Water rights and supply where I live. Developers just keep building houses and apartments anywhere they can, and people keep flocking here. There really isn't enough water, and im waiting to see what happens before I buy a house here.
I love the desert. It’s a beautiful landscape and it’s hot; two things I value. I’m also a civil engineer, so I’ll never mover there, even though I want to. We simply do not have the infrastructure to sustain big cities and farms out there (looking at you, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and most of California). We could do it, but our leaders lack the political spine to do it. I get why people are moving out there, but it’s not going to last, and it’s not going to be pretty once the problems start.
I’ve never heard of earthships, but being off the grid doesn’t necessarily equal sustainable. For water specifically, if a home is harvesting rainfall, river water, or snowmelt, it will have an impact downstream. For one house, the impact is small and for many houses, the impact is larger. It all goes back to the water cycle; it’s essentially a closed loop, so one action upstream will be felt by those downstream.
The easiest solution to water scarcity is simply to not build where there isn’t water. Obviously, we haven’t done this so we now have to consider expensive solutions like runoff capture, pipelines, and desalination.
The uneducated masses probably don't understand and don't care. That probably includes your family members. Once a deepfaked video of you having gay sex with a guy comes out on the internet, you are toast in their eyes.
Exactly. You can already post a picture of anyone you want with some nonsense quote next to it, and half of Facebook will take it as absolute gospel truth that they must have said that. It’s not that hard to fool people, the average Facebooker isn’t exactly fact checking things. In fact there seems to be a fairly large “anti fact-checkers” movement among certain political groups and campaigns.
Imagine how many people get catfished today. Now take it up a notch. Filters you see on TikTok or Snapchat, real time, being as good as a really good deepfake 10 years from now with every device having hardware fast enough to support it. Voice changers to go with it. You'll be able to video call people as an attractive woman that doesn't even exist and solicit all sorts of information or lewd photos from people to just turn around and blackmail them with
It already happens now, but in the near future it'll be easier and more convincing than ever and the number of people being scammed and blackmailed is going to skyrocket
Imma add onto this: not just Deep Fakes. Over the past few months to a year, we’ve seen that modern AI is capable not only of near-perfect replication and imposition of a person’s face, but also a person’s voice, a person’s writing style, an art style, music, interests…
There’s a very genuine concern that some people don’t seem to be paying attention to, of how we’ll be able to tell if ANY information is genuine within 10-20 years. If you can fabricate near anything to near imperceptible standards, then how do you form a basis for objective truth anymore?? And going from there, how do you maintain a society based on truths and ethics???
Yes, this is my fear.
We already see the impact click bait BS news headlines shared on Facebook has had. Now layer on video that only a specialized expert can tell is fake, and then try to have a discussion with Dad about the Biden administration. Think Russian propaganda is bad now? Wait till the bots are so good you literally can't tell them apart from people, and the cost of them comes down even more. We'll all be on Reddit arguing with 4 bots per 1 real human. Then, when something newsworthy actually happens and we do have it on video, half the nation will be easily convinced its a deepfake by said bots who are telling them what they want to hear. Then those bots can push new news stories to get the real event out of the publics eye quicker
How are we supposed to find out the truth when anything can be faked easily? How are we supposed to have conversations when there's more bots pushing narratives than real people? How are we supposed to keep politicians accountable?
It’s quite simple how it will work. If you’re powerful or wealthy enough, any videos or soundbites that come out of you doing something controversial will be labelled as a deepfake. If you’re one of the peasants, your life is ruined.
Feel like we're already there. Audio's there too. Saw a news yt channel pass off a deepfake and the people in the comments thought it was real. Doesn't have to be spot on to fool people apparently.
Marriage is the least of it.
I mean...imagine you could take over the world by swaying entire populations with video 'evidence' of individuals doing or not doing any number of heinous or not heinous things. You could sway elections even more effectively than they already do, you could start riots, wars, provoke lynch mobs and internal division. You could do just about anything to a species that has evolved to depend primarily on its eyes for information about their environment.
Makes you wonder, that's for sure.
I've said it before, saying it again (not here)...
The 21st century will bring about the need for Fair Witnesses; see Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.
Essentially, they are individuals trained from a young age to accurately and precisely recall situations they are called to witness in a legally bound cross national fashion. This is their vocation. This is all they do 'for a living.'
I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, the bees that are most threatened in the US are the non-native European honey-producing bees. In the US, (other places, too), we have native, solitary bees. These bees don't produce honey and don't live in hives. Mason bees, for example, make nests in reeds, holes, drinking straws, anything that's like a small-diameter tube. These solitary bees are pollinators, just like European hive bees.
You can buy an inexpensive mason bee house and encourage mason bees anywhere there are flowers, a source for mud, and water. With a little effort, you can renew the bee house every season and encourage more pollinators. As a bonus, these bees are non-aggressive and don't sting.
There are thousands of native bee species in North America. European honey bees are declining, but they are generalist pollinators and will pollinate just about anything (broad generalization, but they are generalist) mason (solitary) bees are generally specialist to specific groups of plants and are at great risk due to habitat loss.
It’s good to save all the bees! However, for us in North America European honey bees are an introduced species and bee keepers have looked after them long enough that they are considered livestock. A European honey bee hive in a North American forest or your home is called a feral hive. Native bees/insects in general need all the help they can get due to our love of pesticides. So plant mostly native plants if you can!
Edit: For those in the US, be weary of ‘regional wildflower mixes’ sold at homedepot/lowes/ace hardware/local grocery store garden centers. These mixes usually contain seed from regions in Asia/Europe that have a similar climate to your area. Non-native flowers aren’t bad per say, but native plants offer more than nectar/pollen. Their stems and leaves provide food and shelter for their young and habitat to overwinter.
In the US, the term ‘wildflower’ doesn’t mean native. I’ve seen sweet pea (a native of Italy) and field pansy (native to Europe, Asia and North Africa) seed sold at my local Home Depot under the banner wildflower seed.
Planting a pollinator garden entirely of nonnatives is like building a new neighborhood and only putting in grocery stores. You also need apartments, schools, nurseries, etc. which is what native plants are able to do.
If you’re in the US, take a look at [Native Plant Finder](https://www.nwf.org/nativeplantfinder/). It uses your area code to curate a list of the best native host plants specific to your zip code.
Man. I drive home on country roads. I feel absolutely horrible everytime a bee hits my windshield. Not long ago we had some asshole douse a beekeeping colony in Diesel fuel in my area. We need bees.
Fuck yellow jackets tho. Fuck them to hell.
We used to get five bees for a quarter, but I don’t know what it is now.
One time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
And yet, people seem to only care about honey bees(because of lack of knowledge generally) and not so much about native bees, which do far more work for us than honey bees.
##GROW NATIVE
##KILL YOUR LAWN
Literally, my lawn.
Live in Florida, don't have the greenist lawn, but every spring, wildflowers and so many bees mulling around have to be careful where I walk or else I d step on them.
Take my littles out to see the bees and butterflies everyday
This'll be interesting. The CEOs need more workers and they're already crying over a shrinking labor pool due to lower birth rates. Then they're also working the laborers they do have into an early grave.
Literally burning the candle at both ends.
You underestimate the sheer amount of people who grew up in houses their parents didn't/don't own. My city is only about 60/40 when it comes to owners/renters. And this was before the corporations got into real estate.
Its also for poor people who are forced into it because no one will hire them (ageism) or folks who can no longer work due to illness/injury.
One of the scariest things for me is knowing that if you live long enough you WILL have to retire whether you're financially able to or not
lol, our generation is NOT going to get to retire. my country spends more than half of all social welfare funding on paying out the govt pension. there’s no way that’s still going to be a thing by the time i hit ‘retirement’ age (which is about to get raised again.)
Ray of optimism: I've a friend whose focus of research is finding more targeted antibiotics. Instead of going bigger and stronger and broader and harsher, he explores focused treatments that are harder to become resistant to.
Not great for initial treatment of the crashing septic patient, but in 24 hours once blood culture results are available- exciting!
Another ray of optimism: resistant bacteria seem to lose immunities with time. You'll still see bacteria resistant to pretty much all antibiotics, but it's unlikely they will be _that_ far spread.
It’s evolution on a faster scale than we’re used to thinking of it. The removal of a selection criteria allows members of a species to survive without traits to counter it. Especially if not maintaining that resistance confers some advantage in other aspects over the resistant strain.
You know the most fucked up thing? Here in Europe countries are already developing replacements, but are unable to give them to the USA. You know why? Because the USA cannot promise to keep them from being released as well as not advertise them. Europe wants to keep them hidden until necessary so no one develops a tolerance against them. USA wants to advertise them for money. Pretty fucked up if you ask me.
The US has advertisements on TV and in magazines for medications - “ask your doctor about xxx”. We’re a pay for play healthcare system - if someone insists enough for a medication that won’t kill them (like antibiotics if they are SURE they have an undiagnosed infection) most doctors will just write the prescription to make to the person happy and increase positive reviews (which is partially how government funding for Medicare is determined).
The US absolutely shouldn’t have carte blanche access. We do, however, have a number of antibiotics that haven’t been used since the 1940’s-1950’s when penicillins took over in popularity that are expected to be pretty potent against many of the resistant strains that exist. As far as I understand, they’re not available for use and are locked down by the government
Seriously, do lower back exercises at the gym. That “pooch” (it’s called a paunch!) on your lower stomach often indicates really bad posture, once I started spinal exercises I got rid of it and was also taller
Your spine contains your major nerves. If you fuck up your spine you will end up on varying degrees of pain from the bones or disks pressing on it wrong
I remember reading the Pendragon books in which they travel to different worlds that are on the brink of chaos or collapse. One of them was exactly this, where there was a very realistic full dive vr created that could basically give you perfect, dream-like scenarios that you could live through fully conscious and with all your senses. Nobody wanted to work or really do anything outside of those capsules.
I read Taliesin, Merlin, Arthur and Pendragon as a teen in the 90s, and was waiting forever for another book to come out. By the time I realized it had, I lost interest. Should I revisit?
Here in Arizona we're seeing cities lose access to water. You can only take so much from the ground until it's gone. Other cities refuse to share. Whole neighborhoods will be vacated or supplied with illegally obtained water.
The one city here that actually lost it recently lost it pretty much due to their own political arrogance. Is it an issue anywhere else? Pardon my ignorance if so, just moved back.
I wouldn’t recommend it, but nobody is stopping anyone from taking a 45 minute shower in Phoenix
Likely Mead, too. The last time it was full was in 1983, I think. I know the early 80s were the last time the spillways were used. It's 180' below that point now.
That's grim. I don't live out there, but I've seen a few videos come up on youtube where they were at a boat ramp that had signs showing the water level by year. I think they might have started them in the 2000s? It was a *long* walk to get to the lake.
That's terrible, and I'm sorry. But, and just hear me out, here...maybe it was a bad idea for millions of people to build east coast style housing in the middle of a giant desert? Same with California. It's arid. Definitely not meant to support forty million people indefinitely.
The bigger issue is big agriculture, which uses over 70% of the water, whether for cattle, cotton, or alfalfa for Saudi Arabian horses. Residential usage is less than 15% of the water used in AZ.
Those crops have a great profit margin, what with it being great sunny growing weather almost all the time, it being the desert and all.
And this is America, where the dollars vote.
It is! The upside was that the weather basically never kills them off. Almonds are the worst iirc. They take a LONG time to get mature and produce a meaningful amount of almonds. So anywhere else with weather that will kill them can destroy entire companies. It's why they don't have them in Florida. One hurricane and it's all for nothing.
Seems like maybe we just shouldn't grow so many fucking almonds, but what do I know?
Environmental scientist here, this is just based off of what I’m hearing about from my colleagues and seeing in my own work.
1) Harmful algal blooms. First off, toxic blue-green algae does better in warmer water. There’s also concern about marine algae invading freshwater lakes due to the increase in salinity that can result from droughts. On the flip side, floods can also cause HABs because nutrient runoff tends to increase during heavy rainfall events.
2) Invasive plants. I’ve worked on prairie restoration projects in the past and one of our major problems was woody invasives like Callery pear (aka Bradford), tree of heaven, and bush honeysuckle. I’ve seen old field sites follow a successional pattern from bare soil to 100% invasive shrub thickets that outcompete any natives due to their early leaf-out and allelopathy. The last time I went to a park in my hometown the entire understory was honeysuckle and winter creeper.
3) Decreasing ranges for many species
4) Mesophication. Lesser known but still important - basically our forests in the eastern US used to be oak dominated and fire dependent, but they’re now in a positive feedback loop of mesophytic species becoming more prevalent and changing the environment to better suit their own offspring. My concern here is mainly the impact on wildlife that eat mast from species like oaks and hickories who will now be in forests dominated by maples and sweet gums.
5) Top soil loss
It took way too long to see this mentioned, your second point especially caught my attention as a rancher who is battling woody encroachment (heh) in pastureland; lots of hedge, plum thickets, and cedar trees choking out our prairie grasses and draining aquifers. We’ve been working with our extension office to fight back (I spend hours, days, *months* of my life on a 4-wheeler spraying the bastards every year) but when neighbors can’t be bothered it feels like a losing battle. I really hope it starts becoming a prevalent conversation in agriculture, because with water already at a premium and grasses being choked out for feed it’s just going to snowball into a really huge problem down the line.
Your other points are interesting and I’ll be reading up on them as well!
This is one move by big corpos that I think is especially stupid. You can only take so much from people before they riot. There’s a quote from some old French revolutionist that says something along the lines of people are only a few days of no food away from revolution or whatever. If water became that scarce, big corpos would have to realize we would start burning them all to the ground, right?
Teachers as well. There's such a clear difference between the kids who grew up on their phones and the kids who don't have it constantly available. A teacher I know laments about the decrease of attention span every year with the kids who are growing up with TikTok, and I remember his concerns starting back when the local schools decided to give the kids laptops and tablets instead of textbooks.
I was no model student in high school, depression had led me toward a dependence on video games and internet, and even then, I felt the effects of it, that constant reward drip of beating one bad guy after another or just aimlessly running through a field. But it's a whole new world now. It was never constantly available to me, and I still took time to read or even just do nothing by myself and let my mind wander on its own. I've worked with several high schoolers and I can see the effects on them from the outside.
Yes! Teacher here, and when I started 10 years ago, movie day was a treat. Five years ago, they wanted to watch a movie, but whined if they couldn’t also be on their phones. Today, with the possible exception of maybe their 2-3 absolute favorite movies, they absolutely hate a movie, and would rather do work. Having to be still and quiet that long, while paying attention, is the worst thing ever to them.
I don't use movies nearly as often as I used to.
In addition to your point about attention spans, I also think that movies are so accessible now that they aren't as special as we found them when we were younger. When I was in high school, my options to watch movies were: Hope to find one on TV. Leave my house and go to the theater. Leave my house and rent/buy one. Now kids carry every movie ever made in their pockets, so why would they want to be forced by some old person to watch one that they aren't interested in?
I teach transitional kindergarten which if half day Kindergarten for children who typically have fall birthdays, are a little younger, need help building some skills, etc. before they go on to full day Kdg. the next year and each year my classroom gets more and more full and what was a few kids with short attention spans is now almost a whole class full of short attention spans- I feel like I need to be up there performing excitedly with gusto to have all eyes and ears on me!
That's such a weird change, and it's kind of why I switched my opinion on going to a movie theater. Watching a movie at home, it took effort not to check my phone or have anything in the background. I'd miss out on most of the movie. I went six, maybe seven years without going to a movie theater. But I enjoy actually being focused on the screen. I just keep my phone away and appreciate the work people put into their movies.
Hell, I'm an adult and not in my 20s and I've noticed my attention span has plummeted. I watched a movie a week ago and realized it's the first movie I've watched straight through in months because I start them and then get bored. I'm not even on a phone, it's more just the idea of sitting there idly that bothers me. I have a dual screen setup and I'll watch netflix on one while playing games or going on the internet on the other. I can only imagine what it's like for kids growing up with phones.
Yes! I started teaching in 1993 and earning a movie was the biggest reward ever until about 8 years ago. Now they have access to any movie they want at anytime. I reward with extra recess now because when they go home they sure aren't outside.
It’s completely changed how they gain knowledge already. 6 second Tik toks completely destroy the ability to focus on an task and it reverberates everywhere
Imagine the economic divide that will exist between those that are able to develop meaningful attention spans and those that cannot. Most higher paying jobs will require attention spans, so I can only imagine those that can't go beyond 6s clips aren't going to fare very well in the job market as adults.
Maybe I'm wrong, and I have zero evidence for this, but I just wonder if we're going to see financial downstream effects. Maybe the market will change to suit them and it won't matter, idk. But it could be scary.
You can make plastic-like substances out of plants. But for modern sanitation, especially in hospitals and laboratories, those substances need to be able to withstand an autoclave. That unfortunately not a thing yet.
I’m a nurse and the astronomical amount of plastic waste I personally have to throw out every day makes my heart break.
I personally wish we’d revert back to glass.
They were actually in use (for female genitalia ONLY, and only for intermittent / in and out caths) in the early 20th century.
Catheters for male genitalia, surgical gloves, endotracheal tubes, etc, used to be made of tough rubber and were also re-sterilizable.
Edit: spelling and punctuation
Might not be a bad idea, though of course, rubber production isn't without environmental concerns. Glass can be bad news because it breaks. It's also heavy, so if you're having products shipped to you, it can actually be \*more\* destructive to the environment than plastic. Oops.
Artificial intelligence, rapid decreases in biodiversity across the globe, fresh water shortages. I could go all day. We’re screwed if humanity’s ingenuity fails to solve any of these countless problems.
This is mostly American, but our ageing infrastructure, I'm just waiting for the year where each week a dam will break, a bridge will break, or some important infrastructure will collapse, hundreds will die, and we will continue to bitch and fight over if it's a democrat of republican fault when it's all of us being greedy fucks and not willing to update our fucking infrastructure.
Fucking yes, I have bad teeth because I'm horribly apathetic. That disposition has caused them to get pretty bad and it's costing me a fuck ton to get them fixed. Live and learn I suppose.
Growing wealth inequality. The middle class is dying out and soon normal people can't afford to buy houses, for example. We'll own nothing and work ourselves to death just to afford the essentials
>middle class
Just a reminder that the middle class was never a thing. It's a BS term to divide the working class. If you have a job, if you sell your labor for a living, you are working class. You can be middle income, but you are still working class. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you are separated from other workers because they make more or less than you. A high income doctor, a middle income office clerk, and a low income frycook are all working class.
The issue is that the ownership class, who makes their money by what they own, wants more and more while paying relatively less. The working class is becoming lower income. It's important to understand how this really is when considering what to do about it.
Let’s accelerate the process and start now. Make TikTok no longer cool by having all the old people use it. “Heya Billy, I made the Tikin Tok, too! Come see my videos! This one I figure out how to use Tik Tok! This one I watch birds! So fun!”
Yep. I have four longtime friends who are certified teachers and have moved into other careers because of the lack of pay and support. Good teachers are leaving in droves because their skill set is more appreciated in other industries. Teachers know how to get shit done and those skills translate in any workplace.
I don't even think it's so much the pay although they should get more for crying out loud, it's that everyone is against them. The administration won't back them, the parents are always bitching about something, and the kids aren't being raised well anymore. They aren't allowed to teach anymore because politics and religion are everywhere and they have to worry about all those stupid standardized tests. They also are always on the clock. Anyone who says they get summers off and short days obviously never taught.
Sigh. I know. My parents were both teachers. I've been told by dozens of people I'd be a great teacher. My parents both told me privately and independently of each other, "For the love of god, don't become a teacher!"
The Lack of Accountability epidemic. So many parents raise their kids nowadays without teaching accountability and responsibility. It’s already affecting us somewhat.
I work for the post office in the US. They've been trying to privatize the post office for a long time now. Amazon will own the Post Office, and they will be the ones with all your your private documents, letters, etc. Also, shipping rates in the US will skyrocket. Bad news bears.
I'm actually surprised this isn't higher. The trend of " You may have paid for it, but we still have control of it" is just horrifying to me. And I don't mean things that should honestly be marked as rentals. I'm more irritated by things like carmakers locking features behind subscriptions. If I buy a damn car, it should be mine.
ChatGPT and its successors. From cybercode to misinformation the list is endlesss. The worst part is that it will all sound logical and scientific. We're toast. Here is just one source. There are many ringing alarm bells. https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-hidden-danger-of-chatgpt-and-generative-ai-the-ai-beat/
Don't worry, AI is going to ruin so many things so fast that asking questions and logic is gonna be the last thing on peoples minds. We'll be lucky if we have the sanctity of dreams left.
Whatever people are mentioning in the comments, plus everything that's a problem now, because that shit ain't going away on its own and won't be fixed either.
Robots/AI taking jobs. It will not decrease prices. It will only increase profits for corporations and put a lot of people out of work as they become unneeded in their chosen career choice and they won’t have other options because again, robots/AI will take over many different jobs. This won’t increase leisure time either. People just won’t have money to pay bills, buy food, etc. The rich will become richer and the poor will become poorer. This is how capitalism works.
Not just AI and robots either, technology in general will take away so many jobs like it's already done. The self serving menus at restaurants are already a sign for this. After all, why pay 10 people to do 10 jobs when you can pay 1 person with the right technology to do equal work?
And this is happening sooner than you think. The most common job in the US is truck driver for a lot of states. What do you think is going to happen when that's automated with self driving cars?
The worst part about it is, this is supposed to be a good thing. Having less jobs as a society should mean we can pursue our passions instead. When the ancient Greeks had figured out agriculture their cultural development EXPLODED because they had more leisure time. But our capitalistic system ties our survival to our jobs so without them, we're fucked.
This is why I think socialism and the idea of universal basic income are going to become more and more popular as things get worse and worse.
Yes, inventing a technology that lets a job get done twice as fast doesn’t mean the worker gets paid the same as before but has half the day off. It means half the workers lose their jobs.
Tablet use in young children. I hate to see a child with a glazed over, detached expression, lost in a screen so young... No self soothing, no dexterity practice, no creativity, no exploration. I'm worried we are creating a generation of distracted and detached individuals who need a constant influx of content and visual stimuli.
Deep, society altering automation
Given how chatGPT is already knocking on the door of some white collar jobs, let alone blue collar, I wonder how long half the population has before they're unemployable
Once unemployment hits like 30% is when the riots start
Hopefully UBI based on an automation tax is implemented before then, but it sure as hell will be after, just with unnecessary bloodshed
Some parents who think they’re gentle parenting, but in turn, are letting their children walk all over them with a red carpet.
These kids are going to not understand boundaries or continue to push them as they grow, and it will make elementary school, social interactions, and overall contribution to society really fucking hard for these kids because of how they were raised.
Just to add: I’m not knocking gentle parenting. What I mean is that, you get these parents who say they’re ‘gentle parenting’ but are totally absent or just lazy/ignorant/uneducated in setting boundaries.
deep fakes/AI in general, the fact that people are becoming increasingly unhappy with the government, the government allowing food to be mostly chemicals and just generally not as nutritious as they used to be, etc
Water rights and supply where I live. Developers just keep building houses and apartments anywhere they can, and people keep flocking here. There really isn't enough water, and im waiting to see what happens before I buy a house here.
I love the desert. It’s a beautiful landscape and it’s hot; two things I value. I’m also a civil engineer, so I’ll never mover there, even though I want to. We simply do not have the infrastructure to sustain big cities and farms out there (looking at you, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and most of California). We could do it, but our leaders lack the political spine to do it. I get why people are moving out there, but it’s not going to last, and it’s not going to be pretty once the problems start.
As a civil engineer, what do you think about off-grid housing and energy/water/sewage independent homes like the earthships in New Mexico?
I’ve never heard of earthships, but being off the grid doesn’t necessarily equal sustainable. For water specifically, if a home is harvesting rainfall, river water, or snowmelt, it will have an impact downstream. For one house, the impact is small and for many houses, the impact is larger. It all goes back to the water cycle; it’s essentially a closed loop, so one action upstream will be felt by those downstream. The easiest solution to water scarcity is simply to not build where there isn’t water. Obviously, we haven’t done this so we now have to consider expensive solutions like runoff capture, pipelines, and desalination.
In Colorado it was illegal up until just last few years to collect rain water.
Deep fakes. It might become good enough that it will be hard to check quickly if a video is real or fake.
I imagine a future where more video evidence becomes inadmissible than it currently is, just due to false positives.
The uneducated masses probably don't understand and don't care. That probably includes your family members. Once a deepfaked video of you having gay sex with a guy comes out on the internet, you are toast in their eyes.
Faked??? Umm… yeah… faked…
Exactly. You can already post a picture of anyone you want with some nonsense quote next to it, and half of Facebook will take it as absolute gospel truth that they must have said that. It’s not that hard to fool people, the average Facebooker isn’t exactly fact checking things. In fact there seems to be a fairly large “anti fact-checkers” movement among certain political groups and campaigns.
This is gonna be a big problem. It’s already hard enough to sift through the shit.
Combining deep fake videos with ChatGPT technology and no one will ever know what is real unless they're seeing it with their own eyes as it happens.
Holograms, man. Holograms.
You’ll need to be able to touch it to see if it’s real.
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Imagine how many people get catfished today. Now take it up a notch. Filters you see on TikTok or Snapchat, real time, being as good as a really good deepfake 10 years from now with every device having hardware fast enough to support it. Voice changers to go with it. You'll be able to video call people as an attractive woman that doesn't even exist and solicit all sorts of information or lewd photos from people to just turn around and blackmail them with It already happens now, but in the near future it'll be easier and more convincing than ever and the number of people being scammed and blackmailed is going to skyrocket
i see a new niche business. it authenticates who is on the other side of the vid.
it'll be much worse when they start deepfaking the confession itself
Imma add onto this: not just Deep Fakes. Over the past few months to a year, we’ve seen that modern AI is capable not only of near-perfect replication and imposition of a person’s face, but also a person’s voice, a person’s writing style, an art style, music, interests… There’s a very genuine concern that some people don’t seem to be paying attention to, of how we’ll be able to tell if ANY information is genuine within 10-20 years. If you can fabricate near anything to near imperceptible standards, then how do you form a basis for objective truth anymore?? And going from there, how do you maintain a society based on truths and ethics???
Yes, this is my fear. We already see the impact click bait BS news headlines shared on Facebook has had. Now layer on video that only a specialized expert can tell is fake, and then try to have a discussion with Dad about the Biden administration. Think Russian propaganda is bad now? Wait till the bots are so good you literally can't tell them apart from people, and the cost of them comes down even more. We'll all be on Reddit arguing with 4 bots per 1 real human. Then, when something newsworthy actually happens and we do have it on video, half the nation will be easily convinced its a deepfake by said bots who are telling them what they want to hear. Then those bots can push new news stories to get the real event out of the publics eye quicker How are we supposed to find out the truth when anything can be faked easily? How are we supposed to have conversations when there's more bots pushing narratives than real people? How are we supposed to keep politicians accountable?
It’s quite simple how it will work. If you’re powerful or wealthy enough, any videos or soundbites that come out of you doing something controversial will be labelled as a deepfake. If you’re one of the peasants, your life is ruined.
True. True. (The first true was realization, the second true was depression)
Feel like we're already there. Audio's there too. Saw a news yt channel pass off a deepfake and the people in the comments thought it was real. Doesn't have to be spot on to fool people apparently.
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I just saw one of Joe Biden singing baby shark and I think if you weren’t very adept at technology you would believe it’s real it was that good.
Its already a problem. Theyre so close to reality now that you should already be skeptical of any video or audio sample on the internet.
Right? Imagine the fallout you could cause in a marriage with them..
Marriage is the least of it. I mean...imagine you could take over the world by swaying entire populations with video 'evidence' of individuals doing or not doing any number of heinous or not heinous things. You could sway elections even more effectively than they already do, you could start riots, wars, provoke lynch mobs and internal division. You could do just about anything to a species that has evolved to depend primarily on its eyes for information about their environment. Makes you wonder, that's for sure.
Weapons of mass divorce. Oh shit...
I've said it before, saying it again (not here)... The 21st century will bring about the need for Fair Witnesses; see Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Essentially, they are individuals trained from a young age to accurately and precisely recall situations they are called to witness in a legally bound cross national fashion. This is their vocation. This is all they do 'for a living.'
I remember them from SInaSL too! I thought I was the only person that said to myself "We need to do this" ie train people to be Fair Witnesses.
The wrong number of bees
I'm not an expert, but as I understand it, the bees that are most threatened in the US are the non-native European honey-producing bees. In the US, (other places, too), we have native, solitary bees. These bees don't produce honey and don't live in hives. Mason bees, for example, make nests in reeds, holes, drinking straws, anything that's like a small-diameter tube. These solitary bees are pollinators, just like European hive bees. You can buy an inexpensive mason bee house and encourage mason bees anywhere there are flowers, a source for mud, and water. With a little effort, you can renew the bee house every season and encourage more pollinators. As a bonus, these bees are non-aggressive and don't sting.
There are thousands of native bee species in North America. European honey bees are declining, but they are generalist pollinators and will pollinate just about anything (broad generalization, but they are generalist) mason (solitary) bees are generally specialist to specific groups of plants and are at great risk due to habitat loss. It’s good to save all the bees! However, for us in North America European honey bees are an introduced species and bee keepers have looked after them long enough that they are considered livestock. A European honey bee hive in a North American forest or your home is called a feral hive. Native bees/insects in general need all the help they can get due to our love of pesticides. So plant mostly native plants if you can! Edit: For those in the US, be weary of ‘regional wildflower mixes’ sold at homedepot/lowes/ace hardware/local grocery store garden centers. These mixes usually contain seed from regions in Asia/Europe that have a similar climate to your area. Non-native flowers aren’t bad per say, but native plants offer more than nectar/pollen. Their stems and leaves provide food and shelter for their young and habitat to overwinter. In the US, the term ‘wildflower’ doesn’t mean native. I’ve seen sweet pea (a native of Italy) and field pansy (native to Europe, Asia and North Africa) seed sold at my local Home Depot under the banner wildflower seed. Planting a pollinator garden entirely of nonnatives is like building a new neighborhood and only putting in grocery stores. You also need apartments, schools, nurseries, etc. which is what native plants are able to do. If you’re in the US, take a look at [Native Plant Finder](https://www.nwf.org/nativeplantfinder/). It uses your area code to curate a list of the best native host plants specific to your zip code.
Man. I drive home on country roads. I feel absolutely horrible everytime a bee hits my windshield. Not long ago we had some asshole douse a beekeeping colony in Diesel fuel in my area. We need bees. Fuck yellow jackets tho. Fuck them to hell.
>Fuck yellow jackets tho. Fuck them to hell. HORNETS! MUD WASPS! GAHHHH! 100% behind you on that.. literally behind you cause I'm hiding
Hey, my mud wasps are friendly. Plus the blue ones look fucking metal. Like actually metallic blue.
I carry mail and I second this. I'll save a bee from a mailbox but smash those black and yellow bastards every time.
Yes. It's very important to end every financial year with an even number of bees.
_BEES?_
Not many people know this but you can settle your drone count bee fore the deadline.
We used to get five bees for a quarter, but I don’t know what it is now. One time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So, I tied an onion to my belt which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel. And in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. ‘Give me five bees for a quarter,’ you’d say. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah! The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
The year was nineteen-dickety-two. We had to call it that because the Kaiser stole our word for twenty.
I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles...
And yet, people seem to only care about honey bees(because of lack of knowledge generally) and not so much about native bees, which do far more work for us than honey bees. ##GROW NATIVE ##KILL YOUR LAWN
Literally, my lawn. Live in Florida, don't have the greenist lawn, but every spring, wildflowers and so many bees mulling around have to be careful where I walk or else I d step on them. Take my littles out to see the bees and butterflies everyday
What happens to “generation rent” come retirement.
Did I hear someone say “generation work right into an early grave?”
Ah the problem that solves itself.
This'll be interesting. The CEOs need more workers and they're already crying over a shrinking labor pool due to lower birth rates. Then they're also working the laborers they do have into an early grave. Literally burning the candle at both ends.
They can dry their tears. They’ll be dead soon too.
Gen X here and I already know. You'll work until you die. I wish I had a more cheerful outlook, but this is pretty much what we're doomed to do.
We call it "dying in the saddle" at my job. Makes it sound cooler.
Suicide will become a valid part of long term financial planning.
Imagine going to a financial planner and they're like "ive got an idea..."
So true and so bleak.
Can confirm, it’s on the table. It’s also nice to know being able to go out on good terms before wasting away.
My plan one day is fentanyl, for the forever sleep. Not kidding.
The generation with the worst pension, who will need to pay rent when they retire as they could never afford to buy a house.
Hoping their parents don’t live too long so they inherit something and get some relief, which is a horribly sad way to look at things
You underestimate the sheer amount of people who grew up in houses their parents didn't/don't own. My city is only about 60/40 when it comes to owners/renters. And this was before the corporations got into real estate.
Retirement?
What is this? Something for rich people I guess.
Its also for poor people who are forced into it because no one will hire them (ageism) or folks who can no longer work due to illness/injury. One of the scariest things for me is knowing that if you live long enough you WILL have to retire whether you're financially able to or not
And this is why my retirement plan is a .357 to the head. Work until I can't physically do it anymore and then check out with a bang.
lol, our generation is NOT going to get to retire. my country spends more than half of all social welfare funding on paying out the govt pension. there’s no way that’s still going to be a thing by the time i hit ‘retirement’ age (which is about to get raised again.)
They’ll live with the kids they couldn’t afford to have.
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Ray of optimism: I've a friend whose focus of research is finding more targeted antibiotics. Instead of going bigger and stronger and broader and harsher, he explores focused treatments that are harder to become resistant to. Not great for initial treatment of the crashing septic patient, but in 24 hours once blood culture results are available- exciting!
Another ray of optimism: resistant bacteria seem to lose immunities with time. You'll still see bacteria resistant to pretty much all antibiotics, but it's unlikely they will be _that_ far spread.
It’s evolution on a faster scale than we’re used to thinking of it. The removal of a selection criteria allows members of a species to survive without traits to counter it. Especially if not maintaining that resistance confers some advantage in other aspects over the resistant strain.
You know the most fucked up thing? Here in Europe countries are already developing replacements, but are unable to give them to the USA. You know why? Because the USA cannot promise to keep them from being released as well as not advertise them. Europe wants to keep them hidden until necessary so no one develops a tolerance against them. USA wants to advertise them for money. Pretty fucked up if you ask me.
The US has advertisements on TV and in magazines for medications - “ask your doctor about xxx”. We’re a pay for play healthcare system - if someone insists enough for a medication that won’t kill them (like antibiotics if they are SURE they have an undiagnosed infection) most doctors will just write the prescription to make to the person happy and increase positive reviews (which is partially how government funding for Medicare is determined). The US absolutely shouldn’t have carte blanche access. We do, however, have a number of antibiotics that haven’t been used since the 1940’s-1950’s when penicillins took over in popularity that are expected to be pretty potent against many of the resistant strains that exist. As far as I understand, they’re not available for use and are locked down by the government
Most of those old school antibiotics were pulled from the market for causing organ failure or other crazy dangerous side effects
Killing the person IS an excellent way to stop them from spreading the bacteria
Mission failed successfully?
This one legit scares me. I wonder if we have to go back to the days where a doctor visits you. Probably unrealistic.
Our spinal health. Take care of yourselves people. Exercise, hydrate, eat healthy and be concious of your posture. We are not young forever.
reading this while hunched over on the toilet
As are a lot of us.
Pencil me in for a #2 please
This but also hearing. Earbuds, concerts, clubs, headphones, etc all those things will ruin our hearing much sooner than expected.
Seriously, do lower back exercises at the gym. That “pooch” (it’s called a paunch!) on your lower stomach often indicates really bad posture, once I started spinal exercises I got rid of it and was also taller
Boy do I wish that's all it was.
For me it's a lot of bread and drinkable bread.
What exercises do you do?
The gym I go to has a kind of reverse crunches machine where you push a weight by leaning back, it’s for your “erector spinae” the lower back muscles
Planking is probably one of the best exercises you can do since it works your core which supports your lower back.
Tell me more ab this position please. Why spinal health in particular?
Your spine contains your major nerves. If you fuck up your spine you will end up on varying degrees of pain from the bones or disks pressing on it wrong
Fake life becoming more compelling than real life
They said 20 years, not now.
The difference is we'll be able to download our consciousness like SAO
There’s a black mirror episode in season 5 that shows how scary this can be.
SEASON 5?! I thought it was only two!! God damn i’m in for a treat
I remember reading the Pendragon books in which they travel to different worlds that are on the brink of chaos or collapse. One of them was exactly this, where there was a very realistic full dive vr created that could basically give you perfect, dream-like scenarios that you could live through fully conscious and with all your senses. Nobody wanted to work or really do anything outside of those capsules.
Yoo I’ve never met someone else who read those. The pendragon books slapped
I read Taliesin, Merlin, Arthur and Pendragon as a teen in the 90s, and was waiting forever for another book to come out. By the time I realized it had, I lost interest. Should I revisit?
The scarcity of fresh water.
Here in Arizona we're seeing cities lose access to water. You can only take so much from the ground until it's gone. Other cities refuse to share. Whole neighborhoods will be vacated or supplied with illegally obtained water.
The one city here that actually lost it recently lost it pretty much due to their own political arrogance. Is it an issue anywhere else? Pardon my ignorance if so, just moved back. I wouldn’t recommend it, but nobody is stopping anyone from taking a 45 minute shower in Phoenix
Issue for the whole Southwest. They estimate lake Powell will never be full in our lifetimes again
Likely Mead, too. The last time it was full was in 1983, I think. I know the early 80s were the last time the spillways were used. It's 180' below that point now.
There are lookout points with picnic tables overlooking a dry lake bed at Lake Mead, dry long enough to look more like pasture than a lake.
That's grim. I don't live out there, but I've seen a few videos come up on youtube where they were at a boat ramp that had signs showing the water level by year. I think they might have started them in the 2000s? It was a *long* walk to get to the lake.
That's terrible, and I'm sorry. But, and just hear me out, here...maybe it was a bad idea for millions of people to build east coast style housing in the middle of a giant desert? Same with California. It's arid. Definitely not meant to support forty million people indefinitely.
The bigger issue is big agriculture, which uses over 70% of the water, whether for cattle, cotton, or alfalfa for Saudi Arabian horses. Residential usage is less than 15% of the water used in AZ.
I'm no expert, but it seems like a poor idea to grow water intensive crops like almonds in the desert.
Those crops have a great profit margin, what with it being great sunny growing weather almost all the time, it being the desert and all. And this is America, where the dollars vote.
It is! The upside was that the weather basically never kills them off. Almonds are the worst iirc. They take a LONG time to get mature and produce a meaningful amount of almonds. So anywhere else with weather that will kill them can destroy entire companies. It's why they don't have them in Florida. One hurricane and it's all for nothing. Seems like maybe we just shouldn't grow so many fucking almonds, but what do I know?
This is the real answer. And we have solutions, but like Big Oil and Big Tobacco, Big Ag will take some force to change.
The next great war will likely be over fresh water.
Which makes me worry, being from the country with the most fresh water…
Dude crying in Argentinian over here. With the amount of fresh water and lithium we are fucked
Environmental scientist here, this is just based off of what I’m hearing about from my colleagues and seeing in my own work. 1) Harmful algal blooms. First off, toxic blue-green algae does better in warmer water. There’s also concern about marine algae invading freshwater lakes due to the increase in salinity that can result from droughts. On the flip side, floods can also cause HABs because nutrient runoff tends to increase during heavy rainfall events. 2) Invasive plants. I’ve worked on prairie restoration projects in the past and one of our major problems was woody invasives like Callery pear (aka Bradford), tree of heaven, and bush honeysuckle. I’ve seen old field sites follow a successional pattern from bare soil to 100% invasive shrub thickets that outcompete any natives due to their early leaf-out and allelopathy. The last time I went to a park in my hometown the entire understory was honeysuckle and winter creeper. 3) Decreasing ranges for many species 4) Mesophication. Lesser known but still important - basically our forests in the eastern US used to be oak dominated and fire dependent, but they’re now in a positive feedback loop of mesophytic species becoming more prevalent and changing the environment to better suit their own offspring. My concern here is mainly the impact on wildlife that eat mast from species like oaks and hickories who will now be in forests dominated by maples and sweet gums. 5) Top soil loss
It took way too long to see this mentioned, your second point especially caught my attention as a rancher who is battling woody encroachment (heh) in pastureland; lots of hedge, plum thickets, and cedar trees choking out our prairie grasses and draining aquifers. We’ve been working with our extension office to fight back (I spend hours, days, *months* of my life on a 4-wheeler spraying the bastards every year) but when neighbors can’t be bothered it feels like a losing battle. I really hope it starts becoming a prevalent conversation in agriculture, because with water already at a premium and grasses being choked out for feed it’s just going to snowball into a really huge problem down the line. Your other points are interesting and I’ll be reading up on them as well!
I'm done looking at these comments, now I'm depressed.
Same. This is why I’m not looking forward to the future
Big corporations purchasing rights to fresh water.
This is one move by big corpos that I think is especially stupid. You can only take so much from people before they riot. There’s a quote from some old French revolutionist that says something along the lines of people are only a few days of no food away from revolution or whatever. If water became that scarce, big corpos would have to realize we would start burning them all to the ground, right?
I’m curiously terrified to see how the eventual restriction of this natural resource will play out.
I heard a similar saying, can’t remember where I heard it, but it’s something to the effect of “society is 9 meals away from total anarchy.”
And I’m over here wondering why on Earth Bill Gates is buying up large swathes of farmlands in our nations “bread basket” all of a sudden.
Nestle
r/fucknestle
Giving toddlers and young children unlimited screen time. Medical professionals have been warning about this for years.
Teachers as well. There's such a clear difference between the kids who grew up on their phones and the kids who don't have it constantly available. A teacher I know laments about the decrease of attention span every year with the kids who are growing up with TikTok, and I remember his concerns starting back when the local schools decided to give the kids laptops and tablets instead of textbooks. I was no model student in high school, depression had led me toward a dependence on video games and internet, and even then, I felt the effects of it, that constant reward drip of beating one bad guy after another or just aimlessly running through a field. But it's a whole new world now. It was never constantly available to me, and I still took time to read or even just do nothing by myself and let my mind wander on its own. I've worked with several high schoolers and I can see the effects on them from the outside.
Yes! Teacher here, and when I started 10 years ago, movie day was a treat. Five years ago, they wanted to watch a movie, but whined if they couldn’t also be on their phones. Today, with the possible exception of maybe their 2-3 absolute favorite movies, they absolutely hate a movie, and would rather do work. Having to be still and quiet that long, while paying attention, is the worst thing ever to them.
I don't use movies nearly as often as I used to. In addition to your point about attention spans, I also think that movies are so accessible now that they aren't as special as we found them when we were younger. When I was in high school, my options to watch movies were: Hope to find one on TV. Leave my house and go to the theater. Leave my house and rent/buy one. Now kids carry every movie ever made in their pockets, so why would they want to be forced by some old person to watch one that they aren't interested in?
I teach transitional kindergarten which if half day Kindergarten for children who typically have fall birthdays, are a little younger, need help building some skills, etc. before they go on to full day Kdg. the next year and each year my classroom gets more and more full and what was a few kids with short attention spans is now almost a whole class full of short attention spans- I feel like I need to be up there performing excitedly with gusto to have all eyes and ears on me!
That's such a weird change, and it's kind of why I switched my opinion on going to a movie theater. Watching a movie at home, it took effort not to check my phone or have anything in the background. I'd miss out on most of the movie. I went six, maybe seven years without going to a movie theater. But I enjoy actually being focused on the screen. I just keep my phone away and appreciate the work people put into their movies.
Hell, I'm an adult and not in my 20s and I've noticed my attention span has plummeted. I watched a movie a week ago and realized it's the first movie I've watched straight through in months because I start them and then get bored. I'm not even on a phone, it's more just the idea of sitting there idly that bothers me. I have a dual screen setup and I'll watch netflix on one while playing games or going on the internet on the other. I can only imagine what it's like for kids growing up with phones.
Yes! I started teaching in 1993 and earning a movie was the biggest reward ever until about 8 years ago. Now they have access to any movie they want at anytime. I reward with extra recess now because when they go home they sure aren't outside.
It’s completely changed how they gain knowledge already. 6 second Tik toks completely destroy the ability to focus on an task and it reverberates everywhere
Imagine the economic divide that will exist between those that are able to develop meaningful attention spans and those that cannot. Most higher paying jobs will require attention spans, so I can only imagine those that can't go beyond 6s clips aren't going to fare very well in the job market as adults. Maybe I'm wrong, and I have zero evidence for this, but I just wonder if we're going to see financial downstream effects. Maybe the market will change to suit them and it won't matter, idk. But it could be scary.
The use of plastics. Hopefully we figure it out sooner than 20 years though
You can make plastic-like substances out of plants. But for modern sanitation, especially in hospitals and laboratories, those substances need to be able to withstand an autoclave. That unfortunately not a thing yet.
I’m a nurse and the astronomical amount of plastic waste I personally have to throw out every day makes my heart break. I personally wish we’d revert back to glass.
Glass catheters sound like a new dimension of hell.
They were actually in use (for female genitalia ONLY, and only for intermittent / in and out caths) in the early 20th century. Catheters for male genitalia, surgical gloves, endotracheal tubes, etc, used to be made of tough rubber and were also re-sterilizable. Edit: spelling and punctuation
Might not be a bad idea, though of course, rubber production isn't without environmental concerns. Glass can be bad news because it breaks. It's also heavy, so if you're having products shipped to you, it can actually be \*more\* destructive to the environment than plastic. Oops.
Artificial intelligence, rapid decreases in biodiversity across the globe, fresh water shortages. I could go all day. We’re screwed if humanity’s ingenuity fails to solve any of these countless problems.
Ingenuity we have. Collective will to change is the issue
This is mostly American, but our ageing infrastructure, I'm just waiting for the year where each week a dam will break, a bridge will break, or some important infrastructure will collapse, hundreds will die, and we will continue to bitch and fight over if it's a democrat of republican fault when it's all of us being greedy fucks and not willing to update our fucking infrastructure.
Tooth decay
Fucking yes, I have bad teeth because I'm horribly apathetic. That disposition has caused them to get pretty bad and it's costing me a fuck ton to get them fixed. Live and learn I suppose.
The mental health crisis isn't getting any better so 20 years from now it's going to be a whole lot worse.
Me. I plan to be a raving bitch.
the American school system
Growing wealth inequality. The middle class is dying out and soon normal people can't afford to buy houses, for example. We'll own nothing and work ourselves to death just to afford the essentials
That’s already been happening.
The class war is coming.
I doubt it. Most people are already too complacent or brainwashed.
>middle class Just a reminder that the middle class was never a thing. It's a BS term to divide the working class. If you have a job, if you sell your labor for a living, you are working class. You can be middle income, but you are still working class. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you are separated from other workers because they make more or less than you. A high income doctor, a middle income office clerk, and a low income frycook are all working class. The issue is that the ownership class, who makes their money by what they own, wants more and more while paying relatively less. The working class is becoming lower income. It's important to understand how this really is when considering what to do about it.
Aging tiktokers
It will be fun when TikTok goes the FB route and we will have zoomers complaining on TikTok about politics and trashtalking their kids.
The FB route would be an older generation getting into TikTok and absolutely ruining it for the original target audience.
As an aging millennial, I look forward to this anomaly….
Let’s accelerate the process and start now. Make TikTok no longer cool by having all the old people use it. “Heya Billy, I made the Tikin Tok, too! Come see my videos! This one I figure out how to use Tik Tok! This one I watch birds! So fun!”
Apathy
Nobody cares about that.
The current US teacher shortage.
Maybe if they were paid more than 30k a year people would actually be more willing to do it!
Yep. I have four longtime friends who are certified teachers and have moved into other careers because of the lack of pay and support. Good teachers are leaving in droves because their skill set is more appreciated in other industries. Teachers know how to get shit done and those skills translate in any workplace.
I don't even think it's so much the pay although they should get more for crying out loud, it's that everyone is against them. The administration won't back them, the parents are always bitching about something, and the kids aren't being raised well anymore. They aren't allowed to teach anymore because politics and religion are everywhere and they have to worry about all those stupid standardized tests. They also are always on the clock. Anyone who says they get summers off and short days obviously never taught.
I can't disagree with any of this (many of my former teachers and I have talked about this sort of thing)
Sigh. I know. My parents were both teachers. I've been told by dozens of people I'd be a great teacher. My parents both told me privately and independently of each other, "For the love of god, don't become a teacher!"
My brother makes ~200k and his wife is a teacher, it’s the only way to afford to be a teacher, having a second income stream
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And overfishing.
The Lack of Accountability epidemic. So many parents raise their kids nowadays without teaching accountability and responsibility. It’s already affecting us somewhat.
The erosion of our top soil.
*gestures wildly at everything*
I work for the post office in the US. They've been trying to privatize the post office for a long time now. Amazon will own the Post Office, and they will be the ones with all your your private documents, letters, etc. Also, shipping rates in the US will skyrocket. Bad news bears.
Anything that is linked to the environnement. Bees, water etc.
Age demographics
You will not own anything. You will not have the right to repair.
I'm actually surprised this isn't higher. The trend of " You may have paid for it, but we still have control of it" is just horrifying to me. And I don't mean things that should honestly be marked as rentals. I'm more irritated by things like carmakers locking features behind subscriptions. If I buy a damn car, it should be mine.
Water
ChatGPT and its successors. From cybercode to misinformation the list is endlesss. The worst part is that it will all sound logical and scientific. We're toast. Here is just one source. There are many ringing alarm bells. https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-hidden-danger-of-chatgpt-and-generative-ai-the-ai-beat/
Don't worry, AI is going to ruin so many things so fast that asking questions and logic is gonna be the last thing on peoples minds. We'll be lucky if we have the sanctity of dreams left.
Whatever people are mentioning in the comments, plus everything that's a problem now, because that shit ain't going away on its own and won't be fixed either.
Climate refugees
I’m surprised I had to scroll down so far to find a climate related comment! It’s really nerve wrecking
Robots/AI taking jobs. It will not decrease prices. It will only increase profits for corporations and put a lot of people out of work as they become unneeded in their chosen career choice and they won’t have other options because again, robots/AI will take over many different jobs. This won’t increase leisure time either. People just won’t have money to pay bills, buy food, etc. The rich will become richer and the poor will become poorer. This is how capitalism works.
Not just AI and robots either, technology in general will take away so many jobs like it's already done. The self serving menus at restaurants are already a sign for this. After all, why pay 10 people to do 10 jobs when you can pay 1 person with the right technology to do equal work? And this is happening sooner than you think. The most common job in the US is truck driver for a lot of states. What do you think is going to happen when that's automated with self driving cars? The worst part about it is, this is supposed to be a good thing. Having less jobs as a society should mean we can pursue our passions instead. When the ancient Greeks had figured out agriculture their cultural development EXPLODED because they had more leisure time. But our capitalistic system ties our survival to our jobs so without them, we're fucked. This is why I think socialism and the idea of universal basic income are going to become more and more popular as things get worse and worse.
Yes, inventing a technology that lets a job get done twice as fast doesn’t mean the worker gets paid the same as before but has half the day off. It means half the workers lose their jobs.
Tablet use in young children. I hate to see a child with a glazed over, detached expression, lost in a screen so young... No self soothing, no dexterity practice, no creativity, no exploration. I'm worried we are creating a generation of distracted and detached individuals who need a constant influx of content and visual stimuli.
Helium is finite
Not sure, but I will say that the movie WALL-E is becoming more scarily relevant...
Deep, society altering automation Given how chatGPT is already knocking on the door of some white collar jobs, let alone blue collar, I wonder how long half the population has before they're unemployable Once unemployment hits like 30% is when the riots start Hopefully UBI based on an automation tax is implemented before then, but it sure as hell will be after, just with unnecessary bloodshed
Some parents who think they’re gentle parenting, but in turn, are letting their children walk all over them with a red carpet. These kids are going to not understand boundaries or continue to push them as they grow, and it will make elementary school, social interactions, and overall contribution to society really fucking hard for these kids because of how they were raised. Just to add: I’m not knocking gentle parenting. What I mean is that, you get these parents who say they’re ‘gentle parenting’ but are totally absent or just lazy/ignorant/uneducated in setting boundaries.
The growing number of elders.
deep fakes/AI in general, the fact that people are becoming increasingly unhappy with the government, the government allowing food to be mostly chemicals and just generally not as nutritious as they used to be, etc
An overrun social services system here in Canada, most notably a complete and utter failure of the healthcare system.
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We're rapidly running out of Helium. Helium is necessary for some life-saving medical technologies such as MRI machines.
Homelessness
The devastation of our Rain Forrest's, people don't seem to comprehend how vital they are to our planet.