Powerful currents
Wherever you look, people are pessimistic about the future. Whether it’s climate change or the end times, increasingly we are all doomsday prophets. What I notice is a deficit, on right or left or what-have-you, of any idea about what’s going to happen after next week, except in a general sense of bad, bad things.
I think the future is probably quite positive for humanity, although it is complex.
To lift the veil on what’s happening, and what’s happening next, I first need to talk about the great driving forces powering everything. Right now I think there are three powerful currents creating most all of what we see.
1: Computers and the Internet
Moore’s law may be stuttering (although it looks pretty healthy to me), but the bigger trend of expanding computation continues, and underlies basically everything else of import coming in the next couple of decades.
Cheap computers and networks mean more people connected more densely and more interestingly, with exponential characteristics over time.
Where this is going: Everyone connected to all of human knowledge, all people, and all compute resources, all of the time. Maximal collaboration.
More long term, the trend might be toward converting all matter and energy into computing substrate.
2: Solar Power
The relentless exponential nature of solar build-out was visible ten years ago. I wrote about it in 2012, when there were still big questions about viability, and things like storage (sometimes the sun don’t shine).
Since then, we’ve seen the emergence of storage tech, the front runner being lithium ion batteries at scale dropping in price at a measurable and forecast-able rate, which answers these questions and then some.
Where this is going: Solar PV + batteries will replace every other form of electrical generation by the mid to late 20s (if something even more radical doesn’t emerge to beat it), and will radically surpass our current energy use in total by the 2030s.
Back-of-the-envelope:
- Build-out increases by 10x every 6–8 years. Let’s say 8.
- We should hit a capacity of roughly 1TW in 2020.
- Multiply this by a capacity factor of 0.25 (that’s how much a solar panel actually outputs based on its rated capacity because of day/night cycle, etc).
- so the actual rate is about 0.25TW in 2020.
- The whole world uses electricity at a rate of roughly 2TW.
- So, in about 2025 or so, solar PV will output enough energy to replace every other source of electricity generation.
- 8 years later (2033) solar PV will output 20TW globally, more energy that is used in total in all forms on planet earth (about 18TW iirc)
After that, there’s no reason to suspect the build-out will stop. 2040 will be a mad place.
A shift like this in energy production becomes a total disruption of the production of everything. If you’ve ever heard of the idea that our economy is a fossil-fuel economy (and has been since the beginning of the industrial revolution) then you might see the impact of the coming changes.
3: The memepocalypse
Back in the early days of the internet, we thought we were building a wonderful library of all human knowledge, and that this would begin a golden age of human insight and civilization.
What we didn’t understand was that we were hosts to replicating ideas, memes, and that they were building the network of computers and people for their own ends.
If you remember the early 2000s, you might remember the rise of email spam to a level where email itself looked like it was going to be made worthless by the domination of spam messages. Bayesian filters, and gmail in particular, rescued email, but I remember particular the viral nonsense that used to flow around; the nigerian scam, the bill-gates scam, virus hoax messages. It turns out that was a harbinger of things to come.
Social networking really got things going, then the addition of smart phones to accelerate everything. Some years back I thought wow, look at those Americans, it’s like they’ve been bombed using a technology that just destroys your ability to think critically, and they’re all staggering around unable to make sense of what’s happened, or much of anything else.
Exponential increase in computation and solar power lets us draw trend lines into the future, but the memepocalypse adds an apparently random factor to everything. I believe the reason we’re so generally negative about the future is that even the present is now bewilderingly obscure and weird; how can you even think about what will happen 5 years from now?
It’s not entirely random though. The viral memeplexes that inject chaos into everything have a few basic features:
- They play to basic human emotions
- They form self-reinforcing systems; they reproduce themselves
- They cloud the truth
So where does this all go?
Some ideas:
- A two speed civilization of the haves and have-nots
- A recolonization of rural spaces in the West
- Decentralization driven by locally sourced solar, local manufacturing, and internet from the sky
- The slow and then fast disruption of money
- The collapse of utilities and infrastructure (due to disinterest)
- The follow-on collapse/transformation of government from the ground up
- Platformization replacing hierarchy; the end of the hierarchical organization
- The end of the factory production system and the beginning of the local mode of production
- The decline of jobs and the emergence of adhocracy
- A confusing time of wealth for all mixed with narrative driven hopelessness
I’ll mean to write about these topics, but I can be busy (lazy). If you’re interested, comment, give me a push ;-)
