This is a positive story and one I can get behind on a Stay Whole Tuesday. What can go wrong? Well, Peter Leyden lays some spoilers below. But first, the optimistic part seques from yesterday.
On Make it a Great Monday, I wrote about an optimistic futurist, Peter Leyden, and something he calls The Great Progression.
This 3-minute video clip features Peter discussing how three world-changing technologies drive The Great Progression:
- AI
- Clean Energy
- Bioengineering
These technologies are likened to historical shifts such as the Iron Age, marking a new age for humanity. AI will augment human capabilities, clean energy will lead to a sustainable future, and bioengineering will allow us to engineer living things. Peter emphasises that these changes are just beginning and will continue to shape the future.
[Note: Peter Leyden is based in San Francisco, so the below is written from that perspective.]
When I read these, I like to ask myself a couple of questions:
- Which of these potential spoilers are in my control?
- How can I do my part to ensure these world-changing technologies make the world a better place in the future?
TOP 10 SPOILERS
The Great Progression, the largely positive story of the next 25 years, is probable but can’t be considered inevitable.
Many potential adverse developments could emerge to slow down or thwart progress in solving the significant challenges of our time.
- Liberal Democracies Fail: America and liberal democracies worldwide need structural reforms to effectively carry out the actual will of their majorities and adapt to the significant changes in the 21st century more rapidly. They might not.
- Quasi-Civil War: Zealots on the American far right get so desperate that talk of civil war crosses over to actual political violence in a country armed to the teeth with guns. Containing such civil unrest could seriously set us back.
- Enforced groupthink: Zealots on the American far left take cancel culture to the next level and indeed stifle open debate and free thinking in universities and other public forums, with the whole of pluralistic society suffering.
- Losing Track of Truth: Facts continue to become increasingly contested until people can’t communicate across parallel universes of media. This jeopardizes many of the fundamental pillars of advanced societies, like science.
- Tech Gets Demonized: The dramatic success of tech companies in the last 25 years has made them new targets for misplaced scapegoating. We will need various new technologies and vibrant tech companies to help solve the challenges ahead. We can’t demonise or undermine them too much.
- Genetics Gets Shut Down: We will need synthetic biology and the whole new world of biological engineering to help create sustainable everything and solve climate change. Fears about messing with Mother Nature or God could shut those efforts down.
- Nuclear Bomb Explodes: We’ve managed to avoid a nuclear explosion since Nagasaki, but nuclear proliferation continues. All it might take is an actual nuclear bomb going off to shut down the entire nuclear energy industry again and cut off the promise of nuclear fusion. We’ll need both this century.
- Desperate Oil States: The rapid shift from carbon to clean energy could make the world’s oil states increasingly desperate and lead to unpredictable gambles, particularly with a fading power like Russia.
- Balkanized World: There’s no way to solve climate change without the whole world evolving in common directions, and this gets much more complicated if globalisation reverses and devolves towards uncoordinated localities. Let’s hope we don’t get more virulent global pandemics.
- China Hot War: The world could arguably survive and possibly even thrive from a competitive Cold War between China and America, but an actual hot war between these superpowers would be catastrophic. However, it’s not impossible.
Dig deeper by exploring more through Peter’s website and company, Reinvent Futures.
Founder Peter Leyden has spent his entire career in pursuit of the constantly evolving answers to four questions:
- What’s really going on?
- What’s probably coming?
- What’s possible to achieve?
- What we should do now?
