The future will be both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because it will take off in completely unexpected ways; terrible because everything we love will be dead, including ourselves.
It’s two years at least since I saw a 3D printed sculpture. It was made on a device that worked rather like an ordinary 2D printer; the instructions were sent via the internet. What happens when you can print your own shoes, dresses, household utensils and spare parts for your door lock? What happens to manufacturing when things that were once safely physical are as easily pirated as any other form of information? What happens to lorry drivers and container freight and manufacturing in China? Will that be balanced by benefits of transferring the costs of production to the end user?
They’ve found a swimsuit that really does make swimmers go faster. Should they ban it for competition? Cognitive enhancement drugs are not provably unsafe, nor are they quackery. They work and that’s the problem. The British government has asked the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to look at making them controlled substances because they “could be seen as giving an unfair advantage”.
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Computer implants, embryo screening, stem cell therapies, maybe even improvements to the genotype… all leave behind the world’s surplus people. What happens when one population really is smarter, stronger and more emotionally reliable? We’ve seen what happens when people only think they’re superior.
The coming multiple meltdowns could mean we have democracy in name only – if that. Command societies may be more able to enforce the mass changes necessary to survive and prosper. China was able to limit population growth by command. Thatcher/Reaganism took it as self-evident that capitalism and democracy are outcomes of each other. We might be about to learn differently.
Unsolvable, wearisome, a cliché: oil will start becoming very expensive at the same time climate change hits water supplies and food production. Say it’s around 2030. The end of the oil culture will be mass creative destruction and I have no idea what lies the other side of it. At this point I echo the delicacy of Canada’s great SF writer, Elisabeth Vonarburg: “I can’t face writing across that mountain of corpses.”
The future will look like Darfur, Lagos and Shanghai. Wonderful, terrible, depending on who you are.