Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak
nytimes.comA lot of what they are saying is that governments are losing legitimacy and ability to deliver what people want, and this will shift governance and power to other institutions that will take over much of how humanity interacts.
I guess that is bleak for the spy agencies but not for the world overall. People will be happier with a reversal of the tendency of governments to get larger and a return to more fragmented communities that humans have evolved to be happy in.
I’m surprised they have the balls to say this though
What you are describing is much closer to Mad Max than a Utopia. The world ended up as countries and governments for a reason.
Yep. The reason was that geography based communities were relevant. That reason is getting out of date. And it is important to remember that nation states are a step in an evolutionary process, not the end point.
The reason these things are happening is that the world needs different institutions going forward and the failure of the old is part of that evolutionary process. And the old naturally dislikes being replaced and invents myths that claim this replacement is a negative event. It is not.
> The reason was that geography based communities were relevant. That reason is getting out of date.
Only for a very small part of the population though.
I have a physical body. It's going to be somewhere. I therefore care about the physical environment, security, and so on of that place. That isn't going to change until we can upload our consciousnesses. Virtual communities aren't enough to protect my body, and therefore virtual communities aren't enough.
It did, but perhaps the grounds that made countries and governments make sense no longer apply? After all nation states as we knew them today are a rather new innovation.
You are saying that modern countries are new and out of date?
This is a simple economy of scale. A government can provide stable security - police and military - consistent services, retirement benefits, certification, education, etc.
How a bunch of warring feudal clans are going to be in vogue again is hard to see. I mean, all of this is in medieval history. Technology did not suddenly make people "ready". If anything, it made us worse.
Relatively new, on the scale of human settled history. The Greek had city states and feudal Europe had feudal kingdoms.
I agree that security can probably best be provided at a level of states, but does a kid in the Ghetto really receive a comparative level of protection, service or education as another kid in the US, chosen at random?
And also the flip side of security is that oppression can also best be delivered at the state level. North Koreans would be strictly better of if NK was a bunch of warring states.
One of the biggest takeaways from a college lit class was utopias and dystopias are the same thing, simply from different perspectives.
> People will be happier with a reversal of the tendency of governments to get larger
I disagree and suggest this is dependent on your political viewpoint.
Whilst some (very frequently in the USA!) recite the mantra of 'small government', most of us don't care how big or small a government is, providing it is effective. I'd argue an effective government is one that protects its subjects & citizens by providing universal healthcare, education, a justice system and defence to all.
Your opinions may differ!
Agreed! The outcomes of government are what matter to me. Many of the outcomes I expect like infrastructure, healthcare and education, take a lot of work to deliver. If the government is large to support these then so be it.
I'd also suggest that as the world gets more complex, governments should be getting larger. There are more facets to society that need understanding and regulating these days. I'd be alarmed if a government was shrinking under the conditions of population growth and high levels of technological advancement as that would suggest to me a dereliction of duty
It would be rather surprising were a spy agency to say "the world is fine and living in harmony, guess you don't need us spies anymore ..."
There's a difference between a report that is overly alarmist and near fabricating things and a report that points out things are worse now than they were in previous years, which seems to be the case here. While intelligence agencies obviously have their own agendas they still play an important role in modern governments and it would be a fools errant to ignore what they say completely.
The article says it's gloomy compared to the previous spy agency reports.
The article is a summary of this government report (from March 2021):
Global Trends 2040 by the National Intelligence Council
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalT...
CO2 levels at 418 ppm right now. It's not just rising but accelerating up. When are we going to start fixing this exactly? https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2
15 years ago, I was extremely concerned about CO2. Now? CO2 is the single major environmental issue that I think is now certain to work out fine.
Why? Because PV and wind are now the cheapest forms of energy, because even when you add the cost of batteries those are still cheaper than coal and oil, and because the factories to make them are being made as quickly as possible because the eco-friendly solution is so much cheaper than fossil fuels.
The current trend line for PV is an exponential that started in 1992, going up by a factor of ~9000 in 29 years. Keep it up just until the end of this decade and all power — electric, heating, transport; domestic, industrial — is PV by around 2030, and the only reason to expect reality to fall short is that transitioning the final few bits is going to be harder than the first few bits.
I’m still worried about biodiversity losses, phosphorus, antibiotic resistance, etc., but not about CO2.
2030 is easily way past due date, and fossil fuel deployments have increased lately too.
While it isn’t ideal, there is no hard cut off point between “that’s fine” and “we’re screwed”.
And the recent CO2 emission trend is irrelevant compared to 37%/year compound growth for PV. Second half of the chessboard and all that.
You should not focus on the easiest emissions to eliminate.
The issue is with the most difficult.
Some 10% of our emissions are from steel and cement. There are no cheap green solutions here.
Here's a chart from the EPA. says ag 10%, transport 29%.
Ag is very scary to me. another article from today on first ever drought declaration for the CO river.
How much unsustainable water use in the west is used for 'wrong' crops (or just should be none at all)? And how much from huge population growth in hot deserts just getting hotter? Meat?
And is it even possible in the near (20 years) future to for instance change air and sea transport (those giant tankers). Maybe could move to autonomous smaller ships that use sail / electric combo but batteries are heavier than oil per unit of power right? cool startup idea.
I'm so pessimistic lately feeling totally powerless and that even if we collectively get it together, we might not be able to pull it off in time.
I think it might come down to whether or not this all causes a new world wide catastrophic event to force change. Ideally realizing climate change is that event before it goes off the walls. But maybe some confrontation like wealth inequality or 'west' verse CCP (even cold to spur competition).
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/us-west-prepares...
Focusing on the easiest gives us breathing room for the hardest. And in any case, I’m not going to solve any of the problems as I’m a software engineer rather than a civil or electrical or chemical engineer.
If you could plant a forest about the size of Australia, or some crop that you could cut down regularly, dry out, and compress and then bury it. All using clean energy of course. That may help.
C02 in the atmosphere is grim problem. Disperse source pollutants suck.
Never. Most humans are not willing to make the changes that are required to fix this. Instead we should focus on mitigation and adaptability.
Not much. But I guess COVID did much more to this front than the aggregate of the policies of decades before that.
I’ll just leave this here. https://youtu.be/1XKFQVJlmZY
Blocked in my country because digital rights..
Too perfect.
I don't see the future to 2040 as bleak, kind of the opposite mostly as I'm kind of a Kurzweil techno optimist and think we should be able to get that sort of stuff going, possibly including uploading, immortality, interplanetary travel and the like.
Martin Gurri, a former intelligence analyst, wrote a book on this subject called Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Part of his thesis covers the power the public holds with decentralized information flow .
Here is link without the paywall: https://archive.is/Y1sm1
The article is a summary of this government report: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/GlobalT...
Because this is how they designed it.