The world in 2072
Written for the Effective Ideas Monthly Blog Prize for May 2022.
Macrotrends
“If in the 2010s what were under-rated were crypto and China, I think in the 2020s what’s underated are India and transhumanism, and it will be more obvious by the end of the decade.” - Balaji Srinivasan, 2021.
Shifting demographics and culture
There are several obvious macrotrends that will come to fruition in the next 50 years. The obvious is the plateauing of global population. The UN projects the population in 2072 will be 10.58 billion, up from 33% from today’s 7.95 billion. Feeding, clothing, and housing this larger number of people will not be an issue due to technologies like GMO crops, desalination, and robotic agriculture. A bigger issue humanity will face, is a shifting demographic pyramid due to declining fertility rates and longevity medicine. As the workforce ages and more people retire, there will be labor shortages across many sectors with the healthcare and service sectors being especially hard hit. These labor shortages will drive the development of service robots, discussed below.
Global culture will shift dramatically by 2072, although some things will stay the same. Religion will remain a powerful force, with slightly more Muslims in the world than Christians. The “anglosphere” (I’m mainly thinking about America and the UK here) will remain a powerful soft power force globally. The main difference is that India will have soft power and cultural export on par with the anglosphere. Why do I predict this? Firstly, India will be the largest country — the U.N. projects India’s population will be 1.62 billion in 2072, compared to China’s 1.24 billion. More people means more consumers and more demand for cultural artifacts. More importantly though India is a place where both Western and Eastern cultures have collided, especially in the past century with British colonial rule. So theoretically, cultural exports from India should have more widespread appeal than those from China. I’m also betting on the CCP becoming a bit reactionary and keeping Chinese culture more distinct from global culture.
Africa will also be a much larger cultural and economic force as Africans will be much wealthier and will comprise 32% of the global population compared to 17.6% today. The general story will be one of cultural convergence and homogenization. Some languages, like Gaelic, will finally die. The cultural distinctness of most of the central European countries will be blurred due to immigration and the mixing of the younger generations within the EU.
Transhumanism
Some of the things transhumanists advocate for, such as investing in age-reversal biotechnology, are already pretty popular. However, western culture is largely technopessimistic and the term transhumanism has taken on a very negative gloss in the popular imagination. For the past few years or so, news coverage of transhumanism has been overwhelmingly negative in tone (just search Google News to see). Moreover, the West suffers from what Douglas Murray calls civilizational “tiredness”, or a lack of belief in itself. The West also has major hangups over germ-line gene editing, given the legacy of eugenics. Both India and China, by contrast, are very techno-optimistic. Large parts of Africa are as well. In fact, most of Asia and Africa are fertile ground for transhumanism to go mainstream. This will have a massive accelerative effect on technological development and adoption.
Technology
For new technologies to transform society four things generally have to happen:
— Requisite precursor technologies and scientific knowledge must be in place.
— The technology must be invented. By this I mean the creation of a minimal working prototype.
— The invention has to be innovated on so it is useful and can be mass produced.
— People agree to adopt the technology and it is widely deployed.
Those last two points are the most time-consuming. When a new technology is invented, it’s easy to see the ramifications and applications. Hype proliferates and FoMO abounds. Companies race to lay claim to it. However, translating from an initial prototype to real-world deployment generally takes a lot of time. Many problems have to be solved. This “innovation” phase is just as critical as the invention phase.
Thus we end up with Amara’s law:
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” - Roy Amara
The final phase is adoption. The time it takes before more than half of people to start using a technology is generally a few decades. It does appear that adoption times are speeding up, generally, as people become wealthier.
Predicting when new technologies will be invented is hard. When will self-sustaining fusion or a cure for Alzheimers be invented? It’s almost impossible to say. The fact that many people are working on both problems may be a cause for either optimism or pessimism, depending how you look on it.
What’s much easier is looking at things for which we have crude prototypes today, ie technologies whose core has already been “invented” but need a lot of innovation and refinement. 50 years is enough time for innovation, adoption, and at least some transformation of society.
Fusion power
By 2072 we will have fusion power. I am not sure how exactly, but I feel pretty confident saying this. The transformative potential of unlimited clean energy is generally underrated. With fusion fully deployed in 2070, people won’t worry about “saving energy” and the 1950s dream of “energy too cheap to meter” will have finally been realized. Here’s some of the things fusion power will be doing for us in 2072:
— Desalinating and pumping water at extremely low cost, turning deserts into thriving agricultural regions.
— Powering electric vehicles at extremely low cost.
— Refining aluminum and copper at extremely low cost
— Powering ion-drive spaceships for fast Earth-Mars transport
Space travel
There will be a base on Mars in 2072. It will not be self-sustaining though. However the Martian economy will be making money via tourism for the uberwealty, exporting tritium deuterium, and intellectual property. Robotic expeditions to find ore deposits on Mars will just be starting.
Longer lifespan & healthspan
The UN projects that life expectancy in the US in 2072 will be 86, up from 79 today. I think it will actually be higher, maybe around 95. These gains may seem modest to many futurists. However, keep in mind that “life expectancy” uses the rate of deaths at the present moment and then extrapolates forward. In reality, people born in 2072 will live much, much longer on average. Somatic gene therapies will be widely adopted. Many diseases such as sickle cell anemia and Tay Sachs disease will be cured.
Germline gene selection/editing
Germline gene editing will fairly popular in 2072 especially in the places where transhumanism is popular (China, India, SF Bay Area). This will largely be done by pre-implantation genetic testing and embryo selection. There will be some germline editing as well. However, my sense is that the adoption curve here will be slow and the main benefit will be eliminating genetic diseases and reducing risk for depression and schizophrenia. Things will be moving in a very good direction here though as humanity breaks away from the currently ethically problematic state of leaving things to chance and takes control over the future evolution of the species.
Brain-computer interfacing
“.. it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone. There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. … those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.” - J. C. R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960.
The basic idea of BCI output - read the brain and then do something based on it, has been around since 1969. Basic BCI input, such as cochlear implants or cortical electrodes, have also been around for around 20 years or more. The technology just needs to be innovated heavily to increase the number of electrodes and longevity in the body. It seems entirely plausible that BCI is going to be very well developed by 2072, and there may even be some sort of neural lace. At the very least people will be able to communicate with each other telepathically. A heads up display and augmented memory may also be possible. I generally think the effects of BCI are under appreciated by futurists. Trying to deduce the myriad effects of BCI technologies would take an entire post by itself.
Home robots, finally
In 2072 most labor is done by robots everywhere in the world. The first jobs to be automated away were truck drivers. Next, farms went fully robotic. Finally general purpose humanoid service robots were developed. There will be a lot of safety regulations around robots after numerous incidents.
A lot more tech
Here’s some more tech we will have by 2072, according to Metaculus:
Commercial supersonic flights (current forecast: 2030)
Derivation of gametes (eggs and sperm) from stem cells (current forecast: 2034)
De-extinction of Wooly mammoths (current forecast: 2057)
Metaculus thinks we will also be on the verge of uploading minds (current forecast: 2073, although the Metaculus community has very wide uncertainty on this).
Perils
So far the picture I’ve painted is fairly rosy. However, the world of 2072 will be much more complicated, chaotic, and perilous that the world today. Technological systems will have advanced enormously, but the human brain will be the same ape-like construct it is today. Even today many technological systems are more complicated than any one human can fully grasp, and this will be even more true in 2072. The “global brain” will be much more technological and less human in 2072.
AI being used for malevolent ends everywhere
After terrorists hacked into driverless cars and started crashing them, a lot of regulations and work went into making cyberpysical systems more secure. After self-modifying AI trojans brought down vasts swaths of the net and crippled the global economy, self-modifying AI systems were made illegal. Cybersecurity in 2072 will be intense. Computer networks will be tightly monitored for signs of intrusion by AI sentinels.
Addendum - Parting thoughts
“There is indeed an objective difference between a false explanation and a true one, between chronic failure to solve a problem and solving it, and also between wrong and right, ugly and beautiful, suffering and its alleviation – and thus between stagnation and progress in the fullest sense.” - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity.
You my have noticed that I didn’t say much that much about the elephant in the room - AI. This is largely because unforeseen circumstances prevented me from getting around to writing that part before the deadline for this essay. However, I generally had trouble deciding what to say about AI because I have a lot of uncertainty on the matter. While I personally am a (rational) optimist, I have had mixed-thoughts about writing an optimistic vision for AI, because I generally think humanity needs to be more worried about AI x-risk right now, not less. My plan was to present a slow-takeoff vision for AI development where AI accidents had constantly been happening with highly advanced AIs, leading to lots of regulation and large scale AI safety efforts. In the future I envision sentinel AIs have been built to protect against rouge AIs. Boxing (hardware-based containment) is also heavily used, although it isn’t a completely foolproof solution. I also suspect that man-machine symbiosis, as Licklider called it, will be an important part of the story of how humanity will survive with superhuman AI. Biological humans probably will be succeeded by something else eventually, but that will be far after 2072.
The future I envision is one where exciting progress had been made but there are still enormous problems. Problems are inevitable - there will never be any final state of rest for humanity. But don’t think for a second that progress isn't real. Progress is real and we should seek more of it. Solving problems and creating progress brings meaning and purpose to our lives. As Popper said, "all life is problem solving".
Fantastic post! All of the predictions are realistically possible within 50 years without being overly conservative or unimaginative.
Nice to read some techo optimism for a change!