Free Association Futureism

I need to write a new blog post. I thought I'd start with some free association thoughts and reflections on the random things I think will happen.

Why should you care what I think? Well, you probably shouldn't. But I do pretty well at this futurism shit. I predicted the economic crash, the housing bubble, Obama's quick approval collapse followed by his slow climb up the ladder, the Nintendo Wii's early dominance, and at one point, six consecutive NCAA national champions.

Of course, I also predicted Rick Perry would dominate the Republican debates. So...

Onto my predictions!

1. If things continue on their current trajectory, Romney will eke it out over Santorum, and Obama will eke it out over Romney.

2. Alternatively, Paul or another media figurine could decide that both parties are weak going into this election and stake a third party bid. If this happens, the elections are going to get messy quickly. This is probably the only way the election result becomes unpredictable, so it will probably happen.

3. Israel and Iran will continue their staring contest, but the next major global brouhaha will come from Pakistan and India. And it'll be the messiest international crisis since the Cold War ended.

4. Peak oil will happen and temporarily destroy the economy...but we'll rebuild it faster than people think. While the US is overreliant on oil, we also waste so much that we could conceivably cut consumption by a fifty percent without even affecting our lifestyle. For example, everyone who owns an SUV could go buy a more fuel efficient car, we could cut the nonstop orgy of business travel, we could stop buying products from halfway around the world and start buying local out of sheer necessity, etc.

5. In fact, peak oil in the long run may *help* the US economy by forcing people to go spend money on more fuel efficient living and buy local products. While this will devastate standard of living in the short term, it'll get people working again in a hurry to facilitate the transition.

6. The next scientific revolution will be biological. We've learned more about biology than anything else over the last ten years, and some of what we've discovered is enormous: the ability to map the genetic code quickly, full activity maps of the human brain (less than ten years ago, high school science taught us we'd *never* know how the brain worked).

7. We'll learn how to 'code' in genetics. DNA comes in two sets of allele pairs that contain the code for every living thing that exists. In a way, this is like 1s and 0s, the backbone of everything we use for computing. Computer science, then, will become a very simple port to biological systems.

8. As we learn how to 'program' in genetic code and better design and build biological structures, bio solutions will rapidly begin to replace manufactured solutions. This will become even more true as oil prices make it more difficult to move physical material around.

9. The energy crisis will be solved when scientists crack the code for photosynthesis. While solar panels have major efficiency limitations, plants seem pretty damn good at converting solar energy to more useful types. And solar has to be the ultimate winner in the renewable war: there's literally an unlimited supply of it (though, as with all other unlimited resources we've had as a species, we'll find a way to use it all eventually).

10. We'll soon be able to grow things that we need more efficiently than manufacture them. By combining genetic code from the millions of sources of life we have, we'll be able to make virtually every product we use today, and improved versions of many of them.

11. While this will start in 'eco-factories', eventually the technology will become portable, and the entire idea of shipping products will fall by the wayside. Instead, our products will be transported as seeds that contain the code for the products we need. Without the shipping and manufacturing costs, these seeds will become virtually free. Industry will, of course, attempt to put a price on them and control their distribution, but hackers and bootleggers will distribute them regardless, like torrents.

12. We'll make the jump to being able to modify our own genetic code as well. While this will have huge medical benefits, it will also be coopted to support enormous genetic modification industries, like plastic surgery and tattoo artists today. Some will use the genetic modifications to achieve a model standard of beauty (like plastic surgery), while others will use it to reject this standard and differentiate themselves from the mainstream crowd (like tattoos and ear gauges).

13. As we get more and more proficient, the types of modifications will become more and more extreme. What starts as skin pigmentation or eye and hair color change will become more and more exotic: horns, scales, fur become available modifications for the counter culture.

14. We'll learn to map the brain and become very knowledgeable in how different parts of the brain create different parts of our reality. Once we know how it works naturally, we'll be able to manipulate it as well. We'll learn to 'adjust' our own experience of the world.

15. This can be as simple as putting a 'skin' over it (like the way you can adapt your computer desktop's visual settings) or as complex as generating a virtual reality that we can escape to and experience as if it were real.

16. We'll use this to create both awesome video games and a new, intensely addictive type of drugs. Some people will spend their entire lives in either type of world, the way a WoW addict lives his life in his bedroom's virtual world or the way a drug addict lives entirely in his drug induced world, slowly modifying his body more and more until outsiders can barely recognize his humanity.

17. We'll also learn how to interface between our virtual, computer worlds and our biological worlds. We'll learn how to download the entirety of wikipedia to our memory banks. We'll be able to 'visit' Minecraft and walk around it as if we were actually there. We'll be able to text and tweet our thoughts directly from brain to brain without the computer interface. In this way, a human hive mind will be created.

18. As these changes evolve, the physical world will gradually become less and less important to more and more people.

19. A few traditionalists will insist on living entirely in the physical world and rejecting the new lifestyle. Nobody under 30 will understand them. Everybody over 30 will envy them.

20. As we learn to communicate directly brain to brain, we'll learn to distribute our art through thought waves as well. Initially, this will be free. But as always, record and film studios will become upset that they're missing out on a profit, and insist that unauthorized mind to mind transfers of copywrited material is a crime. They'll attempt to draft legislation that allows them to sue and jail people for unauthorized thoughts.

21. As always, everybody will ignore these laws and share anyway.

22. Terrorist attacks will become less focused on the physical form and more on this biological hive mind. They'll attempt to create viruses that infect people through their thoughts. An enormous security and defense industry will grow to protect against these types of viruses. Doomsday literature and anxiety will grow about these type of attacks, as they would be literal mutual assured destruction.

23. Just as with nuclear attacks, the suicidal nature of this type of attack will prevent it from happening. The worrying and angst over the possibility will cause more harm to humanity than the threat itself.

24. As we begin to manipulate perception, we'll also begin to manipulate perception of time. We'll be able to grow our experience of nanoseconds out as if they were full minutes or hours or years. As we find ourselves able to do that, we'll also be able to program inhabitable mental environments that take place in 'nanotime'. In this way, humanity will obtain a type of immortality: we'll live whole lifetimes in the seconds between our physical blinks.

25. Many will choose to die regardless.

26. We'll still spend the vast majority of our time thinking about cats in adorable poses.




If you're still reading, damn. Thanks for jumping down this rabbit hole with me. Will it come true? Who knows?

If nothing else, this is a pretty good fucking setup for a kick ass sci-fi novel.