FUTURE IS HERE
I am nowhere near being a fortune teller nor I am a futurist. But from things I have read and heard i can see where the future is going. Today I want to talk about stuff you most likely heard or can already see yourselves. I am gonna talk about what is probably gonna be waiting for us in the future.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 4.0
Let's start with the most obvious one. You must be living under a rock if you never heard industry 4.0. It is the new industrial revolution waiting for us. This revolution includes all sorts of things you heard countless times before and very familiar with. From Internet of Things to Augmanted reality. And unavoidble jump of AI technologies. Automatization never been this prominent before. Specially after the pandemic we gained 10 years worth of momentum in automatization. What that means is, machines are gonna fuck all of us up sooner than we thought. I am not talking about Skynet type of robocalypse. They are gonna take our jobs and nobody is safe. This time is so different than first industrial revolution. This time technology doesn't create as much job opportunities as it destroys. Fuck those who say "EvErYtHiNg Is GoNnA Be AlRiGht TeChNoLoGy AlWaYs CrEaTeS NeW JoBs". If a piece of algorithm makes 1 million people unemployed, you don't need 1 million people to create such algorithm. A few people can build a piece of software to turn up millions of people homeless. Even if we say all population can end up being knowledge workers, nobody can guarantee we will ever need that many knowledge workers. From things I know there is no need for billions of people in IT industry. And there is this problem that not everyone is passionate about learning. We will see a lot of homeless people on streets. And there is also that argument, if there is no consumer there is no money. If unemployment rates goes up, nobody can sell their stuff. It is correct that many people are gonna lose their revenue due to sharp increase in unemployment rates, but top 20% consumes 80% of resources anyways. Top rich people are always gonna be able to find a market for their stuff. Universal basic income won't solve the problem either. But at least it can avoid people being homeless or starving. What you think is gonna happen if majority of population lives substandard lives? I leave it to your imagination.
As a result of industry 4.0 some countries are not gonna make it. There is not gonna be any 2nd world country. There is gonna be day and night difference between different civilizations. Some are gonna rule the world with technological supremacy, others are gonna turn back to dark ages. There is only gonna be 1st world countries and 3rd world countries.
SECOND COLD WAR
Another thing you probably know better than me. I am semi apolitic but even I know there is some fuckery going on between America and China. China invests in many 3rd world and second world countries, soon they are gonna conquer all trade routes. China already is the new biggest superpower of the world and America is not happy with that. I already mentioned how China plans to build their own national network and wants to totally ban the internet in their country and also mentioned other eastern block countries might do the same thing. A global war is a stupid idea, nobody can earn anything from it. Everyone loses. I don't see a global war coming but again the entire world is being ruled by bunch of bloodthirsty idiots. You can never know. Before the first world war, world was in the same situation. Nobody could see it coming. Entire Europe was having their best times. A war would only fuck everything up for everyone. Yet we saw two of the greatest wars in history.
Trade wars is already a thing and I see many countries growing their armies. Governments are sharpening their teeth. But again, politics was always so full of shit. This is not something new. With first world war we have seen the concept of entire nations turning into armies. We have seen how entire manpower of nations can grind each other down to zero. At the end of second world war we have seen the destructive power of nuclears. With the cold war we have seen the power of ballistic missiles and rockets. We now know we have enough power to truly wipe ourselves out from this planet. 3rd world war would be a suicide. Therefore i think it is not likely. But if this political dick measuring contest goes on, we won't have easy times.
CONFLICT HAS ENTERED THE CHAT
I probably mentioned how easy it is to control masses nowadays. In the future more conflict is gonna be waiting for us. We will see big and small groups of people hating each other to death. Having this much communication and being in the verge of great economical crisis is a deadly combo. People can easily get organized and make many countries suffer from either civil wars or a full blown rebellion. Wannabe revolutionaries are gonna ruin many second and third world countries. We might even see the birth of new nations and death of older ones. Conflict is the human nature. No escape from that. It is gonna get more heated with the help of communication technologies. We already see the birth of new cultures on internet. Most are retarded, memeworthy things but some can evolve into being new age cults or terrorist organizations.
MORE TECHNOLOGY
If you ask a 5 year old they would say we are gonna have greater technologies in future. This shouldn't be a surprise. Everyday you see something new and fancy. You can hear things like brand new artifical heart works like a turbofan and doesn't require you to have a pulse and can last 50 years inside human body. Brand new treatment for cancer. Brand new microchip that can cure dementia. Artifical limbs, monthly hardware update to your phone, brain computer interfaces, more sattelites being sent into space, brand new drugs to make you look younger and live longer, smarter electronics, printed human organs etc. Being a science fiction writer becomes harder and harder each day. People are hungry for technology. It doesn't even matter if it is useful or not, they don't even care if that shit makes things harder and more complicated. With cars you get no buttons nowadays, you switch between 5 different menus on a touch screen just to control air conditioner. I feel like a boomer talking about this. But there is a truth that consumerism creates lots of bullshit. And there is that "environmental friendly" technologies companies trying to shove down to your throat. You telling me I can buy a really expensive high end product and act like a saviour despite being a wasteful fucker and brag about saving the planet and poor shame people all at the same time? Sign me in. Who cares if I buy a new tesla every year and fuck up the planet with unchangeable lithium ion batteries, as long as I feel like a saviour of nature and can blame others for being poor dirty assholes killing the nature with their cheap gasoline powered cars I will pay for that ugly piece of aluminium.
NEXT STEP OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
You all probably familiar with biomechanical augmentations and cyborgs. You have seen some primitive versions of these in real life and fictional ones in moves, video games, tv series etc. You are also familiar with genetic engineering i assume. There are some great books and movies about social effects of such concepts. Gattaca is a great movie for example. We will not only see uneven distribution of money and power but we will also see those who have money living longer and having real physical differences than rest of the world in the future. We will see the most pronounced social classes in history maybe. In one hand there are immortal demigods, next step of human evolution, designed to be perfect, has all the physical and mental supremacy, lives longer than 100 years, has altered genetics, tons of hardware in their brains making all the calculations for them, IQ over 200, has all the wealth, has their own cultures cannot even be understanded by others. In the other hand there are the unlucky ones. The ones who are gonna stay human. Probably not gonna live longer than 60, gonna die from a heart attack or some other sickness that will be associated with poor people. This social class will be the 80% of population if not more.
FROM BRAIN TO COMPUTER
Brain computer interfaces(BCI's) are part of reality even today. Wiring a computer into human brain is a really old concept. Effects of such thing is really unpredictable. Getting brainfucked by hackers is a common concept in cyberpunk. I don't think we will be seeing such things anytime soon. And hacking doesn't really work the way science fiction depicts. Eventually we will see literal human brains wired into each other. And such thing is a really big threat to security. I am not sure if they will be able to create a hackproof "cyberbrains" but this won't stop people creating a network based on real human brains. This will allow people to communicate telepathically. We will go beyond words. It will create concepts that cannot be explained with the use of language. It is gonna create a whole new culture that cannot even be understanded by those who are not wired into that network. Maybe even language is gonna be an old and useless concept. Maybe we will see massive collective minds consists of millions of people. If human communications doesn't require words and can happen in miliseconds everything is possible. Imagine a group of people working like a single body. Has the same thoughts and as unified as they can be. Basically the same person in multiple different bodies. Circlejerk in a whole another level. Imagine sharing so many things with your social circle you end up being the exact same person.
Maybe we will be able to get totally freed from our physical bodies. I am not talking about uploading ourselves into computers or some stupid shit like that. This is not possible. But if you can take out the brain and put it into a jar and connect it into a network you can end up having an individual freed from their body and can change their body like changing clothes. This might even be key to immortality. No more brain death due to failure of a stupid internal organ. No more hunger, no more thirst. Can survive forever as long as your brain doesn't get damaged. There are other things that should be solved of course. Brain cells doesn't recover themselves. You will eventually lose all of them. But this can be fixed by magic of genetic engineering. Stem cell therapy is already a thing.