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posted by
janrinok
on Saturday January 24 2015, @12:03PM
from the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine dept.
from the your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine dept.
Politico Magazine asked 15 other big thinkers and doers for their ideas of what will change the world the most in the next 15 years. We got back lots of inspiration—from the transformative power of opening up national borders to the commercialization of the human genome—and one dyspeptic dissenter. Read on, for a sense of the possible in the world of 2030.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/15-big-breakthroughs-in-2015-114486.html
Would you agree with their predictions? What would surveillance be like in 2030? Would we have any freedoms at all, any privacy?
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YOW!! Up ahead! It's a DONUT HUT!!
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 24 2015, @05:58PM
Rich vs poor is a big problem but not the full story. Many of the poor do plenty of stupid things to themselves, bringing their poverty upon them. Of course that's no excuse for the rich to rig the game and cheat everyone else, as they do now. What I see is that the age old competition with each other could easily turn ugly and self-destructive in the near future. We've grown so powerful that we've won decisively against our old adversary, the rest of nature. Forests are not mysterious and scary anymore, and we can harvest them any time we want. No large animal can compete against bullets. There's not an obvious external common threat to help hold people together, now our biggest dangers are ourselves. We have so far avoided nuclear war. We see the perils of Climate Change, which we caused, but so far, our response has been mixed.
One problem is slack. Just like muscles weaken when not used, our easy living has eroded our good senses, and spoiled us a bit. This is most easily seen among the children of the rich, who may not have to work a day of their lives.
At the other extreme is crippling poverty. Children who did not get enough nutrition and got a bad or no education, perhaps because the rich stole from their parents, are weaker from the privation they suffered.
When the Climate Change chickens come home to roost is when it could turn ugly. We tend to use everything available, don't hold back, so that if something causes a reduction, we're hurting. The obvious consequence is a reduction of us. The easy way out is fewer children, but that's slow. The hard ways are war and famine. Which way will we go? If we don't plan for these problems, if we're stupid, maybe made ourselves stupid from easy living for the rich and too hard living for the poor, we'll go the ugly route.