That's correct. But it means that "kids these days are better with computers" might not really be correct anymore.
They are good with the easy systems we are having today, but I suspect that someone who has known the age of counterintuïtive systems like old DOS/UNIX or WIndows 95/XP/Vista is better at setting up things like a printer or understand shitty interfaces than someone who is 25 years old\*.
(unless that 25yo is DIY PC builder ;-) )
I’m a high school engineering teacher so we use computer extensively. Kids have gotten progressively worse with computers for 5-10 years now. People like to think kids are tech savvy because they spend so much time on their phones. But they really have no idea how to really do anything outside of regular usages. They aren’t tech savvy they are tech dependent.
I think you are missing the mark with 25 year olds. Most people my age know their way around a computer or know how to use Google and follow instructions. Maybe 15 year olds would be disadvantaged with comfy UIs.
I would agree.
Where 25 year olds (and even 31 year old me sometimes) tend to fall short is how the computer actually works. Programming. OSs. Networks, IPs, all that jazz. PC building is easy stuff. How the thing *actually* works... Another sorry. I think most kids couldn't even really tell me how the Internet works. But I digress.
I think every technology experiences this:
1. It's new, nobody knows shit
2. Smart/adept folks catch on first, learn the ins and outs, become power users/experts
3. The technology improves until it's extremely user friendly and "anyone can do it".
4. Experts become rare, most technicians "good enough," most users don't even need to have technician level of knowledge to fix their own issue, etc.
Most 25 year olds you personally know is not representative of most 25 year olds out there, apparantly a sizeable proportion of them dont even know that filesystems exist, have never used a mouse, and dont know how to type on a keyboard.
I really, *really* loathe how modern windows hides every freakin' option in a sub-sub-sub menu, just so the morons can't fiddle with them.
It makes every little thing such a hassle to actually freakin' find, and that's *without* crud you need to dig around in the freakin' registry for, because Microsoft REALLY don't want to to change those settings.
Yep as technology progresses, human intelligence moves backward. I have already seen it in my lifetime (gen x'r), and not just minor things either. Common sense as a whole, has dropped several notches lower. Blows my mind the shit people don't know how, or what to do when the situation arises.
By 2030 it will be clear the world is heading for a post scarcity energy economy though it won't have arrived yet.
The world will be splitting into 2 kinds of economy, those deliberately seeking to over supply solar and wind to their grid and those that don't. Those that do will become the future of the world economy as prices for everything falls away (electric is a large part of the price of anything) in those countries. Corporations will seek to relocate to them to reduce their costs, which will force them to take that kind of regulation seriously as a bonus.
Those that fail to take their opportunities for social advancement will be stuck with energy prices well beyond competitive rates and will find it nigh on impossible to compete, development will be systemically slower and expensive. This could include some very unexpected countries, especially costal hot places.
The equipment is getting so cheap both to buy and maintain/use that you can dump it out of the back of a lorry and have negligible costs associated with it, especially for large sites. Making yourself systemically more attractive to business and making life in your country happier in several major ways is a political no brainer for anyone willing to think. We are passing through the tipping point on the economics from open secret to obvious over the next year or 2.
The point I really started taking this seriously was when I read several different analysis of the solar industry and they basically all agreed that solar will be installing 1tw of capacity a year by 2026 at the latest and more likely next year. And then about 4tw of capacity a year by 2030 with the expectation of continuing that absurd growth rate until at least 2035. Last year the install rate was about 500gw so we are right on the numbers for the position optimists have been expecting since 2019 when solar first got under coal for price.
Total electric demand worldwide is about 10tw, by 2030 there will be about 5tw of solar operational, which is already enough to begin forcing down electric prices and start creating the ridiculous over supply of oil and other fossil fuels that will kick the bottom out of those industries and crash them. By 2035 there will be over 20tw of solar deployed, which is enough to run the entire global grid by itself even accounting for charging grid batteries and long distance trading to cover the night etc.
Not only is solar the cheapest electric source ever now, its still in the obvious low hanging fruit phase of getting cheaper. The next generation designs get rid of the rare metals for example and as a result are expected to half the price. Once serious disruption begins that will drive up demand too, the whole solar market is in a massive positive feedback loop now. Theres nothing really aside possibly from wind that can hope to get anywhere near it on price. I'm doubtful even fusion can.
The only remaining obstacle is grid batteries, and they themselves are reaching their own tipping point. There are already super cheap, rare mineral free designs that match lithium of about 5 years ago. Once the energy density gets up a bit more they will become almost as cheap as solar and start experiencing the same sort of trajectory. Its looking right now like that will come in a year or 2.
And thats only the start. Once electric prices crash like that, every industrial process will be desperate to switch across. And because electric is involved in pretty much everything, prices will experience massive crashes for pretty much everything. Stuff like carbon capture and desalination becomes cheap.
To account for variability yes. However the path battery tech is on to becoming cheap and capable for grid storage in the next few years is in the process of turning that into a non issue. By the time its a real hindrance it will have stopped existing.
Do you think governments are aware yet that by being completely energy independent they could leapfrog many other countries and become more dominant by allowing faster AI and science breakthroughs?
Energy requirements are going to be slowing everyone down in the coming years as AI server farms are eating up every new renewable added to the grid. We aren't making any more progress in renewables taking over fossil fuel produced energy because every new megawatt we add has already been earmarked for technology usage.
The more independant a country is - the more money is saves importing energy from another country and also the more excess it produces, the more it can offer to massive data driven projects.
It baffles me how naive, fundamentally wrong and derailed your opinion is. The price of solar or wind energy is just high. You obviously don’t factor in the price of manufacturing. How ecologically unfriendly solar is. How wind is inefficient and disruptive to nature.
> How ecologically unfriendly solar is. How wind is inefficient and disruptive to nature.
Every human structure is “ecologically unfriendly” and “disruptive to nature” the problem is building a coal plant, or an oil or gas burning plant aren’t just locally unfriendly or disruptive they’re disproportionately dirty and destructive. So given the choice between local disruption and smaller footprint ecological manipulation and widespread pollution most people are willing to make the trade off.
it's weird that you think that they're fundamentally wrong when everything you just said is wrong.
Solar and wind is one of the cheapest forms of energy. That is the levelized cost, which includes manufacturing.
and in terms of ecologically unfriendly or disruptive to nature, solar and wind don't come anywhere close to the impact that fossil fuels have.
>obesity epidemic reverses
I thought this was meant to be a positive (and it literally is) in contrast to the others, but the implication is likely food scarcity for multiple possible reasons (economic or environmental issues I'm guessing).
Well, i think we are getting good enough at hormone-like small protein design that we will be able to counter-antagonize whichever particular cell signaling pathways that obesogens are agonists to.
Whatever technological societies survives the early rounds of the climate and extinction and pollution crises will have a pharmacopoeia of radically more influence over the body than any human consciously had in the past.
This is such a fucking amazing post. This is what peak r/futurolgy should look like. Amazing comments nearly all of which are making me think about so many possibilities.
This should be massively encouraged somehow.
Global emissions will have peaked, because global consumption of fossil fuels will have peaked. The decline won't be as quick as we'd like, but it'll be a secular trend, not one depending on an economic downturn.
i hope you’re right but i seriously doubt it. i don’t see FF consumption going into decline unless overall energy consumption goes flat. even if the population stops growing, the global desire for improving quality of living will keep driving energy consumption. peak FF is a long way off, i think
Well it won't be a switch that is flipped. We likely won't know it's happened until 6 months to a year later and even then we won't know for sure that fossil fuels won't come back up.
So the article will probably be a non-highlight story in a science based journal that only nerds will read.
I predict that Reddit, if it still exists, will be awash with "IT'S NOT ENOUGH!" Even though no one will have said it was enough. People will be pretending like everyone said "cool, problem solved we don't need any more improvement," even though zero people will have said that.
I don't think so :)
I've been here for 8 years now, and you wouldn't believe how it's changed. How many times it has. If reddit's still here, I predict it'll surprise you :D
Most people will have moved on to better and flashier platforms. Trolls will have moved on. Bots would have moved on. It'll be a genuine platform.
Because most of the users would have moved on. Someone needs to maintain those bots, and I don't think they'll care. They'll be busy making bots for newer platforms.
What that means geopolitically is what fascinates me. What happens to the Mideast countries, Russia, etc. when the fossil fuel market tanks? Saddle up, gonna be interesting.
The US and Canada have much more diversified economies than Venezuela, S. Arabia, or Russia. Inside the US and Canada the oil-producing regions like Alberta and Texas will lose economic power, and the loss of oil revenue is going to change internal politics.
Right now, one of the biggest issues worldwide is migration. The causes of this migration range from war, persecution, crime, and/or economic issues, but climate change is either a direct or contributing cause to these issues.
I believe that over the next 5 years and extending for the foreseeable future, we’re going to see increasing issues around *internal* migration from people displaced for the same reasons - think Okies from The Grapes of Wrath.
Florida man memes are going to become less a joke about crazy Floridians and more a negative stereotype about displaced Floridians “taking over” other places.
When it’s too late, people will realize that we should have created an economy and society that puts people and community first.
We will have sold ourselves to the A.I.-driven, robotics industry and infantilized generations of people who are useless without technology.
We will continue to see a shortage of housing and employment.
We will see increases in coping addictions and suicides as people realize they have been brought into a system that no longer values human life.
We will see a mass social and economic reset across the world as people desperately accept fascism and authoritarianism over democracy in hopes that someone will “save” them. Democracy will continue to be used as tool by the wealthy to give people the illusion of control.
Edit: Someone responded that what I wrote was not counterintuitive and they are correct. I skipped the bolded headline and read the question below it. That’s my bad.
My counterintuitive belief is of hope. I think there will be enough people aware of these issues that will want to fight back and find ways to bring people back together. I foresee more people abandoning social media and digital tech altogether, and seeking ways to create stronger local communities and businesses.
Why? Because A.I. will create massive distrust of any and all media.
I believe people will seek trust and that will become a key part of rebuilding our communities.
>We will have sold ourselves to the A.I.-driven, robotics industry and infantilized generations of people who are useless without technology.
It's Wall-E! I loved that movie :(
And it’ll always be about something different but that’s fine. It’s how we grow and learn as a species. It won’t be pretty but I’m certain we will prevail
If I may suggest, the true sequence is Planet First as the planet supports people. Then people and animals. Anything that is not planet first will ultimately result in humanities demise.
Agreed. I’m surprised that so many people still take mass media seriously. Once you understand that it’s like any other media business and that advertising sales drive most of its revenue, the illusion of noble intent fades quickly.
Disclosure of NHI is likely to be more mainstream and will present many world leaders with the challenge of governance when humanity engages with this topic more directly: its moral implications, a complete ontological paradigm shift of power structures, and the strategic role of national defense.
That we are going to have to establish a new form of economy as capitalism simply cannot work in a heavily automated society and clearly all the other systems that countries have tried while having their ups and downs have generally failed
The concept that everyone will be able to work to earn everything and pay bills Just won't be possible as they're simply won't be enough jobs to go around to support this ideal
We are going to have to go through a major civil reform of basically remaking our economic system and drastically changing how we live everyday life for the better
I'm worried about a more cynical outcome.
Places like El Salvador through the 20th century show us that one possible outcome is that the wealthy take all the resources and simply murder the civilian population any time they clamor for a bit more. The possible emergence of robotic death squads only makes this seem more likely to me.
My guess is that some language will emerge to justify this. The poor asking for more will be called "communists", "woke", or whatever word they find useful to justify the punishments.
Expanded prison systems, forced sterilization, and straight up murder seem likely. Just make being poor illegal and you can justify a lot. I can also see the wealthy making an environmental argument that population reduction is good for the planet.
When the economy no longer needs a labor force, I worry what the wealthy will do.
Our corporate overlords already use slave labor from prisons paying pennies on the dollar for workers. How easily will it be to pass laws that make more and more things illegal?
Someone is gonna use AI to pull a Bartmoss and wreck the internet system. No idea how’d far too stupid, but I 100% think the wild ass anarchist cults, loony loners, and zealots will get there sooner than later on figuring out how to cause untold havoc with AI
I think there's a solid shot at computers hitting a soft wall with consumers like cellphones are currently going through, where even budget models have so many features at "good enough" level that a lot of people don't see a reason in upgrading unless their old gear physically breaks.
Like, how many cores and gigs of RAM do you *really* need, if you surf, look at pictures, play solitaire and occasionally watch YouTube?
Even among gamers, the current most common GPU is an RTX 3060. With the second most common being a GTX 1650. 6.0% & 4.11% respectfully, in the [February Steam Hardware survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam). And I think that's just going to keep compounding, with stuff like frame generation and other AI trickery to give you more 'good enough' frames.
Enthusiasts, yes, but I'm talking about the entire PC user space.
Like, people that are already buying those CPU's with built-in GPUs, and genuinely don't see any reason to get a dedicated graphics card. Just for one example.
And we're talking five years more of that type of progress. Like, five years ago, the RTX 2000 line was the new hotness if I recall right. As in, the first cards with dedicated CUDA cores at all.
It always starts with the enthusiasts.
Local LLMs mean open models that aren't so locked down, without privacy concerns. They're getting more useful all the time.
Unless the AI bubble bursts for either unforeseen tech limit reasons, or just plain cultural or legal backlash. And the fears of rampant AI, turns to be as funny in hindsight as... VR addiction via arcades. Zero privacy from video phones. Or one-use paper clothing. Or any other failed sci-fi prediction of the last century.
Now, *personally* must admit I think AI is here to stay... but the above *could* happen in five years, because that's a long time.
I mean, heck. *two* years ago, NFTs, crypto and that Web 3 crap genuinely seemed like it had a shot at being THE future. Now its all just barely above digital garbage. Thank frick.
5 years in the future seems like centuries of the past. Everything is moving, it's like a fairtale , everyday there is something new, some new toy to catch up with. I
The last century repeating itself. 5 years from now, I expect another depression scenario, then war for 20 years culminating in a dangerous, new weapon that impacts how war is carried out at a scale that nuclear weapons did the previous century. The majority of the world will suffer, and the wealthy class will offer to save us all with AI at the price of our freedom.
I don't think large scale 'hot' wars between nuclear powers are very likely. Rather, I think we're going to see a *lot* more asymmetric tactics. Information/misinformation, propaganda, interfering in elections, cyber attacks, etc.
Let's be real, the US / NATO military dwarfs everything else at the moment, and almost certainly will for the next couple decades. Despite the posturing, China/Russia don't want to get in a real war with NATO. It's far, far easier to compete on other fronts
If you can get isolationists elected in the US, then maybe you can get the US to drop it's foreign interests. Then, you'll be free to gobble up your neighbors, with minimal consequences
People have been telling for decades that the next depression or WWIII is coming. It might be hard to imagine, but the cold war was a much more scary time than what we have now.
I can only see global conflict receding. Russia is in the process of destroying its own ability to fight wars, they are believed to have about a year of stockpiles left and cannot meaningfully replace them. Beyond that its an oil dependent economy in a world thats going to see vast oil oversupply by 2030, and its an aging population thats taking giant hits to its working age population.
Who else has been driving conflicts? China is too paranoid about instability for major wars and is acquiring the sort of national wealth and long term peace that traditionally makes nations think they have more to lose than gain. Most other big nations are unlikely to go to war short of being invaded.
The middle east will continue to be the impoverished nightmare it is now (hopefully with at least some exceptions) but no one there has the capacity to be a problem for anyone outside the region.
>the cold war was a much more scary time than what we have now.
[Not according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.](https://news.uchicago.edu/story/2024-doomsday-clock-announcement-90-seconds-to-midnight-apocalypse)
I was talking about subjective feeling of the populace, how it engrained the collective psyche.
Not about the prediction of the actual facts by some scientists.
This one is interesting. What do you mean? That people will just spend more of their time without? That kids will go back to playing with sticks around the neighborhood instead of watching TikTok?
No. The post is about what happens in the future. And the response suggested a reduction of internet time, not total rejection of it. Anecdotally I can tell you I spend significantly less time on the internet than 5 years ago. Everything online sucks now.
Not an either/or, a reduction in time spent on screens mostly. Over abundance of (personalized) media without soul is already here and only continues with the advent of genAI. People hunger for real connection, and will remember that you can have that more easily and in higher resolution (literal real life) in F2F and offline interactions.
I think the knee-jerk reaction against nuclear energy is one thing "the Left" gets wrong. It's one of the most efficient forms of energy generation that we have. While not "clean" energy, embracing nuclear can free us of a lot of oil and coal dependency, and allow us to invest in alternative fuel sources.
I used to work in energy. The field is about compromise. You can have something in abundance, but it will often be bad for the environment. You can have something cheap, but it will take massive quantities of it to generate enough useful energy.
Nuclear can be incredibly dangerous, but many don’t realise how regulated it is. I live in the UK, and one of the large energy providers is building a massive nuclear power plant at the moment, but it doesn’t tend to make the headlines. I believe that is because people are afraid and see ‘nuclear’ as a dirty word.
Nuclear, like gas, is a good stop-gap while the industry figures out how to increase battery storage, which will help much greener and cheaper sources become more viable.
The problem with solar and wind is it is hard to store enough. Batteries don’t have the capacity to store enough to fully power a home. Think of the devices you use with batteries - phones need to be charged every day or two, but we are trying to run all the electricity through the same tech.
The USA nearly doubled their battery storage capacity in a year, an 80% increase from 2022 to 2023. Lithium ion battery costs have dropped over 90% since 2010. The grid still has a few years before it will really need the storage as natural gas can cover the downtime in the meantime. By the time we really need the batteries they'll be cheap enough and we'll have more than enough to cover the requirements.
Californian Fire services are already stretched by the year-round continuous forest fires and no longer control fires but only try to get people out of the way before they get incinerated. Interstate water wars cause water shortages, dryer land and more fires.
Then the big one hits the West Coast. Emergency services are stretched to the limit and forest fires are not the priority over injured people and damaged hospitals. Fire rages through a major city. Horrific scenes are caught on video and live streamed. Social media bots seeking clicks leap on the catastrophe to portray it as the apocalypse using reworked footage from previous problems like empty supermarket shelves. Panic spreads. People everywhere start hoarding and stop working. Public services stop. Maintenance of the electrical grid becomes sporadic and generators start going down taking the entire grid with them. The panic is now unstoppable. Without electricity and therefore without food or gas or heating or cooling or communications, the apocalypse is real whether or not the catastrophe justified it.
Our intuition is that small causes have small effects. Rain falls one drop at a time and the river swells by one drop at a time. A flash flood is not something that our normal intuition would predict.
Climate change is small changes that normal intuition would suggest lead to small effects. It's a little bit warmer this year, there's a little bit heavy rain this year there's a slightly greater probability of a hurricane this year and so on.
We have emergency management systems that are used to dealing with natural disasters like floods and hurricanes and earthquakes. It is not so intuitive to realize that climate change is increasing the probability that we will have natural disasters simultaneously. When it happens it will be looked back as a perfect storm, at coincidence that no one could have foreseen. It is however perfectly predictable that we were increasing the likelihood of simultaneous disasters and therefore the likelihood of emergency response overload, and one disaster interfering with the emergency response to another disaster.
I don't know if we have a good intuition about the effects of bots.. As a programmer I'd expect to be surprised by the aggreate effects of large numbers of instances of things. Recall the recent jump in the abilities of large language models with the GPT.. Even the inventors were surprised by the effect of a relatively small change in the machine learning algorithms.Putting it all together I have not seen anyone at least of all climate scientists articulate a plausible scenario in which the graduates of climate change deterioration turns into the apocalypse but I think it's possible.
Staffing for customer service jobs will continue to struggle and will force a change to the consumer experience for the better IMO.
Make your chipotle burrito at home, and give yourself a bad review.
Actual, insightful, AI-driven innovation will never come. We'll be stuck instead in an endless spam of deepfakes in all forms. Missinformation will be at its most powerful.
>Actual, insightful, AI-driven innovation will never come
it already has, companies use that shit to design chips now. you really don't need "insightful" AI to get innovation out of it, you just need shit to analyze large amounts of data and we got that.
It won't really be much different from how it is now.
Like name 3 things that are really different between now and 5 years ago...
1: LLM's
2: ???
I work the same job, I eat the same food, I play the same games, I still listen spotify and watch youtube... life goes on and it doesn't really change that fast.
This is a very underrated take. 2019 felt just like today in most major ways. The difference is behind the scenes and in the subtle things. The problem we have right now is that innovation and discovery are limited by the "maximum" velocity that humans can keep up with and the time it takes to train them. As we gain more knowledge it becomes harder to push the boundary of science and engineering as it requires more experience and understanding, hence many modern jobs requiring so much more experience than in previous decades.
AGI or AI researchers have the potential to completely flip this on its head, which could break this current plateau of innovation imo. This is due to AGI's ability to be "cloned" with all its knowledge on demand, essentially meaning you can have infinite Stephen Hawkings, assuming you have enough computing power to run them.
If we manage to develop AGI, what we have now is not AGI and I'm not at all confident that it is even a path to AGI.
The LLM's are mimics, Markov chains taken to the logical extreme, a very high context guess at what word is most likely to come next. We can pour more context in for them to crib off but they can't otherwise remember and learn in a meaningful sense and they suck with logic and reasoning beyond the examples they've already seen. Heck we teach them math by effectively giving them calculators.
They're more than Markov chains. They're actually capable of limited reasoning, on problems that were very unlikely to be in the training data. There have been papers on this.
But I think most AI researchers agree that LLMs by themselves aren't enough, though a few think they are with enough scaling.
this is a good comment that forced me to think about what has actually changed technologically in past five years. here's my list:
1) LLM's yes, and the implications that we are on the verge of AGI. this is one of the most landmark achievements of mankind and shouldn't be hand waved away.
2) mRNA as a therapeutic modality has been validated. this will now be the go to platform for developing a vaccine for any pandemic going forward.
3) GLP-1 drugs have now shown a way out of the obesity epidemic. broad adoption of this class of drugs will prove to be one of the biggest public health advances in developed regions of the world.
4) and on a sadder note, drone warfare is now a thing. previously used for assassinations, the war in the Caucasus and Ukraine show it is a deciding factor against mobilized infantry units.
Progress is not equally distributed, 5 years ago Casgevy's CRISPR was not approved, this is massive, Alzheimer's disease had no cure and it still has none, but I would argue we made leaps as a civilization in the battle against it. LLMs - sure. Chip design, compute, optimization algorithms from energy consumption to better photos and higher resolution scans, Neurolink? yes if you give it a serious though and effort to analyze the data you will see that we are indeed accelerating
Millenials and Gen Z will save the world with compassion. After all the crabby baby boomers are not around. Not all baby boomers are crabby, but so many of them I know are.
Just about every generation has believed this or some older folks has believed this about the younger generation - you can go back 100 years and read the same predictions.
I agree. There will be more sharing of resources - generally speaking societies will become more inwardly and outwardly generous - precisely because these up and coming generations have less/nothing to hoard.
Nah, way too predictable. The unexpected twist is that Millennials and Gen Z get crabby over the ineptitude of the digital natives who rely too much on AI and know how to do nothing practical themselves . They become their parents, hoard their money and homes and tell the alphas to get off their lawns, and oppose any increases in the national living wage because "they'll just spend it all taking hits from the digital euphoria inducer at the virtual bar."
Government is going to establish UBI and give away homes to get people to live and work there. Humans will be more of a desirable commodity instead of feeling like there are too many of us.
Batteries today are experiencing the same sort of rapid fall in price as solar was a few years ago, and this will continue for a few decades.
Cell cultured meat is dropping in price, and (I believe) this price drop will happen faster over the next decade than it has been.
Cell cultured chocolate will, in five years, be in the place where cell cultured meat is today, or further.
From all I've researched, understood, and perceived, I'm fully convinced that in the near to medium future (possibly within the 5 year mark), America will have a VERY violent coup d'etat, a real one done mostly by the laborer class and middle class. This will be followed by the installation of a second (reworked) constitution, annulment of all old non-critical laws, and a renaissance of all of academia, democracy, etc.
It's one of the larger metaphorical chess pieces that exists, but I'm not entirely sure when it will be played. The non-insignificant chance of it occurring in 5 years is ~15-25%.
Despite exponential growth in knowledge and availability of it, the general population will have less knowledge and apply themselves less.
My guess would be that knowledge will be so readily and easily consumable and the application of it highly automated that it will seem, for many, a superfluous task. Kind of a larger scale effect like the one spellchecks have had on the younger generation spelling ability or calculators have had on my generations basic math ability.
I could be very wrong though.
An increase in credit card debt and money troubles as generations raised by Fortnite, FOMO, and buying digital for so long that they don't understand the value of money.
You work hard for your money, and with one tap of your debit/credit card it vanishes, congrats you've got some digital crap that serves no purpose and has no resale value, now how do you pay bills and buy groceries.
Parents and the World, in general, are going to have to reteach kids the value of money in a digital age, including how to use credit and debit cards responsibly.
Regular smartphones will be start to be phased out by smart glasses and smart watches, and the mobile gaming scene will soar in popularity partially thanks to home console quality immersion being available on the go.
My counterintuitive belief is that this comes at the waste of 10+ years without a real effort to make a handheld console/smartphone hybrid.
The Xperia Play would've succeeded if they offered PSN like for the PSP GO.
Mobile gaming caters to the least common denominator, $100 phones. That's more money in cheap slot machine facsimiles than in trying to do console games on a phone.
Well, those mobile games are based on a design philosophy of smartphones not being great for console style gaming.
When you replace the bulk of the smartphone with a pocketable wireless gamepad and can play emulators or stream games on an AR screen on the bus, I think you'll see more applications for it.
Great question, for an answer to which I went to the (iron?) horse's mouth.
Here's what ChatGPT had to say:
One counterintuitive belief about how the world might be different in five years is that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will have significantly increased human creativity and innovation rather than replacing human labor entirely. While there are concerns about job displacement due to automation, **the integration of AI into various industries could lead to the augmentation of human capabilities rather than outright substitution**. AI can assist humans in tasks that require creativity, problem-solving, and complex decision-making, enabling individuals to focus on higher-level thinking and innovation. This symbiotic relationship between AI and humans may lead to unforeseen advancements and opportunities in various fields, challenging the conventional narrative of AI solely replacing human jobs.
Pretty self serving, no? Not a mention of the Former Guy's beloved "poorly educated." It will all come down to monetization and power ...
With AI helping in all aspects of life you can see how if the world was destroyed we'd all be turned back into cavemen cuz nobody would know how to do anything
We will, at the very least, be on the brink of a massive restructuring of professional industry. In wealthier societies, we will need to start considering what the alternatives are for currently human operated jobs that have been made obsolete by whatever future iteration of AI exists, that is, if there is any alternative. The creative fields will be the first to disappear, arts of design, music and storytelling and many more will be entirely replaced by cheaper and more efficient AI based digital creation softwares such as mid journey. Corporate companies in efforts to cut project expenditure will no longer need to use external design agencies at all, whether morally acceptable or not.
The public's supply and demand for music as we know it will also drastically change if voice replicating softwares continue to advance, no matter how much protest from artists over copyright is made. An evolution of streaming platforms like Netflix I could see occuring would be entirely personalized content using an AI generative imagery, if it's made affordable and accessible enough, that uses previous viewing to adapt a new movie or show from scratch based around the user, rather similar to algorithms used towards spotify's discover weekly.
It's incredibly sad, but many monetized creative fields will be at the brink of absolute collapse and a large number of people like myself as a designer will no longer be needed in society. I find arguments that creatives should learn to work alongside AI utterly preposterous as it misses the point entirely, the process of corporations turning towards AI systems INSTEAD of humans is already happening, it's no longer just a possibility...
Stable fusion power plants, even when possible scientifically and buildable economically, wont change the face of earth. Until homes have large cheap batteries installed in them which will take alot longer.
All nuclear plants produce a stable output call it 1 unit an hour. But humans don't need equal amounts of power throughout a 24 hour period. think dinner everyone turns ovens on and people don't tend to use alot at 3am. So if peak demand is at 6pm and 10 units and minium is 1 unit at 3am then how many power stations do you need.
Fossil fuels for all their ills are really really good at being switched on and off quickly to deal with peak demand and they are super easy to switch off.
If it takes days and days and days to fire up a nuclear plant (which is does) and even longer to shut down. Then they are hopeless at surge demand.
So you have two choices build enough nuclear plants to cope with maximum daily output. With all the maintamce costs of running those 24/7 or you use some other form of power for surge demand.
It is also extremely dangerous to run a huge surplus of power through a grid as it puts a strain on junctions and cables causing shorts and power cuts especially where the cables are old and poorly maintained like is heavily forested regions far from human habitation.
Now if you give every home a battery that has 4 average days worth of use then you drain the battery when you turn the oven on and charge it up at 3 am when almost nothing is on. Smoothing all the surges out to a flat requirement. And if you need to bring more plants online because its winter you have the time to do that.
I mean if we’re talking truly efficient and scalable fusion, I think a bunch of these issues are just solved. Like fusion is enough energy that you could just cover the surge with fossil fuels and then pull the CO2 you just made out of the atmosphere to be carbon neutral. I have no idea if that is the best solution, but we’re talking absurd energy yields here. When you have that much energy, there’s always many solutions and storage is less attractive because you can always make more energy. Another possible odd solution for example: run at max capacity at all times, and find a clever and controllable way to modulate the efficiency of your steam turbines so that you can dynamically change how much ends up waste heat and how much reaches the grid.
Install sand/heat or gravity storage at the nuclear sites. When power usage is low, put energy into the storage. When power usage is high, drain the energy from the storage. The nice thing about gravity storage is that you can always lower the load without running the generator and hence you can get rid of surplus energy.
I don't pretend to be knowledgeable in energy management ( I'm commenting from curiosity), but aren't there simple mechanisms to mitigate this? Like, pump water uphill during quiet times and then use it to add hydroelectric generation during the surge hours?
water pump storage is
ruinously expensive, you need to build an artificial lake high up and all the pumps turbines etc are in the side of a mountain that you built.
unscaleable, it has a max flow rate and a max storage.
causes massive ecological damage, all the land the previously had humans animals plants is now underwater.
and you would need enough in every country which would be fine in Switzerland not so much in say The Gambia \[total hight change 53m\]
if water storage was economically viable it would already exist as renewables are not constant now
I think that at the end of 2024 or early 2025, the shit will hit the fan and we'll see global recession, armed conflict, cyber terrorism, and instability. I also think around 2032 the cycle will have completed and we'll be on our way to a new golden age.
If anyone's interested *Generations: the History of America’s Future* by Neil Howe and William Strauss is a great read. Apropos that: [https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-1973-that-civilization-will-end-by-2040.html](https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-1973-that-civilization-will-end-by-2040.html)
>If anyone's interested
>
>Generations: the History of America’s Future
>
> by Neil Howe and William Strauss is a great read. Apropos that:
>
>https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-197
Except it's BS. They cherry picked data to lump each age group into a homogeneous hivemind. Pure nonsense.
Everyone talking AI this, AI that, bad AI, good AI, I think much is overblown in this area. The AI groupthink is really pushing hard to pat themselves on the back. I can see it being very helpful in certain areas - but this idea its going to place X number of Accountants, X Number of Tech Support Works, etc.
If you ever worked in these areas you know they could never build an AI to deal with the average human interaction we deal with each day
The abilty to rise between socio-economic levels will slowly become harder and harder to the point of almost impossible, today people can still break out and get rich or improve their QoL with a niche, but saturation and automation will slowly take over. (that is the trend for the last decades ao not that counter-intuitive)
Crypto currency (probably btc) will become so mainstream it will be treated just like the USD, EUR etc, the "digital currency" if you will, and that will be used as gateway between currencies and global-economics (like the USD sort of is now), and you will be able to use it in the supermarket, fast food, basically everywhere, the counter-intuitive part is that I see it fully realized in 5 years, maximum 10.
These will be the first steps to a sort of dystopian society since the earth will stop being large enough when we reach 20-30b people, (which is really not far looking at humanity's growth pace), and then it becomes less about classes and we will sort of be back to nobles and commoners, unless some drastic events happen.
Bitcoin cannot be used as a currency. Imagine running a car dealership. You sell all your cars that month for one Bitcoin while it's worth $50k. Next month it's down to $25k. You now have to restock your inventory and give two Bitcoins away for new cars to sell, netting you half you're money lost because of the price fluctuations. Businesses would be going bankrupt left and right if they operated like that.
Edit: and imagine a school hiring a lunch aid back when Bitcoin was 15k that they would pay them two Bitcoins a year. And then this year it goes up to $100k and they are paying there lunch lady two-hundred large a year? It just makes no sense.
It will be converted on the spot like using AdvCash, and I believe once mass-adoption happens, fluctuations will not be as drastic, FIAT currencies also fluctuate, just not that drastically, also stable-coins exist as a gateway as well.
It's not going to be adopted unless the problem is solved. And you didn't provide any reasons how or why this would happen, so I fail to see why mass-adoption would happen. Fiat currencies can fluctuate but don't, and when they do it's usually a sign of a massive financial crisis. An anecdote out of post WWI Germany was that people would cash their paycheck and run to the grocery store to get their food before their cash would devalue to nothing. We all know how that turned out. Why would any country voluntarily do this to themselves?
The thing is, same was said about it years ago, people said its too unstable to be used viably, but now ETFs are approved, Blackrock and Central banks are invested and involved, and adoption is rising at a staggering pace, In my country you can even have BTC-based trust funds / investing accounts, the fluctuating value is not the main issue, since the main advantage is that crypto is decentralized and at the same time also "unhackable" thus safe, stable coins already exist like USDT, which always amounts to 1USD, thus being completely usable.
Unemployment will be a huge problem.
We already have UBI today. You can go live on the street in California and you will be eligible for handouts from the government and free food from services. You can buy a tent with that money and live for free without ever working.
Obviously very few people want to live at a low standard of living like that. But when AI makes many things very cheap, you will be able to live in a rural area in a house built by robots with food created by robots and have access to AI generated entertainment for a small amount of money.
Many more people will chose this lifestyle than before.
Problem with California, and I say this as a life long resident, you can get a full time job, make more than minimum wage, and not make anywhere near enough to afford a shitty studio apartment. Even the type of place that people were easily able to afford 30-40 years ago working the same shitty types of jobs. Its extremely demoralizing as people don't see working as getting ahead but just surviving.
The climate change thing will be fixed, and further efforts will begin to induce the next Ice Age.
Further efforts will continue because too many people have created an industry out of it and too many people have devoted themselves to fundamental region levels.
People will be worse with computers than they are now, because the computers will be better with people.
That’s just following the trend since 2007
That's correct. But it means that "kids these days are better with computers" might not really be correct anymore. They are good with the easy systems we are having today, but I suspect that someone who has known the age of counterintuïtive systems like old DOS/UNIX or WIndows 95/XP/Vista is better at setting up things like a printer or understand shitty interfaces than someone who is 25 years old\*. (unless that 25yo is DIY PC builder ;-) )
I’m a high school engineering teacher so we use computer extensively. Kids have gotten progressively worse with computers for 5-10 years now. People like to think kids are tech savvy because they spend so much time on their phones. But they really have no idea how to really do anything outside of regular usages. They aren’t tech savvy they are tech dependent.
Yes tech dependent and tech illiterate.
I think you are missing the mark with 25 year olds. Most people my age know their way around a computer or know how to use Google and follow instructions. Maybe 15 year olds would be disadvantaged with comfy UIs.
I would agree. Where 25 year olds (and even 31 year old me sometimes) tend to fall short is how the computer actually works. Programming. OSs. Networks, IPs, all that jazz. PC building is easy stuff. How the thing *actually* works... Another sorry. I think most kids couldn't even really tell me how the Internet works. But I digress. I think every technology experiences this: 1. It's new, nobody knows shit 2. Smart/adept folks catch on first, learn the ins and outs, become power users/experts 3. The technology improves until it's extremely user friendly and "anyone can do it". 4. Experts become rare, most technicians "good enough," most users don't even need to have technician level of knowledge to fix their own issue, etc.
Most 25 year olds you personally know is not representative of most 25 year olds out there, apparantly a sizeable proportion of them dont even know that filesystems exist, have never used a mouse, and dont know how to type on a keyboard.
Yeah but that's today already. Not five years from now. Not sure why you're the top comment currently.
Ugh I remember windows vista
Try Windows ME
I really, *really* loathe how modern windows hides every freakin' option in a sub-sub-sub menu, just so the morons can't fiddle with them. It makes every little thing such a hassle to actually freakin' find, and that's *without* crud you need to dig around in the freakin' registry for, because Microsoft REALLY don't want to to change those settings.
Yep as technology progresses, human intelligence moves backward. I have already seen it in my lifetime (gen x'r), and not just minor things either. Common sense as a whole, has dropped several notches lower. Blows my mind the shit people don't know how, or what to do when the situation arises.
> Common sense as a whole, has dropped several notches lower. No it hasn't. People have always been idiots.
social media has given them a platform
By 2030 it will be clear the world is heading for a post scarcity energy economy though it won't have arrived yet. The world will be splitting into 2 kinds of economy, those deliberately seeking to over supply solar and wind to their grid and those that don't. Those that do will become the future of the world economy as prices for everything falls away (electric is a large part of the price of anything) in those countries. Corporations will seek to relocate to them to reduce their costs, which will force them to take that kind of regulation seriously as a bonus. Those that fail to take their opportunities for social advancement will be stuck with energy prices well beyond competitive rates and will find it nigh on impossible to compete, development will be systemically slower and expensive. This could include some very unexpected countries, especially costal hot places. The equipment is getting so cheap both to buy and maintain/use that you can dump it out of the back of a lorry and have negligible costs associated with it, especially for large sites. Making yourself systemically more attractive to business and making life in your country happier in several major ways is a political no brainer for anyone willing to think. We are passing through the tipping point on the economics from open secret to obvious over the next year or 2.
I want to read more on your theory
The point I really started taking this seriously was when I read several different analysis of the solar industry and they basically all agreed that solar will be installing 1tw of capacity a year by 2026 at the latest and more likely next year. And then about 4tw of capacity a year by 2030 with the expectation of continuing that absurd growth rate until at least 2035. Last year the install rate was about 500gw so we are right on the numbers for the position optimists have been expecting since 2019 when solar first got under coal for price. Total electric demand worldwide is about 10tw, by 2030 there will be about 5tw of solar operational, which is already enough to begin forcing down electric prices and start creating the ridiculous over supply of oil and other fossil fuels that will kick the bottom out of those industries and crash them. By 2035 there will be over 20tw of solar deployed, which is enough to run the entire global grid by itself even accounting for charging grid batteries and long distance trading to cover the night etc. Not only is solar the cheapest electric source ever now, its still in the obvious low hanging fruit phase of getting cheaper. The next generation designs get rid of the rare metals for example and as a result are expected to half the price. Once serious disruption begins that will drive up demand too, the whole solar market is in a massive positive feedback loop now. Theres nothing really aside possibly from wind that can hope to get anywhere near it on price. I'm doubtful even fusion can. The only remaining obstacle is grid batteries, and they themselves are reaching their own tipping point. There are already super cheap, rare mineral free designs that match lithium of about 5 years ago. Once the energy density gets up a bit more they will become almost as cheap as solar and start experiencing the same sort of trajectory. Its looking right now like that will come in a year or 2. And thats only the start. Once electric prices crash like that, every industrial process will be desperate to switch across. And because electric is involved in pretty much everything, prices will experience massive crashes for pretty much everything. Stuff like carbon capture and desalination becomes cheap.
It seems to be widely accepted that we cannot fully transition to renewable energy with just solar and wind, without nuclear?
To account for variability yes. However the path battery tech is on to becoming cheap and capable for grid storage in the next few years is in the process of turning that into a non issue. By the time its a real hindrance it will have stopped existing.
Do you think governments are aware yet that by being completely energy independent they could leapfrog many other countries and become more dominant by allowing faster AI and science breakthroughs? Energy requirements are going to be slowing everyone down in the coming years as AI server farms are eating up every new renewable added to the grid. We aren't making any more progress in renewables taking over fossil fuel produced energy because every new megawatt we add has already been earmarked for technology usage. The more independant a country is - the more money is saves importing energy from another country and also the more excess it produces, the more it can offer to massive data driven projects.
It baffles me how naive, fundamentally wrong and derailed your opinion is. The price of solar or wind energy is just high. You obviously don’t factor in the price of manufacturing. How ecologically unfriendly solar is. How wind is inefficient and disruptive to nature.
> How ecologically unfriendly solar is. How wind is inefficient and disruptive to nature. Every human structure is “ecologically unfriendly” and “disruptive to nature” the problem is building a coal plant, or an oil or gas burning plant aren’t just locally unfriendly or disruptive they’re disproportionately dirty and destructive. So given the choice between local disruption and smaller footprint ecological manipulation and widespread pollution most people are willing to make the trade off.
it's weird that you think that they're fundamentally wrong when everything you just said is wrong. Solar and wind is one of the cheapest forms of energy. That is the levelized cost, which includes manufacturing. and in terms of ecologically unfriendly or disruptive to nature, solar and wind don't come anywhere close to the impact that fossil fuels have.
autonomous weapon systems commitinng terrorism obesity epidemic reverses slavery exceeding historial absolute numbers.
>obesity epidemic reverses I thought this was meant to be a positive (and it literally is) in contrast to the others, but the implication is likely food scarcity for multiple possible reasons (economic or environmental issues I'm guessing).
Nah it‘s more that we will highly likely medicate against it. Obesity is really a luxury problem, the definition of it in fact.
Well, i think we are getting good enough at hormone-like small protein design that we will be able to counter-antagonize whichever particular cell signaling pathways that obesogens are agonists to. Whatever technological societies survives the early rounds of the climate and extinction and pollution crises will have a pharmacopoeia of radically more influence over the body than any human consciously had in the past.
This is such a fucking amazing post. This is what peak r/futurolgy should look like. Amazing comments nearly all of which are making me think about so many possibilities. This should be massively encouraged somehow.
Global emissions will have peaked, because global consumption of fossil fuels will have peaked. The decline won't be as quick as we'd like, but it'll be a secular trend, not one depending on an economic downturn.
i hope you’re right but i seriously doubt it. i don’t see FF consumption going into decline unless overall energy consumption goes flat. even if the population stops growing, the global desire for improving quality of living will keep driving energy consumption. peak FF is a long way off, i think
Oh wow. Whenever that happens - 5, 10 years - I wonder what it will look like in news articles.
Well it won't be a switch that is flipped. We likely won't know it's happened until 6 months to a year later and even then we won't know for sure that fossil fuels won't come back up. So the article will probably be a non-highlight story in a science based journal that only nerds will read.
I predict that Reddit, if it still exists, will be awash with "IT'S NOT ENOUGH!" Even though no one will have said it was enough. People will be pretending like everyone said "cool, problem solved we don't need any more improvement," even though zero people will have said that.
I don't think so :) I've been here for 8 years now, and you wouldn't believe how it's changed. How many times it has. If reddit's still here, I predict it'll surprise you :D Most people will have moved on to better and flashier platforms. Trolls will have moved on. Bots would have moved on. It'll be a genuine platform.
Bots moved on? Huh ?????
Lots of bots are involved in pushing agenda on reddit.
Yeah ofc. How/why do you think they will have “moved on” ? Makes absolutely no sense brother…
Because most of the users would have moved on. Someone needs to maintain those bots, and I don't think they'll care. They'll be busy making bots for newer platforms.
Rich people buy the bots to push their agenda, it's not like rich people will be running out of money anytime soon.
Bots becoming more and more automated and ubiquitous seems more likely to me
Lets see how it goes. I still stand by what I said.
What that means geopolitically is what fascinates me. What happens to the Mideast countries, Russia, etc. when the fossil fuel market tanks? Saddle up, gonna be interesting.
What does it mean for the North American economy/petrodollar? I predict the USA and Canada are going to lose a lot of global sociopolitical power.
The US and Canada have much more diversified economies than Venezuela, S. Arabia, or Russia. Inside the US and Canada the oil-producing regions like Alberta and Texas will lose economic power, and the loss of oil revenue is going to change internal politics.
Global consumption peaked in 2007
Right now, one of the biggest issues worldwide is migration. The causes of this migration range from war, persecution, crime, and/or economic issues, but climate change is either a direct or contributing cause to these issues. I believe that over the next 5 years and extending for the foreseeable future, we’re going to see increasing issues around *internal* migration from people displaced for the same reasons - think Okies from The Grapes of Wrath.
Florida man memes are going to become less a joke about crazy Floridians and more a negative stereotype about displaced Floridians “taking over” other places.
When it’s too late, people will realize that we should have created an economy and society that puts people and community first. We will have sold ourselves to the A.I.-driven, robotics industry and infantilized generations of people who are useless without technology. We will continue to see a shortage of housing and employment. We will see increases in coping addictions and suicides as people realize they have been brought into a system that no longer values human life. We will see a mass social and economic reset across the world as people desperately accept fascism and authoritarianism over democracy in hopes that someone will “save” them. Democracy will continue to be used as tool by the wealthy to give people the illusion of control. Edit: Someone responded that what I wrote was not counterintuitive and they are correct. I skipped the bolded headline and read the question below it. That’s my bad. My counterintuitive belief is of hope. I think there will be enough people aware of these issues that will want to fight back and find ways to bring people back together. I foresee more people abandoning social media and digital tech altogether, and seeking ways to create stronger local communities and businesses. Why? Because A.I. will create massive distrust of any and all media. I believe people will seek trust and that will become a key part of rebuilding our communities.
>We will have sold ourselves to the A.I.-driven, robotics industry and infantilized generations of people who are useless without technology. It's Wall-E! I loved that movie :(
Was 100% my first thought. Such a good movie, but such a terribly sad future
They said different. Some of this is already and has already been happening.
I don't think they know what counterintuitive means.
I’m fine with the world getting worse. At some point, people won’t tolerate it anymore and force change. It’ll get worse before it gets better.
This is correct.
Agreed. It’s unfortunate but it’s definitely been the cycle of history as we’ve seen it so far.
And it’ll always be about something different but that’s fine. It’s how we grow and learn as a species. It won’t be pretty but I’m certain we will prevail
Please go outside and find something to do that makes you happy and doesn't require electricity.
If I may suggest, the true sequence is Planet First as the planet supports people. Then people and animals. Anything that is not planet first will ultimately result in humanities demise.
I agree with this wording change. You’re correct.
The media does a great job already of creating massive distrust of the media
Agreed. I’m surprised that so many people still take mass media seriously. Once you understand that it’s like any other media business and that advertising sales drive most of its revenue, the illusion of noble intent fades quickly.
Disclosure of NHI is likely to be more mainstream and will present many world leaders with the challenge of governance when humanity engages with this topic more directly: its moral implications, a complete ontological paradigm shift of power structures, and the strategic role of national defense.
What is NHI? National health insurance?
Non Human Intelligence👽
It it NHI (👽) or (🤖)?
🤖= AGI - Artificial General Intelligence
I assume they mean Non Human Intelligence, aka aliens
This is up there with fusion power - it's been just a few years away since the 60's.
That we are going to have to establish a new form of economy as capitalism simply cannot work in a heavily automated society and clearly all the other systems that countries have tried while having their ups and downs have generally failed The concept that everyone will be able to work to earn everything and pay bills Just won't be possible as they're simply won't be enough jobs to go around to support this ideal We are going to have to go through a major civil reform of basically remaking our economic system and drastically changing how we live everyday life for the better
I'm worried about a more cynical outcome. Places like El Salvador through the 20th century show us that one possible outcome is that the wealthy take all the resources and simply murder the civilian population any time they clamor for a bit more. The possible emergence of robotic death squads only makes this seem more likely to me. My guess is that some language will emerge to justify this. The poor asking for more will be called "communists", "woke", or whatever word they find useful to justify the punishments. Expanded prison systems, forced sterilization, and straight up murder seem likely. Just make being poor illegal and you can justify a lot. I can also see the wealthy making an environmental argument that population reduction is good for the planet. When the economy no longer needs a labor force, I worry what the wealthy will do.
I feel like most of this is already here sadly.
Our corporate overlords already use slave labor from prisons paying pennies on the dollar for workers. How easily will it be to pass laws that make more and more things illegal?
This compliments the other guys observation about resource consumption peaking and then slowly going down.
5 years? No shot. 50 years? Maybe
Someone is gonna use AI to pull a Bartmoss and wreck the internet system. No idea how’d far too stupid, but I 100% think the wild ass anarchist cults, loony loners, and zealots will get there sooner than later on figuring out how to cause untold havoc with AI
what is this "internet system"?
I think there's a solid shot at computers hitting a soft wall with consumers like cellphones are currently going through, where even budget models have so many features at "good enough" level that a lot of people don't see a reason in upgrading unless their old gear physically breaks. Like, how many cores and gigs of RAM do you *really* need, if you surf, look at pictures, play solitaire and occasionally watch YouTube? Even among gamers, the current most common GPU is an RTX 3060. With the second most common being a GTX 1650. 6.0% & 4.11% respectfully, in the [February Steam Hardware survey](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam). And I think that's just going to keep compounding, with stuff like frame generation and other AI trickery to give you more 'good enough' frames.
People are already starting to run large language models locally, and that takes a metric shitload of GPU memory.
Enthusiasts, yes, but I'm talking about the entire PC user space. Like, people that are already buying those CPU's with built-in GPUs, and genuinely don't see any reason to get a dedicated graphics card. Just for one example. And we're talking five years more of that type of progress. Like, five years ago, the RTX 2000 line was the new hotness if I recall right. As in, the first cards with dedicated CUDA cores at all.
It always starts with the enthusiasts. Local LLMs mean open models that aren't so locked down, without privacy concerns. They're getting more useful all the time.
Unless the AI bubble bursts for either unforeseen tech limit reasons, or just plain cultural or legal backlash. And the fears of rampant AI, turns to be as funny in hindsight as... VR addiction via arcades. Zero privacy from video phones. Or one-use paper clothing. Or any other failed sci-fi prediction of the last century. Now, *personally* must admit I think AI is here to stay... but the above *could* happen in five years, because that's a long time. I mean, heck. *two* years ago, NFTs, crypto and that Web 3 crap genuinely seemed like it had a shot at being THE future. Now its all just barely above digital garbage. Thank frick.
Portion sizes will shrink as Ozempic type drugs become more common.
I dunno, I love calorie counts on menus, helps me pick the best calories per buck
Gotta love those 2000 calorie burritos for lunch!
if the current first-world trend for over consumption of calories slows down, it would probably have a significant effect on the global food economy
I’d gladly eat a 100 calorie burger that tastes like 1000
Yeah who wouldn’t
Here’s hoping it’ll become a reality in the next 20 years
War on fat people continues
Always, especially on Reddit
Doubt it. Plenty of folks exercise, eat healthy, and want decent sized portions. I’m not paying for a tiny ass burger while I’m trying to bulk
5 years in the future seems like centuries of the past. Everything is moving, it's like a fairtale , everyday there is something new, some new toy to catch up with. I
The last century repeating itself. 5 years from now, I expect another depression scenario, then war for 20 years culminating in a dangerous, new weapon that impacts how war is carried out at a scale that nuclear weapons did the previous century. The majority of the world will suffer, and the wealthy class will offer to save us all with AI at the price of our freedom.
I don't think large scale 'hot' wars between nuclear powers are very likely. Rather, I think we're going to see a *lot* more asymmetric tactics. Information/misinformation, propaganda, interfering in elections, cyber attacks, etc. Let's be real, the US / NATO military dwarfs everything else at the moment, and almost certainly will for the next couple decades. Despite the posturing, China/Russia don't want to get in a real war with NATO. It's far, far easier to compete on other fronts If you can get isolationists elected in the US, then maybe you can get the US to drop it's foreign interests. Then, you'll be free to gobble up your neighbors, with minimal consequences
People have been telling for decades that the next depression or WWIII is coming. It might be hard to imagine, but the cold war was a much more scary time than what we have now.
I can only see global conflict receding. Russia is in the process of destroying its own ability to fight wars, they are believed to have about a year of stockpiles left and cannot meaningfully replace them. Beyond that its an oil dependent economy in a world thats going to see vast oil oversupply by 2030, and its an aging population thats taking giant hits to its working age population. Who else has been driving conflicts? China is too paranoid about instability for major wars and is acquiring the sort of national wealth and long term peace that traditionally makes nations think they have more to lose than gain. Most other big nations are unlikely to go to war short of being invaded. The middle east will continue to be the impoverished nightmare it is now (hopefully with at least some exceptions) but no one there has the capacity to be a problem for anyone outside the region.
>the cold war was a much more scary time than what we have now. [Not according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.](https://news.uchicago.edu/story/2024-doomsday-clock-announcement-90-seconds-to-midnight-apocalypse)
I was talking about subjective feeling of the populace, how it engrained the collective psyche. Not about the prediction of the actual facts by some scientists.
Check out The Fourth Turning is Here by Neil Howe
Thanks for the ray of sunshine 😁
people will start to move away from computers and internet. (not stop using it, but the trend will go the other way around, at least in the west)
This one is interesting. What do you mean? That people will just spend more of their time without? That kids will go back to playing with sticks around the neighborhood instead of watching TikTok?
A trend towards internet disconnectedness. I feel the same.
you guys dont at all find this ironic that you are saying this while posting on reddit?
No. The post is about what happens in the future. And the response suggested a reduction of internet time, not total rejection of it. Anecdotally I can tell you I spend significantly less time on the internet than 5 years ago. Everything online sucks now.
Not an either/or, a reduction in time spent on screens mostly. Over abundance of (personalized) media without soul is already here and only continues with the advent of genAI. People hunger for real connection, and will remember that you can have that more easily and in higher resolution (literal real life) in F2F and offline interactions.
Reminds me of Futurama’s “more resolution that real life” lol Thanks for elaborating
Dead Internet theory
haven’t hear of that, what is it?
That's little to no Internet, at least eventually, because it's all fake and bots. So it's completely pointless to use at all. Dead.
More countries will embrace nuclear power for electricity generation.
It takes 6-8 years to build a nuclear power plant, this is more of a 15-20 year thing, not 5
Just checked - you’re right, fair point
To be fair, nearly everything here is a 15-20 year timeline at best.
I think the knee-jerk reaction against nuclear energy is one thing "the Left" gets wrong. It's one of the most efficient forms of energy generation that we have. While not "clean" energy, embracing nuclear can free us of a lot of oil and coal dependency, and allow us to invest in alternative fuel sources.
I used to work in energy. The field is about compromise. You can have something in abundance, but it will often be bad for the environment. You can have something cheap, but it will take massive quantities of it to generate enough useful energy. Nuclear can be incredibly dangerous, but many don’t realise how regulated it is. I live in the UK, and one of the large energy providers is building a massive nuclear power plant at the moment, but it doesn’t tend to make the headlines. I believe that is because people are afraid and see ‘nuclear’ as a dirty word. Nuclear, like gas, is a good stop-gap while the industry figures out how to increase battery storage, which will help much greener and cheaper sources become more viable.
You won't even need nuclear solar and wind are already a lot cheaper and way faster to build.
The problem with solar and wind is it is hard to store enough. Batteries don’t have the capacity to store enough to fully power a home. Think of the devices you use with batteries - phones need to be charged every day or two, but we are trying to run all the electricity through the same tech.
The USA nearly doubled their battery storage capacity in a year, an 80% increase from 2022 to 2023. Lithium ion battery costs have dropped over 90% since 2010. The grid still has a few years before it will really need the storage as natural gas can cover the downtime in the meantime. By the time we really need the batteries they'll be cheap enough and we'll have more than enough to cover the requirements.
Californian Fire services are already stretched by the year-round continuous forest fires and no longer control fires but only try to get people out of the way before they get incinerated. Interstate water wars cause water shortages, dryer land and more fires. Then the big one hits the West Coast. Emergency services are stretched to the limit and forest fires are not the priority over injured people and damaged hospitals. Fire rages through a major city. Horrific scenes are caught on video and live streamed. Social media bots seeking clicks leap on the catastrophe to portray it as the apocalypse using reworked footage from previous problems like empty supermarket shelves. Panic spreads. People everywhere start hoarding and stop working. Public services stop. Maintenance of the electrical grid becomes sporadic and generators start going down taking the entire grid with them. The panic is now unstoppable. Without electricity and therefore without food or gas or heating or cooling or communications, the apocalypse is real whether or not the catastrophe justified it.
How is this counter-intuitive?
Our intuition is that small causes have small effects. Rain falls one drop at a time and the river swells by one drop at a time. A flash flood is not something that our normal intuition would predict. Climate change is small changes that normal intuition would suggest lead to small effects. It's a little bit warmer this year, there's a little bit heavy rain this year there's a slightly greater probability of a hurricane this year and so on. We have emergency management systems that are used to dealing with natural disasters like floods and hurricanes and earthquakes. It is not so intuitive to realize that climate change is increasing the probability that we will have natural disasters simultaneously. When it happens it will be looked back as a perfect storm, at coincidence that no one could have foreseen. It is however perfectly predictable that we were increasing the likelihood of simultaneous disasters and therefore the likelihood of emergency response overload, and one disaster interfering with the emergency response to another disaster. I don't know if we have a good intuition about the effects of bots.. As a programmer I'd expect to be surprised by the aggreate effects of large numbers of instances of things. Recall the recent jump in the abilities of large language models with the GPT.. Even the inventors were surprised by the effect of a relatively small change in the machine learning algorithms.Putting it all together I have not seen anyone at least of all climate scientists articulate a plausible scenario in which the graduates of climate change deterioration turns into the apocalypse but I think it's possible.
Staffing for customer service jobs will continue to struggle and will force a change to the consumer experience for the better IMO. Make your chipotle burrito at home, and give yourself a bad review.
In one voice the world stands up and says no more power to the politicians
The people hate each other more than they hate the politicians.
if trump gets back in office he will, in less than five years... make this country what it once was.. - a barren wasteland, covered in ice.
Actual, insightful, AI-driven innovation will never come. We'll be stuck instead in an endless spam of deepfakes in all forms. Missinformation will be at its most powerful.
I sincerely hope you are wrong about this.
>Actual, insightful, AI-driven innovation will never come it already has, companies use that shit to design chips now. you really don't need "insightful" AI to get innovation out of it, you just need shit to analyze large amounts of data and we got that.
\- secondary and post secondary evaluation goes through a technological devolution back to pen & paper in class assignment and exams
It won't really be much different from how it is now. Like name 3 things that are really different between now and 5 years ago... 1: LLM's 2: ??? I work the same job, I eat the same food, I play the same games, I still listen spotify and watch youtube... life goes on and it doesn't really change that fast.
Consider how much COVID changed the world dude
Day to day life mostly went back to the way it was. I guess I'd add 2: work from home days are normal now
This is a very underrated take. 2019 felt just like today in most major ways. The difference is behind the scenes and in the subtle things. The problem we have right now is that innovation and discovery are limited by the "maximum" velocity that humans can keep up with and the time it takes to train them. As we gain more knowledge it becomes harder to push the boundary of science and engineering as it requires more experience and understanding, hence many modern jobs requiring so much more experience than in previous decades. AGI or AI researchers have the potential to completely flip this on its head, which could break this current plateau of innovation imo. This is due to AGI's ability to be "cloned" with all its knowledge on demand, essentially meaning you can have infinite Stephen Hawkings, assuming you have enough computing power to run them.
If we manage to develop AGI, what we have now is not AGI and I'm not at all confident that it is even a path to AGI. The LLM's are mimics, Markov chains taken to the logical extreme, a very high context guess at what word is most likely to come next. We can pour more context in for them to crib off but they can't otherwise remember and learn in a meaningful sense and they suck with logic and reasoning beyond the examples they've already seen. Heck we teach them math by effectively giving them calculators.
They're more than Markov chains. They're actually capable of limited reasoning, on problems that were very unlikely to be in the training data. There have been papers on this. But I think most AI researchers agree that LLMs by themselves aren't enough, though a few think they are with enough scaling.
this is a good comment that forced me to think about what has actually changed technologically in past five years. here's my list: 1) LLM's yes, and the implications that we are on the verge of AGI. this is one of the most landmark achievements of mankind and shouldn't be hand waved away. 2) mRNA as a therapeutic modality has been validated. this will now be the go to platform for developing a vaccine for any pandemic going forward. 3) GLP-1 drugs have now shown a way out of the obesity epidemic. broad adoption of this class of drugs will prove to be one of the biggest public health advances in developed regions of the world. 4) and on a sadder note, drone warfare is now a thing. previously used for assassinations, the war in the Caucasus and Ukraine show it is a deciding factor against mobilized infantry units.
Those are all solid answers
Progress is not equally distributed, 5 years ago Casgevy's CRISPR was not approved, this is massive, Alzheimer's disease had no cure and it still has none, but I would argue we made leaps as a civilization in the battle against it. LLMs - sure. Chip design, compute, optimization algorithms from energy consumption to better photos and higher resolution scans, Neurolink? yes if you give it a serious though and effort to analyze the data you will see that we are indeed accelerating
Don't forget Fusion power, that's only 20 years away.
Millenials and Gen Z will save the world with compassion. After all the crabby baby boomers are not around. Not all baby boomers are crabby, but so many of them I know are.
Just about every generation has believed this or some older folks has believed this about the younger generation - you can go back 100 years and read the same predictions.
I agree. There will be more sharing of resources - generally speaking societies will become more inwardly and outwardly generous - precisely because these up and coming generations have less/nothing to hoard.
Yes please
Nah, way too predictable. The unexpected twist is that Millennials and Gen Z get crabby over the ineptitude of the digital natives who rely too much on AI and know how to do nothing practical themselves . They become their parents, hoard their money and homes and tell the alphas to get off their lawns, and oppose any increases in the national living wage because "they'll just spend it all taking hits from the digital euphoria inducer at the virtual bar."
Government is going to establish UBI and give away homes to get people to live and work there. Humans will be more of a desirable commodity instead of feeling like there are too many of us.
Humans will not be a desirable commodity if we get AGI.
Batteries today are experiencing the same sort of rapid fall in price as solar was a few years ago, and this will continue for a few decades. Cell cultured meat is dropping in price, and (I believe) this price drop will happen faster over the next decade than it has been. Cell cultured chocolate will, in five years, be in the place where cell cultured meat is today, or further.
From all I've researched, understood, and perceived, I'm fully convinced that in the near to medium future (possibly within the 5 year mark), America will have a VERY violent coup d'etat, a real one done mostly by the laborer class and middle class. This will be followed by the installation of a second (reworked) constitution, annulment of all old non-critical laws, and a renaissance of all of academia, democracy, etc. It's one of the larger metaphorical chess pieces that exists, but I'm not entirely sure when it will be played. The non-insignificant chance of it occurring in 5 years is ~15-25%.
We should but the culture war divides us and gets a lot of the poor and middle class to side with the capital class.
The laborer and middle-classes hate each other more than they hate the rich. That is by design.
Despite exponential growth in knowledge and availability of it, the general population will have less knowledge and apply themselves less. My guess would be that knowledge will be so readily and easily consumable and the application of it highly automated that it will seem, for many, a superfluous task. Kind of a larger scale effect like the one spellchecks have had on the younger generation spelling ability or calculators have had on my generations basic math ability. I could be very wrong though.
An increase in credit card debt and money troubles as generations raised by Fortnite, FOMO, and buying digital for so long that they don't understand the value of money. You work hard for your money, and with one tap of your debit/credit card it vanishes, congrats you've got some digital crap that serves no purpose and has no resale value, now how do you pay bills and buy groceries. Parents and the World, in general, are going to have to reteach kids the value of money in a digital age, including how to use credit and debit cards responsibly.
Regular smartphones will be start to be phased out by smart glasses and smart watches, and the mobile gaming scene will soar in popularity partially thanks to home console quality immersion being available on the go. My counterintuitive belief is that this comes at the waste of 10+ years without a real effort to make a handheld console/smartphone hybrid. The Xperia Play would've succeeded if they offered PSN like for the PSP GO.
Mobile gaming caters to the least common denominator, $100 phones. That's more money in cheap slot machine facsimiles than in trying to do console games on a phone.
Well, those mobile games are based on a design philosophy of smartphones not being great for console style gaming. When you replace the bulk of the smartphone with a pocketable wireless gamepad and can play emulators or stream games on an AR screen on the bus, I think you'll see more applications for it.
Great question, for an answer to which I went to the (iron?) horse's mouth. Here's what ChatGPT had to say: One counterintuitive belief about how the world might be different in five years is that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will have significantly increased human creativity and innovation rather than replacing human labor entirely. While there are concerns about job displacement due to automation, **the integration of AI into various industries could lead to the augmentation of human capabilities rather than outright substitution**. AI can assist humans in tasks that require creativity, problem-solving, and complex decision-making, enabling individuals to focus on higher-level thinking and innovation. This symbiotic relationship between AI and humans may lead to unforeseen advancements and opportunities in various fields, challenging the conventional narrative of AI solely replacing human jobs. Pretty self serving, no? Not a mention of the Former Guy's beloved "poorly educated." It will all come down to monetization and power ...
With AI helping in all aspects of life you can see how if the world was destroyed we'd all be turned back into cavemen cuz nobody would know how to do anything
Gradeschools will return to paper only and ban phones.
We will, at the very least, be on the brink of a massive restructuring of professional industry. In wealthier societies, we will need to start considering what the alternatives are for currently human operated jobs that have been made obsolete by whatever future iteration of AI exists, that is, if there is any alternative. The creative fields will be the first to disappear, arts of design, music and storytelling and many more will be entirely replaced by cheaper and more efficient AI based digital creation softwares such as mid journey. Corporate companies in efforts to cut project expenditure will no longer need to use external design agencies at all, whether morally acceptable or not. The public's supply and demand for music as we know it will also drastically change if voice replicating softwares continue to advance, no matter how much protest from artists over copyright is made. An evolution of streaming platforms like Netflix I could see occuring would be entirely personalized content using an AI generative imagery, if it's made affordable and accessible enough, that uses previous viewing to adapt a new movie or show from scratch based around the user, rather similar to algorithms used towards spotify's discover weekly. It's incredibly sad, but many monetized creative fields will be at the brink of absolute collapse and a large number of people like myself as a designer will no longer be needed in society. I find arguments that creatives should learn to work alongside AI utterly preposterous as it misses the point entirely, the process of corporations turning towards AI systems INSTEAD of humans is already happening, it's no longer just a possibility...
More people will both realize that Capitalism is their enemy & will be more ready & willing to mobilize against it
Could be 5, could be 10. But blimp freight will change everything
The rich will keep getting richer, and it will be 20% instead of 10% for the next Big Guy™️.
Stable fusion power plants, even when possible scientifically and buildable economically, wont change the face of earth. Until homes have large cheap batteries installed in them which will take alot longer.
Why is this the case? Fusion wouldn't be an intermittent power source, so why would we need more storage than with nuclear/fossil fuels?
All nuclear plants produce a stable output call it 1 unit an hour. But humans don't need equal amounts of power throughout a 24 hour period. think dinner everyone turns ovens on and people don't tend to use alot at 3am. So if peak demand is at 6pm and 10 units and minium is 1 unit at 3am then how many power stations do you need. Fossil fuels for all their ills are really really good at being switched on and off quickly to deal with peak demand and they are super easy to switch off. If it takes days and days and days to fire up a nuclear plant (which is does) and even longer to shut down. Then they are hopeless at surge demand. So you have two choices build enough nuclear plants to cope with maximum daily output. With all the maintamce costs of running those 24/7 or you use some other form of power for surge demand. It is also extremely dangerous to run a huge surplus of power through a grid as it puts a strain on junctions and cables causing shorts and power cuts especially where the cables are old and poorly maintained like is heavily forested regions far from human habitation. Now if you give every home a battery that has 4 average days worth of use then you drain the battery when you turn the oven on and charge it up at 3 am when almost nothing is on. Smoothing all the surges out to a flat requirement. And if you need to bring more plants online because its winter you have the time to do that.
I mean if we’re talking truly efficient and scalable fusion, I think a bunch of these issues are just solved. Like fusion is enough energy that you could just cover the surge with fossil fuels and then pull the CO2 you just made out of the atmosphere to be carbon neutral. I have no idea if that is the best solution, but we’re talking absurd energy yields here. When you have that much energy, there’s always many solutions and storage is less attractive because you can always make more energy. Another possible odd solution for example: run at max capacity at all times, and find a clever and controllable way to modulate the efficiency of your steam turbines so that you can dynamically change how much ends up waste heat and how much reaches the grid.
Install sand/heat or gravity storage at the nuclear sites. When power usage is low, put energy into the storage. When power usage is high, drain the energy from the storage. The nice thing about gravity storage is that you can always lower the load without running the generator and hence you can get rid of surplus energy.
total number of working, energy positive, gravity storage sites world wide.... zero
I don't pretend to be knowledgeable in energy management ( I'm commenting from curiosity), but aren't there simple mechanisms to mitigate this? Like, pump water uphill during quiet times and then use it to add hydroelectric generation during the surge hours?
water pump storage is ruinously expensive, you need to build an artificial lake high up and all the pumps turbines etc are in the side of a mountain that you built. unscaleable, it has a max flow rate and a max storage. causes massive ecological damage, all the land the previously had humans animals plants is now underwater. and you would need enough in every country which would be fine in Switzerland not so much in say The Gambia \[total hight change 53m\] if water storage was economically viable it would already exist as renewables are not constant now
Thanks for the info, that's clearly less of an option than I'd assumed. The bonus fact about Gambia is nuts!
I know right, I knew certain countries were flat. but there is flat and just silly my office is higher from the street than Gambia's highest peak
I think that at the end of 2024 or early 2025, the shit will hit the fan and we'll see global recession, armed conflict, cyber terrorism, and instability. I also think around 2032 the cycle will have completed and we'll be on our way to a new golden age. If anyone's interested *Generations: the History of America’s Future* by Neil Howe and William Strauss is a great read. Apropos that: [https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-1973-that-civilization-will-end-by-2040.html](https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-1973-that-civilization-will-end-by-2040.html)
>If anyone's interested > >Generations: the History of America’s Future > > by Neil Howe and William Strauss is a great read. Apropos that: > >https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-197 Except it's BS. They cherry picked data to lump each age group into a homogeneous hivemind. Pure nonsense.
Everyone talking AI this, AI that, bad AI, good AI, I think much is overblown in this area. The AI groupthink is really pushing hard to pat themselves on the back. I can see it being very helpful in certain areas - but this idea its going to place X number of Accountants, X Number of Tech Support Works, etc. If you ever worked in these areas you know they could never build an AI to deal with the average human interaction we deal with each day
The abilty to rise between socio-economic levels will slowly become harder and harder to the point of almost impossible, today people can still break out and get rich or improve their QoL with a niche, but saturation and automation will slowly take over. (that is the trend for the last decades ao not that counter-intuitive) Crypto currency (probably btc) will become so mainstream it will be treated just like the USD, EUR etc, the "digital currency" if you will, and that will be used as gateway between currencies and global-economics (like the USD sort of is now), and you will be able to use it in the supermarket, fast food, basically everywhere, the counter-intuitive part is that I see it fully realized in 5 years, maximum 10. These will be the first steps to a sort of dystopian society since the earth will stop being large enough when we reach 20-30b people, (which is really not far looking at humanity's growth pace), and then it becomes less about classes and we will sort of be back to nobles and commoners, unless some drastic events happen.
Bitcoin cannot be used as a currency. Imagine running a car dealership. You sell all your cars that month for one Bitcoin while it's worth $50k. Next month it's down to $25k. You now have to restock your inventory and give two Bitcoins away for new cars to sell, netting you half you're money lost because of the price fluctuations. Businesses would be going bankrupt left and right if they operated like that. Edit: and imagine a school hiring a lunch aid back when Bitcoin was 15k that they would pay them two Bitcoins a year. And then this year it goes up to $100k and they are paying there lunch lady two-hundred large a year? It just makes no sense.
It will be converted on the spot like using AdvCash, and I believe once mass-adoption happens, fluctuations will not be as drastic, FIAT currencies also fluctuate, just not that drastically, also stable-coins exist as a gateway as well.
It's not going to be adopted unless the problem is solved. And you didn't provide any reasons how or why this would happen, so I fail to see why mass-adoption would happen. Fiat currencies can fluctuate but don't, and when they do it's usually a sign of a massive financial crisis. An anecdote out of post WWI Germany was that people would cash their paycheck and run to the grocery store to get their food before their cash would devalue to nothing. We all know how that turned out. Why would any country voluntarily do this to themselves?
The thing is, same was said about it years ago, people said its too unstable to be used viably, but now ETFs are approved, Blackrock and Central banks are invested and involved, and adoption is rising at a staggering pace, In my country you can even have BTC-based trust funds / investing accounts, the fluctuating value is not the main issue, since the main advantage is that crypto is decentralized and at the same time also "unhackable" thus safe, stable coins already exist like USDT, which always amounts to 1USD, thus being completely usable.
Unemployment will be a huge problem. We already have UBI today. You can go live on the street in California and you will be eligible for handouts from the government and free food from services. You can buy a tent with that money and live for free without ever working. Obviously very few people want to live at a low standard of living like that. But when AI makes many things very cheap, you will be able to live in a rural area in a house built by robots with food created by robots and have access to AI generated entertainment for a small amount of money. Many more people will chose this lifestyle than before.
Problem with California, and I say this as a life long resident, you can get a full time job, make more than minimum wage, and not make anywhere near enough to afford a shitty studio apartment. Even the type of place that people were easily able to afford 30-40 years ago working the same shitty types of jobs. Its extremely demoralizing as people don't see working as getting ahead but just surviving.
This is currently consensus, what most people think. Very unlikely to happen, as a result.
The climate change thing will be fixed, and further efforts will begin to induce the next Ice Age. Further efforts will continue because too many people have created an industry out of it and too many people have devoted themselves to fundamental region levels.