For this splendid audience, I considered six scenarios for how the long-run might drastically differ from the world we see before our eyes:
1. A return to Malthus, noting that wages cannot forever exceed the marginal cost of producing labor. Perhaps we are in for a massive population increase, if only of robots.
2. Robin Hanson’s exponential growth, which means a huge burst of growth sometime "soon" — maybe really good drugs, uploads, or nanotechnology?
3. Most of the economy becomes health care costs.
4. Energy becomes very cheap, destruction is easy, deterrence is difficult, power decentralizes, and we retreat to medieval-style fortresses.
5. People become more and more interested in "vivid" experiences, such as they obtain in museums, going to date movies, or spending lots on higher education. This sounds so lame, but it’s pretty close to reality now.
6. Wealthier economies boost human optimism and thus asset markets become increasingly vulnerable to bubbles.
#4 is pessimistic, I am not sure the others are, at least not in the proper "all things considered" sense. If #1 is on its way, make sure you own some capital (as Robin Hanson points out), you will be very wealthy then. Your evaluation of #1 may depend on your view of Derek Parfit’s population conundrums. There will be lots of rich people and also lots of poor people.
Over dinner I pressed the claim that very few people or organizations are capable of stating what they are actually good at.
7. Nuclear Annihilation
Just an observation – You are not very interested in or affected by Nature. The natural world doesn’t show up often in your posts. You don’t mention climate change and its gigantic long run effects in this list. Or maybe it’s included in “energy is cheap”? Solar and wind power make everything feasible, and do so soon enough that the world doesn’t turn dry and blow away?
“I pressed the claim that very few people or organizations are capable of stating what they are actually good at.”
To know thyself is particularly hard, especially when “what we’re good at” depends on how we interact with others. With constant, unbiased and evenly weighted feedback, we may get a clue — but that requires that we can perceive what others are saying and apply it to ourselves. So yeah, hard.
Competition does a good job of sorting us out — even if we don’t know what we are good at.
#7. Things pretty much muddle along like they always have.
“I pressed the claim that very few people or organizations are capable of stating what they are actually good at.”
This is in line with a well established idea in the field of management that “causal ambiguity”-not knowing the causal links between resources and organizational performance-can be important in preventing imitation and sustaining competitive advantage.
happyjuggler,
I think you should consider increasing life expectancy and life quality alongside the cost of those things.
My dad used credit for Korean War service (snuck into the Marines age 17) plus 25 years on a suburban police department to retire at age 50 with lifetime inflation-indexed benefits.
How long can the foundation hold up when the pyramid inverts?
Add me to the list of those confused by this post, especially #5.
Is there something wrong with museums and higher education? Isn’t the fact that we spend a lot of money on these things actually a good sign, because we’ve got resources left over after food and (sometimes) shelter are provided for? Are travel to foreign countries and the search for authentic ethnic cuisine also on your list of “lame” things people will want more of in the potentially lame future? What about books (in digital or non-digital format)? Those provide a vivid experience, too.
I also think that nuclear war and its consequences are a lot more likely than people fond of speculating about the future care to think about. With the end of the Cold War we may get lucky and avoid M.A.D., but I don’t see the technology to make nuclear weapons getting much harder to master (India and Pakistan have them, after all), so we’ll probably end up with more nukes in the hands of more people, some of whom might be crazy enough (or have little enough to lose) to use one.
1. A return to Malthus, noting that wages cannot forever exceed the marginal cost of producing labor. Perhaps we are in for a massive population increase, if only of robots.
I can see that, if we stretch the definition of ‘robot’ to include ‘automation’.
We’re already doing that in the manufacturing environment I work in – any task that is repeatable can be done by a process better and cheaper than paying a fallible human.
Who was Saint Capital?
All these projections of enormous percentages of future
GDP going to health care strike me as terribly unlikely,
more simple-mindedness that does not understand when one
is in the first part of a logistic curve.
The US already has the highest percentage of GDP being
spent on health care of any nation on earth, any nation
(#2 is not even properly a nation, the Occupied Palestinian
Territories). Arguably we are wildly out of equilibrium,
and something will occur, institutionally, pricewise,
technologically, or in some other way, to if not move
us to the rest of the world’s ratios, then at least to
slow our rate of health care cost increase pretty soon.
The young war against the old (80+)
Tyler,
It is surpriing you do not mention the two most likely (and disturbing) scenarios.
1. We destroy ourselves either accidentally or through the insanity or one more people groups. Given its getting easier all the time. This is the most likely scenario.
2. We reach the singularity as AI becaomes a reality and humanity is voluntarily or compulsorily subsumed by a non-bilogical intelligence(s) that we really can’t comprehend.
The fermi paradox and the extrapolotion of current trends make these two scenarios so likely its really a question of when not if.
bleh. That last sentence should say:
Also, I would say that is has always been, and will forever be, the case that destruction is easy, detterence is hard. (see also 2nd law of thermo)
You can’t use the Fermi Paradox to show anything.
Sure you can. Once you’ve shown that highly advanced starfaring civilizations are somewhere between very rare and nonexistent, you can use this information to make a Bayesian argument against our persistence.
It’s possible (here I am being optimistic) that we have already threaded the needle, so to speak. Either the occurrence of human-level intelligence or the relatively stable persistence of our biosphere for ~2 billion years may be the truly improbable events, in which case the absence of other intelligent life is not such a strong argument for civilizations being prone to self-destruction. But some sort of explanation is in order, and the self-destructing one is sadly all to simple.
I think #1 is quite possible. Long before we get anywhere near Robin’s Singularity we get to the point where most current human work can be automated. There will be far more people around than a capitalist economy will need. I doubt the result will be a 2 day work week.
In regard to #3, didn’t we start to approach that with housing? It seems that here in DC, unless you bought before the boom, for most people, housing costs dwarf all other spending.
Guys,
we need to think about what will likely be possible in the future…
Nuclear destruction is hardly the only or even most likely way we could destroy ourselves. I can think of at least two other alternatives:
1. Environment meltdown due to pollution.
2. Advances in genetic engineering/nanotechnology creating a superbug (or bot). That destroys the world.
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