Why The Future Will Be An Unimaginable Utopia Beyond Our Wildest Imaginations

Humanity is moving ever faster towards a perfect world, but we’ll probably never get all the way to perfect. A somewhat plausible alternative to this utopian future is that humanity destroys itself. Typical science fiction dystopias, on the other hand, are quite unrealistic, in my view.

Interstellar is one of my favorite movies, but there’s one thing about it I don’t like; it’s set in a dystopian future where sandstorms and blight make it increasingly difficult for humans to survive. Although science fiction is my favorite genre, it annoys me a bit that science fiction movies are often dystopian to some degree.

Unfortunately, news media also have a tendency to focus on the negative, so it’s not surprising if you have a negative view of the world today. And with science fiction movies often being dystopian, it’s not surprising if you have a negative view of the future as well. But if we look at the bigger picture – the trends – how the world is changing – we actually see that some very positive changes have been – and are – happening.

Terrorism, war, famine, natural disasters, economic recessions, global warming, climate change, overpopulation… We hear about this in the media all the time. What we don’t hear about nearly as much is that we’re living longer, getting richer, eradicating extreme poverty, becoming more peaceful, curing diseases and working on curing aging.

And in the last 100 years, the cost of food has come down by a factor of 10, electricity cost by a factor of 20, transportation cost by a factor of 100 and communication cost by a factor of 1000! This is all according to Peter Diamandis in his excellent TED Talk Abundance is our future.

Many people are probably aware that the world in many ways has gotten better over the last centuries. But did you know that the risk of dying from violence today is lower than at any other time in human history? That the risk of dying from natural disasters is also lower than at any other time in human history? With all the focus on climate change, many people are surprised to hear this.

In a sense, we already live in a utopian world. If we go back just 100 years, people’s lives were a lot less pleasant. As I wrote in another blog post:

[100 years ago] traveling was slow, air-conditioning was uncommon, there was no radio or television, and just a few movies. You could listen to recorded music, but the quality was poor, there was less music to choose from and you couldn’t download it from the Internet, because, of course, there was no internet. There were no mobile phones. Medical care was both more painful and less effective, and women had a near 1% chance of dying giving birth.

So from the perspective of someone living in 1919, the world of 2019 would seem quite utopian and hard to imagine. Yet we know there are huge problems in the world today as well. Likewise, the world will be so much better a few decades from now, and that future world will seem utopian and hard to imagine for 2019-humans, but there are still going to be problems, though they won’t be as big as today’s problems.

But how can we be sure that the future will be better than the present, that the positive trends will continue? Well, no one can know exactly what will happen in the future. But some things can actually be predicted with a high degree of certainty if we just assume that our economic system doesn’t break down all over the world.

One of the things that’s easy to predict is that our technology is going to improve over time. It has actually turned out that for one aspect of technological change we can even predict with surprising accuracy exactly how fast progress will be. What I’m referring to is the cost of computation – how much computing power you can get per constant dollar. In the 1980s, Ray Kurzweil noticed how predictable the cost of computing had been in the previous decades and extrapolated this into the future. So far his predictions have been astonishingly accurate.

Just as we can’t predict what one molecule in a gas will do – it’s hopeless to predict a single molecule – yet we can predict the properties of the whole gas, using thermodynamics, very accurately. It’s the same thing [with technology]. We can’t predict any particular project, but the result of this whole worldwide, chaotic, unpredictable activity of competition and the evolutionary process of technology is very predictable. And we can predict these trends far into the future.

– Ray Kurzweil, The accelerating power of technology (TED Talk, 2005)

Cheap and efficient computation is a very important factor for technological progress in general, so cheaper and more efficient computation is good news. It means we can accomplish more in a shorter period of time. And the amount of computing power we have access to doesn’t just increase by the same amount each year – it increases exponentially, which means that it will increase by a larger amount this year than it did last year, and by an even larger amount next year. Since humans have evolved to think linearly, this means the future is arriving faster than most of us expect. This, too, is good news, since it means we can fix the world’s big problems sooner than otherwise and improve the lives of more people sooner.

Continued technological progress will have huge implications for human health:

• In 2016 Ray Kurzweil predicted that we’ll have cures for all diseases within 20 years (so by around 2036).
• According to Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation (a charitable organization that’s working on curing aging by fixing aging damage in our bodies to rejuvenate people), there’s a good chance we’ll reach so-called longevity escape velocity in about 18 years. When someone reaches longevity escape velocity, that means his or her remaining life expectancy starts to increase with time rather than decrease. Ray Kurzweil is even more optimistic and says this will happen around 2030.

Of course, everyone won’t get access to these technologies and cures right after they’re developed. They’ll be expensive at first, but if there’s enough competition, the prices will soon fall to affordable levels, as the quality also improves.

You may worry that curing aging will lead to overpopulation. I’ve previously argued that that’s not the case. Yes, there will be more people, but longer lives won’t lead to an exponential increase in population, so when technology progresses exponentially, we’ll be able to handle the increasing population. More people isn’t just a bad thing either. More people also means more people who can work on solutions to the world’s grand challenges, so we can solve them faster. The markets for everything will also be bigger, so there’s more money to be made for those who are able to solve problems – which makes it more likely that they will be solved. And if we are to believe Peter Diamandis, the world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.

Human ingenuity and the magic of the price system

We sometimes hear that we’ll run out of chocolate in a few decades. According to some scientists the reason is that cacao plants can only grow in highly specific conditions near the equator, and if global warming causes the temperature in these areas to rise by just 2°C, these plants will die. They’re probably right that the plants will die if the temperature rises, but as long as people enjoy eating chocolate and are willing to pay for it, we won’t run out of chocolate.

I don’t know exactly how the problem will be solved provided it turns out to be a problem, but one way or another, we will have chocolate or something very similar in 2050. The reason is human ingenuity, the price system, and that the market for chocolate is huge, so there’s a lot of money to be made. If cacao plants start dying, the price of chocolate increases. The fewer cacao plants, the higher the price of chocolate. And the higher the price of chocolate, the greater the incentive to come up with new ways to make chocolate, and the more money and effort investors and entrepreneurs will be willing to spend trying to come up with new solutions.

In this video, Steve Horwitz explains how the price system prevents us from running out of resources:

Going back to the overpopulation issue, you might now – at least if you watched the video – understand how the price system and human ingenuity will be able to handle an increasing population – it’s the same argument that we used for chocolate: when a resource, such as food, becomes scarce, prices increase, giving incentives to produce more food more efficiently. The more scarce the resource, the higher the price, and the more time and money investors and entrepreneurs will spend trying to find solutions – either finding or producing more of the resource, or finding a substitute. And when they do solve it, competition and the law of supply and demand cause prices to go back down.

As for global warming, if that becomes a big problem, we’ll be able to remove excess CO₂ and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere at relatively low cost in a few decades. Currently, however, the costs of removing CO₂ from the atmosphere are out of range of what can be handled by the world today, according to nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler. Until then, the best solution would probably be to invest in renewable energy research, so that cleaner energy sources can out-compete fossil fuels.

But what if our worst fears about global warming had already become reality? In that case we obviously wouldn’t be in a position where we could afford to wait decades before coming up with solutions. So what would happen?

Since that would be such a gigantic problem, affecting more or less everyone on Earth, no doubt there would be a lot of different approaches. Although expensive, one of the solutions would probably be to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, but since it doesn’t solve the problem immediately, but would take many years or even decades, there would be a strong demand for other solutions too – solutions that solve people’s problems right here and now.

And although not every challenge can be attributed to climate change, people are today already adapting to challenging climate or weather conditions around the world. In The Netherlands they have a long history of building dikes to prevent flooding. In Bangladesh they’ve created floating farms to cope with recurrent floods. More robust crop species have been engineered to resist drought, flooding, heat, cold and salt.

So we are already adapting to difficult conditions. We can expect this to happen on a larger scale in a worst-case climate scenario since the higher the cost of a problem, the more money we’re willing to spend to fix it. So extreme climate change would be expensive, but we would adapt and eventually solve the problem.

In general, we’re willing to spend money on things that improve our lives – things that make our lives easier, better, and more meaningful or interesting. And providing things that people are willing to pay for can be very profitable. That’s another reason to expect the future to be better than the present.

So, will humanity destroy itself?

In general, I believe that the future of humanity is technovolatile – meaning either a utopia beyond our wildest imaginations, or extinction. Given the technological capabilities that will be unlocked this century, anything in between (i.e. a traditional dystopia) is hard to imagine.

This quote is from an answer by Maxim Kazhenkov to the question What will our future look like, dystopian or utopian? on Quora. I tend to agree with what he’s saying here. So the way I view it, there is a chance that humanity will destroy itself. The reason is that we’re developing more and more potent technologies. This means individuals or small groups of people will have the power to wreak ever more havoc.

But I do remain more optimistic than pessimistic in this regard as well. The technological dangers won’t come as a surprise so we’ll have time to implement defences. In his 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil also expresses a slightly optimistic view while discussing the dangers of self-replicating nano-technology:

As a test case, we can take a small measure of comfort from how we have dealt with one recent technological challenge. There exists today a new form of fully nonbiological self replicating entity that didn’t exist just a few decades ago: the computer virus. When this form of destructive intruder first appeared, strong concerns were voiced that as they became more sophisticated, software pathogens had the potential to destroy the computer network medium they live in. Yet the immune system that has evolved in response to this challenge has been largely effective. Although destructive self-replicating software entities do cause damage from time to time, the injury is but a small fraction of the benefit we receive from the computers and communication links that harbor them. No one would suggest we do away with computers, local area networks, and the Internet because of software viruses.

One might counter that computer viruses do not have the lethal potential of biological viruses or of destructive nanotechnology. Although true, this strengthens my observation. The fact that computer viruses are not usually deadly to humans only means that more people are willing to create and release them. It also means that our response to the danger is that much less intense. Conversely, when it comes to self replicating entities that are potentially lethal on a large scale, our response on all levels will be vastly more serious.

What do you think? Will the future be utopian, dystopian or something in between, or will humanity become extinct before the end of the century? (Michio Kaku argues that if we can just make it past this century, we may be in the clear.)