It seems possible to
discern four major trends that will determine the future of humanity
in the 21st Century. They suggest a world approaching a
multifaceted singularity
that will mark an unprecedented change in everything and
characterized most fundamentally by a loss of even the gloss of human
agency.
The
Economist of March 14 (2015) covers one of these trends in
suggesting the likely continued success of “Factory Asia” –
China plus its manufacturing chain of the currently even lower wage
countries of Southeast Asia. This already accounts for almost half
of all manufactured goods produced on the planet. China's advantages
– financial and technological plus low cost labor and the very
large domestic market – will allow it to continue to dominate
manufacturing. But the real story here is that – as The
Economist points out – this dominance will make it very
difficult for other developing countries to progress to growth and
prosperity through making things. The paper suggests services and
agriculture as alternatives. But the basic problem is deeper and has
been visible for much longer: looking at it globally, there may not
be enough work to do to supply meaningful paid jobs to everyone who
needs or wants one.
This highlights the
second trend – the rising tide of computer-driven automation and
the subject of “How
Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over” by Sue Halpern in the
New York Review of April 2 (2015). In reviewing a book by Nicholas
Carr (The Glass Cage: Automation and Us), Halpern notes that
while predictions that mechanization would put humans out of work –
and even Keynes saw the problem of what he called “technological
unemployment” – so far technological advance has seemed to create
new jobs to replace lost ones. But Carr argues that we are facing
something new this time as computer driven automation – robots and
virtual robots – takes on tasks such as surgery, drug
development, driving, analysis and writing software and not only old
fashioned machine production. This means not only losing jobs but
most especially good jobs. While increased efficiency and
lower cost of the goods and services produced through this new age of
automation may be good for consumers with money, the questions arise
of who will be able to afford them and what quality of life will
those with no or unrewarding work have? As Paul Krugman has noted,
most benefit – in the form of higher profits – will accrue to
those few who own the robots.
So “modernity”
in the 21st Century may turn out to equal a shrinking
middle class and increased and unrelenting inequality. This leads to
the third trend, the breakdown of order. Over the last few
centuries, an increasing number of people have experienced modernity
as disruption to their lives and traditions and an increasingly
fierce struggle for livelihood. The frustration, resentment and
often unbridled competition produced provided the motive force to the
social and political movements that led to the domestic and
international conflicts and wars of the 20th Century. The
Cold War contained these forces by dividing the world between just
two all-powerful and demanding camps. But since the fall of the
USSR, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and reassertion of
nationalisms, new forces of disorder have added to the old while the
world has splintered into multipolar chaos. Globalization has
meanwhile not solved inequality but has succeeded in presenting
have-nots with minute-by-minute images of what they have not. The
Cold War may have been an artificial order while disorder and chaos
may be the new rule in what might be best described as an ever
encroaching “state of nature.” And by the way, “military
responses” just seem to make things worse and the rich don't seem
to see a problem.
This brings us to
environmental change, where the environment might be best understood
as including the natural world in its totality: biology (e.g.,
disease) and land (e.g., desertification) as well as weather and
climate. Scientists tell us – and have been telling us for a while
– that humans are changing the world in ways we can't entirely
predict but seem to be leading to challenges unprecedented in human
evolution.
So, we – and more
to the point, our children and their children – face finding a way
to live in a world increasingly characterized by inequality, disorder
and automated change that seems to be racing beyond our control. A
singularity is something you enter that leads into a reality beyond
normal experience. If we have not yet passed the event horizon
of this human “black hole,” we are close. Time
to start thinking of something different?
