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7 Reasons to be Optimistic About the Future
By John Loeffler
Sometimes, it can be easy to be distrustful or
pessimistic about the future. Here are 7 reasons to be optimistic instead.
If you’ve been paying attention the past few
years, there’s a lot of concern in the media about the direction of technology
and its impacts on our society.
Fears about automation, out of control
artificial intelligence, human augmentation, and a technological gilded age are
all the stuff that you’d normally encounter in a dystopian science fiction
story or video game.
Not to mention threats of drone warfare or
climate change that haunt us from the background.
But there’s a lot of reasons to be optimistic about
the future and our place in it if you’re willing to take a step back from the
awful stuff and see the whole picture.
Renewable Energy May Save Us All
For the longest time, very smart people in the
energy industry have continued to underestimate the rapid growth and expansion
of renewable energy sources, particularly solar and wind power.
The price per kilowatt-hour for these renewable
energy sources continues to fall faster than anyone could have predicted,
meaning that many of the worst-case scenarios for climate change might need
updating as the world might find itself moving more quickly from fossil fuels
to renewable energy than most people realize.
As solar panels and wind turbines get cheaper,
much of the developing world, where a lot of the projected growth in carbon
emissions will come from, may find it cheaper and more accessible to use
renewable energy sources over fossil fuel alternatives.
Autonomous Vehicles Will Save 1 Million Lives A
Year
The coming decade will see a major push from
many in the automotive industry to move us toward widespread adoption of fully
autonomous vehicles.
There will be hold-outs, those who believe that
they pose more of a danger than human drivers.
But as more countries begin rolling out
autonomous vehicles and integrate them into smart city infrastructure,
especially China, the evidence will become irrefutable: autonomous vehicles
will save nearly a million lives every year in the decades to come.
These vehicles will also be entirely electric
and efficient, and the more of them there are on the road, the stronger and
safer our roads will become.
Smart Cities Will Make Cities Actually Livable
Once 5G begins to roll out around the world, the
growth of smart infrastructure will lead to the emergence of truly smart cities,
cities whose essential infrastructure is managed in real-time by artificial
intelligence systems.
These smart cities will efficiently manage
traffic patterns, provide faster response times for emergency services, and
produce a city that is safer and more interactive in ways we can’t even imagine
yet.
So many of the day to day frustrations of modern
urban life, like finding parking, getting stuck in traffic, or managing
reservations at a restaurant will be eased by a smart city infrastructure that
will become more responsive to its citizens in ways it has never been before.
We Will Put an End to Famine Once and For All
Whether it's genetically modified crops, CRISPR
edited crops, lab-grown meats, or insect proteins, food production will soon
reach a place where we can feed the world’s population and run surpluses.
We won’t need to slaughter animals for food,
ending some of the cruelest methods of meat production for good, or even ending
animal slaughter completely.
Generations to come may look back on us and see
humans at the start of the 21st century as nothing short of barbarians and we
should welcome that.
Medicine Will Keep Us Healthy Long Into Our Old
Age
I highly doubt that one day we’ll wake up and no
longer have to die, but there will come a time that when we do, we’ll probably
be in better shape physically than the average person is today.
Communicable diseases will likely continue to be
eradicated, and now with CRISPR, the potential for genetically engineered
solutions to infections might make all the concerns about antibiotic-resistant
bacteria look hysterical in hindsight.
The fight against cancer is looking more
promising every year and life expectancy for many is expected to increase in
the next few decades.
A New Space Age Is Coming
Since we landed on the moon, mankind hasn’t gone
much further than the International Space Station. We talk about Mars a lot but
never seem to actually get around to it.
That will all change once the new crop of
space-focused companies begins perfecting commercial space exploration.
SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Horizons, and
others have all set their sights on exploiting space for profit, which has been
quite an accelerant for opening up new frontiers to explore. Recent plans by
several companies like Planetary Resources to begin harvesting near-Earth
asteroid for minerals may actually end mineral scarcity as we know it.
Artificial Intelligence Will Put an End to Work
While artificial intelligence systems have a
very long way to go before they ever reach human-level intelligence — I’ll
leave speculation about an artificial superintelligence for another article —,
even what we are seeing in its infancy is stunning.
The biggest fear, other than ourselves becoming
obsolete in the face of our robot overlords, is that artificial intelligence
will take our jobs.
They almost certainly will, but despite the
reassurances from business and technology leaders, there’s no reason to think
that new jobs will be created after artificial intelligence start doing all of
our mental labor.
Instead, we may be actually coming to a point in
human history where we no longer need to work at all.
Allocation of resources will always be a
political concern, but there’s no reason why that political decision needs to
be for us to go and find some other work to do or else we'll starve.
We won’t need to starve. Artificial intelligence
systems working with robotic labor could produce whatever we need to survive,
and with renewable energy do so at a quickly diminishing cost.
Our time may simply become our own to do with it
as we see fit. We may still labor, but for enjoyment, rather than subsistence.
People have been anticipating the end of work
for a very long time and we just may be the generation who actually achieves
it.
John
Loeffler
Author
John is
a writer and programmer living in New York City who writes about computers,
general science and technology, and various gadgetry, including gaming, VR/AR,
and related consumer technologies. You can find him on twitter @thisdotjohn
https://interestingengineering.com/7-reasons-to-be-optimistic-about-the-future
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