Deutsche Post DHL has produced an interesting set of scenarios for the world of 2050. As you might expect it’s a bit transportation-centric.
The paper has been digested into a seven minute video:
The five scenarios they consider are:
- Untamed economy—impending collapse, essentially a continuation of U. S. Aughts-style consumerism.
- Mega-efficiency in mega-cities. The countryside is hollowed out with the population concentrated in enormous, efficient cities. Basically, China without the pollution.
- Customized lifestyles. Fab labs and 3D printing enable even ordinary people to make their own stuff to their own tastes.
- Paralyzing protectionism. Slowing growth and contention for resources brings an end to globalization.
- Global resilience—local adaptation. Redundancy and survivability supplants efficiency.
Hat tip: Business Insider
I have no idea what the world of 2050 will be like—my crystal ball just doesn’t see that far. I don’t think anybody else does, either. My siblings and I are all likely to be dead. I have no hostages to fate. Some of my nephews and nieces will probably have died as well. I see the future as neither rosy nor terrifying. I doubt that the world of 2050 will be Mad Max but I doubt it will be Star Trek, either.
I’m surprised that DHL doesn’t consider what would seem to me to be the most likely scenario: everything is much as it is today except that nothing works quite as well. Worse and more frequent outbreaks of contaminated food, clothing, etc. Nobody stocks any inventory and there are increasingly long waits for practically everything.
I note that DHL seems to have surrendered to the worst case global warming scenarios. That doesn’t seem too likely at this point, either.
There are things that puzzle me about the “Peak Everything” scenarios some people seem so fond of. We’ve been there before. For example, there was a thriving obsidian trade that extended through the Middle East into parts of Europe and Asia eight to ten thousand years ago. You don’t hear much about obsidian shortages any more although I suspect it was big news a half dozen millennia ago. Why? Because substitutes were found, people began living in ways that didn’t require as much obsidian, and so on.
The universe is big. It has lots of stuff in it. Stuff we can’t even imagine yet. I suspect that eight or ten millennia from now people will still be around and we have no idea how they’ll be living or making the stuff they use. They probably won’t be any more interested in petroleum or rare earth elements than we are in obsidian.
Well, here’s something to look forward (or upward to):
Japanese Firm To Build Space Elevator By 2050
Japan’s population has already peaked. It’s expected to decrease by 20% between now and 2050. Judging by this population pyramid which suggests that Japan will have more people 65 and older than it does 20 to 64, the Japanese may be too busy emptying bedpans to build space elevators.
Why do you think they’re so obsessed with robots?
I think the causality may go the other way. Between Japanese men petitioning the government to allow them to marry anime characters, preferring robots to human beings, and Japanese women eschewing any sort of relationships it’s not surprising that the population is expected to decline.
You’re overthinking it Dave. Do you really want to have children if you think they’re just going to get stomped flat by Godzilla & Co.? Do you really want to have children if there’s a good chance they’ll be blown up by motorcycle-riding bomb throwing Yakuza? Or if they’ll get their heads cut off do to long running family vendettas over who conquered whom? Seriously! And I’m not even mentioning the earthquakes, the tsunamis, the Mongol Hordes, etc. You’d prefer relationships with robots or anime characters too. There isn’t one single recorded instance of a robot cutting off a spouse’s head with a samurai sword because the spouse’s family firm bought out the robot’s ancestor’s robot production line 30 years ago. Not one!
And think, if it’s tragic when a loved one gets stomped flat by Godzilla, it’s tragi-comic when a loved one gets stomped flat by Gamera. There’s a lot of shame in that.
Which one of you guys got the internet email address for the free trials of psilocybin?
The Japanese plan depends on the mass-manufacture and use of carbon nanotubes for structural support, which is very iffy. Nanotubes are only strong when it comes to tensile strength, and that actually seems to disappear when you bundle a whole bunch of them together.
As for 2050, I think two areas are going to be huge:
1. Implants: Many people will have medical and non-medical implants. Imagine medical implants that monitor body functions and administer drugs; eye implants that allow you to view "streams" of information without a computer screen; and possibly brain implants that periodically stoke the pleasure centers of your brain, keeping you in an upbeat mood most of the time. They've already done that with monkeys IIRC, stimulating their pleasure centers.
2. Augmented Reality: Imagine having either implants or contact lenses that double as screens, and being able to overlay what you see with “customization”. You could look at a blank, white wall, and it would be overlayed with colors and information.
On the downside, resources are likely to be more expensive even with extensive recycling and substitutes. There might be a lot of money in 2050 in being an owner of some valuable supply of natural resources.
Ah, crap. I screwed up the formatting on that post. Sorry.
As to your first point, it will take a revolution in our approach to medical certification for therapies like that to get approved.
It looks fine to me Brett.
Drew, I know you believe I’m drunk most of the time, but I haven’t even been tipsy since 1996.
and possibly brain implants that periodically stoke the pleasure centers of your brain, keeping you in an upbeat mood most of the time.
Larry Niven was writing about the potential problems with such devices back in the 1960s. One the upside – it will kill most other forms of addiction. On the downside – wireheads will become a real problem. Anyone with even a touch of addictive personality will be wiped out by such devices on one use.
Brett, as to your second point, one could make every woman one meets look much like one’s ideal. Or the men, for that matter! This kind of technology has LOTS of potential downsides: Beer Goggles x 100!
Probably because I fixed it. I sometimes think about enabling an edit functionality for comments but so far I haven’t seen anything that I like.
Ah, then thank you Dave.
Ah, 2050 when I’ll be. . . Oh.
Deep breath.
I’m looking to some serious genetic manipulation by then with all sorts of fashion-driven customizations. “Yes, we have two children, one green, one plaid.” And, “Would you like our dog, Rover, to give you a massage and a colonoscopy? Just scratch him behind the ears.”
You know, it’s stories like this that make me take all prognostications with a big dollop of salt: Six-Legged Giant Finds Secret Hideaway, Hides For 80 Years. Who know wtf is out there?
Sorry, that link is fracked. Try this:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/24/147367644/six-legged-giant-finds-secret-hideaway-hides-for-80-years
Genetic engineering is one of those technologies that’s much harder to implement than you would initially think. So many traits are the product of a mess of complicated links between lots of different genes.
I think it’s more likely that we get a lot of human-cybernetic integration first, particularly with research into connecting devices/prosthetic limbs directly to the human nervous system.
If the goal of that presentation was to garner exposure for Deutsche Post DHL , then mission accomplished. If the goal was to highlight a GIGO Box (Garbage In – Garbage Out) then mission also accomplished. If the goal was to present serious forecasting, even within the scope of trying to predict 38 years into the future, then mission failed.
All that infrastructure enhancement requires serious wealth be directed at the job, especially when the infrastructure requires wide-spread networks to become more effective than the existing infrastructure that it is replacing. Where is that wealth coming from? All of the West is facing the twinned problems of the Birth Dearth and the Entitlement Choke-hold.
When resources have to be allocated for future schemes to be brought to fruition then some attention in the forecasting should be focused on how those resources will be divided.
The second flaw here is the showcasing of loaded assumptions, for instance, the consumerist society is choking the world with pollution but the green society is efficient. What??? The empirical evidence is showing that wealthier societies have more resources that can be devoted to environmental activities and generally have less toxic environments than do poorer countries. Secondly, the adoption of green technologies is economically inefficient at present and for the near term future, so a long term projection predicated upon the wholesale adoption of green tech leading to a more efficient and pleasant life who our descendants is being built on a logical foundation of sand – it’s wishcasting rather than forecasting. I could point out the wishcasting in all of the other scenarios, but why bother, this clearly wasn’t a serious effort to do their best to project trends into the future.
Shorter TangoMan:
Why isn’t the future a post-apocalyptic hell where the Aryan Overlords ride armored vehicles through crowds of starving brown people the way it is in my head?
@TangoMan
Who says they have to be Americans paying for that wealth? The whole world-wide pool of capital in 2050 will be vaster than anything we have right now, and likely far more liquid barring some sort of return to protectionism.
They also emit more CO2 and produce more waste-byproducts, at least within the US. But when they’re talking about “efficient” in that context, I suspect “efficient” means “more efficient electrical power usage, more urban density, and such”.
That’s not necessarily true. The price for solar has been falling for well over a decade, although it’s still not quite enough to compete with the (subsidized) coal power-generation infrastructure. Wind and geo-thermal have a lot of promise in certain areas (Iceland draws a massive amount of power from geothermal, and Denmark from wind).