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  • I guess the only way to answer that is to ask what things were like 10 years ago and where they are now and then project that another 10 years forward.

    Misinformation will be worse and people will be dumber. It will be a "choose your own reality" type situation where any claim can be opposed with a mountain of manufactured evidence. Institutions like Wikipedia and public broadcasters and the internet archive will be hollowed out and corrupted.

    Financial mobility will be nil. If you don't get support from your parents then you're basically slave class. Work an awful job your entire life in order to not starve when you're too old to continue working. Wealth will be a lot more concentrated and classes will be more ingrained between the haves and the have-nots. A lot of medical interventions like growing new organs will be available to the haves but permanently out of reach for the have-nots.

    Climate Change will have progressed much faster than we predicted (that's what's been happening). Mass extinctions and climate change starting to make critical food sources (like fisheries) unstable. Bullshit weather events like drought and flood making broad acre farming unstable. Plastic.

    There are some positives. Advances in medicine, progress towards net zero carbon emissions, DJT probably being dead.

  • Not trying to be too dismissive, but anyone in 2019 who guessed what the world would be like in the future was terribly mistaken, at this point I'm just hoping things don't get too hot.

  • Considering that we could just end up with covid 2 tomorrow it seems that any answer is going to be arbitrary so might as well give an optimistic one. The West's slide to the right is prevented by a leftist surge as parties such as Labour and the Democrats realise that they can't win by trying to attract the right, and so instead double down on progressive policy - which works for them as they're able to reform their image and start really appealing to the people.

    AI slop starts to falter as it feeds off of self-produced training data until it becomes literally incomprehensible, meaning that it can be easily ignored or not understood by the majority of people, as well as being banned on the rising stars of the internet: federated social media, independent streaming services (think Nebula, Dropout), and newly-independent news sites, like Giant Bomb.

    The climate change issue is now taken more seriously, as the generations unfamiliar with the internet who could be sucked into misinformation rabbit holes start to die off, and policymakers who have grown up understanding the existential threat it poses to all of us take power.

    The workplaces of large corporations start unionising, even illegally at first, and establish strong community centred power bases which are used to demand better treatment not only in the workplace, but also to bargain with the government. A focus returns to the local community.

    (I know all this is very wishful thinking, but figured the thread could use some more positivity 🫶)

39 comments