This being the first week of the New Year, all
the notable writers on any topic at all are posting predictions for this year.
The more prudent ones are saying what they’ve been saying all along – expect
2016 to be a continuation of 2015, but with a few more bumps and steeper
gradient. For those who are hoping now is the time for some miraculous piece of
technology or sudden revolutionary awakening of human consciousness to save the
impending doom of our civilisation, this year is once again going to disappoint.
I can’t add much of value to the predictions already made by Greer or Kunstler,
so I think I’ll probe further into the future.
This slightly-further future is going to be
very different to the one that has constantly been predicted by
tech-fetishizing cheerleaders. Let’s take the year 2050, when I will be 55
years old. I expect that world to be very different from the one we find
familiar. The ravages of war, depletion and climate change is going to result
in a world, if parts of it are functioning at all, more resembling that of my
grandfather’s time and earlier – perhaps like the year 1950, a century earlier. I'm going to (very roughly) outline how the forces of engineering and economics will shape the trajectory
of the future ahead of us in terms of some features central to the lifestyles of
people inhabiting developed societies right now.
Personal
Computers and the internet: Expect these to
disappear from the home, from your backpacks and pockets. To produce these
devices, we need a strongly globalised economy with ample inputs of fossil
fuels to extract, process, and manufacture raw materials into the highly
precise pieces of circuitry required for digital computing. This massive
embodied energy cost will be economically inefficient for functions that can be
fulfilled with printing presses and radios. On top of that, the continuing pursuance
of planned obsolescence production by most of the major tech companies means
that plenty of valuable material is simply being wasted instead of being
reused. As our current culture is obsessed with constantly producing and
consuming ever more high-powered and resource consuming devices, regression to
more sensible, low powered earlier computers will also no longer possible as our entire computer systems infrastructure is constantly ‘upgrading’ to better produce the sort of needlessly overpowered devices we use today.
By 2050 vast cost of manufacturing personal
computers will make them inaccessible to average households once again. Emails
will once again be a luxury, probably costing several times regular ‘snail’
mail. Computers will only be affordable to rich companies, government
departments and academic institutions who will use them for what they were
originally meant for – processing large amounts of data and complex
calculations, instead of watching cat videos. As explained by John Michael
Greer, the internet will morph into something more resembling the older
DARPA-net, used only for essential tasks.
Cars: People living in many western societies can’t fathom life without
their personal oil burning machine – I mean, car. Our cities are all structured
around this gargantuan form of wastage and pollution. The advent of the car was
a sign of a huge surplus of energy that our society had in the 20th
century, and similarly future shortages of such energy will do the opposite. When
filling up your car is going to cost a quarter of your weekly income, and you
have to juggle rent and soaring utility costs, you’re likely to ditch that
gas-guzzler and live closer instead. No matter how much people try and cover
up, facts are that personal transport is simply infeasible in a society where
people have to pay the full costs of energy usage.
Take the graphic below, for example. Apart
from just noticing the congestion issues, notice that each vehicle expends most
of its energy in making itself move, and that moving passengers is a much
smaller marginal energy input. Obviously a mode of transport that can move the
most people is going to be more efficient in variable cost (per person), than
one that spends a majority of its fuel in just making the frame and associated
parts move (the extremity of that being a car with one person in it).
Secondly, think about systems costs. Cars and buses both require several lanes of gravel and tar, which is really energy and
cost intensive. Compared to that, one set of rails with loose gravel, and
cobblestone roads (that can be made with human labour) is going to be far
easier to build and maintain. Any sensible administration will make the
cost-effective choice, that is, ditch conventional roads once the huge subsidies
governments have set up for them are ditched.
Along with this, I also expect that the
time of sprawling suburbia with associated highways and malls is going to end
as well. More competent administrations will invest in better urban planning
and public transport, such as light rail. Long commutes are going to be
unaffordable and thus undesirable (thankfully). Already built large suburban
areas are going to turn into desolate ruins, be stripped down to make way for
agriculture if possible, or turn into smaller towns and hamlets.
Phones: More and more of our communication
infrastructure is tied to the internet, so the demise of the internet will bring
about the phasing out of mobile phones associated nick-knacks like video calling.
Rolling out wires for a telephone line operated by humans with switchboards is
considerable, but a lot less than building mobile towers every few kilometres
and keeping satellites in the sky just so you can find the nearest restaurant. It’s far
easier to just use your local telephone to keep your loved ones notified when
increased mobile costs mean that texting or calling on the cellular network
costs as much relatively as it did in 1990.
Expensive cellular network costs will increase the demand for substitutes
such as regular mail, or maybe a cost based email system. Even amongst those
who could potentially afford the luxuries of mobiles, such as the elite, I
expect that the most functionality the average phone will have will be calling
and messaging. Mobile data networks are likely to disappear altogether,
especially when the internet of the near future won't be even near as large as it
is today. You’ll have to look up city directories and magazines to find a nearby restaurant,
or rely on word of mouth again. And perhaps learning to read a map will be of
value as well.
Flying: I myself have been very guilty of this particular form of waste,
having travelled across the world in the past few months. Of course, not only
are jet aircraft very fuel consuming, the also require huge amounts of embodied
energy to produce and maintain. In terms of domestic transport, a country that
wants to remain connected will have to resort to a lower capital and higher labour input level form of mass transport, such as railway or boats. There
might be a narrow window of opportunity where airships can be a competitive substitute
to both rail and flight, however due to our cultural obsession with
needle-shaped heaver than air devices, I highly doubt that airships will gather
sufficient investment to be developed before things get worse. I could (and
hope to be) wrong – several militaries have been working on airships as
heavy-load transport, and will perhaps have some sway over civilian transport
policymakers.
Entertainment: When things regress, it’s often not in the same way backwards as it
was forwards. The shifting of mass-entertainment from TV to the internet
affected a profound cultural shift where people are now used to being instantly
gratified with whatever form of entertainment they want.
Gone is the patience
of pencilling down a show you want to see at 7:30pm on a certain channel.
Furthermore, most inhabitants of currently ‘developed’ societies are going to
be overburdened with work to just feed themselves and therefore are unlikely to
find TV worthwhile in terms of time or money. I find the return of TV as a mass
medium unlikely in such circumstances. Perhaps old-fashioned movies combined
with news reels will be the most viable form of visual entertainment and become
popular as they were during World War II and after, as it’s far cheaper to pay
a few dollars to walk into a short news and TV show than to buy a TV set and
subscription.
Books are still relatively popular and will
have better demand as handheld devices become less common. Although this also
means that personal music will also disappear, the demand gap will be picked up
by a renaissance of radio media, which has been surviving somehow through all these
years of increasing on-demand digital entertainment. Radio is a much cheaper
alternative as all it requires is a few microphones, maybe a recording player
or two and a transmitter, rather than huge servers and factories needed to keep
tablets and iPods going. The same can be said of newspapers; the printing press
has been around since the 13th century and isn’t going to be
upstaged by internet news in terms of energy and cost input - ever.
Usually predictions of the future done by
my fellow millennials are an assortment of their preferred techno-fantasies.
However, most millennials are also completely oblivious of the unfolding crises
that are going to wipe out industrial civilisation a few lifetime from theirs.
Most see their current difficulties as a temporary set of circumstances that
will improve once all boomers die and more ‘efficient’ or ‘equal’ policies are
enacted as part of their utopian revolution. The fact that economic decline is
going to be a permanent feature of their lives which they can adapt to or flounder
in hasn’t struck home. Of course, the school of hard knocks is expected to make
many students over the next few years. Being more realistic about the future
ahead, can help preparation.