people solve world problems if they can’t spend the time to deeply read, comprehend, and synthesise the underlying research. How can any problem get enough attention on it if it’s already forgotten by the next day because something else came and grabbed the attention (how often do we already see this in news cycles of world tragedies today)?
• Downward trending technical capability of younger generations
  
  • Reports are surfacing both anecdotally, but also professionally that Gen Z are less technologically literate than previous generations, despite being raised natively around technology. There are even more worrying trends that suggest not only reading literacy, but also IQ is now in decline. If the current generation in power is unable to resolve current global issues, then we are relying on future generations to do so. A downward trend in capability makes this more difficult.
• Aging populations with fewer people to care for them
  
  • Connected to both the lack of good pay for key workers, and the declining birth rate resulting in more aging people needing care, there is a looming time-bomb of too many aging people needing care, and not enough people to look after them. What happens then? We let them die? Perhaps supported by state sanctioned “assisted suicide”? To be clear here, when I say “them”, I mean “us”, who cares for us when we are old, when fewer people are being born, and even fewer of those are taking up roles in care work.

Technological advancement in opposition to the benefit of humanity

• Enshittification everywhere

  • If there ever was a word to represent the current global zeitgeist, it is this. So much so that it has already been chosen as word of the year 2024 by the national dictionary of Australia.

  “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

  Enshittification of everything, everywhere, affecting all services, particularly those we were previously happy with. Tied to the façade of eternal growth, corporate greed knows no bounds. What happens when they can enshittify no more? What happens when there is no more juice to be squeezed?

• The value of AI

  • Let’s be honest, a lot of AI (maybe most of) is of no value to humanity. While there are some interesting use cases for large language models, serving up false information, telling people to put glue on their pizza, please die, citing false cases in legal filings, and the countless other falsehoods peddled by such systems are not the ones we need. Not to mention as tools being used by an entire generation to bypass learning by simply submitting generated answers to homework and essays (thus also contributing to the decline in education). Hallucinations and incorrect information are a fundamental part of these systems that will not be solved without some secondary fact checking tool. Yet corporations are rushing ahead to either convert everything to AI, or add AI to everything (presumably out of fear they will be left behind in the façade of eternal growth). What benefit does any of this bring humanity? Progress for the sake of corporate bank balances? Move fast and break things doesn’t work if the thing broken is the entirety of society.

• Energy consumption of AI, Blockchain, and data in general

  • A single request to GPT4 to generate 100 words uses 1.4 litres of water.
  • A single image generated with AI uses as much energy as fully charging a smartphone.
  • Mining bitcoin globally uses more electricity than many countries.
  • Driven by AI, datacentres are expected to reach 5% of global energy consumption by 2026. In Ireland this is expected to be 32% of their energy consumption.
  • Given the costs, do we really need any of this? Such a vast usage of electricity and water in exchange for the degradation of education, the continued enshittification of applications, incorrect information being confidently presented as fact, and a currency whose primary use is holding in the hope the value goes up (as well as for the purpose of scams), rather than for any payment/exchange of goods. What happens when we no longer have enough electricity generation capacity to cover real uses?

Political degradation

• Risk of global thermonuclear war
  
  • Not a day goes by without yet another authoritarian, or genocidal warlord killing people or making threats on the global stage, and the more countries that get involved, the greater the risk of a global interconnected war (if the asymmetric one we are currently in doesn’t already count). And to top it off: nuclear risks are rising. Maybe all of the above issues will be moot if we wipe ourselves out in a nuclear apocalypse first.
• The rise of authoritarian regimes
  
  • Authoritarianism is rising, potentially to the point that democracy will no longer be the politically dominant social system. The previously mentioned social and economic problems combined with extreme polarisation are leaving people feeling disenfranchised and left-out from traditional political systems. As a result people are inevitably choosing to vote for authoritarian regimes that promise them the world. Once authoritarian regimes are entrenched, reverting to a state of democracy will become near-impossible in the short-term. It is a one-way street that we are already on a path towards globally, and it will continue unless the underlying economic and social causes are solved.
• Political systems incapable of solving complex problems (both global and local)
  
  • Finally, and truly the most important problem of them all. Everything is simply too interconnected, and too complex to be solved by individual governments. To solve global problems we need global coordination. Given the geopolitical relationships this is unlikely, and demonstrably so with the lack of actual action on global climate goals. Even within countries, seemingly simple problems are too complex to be solved by a single government focused on short-term actions in winning the next election cycle. What could possibly be more damning for the fate of humanity than us knowing all the details of what our downfall will consist in (decades in advance in many cases), yet world governments not taking any actual action to solve it. Talk is not action, an agreement is not action (especially when they are broken without consequence), only actual concrete actions are actions.

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There are no doubt subjects missed, and years worth of research dedicated each individual point above that have not been adequately summarised.

However, overall, it is clear there is a complex interweaving of global catastrophe on the horizon, likely within the remainder of our lifetime, and this only scratches the surface of disaster or downward trend we face.

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Is there any room for optimism left for anybody at all? It certainly seems like there is no global coordinated progress, effort, or even the basic ability to solve any of these. There is only a downward trend in every single area.

Perhaps the only hope left an individual can wish for is this: they win a lottery with enough money to create a self-sufficient, off-grid house, in a location least likely to suffer the greatest impacts from climate, war, or other disasters. Living out their days, oblivious/head in the sand, and largely immune from the fall of humankind, just as today’s billionaires are already doing.

Failing that, maybe we could turn instead to John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.

…though in today’s world, it feels increasingly hard to justify.

#collapse #enshittification #future #climate

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