In this piece, I make predictions thirty years forward from today. All futuristic predictions are by nature, a theory, regardless of who makes them. Due to the ideal of a ‘butterfly effect’, a tiny event that creates great changes in outcomes far away, my predictions could be nullified at any moment. However, future history has some degree of predictability. We observe today when an event or a movement leads to changes and consequences. If those conditions are repeated many times and lead to the same outcome just as often, it’s probable that the same pattern will occur in the future. While I will point out patterns that have never occurred on a historical scale, I can point to comparatively small present instances where patterns are being wrought in real time today. They will grow to become larger historical trends. My perspective is to choose the dots that affect today and connect them to other dots until a picture forms. This exercise now has an urgency that never existed for prior generations. I will probably not be here in thirty years, but my children will, my grandchildren as well and Lord willing, other generations to come. I cannot console them with vague ideas that their life course will follow the patterns of mine or my father’s past. In fact, the only chance that we have to prepare our kids and grandkids for the future is to first speak what they will likely see and face in the fullness of adulthood. This is where we must start.
The year is 2052, thirty years into the future. Most of us presently over sixty years old will be substantially gone from this mortal coil. Thirty-somethings just now entering the prime of their career life may be starting to retire if there’s even such a thing and there’s still a fiscal system to support that life decision. Kids presently in high school and college will hold many of the key positions of responsibility in civic and commercial affairs. The world they must govern will be far different than it is today and far different than any other modern generation faced. In addition to all the perennial dangers that each generation faces, there will be two unique factors: 1) the world will be entirely dominated and controlled by applied technologies, 2) they will be facing a world plunging in population from causes that they cannot control or reverse.
To those not familiar with the prospect of declining global population, there are several factors presently at work, putting the brakes on previous increases and promising an imminent decline within a generation. The first seems controllable but is likely, nearly impossible to change: the prospect of higher economic standards are tied to reductions in birth rate. Once technology freed agriculture from widespread subsistence failures and starvation, large agrarian workforces were and are no longer necessary for survival and rudimentary prosperity. The path to escape a prison of lower caste status is to have less children, embrace modern technologies, and urbanize, which the world is doing in droves. This is driving even many developing nations toward a lower or even negative birthrate. Most developed nations are already in negative birthrates, some of which will be extinct by 2100. Add to this, aggressive global abortion campaigns tied to globalist social engineers, widespread abandonment of hetero lifestyles, and significant drops in physiological fertility.
The things that we usually think of to shape the future are nation-states, wars, and political factions. If you believe the present screeching political rhetoric, you’d think ‘climate change’ will be the only thing that matters; except that actual changes in the climate will be nominal and well within the patterns for our geological time frame. Only climate rhetoric will cause disruption, not the climate.
Demographics create significant changes for any age moving forward. These are usually caused by the dislocation resulting from war, local climate change such as regional droughts, or by mass [historical] pandemics like the black plague. (Covid doesn’t come close to the same impact.) While these will inevitably affect generations moving forward, by 2052, population will have peaked and begun a decline that will accelerate. The world is presently populated by eight billion people. Maybe we’ll reach 9 billion before the decent begins, but imagine a world headed back toward seven or even six billion by the end of the century. When populations decline, the order of life, presently dependent on growth, will cease and drastically change the dynamics and incentives for all populations going forward. What sets this apart from prior depopulations caused by war, disease, and starvation, is that it will be tied to reduced human fertility and it will be and already is, global.
The second factor will interact with the first but in ways that cannot yet be predicted. Technology is and has been moving ahead at a blinding rate. AI, artificial intelligence, is ready to pass by most human’s applied potential. Over the next thirty years, it will be a race to see which of several factors matters the most. Will AI remain our friend and servant and help humanity that has a rapidly depleting ability to help itself maintain the standards of living that they grew up with in their past? Or will AI become our enemy, wage war against us and accelerate the demise of humans, seeing us as a virus that should be eradicated on the planet? That potential is no longer just science fiction. Or will human fertility drop so fast that AI never completes the development necessary to reach critical mass needed to be a factor for plummeting populations? An unclear hybrid of these possibilities is most likely, with some validity for all of them. AI could be helping us, subverting us, and not reach a critical mass on any front to fully decide our outcome.
Fertility drops already have some known causes. Chemicals, micro-plastics, synthetic estrogens, and processed food components are already playing havoc with human endocrine systems on a global scale. Legal pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs and epi-behavioral trends are further diminishing human breeding ability. The irony of present neo-liberal concern is that they pursue activism for the mythical and politically expedient ‘climate change’ – because it will kill us – while tolerating or ignoring the factors that really are killing people and hindering our replenishment, and yet that’s an intentional objective for some of their factions. Covid MNRA ‘vaccines’ are rumored to be an intentional campaign to depopulate the earth. While I cannot yet endorse that with certainty, it’s possible and may be proved to be so, but there are and were enough causes for population degradation even without the vaccine. The depopulation advocates will get their wish if they live long enough but may not be happy with the results, especially when societies start to rebel over it and them. By 2052, there will have been well over a hundred years of environmental and lifestyle damage affecting fertility. There will be no quick easy fix but there will be a movement to mitigate the damage.
For the super-rich, they hold out hope for medically engineered immortality called trans-humanism. They hope to transcend all the woes of humanity. They aspire to rig their bodies to not age or to reverse aging. If they cannot successfully rig their bodies, they plan to and may already be attempting to augment their mind by computer implants or if that ultimately proves futile, to transfer the contents of their mind to a computer, which they hope will also yield or preserve ‘consciousness’. The aspiration of trans-humanism becomes more relevant in a world facing the prospect of rapidly diminishing human presence. I predict that even as it becomes a high-profile pursuit by 2052, its failure will be equally high profile. Disease resistant bodies will host grossly diminishing minds. Assuming transhumanist garner some success, human minds linked to high powered nuero-computers will successfully flood the mind with limitless databases of knowledge but could just as easily present the consciousness or soul of the bearer with limitless torment. This is how we process excess mental stimuli now. Factor that exponentially to gauge how this will feel. Scientist may someday, successfully transcribe and upload the cognitive content of the human mind to a machine. There is no guarantee that consciousness or soul can or will also successfully be transferred along with the data. There will be no one there to feel joy or regret. In the end, it is nothing but a machine that will run on until it’s severed from an external energy source.
In 2052, there will be two social movements setting the stage for a new century of human conflict. One party of people will pursue their endeavor to be inhabited and co-mingled with computers. They will segregate themselves from others. The remainder, partially by choice and partially with no choice in the matter will re-discover primitivism though not fully to the extent of agrarian subsistence. These people, we’ll call them primitivist, will choose this course in a search to recover humanity and along with that, fertility. They’ll search for a metaphorical new Eden. In contrast, the transhumanist will actively work to disengage from humanity.
In response to the dearth in global fertility and in the quest to disengage from humanity, transhumanist will diverge from the primitivist in key interrelated areas. In place of natural conception and birth, transhumanist will embrace not just test-tube conception but also artificial gestation. Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ will become somewhat of a reality and have some tangible manifestation in thirty years. There is a critical connection between the rich ‘geeks’ seeking computer-aided immortality and the present-day movement to abolishing sexual and gender norms. The point of commonality is the quest to unlink procreativity from those norms and it’s resulting demolition of natural fertility. It is both cause and effect. Once procreation is artificially mimicked by transhumanist, traditional sexuality is no longer a necessity and will instead become a long menu of impulses and sensations facilitated by an array of surgeries for body modification and drugs, because, as we see even now, the concept of gender is already being destroyed. Male and female are only essential for natural procreation. Natural gender, sex, and procreation will become a thing of the past for the transhumanist and for their aligned cohorts dedicated to science enhanced quasi-sexual pleasure.
Today, conservatives see the eradication of gender as a malign outgrowth of ever more deviant alternative sexuality and as a rebellion against heterosexual norms; in short, perversion. While this is certainly part of the equation, the trend should be viewed at least equally through the transhumanist lens, seeking not just to dispense with normative sex, but as a much broader effort to engineer hybrid variations out of the human species, eventually down to the genome, a much more profound perversion.
Many future predictions are linear narrative solely about the inevitability of technology. There will be a great backlash calling for a re-discovery of humanity. The quest to regain fertility and preserve human procreativity will be central to the primitivist. This struggle is tangential to present day progressive woke ideology but by 2052, the present adherents of both ideologies will undergo realignment, possibly forming new class structures. The transhumanist and primitivist will go to war with one another (but not with geo-political armies), each representing an existential threat to their separate values and existence. Whomever controls energy production and distribution will prevail. Transhumanist will deprive the primitivist of basic technological resources but will be vulnerable to subversion and guerrilla violence.
Some of the usual power structures that are of great strategic importance today, are conspicuously absent from the narrative I paint of 2052. Rich and poor are certainly present but not with the same factors of deprivation from all prior generations. Global standards of living have risen and will continue to do so, albeit with an even keener divide between ultra-rich and everyone else.
The most conspicuous absence is East vs. West superpower struggle. It would only take one push of a nuclear button to nullify everything in this predictive narrative, but I am cautiously hopeful that that won’t occur thanks to the ever-present disincentive of mutually assured destruction. I do predict that the present superpowers will cease to have the same global relevance in thirty years. The US will have the hardware of a superpower but lack the internal leadership, the status of global leadership and a strategic enemy. Present day Russia will collapse, and China will turn back inward. No other country will reach the scale necessary to replace the present superpowers. Peaked or diminishing world population, the two-edged sword of technology, and an emerging struggle to define and maintain a true humanity will diminish aspirations of geopolitical domination. Once humanity is squarely faced with a global extinction scenario, albeit much different than the ones touted today, and once the former superpowers face acute escalating internal vulnerabilities as is already happening, there will be less will and energy for large scale conflicts. We become mutual survivors.
In the United States, progressive vs. conservative will take on different forms. Even the progressive quest of world socialism will struggle as nominal living standards continue to rise. Tech as we know it today will be gone. By 2052, it’s likely there will be no Google, FB, or Amazon, and dozens of other entities that seem essential today. The earth will be greener, but it is and will continue to be poisoned in ways that cannot be cleaned up for hundreds or maybe thousands of years and it will still poison us. Technology will deliver abundant cheap clean energy ultimately driving oil dependent economies to seek alternative revenues or else crash. The struggle will be for the access and distribution of that energy for which wars will be waged.