Predictions for 2301

[Travis B.]

So far all preliminary steps toward the robot apocalypse have been purely economic.

Take, for example, the internet of things. Have you ever, in your entire time on this planet, met someone who wanted their refrigerator to know their milk preferences? Have you ever met someone who relishes the idea of a "smart lock" standing between them and a burgler? No. You haven't. No one has. No one is asking for this. Nobody wants to take a perfectly good kettle and make it so that it's inoperable anytime the wifi is out. We get these things because businesses want us to have them. That smart fridge tracks your behavior and sends you advertizements. That smart lamp needs periodic software updates. These products make you more pliable to large corporations.

This means two things: first, that if the human race is ever annihilated by robots, it will have nothing to do with the hubris or laziness of the consumer. And more importantly, it means that when we do finally get around to stomping Capitalism down the shower drain to live with the other rats and cockroaches, we cancel robot apocalypse as a bonus.

Agreed completely. The whole "IoT" thing is absolutely horrid and is being pushed on us by corporations despite that we really want and care about.

[Raphael]

Why not rugby? Heading is pretty rare in rugby,

Umh, I was talking about a scenario where soccer loses ground because of concerns over CTE. I don't see how any of the oval ball sports would gain ground under those circumstances.

Oh, you mean all similar sports would be tainted, even if they result in no cases of CTE?

First of all, how is rugby similar to soccer, except to the extent to which all sports descended from medieval mob football share some similarities? As far as I can tell, the sport with the most similarities to rugby is American Football, which is the sport where CTE first became a major issue. Which leads to the second point: how do you get the idea that a sport that is very similar to the sport where CTE first became an issue would not lead to CTE?

I should have known anyone who watches a sport based on running around randomly until the other side's random running around creates a random opening to kick a ball through and hoping that the goalie randomly chooses to dive in the wrong direction wouldn't be terribly descriminating.

Sigh. Ok, I'll bite. Can you name one team sport that doesn't look pretty random to someone who doesn't know it well enough to understand what's going on?

[Raphael]

On robots: going one step further, I'll suggest in the long run we'll move away from the trend of networking everything.
(But 'murder by hacked robots' would make for a good short story!)

Something doesn't necessarily need to be constantly networked in order to get hacked into. Stuxnet reached its eventual targets by temporarily hiding in thumb drives.

[linguistcat]

I wouldn't mind my refrigerator knowing my milk preferences, especially if it knew that in X days I'd be out of milk and order more. What I don't want is some third party being given my milk preferences, along with a bunch of other preferences and correlations, to advertise to me based on said milk preferences. I also don't need any of my kitchen appliances telling me the current weather, or where I can buy scrunchies on sale.

My toaster especially should just not talk or show me anything. It should make toast and that's it. The "smartest" it needs to be is smart enough not to burn my toast.

[Travis B.]

I wouldn't mind my refrigerator knowing my milk preferences, especially if it knew that in X days I'd be out of milk and order more. What I don't want is some third party being given my milk preferences, along with a bunch of other preferences and correlations, to advertise to me based on said milk preferences. I also don't need any of my kitchen appliances telling me the current weather, or where I can buy scrunchies on sale.

My toaster especially should just not talk or show me anything. It should make toast and that's it. The "smartest" it needs to be is smart enough not to burn my toast.

A threat one must not forget is one's "IoT" devices being hijacked so as to eat up one's bandwidth by becoming DDOS botnet nodes or or jack up one's electricity bill by mining bitcoins. I think this is a bigger issue than attackers knowing how long it will take before one's milk goes sour. (Other threats to consider is attackers turning off one's refrigerator remotely to make one's food spoil for the lulz, or trying to make one's toaser start on fire...)

[keenir]

I should have known anyone who watches a sport based on running around randomly until the other side's random running around creates a random opening to kick a ball through and hoping that the goalie randomly chooses to dive in the wrong direction wouldn't be terribly descriminating.

Sigh. Ok, I'll bite. Can you name one team sport that doesn't look pretty random to someone who doesn't know it well enough to understand what's going on?

people-sized checkers? (mayyyybe chess at that scale)

[Travis B.]

I should have known anyone who watches a sport based on running around randomly until the other side's random running around creates a random opening to kick a ball through and hoping that the goalie randomly chooses to dive in the wrong direction wouldn't be terribly descriminating.

Sigh. Ok, I'll bite. Can you name one team sport that doesn't look pretty random to someone who doesn't know it well enough to understand what's going on?

people-sized checkers? (mayyyybe chess at that scale)

I wonder who gets to be the pawns.

[Raphael]

I guess chess, people-sized or not, would look pretty random to someone who doesn't know the rules...

[Moose-tache]

First of all, how is rugby similar to soccer, except to the extent to which all sports descended from medieval mob football share some similarities? As far as I can tell, the sport with the most similarities to rugby is American Football, which is the sport where CTE first became a major issue. Which leads to the second point: how do you get the idea that a sport that is very similar to the sport where CTE first became an issue would not lead to CTE?

Jesus, can you all not, like, read books? Look up the CTE rate in rugby vs association football or American football. The rate is virtually nill, about on par with the rate of CTE you would get from skateboarding or hanging out around Johnny Knoxville. We don't have to rely on erroneous ideas about what a sport is "similar to." As for that, rugby certainly seems more similar to soccer than any of the alternatives available to Europeans, so it would be a plausible switch if they wanted to avoid CTE. Nobody's going to say "Well, I was going to switch to rugby, but then I learned that is has some similarities to another sport I've never heard of, so that prevented me from watching it for some reason."

As for your second question: any other sport. Name one sport other than association soccer where it is never apparent more than half a second ahead of time, even to experts, that a goal is about to happen. In most sports, a team has to have some idea of what they want to do, a plan that they steadily work toward, rather than just killing time until the other team accidentally makes a goal happen for them.

[Raphael]

Jesus, can you all not, like, read books? Look up the CTE rate in rugby vs association football or American football. The rate is virtually nill, about on par with the rate of CTE you would get from skateboarding or hanging out around Johnny Knoxville.

Hm, ok, if there's a good source for that claim, I stand corrected. I wonder if people have seriously looked, though. And Ares Land has claimed that there have been cases.

As for your second question: any other sport. Name one sport other than association soccer where it is never apparent more than half a second ahead of time, even to experts, that a goal is about to happen.

1) Either form of hockey.
2) Not what my question was about. I had asked which sport doesn't look random to people unfamiliar with it. "Any other sport" is a pretty poor answer, since there are certainly a lot of sports that look pretty random to me, who doesn't know much about them.
3) "difficult to predict" isn't the same as "random". There are definitely situations in which a goal in the near future is more likely than in other situations, and most of the time such situations arise because someone worked towards them.

In most sports, a team has to have some idea of what they want to do, a plan that they steadily work toward,

If you seriously think that's not the case in soccer, that just shows that you know as little about that sport as someone who describes gridiron as "people randomly running into each other" knows about gridiron. Nothing wrong with that - I know next to nothing about most sports - but at least I try to avoid the fallacy of assuming that whenever I don't understand what's going on, it means that there's nothing going on.

[Ares Land]

Jesus, can you all not, like, read books? Look up the CTE rate in rugby vs association football or American football. The rate is virtually nill, about on par with the rate of CTE you would get from skateboarding or hanging out around Johnny Knoxville. We don't have to rely on erroneous ideas about what a sport is "similar to." As for that, rugby certainly seems more similar to soccer than any of the alternatives available to Europeans, so it would be a plausible switch if they wanted to avoid CTE. Nobody's going to say "Well, I was going to switch to rugby, but then I learned that is has some similarities to another sport I've never heard of, so that prevented me from watching it for some reason."

I don't rely on erroneous ideas about rugby; I'm familiar enough with rugby to draw my own conclusions. It's a lot more physical than soccer; injuries are common, including head injuries.

The concussion rate in rugby seems accordingly pretty high: https://completeconcussions.com/2018/12 ... ncussions/

Nobody familiar with both sports would even consider switching from soccer to rugby for the sole purpose of avoiding head injury.

[Moose-tache]

[I want you all to know I read none of your responses. Rugby good. Soccer boring. Stay mad.]

On the topic of people predicting our present, and our predictions of the future... There’s a bit of “operation of the mind” involved, because we have to guess the psychology of people living a century ago. But I have some tentative guesses about what they would and wouldn’t predict:

First, a person living in 1922 might be able to predict the trajectory of Communism/Socialism: that it will continue to be a significant force in Western politics, but as a dominant state ideology it will not spread much beyond the new Soviet Union. However, I doubt they would have predicted that the most vocal champions of the anti-Communist movement would be remembered not as canonized saviors of the human race, but as history’s greatest monsters.

Second, I think it would be easy to guess that automobiles and airplanes would see greater use, probably taking some traffic away from trains and changing the way rural land is developed. But I think they would find it very difficult to believe that transportation technology would stop developing in fifty years, possibly within their lifetime, and make no meaningful advancements for generations (technological development becomes so stagnant that the reintroduction of the electric car is treated as a new invention, like Aristotle in the Renaissance).

Third, a person in 1922 would find it trivially easy to guess that traditional aristocracies would all but disappear in the near future, with more opportunities in public life for women and religious minorities. However, no one in that time would guess in a million years that gays and the handicapped would be considered normal and people.

The pattern seems to be: feel free to project into the future, but a) don’t try to project too far without a change of direction, and b) assume that how this process is understood will change dramatically.

On that note, I will hesitantly make some predictions for the United States of 2122:

First, pre-Keynsian economics will be all but extinct. Running a government on taxes will make about as much sense to them as running a government on rum tariffs would to us. The government finances itself mostly by selling itself its own bonds, and when that fails, actual literal magic. In political debates, this may be treated as good or bad based on party affiliation, but in practice no political actor wants to return to the time of levying taxes.

Second, the question of big or small government has been settled by doing both simultaneously, badly. The social safety net is robust by our standards, with UBI and universal healthcare. However, virtually every government service is operated by private companies. This is a little different to how you might imagine it. These are massive corporations that have no need to make a profit on individual consumers, because their revenue is larger than an actual government’s. A company can operate a hospital for the poor, for example, with revenue collected by selling dog grooming services. On the plus side, these companies tend to have social responsibility written into their charters, and often sacrifice profitability for market share or reliable government contracts. Rentier capitalism will be predictably miserable and stupid, but no one will mind, and if they do they’ll probably blame smart watches. Oh, did I mention we’ll all be trying to type and watch videos on our watches? Because that’s definitely happening.

Socially, I think there will be more progress made on no-brainer issues like trans rights. But complex issues like gender inequality will run into serious problems. First of all, and I cannot believe this hasn’t taken off yet, the Right will learn that feminism is just sitting right there on the ground waiting for them to simply pick it up. The resulting Femme Fascism will ruin everything for a generation, and force the Left to a) lay down and wait for death, followed at some delay by b) reimagining how we think about and talk about gender and gender equality. The resulting advancements in thought will have to wait until the next century to be put into practice.

Finally, I predict that we will still have to live with architects. Despite failing to improve the lives of any single person in the last thousand years, architects will continue to ruin buildings well into the future. Round bedrooms that don't fit a bed? Get good, loser! Cantilevers over active volcanoes? Pfft, learn to think for yourself, Sheeple! Building materials designed to emit a high pitched whine 24 hours a day? It's an allegory; you're too dumb to understand.

[Ares Land]

I agree with most of your points, except for the smart watches and the taxes.

a) are people really buying smart watches? b) on taxes, I think the sole advantage of printing money is that you can euthanize the rentiers that way. Otherwise, nope.

[Raphael]

[I want you all to know I read none of your responses. Rugby good. Soccer boring. Stay mad.]

Just for the record, I never denied that soccer is boring. I just denied that it's random.

[Raphael]

I agree with most of your points, except for the smart watches and the taxes.

a) are people really buying smart watches?

You didn't really ask for it, so here you go!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yioL7MRQvHM

[malloc]

First of all, and I cannot believe this hasn’t taken off yet, the Right will learn that feminism is just sitting right there on the ground waiting for them to simply pick it up. The resulting Femme Fascism will ruin everything for a generation, and force the Left to a) lay down and wait for death, followed at some delay by b) reimagining how we think about and talk about gender and gender equality. The resulting advancements in thought will have to wait until the next century to be put into practice.

An interesting prediction. From what I have seen, the right seems increasingly committed to anti-feminism if anything. Consider the recent ruling against abortion in the US, the rise of "men's rights" and incels, and the Gamergate movement. From their perspective, feminism is not simply lying there waiting for them to grab, but rather deeply intertwined with the post-modern Marxist globalist menace they are fighting. Then again, I have seen some overtures between TERFS and the right, although that seems more like enemies of enemies becoming friends at this point.

[zompist]

First, pre-Keynsian economics will be all but extinct. Running a government on taxes will make about as much sense to them as running a government on rum tariffs would to us. The government finances itself mostly by selling itself its own bonds, and when that fails, actual literal magic.

I don't quite get this one. Is this based on MMT?

First of all, and I cannot believe this hasn’t taken off yet, the Right will learn that feminism is just sitting right there on the ground waiting for them to simply pick it up.

This has already happened, to a large extent. Though you get your alt-rightists who want to get rid of women's suffrage, conservatives are not fighting against women in the work force, women as CEOs or politicians, women wearing pants, divorce, separate credit accounts, etc. Women can already be eager Trumpists and QAnonists.

[Moose-tache]

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Femme Fascism is not conservatism that allows female participation. Femme Fascism is a female-supremacist movement. The basic idea is this:

All political processes can be characterized as winning or losing. Women are always losing, and men are always winning. If it ever looks like women are not particularly losing, this is an illusion caused by Patriarchy. Meanwhile, women are blatantly superior to men in every way. How is it that men are so far ahead when they are weak and useless? Well, obviously it is because of the machinations of the global Liberal-Marxist elite, Muslims, the [fraktur]International Bankers[/fraktur], and the pick mes who stabbed their sisters in the back. The leaders of the movement would not espouse violence, but of course there are brownshirts at a few degrees remove from the leadership.

The main function of Femme Fascism is it replaces the traditional elites with their daughters, and the rich white men take the role of the dutiful spouses who are just happy to be included. Why would conservative men go along with this? Well, many of them won't, but that's a good thing because you can't have Fascism without a plausible villain, and eventually you run out of journalists to blow up. Some conservative men will see Femme Fascism for what it is: a way to preserve the status quo while completely and irrevocably neutering the Left for a lifetime, by not just stealing their aesthetic and rhetoric, but ruining it. Whatever future generations use as their Tucker Carlson will gleefully exhort men to take a back seat to women, giving examples like Mussolin-She and Her-tler, and waxing historical about how every traditional society was a free market matriarchy until Marx and Engels came along. None of it will make any sense to a time traveler from 2022, but that's to be expected.

[Moose-tache]

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[Raphael]

Nice little satire!