Predictions for 2301

[bradrn]

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.

Perhaps, but even so, I feel this is an important symptom of a fundamental shift. At earlier times, people simply didn’t care on the whole; now, we care enough that people expend significant effort in hiding away anything that looks even a bit unkind.

(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 neither said nor intended to imply that ‘change is always progress’, though I do think this is the case in this specific instance (Western attitudes to animals).

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.

On reflection, you’re entirely right about this. (Though my argument about many of these not being ‘commonplace day-to-day events’ still stands.)

I think there’s an interesting point to be made here. Technologies can, to some extent, be predicted by extrapolating from our current situation and rate of change. Cultural shifts and overall societal reorganisations, however, are very very difficult to predict, and often somewhat mindboggling. You’re focussing on the former, whereas that Yudkowsky article focuses on the latter.

[Ares Land]

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.

A very interesting take! If you don't mind, I'd like to dig in a bit.

What kinds of enhanced do you (or other people, mind!) have in mind? Will it really make us unrecognizable?

(I like, for instance, Iain Banks' enhanced humans, and the features are pretty drastic... But they're still very human nonetheless.)

How about backlash? With the COVID vaccine, for instance, people felt very badly about the 'RNA' bit and feared (rather than welcome) a possible 'genetic therapy'.

---

All very interesting points, really. Thanks everyone!
The burning cats thing is intriguing. Again, let's dig in a bit.

In fact, being cruel to cats is a lot more recent than the 16th century. Let's say two generations ago, people thought nothing of drowning kittens and bored kids would torture cats for fun.

It's not that people in the past were particularly insensitive. Voltaire spoke out against cruelty to animals. He was a philosopher, so likely to get angry about things people generally didn't question, but not, I should add, a particular emphatetic individual (he was an asshole, really. But let's get back to the point.)
From contemporary literature it seems clear people always liked and pampered their pet cats.
So what gives? Why is it that cats were at turns treated as hateful pests and as beloved pets?

This is really not arbitrary. Cats, in fact, breed like rabbits. What happened is that a) people started keeping their cats inside (because with automobiles and high rise buildings, cities became a very dangerous environment for cats) so cats had a lot less occasion to breed b) technology allowed us to control cat reproduction.

(^^ I mean this is all unproven speculation, but I still have a good feeling about it.)

Extrapolating further, I suspect that by 2301 (possibly earlier) people will find rats actually pretty cute, and would find that poisoning them is cruel: we'll be a lot more concerned about ecosystems and their equilibrium and we'd have means to control disease spread by rats, and their reproduction.

[zompist]

I think there’s an interesting point to be made here. Technologies can, to some extent, be predicted by extrapolating from our current situation and rate of change. Cultural shifts and overall societal reorganisations, however, are very very difficult to predict, and often somewhat mindboggling.

Are they? That would surprise a lot of anthropologists and historians, to say nothing of sf writers.

To start with, I think you can go a long way in explaining or predicting social changes by looking at who has power. Is the group with power expanding or contracting? How concentrated is it? How much knowledge is required to use it? What is its effective range, and how fast are its communications? Who do the powerful have to keep happy, and what methods do they have for that?

(As a view from 30,000 feet, quite a bit in the last few centuries can be explained as a hell of a lot wider range of people having more power than ever before... at the same time that the total power available increased beyond the dream of premodern despots. Naturally these two tendencies collide in strange ways.)

I'm influenced by cultural materialism here, particularly by Marvin Harris. Harris believes-- and this is by no means a universal among anthropologists-- that cultural behaviors usually have some material explanation. Cultural variation cannot be explained merely biologically-- humans are too diverse for that. But the diversity is not just random and irregular-- "mindboggling". There's often a reason a culture develops as it does, though it can take very careful work to figure out what that is.

[bradrn]

In fact, being cruel to cats is a lot more recent than the 16th century. Let's say two generations ago, people thought nothing of drowning kittens and bored kids would torture cats for fun.

It's not that people in the past were particularly insensitive. Voltaire spoke out against cruelty to animals. He was a philosopher, so likely to get angry about things people generally didn't question, but not, I should add, a particular emphatetic individual (he was an asshole, really. But let's get back to the point.)
From contemporary literature it seems clear people always liked and pampered their pet cats.
So what gives? Why is it that cats were at turns treated as hateful pests and as beloved pets?

This is really not arbitrary. Cats, in fact, breed like rabbits. What happened is that a) people started keeping their cats inside (because with automobiles and high rise buildings, cities became a very dangerous environment for cats) so cats had a lot less occasion to breed b) technology allowed us to control cat reproduction.

I think you’re perhaps reading a bit too much into the specific example chosen. People were cruel to all sorts of animals back then: dogs, chickens, bulls, bears, horses and so on. I doubt it has anything much to do with cats in particular.

Extrapolating further, I suspect that by 2301 (possibly earlier) people will find rats actually pretty cute, and would find that poisoning them is cruel: we'll be a lot more concerned about ecosystems and their equilibrium and we'd have means to control disease spread by rats, and their reproduction.

I tend to agree. Even today some people keep pet rats. (And even cockroaches.)

I think there’s an interesting point to be made here. Technologies can, to some extent, be predicted by extrapolating from our current situation and rate of change. Cultural shifts and overall societal reorganisations, however, are very very difficult to predict, and often somewhat mindboggling.

Are they? That would surprise a lot of anthropologists and historians, to say nothing of sf writers.

To start with, I think you can go a long way in explaining or predicting social changes by looking at who has power. Is the group with power expanding or contracting? How concentrated is it? How much knowledge is required to use it? What is its effective range, and how fast are its communications? Who do the powerful have to keep happy, and what methods do they have for that?

(As a view from 30,000 feet, quite a bit in the last few centuries can be explained as a hell of a lot wider range of people having more power than ever before... at the same time that the total power available increased beyond the dream of premodern despots. Naturally these two tendencies collide in strange ways.)

This is an interesting viewpoint, and a sensible one, especially your last note. However, as always, the question remains: what can we do with that information? OK, so people are gaining ever more power, both individually and as a whole… so what does that mean in terms of the next, say, 50 years? I’m sceptical that we can know: this trend has been in progress ever since the mid-1700s and the rise of the middle class, and I don’t know of any successful attempts from that period to predict the future.

But also: this is a very large-scale view. When I wrote my post I was thinking about things more relevant to day-to-day life—what is tolerated or distolerated, how people conduct their day, and so on. These are the sorts of things I was referring to as ‘mindboggling’, in that people struggle to get used to them if they’re placed in a place where they work differently. In my mind, this is easily the part of future prediction which is most difficult to get right. (When you mentioned Little Nemo, you specifically mentioned its prediction of rapacious capitalism, which fits here. The Machine Stops also did this fairly well. By contrast, Adams doesn’t focus on this area, but I tend to agree with his prediction of a far-future society with very little in the way of standardisation, homogenisation, effective regulation or sanity.)

I'm influenced by cultural materialism here, particularly by Marvin Harris. Harris believes-- and this is by no means a universal among anthropologists-- that cultural behaviors usually have some material explanation. Cultural variation cannot be explained merely biologically-- humans are too diverse for that. But the diversity is not just random and irregular-- "mindboggling". There's often a reason a culture develops as it does, though it can take very careful work to figure out what that is.

By ‘mindboggling’ I didn’t mean ‘random and irregular’ — I meant, literally, it will boggle your mind if you try to adapt to it. In other words, culture shock. I’m not convinced cultural materialism is correct, though then again I haven’t looked into it at all.

[Ares Land]

I think you’re perhaps reading a bit too much into the specific example chosen. People were cruel to all sorts of animals back then: dogs, chickens, bulls, bears, horses and so on. I doubt it has anything much to do with cats in particular.

Fair. But I'll add two points:
a) this in turn is probably a consequence of material factors. Due to productivty increases, most of us aren't factors and don't interact with animal routinely as a matter of simple survival.
b) we're probably just as cruel to these animals as we were three centuries ago, it's just done in a more industrial manner, so to speak. (People used to beat their dogs, but take a look at factory dog breeding for a solid dose of cruelty.) In other words, we have a lot of blidn spots as to our current practices.

By contrast, Adams doesn’t focus on this area, but I tend to agree with his prediction of a far-future society with very little in the way of standardisation, homogenisation, effective regulation or sanity.)

Related: an interesting thing is that people fail to predict that stuff will sometimes be plain annoying or just break down. I've been in a pretty disastrous video conference lately: people did predict video conference. They failed to predict that sometimes the image would freeze or you wouldn't the people at the other end anymore.

[bradrn]

I think you’re perhaps reading a bit too much into the specific example chosen. People were cruel to all sorts of animals back then: dogs, chickens, bulls, bears, horses and so on. I doubt it has anything much to do with cats in particular.

Fair. But I'll add two points:
a) this in turn is probably a consequence of material factors. Due to productivty increases, most of us aren't factors and don't interact with animal routinely as a matter of simple survival.
b) we're probably just as cruel to these animals as we were three centuries ago, it's just done in a more industrial manner, so to speak. (People used to beat their dogs, but take a look at factory dog breeding for a solid dose of cruelty.) In other words, we have a lot of blidn spots as to our current practices.

I can accept this: there may be just as much animal cruelty as there used to be, but it’s moved elsewhere, so we’re less desensitised to it. (And relatedly, at times we can still be very acceptant of it: over here people squash spiders often, usually without a second thought.)

By contrast, Adams doesn’t focus on this area, but I tend to agree with his prediction of a far-future society with very little in the way of standardisation, homogenisation, effective regulation or sanity.)

Related: an interesting thing is that people fail to predict that stuff will sometimes be plain annoying or just break down. I've been in a pretty disastrous video conference lately: people did predict video conference. They failed to predict that sometimes the image would freeze or you wouldn't the people at the other end anymore.

Hah, yes. This is something Adams did very well indeed. He was particularly prescient in predicting that an Internet Of Things in practice means an Internet Of Failures. (The elevators, the controls, the teleport, the Paranoid Android…) Gibson never did anything like it!

[hwhatting]

Let's look at some of the social changes that happened in my lifetime in Germany. There's a lot of things that have changed from when I was a mid-teen, ca. 1980:
- People already mentioned the electronics. Computers were something I knew (mostly from movies & TV) that existed somewhere, not something that would be part of every household and work place. I still typed my first university papers on a typewriter; correcting mistakes or doing a new version basically meant re-typing it.
- Getting information required to find books / papers / journals, either buying them or going to a library, and search was hard - while you could ask for books on a certain topic, you actually had to read the material to see whether it contained the information you needed, instead of doing text searches.
- Contacting someone meant that you knew the location where they would be at a specific time, in order to send letters or call them on a land line. Even in the early nineties, going on business trips I would leave two or three telephone numbers (of a hotel and of business partners that I would visit), so the people back home could reach me when necessary.
The ease with which documents can be produced and changed now, the ease with which information can be retrieved, the constant availability would have boggled the mind of 15 or 20 year-old me. But PCs, the Internet, mobile phones were already existing or under development back then; most people just had no idea that they would become relevant to our lives and how much it would change them*). Now, these things are just taken for granted, people can't even imagine life without them, and I myself also don't run around marvelling at all that change (except when, like now, I sit back and reflect on it), but rather tend to be annoyed that things don't work better.

*) Fun fact: the company I work for now made a forecast for the German telecoms operator in the early nineties about the number of mobile phones in the next decade. They based it on the number of cars, assumed a percentage of drivers that would want and need to be available for business puproses, and arrived at a number in the low hundred thousands. So even the people implementing the technology had no idea how ubiquitous mobile phones would become.

On the social change side, when I grew up, homosexual acts with minors were still a criminal offence (they were legalised for adults above 21 in 1969, for adults above 18 in 1973; acts with minors were decriminalised only in 1994). While I grew up in a relatively liberal and areligious family and never considered homosexuality to be a crime or a sin, it was still treated as something strange, shameful, and / or ridiculous. I wouldn't have imagined back then how open people would be about it nowadays or that gay marriage would be a thing. Again, back then there were already people fighting for gay rights and imagining a world where gays could live openly and their relationships would be accepted as equal to hetrosexual ones, but for most people that was just fantasy or something that wasn't even on their radar.

Where am i going with that? A lot of the things we now may think of as unlikely or happening only centuries from now may actually be already underway and happen in our lifetime. And they may happen in areas that we currently don't even think about. Other things that are on everyone's prediction list may not happen at all, either because they're not viable or turn out to be unnecessary or a dead end. (One of the things everyone in the 70s expected to be coming up in the next couple of decades was commercially viable nuclear fusion reactors.)

[zompist]

I still typed my first university papers on a typewriter; correcting mistakes or doing a new version basically meant re-typing it.
- Getting information required to find books / papers / journals, either buying them or going to a library, and search was hard - while you could ask for books on a certain topic, you actually had to read the material to see whether it contained the information you needed, instead of doing text searches.
- Contacting someone meant that you knew the location where they would be at a specific time, in order to send letters or call them on a land line. Even in the early nineties, going on business trips I would leave two or three telephone numbers (of a hotel and of business partners that I would visit), so the people back home could reach me when necessary.
The ease with which documents can be produced and changed now, the ease with which information can be retrieved, the constant availability would have boggled the mind of 15 or 20 year-old me. But PCs, the Internet, mobile phones were already existing or under development back then; most people just had no idea that they would become relevant to our lives and how much it would change them*).

I'd take this even further. I grew up with the paper technologies you're talking about too. I still have a few folders with articles or data painstakingly copied from interesting books, because I wanted them at hand rather than at the library. Now it's a frustration if I can't find the info I need with 20 seconds' Googling.

But computerization is just an intensification of the process of increased access to information that's been going on for 500 years, since the reinvention of printing in Europe. Before that, a noble was lucky to have a single bookshelf of books, and they might have to be bolted to the shelf. I just read about the medieval Chinese monk Xuanzang, who traveled all over India collecting manuscripts; no wonder that on his return the emperor built him an enormous pagoda to house the precious scrolls he brought back. The typewriter was another enormous game-changer; so was the scientific journal. (Science as we know it got going when scientists could keep track of and correlate what they knew.)

I'd also note that we underestimate how connected people were a couple generations ago, because we forget what technologies they used. E.g. my grandfather when he was young would ask girls for date that day, by mail. There were three deliveries a day, so he could ask in the morning and get a reply by afternoon. Paris had a network of pneumatic tubes installed in the 1860s.

All this is important for prediction, because it's been possible for a couple of centuries to notice the tendency and predict it would go farther. As I noted, Bellamy predicted home music distribution in 1888. Vannevar Bush essentially predicted the Internet in 1945.

What happens next with information? The obvious worry now is worldwide, AI-enhanced surveillance, operated in the US by corporations and in authoritarian regimes by the state. I expect methods to thwart this surveillance to grow in popularity. It's also really hard to keep modern information private, and increasing content creation abilities also means that eventually there will be a big accuracy problem.

[Moose-tache]

when I grew up, homosexual acts with minors were still a criminal offence (they were legalised for adults above 21 in 1969, for adults above 18 in 1973; acts with minors were decriminalised only in 1994).

I... I assume there's some sort of translation issue going on here? Do you mean that having sex with minors moved from the criminal code to the civil code? Or sex between two minors was decriminalized? Or does Germany have a different definition of minor?

[Travis B.]

when I grew up, homosexual acts with minors were still a criminal offence (they were legalised for adults above 21 in 1969, for adults above 18 in 1973; acts with minors were decriminalised only in 1994).

I... I assume there's some sort of translation issue going on here? Do you mean that having sex with minors moved from the criminal code to the civil code? Or sex between two minors was decriminalized? Or does Germany have a different definition of minor?

I presume this means homosexual acts between minors.

[Moose-tache]

when I grew up, homosexual acts with minors were still a criminal offence (they were legalised for adults above 21 in 1969, for adults above 18 in 1973; acts with minors were decriminalised only in 1994).

I... I assume there's some sort of translation issue going on here? Do you mean that having sex with minors moved from the criminal code to the civil code? Or sex between two minors was decriminalized? Or does Germany have a different definition of minor?

I presume this means homosexual acts between minors.

At the risk of ending up on every government watchlist, I asked Google to translate "sex with X" and "sex involving X" into German and, quelle surprise, they both used "mit." Mystery solved. Also, y'all need better prepositions.

[Raphael]

and increasing content creation abilities also means that eventually there will be a big accuracy problem.

"Eventually"? Didn't you mistype "now"?

Moose, Travis: I think H-W was referring to the time when the laws governing same-sex sexual acts and age in Germany were made the exact same as the laws governing opposite-sex sexual acts and age in Germany. Those used to be different.

[Raphael]

Related: an interesting thing is that people fail to predict that stuff will sometimes be plain annoying or just break down. I've been in a pretty disastrous video conference lately: people did predict video conference. They failed to predict that sometimes the image would freeze or you wouldn't the people at the other end anymore.

Well, Spaceballs kind of "predicted" that even in the future, nothing would work.

[keenir]

- Donald Trump will still be complaining the election was rigged

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

hopefully we'll have a law against it by the time 2300 rolls around.

[keenir]

What happens next with information? The obvious worry now is worldwide, AI-enhanced surveillance, operated in the US by corporations and in authoritarian regimes by the state. I expect methods to thwart this surveillance to grow in popularity.

I'm not sure how effective thwarting efforts will be, given things like, for example, cookies on the internet.

(some forms of thwarting may be used for less than legal reasons -- such as how in some detective shows on BBC and other channels, people tell the detectives "well, yes, we have a security camera, but we don't turn it on")

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.

Perhaps, but even so, I feel this is an important symptom of a fundamental shift. At earlier times, people simply didn’t care on the whole; now, we care enough that people expend significant effort in hiding away anything that looks even a bit unkind.

True that we as members of a society, no longer engage in bear baiting or boxing kangaroos*...now we shoot deer, kangaroos, and civilians. {though that last one touches on earlier history - after some of those shooters were arrested or died, didn't commentators/talking heads say that shooters tend to start out with torturing animals? so even that never really went away}


* = whereas another sport from back then - boxing matches between women - has not only been legalized, its expanded to include MMA and other fighting styles.

[zompist]

What happens next with information? The obvious worry now is worldwide, AI-enhanced surveillance, operated in the US by corporations and in authoritarian regimes by the state. I expect methods to thwart this surveillance to grow in popularity.

I'm not sure how effective thwarting efforts will be, given things like, for example, cookies on the internet.

(some forms of thwarting may be used for less than legal reasons -- such as how in some detective shows on BBC and other channels, people tell the detectives "well, yes, we have a security camera, but we don't turn it on")

Sure, the people most interested in thwarting surveillance are criminals. But I don't think we've seen the worst of surveillance, and I think it could awaken a demand for privacy. Europe is ahead of the US in this, speaking e.g. of a "right to be forgotten".

What should be an easy case: what if your search history could be made public? What if employers could consult it, or the police?

Then think about your movements. You can be quite law-abiding, and yet not want everyone to know exactly where you were at all times.

Plus there are plenty of people besides criminals with a legitimate need for privacy: people being stalked or abused, sexual minorities subject to oppression, people on the run from authoritarian states or organized crime. Traditionally you could move, change your name, and have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but that won't work for long.

[Moose-tache]

Show me someone who has nothing to hide, and I will show you someone on whom life has been completely wasted.

[keenir]

/quote]

apologies; i hadn't intended to say or imply that only criminals would seek to avoid a fully-video-recorded society...I had just intended to use that as an example of how easy it is to short-circuit the road to even a shadow of a fully-recording society. mea maxima culpa for my inclarity and inadequate examples.

[Raphael]

I had just intended to use that as an example of how easy it is to short-circuit the road to even a shadow of a fully-recording society.

Fair enough; but that's current technology. We don't know what kind of stuff of this sort they'll come up with in the future, and whether it'll be equally easy to short-circuit.

[keenir]

I had just intended to use that as an example of how easy it is to short-circuit the road to even a shadow of a fully-recording society.

Fair enough; but that's current technology. We don't know what kind of stuff of this sort they'll come up with in the future, and whether it'll be equally easy to short-circuit.

true. but, on a related note, I'm not sure there will ever be a time that people can't ask "Did you try turning it off and turning it on again?"