the future: a best-guess summary

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What will the future look like? Here’s a minimal-effort (read: no research) attempt to summarize the different trends discussed by popular media that I have reason to believe will be true.

 

Digitalization

Computers will replace most repetitive jobs

Factories began automating manual labor, and future technology will automate service jobs too. Expect everything from truck-driving to elder-care to be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence paired with “big data.”

The languages that matter will be programming ones

Native languages will exist, but few people will need to learn languages other than their mother tongue; computers can do the translation for you.

All money will be digital

Goodbye physical currency.

People will have to worry about cybersecurity

Today, cybersecurity as we hear about it is primarily focused on governments and companies. Tomorrow, people will have to worry about cybersecurity of their data in the same way that they worry about the physical security of their homes.

Science

Global warming will screw us over

Yeah that’s a thing.

People will live longer

Disease will become much more rare because of genetically targeted medications + cure for cancer. As for how much longer, I don’t know.

Designer babies will be better than normal people

Social justice

Wealth inequality will increase

Urban centralization will increase

Educated people will centralize in the ~20 alpha cities where global innovators live and work. Only cities have the scale and infrastructure so that ideas, labor, and capital can move around fluidly enough to make things happen.

Less participation in government

People will find privatized ways of disseminating information and enacting change; e.g. blogs & private companies (respectively).

Stereotyping (e.g. racism) will continue

At its core, stereotypes are about noticing something different and attributing it to some reason that you can identify. Opposition to immigration will continue to pervade wealthy countries.

Female working roles will grow

Despite the fact that stereotyping will continue, women will continue to have increasingly important roles. Smart countries will take advantage of this massive potential workforce and capitalize on the economic gains.

Mind and society

Awareness of flaws will increase

As information becomes increasingly available, people will be more aware of flaws, both in other people and in products and systems that they interact with. Another consequence is that people will spend more time highly curating product/brand image and personal image for others, so that others do not perceive those flaws. On the other hand, information considered fatal to one’s image today will be less damning tomorrow. Finally, people who are able to come to terms with their own flaws and each other’s flaws will be happier.

Opportunities:

  • help people process large quantities of information for further use
  • help people curate or spend less time curating a public image/persona
  • help people build mindfulness and come to terms with flaws

Traditional marriage will decline

Many will still be married for life, but it will become more societally acceptable to have multiple relationships throughout one’s life, and to have multiple relationships at the same time.

Less participation in religion

People will rely more on mindfulness/meditation and non-deity philosophies 

Life will get lonelier

People will communicate more and more through digital means and short-form communication. (Think Snapchat.) Long-distance friendships, family relationships, and romantic relationships will increase. When in need, people will rely more often on paid services. Without as much physical connection and communication context, people will more easily feel sad and get hurt.

Opportunities:

  • create living communities in cities more similar to college dorms for people to stay connected
  • give people ways to cope with sadness and loneliness

Attention spans will decrease

People will find it hard to focus on any one thing for an extended period of time.

 

Thank you to Raymond for inspiring the exercise behind this post.

five facets of “founder”

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I made a beautiful discovery today. The word founder has five different meanings that imply both glorious establishment and sinking collapse.

Given Silicon Valley’s obsession with founders, I find this hilarious. Silicon Valley worships founders, but not founders who founder.

But I also find it fitting. Being a creator inherently means subjecting oneself to stumbles and falls. The connotations of grandeur cannot escape the connotations of failure.

founder /ˈfaʊndə/

  1. noun. A person who establishes an institution or settlement. ‘he was the founder of modern Costa Rica’
  2. noun. A person who manufactures articles of cast metal; the owner or operator of a foundry. ‘an iron founder’
  3. verb. Fill with water and sink. ‘six drowned when the yacht foundered off the Cornish coast’
  4. verb. Stumble or fall from exhaustion, lameness, etc. ‘some of their horses foundered and damaged themselves in the stones of the riverbed’
  5. verb, Irish. Make (someone) very cold. ‘get a fire lit, I’m foundered’

Source: Oxford Dictionary

vulnerability

admin

I first watched this talk in 2013. It transformed the way that I connect with people.

“How would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?” … Having to ask my husband for help because I’m sick, and we’re newly married; initiating sex with my husband; initiating sex with my wife; being turned down; asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying off people. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability.

“The problem is — and I learned this from the research — that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say, here’s the bad stuff. Here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment. I don’t want to feel these. I’m going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. … You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning.

“… To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen … to love with our whole hearts, even though there’s no guarantee — and that’s really hard…that’s excruciatingly difficult — to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we’re wondering, “Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?” just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, “I’m just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I’m alive.”

tarnishing the golden rule

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andrius_maciunas.jpg
Image courtesy of Andrius Maciunas / iStock

The duty of lovers is to tarnish the golden rule.
— Leonard Cohen, “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong“

Nearly every religion and ethical tradition contains a concept of the golden rule or law of reciprocity — that we must treat others as we wish to be treated.1 For me, this is not enough: love demands an even higher stage of empathy.

Stage 0. I exist
In our emotional development, we begin by acknowledging our own emotions. I like the teddy bear; I want to play with the teddy bear.

Stage 1: Other people exist, and are different from me
When we first realize that other people exist and may have conflicting emotions, we see the other-ness of their emotions. I want to play with the teddy bear alone; John also wants to play with the teddy bear; John and I are in conflict; I want to keep the teddy bear to myself.

Stage 2. Other people are like me
Over time (and, often, multiple times), we realize that other people often react similarly to how we would respond if we were in their position. It makes sense that John wants to play with the teddy bear, because I also want to play with the teddy bear; if I were John, I’d want me to share the teddy bear in some way.

This is the golden rule stage — realizing that you could just as easily be in the other person’s shoes as in your own, and that you ought to act well toward others if you expect them to act well toward you in turn.

In my view, however, love asks that we take our empathy even further:

Stage 3. Other people are only sometimes like me
We are not all the same person — we uphold different values, we are motivated by different interests, we have different past histories, we react differently. You like talking with her every day, even though she would rather see you just once a week. You don’t mind when he goes on friend dates, but your 1:1 dinners with others spark his jealousy.

With our closest relationships, our “duty” is to continually learn how a person is unique and different from ourselves in order to treat them with love. Tarnish the golden rule — treat people not how you would like to be treated, but how you’ve learned they would like to be treated.

Empathy is a natural skill for some, and an intentionally-developed skill for most. Some ideas and frameworks that have powerfully affected how I perceive empathy:

  • The Fundamental Attribution Error. We underestimate how important other people’s circumstances are when we evaluate their behavior, and we overemphasize how important our own circumstances are when we look at our own behavior.
  • The Five Love Languages. Different people need different things to feel loved, and different people have different ways of expressing their love.
  • Four career foci. Different individuals may be primarily motivated by company (winning and being successful), people (helping people around you grow and develop), society (making the world a better place), or growth (learning or getting promoted).
  • Difficult Conversations. In complex situations, people often have different perceptions of what’s happening. This is compounded by how people feel and how they think the conversation reflects on their identity. If you approach a conversation with your foremost goal being to listen and understand, you will often learn valuable information that will help you act constructively and spare you significant pain and misunderstsanding.

Thank you to Isaac for sharing the quote that inspired this post.