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Bronzie Beat asks us to predict the future in their January 2022 questions.
I'm going to answer these questions in my typical doomer way. Since these questions are inherently political, I'm posting the answers in my neglected political log, President Xi, Send The Nukes, and just a stub in my regular journal.
The US/SpaceX Artemis mission is supposed to have a crewed moon landing in 2025. I'm sure it won't happen in-budget or on schedule, and I'm skeptical that it will happen at all. Remember that the US is a declining empire, incapable of maintaining its own infrastructure or dealing with basic public health emergencies. The US allowed its own crewed spaceflight capabilities decline through the 2000s and 2010s to the point that it was relying on Russian spacecraft to ferry US astronauts to and from the ISS. Now that there's a private spaceflight company, it's possible for US space expenditures to be public cost and private profit, as required by the dominant neoliberal ideology.
(Side note: if you haven't listened to the "It Could Happen Here" podcast's series on neoliberalism, please do so. It fully explains what the term means and how neoliberal ideology formed after WWII and came to global dominance in the late 20th century. )
Now that space spending can go to enrich Marie Antoinette Musk rather than being of benefit to all mankind, I can see the US continuing to spend money on it, even while continuing to increasingly starve the social safety net and public infrastructure. So I wouldn't count this effort out entirely, though I wouldn't expect it before 2035, and I wouldn't be surprised if people died in the process. This, of course, depends a lot on political and economic conditions in the US staying much as they are.
The People's Republic of China, on the other hand, is pretty regularly sending robot probes to the moon /and back/ on a regular basis, and has in general shown themselves capable of large-scale projects. They have a 2035 expedition planned with a lot of run-up sub-projects scheduled, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're on schedule. If people die in the process, we won't hear about it.
Could Happen Here
I assume the question is asking what I expect, rather than what I want. I'm not sure about either. /The Diamond Age/ introduces both major social changes (phyles on top of the neoliberal CEP), and technological changes (molecular nanotechnology under centralized control). /Walkaway/ has technology that has a clearer continuity with ours, and a society with clearer continuity than ours, and therefore seems more plausible, but I wonder.
Some of the nanotechnology in /The Diamond Age/ is doubtful - dry-phase molecular nanotechnology in the wild is never going to work, as it will get eaten by hungry bacteria. But matter compilers aren't inherently impossible. On the whole, the social and technological changes in the book are just too far-flung to speculate about.
/Walkaway/ is more believable, but I think it has some serious problems. First off: the walkaways have some place to walk away to! And access to public networks while they do it! And walkaway culture starts to threaten Default society, it emerges victorious because the zottas are /not/ willing to simply drone-strike anyone and everyone living off-grid. And it doesn't really engage with the ongoing climate apocalypse as far as I remember.
I /want/ to believe in /Walkaway/. I want a post-scarcity anarchist society. But I think Peter Frase's /Four Futures: Life After Capitalism/ correctly describes a fully-automated capitalist society, like the walkaways are walking away from, as /Exterminist/. The zottas only need us for our labor, and as they need that less and less, they're clearly more than willing to imprison us, to let us die easily preventable deaths, and to kill us off en masse as necessary. Those trends are visible in our current society, and they'd only get worse as we approached /Walkaway/'s future.
I do not believe that artificial general intelligence is impossible. But I also think that it is much further away than current AI-boosters believe. Computer vision has come an impressive way in the last couple of decades, but it's still incredibly fragile compared to animal vision — no one has produced an adversarial patch for animal vision, yet. And I think that huge-corpus language engines like GPT-3 are pretty much a sideshow. They /look/ more impressive than Eliza (or `M-x doctor'), but don't really do anything new; consider also that human children acquire their native language /without/ a huge corpus (the "poverty of the stimulus", in linguistics), which means that something else is going on.
Given that, I'd expect AGI no sooner than the end of this century, /if/ current environmental, social, and political realities were to stay relatively unchanged. But then, we are in the early days of the Jackpot, and looking forward to at least 80 years of "androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit" — droughts, crop failures, pandemics, refugee crises, wars and so on. I would expect the collapse of the social and technological infrastructure required for AI research to be more likely than the successful development of AGI this century.
Which may not entirely be a bad thing. The limited AI we've got so far have been force-multipliers for absolutely the worst people in the world, and any AGI developed under capitalism would be at best the Vile Offspring, and at worst, Clippy.
In the US, both major political parties have functionally done so already. While Trump was in office, there was political hay for the Democrats to make by insisting on a sensible response to the pandemic. Now that Biden is in, the winds are blowing the other way. The Biden administration has effectively endorsed "herd immunity" as their strategy for dealing with the omicron variant, and we are once again expected to go to work sick for the sake of the Line.
It'll be officially over when they start expecting us to pay for booster shots on our own dime (like we have to for antivirals); my guess is immediately after the 2022 midterm congressional election.
> So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit...it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years...No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures... diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. — William Gibson, _The Peripheral_
That's what I think is the most likely situation. Over the last fifty years, we've systematically disassembled any means of collective decision making other than financial markets, and international organizations with a mission of propping up financial markets. The only large and influential country that's not governed on this basis is the PRC, but I don't see them actually bucking the trends. Given that, I think the Jackpot is basically not avoidable unless something (cultural, economic, political) Very Surprising happens.
There's a fictional 2072 I imagine, though. One that's not very plausible, but one that's part of an escapist timeline I keep returning to, a deus ex machina that kicks us out of the fatal rut we're in.
> It's 2072; most parts of the world are finally beginning to recover from World War III, which ended almost 20 years ago but left many regions stuck in a "post-atomic horror". But almost ten years ago, on April 5th, 2063, the most important event in Human history happened; the turning point that changed everything to come. In Bozeman, Montana, a team of researchers had repurposed a former nuclear missile to be the first stage launch vehicle for what would be the catalyst for world peace. This team, led by Dr. Zephram Cochrane, successfully tested their "warp drive", a device that would propel their experimental spacecraft slightly beyond the speed of light.
>
> The warping of space by their drive was detected by an alien starship on the outskirts of the Sol system, engaged in a routine survey mission. The crew of that ship landed and met with Dr. Cochrane and his team, in Earth's first contact with alien intelligence. For the first time in a century, Humanity had a reason to look to the future, and to overcome their internal conflicts, and with guidance from the benevolent and advanced aliens, Humans began to colonize nearby star systems, progress beyond capitalism to a post-scarcity society, and form a single democratic world government.
This is, of course, the early timeline of the Star Trek setting. In our current dark times, I often retreat to the fantasy of a 24th century in which poverty, disease, crime, and war are all eliminated, and remembered as artifacts of a less-evolved past. But it's also, largely, consistent with the thought of Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, better known under the pseudonym J. Posadas, an Argentine Trotskyist who theorized that nuclear war was inevitable, and would lead to the destruction of the capitalist United States and the bureaucratic Soviet Union, allowing the proletariat of the Third World to bring about an authentic communist revolution. The aliens, who were known to be real because of UFO sightings, would necessarily be communist, because of being, like the Vulcans in Star Trek, at a more advanced stage of social and technical development than humanity, and would finally make contact with Earth's revolutionaries to bring about full communism — a vanguard party from outside history. Star Trek's future history is, essentially, Posadism.
I don't believe Posadas was right (though the collapse of the US /is/ a prerequisite for successful socialist revolutions in the rest of the world). I don't believe advanced aliens are out there waiting to make contact with us as soon as we meet their criteria.
But I /want/ to believe. 🛸
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