What will the climate and economic situation look like in 25 years for our young people?

[Teaandcaaaaake]

Trawling through lots of online articles, but it's hard to get a sense of what the outlooks are. It seems clear that food and clean water are going to become more challenging to provide for basically every country to a greater or lesser degree (but obviously, the massive unfairness is that lower income countries will be hit harder) and mass migration will keep growing.

But I can't picture what the reality of day to day life will be like? What will the world look like for young adults just starting out?

Lower income countries always bear the brunt of climate and economic change. In the UK I think there will be massive problems with food production because of climate change. We will have to go back to seasonal produce, which many people are not used to. Less rental properties and more demand will mean younger people will live at home for longer, possibly inheriting their parents home to continue to live in rather than buying their own places with. There will have to be less "throw away" items and trades will come back to fix rather than replace. Costs will continue to rise. We've been spoilt and these days are over. The younger generations will pay the price.

We'll probably be in a similar state to Albania. Only the well off will be able to afford education and healthcare, everyone else will just be left to go feral and fight it out between themselves. The police will be employed to protect the well off, not to solve actual crime.

AI will probably change things in ways we can't imagine.
There will probably be more erratic extreme weather events. The gap will probably continue to increase between the richest people and everyone else.

I agree with you @stbrandonsboat The less well off are pretty much on their own as it is in many deprived areas now. That will only continue to grow as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And many who are borderline ok - the "squeezed middle" - at the moment will become poorer. I know a lot of people who have been doing ok and are starting to struggle now, employment and finances are becoming much more problematic. It can only get worse for them.

I don't know anything about Albania - but your outline about who will be able to afford education and healthcare seems grimly plausible for the futures of people in currently high income countries everywhere.

It's shit. Who wants to live in a society like that, really?

That's the thing - I keep think of the squeezed middle people now, how will that picture look in 20 more years?

Could AI save us all somehow or is that clutching at straws?

I've been thinking more about this recently, and particularly how AI will affect marketing/advertising/our buying patterns/lifestyles. The next stage, which we're on the brink of, will be AI predicting our future purchases/motivations...mapping out a lifestyle over a lifetime rather than just the next 'recommended item for you based on previous purchases'.

The implications of this are pretty terrifying. Huge corporations who can afford to invest in this tech will have access to future data on us as well as past/present data. We'll effectively lose our free will to choose what we buy, unless we go totally local.

On that point, it sounds like on the surface that it would obviously be much better for the climate if we did stay local, but the UK can't grow all its own food to sustain the national population with current growing methods. So I predict there will be much more investment in different growing methods, vertical farming etc. We might not be eating seasonally after all, although that is the ideal. We'll be eating whatever is managed to be grown for the least cost.

The implications of this are pretty terrifying. Huge corporations who can afford to invest in this tech will have access to future data on us as well as past/present data. We'll effectively lose our free will to choose what we buy, unless we go totally local.

@creamedcustard sorry I'm being dim here but what do you mean?

My imagination and the single article I read about this (😂) suggest that AI will be able to collect data on us in the present, and map out what we'll want in the future...indefinitely. So we'll never make a fully informed/free will choice again ever, as advertising will be more personalised and manipulative. AI will know exactly which buttons to press to get us to buy something, whether we would have otherwise done or not without the extras.

Examples of this I was thinking of is if they combined a product advert/service trial with a favourite song of mine, the kind of emotive story they know will get me in just the right way, or a really evocative smell...of course I'd be more swayed to spend my money, time, data on it...eventually AI will be able to get a sense of my whole personality and make my choices for me. In lots of areas of my life.

Albania is poor, but at least they have nice weather and beautiful scenery, so they will ultimately do better than us.

@creamedcustard An interesting perspective. The very personalised adverts we get already do kind of freak me out - especially when you just have been talking about something and then suddenly get bombarded by ads.

To be fair, the UK does have some beautiful scenery too!

I think we can guarantee that shortages will not be dealt with fairly.

Suggest you stop doing that. It's all speculation and the important thing is what's happening now.
Look at old eps of Tomorrow's World...

The way the population is growing we

Won’t have water or green spaces.

Now I've read everything in the 'Britain is THE WORST' ridiculous comment stakes. Albania is grindingly poor, ask some actual Albanians. Most of them are angling to leave at least for work. OH was there a few years back and met a guy whose sole asset was...one cow.

What do you mean "our young people"? It'll be the same for all of us that aren't loaded. It isn't just young people that are affected by everything

Why do you take issue with my concern for younger generations?

Of course it will affect us all. But I feel lucky to have been a young person in the nineties and early 2000s, because things felt more hopeful to me then.

I think standards of living will decline as our current consumption becomes unsustainable. Some things don't really matter (like having a new kitchen rather than keeping the old one); others do (like heating). We may have to give up some of the things that make life more pleasurable or simply easier (pets, holidays, cars).

Not caused by environmental changes, but by other factors, housing is becoming a problem, with house prices increasing out of reach of many people, without the low and stable rents that were often available before house-buying was so common. Of course, looking further back, there was a lot of horrendous housing in this country, along with dire poverty and disease, but until recently changes have been for the better rather than for the worse.

Most worryingly, I think that at some point - in my children's lifetimes, and possibly in mine - there will be a major collapse of ecosystems, with rising seas and changing weather patterns, resulting in mass migrations and probably wars.

Brits rowing across the north sea to scandinavia in small boats, fleeing the arid hellscape the country became are turned around and sent to Rwanda by the Norwegian border guards.

Have neither you nor your husband ever met anyone in Britain with no assets?

I think a lot of people here have a lot of debt and no assets. No house, no car. Not even a cow.

I don't have any assets

Maybe the dog?

Can't milk it though