Predictions for 2301

[Ares Land]

Okay, here's a little conworlding exercise some of you might find fun. (Plus it'll take my mind off the whole fascism things.)

I've picked 2301 as sufficiently far away to be interesting, but not so remote as to make all prediction meaningless.

What would be your predictions for the early 24th century?

Would you expect cities on Mars? The technological singularity? The end of civilization as we know it?
What kind of new technologies would you expect?

[bradrn]

I've picked 2301 as sufficiently far away to be interesting, but not so remote as to make all prediction meaningless.

My prediction: this is so far away as to make all prediction utterly meaningless. 300 years is a long time, especially in today’s society. Even as recently as 60 years ago, SF writers were struggling to predict the society of 2020. Three hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution hadn’t even begun yet. Three hundred years earlier, banks and printing presses were just being invented. The only prediction I have about the world three hundred years in the future is that it will be utterly unrecognisable to us 2020 dwellers. The only author who might possibly have gotten somewhat close to the truth is Douglas Adams.

[zompist]

What would be your predictions for the early 24th century?

I'd just note that nothing has occurred yet to disprove my Incatena timeline.

My prediction: this is so far away as to make all prediction utterly meaningless. 300 years is a long time, especially in today’s society. Even as recently as 60 years ago, SF writers were struggling to predict the society of 2020.

In detail, sure. In overall terms, not really. As just one example, Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in 1910 had a portrait of a rapacious capitalist Mars. The particulars were wrong (old SF had an obsession with airships), but "rapacious capitalism" was not at all a bad prediction. Nor was it just McCay; Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1887) had about the same prediction, though Bellamy had the dystopia reverse itself.

You could very easily predict the following in 1920, and get it all right:
* a century dominated by the USA
* the US would have almost exactly the same governmental system
* a huge role for Russia (Tocqueville predicted in 1840 that Russia and the US would be the future great powers)
* more and more destructive wars
* greater and greater industrialization; fast and reliable global transportation
* the increasing power of capitalists, tempered by the increasing anger of workers
* everyone connected electronically, often for mere amusement (see E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", 1909; it's also in Bellamy)
* the biggest crisis of our century-- global warming-- was predicted in the 1800s
* predictions of artificial life go back to 1818; robots and the threat of robots were predicted in 1921.
* on the science side, recall that general relativity was worked out by 1916, and radio communications were happening by 1910.
* air travel was not hard to imagine, inasmuch as it was invented 239 years ago.
* practical ideas on space travel go back at least to Jules Verne in 1865.
* it was also a commonplace that the future would be fast-paced and stressful-- because the Victorians felt that way about their own time.

Naturally you could produce a long list of mispredictions too. But representative government and laissez-faire capitalism have proven to have at least a century of staying power.

Ironically, pundits of 1920 would probably do way better at predicting 2020 than pundits of 1965. At that time, there had been two decades of American social democracy and progress at all levels of US society. This would have been missed by our 1920 thinkers, who could not imagine the triumph of the middle class and a reduction in the contradictions of capitalism. But it's now clear that people of the 1960s assumed incorrectly that the good things of that period would continue indefinitely.

Or, let's take a look from 30,000 feet. When was the earliest you could see capitalism, crushing debt, courts and law codes, rapacious landlords and rulers, corporations, international trade, power projection by the more advanced countries, as well as complaints of mistreatment from the poor, and rulers occasionally listening to them? You could find all that in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago.

Sure, if you were frozen and woke up in 2301, you'd find a lot of surprises and probably initially be entirely baffled. But by 2302 you'd probably be up to speed, and able to recognize a lot of the baffling stuff as new versions or developments of stuff you know now. Someone from 1910 already knew what an "airplane" was, and had grown up on science fiction about airships. You can ding them for not knowing exactly what a Boeing 777X is, but they were perfectly capable of understanding what air travel was and how it could affect the world.

The only author who might possibly have gotten somewhat close to the truth is Douglas Adams.

Now here I agree with you!

[bradrn]

My prediction: this is so far away as to make all prediction utterly meaningless. 300 years is a long time, especially in today’s society. Even as recently as 60 years ago, SF writers were struggling to predict the society of 2020.

In detail, sure. In overall terms, not really. As just one example, Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in 1910 had a portrait of a rapacious capitalist Mars.

Sorry, I should have worded that better. All serious predictions are ‘utterly meaningless’. What often turn out to come true are the ‘predictions’ which aren’t even meant as predictions: the zany, weird ones which were made purely to astound, which not even the creator seriously thinks will come true. I think this is why The Machine Stops and Little Nemo were so on-point in their predictions, and why I mentioned Douglas Adams as the only modern author who might have had some success in his.

(I got a lot of this from Yudkowsky, actually: Eutopia is Scary has some great examples of culture change even over short time spans. I highly recommend the whole article.)

You could very easily predict the following in 1920, and get it all right:
* a century dominated by the USA
* the US would have almost exactly the same governmental system
* a huge role for Russia (Tocqueville predicted in 1840 that Russia and the US would be the future great powers)
* more and more destructive wars
* greater and greater industrialization; fast and reliable global transportation
* the increasing power of capitalists, tempered by the increasing anger of workers
* everyone connected electronically, often for mere amusement (see E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", 1909; it's also in Bellamy)
* the biggest crisis of our century-- global warming-- was predicted in the 1800s
* predictions of artificial life go back to 1818; robots and the threat of robots were predicted in 1921.
* on the science side, recall that general relativity was worked out by 1916, and radio communications were happening by 1910.
* air travel was not hard to imagine, inasmuch as it was invented 239 years ago.
* practical ideas on space travel go back at least to Jules Verne in 1865.
* it was also a commonplace that the future would be fast-paced and stressful-- because the Victorians felt that way about their own time.

Yes, but did anyone actually seriously predict these? Or even make any serious attempt at predictions, and get more than a 50% success rate?

I also disagree about some of your ‘accurate predictions’ — in particular, that of ‘rapacious capitalism’. I agree we’re not in a great state, but is it really as bad as 1920s-era capitalism? Also, strictly speaking Arrhenius just figured out the science behind global warming; I don’t recall him predicting that it would actually occur.

Furthermore, I’ll note that all this is only over a 100-year timespan… Ares Land was asking about predictions over three times that length! The difference is important.

Sure, if you were frozen and woke up in 2301, you'd find a lot of surprises and probably initially be entirely baffled. But by 2302 you'd probably be up to speed, and able to recognize a lot of the baffling stuff as new versions or developments of stuff you know now. Someone from 1910 already knew what an "airplane" was, and had grown up on science fiction about airships. You can ding them for not knowing exactly what a Boeing 777X is, but they were perfectly capable of understanding what air travel was and how it could affect the world.

This analogy might work over 100 years, but starts to break down over 300. Imagine if an average European person from 1722 was magically transported to 2022. Never mind aeroplanes, they’d have come from before the Industrial Revolution! Practically every aspect of our society and daily life has been radically altered over that timespan. Sure, some parts would be analogous to various things from the 18th century, but you can say that about practically any two societies; it doesn’t make them equivalent.

[Raphael]

Only tangentially related to the main topic of this thread, but some things in the previous posts remind me of my trivial pet idea that if a person from the Middle Ages would be somehow presented into the present, they'd find all kinds of things baffling and completely incomprehensible, but if you showed them a simple drinking mug, they'd instantly recognize what it is and what it is good for.

Perhaps I'll post again later with thoughts on the actual topic of the thread.

[Ares Land]

This is of course not meant as serious prediction but as fun speculation and a conworlding exercise
@bradrn: though of course your own prediction is entirely acceptable under the rules of the game!

I can't agree with Yudkowski, because I have a feeling the technological singularity is behind us. In fact, it looks like we picked most of the low hanging fruit and the pace of change is actually slowing down.

My eldest kid is eight. At her age: kids played video games (and quite few adults too), we worried about fascism, a pandemic, the excesses of capitalism. The country had been at peace for decades but there was a worrisome war in Eastern Europe. Everyone spent way too much time staring at screens. We had computers, and computer networks. There were a few astronauts in a space station in low orbit -- though some people made plans for a mission to Mars. People drove cars. Religion wasn't a big deal, though people were worried about immigrants and Islam. Racism was wrong.

Now, my parents' generation went through several epochal changes! But to be honest the world I live in is a very familiar one, and can't be said to have changed much since I was a kid.

[bradrn]

I can't agree with Yudkowski, because I have a feeling the technological singularity is behind us. In fact, it looks like we picked most of the low hanging fruit and the pace of change is actually slowing down.

Unusually for him, the post wasn’t about the singularity at all. It didn’t even mention it. It was purely about predicting the future, and I found it a very insightful comment on the subject too.

Now, my parents' generation went through several epochal changes! But to be honest the world I live in is a very familiar one, and can't be said to have changed much since I was a kid.

Well, this is hard to evaluate without knowing approximately how old you are…

[bradrn]

Only tangentially related to the main topic of this thread, but some things in the previous posts remind me of my trivial pet idea that if a person from the Middle Ages would be somehow presented into the present, they'd find all kinds of things baffling and completely incomprehensible, but if you showed them a simple drinking mug, they'd instantly recognize what it is and what it is good for.

I agree; I was thinking exactly the same thing just a few minutes ago (albeit with a glass instead of a mug). Lots of basic items have barely changed: desks, chairs, pens, musical instruments of all kinds. However, lots more have.

[Ares Land]

Well, this is hard to evaluate without knowing approximately how old you are…

Fair point I'm in my late thirties; my parents are in their late seventies.

[Raphael]

Well, this is hard to evaluate without knowing approximately how old you are…

Fair point I'm in my late thirties; my parents are in their late seventies.

I'm a little bit older than you; I'd say there was some amount of change between 1992, when I didn't know what the Internet was (although technically it already existed at the time) and was only very vaguely aware of portable phones; 1999, when I got slow-speed internet access at home, but still thought I'd go through my life without giving in to that stupid cellphone fad; 2005, when I got high-speed (by the standards of the time) internet and a fully multimedia-capable computer (all of my and my family's computers up to that point had been used ones that were already outdated when we got them), and had a dumbphone that could take very granular photos (see below); and 2012, when I switched to Android.

Here's a completely unmodified, not-in-any-way resized or cropped photo I took in early 2006 with my first cellphone. (Since I got on the cellphone bandwagon fairly late, my first ever cellphone already had something that might be charitably called a camera.) The photo shows a device that was, at the time, actually used in an actual scientific research institution; I did not take it in a museum. Apparently, some scientists simply don't like to throw anything away.

Bild011.jpg (14.15 KiB) Viewed 10138 times

[Ares Land]

Oh, and here's a list of my own predictions:

• Global population is about 9 billion, not very far from where we are today. Half of it's in Africa.
• The world is considerably richer than now: about 15 times more so. There are no spectacular effects in the West, but the poorest countries have a standard of living comparable to the world now.
• A good share of that wealth is owned by plutocrats; great wealth is rent-based and hereditary. The richest aren't entrepreneurs, but members of rich family, who owe most of their fortune to capital ownership.
• An equivalent share of that wealth is held by governments.
• Individual nations are technically independant. They share a great deal of their sovereignty with continent-sized unions and a world government of sorts. The exact details vary: each country has pretty much a different system, but countries have no independent foreign policy and don't control their own military (this last part is handled by a kind of global NATO.)
• China is important, of course, but India, the Arab World and Nigeria are more influential.
• The US is still the biggest superpower, or let's say the dominant partner in global governance. The US are also notable as a very socialist country by global standards.
• People are generally religious, and follow syncretic versions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism that bear little resemblance to their present-day incarnations. Or entirely new religions.
• The planet's noticeably warmer. Deserts have expanded, Amazonia is probably mostly savannah and sea levels have risen by two meters. Global warming has been halted by the crude expedient of releasing appropriate aeorosols in the atmosphere.
• Energy is cheap; mostly obtained through solar power (produced either on Earth or in orbit) with hydrogen as a transport mechanism.
• Industrial production is almost entirely automated. Most of it has moved in orbit. By contrast anything involving human contact is handled by human beings. In some ways society has moved away from automation in some areas: stores are staffed by humans, public transit may even be handled by humans.
• AI is ubiquitous but is definitely not sentient, nor is there any hint it's even going in that dimension. People use AI as an help and as a a way to supplement human intelligence. It remains to be seen if people directly implant stuff to their brains -- personally I think smartphones are a convenient shape that's going to stay for a long time.
• There's a lot of activity in space as resource extraction and industry moved there in the 22nd and 23rd centuries.
• On the other hand, there are people in space, but not that many people. Probably under a million. There are colonies on Mars, space habitats and asteroid colonies.
• Space travel is still fairly long and difficult. Count about a month to get to Mars when the planet's in a convenient position.
• Racism per se is kind of pointless. Most people are of very diverse ancestry. People have still found new things to be bigoted about.
• Cancer is an outmoded terms as medical research recognize instead a great variety of conditions; most of them are easily prevented or treated. Organ failure can be fixed by a wide array of prosthetic, when tissue isn't just regrown. Neurodegenerative diseases can be prevented and treated to a certain extent.
• In spite of all this, health still degrades past 90 and living to 100 is still somewhat rare.

[Travis B.]

As I see it, predictions from about 50-60 years or so ago were both overly, well, optimistic and underly so. Aside from satellites orbiting the Earth and the occasional space probe the Space Age was stillborn. Yet few really realized how significant the Information Age would be, even though some things were predicted such as cell phones (e.g. Star Trek's communicators), and even those were predicted as being mainly communication devices rather than the all-encompassing mobile computation devices they are today. (Yet at the same time, people were overly optimistic about AI when they did make predictions about such.)

[Ares Land]

As far as I can see, AI is still a blind spot. The dramatic potential of sentient AI is just too high to ignore!

The Space Age is just about right on track I think the race to the Moon was kind of a fluke. The current approach of sensible caution makes a lot more sense. (Even though it means I'll be dead when the first human walks on Mars, dammit!)

[alice]

An interesting exercise on this topic might be to hypothesise a Culture Test for 2301. Two entries go without saying:

- there sure are a lot of lawyers
- you think your kind of people aren't listened to enough in <appropriate-seat-of-government>

A cynic might also add:

- Donald Trump will still be complaining the election was rigged
- The Tories will still be in power, due more to the ineffectiveness of the opposition than anything else

[Travis B.]

- Donald Trump will still be complaining the election was rigged

I wonder if a mummified corpse can run for political office...

[zompist]

Sorry, I should have worded that better. All serious predictions are ‘utterly meaningless’. What often turn out to come true are the ‘predictions’ which aren’t even meant as predictions: the zany, weird ones which were made purely to astound, which not even the creator seriously thinks will come true.

If that's what you believe, you should look seriously at why you call bad predictions "serious" and good predictions "zany." Your heuristic is backwards!

Look at why Little Nemo or Adams seem convincing: they are satire. They are more a critique of their own times and environment than prediction. But it turns out that the prediction "the world won't change that much, only intensify" is a pretty good one. People are people— until we start messing with our DNA– and we're going to use new technology in lots of predictable ways, as the overeducated apes we are.

"The Machine Stops" isn't really satirical; it's pure sf in that it takes an idea and sees how it would work. But it eschews technological optimism entirely. Its idea is that people are foolish and will use their fancy new tech in foolish ways— and then, most people not understanding tech, they'll break their new toy.

(I got a lot of this from Yudkowsky, actually: Eutopia is Scary has some great examples of culture change even over short time spans. I highly recommend the whole article.)

I think he's right and not right. Narrowly: yes, the future will have some stuff that doesn't just baffle us but shocks us. But more broadly: he's a futurist, not a historian, and his whole shtick is playing with new ideas— he quotes with approval the dictum that "the opposite of happiness is boredom". There's nothing wrong with having that kind of mind, but a) a lot of people would love to have a "reassuring, unsurprising, and dull" life; and b) he may not be the best at finding commonalities and underlying sameness, because he recoils at that idea.

Take his example— in the 16C "one popular entertainment was setting a cat on fire." Oh, we have completely changed, says the reader, and then goes and watches a movie about a serial killer, or plays a video game where enemies' spines are removed when you punch them, or just watches videos about battles in Ukraine.

Furthermore, I’ll note that all this is only over a 100-year timespan… Ares Land was asking about predictions over three times that length! The difference is important.

This analogy might work over 100 years, but starts to break down over 300. Imagine if an average European person from 1722 was magically transported to 2022. Never mind aeroplanes, they’d have come from before the Industrial Revolution!

Ares Land's date is 279 years in the future, so we're talking 1743. By that year the Industrial Revolution was well underway, and over 100 Newcomen engines were in commercial use. (They were invented in 1712.). The roots of the modern world go back earlier than you think.

(I also agree with Ares Land that extrapolating the last 200 years of change into the next 200 is probably wrong. Extrapolation in general is a bad technique! I suspect that if you look at the "serious predictions" you mentioned, they rely heavily on it.)

Practically every aspect of our society and daily life has been radically altered over that timespan.

For you, yes— there were no Brits in Australia yet. But imagine the life of a London bourgeois in the 1700s. They would be doing things like these:

* hanging out in coffeeshops
* studying at Oxford or Cambridge
* going into business
* getting loans from large banks
* investing in that nascent Industrial Revolution
* voting in Parliamentary elections, for parties that (under new names) still exist today
* reading printed books and newspapers
* subscribing to scientific journals (first appeared in 1665)
* possibly attending services at an Anglican or Catholic church
* enjoying music by Bach and Handel
* and of course shopping, buying a house, getting married, raising kids

I like to gawp at the new toys myself, and I'm fascinated by little cultural changes; but that sense of dazzlement at the new is not a guide to prediction, or even writing SF. To recall a story I've used before: Jared Diamond likes to tell about a native New Guinean friend, who grew up in a near-Neolithic village. He was Diamond's helicopter pilot. Tech is fun, tech is confusing at first, tech can be mastered in a surprisingly short time.

[malloc]

My biggest prediction is that humans will either go extinct or become endangered by the twenty-fourth century. Currently we seem on track to annihilate ourselves through global warming or nuclear war. On the other hand, technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering are advancing by leaps and bounds. Given another few hundred years, it seems inevitable that superintelligent AIs or genetically enhanced post-humans will displace baseline humans, whether through direct competition or simply people opting to enhance themselves until they become unrecognizable as humans. Granted either of these might find us quaint enough to keep around in small numbers, much like our current efforts to keep pandas and rhinos around because we find them cute.

Beyond that, I think the shape of future civilization will depend on who gets to design those artificial intelligences or genetically engineer our descendants. Perhaps the world becomes dominated by AIs programmed with techbro ideology who seek to convert every atom of matter into cryptocurrency and have a grudge against Brie Larson embedded in their firmware. Then again, maybe radically queer furries created through genetic engineering become the dominant species and implement fully automated luxury communism.

[alynnidalar]

Personally I think basic technical predictions are easy (it doesn't take a brain surgeon to guess that in 300 years we will probably still be eating food or whatever). The part that's much harder to predict is the social change. It's telling that if I lived in 1743, while many things on zompist's list may have been familiar concepts, most would have been entirely inaccessible to me and well over half of the population--yet today, all of them would be completely normal. (okay, so I'm an American and therefore can't vote in Parliamentary elections, and I definitely didn't bother trying to get into Oxford, but you know what I mean)

[bradrn]

Sorry, I should have worded that better. All serious predictions are ‘utterly meaningless’. What often turn out to come true are the ‘predictions’ which aren’t even meant as predictions: the zany, weird ones which were made purely to astound, which not even the creator seriously thinks will come true.

If that's what you believe, you should look seriously at why you call bad predictions "serious" and good predictions "zany." Your heuristic is backwards!

Oh, it’s not my heuristic. Those are how they’re seen by society at large. What I’m saying is that the only predictions which come true are those which we don’t even think of as predictions. (Did anyone seriously consider The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as being a reasonable prediction when it came out? Yet the Guide itself is already basically a reality, though the direction of influence is debatable.)

Look at why Little Nemo or Adams seem convincing: they are satire. They are more a critique of their own times and environment than prediction. But it turns out that the prediction "the world won't change that much, only intensify" is a pretty good one. People are people— until we start messing with our DNA– and we're going to use new technology in lots of predictable ways, as the overeducated apes we are.

"The Machine Stops" isn't really satirical; it's pure sf in that it takes an idea and sees how it would work. But it eschews technological optimism entirely. Its idea is that people are foolish and will use their fancy new tech in foolish ways— and then, most people not understanding tech, they'll break their new toy.

I‘m not sure satiricality has anything to do with it. I’m not familiar with Little Nemo (except as ‘some old cartoon strip people talk about now and again’), but I never perceived Adams as satire, really. If you want some more obviously non-satirical plausible futures, consider Banks’s Culture novels and Orion’s Arm.

(I got a lot of this from Yudkowsky, actually: Eutopia is Scary has some great examples of culture change even over short time spans. I highly recommend the whole article.)

I think he's right and not right. Narrowly: yes, the future will have some stuff that doesn't just baffle us but shocks us. But more broadly: he's a futurist, not a historian, and his whole shtick is playing with new ideas— he quotes with approval the dictum that "the opposite of happiness is boredom". There's nothing wrong with having that kind of mind, but a) a lot of people would love to have a "reassuring, unsurprising, and dull" life; and b) he may not be the best at finding commonalities and underlying sameness, because he recoils at that idea.

Take his example— in the 16C "one popular entertainment was setting a cat on fire." Oh, we have completely changed, says the reader, and then goes and watches a movie about a serial killer, or plays a video game where enemies' spines are removed when you punch them, or just watches videos about battles in Ukraine.

I think this underestimates the distance between the cultures. Back then, people had a whole set of entertainments based around, well, actively torturing animals: cockfighting, bear-baiting, bullfighting, cat-firing and so on. Nowadays, the only one which is still mainstream is horse-racing, which is utterly innocuous compared to the others. What you (implicitly) claim to be equivalent are passive activities performed at several layers of indirection, and often with no actual harm to any living entity at all. (In the case of Ukraine, it’s not like we’re actively provoking anything: people are being hurt anyway, and we’re just watching. Not that I endorse that activity, but it’s obviously different to deliberately killing otherwise healthy animals with your own hands.)

Furthermore, I’ll note that all this is only over a 100-year timespan… Ares Land was asking about predictions over three times that length! The difference is important.

This analogy might work over 100 years, but starts to break down over 300. Imagine if an average European person from 1722 was magically transported to 2022. Never mind aeroplanes, they’d have come from before the Industrial Revolution!

Ares Land's date is 279 years in the future, so we're talking 1743. By that year the Industrial Revolution was well underway, and over 100 Newcomen engines were in commercial use. (They were invented in 1712.). The roots of the modern world go back earlier than you think.

OK, that’s fair… although I’d note that they weren’t very widely used back then. (To quote Gibson: ‘The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.’ Though then again he was one of the less successful futurists.)

Practically every aspect of our society and daily life has been radically altered over that timespan.

For you, yes— there were no Brits in Australia yet. But imagine the life of a London bourgeois in the 1700s. They would be doing things like these:

* hanging out in coffeeshops
* studying at Oxford or Cambridge
* going into business
* getting loans from large banks
* investing in that nascent Industrial Revolution
* voting in Parliamentary elections, for parties that (under new names) still exist today
* reading printed books and newspapers
* subscribing to scientific journals (first appeared in 1665)
* possibly attending services at an Anglican or Catholic church
* enjoying music by Bach and Handel
* and of course shopping, buying a house, getting married, raising kids

I agree with alynnidalar here: these all existed, but were accessible only to the élite. The bourgeoisie were a small proportion of the population at the time; the average London resident had probably heard of many of these, but wouldn’t have personal experience of any. Besides, many of these—like starting a business, voting or getting loans—aren’t exactly commonplace day-to-day events, even for those who perform them with some regularity.

I also note some items of your list are phrased in such a way that they sound more like today than they really were. Bach’s music was played either on a church organ or in small, personal, recitals as chamber music. Going to university was the prerogative of a privileged few. And company registration without the specific permission of Parliament or the monarchy had to wait till 1844.

I like to gawp at the new toys myself, and I'm fascinated by little cultural changes; but that sense of dazzlement at the new is not a guide to prediction, or even writing SF. To recall a story I've used before: Jared Diamond likes to tell about a native New Guinean friend, who grew up in a near-Neolithic village. He was Diamond's helicopter pilot. Tech is fun, tech is confusing at first, tech can be mastered in a surprisingly short time.

This is true, but irrelevant. We’re not trying to use future technologies; we’re just trying to predict them.

[zompist]

I think this underestimates the distance between the cultures. [...] What you (implicitly) claim to be equivalent are passive activities performed at several layers of indirection, and often with no actual harm to any living entity at all. (In the case of Ukraine, it’s not like we’re actively provoking anything: people are being hurt anyway, and we’re just watching.

I think you're being pretty naive here. Modern society can be extremely cruel indeed. We just hide the victims better.

(Also, though I do think Western culture is better about animal cruelty than it was 500 years ago, it's a little misleading to imply that change is always progress. Religions in India were against animal cruelty two thousand years ago-- to a degree that even Western vegetarians would find extreme.)

I agree with alynnidalar here: these all existed, but were accessible only to the élite. The bourgeoisie were a small proportion of the population at the time

Sure, but so what? The question is whether we can make reasonable predictions about the future. Looking at what the elite are doing is in fact a pretty good way of predicting things-- precisely as noted by the Gibson quote you cited.

This is true, but irrelevant. We’re not trying to use future technologies; we’re just trying to predict them.

But you're the one saying that prediction is "utterly meaningless." If what you mean is "yes, they'll do space travel in 2301, but we won't know the model numbers of the spaceships, or what exactly they'll look like, or how to run their control panels".... yes, duh, but those are details. Again, take a dude from 1920, show him a Boeing 777X. He can't identify what it is, but he knows it's a big airplane. He may be amazed at its size and speed, but he won't be baffled. And Jules Verne (1860s) or Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1780s) would understand the concept very well though they didn't have the word.

To quote Dizzy Dean instead, predictions are hard, especially about the future. You may be right that 2301 would be so completely different that no one of our time could recognize a thing. The planet has been turned into computronium, humans are now energy beasts living in the 8th dimension, whatever. But, I doubt it, and I've already explained why.