The World in 2072
Spoiler: the future is bright
The world 50 years ago wasn’t that different from what it is right now. Yes, I said that. Surely, the first PCs had only started to appear during that time, and now we have the internet and all the devices to access it. Of course, medicine has advanced immensely. It is true that we may be approaching the weak form of AGI, and new breakthroughs happen on the scale of months. But we’re not in The Future yet.
We haven’t gotten to live sufficiently1 longer. We still travel at about the same average speed2 we did in 1972, especially long distances. Our digital interfaces are so terrible3 we cannot run any of those nice machine learning algorithms without huge amounts of meaningless work. We access and create information at a sluggish pace4. We have not even established a colony on any other celestial body.
It is a famous idea that during our entire history as a species, advances in science and technology have been happening at an exponential rate5. A less popular hypothesis is that certain periodicity can be noticed in the exponential graphs illustrating progress. I believe that has to do something with sine waves of different lengths superimposed on the global exponential trend. Those hypothetical periods may happen because it requires time for the new ideas to mix and mingle with each other before they will trigger another breakthrough (probably, in a seemingly unrelated field). That’s why fundamental discoveries are followed sometimes by periods of relative stagnation. That has happened to physics, and in more recent history, to the field of AI.
In this essay, I will rely somewhat on this idea and I will also optimistically expect many domains of knowledge to approach the upward phase in their trends.
Methodology
This post is an attempt at forecasting, even though for a period of five decades, it is more suitable to call this prophesying. This is an act of very bright prophesying, too. What I want to show is how vast the opportunity space is if we play our cards right6. Since we cannot account for new knowledge, we cannot predict what changes new knowledge will bring. And we cannot see new knowledge in advance because if we could, we would rather introduce it instead of merely writing about it7.
The method I employed to prophesy about the future is pretty much straightforward. First, I looked back as far as one century, then 50 years ago, then today, and, finally, I tried to extrapolate all that information into 50 years from now. To do that, I did my best to account for first- and second-order effects across all the aspects listed below.
I will abstain from covering exhaustively the future state of the world. Another thing I will shun is political forecasting as I believe politics is too reactive to be predictable over large time frames. What I will focus on is progress and how it may shape society.
Let’s start from the foundation.
Mathematics
Strong automated theorem provers become a thing at some point. They work both in standalone mode and in tandem with people. Other math tools are created, with the Hypothesis Miner among the most prominent ones.
If automated theorem proving is similar to focused thinking then mining hypotheses is akin to diffuse thinking. The Miner lurks in the space of possible problems, looking for new questions and ideas, ordering them by usefulness or curiousness. Paired with an ATP, it outputs new knowledge8 at an unprecedented speed. Similar tools may be constructed for other sciences too.
Physics
The novel tools developed by mathematicians have inspired new attempts to make the quantum theory work with relativity. It is mostly solved but… the new inconsistencies emerge, so the quest to understand the world doesn’t end here.
Major cosmological breakthroughs ensue from the tons of data collected over the last half of the century and novel algorithms looking for useful patterns in that data.
Computation
People start using QPU (quantum processing units) and PPU (photonic processing units) in general-purpose computers, even in portable devices. These units take on specific computational tasks, e.g. machine learning, cryptography, and rendering scenes for games or metaverses.
The above doesn’t make it possible to fit a modern supercomputer into a handheld device but what is accessible in the smallest form-factors now beats 2022 high-end super-tower rigs, and by a large margin.
The word “yottabyte” becomes common in everyday speech.
Analog computers9 that consume an order of magnitude less power than the digital ones have made the Internet of Things a real thing. Tailored for specific narrow tasks, neural networks are cast into analog circuits to enable myriads of devices across the world to work for years instead of days.
Energy
Nuclear fusion. Given all the advances in chips with ultra-low latency, it has become possible to make the process stable and highly controllable. The annual output of 10 TWh has been reached in the last decade, and many new reactors are being built.
Solar power collected and transmitted from orbit is proven to be especially useful for large factory complexes. Other than that, it is used to create artificially warm beaches in colder-than-Mediterranean climates.
All that pushes the common renewable energy to the outskirts: even though it is 100x cheaper than in 2022, its main purpose now is to make faraway dwellings autonomous.
Fossil fuels are now long forgotten. The only use cases for oil and natural gas are in agriculture and industrial chemistry.
Space
Asteroid mining starts to pay out its dividends as the first self-assembled mines start throwing packages of rare minerals our way.
Colonies on Mars and the Moon are long-established and developing. An important caveat is that they’re mostly autonomous: only a handful of enthusiasts live there, and most of the work is done by machines. The Venus colony is a project in development.
Many probes have been sent to different destinations, including the long-anticipated launch to Alpha Centauri10.
Transportation
Hypersonic planes allow you to travel from London to New York in 3.5 hours, or from any point on the globe to the opposite one in about 10 hours.
Local connectivity has improved immensely with the Hyperloop trains. It takes less time to travel between neighboring agglomerations than to traverse any of them.
Almost no one owns a non-autonomous vehicle. Self-driving cars make up 99% of the personal transportation market, most of which is sharing economy. Anyhow, almost all major cities ban cars from their centers. Bicycles, scooters, and segways are the most common means of moving your body from point A to point B.
When it comes to industrial transport, autonomous solar-powered cargo ships do 95% of the sea transportation, and the land is occupied by driverless trucks.
Environment
CO₂ recapture companies are the main providers of fuel for jets and remaining gas-powered wheeled transport. It has been possible to bring the climate change to a halt but it’s too early to call it a win.
The livestock industry has not survived progress, it has been completely converted to vat-grown meat production. Some local farmers still raise animals for food but they only do it under strict regulations and supervision, with animals living their (mostly) good lives in pastures and activists continuing to bring the farmers down.
Terraformation of deserts has started but it’s not a fast process. Only about 1% of the Sahara desert has been converted to livable land which is still a huge deal in absolute numbers, especially for the people living around it.
The ocean plastic problem is mostly solved. Colonies of microorganisms are planted onto the swathes of plastic, with their DNA being modified in such a way that they cannot reproduce beyond several generations to mutate into something dangerous.
The Silent Revolution happens: new norms of noise pollution make the centers of big cities livable. All cars communicate via a common protocol, without using sounds. All loud music in living quarters is forbidden. New composite materials make sounds dissipate more efficiently, and all new buildings are insulated with those.
Communication
Starlink-like connection to the Internet is ubiquitous. Its throughput matches that of the undersea cables, making the whole network much more robust to disruptions.
Everyday life happens in extended reality. The streets and venues are augmented with all kinds of interactive interfaces. Exact copies of the world feature various extensions and form a virtual “multiverse” of sorts. VR is used for education and leisure.
People have finally started to feel less lonely, not only due to all the opportunities to connect, but also because their smart companions have gotten actually smart.
Society
Blockchain governance has won over the centralized authority11. After what is widely known as the wailing twenties, a decade of catastrophes and total disability of the old institutions to cope with the problems, a new type of political technology has formed. The network states12 have emerged most swiftly in the regions that were neither democracies nor surveillance states beforehand, first of all in Africa13.
The pinnacle of the new system is the DeUN, Decentralized United Nations.
Regulation of the emerging technologies becomes much faster, not in the last place because the people who may have opposed it are often not blockchain-savvy, which leaves them on the sidelines of the political process.
All logistic and production chains are fully traceable and on-chain. You want to know where the paper for your coffee cup comes from, you learn that.
Another blockchain-powered enterprise is the Encyclopedia of Human History. To thwart the epistemic nightmare of misinformation around historical records, a tool has been created that features not some “proven facts” about events but links to the pieces of research and evidence. Those links are then interpreted by the Encyclopedia algorithms and rendered in the form of the current consensus, with numerous footnotes and minutiae for every slight disagreement or uncertainty.
Population caps at ~9.5B but that’s not a bad thing. With almost all menial labor being automated, more and more people join the ranks of scientists and engineers. With the prolonged lifespans, the population drop is smoothed, and the new ways of giving birth, like artificial wombs, nudge more people toward having kids.
UBI is implemented everywhere, in one form or another. It’s not always monetary and is closer to a picture of the idealized communism: everyone gets shelter and food, no matter what. But still, there is high-tech low-tech polarization: either geographical, economic, or ideological (certain memes are not that easy to get rid of).
Health
Rejuvenation is partially solved. Ninety is the new forty and forty is the most common age for people to have their first kid.
The high-end prosthetic limbs are hardly any less functional than their biological counterparts. On the contrary, they even offer extra features and tools.
Computational medicine is not a choice but the default option. Health trackers are one of the most used personal items globally, they monitor a wide range of indicators, including those that were previously unheard of or only tested for in clinics.
Neuralink has revolutionized brain-computer interfaces but the industry has swiftly become highly regulated once the DeUN adopted a law making all BCI hardware and software open technology — no private patents and totally transparent.
Labs have tackled artificial neurons and developed several types of them that mimic the real ones.
Appliances
On-demand 3D-printing facilities are there in each city. You can order anything in one of those, from common medication (prescription and personalized drugs are produced by specialized labs) to a fancy outfit to a prefab house.
All household chores are outsourced to narrow-task robots. They’re even sold in sets: you can embed a big stylish box into your kitchen that will do your dishes and launch cleaning automatons and prepare all kinds of food for you. Basically, what you get is an autonomous house. The long-awaited dream has come true: people don’t have to do anything to live comfortably in their homes.
Writing this text14 helped me to see how much more I don’t know compared to how much I thought I didn’t know. The world is vast and complex, and surely many of the things described in this post will not happen or will be colored differently. There are also many things on the bright side of progress I didn’t think of. But anyway…
The future is bright. Live your best life and bring joy to yourself and those around you. Together, we shall make the world the place it should be: kind and prosperous.
Source: Life expectancy, 1969 to 2019. In Africa, where life expectancy was and remains the lowest in the world, it has increased by 1/3 over the last 50 years. In Europe, it grew by a bit more than 10%. While a big deal in any person’s life, it’s not even close to the fundamentally possible indefinite life.
About a year ago, I have started a project that aims to change that.
Source one: Plotting The World’s Exponential Technological Progress.
Source two: Technological Change.
See also this tweet (and other tweets from its author, too).
To read more about knowledge, prophesying, and explanations, see The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I daresay it is the most important book of our millennium.
Analog computers don’t convert data into binary format, they employ different mechanisms to perform basic operations (like using resistors for multiplication) and often don’t require locally installed physical memory. These two factors allow analog chips to be extremely fast and energy-efficient. Read more on Wikipedia. Also, if you’re really interested, reach out to me on Twitter or otherwise, I’m working for an analog hardware company right now.
Source: 2069 Alpha Centauri mission.
Those who said “corporations will have more power than the government” erred because corporations are hierarchical and thus can be easily embedded in the power structures of governments. With decentralized technology, it doesn’t happen as easily.
The term is borrowed from the upcoming book The Network State by Balaji Srinivasan.
This may happen in a similar way to how rural India got from no phones to widespread use of mobile phones without massively adopting landline ones.
This post was prompted by a prize topic suggested by Effective Ideas. Also, during my work on it, I was listening to the Stellaris soundtrack which I highly recommend.
What a great essay on every aspect of life! Well... We just have to live a little longer to make sure everything goes according to this scenario and not some other.