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Hindsight 2070: We asked fifteen experts, “What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in fifty years?” Here’s what they told us
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- Published
- Mar 27 2019
- Word count
- 465 words
Something I would like to see change about views on abortion is the idea that it is necessarily shameful and traumatic and that pains should be taken to limit its occurrence even if it is legal and available. It feels like the compromise on abortion has been "we'll make it legal but not socially acceptable." I'd like to see it viewed more in line with any other medical procedure so that the individuals involved can feel however they want without society telling them what emotions they must have. Mostly, I want the norm to be that it's none of our business why someone gets an abortion or how they feel about it.
I've got to say, this is a pretty interesting article that makes some idiosyncratic predictions, including a social opposition to driverless cars and a volunteer military, though the former I don't think was particularly well thought out. There are good arguments against the current push for driverless cars, and the lack of a natural authority figure in a vehicle is not one of them.
It was also refreshing how the section on bosses both existed, most people having a selective blindness towards private tyranny, and didn't half-ass it and actually described the end of capitalism and abolition of private property. I'm all on board of course, but a Vox article was, well, not where I was expecting to read something like that.
The lack of a natural authority figure seemed like a strange point to me as well, even as it relates to public transportation. I get the concept, sure, but there aren't staff in L cars in Chicago--just an automated voice announcing the stops. And what's to say automated public transport is even shared? Google's concept autonomous cars were only two-seaters, and I doubt you'd be obligated to scoot over. I strongly doubt future autonomous networks will look anything like a traditional bus route.
Not to mention that "driver" and "security guard" are completely separate jobs - why keep the former just to do the job of the latter?
The others that I've read so far were quite interesting and somewhat thought provoking, but the driverless car one seemed incoherent.
I myself have had very similar thoughts to you about lab grown meat and how it will shape societies opinions in the future. And I think that it's fairly likely that's where we are heading. Once you raise a couple generations who have never eaten real meat, but have raised their fair share of pets, or seen numerous animals cutely portrayed in cartoons, I think the stigma will be immense. Especially when considering the unsafe, and unethical conditions that meat farming has realistically endured for decades.
On the topic of the article itself though, I enjoy reading through campy old magazines, and I've read through enough crazy predictions for the future to know a bad one when I see one. IMO I think at least a couple of the expert opinions in the article are simply wishful thinking. That is to say, it would be nice if they came true, but social momentum is just as likely to make them never pan out. The biggest problem here is that these authors wrote about how they wanted the future to look, rather than judging it against some kind of metric to determine where things are going. Not all of them are guilty of that however, and some in fact do a good job of defending their position.
I was wondering that as well. For background: looking up the book linked and finding a summary and discussion of its model here, it looks like the way it works in brief is: public banks will be established which are funded by taxes on physical capital (land, equipment, etc.) owned by firms, these banks will give zero-interest loans to start new firms, and these firms will be run democratically under a one-person-one-vote system. Instead of a fixed wage workers will be paid a portion of their firms' profits and "private ownership of the means of production" will be outlawed.
I'm skeptical of this proposed system. One issue is that no one who starts a business can be guaranteed any form of ownership or control as soon as they have two or more employees. Why put in any work (or make any personal sacrifices) to start a business if you'll effectively lose it as soon as it grows beyond yourself? I suppose the argument could be made that if you're a good manager and you run the business well that the other workers will continue to elect you, but no democracy is ever perfect in picking good leaders (and there's no guarantee you'll be the best leader anyway).
This system would also create some maladaptive incentives around hiring. The decision on whether to hire new employees and who to hire would become extremely political. If a voting bloc is worried about losing power they could hire new employees who share their views, even if more workers would be detrimental to the overall business. Conversely, a voting bloc could resist hiring new people when needed to maintain power by limiting new votes. Every hiring decision would be made with politics in mind: what if I run a restaurant and we need new waitstaff for the summer tourist season, but then these new voters decide to turf me as manager because they want someone who will agree to keep them on after the season is over? My incentive in deciding who to hire wouldn't be how well they could work, it would be in finding people who will want to vote for me.
Then there's the issue of funding. Right now there is a variety of sources both public and private (including personal) but in the proposed model there is only one source of startup capital: public banks. If you can't convince someone there of your vision you're out of luck. You wouldn't even have the option of taking all the risk yourself and putting up your own money through something like a home mortgage. The means of production couldn't be privately owned and the business itself would have a democratic structure that would preclude you from controlling it anyway.
I just don't see this system as working well enough to be the only system legally allowed. What I would like to see is proponents of this system to put theory into practice and start their own businesses with this model. Cooperatives already exist of course, but they're still a relatively small part of the economy and it would be nice to see more variety in what they do and what they've accomplished, especially when it comes to pushing new innovations and technologies. There's also the issue that existing cooperatives aren't necessarily working along the model supported by the author of the original article. e.g. When reading up on Mondragon (a cooperative that often comes up in these discussions) this article mentioned that they have many international workers who aren't part of the worker-owner structure.
I suppose this is all part of a larger discussion. In the last few years the idea of capitalism as a failed system that needs replacing has come closer to the mainstream. At the very least, it's a popular idea among younger people and on the internet. In a way it reminds me of the internet-libertarianism that was popular and omnipresent 10 years ago. Though I consider myself to be broadly on the left (my thoughts on the left-right dichotomy is a whole other topic) I feel downright reactionary in some online spaces nowadays simply for not wanting to abolish capitalism. The ideas I see are well intentioned and I share many of the same values of supporting each other as a society, but I haven't been convinced that actual socialism or communism as proposed in the article will work or lead to a better society, or that the social technologies of capitalism (private ownership, private finance, etc.) are inherently flawed and can't be used for the benefit of society.
I don't know a huge amount about the issue, but I imagine there could be a balanced accommodation made for new companies. Perhaps the employee shares are handed out up front but are non-voting until at least one of the following is met, for example: 5 years since the company started, $8m annual revenue, more than 65 total employees. Or maybe there's a set amount of equity that has to be transferred from the founders to the common pool each year, slowly transferring voting rights over time. Or you could allow companies to keep a fixed percentage of stock privately owned, with a voting majority pool distributed among the employees as they are hired, to give a sort of hybrid system (as we have with some cooperatives now).
There are problems with any of those ideas, of course: you'd need to stop existing companies from just transferring to a new legal entity every time the employee control threshold was coming, there would need to be some incentive for employees to take on the extra risk (and slower payoff) compared to a more established company, and you'd need to prevent unscrupulous founders from driving things into the ground to skim extra cash while they still had control. People can be amazingly innovative when it comes to screwing others for profit, but it doesn't seem entirely implausible for there to be a workable solution.
The self driving cars one made no sense. Apparently self driving cars are unthinkable because the author once was sitting on a bus and the bus driver told a crazy person to remain seated. I was expecting something else but that was pretty much it.
What makes these people experts anyway? Sounds like they just asked a bunch of journalists to share random opinions.
I thought the same thing at first when I copied it from the article but it's correct. It's not going for the expression "what do we know...", rather it's saying something like "what do we currently do that..."
No, the title is correct and it's the same in the article as well.
Although it could be rephrased as "What are we doing now/today that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years".