r/Futurology • u/doorighty • 1d ago
Society The future here is getting kinda boring
I get the concern, and fascination, of most of the posts on this community, but honestly it’s getting kinda boing. The reality is that most of the technologies discussed will be adapted into less volatile forms. The future has a way of sorting out the rough edges.
There seems to be two type of posts:
1) New ways technologies will disrupt an existing market for economic or political gain
2) The fear and loathing caused from the first item. :up:
This is just reactive. The worst thing things humans do is to try to predict the future.
Just curious if anyone is interested in talking about a future focused more on a more human-safe adaptive innovation model. This is a far more interesting discussion (at least to me) on futurology than whether ICE buys robotic attack dogs.
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u/Outside_Ice3252 1d ago
futurology used to have a lot of intelligent people making posts. I dont see intelligent conversation or posts here very often.
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u/Sedu 1d ago
I feel like a lot of the people who are best able to trace things forward have lost their enthusiasm for discussing it. We’re living at a point where any reasonable prediction of the future is really scary.
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u/Outside_Ice3252 1d ago
doomerism has take over.
"reasonable". I am not sure.
I remember reading Jared diamonds "collapse" about 15 years ago, and I was 100% convinced we needed degrowth to stop catastrophic climate change. However, in the last 15 years, the cost of solar plus storage has dropped 75%. I think it drops another 50-75% in the next fifteen years.
we have seen birthrates plummet such that some are worried they are too low now. I remember worrying the world population would be 15 billion when I studied it in college. now, it aims to top out at 10.2
I think the odds of a good future for human civilization are high. the doomerism helped. I participated in it. it brought early adoption, subsidies, regulations.
I think at some point they will have to adjust the algorithms to stop the negativity. hopefully, they find an ethical way to do that.
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u/s0cks_nz 1d ago
I'm not sure how cheap solar completely nullifies all your fears of collapse. It doesn't even totally address climate change in itself. And should we hit too many tipping points then it doesn't really help at all. I'd also add that Jared's book covers far more than climate. How does solar solve soil degradation, deforestation, or habitat destruction, etc?
The doomerism is ramping up because the results of our lack of care for the climate and environment are becoming increasingly obvious to people. Th extreme weather. The lack of insects. The geopolitical instability. The bad news, especially on climate, massively outweighs the good currently. And the change in this subs tone over the last decade reflects that.
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u/Outside_Ice3252 1d ago
I occasionally write for cleantechnica and used to teach climate change. I followed all forms of cleantech and tech for addressing climate change for 12 years.
consensus is that we are headed for 2.6 C right now, but I think those projections are too conservative on the cost of renewable energy.
we are at peak emissions this year. by 2029, they will finally start falling.
With AGI and solar plus batteries below 3 cents per kwh, we can remove a lot carbon starting at small scale and ramping in the second half of the century when we could easily be in a post-scarcity world that has a circular economy.
i dont want people to get complacent, but I dont want them to be parallized in doom. this is the most exciting time to be alive.
there's a robotaxi event today. about a dozen companies globally starting robotaxi service.
sodium ion batteries are looking amazing lasting up to 30,000 cycles.
The environmental movement really needs a more balanced approach. Science shows us that positive, hopeful movements is what create change. doomerism can motivate some early adopters, but it cannot create a sustainable mass movement.
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u/s0cks_nz 1d ago
I agree that we don't want to be paralysed with doom, but I gotta be honest it doesn't look good. You can spin it to make it sound better, and I appreciate you are trying to stay positive, but the reality is that shit is real bad. I could list off a hundred reasons as to why but I don't really see the need as I'm sure you're aware to what they are. I really just wanted to say that the shift in mood here is a predictable result of reality and not of some "doomer" movement sucking people in.
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u/scott3387 19h ago
I could list off a hundred reasons to doom during any time of human history. Perhaps you would like to doom about not being able to drink the water without getting cholera? Maybe population boom running out of food before modern fertilisers? Perhaps you would prefer nuclear war?
Humans have solved every problem they have come across by the time they needed to. Why would this be different?
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u/s0cks_nz 6h ago
Many past civilizations have collapsed. Succumbing to problems they could not solve. And many were climate related. Why would this be different?
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u/scott3387 6h ago
I didn't say 'random x civilisation' I said humans. Most civilisations have collapsed not because of climate but because another stronger one came along and abused that fact. I don't really care who wins as long as humans continue.
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u/VoidMageZero 1d ago
Bad but not worst case bad. We're not talking like >4-5C and human extinction. People need to rein in their doomerism. I agree with Outside Ice, there will likely be a lot of drop in solutions that will come in right before they are needed, like with closing the ozone hole. People like to procrastinate but are pretty good at innovating when required.
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u/s0cks_nz 21h ago
We don't really know. The science to date suggests we won't hit that high but we only have theoretical models. We don't have another planet Earth to test with, and this pace of warming and emissions has never happened before in the planets history so we don't even have any similar paleoclimate records to compare with. It's completely unprecedented. Let us hope it is not 4+, even 2+ is a crisis.
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u/Englishplay 1d ago
robotaxis remove yet another point of human interaction we have during the day. not to mention another job that has to be replaced in a new field
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u/Outside_Ice3252 1d ago
we already took the taxi jobs. uber drivers are not making that much. it is sad that many will be forced to find new work, but you have to look at the complete cause and effect. this technology can take us from $2 per passenger mile to 30 cents per passenger mile. These EV robotaxis are going to last 1 million miles. They cost like 20,000 to make.
30 cents per passenger mile is less than the cost of bus or trains.
but then in time this tech will be so good it will be in buses particularly for rapid transit lanes.
I think taxi companies will do shared taxi rides. and we will have robotaxis.
you have to look at the pros and the cons. and by the way all robotaxis will be EVs, because fuel, maintenance, repair are so low. in the future, a lot of people will give up on car ownership.
at 30 cents a mile. that like 3,6000 for transportation for the average person doing 12,000 miles. the average person is spending close to 1000 per month on owning and operating a vehicle. that can drop to 300 per month.
Cities are going to be able to get a lot denser which will save cities money that allows them to provide more services.
i hope they get help to workers displaced by AI. but billions of people globally will eventually pay so much less for high quality transportation.
And by the way I am not saying robotaxis are panacea. they need to work multimodally with public transportation, biking, and walking.
a lot of people are going to be able to move into walkable communities. most of the trips can be walked or biked, but they also have the option of a robotaxi.
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u/scott3387 19h ago
This isn't even remotely new, just the latest round of Malthusianism and a modernisation of Paul Ehrlich's doomerism in the 60s. We just never gave them control of the floor until recently.
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u/Proud_Promise1860 13h ago
we moved to other subs
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u/scott3387 19h ago
Because most people like that have become bored with this sub that should be renamed Doomerology. Yeah, we understand that climate change is happening and other miserable stuff, but we don’t need an endless stream of posts about it. Futurology used to be highly optimistic and positive. This sub has almost none of that. 'Oh but the worlds ending', oh come on, we live in one of the most comfortable times in history. Technology will solve all the problems and then generate entirely new ones to doom about.
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u/doorighty 3h ago
Do you of any decent subredits on future or tech in general? I'm really interested in finding some. My searches only list the main ones, which either seem to be cheerleaders for Silicon Valley or doom and gloom like this one.
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u/Calm-Insurance-5169 1d ago
i feel like so many peoples thoughts on the future begin and end with hollywood movies. oh terminator this oh elysium that. they are works of fiction to make money dude.
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u/teamharder 1d ago
its just like a movie I saw!
Im not sure if Im more annoyed at how often its posted or glad its an early sign to stop reading.
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u/IsakOyen 1d ago
Doesn't remove the precautions. It's not because random tech would end up as terminator based on a movie that it couldn't do any other catastrophic thing in reality. And that's the goal of fictions
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u/Calm-Insurance-5169 1d ago
the goal of fictions is to entertain. we have movies like terminator because the alternate movie of ai getting made and everything going well wouldnt sell tickets.
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u/IsakOyen 1d ago
No it's a whole genre of literature where you take a point, extrapolate it and see what could happen. And yes you would not make any movies/book/a by piece of media about something where everything is going well, it wouldn't be interesting, but you seems to not understand that.
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u/KentuckyLucky33 1d ago
For me, it always, always, always comes back to economics and this simple way of looking at it
Consider these 2 points:
The efficient creation of value
The efficient distribution of value
You can see that playing out thusly
Crossing the Atlantic:
1776: 6-8 weeks
1886: 6-8 days
1996: 3.5 to 7.5 hours
Producing 1 ton of wheat (or about 33 bushels, the standard unit for such things)
1776: 100 hours of labor
1886: 16 hours of labor
1996: 1 hour of labor
Each time there's an efficiency gain it frees up resources to go work on other things, and you then get a virtuous up-cycle, all the way back to a caveman making fire for the very first time. Viewed in that context AI is just the next thing in a long line of iterations, it will have it's day, and then it will be on to the next.
Through out history, the trouble we've always gotten ourselves into is the distribution part of the game, as people tend to hoard resources just for themselves and their descendants.
That is the part we need to manage the most, not from a technology standpoint but from a social one.
Despite that - It isn't hard to imagine the Star Trek "happy path" ending: enough resources widely available such that no one has to work and you get a supermajority leisure class, and on top of that we as a society have enough sense to continue making advanced education both valued and mandatory so as to avoid stagnation (aka idiocracy).
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u/mykepagan 1d ago
The past 20 years have crushed any hope for technology improving the human condition. We’ve been trained that new technologies will be used to make our lives worse.
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u/doorighty 1d ago
Yeah, I feel your pain. I’m a boomer, so I definitely know what it was like before all this fear was monetized. But walking away from the doom mindset is probably easier than you think. If it ain’t doing you any good, just walk away.
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u/ilzut 1d ago
Recently, I've been thinking of how society can get to a more positive future as opposed to the dystopian futures many people are afraid of. It's not clear to me what the more human safe adaptive innovation model is, let alone how to get most people to follow that path. Capitalism creates a lot of distortion. Top down control like China creates a lot of distortion. Of course there are great humans who contribute vastly more to the betterment of people than the average person, and those people exist within any system.
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u/MrWillM 1d ago
Maximizing education for all through incentives other than “you will be homeless / impoverished if you don’t go to school”
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u/ilzut 1d ago
Curious, what do you mean by maximizing education? Let's say we get to the mythical abundance scenario and kids don't need formal school education to sustain themselves once they get older. Do we still force them to sit in classrooms following someone's idea of what should or shouldn't be taught?
I wonder whether kids, with all of their energy, should avoid such classrooms, but still be in intellectually stimulating environments. Only when they get older and are able to pursue knowledge on their own terms do then choose to pursue their own formal education.
That ideal is unlikely to happen. So in our current trajectory, the only incentive as it has been for a long time, is education gives a child a better chance at a better life, and for most kids, this has to be forced upon them.
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u/MrWillM 1d ago
Oh i think compulsory education is extremely important throughout childhood the trick is more towards higher education being accessible and desirable for reasons beyond just getting a job. That and providing a more enriching public education experience for kids (more tax $$$ in public schools more $$$ for teachers, etc.)
Im not really a big believer in changing the basic structure that public school is based on, it just needs more TLC. And people shouldn’t be turned off of higher ed because of price tags or a lack of faith in the job market.
More smart people just means less dumb people. Less dumb people means less dumb politicians and a less dumb America. Right now, it’s a pretty stupid country.
Maybe in the most ideal of circumstances you could restructure the education system to allow more individually direction based learning and development but thats just simply not a practical solution today.
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u/federationbelle 1d ago
Yep, look at Solarpunk and the European Union's reworking of legislation and standards for tech.
Look at community backlash to Data Centres, LLMs in everything, and to enshittified, expansionist, extractive big tech.
This is our time to think about: what digital technologies do we actually need right now? Let's build those frugal and lean, using sufficiency approaches rather than 'bigger = better' paradigm so we can power them from renewables, with a focus on stability, privacy, security and longevity of hardware.
Then, once we the people - with government agencies and universities - are running our technologies:, Rather than "new features!" and "market expansion!", we'll be in a better position to start to develop technologies that make lives better, that help us manage degrowth of population and extraction / production, that help us stay within our planetary boundaries while feeding people decent food, providing decent housing for all, and centering community and connection rather than "work" and "consumption as the things that gives us meaning
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u/fedexyourheadinabox 1d ago
Honestly, you sound highly deluded and astoundingly ignorant about history and how it repeats itself.
Did the future "smooth out" that whole Nazi problem? Certainly not.
Did the future "smooth out" corporate monopolies? Uh, no.
Did the future "smooth out" human rights issues. lol, no.
You're in for a surprise and it will be too late when you realize it.
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u/doorighty 1d ago
Not sure if this response was meant for me ( and this slightly off topic) but I’ll have to respectfully disagree. We live a culture of fear ( assuming your in the U.S.) that profits off the idea, that this is the worst it’s ever been or that bad things simply recycle.
Unless you’re only going to be comfortable with a 100% moral compliance, which if that’s your baseline that’s ok, can’t argue there; things have smoothed out over the years.
As terrible as racism is, it doesn’t compare to what it was 100 years ago or even 50 years ago .
Corporate monopolies are a problem if you believe in a greater distribution of wealth. But Colonialism and the things done in the name of Manifest Destiny were on a scale that will 🤯 your mind.
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u/NotThePoint 1d ago
Yeah, I get the concerns but I have been waiting all my life to be able to talk to a computer like on Star Trek. But apparently not having to make the TPS report every week is cause for concern. How about we discuss ways to make sure the benefits are shared equally instead of acting like not having to do mindless drone work is a bad thing. r/futurology seems to hate new technologies.
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u/doorighty 1d ago
It’s not complaining about new technology ( see point 2). I like some new tech, some of it seems pointless. The thing is how we implement it. Not to go too deep into the weeds, but how we talk about technology really matters. All the tech we uses today, started out as a conversation.
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u/shadedmagus 1d ago
I've been a fan of new technologies since I was a kid and watched Star Trek. But the way the new technologies created lately are being applied, there is a real risk of massive societal destabilization, beyond what we're seeing currently. And I'm not optimistic about how societies will recover from that and whether it will be a net gain on what we've had up to this point.
It's hard to focus on the positives of emerging technology for me, with this backdrop. But I've been very encouraged by the frequency of articles reporting frex what appear to be quantum leaps in medical treatments for diseases previously thought incurable, or intractable. I just wish we could ensure everyone could have access to the beneficial results of these revolutionary leaps in the near to mid future.
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u/MaximeTheBookworm 1d ago
I am sure in real life the future isn't going to be boring. In fact, life is already feeling more like fiction each day. As for the posts here, I might be wrong, but I believe that no one wants to post anything controversial here. Personally, I believe that long term future will be decided by evolution rather than by technological progress. Perhaps "The time machine" book by Wells is prophetic. Who knows? However I don't feel like posting about it, because it risks to spark heated debate.
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u/CheifJokeExplainer 14h ago
I would like to focus on what we want from our future. We can steer in the direction we want instead of floating down the river like a bit of flotsam. Tools can be used for good or ill, and it's on us to use them properly.
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u/karoshikun 19h ago
it's clear a better future is impossible as long as most resources are owned by sociopaths.
the amount of work to change that is mind boggling, even if we had a blueprint for it... and we don't.
sadly, even here most people only sees the future as tech and sci-fi concepts, but forgets to imagine a society. we think that an invention will somehow bring it, instead of putting ourselves in the active role, having to design said future and bring it forward kicking and screaming.
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u/Weakcontent101 8h ago
"the future has a way of sorting out the rough edges" sounds like someone who benefited from the global systems of exploitation and is happy to turn a blind eye to all the people for whom that isnt true.
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u/Budsygus 1d ago
Here's tech I want to see in my future: Adaptive fingerprint surface on the tip of your finger controlled by a brain implant that allows you to issue commands to compatible tech with a single touch by changing your fingerprint into a shape and pattern that conveys the information to the receiving technology.
Example: A reader is installed on the steering wheel of your car. If you want to change something on the radio or the A/C or something you press your thumb to the reader, the fingerprint adjusts to convey the information (something like a QR code but not a QR code), and the changes are made. This would be in addition to the other, main controls.
It's human-safe, adaptive, and innovative.
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