The state of the future at the dawn of 2024
Topics: The future of American society, politics, and the economy; The Climate Crisis; Technology and Innovation; Interaction and UX Design.
Contexts: Opening the doors of perception
I begin writing this at the dusk of 2023 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Esalen is a legendary holistic retreat center renowned for its workshops in personal growth, meditation, yoga, and other alternative and non-Western practices. Since its founding in 1962, Esalen has hosted many famous visionaries and alternative thinkers. This includes Aldous Huxley, an English writer and philosopher who authored the dystopian 1932 novel “Brave New World.” Huxley’s premonitions about the dangers of a technologically dominated existence describe the world we live in today in many ways. Huxley and many others came to Esalen, in part, to envision alternative futures that are human-centered rather than profit-driven. However, I am reminded of another famous (fictional) person who visited Esalen. Don Draper, the lead character from the TV series “Mad Men,” came here and was inspired to design a world-changing TV commercial for Coca-Cola. This storyline telegraphed how capitalism would exploit human-centered design methods to create wildly profitable products and services that are harmful to humans.
Over the past year, I have done a tremendous amount of futures research on a wide range of topics and domains. I have interviewed more than a dozen scientists worldwide working at the forefront of emerging technologies and spent time learning about macro trends at the Asia-Pacific Futures Forum and the Geopolitical Futures group. I have collected and analyzed enormous amounts of data on human behaviors and mental models and strived to understand and empathize with viewpoints and cultures radically different from mine. Making sense of the data is difficult, but learning to empathize with people I strongly disagree with is harder still. But as both a futurist and a designer, I found this process vital to my practice, stripping away my ego and momentarily disassociating from my personal beliefs so that I could look and listen with openness and neutrality. It required extreme humility to listen without bias to other viewpoints and ultimately admit that my perceptions are one among many valid others. In a future article, I will write about the personas I created of America’s working class and poor Gen-Z from the Midwest and South, who are left out of the opportunities available to the wealthy and mostly coastal Gen-Z. I did my own research and created these personas because I couldn’t find sufficient data about these people, America’s forgotten and left-behind Gen-Z.
Aldous Huxley’s quote, “There are things known, and there are things unknown, and in between the two are the doors of perception,” encapsulates the idea that our understanding of reality is shaped by what we know, what we don’t know, and the way we perceive the world. The “things known” refer to our knowledge and experiences, while the “unknown” represents vast knowledge and experiences beyond our current awareness. The “doors of perception” symbolize our subjective interpretation and understanding of these known and unknown aspects. Our perception acts as a filter, shaping how we interpret and interact with the world around us. This quote invites contemplation on the limitations of our understanding, the potential for expanding our knowledge, and the pivotal role perception plays in bridging the known and the unknown. Meditating on what I learned about the future in the past year and sitting in the same place where Huxley contemplated the future afforded me the opportunity to integrate those learnings and discover hidden patterns.
The future of American society, politics, and the economy
It’s no secret that American society today is deeply divided and dissatisfied. Several factors are driving social and cultural friction and instability. Dr. George Friedman, founder of the Geopolitical Futures group, studies historical patterns in human societies and then relies upon those patterns for forecasting, typically focusing on macro-scale socio-political and economic trends rather than specific events. Dr. Friedman has identified two major historical cycles in America that repeat in our 247-year history with uncanny consistency. These two repeating patterns are the 80-year institutional and 50-year socio-economic cycles. The decade preceding the end of a cycle is typically filled with social and political friction, and we find ourselves in the 2020s, for the first time in history, with both prior cycles ending almost simultaneously.
The end of the Roosevelt Institutional Cycle
Institutional cycles in America define the fundamental relationship between the government and the American people. Institutional cycles have always been triggered by major wars that cause significant disruption to American society. The first was the War of Independence, the second was the American Civil War, and the third was World War II. The current “Roosevelt Cycle” started in 1945 and is due to expire in 2025. That means the United States is due for another reinvention of government that will begin in the middle of this decade and then mature between 2035 and 2040.
While the change of institutional cycles has historically been triggered by significant wars, the underlying causes are always socio-economic. Institutional cycles collapse due to two factors: a deeply unhappy populace due to socio-economic inequality and an overproduction of elites who are the main drivers of inequality.
Will the pattern of institutional cycles continue? Many indicators suggest that it will. The decade before institutional changeovers has always been marked by social frictions and culture wars. The American culture wars from 2015–2024 look very similar to the sociocultural frictions of the 1760s-70s, 1850s-60s, and 1930s-40s.
Today, we see many systems breaking down as higher education has become unaffordable for most Americans, students are saddled with life-crushing debt, more Americans are sliding out of the middle class into poverty, and housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable. The economy is going strong from Wall Street’s perspective as companies are making record profits, and America has more millionaires and billionaires than at any point in history. Just 10% of the population owns more than 67% of America’s wealth, while most Americans struggle to meet basic needs, and the wealth gap is widening rapidly. We are, in many ways, living in an age of techno-feudalism, and most Americans perceive the system to be inherently and blatantly unfair and getting worse every day.
The catalyst of war
The other pattern marker is a major war that catalyzes radical institutional change in governance. President Franklin D. Roosevelt failed in his initial attempts to enact his New Deal policies to pull America out of the Great Depression. Only the shock of World War II and his extraordinary wartime powers enabled him to remake American governance radically, which included a far more educated populace funded by the GI Bill, an expanded higher education system, unprecedented regulation of the economy, and social safety nets.
Dr. Friedman is clear that none of the current military conflicts are significant enough to catalyze institutional change, and the risk of such a major conflict in 2024 is low. However, if there is a significant war in the following years, the events of 2024 will set the stage.
Two high-risk areas are the Taiwan Straight and the South China Sea. In the former, China wants to assert its control over Taiwan, which maintains its independence. If China thinks it can take Taiwan without a direct or protracted military confrontation with the United States, it might go for it. China was on the path to becoming the largest economy in the world by 2030, but its economy has stalled out due to a combination of the global pandemic and the political crackdown on Chinese billionaires and tech companies. Many regional experts I listened to believe that China will be patient and wait to see how events unfold with the U.S. presidential elections and conflicts elsewhere, such as Ukraine. If Trump becomes the new U.S. president, the risk of China invading Taiwan increases significantly. This is because Trump is more friendly and submissive to President Xi, and Xi sees Trump as weak and incompetent. Biden and Xi, on the other hand, have a more adversarial relationship, and Biden is perceived as more likely to launch a robust military response.
The conflict between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea revolves around territorial claims and maritime rights. Here, the risk of war is likely more to do with a minor skirmish spiraling into a broader war that pulls in other nations. Filipino leadership does not seem afraid of a direct conflict with China, and territorial and maritime rights are critical for global supply chains and the economies of all regional nations. Again, China’s restraint in such a conflict will be influenced, in part, by the outcome of the U.S. elections.
America had one civil war, and many of the issues of that war, particularly around racism and oppression of White Americans toward Black Americans (and more generally, people of non-European descent), are still unresolved. We see this dynamic today with an unprecedented number of banned books across the country in attempts to remove African-American and Native/Indigenous history from schools and libraries. LGBTQ+ people are also frequent targets of hate and censorship.
The results of the 2024 elections will determine the risk of civil war in 2025–2030. This is primarily driven by Trump’s ability to amplify divisions and drive his followers to commit violence. If Biden becomes president, the risk of civil war increases. If Trump becomes president, he will very likely lose the election as he did in 2016 but become president via the arcane Electoral College, further angering a disenfranchised majority of voters. With a second Biden presidency, we could see another insurrection similar to the one on January 6, 2020. It’s difficult for us to imagine because no one alive remembers America’s first civil war. A more successful insurrection by right-wing militants, especially if it targeted multiple sites across the country, could quickly spiral out of control. Most people don’t realize how close the insurrectionists were in 2020 to capturing Vice President Mike Pence and Congresswoman/Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, dragging them to the Capitol steps, and hanging them to death from a gallows they brought for that purpose. Pence and Pelosi escaped by the skin of their teeth and, in Pence’s case, by the bullet of a Secret Service agent.
A military conflict between the U.S. and China would be immensely damaging for both nations and disruptive for the world. A second American civil war would be shocking and very disruptive. Both could be sufficient catalysts for America’s next institutional cycle. However, Dr. Friedman admits that historical patterns don’t always repeat. A new pattern may emerge due to disruptions from powerful AI technologies and/or climate catastrophes. So far, the pattern is holding. The events of 2024 will bring into focus the risks of a catalyzing war. Another possibility, Dr. Friedman said, is that America figures out how to change institutional cycles without going to war. Let us all hope for a soft landing.
The end of the Reagan Socio-Economic Cycle
Dr. George Friedman’s theory posits the Reagan Socio-Economic Cycle, inaugurated in 1980 with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, as a defining era in American socio-economic policy. This cycle emphasized deregulation, free-market principles, and a focus on reducing economic government intervention. Over the decades, this approach spurred economic growth, technological innovation, and globalization, leading to substantial wealth accumulation for a small minority of elites while also exacerbating income inequality and shifting economic dynamics. However, as the cycle approaches its projected conclusion in 2030, signs of strain are increasingly apparent. Structural issues such as extreme wealth inequality, stagnant wage growth for most Americans, and the challenges posed by technological disruption and globalization fuel social unrest and political polarization. Moreover, the resilience of the cycle faces trials due to mounting environmental concerns, evolving geopolitical tensions, and uncertainties brought forth by demographic shifts and the changing nature of work.
The culmination of the Reagan Socio-Economic Cycle in 2030 signals a pivotal juncture in American and global economic paradigms. As the cycle nears its end, there’s a growing recognition of the need for fundamental reassessment and recalibration of socio-economic policies. Key challenges include addressing income inequality, ensuring economic inclusivity, mitigating the adverse impacts of technological advancements on employment, and navigating the complexities of a rapidly changing global landscape. Moreover, the climate crisis is entirely upon us and worsening every year, putting more strain on the economy, driving a refugee crisis, and further widening inequality as climate disasters disproportionally affect the poor and middle class. The conclusion of this cycle presents an opportunity for reimagining economic models, emphasizing equitable distribution of resources, and fostering resilience in the face of emerging challenges, marking a potentially transformative phase in socio-economic policymaking towards a circular or doughnut economy.
In 2024, we will experience the worsening conditions brought by the structural flaws of this cycle exacerbated by climate crisis disruptions. By 2030, the top 10% will own more than 80% of the nation’s wealth. Then the Reagan cycle will collapse, and a new socio-economic cycle will usher in a reset that historically has always created more equity and more social mobility. Dr. Friedman believes that the next U.S. president will be the last placeholder of the Roosevelt and Reagan cycles, and whoever is elected president in 2028 or 2032 will preside over the start of the next cycles.
The Climate Crisis
The global climate crisis is the most pressing and escalating global concern, marked by increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events worldwide. The impacts of climate change continue to manifest in rising temperatures, accelerated melting of polar ice caps, intensified hurricanes, prolonged droughts, and devastating wildfires. The scientific consensus remains resolute on the human-induced nature of these changes, primarily driven by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from industrial activities, deforestation, and reliance on fossil fuels. International efforts to combat climate change have seen mixed progress, with advancements in renewable energy adoption and pledges for carbon neutrality juxtaposed against challenges in global cooperation, policy implementation, and meeting ambitious emissions reduction targets. Urgent calls for collective action, policy reforms, and sustainable practices echo across sectors, emphasizing the critical need for immediate and comprehensive measures to mitigate the escalating impacts of the climate crisis and safeguard the planet for future generations.
The world missed the opportunity to prevent the climate crisis at least 10–15 years ago. We are now fully in a crisis, and with global greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise, we are still going in the wrong direction. International climate accords have clearly failed, and the United Nations COP28 Climate Conference held in Dubai in late 2023 was no exception. In 2024, the world will temporarily cross the +1.5ºC (average global temperature increase over pre-industrial levels) warming mark and permanently rise above that temperature within a few years. At this pace, we will cross +2.0ºC in the 2030s. This represents catastrophic climate change that includes loss of farmland, mass starvation, superstorm events, disruption of global supply chains, exponentially rising sea levels, and a rapidly worsening refugee crisis. Going much above +2.0ºC warming is civilization-ending.
While we missed the opportunity to prevent the climate crisis, there is still time to mitigate the damage and save the future of humanity and thousands of species and ecosystems. The good news is that we do not need any magical new technologies to save us. We have everything we need to solve the climate crisis. We must change our global economy, energy, food, transportation, and how we make and consume products. It’s all about changing policy and culture.
We must stop using fossil fuels as soon as possible. All remaining fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground. We must get 100% of our energy from renewable sources as quickly as possible. All agriculture must be regenerative, and meat consumption must be reduced (particularly beef and pork). We need to use a lot less energy and fewer resources. We need a circular global economy that balances people’s needs with the planet’s carrying capacity.
While much of the news is bad, and changing monolithic systems and power structures can seem impossible, I remain stubbornly hopeful. During times of friction and disruption, it becomes more possible to topple old giants and design new systems. As a futurist, I seek insights into potential futures from those doors of perception. As a designer, I seek opportunities to create better futures. And the opportunities we have are enormous:
- We can redesign our energy systems to be more local, resilient, and renewable.
- We can redesign transportation systems to phase out private car ownership, and embracing remote work can eliminate the daily commute.
- We can redesign our food systems to be more local, healthy, and regenerative. Through my research, I discovered that younger generations are eating more sustainably, an early sign of a broader societal shift.
- We have an opportunity to redesign how we move people and things around to shrink or eliminate global supply chains and reduce unnecessary consumption and waste.
- We can redesign a society around human needs, social equity, and planetary carrying capacity.
- We have an opportunity to design ways to draw carbon out of the atmosphere so that we can gradually return the Earth to a more stable climate for future generations.
Any efforts to design or build anything that is not contributing to a sustainable, equitable, and regenerative future are leading us off a cliff of global civilizational collapse. Now, every year is a pivotal year to push hard on climate action.
Zooming in: Technology and Innovation
It’s not going out on a limb to predict that AI embedded into all sorts of products and services will be one of the most significant driving factors in technology and economic growth in 2024. I have already previewed many of the products and services that will be displayed at the Consumer Electronics Conference in Las Vegas in January, and AI is everything, everywhere, all at once.
In 2023, OpenAI’s attempted removal of its CEO stirred controversy and shed light on the complex interplay between AI development, corporate interests, and ethical considerations. The conflict arose over differing visions regarding OpenAI’s direction, with concerns about prioritizing profit, achieving AI superiority, and diverging perspectives on ethical AI implementation. This incident underscored broader industry trends where Big Tech companies, driven by competitive pressures and the pursuit of AI dominance, prioritize technological advancements and financial gains over concerns related to safety, ethical implications, and the potential human costs associated with unchecked AI development. The outcome of this episode highlighted the ongoing tension between the imperative for AI innovation and the need for responsible, ethically guided AI deployment in a landscape where profit motives usually overshadow broader societal considerations. In 2024, corporate AI projects will increasingly disregard safety or inclusion in pursuing AI dominance.
We will also see generative AI power incredible new creative and coding tools for designers and developers, new content creation tools, agentive personalization, more sophisticated AI assistants, and improvements in AI contextual understanding and interpretation. This will also drive increasing anxiety about the loss of skilled jobs. In particular, creative fields like graphic design and illustration and technical fields like software development and engineering are at high risk of being made redundant by AI, even if the AI outputs are inferior.
We will see unprecedented use of AI for cyber attacks, spreading disinformation and deepfakes, and amplifying discrimination and hate speech. In particular, the U.S. presidential election will be flooded with a tsunami of disinformation and deepfakes, making truthful reporting nearly impossible. In 2024, “X” (Twitter) will be a significant source of disinformation and hate speech, driving its continued loss of advertisers, revenue, and reputation. It will limp along as a zombie company.
The Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023 reverberated across the entertainment industry, signaling a pivotal moment in the ongoing debate surrounding generative AI and human creativity. At the heart of these strikes were concerns about fair compensation, creative autonomy, and the growing use of AI-generated content. The protests highlighted tensions between traditional creative professionals and the increasing utilization of generative AI in content creation, raising questions about AI-generated work’s ethical and economic implications. As the industry grappled with these challenges, the strikes sparked crucial conversations about the future landscape of entertainment, emphasizing the need for clear guidelines, ethical frameworks, and equitable compensation models that honor human creativity and AI’s role in content creation in 2024 and beyond. This pivotal moment is likely to shape ongoing discussions on the symbiotic relationship between generative AI and human creativity, influencing how these technologies are utilized while safeguarding the rights and contributions of human creators.
Human-AI cooperation is more powerful and effective for many jobs than replacing humans. However, most large corporate interests don’t see it that way. They see labor as an expense that can be reduced to increase profits. An area that will see increased automation in 2024 is in the service industry. In the past few years, I have worked with several clients on automation or remote work systems for applications like fast food ordering and checkout, drive-through restaurants and pharmacies, and intelligent city kiosks. In most cases, regardless of lip service paid to “human-centered design,” the goals of corporations are clear: eliminate labor and increase profits.
A company I want to highlight for its use of AI to improve people’s lives AND reduce carbon emissions is Xtelligent. Xtelligent is revolutionizing urban infrastructure by harnessing the power of AI to transform traffic management systems and combat traffic congestion while prioritizing environmental sustainability. We all know the frustration of sitting in our car at a traffic light and realizing that there’s no reason for it to be red in one direction with traffic while it’s green in the other direction for absolutely no traffic. This is a problem we can all see and diagnose. Through cutting-edge AI algorithms and real-time data analysis, Xtelligent’s innovative platform dynamically adjusts traffic lights based on current traffic flow patterns, optimizing signal timing to alleviate congestion hotspots. The system efficiently routes vehicles by intelligently predicting and adapting to traffic conditions, reducing idle time and minimizing emissions. This AI-driven approach not only enhances traffic efficiency but also contributes significantly to reducing the carbon footprint of cities, promoting smoother traffic flow, shorter commute times, and a more environmentally conscious urban landscape. Xtelligent stands at the forefront of leveraging AI to create smarter, greener cities, emphasizing sustainable and efficient transportation solutions for a better future. This company signals a trend in 2024 in “civ-tech,” a term my friend and colleague Richard Pelletier (who works with Xtelligent) coined for technology that benefits people at the societal level.
The exponential growth and widespread deployment of AI technologies have raised concerns about their substantial carbon footprint and energy consumption. The computational demands of training and running AI models, particularly deep learning algorithms, necessitate significant computational power and energy resources. This massive energy consumption, predominantly sourced from fossil fuels in many cases, contributes to environmental degradation and exacerbates climate change concerns. As AI applications proliferate across industries, the escalating energy demands pose a looming challenge. There’s a risk of reaching a critical juncture where the environmental cost of AI becomes untenable, prompting the need for a reassessment of AI deployment strategies and a focus on energy-efficient computing solutions.
Balancing the incredible potential of AI with the imperative of sustainability requires concerted efforts toward developing energy-efficient algorithms, optimizing hardware, and exploring alternative energy sources to ensure that AI innovation aligns with global sustainability goals. We need to address these challenges to avoid limitations in AI implementation, necessitating reevaluating our reliance on AI-driven technologies to mitigate its unsustainable energy demands.
Interaction and UX Design
While some creative fields are at high risk of redundancy via AI automation, interaction design and UX design show signs of continued resiliency and growth. The disruptive generative AI tools of 2023 have been quickly integrated into the workflows of all the interaction and UX designers and UX researchers I know. Rather than threatening jobs, AI is turbo-charging the interaction and UX fields, speeding up workflows and improving outcomes. For example, UX researchers are using ChatGPT to aggregate large amounts of qualitative data, performing an enormous card-sorting exercise in seconds. I tested this with some of my data and performed a manual card-sorting exercise as a comparison, and ChatGPT produced excellent results. However, interaction, UX design, and service design are about synthesizing many different qualitative and quantitative data sources and using empirical methods and informed intuition to solve complex human problems. AI is a great tool to help in parts of that process, but it still requires a human to navigate the entire process creatively. Human-AI cooperation is the future of these design fields.
While some tech industry layoffs will continue in 2024, interaction and UX design jobs will grow in industries outside of Silicon Valley tech. These industries include finance and banking, retail and service, and enterprise-level sectors such as energy, aerospace, and logistics.
In 2024, we will see expanded job growth for interaction and UX designers in American government, from the federal to the state and local levels. Government at all levels will hire an unprecedented number of UX designers. There is a tremendous opportunity here for designers to begin designing the next institutional and socio-economic cycles of American governance. Much of how Americans interface with the government will be through digital interfaces in the future. Service Design Blueprinting can help us visualize new systems of governance that are truly human-centered and mission-driven. Our economy has become so skewed that it no longer serves the people and is killing the planet. We must design an economy that balances all people’s needs with the planet’s carrying capacity. Humanity’s future relies upon our ability to design sustainable and equitable systems.
Designer entrepreneurs will also have unprecedented opportunities to launch startups that ethically, equitably, and sustainably serve real human needs. As the realities of climate crises batter us with greater frequency and ferocity, the most innovative companies will be B-Corps and worker-owned cooperatives that recognize the current institutional and socio-economic structures have failed and new systems need to be architected.
2024 will be a year of tremendous friction and discord in America. Interaction and UX designers will have expanding opportunities while working in a society at war with itself and an election marred by an unprecedented flood of disinformation. Within the doors of perception exists a pivotal crossroads where innovation converges with responsibility. As we forge ahead into uncharted territories, let us navigate this threshold with both caution and courage, recognizing that while endless possibilities await, the choices we make today will determine whether we step into a future illuminated by human potential and sustainability or descend into a darker landscape of ethical compromise, extreme inequality, and environmental collapse.
