Prosthetic Conscience

No first-world lifestyle anywhere in 50 years

I heard Jared Diamond, author of Collapse and others on National Pentagon Radio yesterday. He was saying that unless we solve all of about 12 different resource crunches (the top ones being energy, water, and topsoil), no one anywhere in the world would be living what we now consider a first-world lifestyle anywhere in the world in 50 years. This morning I thought a little about different non-first-world lifestyles the people of Earth might be living 50 years from now.

1. 9 billion humans living mostly modern third-world urban lifestyles, like Calcutta ragpickers or Caracas shantytown dwellers. A vanishingly small global elite hangs on to something similar to a modern lifestyle, held in place only by the constant exercise of violence by private armies, but technological advancement ground to a halt a decade ago. Those on top are interested only in holding on to their remaining prerogatives for as long as they can, knowing that it can’t last.

2. 5 billion humans living in dispersed villages in heavily permicultured landscapes. People generally live where they work and vice-versa. Some high technology still exists, mostly for long-distance communication, powered by a diversity of low-yield, decentralized, and sustainable energy sources. Long-distance travel, however, is as obsolete as consumerism. Tools, works of art, and toys are made as heirlooms to last generations. Every village is a little different from its neighbours, and peoples efforts to make their own entertainment lead to a flowering of all kinds of creativity.

3. A few tens of millions of deculturated, often cannibalistic savages scrounging in the bombed-out ruins of the cities for even the simplest tools, which they can use, but are unable to make. Many of these bands of wretches are deprived in ways no so-called primitive society ever was, being descended from consumers with no skills useful outside the culture they once lived in. Some have even all-but lost the use of language, being descended from packs of feral children.

4. Tens of billions of post-human minds, each more brilliant than we can imagine today, limited as we are. Their numbers are difficult to estimate, because they merge with each other, or spawn off partials and independent copies from moment to moment. At any given time, only a few of them occupy physical bodies, most of them living wholly virtual existences in dense matrices of highly-efficient computing substrate. The ones that do have a physical presence at any moment build bodies as they need them, perhaps nearly-baseline human, perhaps robotic. New sources of energy, and the lack of need of fuel for transportation or land for agriculture, mean that they bear more lightly on the land than the two billion baseline humans of a century ago. Many have left the Earth entirely.

Two of these societies blatantly failed to solve the problems ahead of us. One of them did everything right, and reached a “soft landing” with limited horizons, but the potential for abundant happiness at a humane scale. And one of them changed so radically that the problems we see ahead of us never had a chance to matter to them. We can’t even imagine what their real problems are.

What other possibilities do you see? What world do you want to live in? What world are you afraid we’ll get?

[ Posted: 20:31] | [ Category: /sci-tech] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]