What could we anticipate in the next 300 years?
My conviction is that living in the best possible way in a 300 year plan is living the best possible way for a 1 year plan. Why 300 years? It’s 10 generations. It’s long enough that the only question holding your attention is “What is the most worthwhile investment of my time, gifts, and energy to benefit humanity?”
We must first anticipate what could happen in the next 300 years. It’s an exercise of extrapolating from hard trends evident today, adding in elements which are likely, and stretching your imagination to weave into likely scenarios. Demographics, geopolitics, technology trends, persistent human strengths & foibles, economics, social structures. Whatever we imagine will surely be incorrect in precise details, but still useful. My book “Bold and Gentle” has guidance for my adult children for the next 50 years of living in this age of exponential technology change. I made specific predictions about the largest issues that would affect us (including pandemics).
It’s possible that the human species will be gone in 300 years. I doubt it, despite our astounding capacity for self-sabotage. A friend recently pointed out to me that humans adapt to change better than any other species – indeed, we change the environment to suit us – and we are the superior long-distance runners in the animal kingdom. We go the distance.
The future need not always move in the positive direction. We don’t know what mathematics was lost when the Islamic caliphates collapsed. The secrets of Roman self-healing cement were lost for a millennium and still can’t be replicated well; the same is true for the cement used by the Ancient Ones who built the pyramids outside Mexico City. We have almost nothing of the philosophy and art of the Assyrian empire. The jungles crept back over magnificent cities in Central America and at Ankor Wat. The 20th century saw many retreats from knowledge, art, sophistication, and justice.
Overall, I’m an optimist about the future. Winston Churchill commented during the worst of the London Blitz that he saw little value in being a pessimist. I’m long people, and short government. We must temper optimism with realism, especially about the fundamentals of human nature, and the recognition that we overestimate how much can be done in a few years and greatly underestimate how much can be accomplished in hundreds of years.
Ready? Here we go.
Foundation truths:
- The future can be shaped by people with agency.
- Exponential technology trends — and the changes are accelerating — will utterly transform the capabilities people think as “normal.”
- People will still be people, with similar aspirations we experience today, and every generation must learn anew.
- The future is integrated. All the elements I could possibly tease out and consider separately are still entwined and enveloped by all the other elements.
- “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”
Assumptions for this exercise:
- Wars, tyrannical governments, pandemics, and natural disasters will kill many millions over the years but not end the human species.
- We successfully adapt to environmental changes.
- Jesus’ return happens after 300 years from now.
So my thoughts about likely scenarios, in no particular order:
- Global population will level off and begin a slow decline 150-200 years from now. Effectively every human mind is connected at some level via technology; this is widely perceived as a both a blessing and a curse.
- The human footprint will extend further into the solar system — the moon, asteroid mining, low-earth orbit habitats, and Mars. We will have as detailed an understanding of the oceans as we do the land today. Many people will gravitate to these new frontiers.
- Medical advances will lengthen healthy lifetimes to the point where we grow into a new collective sense of who is “old.” Breakthrough genomic analysis paved the path to treat the most common chronic diseases of the 20th century — including diabetes and neurological dementia. We will look back in revulsion and wonderment at circa 2000 medical paradigms for treating cancer. More will go into shaping health and less to treating late-stage disease. People will still die. Even 300 years from now medical care and life-extending options will not be equally available to everyone.
- Exponential technology changes in computing, materials, sensors, energy, and biotechnology will generate more 98/2 distributions than 80/20 distributions. Inequity (unequal outcomes) exists, and is used by some as a driving force for political and social change. There will be completely new industries and job opportunities by 2050. And again in 2100. Every generation will be challenged to adapt and find meaning amidst fast changes.
- There will be an ebb and flow of religious dynamism in tension with areligious world views. New syncretisms of old religious ideas with neurochemistry and machine learning will arise.
- English as written and spoken today will be an important language but likely not the globally dominant language. There are good geopolitical reasons to think the United States and China will be strong in 300 years (e.g., natural resources, strategic geographic buffer of oceans and mountains), but other nations and coalitions of nations will be critically important. India, Vietnam, Korea, Turkey, and Brazil are likely to be important centers of economic and political power. The African continent will be fully developed.
- Wars will occur. The weapons will largely be enhanced versions of what exists in the 21st century, much more AI-driven capability, and some new types of weapons. Courage, resolve, leadership, deception, and maneuver tactics will be critical elements.
- Personal privacy will continue to be a point of struggle for power, influence, and dominance. National governments will experiment with different legal approaches.
- The unintended structural threads of the global credit cycles in the 21st century – we have fewer business cycles and more credit cycles now – shred. The debt reset will be difficult, with a thousand fathers to blame, and we’ll move past it to something I can’t yet conceive. This will cement digital currencies as normative.
- There are likely to be at least 2 major reserve currency shifts after digital currencies become the norm, especially in the economic frontiers in the solar system.
- The primary reasons people struggle to achieve their dreams and reach full potential are neither technical nor economic. Our individual and collective capacity for self-sabotage will remain limiting factors.
- We are likely to go through two “Renaissance” movements in the next 300 years — recovering old wisdom and applying it in new ways, particularly in art, narrative, and governance. A significant component will be integrating training in mental fortitude and creative flexibility with historic education topics.
- Many institutions will be broken, re-formed, and renewed. The breaking points for change will approach as people recognize that the leaders of the institutions care more about protecting the status quo than serving the people the institution was created to help. Guilds and unions will resurge multiple times as the global labor pool levels and demographic changes ebb and flow.
- Some corporations and associations will become more powerful than most of the national governments. One continuing paradigm for major institutions is the desire to control the narrative. The proportion of the human population which desires to tell others what to do does not change.
- We will leverage deeper understanding in neurobiology and psychology to shape “learning how to learn” at every age. Technological changes move fast enough and typical lives are long enough that we’re motivated to learn new skills to remain employable and successful. There will be ongoing tension between true education and indoctrination.
- Skilled and wise leadership paired with character and integrity will be much needed, and always at a premium.
What’s your reaction to this list? Hit reply and let me know.
I should add another key caveat to this exercise: It’s difficult to make our minds go beyond a linear extrapolation of what we imagine happening soon. My ancestors in 1910 would have scoffed at the idea of GPS navigation or DNA sequencing, or that Woolworth’s stores would be a memory. My 12-year-old self could not have imagined that Sears and Montgomery Wards would practically disappear with the rise of ubiquitous ecommerce. Paradigm shifts seem obvious in retrospect. Paradigm shifts are difficult to anticipate in an 80/20 world, and practically impossible in a 95/5 world like ours. People will still fundamentally be people in the next 300 years, so it is people that deserve our attention.
