-Confucius
My friend sent me an article on the future of food. It talked about how in the future we’ll eat insects and novel fermented foods because we need to account for climate change. It’s sad how politics have seeped into every industry. It taints what would be a fun exercise of predicting cool things humanity will create with the pessimistic lens of partisan politics. Politics permeate our media from science papers to researched articles on how to raise children. I was reading an article in The Atlantic on nature vs nurture and the studies done there. It argued the data shows that nature matters at least 2.5x more than nurture. It then makes a detailed, personal attack on Jared Kushner about how his wealthy parents changed his supposed fate so there are exceptions to the rule. It felt so out of place with the rest of the article using research and statistics to make every other point. This is an exercise of me giving fun ideas and high level thoughts on what I believe will happen in the future.
Free energy and AI are going to change the food industry. Imagine having an awesome AI chef that can 3D print food for each person’s particular pallet. You can talk to the AI chef and tell them what you’ve had recently, and they can suggest different foods. You confirm and the AI chef prints your food, Star Trek replicator style.
Even better and more likely, the AI chef will come up with new cuisines that haven’t been invented yet. AlphaZero came up with new kinds of moves and strategies for Chess and Go. Our AI chefs may know what we want to eat better than we do ourselves. The possibilities are endless from both a nutritional and tastiness standpoint.
When I eat unhealthy foods, I think of whether they’re “worth it”. Meaning, is it tasty enough to be worth the high sugar/sodium/caloric content. With feedback, an AI chef will know better than us if a given treat is worth it.
The future will have better technology. Almost every task will be easier to do than it is today. At the same time, happiness will be the same. We’ll still suffer from the same problems. There will be those who are cowards and those who are courageous. Those who make a dent in the universe and those whose lives pass without incident. We’ll adjust to thinking our AI chef is normal. We’ll have the same political debates even though there are clearly systems that tend to work and systems that tend to not work.
Ben Franklin said it was crazy how people still used lead in paint. It was appalling to him given what we knew at the time. Even the Romans knew to not use lead in their construction and aqueducts. We still use lead in single propeller piston engine airplanes. We refuse to learn from our many mistakes. We’ll continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
The show Futurama was one of my favorites growing up. The beauty of it was how human it was. There was massive volatility in the quality of episodes even within a season, but it was always intelligently written. The writers even came up with a couple unique alien languages as easter eggs throughout. What I loved about Futurama is the human condition staying the same. If AI can do our jobs, we won’t suddenly all become happy. It’s the beauty and shame of the human condition.
People will be against corporations while participating in corporate bureaucracies. There will be corruption throughout society via unions and special interest groups, but it won’t be addressed. The amorphous, bureaucratic blobs that can’t be personified will live on.
Politicians will borrow against future earnings. People will follow incentives. People will build and innovate as long as the means and incentives are there to do so. Authoritarians will rise; authoritarians will fall. Democracy will fail. Communism will fail. Socialism will fail. They’ll all be tried again. Economic booms will eventually be followed by economic busts. Innovation will happen in S curves over and over again. People and nature will continue to follow the 80/20 rule and other power laws. Humans will be humans. It’s the same reason ancient philosophers are relevant today. We’re the same as humans from the past. We just have more tools.
People will fall in love. People will fall out of love. People will procreate. Others won’t. People will be great parents. Others won’t. Nuance will exist. Many will acknowledge it. Others won’t. People will be religious about beliefs. Some will proselytize. Others won’t. Music interests will change with the times. People will enjoy the songs they listened to growing up. We will always have our sacred cows. Our own idiosyncrasies. People will think they’re different; People will think they’re special.
Kids will be kids. Teens will still go through puberty. Their brains will make their parents' voices annoying and novel voices interesting. I doubt there will be technology that makes it so parents can manipulate their teenagers. And even if there was and it was applied, it would make teens rebel more when they learn what their parents did.
Groups will say new inventions like access to infinite 3D printed food are a human right. Innovations we can’t even imagine will one day be thought of as a basic human right.
Our lives will be relative. We’ll take all the advances civilization has made for granted. We’ll want more. A large contingent will think life is unfair. And there’s truth in what they say– life is unfair. It always has been and it always will be. We’ll never truly have equality of outcome even with the exact same effort put in. That’s ok. Humans will continue being humans.