What do you think life in the UK will be like 30 years from now?

[Blancmangemouse]

The year is 2053. I will hopefully be about to retire. What do you think life will be like?

I remember in my teenage years I became irrationally convinced I would die at 25. I remember reading that young people inexperienced with life can feel this way because they just can’t picture their future selves in an adult world which is unknown to them.

Now mid 30s I am getting similar feelings and it could be because the future seems so uncertain. AI, Climate Crisis, World Powers shifting- etc etc.

So what do you think 2053 will realistically look like?

Ever watched the Last of us? Like that.

@Howpo

Fusion will happen. It already happens. When WE will harness Fusion reactions is debatable. It's not fantasy though. I don't think it's that far off. And once it does. Woohoo!

And everyone gets a bit agitated about 'AI', it's just machine learning. If you actually understand how current 'AIs' work, you wouldn't be that scared.

The singularity may be close but I don't think it's anything to be scared of.

It's just computing power.

Do you know what?

The world will be absolutely fine.

It really will.

Stop making yourselves go mad.

We will absolutely all die. But we'll absolutely all die in a slightly better world than the one we were born in.

We're not going to be scrapping over the ashes.

People from 50-60 years ago thought we'd be much further ahead than we are now. I'm sure once man got to the moon everyone thought 'that's it! We will be taking holidays there in 20 years and cars will be electric and we will have robots doing housework by the turn of the century...'. I was alive then.
I'm not sure it will be that different from now in 2053. Sure there will be different jobs, just like when computers and Internet became widespread. But I'm living in a house (London) that's over 130 years old. I live in a different way than those who built it, but not that different than those from 40 years ago. My daughter may well be living in it with her own kids inn2053, and they may well go to the same school down the road that's there now. Her car may look different (in fact I bet she won't have one), and her job may not be what she envisions now, but day to day life will still be as it is in terms of routine.

We will have herbivorous pets as no one will be able to afford the meat to feed cats and dogs.
I'd quite like a pet goat.

@Hal9001 I ve several IT related qualifications thankyou, i ve just finished a Global Knowledge one in SIP essentials.. You?

I ve seen first hand how moving from analogue to digital and now IP has affected communications... BT's latest announcement will add to this.

I'm currently contracting for a data security company, the move to AI is going to transform our world, for better or for worse, as many established and cutting edge companies are also saying.

AI is far far more than "computing power" you clearly don't know what you are talking about in your "all will be be fine and dandy" world.

Fusion is not "nearly" there, no one thinks that and even if it does become feasible, it does not solve the UKs falling to bits housing stock, NHS, education, the environment issues let alone migration.

Whether the world falls to bits will depend on how we deal with these issues and first step is to acknowledge them, not stick your fingers in your ears, singing God Save the King.

The concept of society may suffer. People will mainly live in/on their phones. They will be influenced by what they see on their phones, what they see in their phones will be what they chose to see, so an ongoing feedback loop. This will affect who is elected to govern us. People will not attempt to understand complex issues, a TikTok style video will be considered enough to help someone decide who to vote for or what to think. Concentration will be virtually impossible as media content grows and becomes splintered even more. Everything will be available at home, via your phone, so people will go out and socialise a lot less, this will mean we are less tolerant of others or interested in getting to know other people. People will feel more paranoid that other people are a risk to them, they will stay at home more to feel safe. Other people may actually be more of a risk if there is greater poverty and food shortages.

I think for every bad thing that you can see coming, there is a good thing to offset it. Work going on in combating climate change, general advances in tech and medecine. The UK has always been good at inventing things and necessity is the mother of invention. But the phone thing is the tricky thing for me. You see entire families just sitting staring slack jawed into phones and everyone always seems to want to be somewhere else, talking to someone else.

I find discussions like this really weird because it seems that people believe there's some mysterious power controlling everything and they have no personal control whatsoever.

If you're aged 20-65 currently, you are the controlling power, you are part of the generation of adults forming the future for 2053. There's no mysterious being doing it for you. If you think it's going to be shit, why not try to change it? You have 30 years.

My predictions are:
A form of hydrogen power will be developed making energy and travel cheap and clean
We will crack or be on the way to cracking how to manage the human immune system and that will be the key to curing a huge number of diseases. Many cancers will become trivial and easily dealt with
Climate change will be a problem, though not as big as many make it out to be. Falling population will be a much bigger problem - the balance will tip too much towards older people. Some countries will roll back women's rights and use coercion to induce women to have more children, others will use incentives, some will actually figure out what it takes to make having more children attractive and they will pull ahead of other countries in terms of wealth and ability to take care of the elderly. The past obsession with curbing immigration will seem ridiculous - there will be competition for younger people, schemes to attract workers, potentially conflict over who gets the younger, fertile people.
Hopefully the nonsense about AI taking over everything will have died out and will look as ridiculous as the prediction that we'd all have flying cars in 2020.
I'm hoping at some point we'll recognise that tech is great but it's just a tool and that it's there to support people and make their work/lives easier, not replace them.

Anyone who thinks we're fucked would do well to remember that 3 years ago you weren't allowed to visit your friends and people were trying to report their neighbours for taking a walk.

We're no shining example of anything and yet here we are, soldiering on.

There's no decking way I'm implanting something like that in my body!!

Dim question: what is fusion? Is it nuclear energy or something else?

If everything is digitised and people socialise online and stay at home, there will be counter movements with people seeking to live off grid in small, self-governing low impact communes. This will have an impact on gender roles, but there could also be female only communes.

Harrison Bergeron is a film set in the year 2053. I think it might have some things right.

• That there was a 'forever recession'
• The state responded by imposing total control over everything to manage it all
• The state dumbed people down so they didn't mind

You can watch it on YT:

Complex adaptive systems such as the global economic super organism cannot be controlled that way. Ultimately, everything abides the Maximum Power Principle as dictated by thermodynamics. You think we have some control over how all this goes down, but evidence shows that’s a fiction.

No, voting in progressive green parties will not stop climate change and biosphere collapse and inequality.

Hydrogen, by the way, isn’t an energy source. It’s an energy carrier.

There will be a 2 tier society of adults. Those who spent their teenage years doom scrolling and losing their creativity, concentration and good mental health to their phones. And those who didn’t. Social Media for under 18s will be banned in the next 10 years when the effects on mental health can’t be ignored anymore.

Ok @Howpo, I'm not sure you do know how current AI works.

But well done on your qualifications.

We don't have AGI yet.

AI as we have it has many applications, and yes, it will transform the workplace in terms of the service economy. It can and will take over the call centres etc.

'AI' as we have it isn't really intelligent. It's just a language model, and yes, its competency is related to computing power.

Also, fusion has been replicated in labs. It's not workable yet. But it's possible.

I don't 'stick my fingers in my ears'.

But carry on with your portents of Doom if that floats your boat.

I think that we'll be OK.

And if the world falls to bits, hey-ho, the world falls to bits.

You know that it doesn't really matter.

Because nothing really matters.

Where did I say anything about voting in progressive green parties?

Things like economic super organism sound clever but are essentially meaningless. And if you believe in concepts like that I'd point out that an organism is the sum of its parts - we are all a part, no matter how small. It simply doesn't exist without us.

If you had told someone in 1900 that in 2008 that a black man would be president of the US there is no way on earth they would have believed you. The world changes in ways that are hard to predict, partly because of how ideas catch on and grow among people. The idea that we're all helpless cogs is just pure bollocks - it's a comforting way for people to abdicate responsibility for the world they are creating.

I hope this is true!

Sustainable community living off grid in somerset. This might be a way of living that will appeal to more people the more we digitise ourselves.

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Not to belittle your fears, but people said similar things about women wearing shorter skirts, women going out to work, women wearing trousers (seeing a theme?), tv, rock and roll, the Pill, etc etc etc.

The world changes. As you get older it's harder to accept that - you start to lose touch and feel out of the loop. There are upheavals - early 20th century had two world wars ffs - but things do try to get back to some sort of equilibrium.

I'd like to point out also that in the west we've lived for a long time in a white patriarchy - the voices of white men have always been the loudest, setting the tone and the agenda. White men are now finding that they don't have quite the same hold on everything anymore - they now have to compete with people they could have totally disregarded in the past. That feels scary to them - they don't know how to be in a world where everything isn't centred on them and they're expressing that fear in their particular way, through doom and in some cases, violence.

If you were a black woman in the early 1800s in many parts of the west your life would likely be horrendous - you had a very high chance of being a slave and if you weren't you had very little chance of prosperity for you and your children. Things aren't fantastic now, but they are a darn sight better than that.

I think we have a responsibility not to listen to the doom mongers because there is also often an agenda behind that - you tell people the world is awful and it'd be better if they went back to 'traditional values' for example, or if they left the EU. White men really really don't want to share.

much more ethnically diverse uk
probably back in the EU
probably universal basic income (AI) but plenty of jobs still around (leisure time for all never seems to happen)
more biodiversity in the Uk than now
A world dominated by the east, but looking like it will switch to Africa, South America also very prominent, US much less so (and Europe, but we’re used to it)
Space exploration mostly dumped when everyone got a grip and realised colonisation was way off / and how expensive managing climate change was.
Hot summers, a lot of rain, a lot of climate challenge
Extinct species WW
a huge problem with climate migration and a fortress europe, whitewashed by various initiatives to manage climate change in the places that are really fucked

Give over

You are sounding like someone getting worked up about about flappers.

We will get better and managing it for sure, but humans have survived millennia of semi starvation, disease, and war, TikTok isn’t taking us down

😁

@Hal9001

Given you don't think it matters nor did you read what i wrote, does suggest you have your fingers in your ears, your blinkers on and your head in the sand.

Have Great Day!

No idea. I may well not be here by then or you old / senile to care or notice.

Everyday life has changed a lot in the past 30 years, in ways we didn't imagine, so who knows. Technological advances are hard to predict and they have had a huge impact.

As for politics, world order etc. In my late teens / 20s, we were waiting for what seemed like an inevitable nuclear war. That was in the 80s.

You do know that people worried about the impact on the young that reading novels would have, once upon a time?

Something that would make a huge positive difference would be if men would sort themselves out. They cause so much misery every day for no good reason. Imagine a world where a woman could walk alone down a street at 2am and feel safe?
If we could get there, we could get anywhere.