What the World Will Look Like by 2050

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1890927,00.html

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

16 37 17 years ago

edw519• 17 years ago

Thank you for giving me something to think about instead of, "Was this last request part of the origInal spec or not?"

jbrun• 17 years ago

Simply put, that is ridiculous. I find it remarkable to see apparently very intelligent people predict insane xenophobic doomsday scenarios as the future. Often, they seem to be reminiscing about a simpler past they were familiar with and how we [the young] have shot it all to hell, and are thus on a path towards self-destruction and reckoning.

electromagnetic4• 17 years ago

I love that they claim they're predicting things from the past, but actually aren't. They claim the future will see a 'polycentric' (see: multipolarity; they got the name wrong) world where we will be ruled by many powers instead of one.

Aside from the fact this has rarely been seen in history, and only during transitional periods (After WW2, briefly we had USA, USSR and the British Empire as superpowers) when it has been seen. When we look back, with hindsight it becomes clear that there is a direct line of superpowers back to the dawn of civilization and, largely, one superpower passed off the power to its successor. The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of fighting to the death stepped aside for the USA. This has been played for thousands of years, during the Classical period it was passed between Greece and Rome, who was the super power. After the Roman Empire was defeated by the Hunnic Empire (Atilla the Hun) the power moved so far to the east no one in Europe had a clue, which led to the Dark Ages, because the people who had spread their technology (the Romans) rarely taught the locals how to build it themselves.

This meant that after the Roman Empire, and the fairly swift collapse of the Hunnic Empire with the death of Atilla, Europe was left without a power and so was the world. It was quite ironic, it would be like if the USSR had beat the USA in 1990, and a year later still collapsed. The effect was profound, especially moving into the medieval period, due to the fact that people relied on these Empires to shift around technology and without them there was no one big enough to move the information.

(Ed: This is also why when moving into the late Medieval Period and the Colonial Era, we had multiple powers all handing the superpower status between them as one got a clear advantage. In hindsight this largely centered between England and France, a play reminiscent of how Greece and Rome passed the superpower title between themselves many times during the classical period, but at no point was there two true superpowers.)

I find that their predictions are based on personal opinions, and they choose to use history to back themselves up whenever it's convenient, but in many of the examples they wholly ignore it. There's no historical basis to assume suicide bombings, it's an exceptionally rare development with the invention of compact explosives and religious brainwashing. Why would a pirate perform a suicide bombing, it's absurd they're in it for personal gain not religious gain.

This article is very stupid merely for trying to predict the future. I'll trust a Sci-Fi writer on the future before I trust an economist, if we could trust economists to predict the future then we wouldn't be in the financial crisis we are.

eru• 17 years ago

Don't you confuse history as a story with the real thing?

The greeks were only a super-power in their limited sphere. China and Rome/Greece did not even interact that much.

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

Europe was left without a power and so was the world.

Europe yes, but power for the world as you suggest moved east, and remained in the Muslim world for most of the middle ages.

While people in London were dying in plagues, the folks in Constantinople were enjoying their new found success.

rsheridan62• 17 years ago

>The example here would be that the British Empire, instead of fighting to the death stepped aside for the USA.

Uhh, no. There will always be a premiere power and the British Empire was it, but they weren't head and shoulders above everybody else the way the US is now, or Rome was in its day. Neither was any other power ever an undisputed champion between Rome and the post Cold War US.

Edit: not in Western Europe, anyway. The Mongol Empire and the Caliphate were supreme at certain times and places.

>After the Roman Empire was defeated by the Hunnic Empire

WTF? That never happened. The Romans defeated the Huns at Chalons and were then conquered by Goths a few decades later.

rms• 17 years ago

You'd think these smart people would have figured out what globalization means by now. Here's a big hint: world government.

cmars232• 17 years ago

And when that government becomes corrupt, there will be no refuge, nowhere left to run.

run4yourlives2• 17 years ago

There is a 37signals lesson in here somewhere about expanding sales... the guy predicted the recession, so now is the time to preach doomsday on that record.

I'm sure Oprah's secret followers will lap it up.

thingie2• 17 years ago

It is not a doomsday scenario. It will be simply a different world, and people will get used to it (well, at least, they will have no other option). Our problems of today aren't very happy either, and if you told someone in 1950 how the world will look in 2009, he would call it insane and doomsday scenario too :)

ankeshk• 17 years ago

I wish more people would read Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Just as we could not predict in 1968 what the world would look like in 2009 - similarly we can't predict what the world will look like in 2050 today.

I've heard some crazy predictions... world will end in 2012 (when the Mayan calendar ends)... USA will break down into 2-5 different countries and there will be a civil war there... the arctic cap will melt submerging all the major port cities: NY Tokyo Mumbai...

Not gonna happen!

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Would you have predicted in 1975 that by 1995 there'd be no Soviet Union? Big changes and breakups do happen; they're inevitable over long enough. I'll agree, though, that prediction (especially of technology-affected things, which is more and more of the world) is getting considerably harder, and that that trend, at least, will continue absent some other radical change like an asteroid strike or a US police state.

tokenadult4• 17 years ago

Would you have predicted in 1975 that by 1995 there'd be no Soviet Union?

I know a man who is now a United States diplomat who predicted to me (when he was still a student of Chinese) in 1984 that the Soviet Union would be around well into the twenty-first century. Sometimes empires that have little press freedom are especially hard to make predictions about.

orionlogic• 17 years ago

There is arctic cap meltdown and if the world stay as it is now, we might face its' catastrophic consequences.

Thats why in his latest movie "Examined Life", Slavoj Zizek points out that humanity should cut his roots from nature and doesnt intervene its inner workings.

gaius• 17 years ago

Why would a pirate blow themselves up? It makes no sense.

AndrewO2• 17 years ago

Because they're in the news now and Time has a pessimistic opinion of its readers' attention spans.

swombat2• 17 years ago

In the belief that past experiences are indicative future events ...

Epic mega-fail.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Well, leaving out "of" is hardly a mega-fail.

But maybe you meant that the meaning of the snippet, that experience and evidence can guide us in what to expect for the future, is somehow profoundly wrong?

swombat2• 17 years ago

I did indeed mean the latter. Didn't even notice the missing "of".

For some things, past experience is of use. For guessing at the general trends of history, past experience should, in fact, teach us that it's completely useless. On a personal, immediate scale, it is useful to try and figure out what's about to happen, but when it comes to large trends, there are too much chaos and wild swings involved for past experience to be of any use.

pj• 17 years ago

I didn't see anything in here that was stricking or insightful. Pretty run of the mill introspection will lead you to the conclusions in the article.

AndrewO2• 17 years ago

> As the cofounder and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Attali won fame for calling the U.S. financial collapse as early as 2006...

But somehow he managed to not predict Europe's own financial troubles. Yes, quite the soothsaying there...

rjprins• 17 years ago

The problem with prediction on this scale is that it's becomes a function of chaotic effects. i.e., Some small unpredictable thing like an invention or some trait of a president can have very profound effects over time akin to the butterfly effect.

Even solid statistics will fail horribly over a longer time period.

aoeu• 17 years ago

To me the article reads like an extension of current popular news stories.. which don't all reflect reality.

tom_rath• 17 years ago

I love these articles.

Ten years ago, the same dreck would claim 2010 would see us away on extended vacation while WebVan and Pets.com delivered goodies to our internet-automated homes. Of course, everything would be paid for by effortless automated day-trading, with the Dow at 50,000 and markets headed higher due to Western nations celebrating some multi-decade milestone for time without conflict.

If someone claims to have the future figured out, it's pretty safe to assume you can ignore 'em.

Gibbon• 17 years ago

In the Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon, he covers the prognostications of futurists and discovers that they are wildy wrong something like 91% of the time.

mrbgty• 17 years ago

By 2015 we will have hoverboards

warfangle• 17 years ago

But they still won't work on water. Unless you've got power...

apstuff• 17 years ago

I agree with the statement on water. Other than that, thanks, but I have to get back to work.

rsheridan62• 17 years ago

This guy is kind of an over-the-top doomsayer, but I would note that he's also a Jewish pied noir (French people born in Algeria) born during WWII, probably regaled with stories about relatives back at the mainland who ended up in concentration camps from an early age, and who would have been ethnically cleansed out of Algiera as a young man if he hadn't left already. If you could go back to the time of his birth (or a little before) and tell people what actually happened, they'd probably think you were over the top too. I'm sure this has influenced his way of thinking.

What the World Will Look Like by 2050

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