It’s that time of year to look ahead to the next year.
Since it’s arguably the end of a decade — the 20 teens — how about we look toward the end of the 2020s?
The year 2030 is just 10 years away. What will the world look like?
In most respects, everyday life in 2019, at least for North Americans, doesn’t look a lot different than it did in 2010. About the most obvious change is how ubiquitous smart phones have become. But even that trend was well on its way when the current decade began.
A few other trends have arisen during the teens, such as the increasing prevalence of electric vehicles — driven by environmental concerns. That trend isn’t new either, although it is taking on increasing urgency.
We should expect that trend to build during the 2020s, although we shouldn’t be surprised at a backlash against it either. Lest we think that a transportation revolution cannot happen quickly, let’s harken back to the 1920s. Car ownership, which had grown exponentially in the preceding decade as the price of the Model T dropped, grew by many multiples again after the First World War in North American as the continent experienced economic prosperity. Of course, we know how the Roaring Twenties ended — with a Great Depression followed by the Second World War.
Compared with that, maybe we should hope for a Snoring Twenties this time around.
Oh how the world has changed since those times. Our enemies in that brutal global war are now our allies. Just the thought of it makes the Brexit worries seem quaint. On the trade front, the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal will soon be a done deal. A trade pact with China also seems inevitable — despite differences between the superpowers. (OK, that one could go sideways, with devastating consequences. But if we can survive the Cold War without disaster, the world can find a way around an East-West impasse.)
By and large, the world economy had a pretty good decade in the wake of the financial crisis of 2009. Yes, the rewards aren’t as equitably distributed as they could be. But in the past half century, billions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty. We live in world where the poorest have access to a smart phone — a pocket computer a million times more powerful than the ones used to send men to the moon 50 years ago.
Of course, our civilization has a lot to worry about, aside from the perils of climate change, species extinctions, and potentially diminishing non-renewable natural resources. But we do live in a global civilization. Just notice how the skylines of the world’s major cities all tend to look alike from a distance.
One thing we should always be wary of are unforeseen and unintended consequences. When it first became popular, the automobile was hailed as a solution to a pollution problem that plagued the cities of the day. That pollution was, of course, horse excrement. Only later did it become obvious that the internal combustion engines of those cars created other pollution problems. So we should be wary that alternative forms of propulsion might also have their unintended consequences. That doesn’t mean discarding them; it simply means avoiding denial about any issues and dealing with them.
The decade ahead will no doubt present its share of potholes, detours and dead ends. But it also holds a lot of promise. Recent advances in genetic medicine, for example, are showing the potential to eradicate diseases and even extend the human life span. Quantum computing, which could solve problems that would take millennia for classic computers to works out, appears nearly ready for prime time. Mankind is poised to return to the moon in the middle of the coming decade, setting the stage for missions to Mars in the 2030s.
The vast majority of us will be staying put here on Earth. And we’ll have to make a living — including doing things like repairing all the equipment needed to build and maintain the 2020s civilization. Or not. If powerful quantum computers and robots, which will also become more advanced, do most of the work, humans will have to find other meaningful things to do.
Yes, we’ve heard that before. But with 2020 foresight it looks like many of these future dreams will become real in the coming decade.
— Keith Norbury
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