Last fall, at a small SF con in Toronto, I was on a panel where the participants predicted the near-future of humanity. The panelists were two Baby Boomer men, two Millennial women (all four with PhDs), and me, a no-PhD from Generation X. I sat between these two pairs and was struck by the contrast in opinions. The Boomers saw only doom and gloom in the years ahead, but the Millennials saw many indications of progress and reasons for hope.
I don’t mention the panel’s demographics to be argumentative or to stir up gender or generational divisiveness. It was only one panel. But opinions split starkly along gender and age lines. I was amazed that the two Boomer men—the demographic who are the architects of the world we live in—were really quite scared of the future. I’d love to investigate this split further. I think it’s significant, because in a real, non-mystical way, the future we imagine is the future we get.
This isn’t magical thinking. We create opportunities by imagining possibilities, both for ourselves personally, and for the world in general. I’m not saying we can conjure luck out of thin air, or that applying the power of imagination makes everything simple and easy. But there’s no denying the importance of imagination. The things we imagine fuel our intentions, help us establish behavior patterns that become self-perpetuating, and those patterns generate opportunities.
To repeat: The future we imagine is the future we get. This becomes especially true when whole groups of people share the same dreams.
As the sole Gen Xer on this panel, I was on the side of the Millennials. Most Generation Xers are, and in any case, I will always side with the future.
The future I see is complex indeed. Here’s a run down of my vision, which informs my book Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach.
My future is post-scarcity
We already live in a post-scarcity world. We produce enough food to feed everyone on Earth. We produce enough energy to keep all humans safe and warm, and enough clean water to drink. Extreme poverty exists not because we don’t have enough to go around, but because we can’t distribute it. People die of starvation because of political barriers and supply chain problems, not scarcity.
In my future, these supply chain problems are solved, and the political ecosystem acknowledges and values the economic contributions of every human. That may sound utopian, but it’s not, because…
My future is overpopulated
Human economic activity is organized around shared delusions. Sorry — delusions is too strong and prejudiced a word, but collective agreements sounds far too organized. Perhaps dreams is more accurate. In any case, we have agreed that a dollar is something of value that we can trade for other things. The dollar has no value in itself. That’s Economics 101, and it’s nothing we need argue about right now.
What I’m trying to get at is this: Since the 1990s, we have agreed that people’s time and attention generates value even when they’re not working. When we open a browser window and Google something, even if it’s as trivial as celebrity gossip or as pointless as ego-surfing, we are adding to Google’s value — even discounting ad revenue. Google is worth billions because we all use it. If nobody used Google, the company would be worthless.
So, human time is worth money even when we’re not on the clock. That’s a given in our world right now. Venture capitalists bank on it.
We also acknowledge that a high population confers economic power. A city with a growing population is booming, and a city losing population is busted. Growth requires an expanding market. And ultimately, an expanding market requires one thing: more humans.
So we begin to see that my future isn’t utopian at all, especially since…
My future is urban
Right now, more than half of all humans live in cities. That proportion will keep growing. I see a future where the vast proportion of people live in cities — maybe everyone.
I’ll admit I’m a bit prejudiced in favor of cities. I live in downtown Toronto, the fourth-largest city in North America. I love the quality of life. Everything I ever want is within walking distance — arts, culture, sport, shopping, restaurants, parks, museums, festivals. It’s terrific, but it’s certainly not the standard ideal of a high quality of life as defined and achieved by by the Baby Boomers, and it’s not the way my Silent Generation parents lived.
The dominant dream of the mid-to-late 20th Century was to live in a suburban pastoral estate, commute in an energy-inefficient, pollution-producing exoskeleton to a stable, well-paying, pension-protected nine-to-five job, and come home to dinner prepared by an unpaid supply chain manager. That Boomer dream is already becoming history. Most people in the world never had it in the first place, and even in North America, it’s a lifestyle beyond the reach of younger generations.
This exclusively urban future will happen because providing high quality of life to the huge populations required for economic growth is only possible if those people live in highly-concentrated populations, where services can be provided with an economy of scale. But highly concentrated populations have a down side…
My future has little privacy
In a high-density city where adaptive, responsive supply chain management ensures all those value-creating humans are safe, fed, and housed, one thing makes it all work: Situational awareness. Unless the needs of a population can be monitored in real time and requirements met before a disaster happens, a high-density population isn’t sustainable. History teaches us this.
In a natural ecosystem, population growth is controlled by natural disruptions. A peak forest cannot remain at peak indefinitely — disease and fire will clear away species to an earlier state. In the same way, peak populations in animals are controlled by disease and predators. The ecosystems that support humans are also vulnerable to epidemics, war, and natural and human-made disasters.
What’s seldom acknowledged is that the disaster that looms over us right now, global climate change, is as much a threat to our economy as it is to polar bears. To survive climate change without having human culture slapped back to a pre-industrial state, we’re going to have to manage our ecosystem better. I don’t mean nature (though it’d be nice if we managed that better, too), I mean cities.
Luckily, we have the tools to do this. High resolution remote sensing and data collection allow us to manage and distribute resources in real-time, as needed, whether that’s power, water, conflict mediation, transportation, healthcare, or any other community service. These are the basic elements of smart cities, being developed all over the world right now, but they sacrifice privacy.
To many people, a lack of privacy sounds like dystopia, but to me it’s just business as usual. I grew up in a small town where everyone knew who I was. The clerk in the drugstore where I bought my Asimov’s magazines probably knew more about my parents’ divorce than I did. To me, privacy has always been mostly an illusion.
I’m not saying the privacy of others is something I would readily sacrifice. But there are tradeoffs for living in a high-density urban environment, and privacy is one of the big ones. But that’s okay because…
My future embraces difference
The future Earth I created for Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach draws on all these factors. The Earth of 2267 is post-scarcity, overpopulated, highly urban, and offers little privacy. It’s neither a utopia or dystopia, but has aspects of both (just like our world does right now). It’s a vibrant world where cities compete with each other for the only resource that matters: humans.
Buy the Book
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
In the book, cities are completely managed environments known as Habs, Hives and Hells. Hells are carved out of rock deep underground. Hives are also underground but are dispersed, modular cities located in deep soil. Habs are above ground. All are independent, self-contained, completely managed human environments that eliminate the threat of natural disasters such as floods, fires, storms, and tsunamis.
Habs, Hives and Hells compete with each other for population. Those that offer the quality of life attractive to the most people are the most economically successful, but there are trade offs. You and I might want to live in Bangladesh Hell (the Manhattan of 2267), but because everyone wants to live there so personal space is in short supply. If I didn’t want to make that trade-off, I might choose to move to Sudbury Hell, deep in the Canadian Shield, where there’s not much going on but at least it’s not crowded.
In the Earth of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach everyone chooses the city that offers the lifestyle they want, and to me, that’s utopian. Humans don’t all want all the same things. We are stunningly diverse and complex animals, and are all capable of amazing things if we have the scope to pursue the conditions of life that feed our passions. This is the world I want—a world where everyone is free to define and pursue their own dream life.
And maybe that’s why the Boomers and the Millennials in the panel were at such odds. The life the Boomers wanted (or were told they should want) is fading. That’s a scary situation. And the Millennials can see the future rising to meet them, and offering a chance create their own dreams.
Kelly Robson’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and multiple anthologies including many year’s bests. Her Tor.com novelette “A Human Stain” is currently a finalist for the Nebula award. In 2017, she was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the 2016 Aurora Award and has been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Sunburst awards. Kelly grew up in the foothills of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and competed in rodeos as a teenager. From 2008 to 2012, she was the wine columnist for Chatelaine, Canada’s largest women’s magazine. After many years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, now live in Toronto. Kelly’s latest book, Gods Monsters and the Lucky Peach, is available from Tor.com Publishing.
I’m a gen x’er too. I’m much less eager than you to devalue privacy. I also would never refer to someones spouse as an unpaid supply chain manager. It reveals more about you than about them.
Urban life is a crowded, dirty, pointless struggle, unless you possess the purchasing power to make it spacious, clean and meaningfully enjoyable.
Millennials should read things like The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair or How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Notice how our current round of mass urbanization creates similar misery to previous ones.
People organizing in large groups to fix things up for all of us is the scariest thought of all. Give me The Road over 1984 any day.
It’s nice to see Human beings considered an asset rather than a burden or worse a poison for a change.
Depending on which definitions you go by I’m either at the end of the Boomers or the beginning of Gen X, but I’ve never felt affinity for either of those. I’ve always had, I suppose, a Millennial outlook, and felt like a fish out of water for years because of that. I need to check out your book because it fits quite well with what I’ve predicted the future to be like.
@1 The book you mention were written in 1906 and 1997 respectively. The world has moved on since then. I suggest you read The Well-Tempered City by Jonathan F.P. Rose, published in 2016, or The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann, published in January this year.
@2 For all the reasons above, I think we’ll come to realize the power of a large population. The more people, the more solutions.
I’m an older GenX-er, the child of Depression Babies, and thus shrug over Boomers’ angst, and wonder how they changed from that peace and love stuff to being stuffy toward interviewees who did what they were “supposed” to do and got at least one degree.
Solving the climate change problem will help a lot of things! About that I am optimistic, tho’ from what I hear from someone in the industry w/out the academic background, a lot of people in the industry don’t have much imagination about what can change things for the better. I have a different academic background and so I can see how exactly what could happen to change things.
“Urban life is a crowded, dirty, pointless struggle, unless you possess the purchasing power to make it spacious, clean and meaningfully enjoyable.” (1. chuck)
Yup, as a former Torontonian, that lived on the bottom, I could attest to that. No choice, no privacy, and already a hell in the first place. Also, apparently I’m ‘millennial’, and don’t see a particularly bright future.
Sounds like a cool book though, I will keep my eyes out for it.
Because we choose not to. Riches are fine but knowing others are being denied basic necessities for essentially trivial reasons? Priceless.
Won’t, not can’t. It exists right now because we won’t distribute it because that would devalue money, which devalues power. And those in charge like having power, and especially like exercising that power in the form of rationing (food, money, electricity, housing) against anyone they so choose. I can imagine a better world than that too, I just wish more people would. Just look at how strongly people rail against the Culture novels as a mark of how determined some are to not imagine it, to stop imagining it.
However, my future which I imagine has little use for cities, has a humanity wise enough to stop breeding so prolifically and instead work to reduce population, has a great deal more privacy than this one. Also, no religion too. You may say that I’m a dreamer…
As a member of Generation Z, I have to say that the future you envision is not one that I would enjoy. It seems that I would agree with the Boomers here.
I’m in the “millenial” age range and, honestly, I agree with the boomers POV. The future imagined in the book described sounds like a dystopia for me.
A lot of Boomer-era SF is extremely hostile to the idea of cities, and not too keen on humans either; Bova’s Titan, for example, seems to assume the marginal utility of additional humans is zero or maybe negative. At the same time, there was lots of “the destiny of the RACE! demands we go out and colonize other worlds like we were oversexed bunnies,” which combines to form “the destiny of the RACE! demands we try to create more communities just like the one we pretty obviously loath with a passion.” I never understood how the same brains could hold what seem to me to be opposed theses.
Have to agree with 9 and 10. Encouraging people to breed for the sake of an economic system doesn’t do much for human dignity.
Robson doesn’t appear to be arguing in favor of high population because she likes it, but because it seems to be coming our way regardless. We’re just under 7.5 billion right now. Growth appears to be slowing but not yet sufficiently to level out in the near future. So 11 or 12 billion humans is very likely.
@12 A future with a shrinking human population would have to be anti-capitalist. Which would be great but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. My assumption about continually increasing population comes from the needs of capitalism, nothing else.
@13 is right about my intent. I’m not saying this is what I want. I’m saying we’re already on that path. And I would rather imagine a way it could work rather than stick my fingers in my ears and pretend the future isn’t going to happen.
Socialist policies seem to guarantee a severe drop in population. Europe’s population has fallen below replacement level. This is problematic because you have a much smaller youthful population to support a huge elderly one. China has a similar problem thanks to the one child policy along with a derth of women.
@15 That is only problematic if you are determined to enforce artificial scarcity. Drop in population is a good thing, and if it forces a re-evaluation of artificial scarcity in order to handle societal stresses (and society is going to have stresses regardless of population, it is just the type of stresses that are produced) then that is also a good thing. It is not a problematic situation, it is a situation which is plentiful with opportunities.
I don’t quite follow, how do fewer producers not create a problem?
Absent uterine replicators, who is producing the necessary babies in this future? TFRs seem to be dropping towards sub-replacement levels across the planet, although Africa is for the moment an exception.
I’ve read Charles Mann before although not that one, I’ll check it out.
You miss my point I fear. I specifically called out the creation of misery by mass urbanization and pointed out that very little has changed. Just because a book is old doesn’t make it irrelevant. The two I cited are more on the nose for our current situation than most recently published works.
I disagree vehemently with the author mainly because people who believe in a managed, urban, utopian society are doomed to get a poorly managed, urban, dystopian society. This is because they refuse to learn fom history.
Human nature does not change.
Ah-huh. Well, they all retired to some Gulch somewhere.
1. Remember, until the late 19th C. / early 20th C, cities had negative rates of natural growth (meaning higher rates of death than births), and only grew due to migration from the countryside. In other words, as bad as cities were, they were preferable to life in the countryside. Despite the Jeffersonian dislike of cities (strongly echoed by most writers of SF’s Golden Age who weren’t named Isaac Asimov) the future is urban.
2. As Mr Nicoll’s noted, TFRs worldwide are converging on replacement level. Regardless of majority religion, women are having fewer babies than their mothers did. This trend has existed for multiple generations and there is no strong reason to suspect that it won’t continue into the near future. In the words of Hans Rosling, we are at Peak Baby.
3. I’m part of the late Baby Boom (b. 1959). I refuse to take part in the false nostalgia that the recent past was some sort of golden age. For the vast majority of the world’s population life in 2018 is better than life in the 1950s or 1960s. And despite set backs, disappointments, betrayals, and atrocities, I’d be willing to bet that the future will be better for more and more people.
But what was the prime factor for people moving from the country to the cities in the late 19th / early 20th centuries? Industrialization, right? Factory jobs? Trucks drivers? Dock workers? With the expected rise of automation in the next few decades, that’s going to be a diminished factor. In fact, it already is.
The only way people will be able to gain membership into these super efficient, gentrified, self-important, coffee-swilling havens of the highly skilled—the cities of the future—is investing in education and training in areas that don’t involve having a strong back. And good luck to the poor future souls living in a ‘smart’ tenement filled to the roof with poetry majors.
The future is ego.
I’m not sure why we are all stating our generational bias, though I am part of the Oregon Trail Generation (in between X’s and Millennials). Oh I also have a PhD.
In my opinion too the future is complex.
I also suspect that a crowded future is likely, but I don’t think continual population growth is necessary for that. If nothing changes, yes population growth continues. But we know things will change. A massive resource shortage, for example we have already begun running out of fresh water, could decimate humanity’s numbers. Soil fertility is also drastically declining, which will have similar impacts. When we combine these with significant migration issues that climate change will inevitably lead to, it seems that there are multiple factors that will disrupt population growth in spite of our best efforts. The left over people they will need to be near sources of those scarce resources. So it seems, to me at least, like it would still be crowded into small regions.
So the earth could turn into pockets of dense urban centers that are very isolated from each other. In this scenario people don’t really have a choice where they live. You’re born near the north american water center, so there’s no where else to go. Though that could lead to embracing differences too, if you have to live with these people.
I am going on too long. Very interesting post! :)
Is Minh’s future right or wrong? I don’t know, but am on fire for the wonderful world-bui!ding. I’m a third of the way through, and anxious to finish, so I can read it again!
RE: continued population growth. TFR at replacement level means that over time, the population pyramid becomes the population rectangle. And once it becomes a rectangle, total population is stabilized. Depending on the speed of economic growth in parts of Africa and West Asia I think the current projection is a world population of something like 11 billion in 2100, with much of the growth concentrated in a small number of countries. Also, quoting from a recent UN report, “During 2010-2015, fertility was below the replacement level in 83 countries comprising 46 % of the world’s population.” https://preview.tinyurl.com/y9yygar7 %5BOpens in new window]
Darn, the url messed up. Insert a space between the final B and the beginning of the phrase Opens in new window.
The Future? David Brin already showed it to us.
Earth.
From 1990 & set ~50 years ahead. That 2038 is only 20 years away now and looking more accurate by the day. Though even he didn’t predict the Moron In Chief to help things down the slippery slope.
I am a millenial and I would rather die than live in a city. Humans weren’t meant to live packed together. We are territorial and hyper attuned to noise. The constant noise and heat generated by cities put residents constantly on the edge of catastrophic breakdown. Constant close contact spreads disease and health facilities in cities are easily overwhelmed and generally pretty squalid and run down. There’s a reason why life in cities (unless you’ve got money) is associated with decreased life expectancy and danger.
The opportunity for the future is to (actually) become sustainable. (We consume enough for everyone, but don’t produce enough clean water or energy yet.)
I also strongly challenge the idea that money is a dream or a delusion. Your free time and your attention are valuable because of the very real money that is spent on advertising and marketing (not a new thing, free time has been monetized since the Greatest Generation). Right now, though, we are a golden age of marketing. It has driven our economic growth for 20 years, and is seamless to most people.
Google is worth what it is because many people buy advertisements from them (ads served all over the web, people using Google is no longer necessary), and stock traders use the same sort of price/earnings ratios they apply to other companies to set a value. It’s not mysterious.
To work on sustainability, we need to base our economic growth on something new. Depending on which type of PhD you ask, the guess is it will be advanced biology or artificial intelligence (or both, I’m a both type of PhD).
@15/Roxana: “Socialist policies seem to guarantee a severe drop in population. Europe’s population has fallen below replacement level.”
This is interesting. Is it common US-American parlance to call (Western) European policy “socialist”? In my country, this term is usually reserved for planned economies.
If you refer to what we call the welfare state, people have more children in Scandinavia than the European average. We have the lowest birth rates in former socialist countries (i.e. former planned economies). They only decreased after the fall of socialism.
@17/Roxana: “I don’t quite follow, how do fewer producers not create a problem?”
Because thanks to technological advances, fewer producers are needed to achieve the same result?
Interesting article and discussion. I´ve just one observation: It´s kind of funny how a discussion on the future of the world is determined by an US-American perspecitve.
Jana Jansen already drew attention to that.
I think your view of cities is strongly determined by what the lack of a welfare system and infrastructural spending in the US does to cities. In Europe (which is far from ´socialist´), for example, the following is just not true: “health facilities in cities are easily overwhelmed and generally pretty squalid and run down.” With a working health care System, health facilities in most European cities are pretty good, modern and most of the time also research facilities (University Clinics, which you won´t find in the country side).
A system where economic success results from offering the most attractive ‘quality of life’ seems tailor-made to create a runaway monopoly; the settlement which offers the best quality of life makes more money, enabling it to offer a better quality of life, enabling it to make more money…
And what if the lifestyle I want isn’t offered in a city? Perhaps because it’s desired by a sufficiently small minority that such cities weren’t economically successful?
Reading this, it seems like it’s a system tailor-made to homogenise humanity. You can’t simply pick “the lifestyle you want” a la carte, you can only pick from among those which have been sufficiently economically successful to support a city, and the system is designed so that only lifestyles which attract a large number of people will be able to do this. Thus, you end up with only cities providing lifestyles that are desired by numerical majorities. People will be born and raised in those cities, accustomed to those lifestyles, and gradually the ones which aren’t desired by the majority will fade away and be lost.
Great if you happen to be part of a majority already. Not so much for those who are not.
@18 — Great point about uterine replicators, absolutely they are a requirement for this future. I get into that in my story upcoming in Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Infinity’s End coming this July.
@30, we in the States do tend to equate welfare state with socialist. Interesting that the Scandinavian countries don’t share the trend to negative population growth. Could it be those chilly northern nights?
Is urban concentration really necessary with modern transportation and communications?
Is urban concentration really necessary with modern transportation and communications?
@34 I’d be happy to be proved wrong, but I think it is — simply because providing services to dispersed populations isn’t sustainable. For example, in the US right now suburbs are having problems maintaining their civil engineering infrastructure. But I’m not saying this is desirable, simply likely. More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities right now, and that will increase to 66% by 2050.
I don’t make the rules, I just play the game :D
Cities offer significant efficiencies over low density living.
As far as health goes… in general, it takes ambulances about three to five minutes to show up after a 911 call in Kitchener. When we lived out on our farm, it could be thirty to forty minutes and of course the opportunities for really interesting mishaps are much higher on a farm.
@34/Roxana: Whereas we tend to lump together all the multi-party democratic market economies, independent of their social security. Interesting.
Actually, the Scandinavian countries do have negative population growth, just not as severe as Italy, Germany, or many Eastern European countries. More on a level with Canada (more chilly northern nights?) and Australia (hmm, perhaps not), if you discount immigration. The European countries with the highest fertility rates are Ireland and France (still negative, though).
What about this theory: The countries that lost World War II have lower fertility rates than the countries that won ;)
@35, are wilderness vacations a thing in your future? Are there holiday camps, vacation homese etc in the places between cities that people can get away to?
A surprisingly long time ago I considered scenarios for human populations and it seemed to me there were only two possibilities:
It could keep growing until it hit a limit, then stay there. The likely insurmountable opportunity was heat management. There’s enough biomass on the planet for about a trillion humans (at the cost of a significant reduction in biomass invested in other animal species) but the margin between our current energy production and a level high enough to directly force the planet into a Venus-style run away greenhouse is about five thousand, if I remember correctly. And probably you want some margin between us and killing the planet.
I found considering what a planet that had had a trillion humans for a very long time interesting. We’d be about the same fraction of living animal matter as the ants and bees are now, and would be the most common potential source of food for other species, whether willlingly (pets) or less willingly (parasites and such).
Population could grow, encounter some insurmountable opportunity and collapse. There are two forks in this scenario: it could recover or if we’ve really creative about that crisis, dwindle away to zero. On the plus side, I would expect total extinction to occur at most once.
The demographic transition could turn out to be the insurmountable opportunity mentioned above, with none of the fixes we’ve tried (from denying people birth control, as attempted in places from Romania to the US, to trying to make raising kids more financially doable, as in France) reversing the decline. In this case, we’d all end up in the scenario Japan is in, with populations aging and total numbers shrinking.
Industrializing human production runs into the problem that it’s not enough to simply produce the babies. As anyone who has ever handed a toddler a chainsaw can tell you, the little guys are uncoordinated and pretty ignorant. Turning them into useful economic units means years of training and someone has spend the time to train them. In the past, we forced women to handle this for free but once that expense is on the books, the business case for each additional human is not great. Automation means it will probably get worse.
Somehow I can’t imagine a world where a great number of people would prefer to live underground. Wouldn’t they miss the sun, the clouds, the sky, the wind, or simply looking into the distance?
Presumably humans vary in how well they can adapt to the new reality and those less suited would be selected out.
@36, I have lost track of the number of times I have had to explain to a chirpy call center employee that the in-network health care facility they have suggested is five or ten air miles from my home – actually getting to it involves a 30-mile drive in one direction, or a 35-minute ferry ride in the other. 24,000 people on this island and there is no hospital, not even a 24-hour urgent care facility closer than that. As my spouse and I age, it’s going to send us packing (if the housing prices don’t do it first).
Waterloo Region (where I live) has a lot of Old Order Amish, whose relationship to modern technology is more complicated than the “nothing post-1800” outsiders may assume it is. I was intrigued to discover at least one of the local Old Order churches permits cell phones, used outside the home, on the grounds having a phone could save someone’s life if they suffer a disabling mishap out in the fields. But it won’t make the ambulance show up faster than 30 or 40 minutes.
When I had my turned out to be not a heart attack, I could have walked from my downtown home to either of two hospitals in the time it would have taken an ambulance to arrive at my farm. Not that I got to walk. People were quite firm that I need to use some mode of self-powered vehicular transport so I took the bus.
@39, ‘forced’ women to have and rear children? There seems to be an assumption here that nobody of either sex would voluntarily engage in childcare. Institutionalized child rearing has been shown to have significant flaws ‘failure to thrive’, emotional difficulties. etc.
Here in Germany there are too many doctors in cities, while in the countryside retiring doctors don’t find replacements.
Many rural areas still don’t have fast internet, which makes it impossible to run a business there.
Small village schools are closed, forcing young children to travel far to school.
That increases the trend that young people go to the cities while the old people are left behind in the country without doctors, shops or regular bus connections to places that have such things.
In big cities like London or Frankfurt apartments are only affordable for billionaires (who push out the “poor” millionaires) because speculants buy all the available houses. In some cities owners prefer renting short-time to tourists instead of long-term homes because they can take more money that way.
In villages houses are cheap or empty because nobody wants to live in places without fast internet, shops, working opportunities, doctors, etc.
Cost of living is a huge issue in California. I was born and raised there but left in my teens. My brother stuck it out for decades until it finally became a choice of eating or having a roof over his head. A lot of the modern homeless are people with jobs who’ve been priced out of the housing market.
@32 Crane says “what if the lifestyle I want isn’t offered in a city? Perhaps because it’s desired by a sufficiently small minority that such cities weren’t economically successful?”
This. This is why I don’t want the “competing cities” future. I’m one of those well-off educated Americans who can sort of buy my way out of a system, but I’m so used to making minority choices that I want more options, not fewer.
(If you care, here are some of my minority choices: love classical music but hate contemporary, prefer Mac to PC, raised atheist in the 60s, female with computer science degree from the 70s, married but child-free, folk dancer, read many books but see about 5 movies a year, haven’t watched TV since the 70s, shop at both Whole Foods and WinCo, etc, etc.)
Also, not everybody wants to move to the place with the better lifestyle. People are attached to their friends and family, to the house they’ve lived in for generations, or to their native landscape. Although the latter probably doesn’t play a role in underground cities.
I think future housing will go two directions, cities made livable and “Dymaxion”, or functional equivalent, homes in disused bits of countryside, both heavily connected and intensively recycling. Apart from a handful of historical buildings, very little continuity with cities as we know them and while I live in a 2nd ring suburb, I expect ” ‘burrb clearing” will become a thing.
The future presented by ms Robson sounds workable, especially for those who grow into it.
Many interesting ideas to cover, but we will start at the top…
For starters, global warming is one of those shared fantasies. The actual data and analysis is mostly a case of give me the data, give me the conclusion, and I will give you the results you want. If it is not catastrophic, go back and make sure it is!
Next, arcologies are fine for some, but will never be the be-all and end-all of human existence. One human’s heaven is another human’s hell. Some will always live in smaller communities. Actually, dispersed populations have lower environmental footprints in many ways that concentrated cities. Look at LA! They divert resources from 2/3 of a state to support their population, even at the expense of their own food production!
This analysis seems to be from an entirely “global north” perspective. Can we assume the panel was as well? That, IMO, is a great shame since it is likely that being from the global north or from the global south has much more bearing than generational difference on distinct visions for the future. Some of the truly innovative/adaptive thinking about about future cities, for example, has come from the informal economies within cities in the global south. Likewise ideas for managing the impacts of climate change, harvesting potable water from condensing billboards, adaptive and sustainable housing with traditional materials/building techniques, community-centered health care, etc. If we’re not including the global south in our panels and analyses on this topic, we aren’t really imagining the future at all.
I too am Gex X, and I agreed with most of what she’s saying, except I think she’s wrong that the future is necessarily high-density urban and lacking privacy. I think that’s a failure of imagination. Yes, in the near short term, it’s true that the systems we have in place right now are going to continue to operate and that urbanity is steadily increasing, but there’s no reason to assume the system which support ultra-high-density urbanism and invasive information technology will continue indefinitely. In fact, I believe these things carry the seeds of their own destruction.
My greatest concern with urbanism is that the vast majority of the land area of even our most dense cities is grossly under-utilised. We don’t need to turn every square inch of the planet into Manhattan in order to live well, but we do need to increase the *average* or *mean* density of our cities and towns. There is density and there is density. There’s The Sprawl, and then there’s Hong Kong, and then there’s cities like Pittsburgh or Seattle.
Possibly the most dangerous thing about Millennials is, they don’t seem to have a healthy enough respect for how technology is invisibly shaping their opinions. As I wrote earlier today, the communications systems which currently dominate the Internet are not conducive to and are inadequate to support reasoned debate, and that is what is polarising our society to the point where it is endangering the entire edifice. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current attacks on civil rights by misguided “gun control” advocates, with children staging walkouts which are being championed as if they were equivalent to protesting *for* civil rights in the 1960s.
Everything online is now a shouting match, a rhetorical brawl where bad information is amplified just as loudly as good information, and when the ability to garner “likes” and “followers” has become the metric by which we judge the value of statements, cheap insults are the fastest route to the top of the heap.
There’s no respect for actually evidenced truth, let alone honest differences of opinion, no understanding of what evidence even entails, and absolutely no room whatsoever for acknowledging one’s political opposition may have some very good ideas or that their views should be equally regarded in public policy discussion. Respect for facts, evidence, reason, logic, and the historical record are virtually defunct.
The fact is, technology doesn’t solve these problems, and only exacerbates them. The fact is, the solutions are not only not technological, they require the absence of technology, because they are political solutions, and it is political solutions that are most in danger of the technologies we are using.
“Privacy” in the modern era doesn’t mean “not knowing other people’s intimate details” as much as it means respecting the domain in which their private opinions should hold sway over public and civic power. “Responsive supply chain management” and “situational awareness” sound exciting, but they are very dangerous if used for malice, and nothing can stop them from being used for malice.
As I have said in the past, I don’t need to ascribe malice to people, because when people have a profit motive, they can generally be counted upon reliably to pursue that profit. If you don’t see the dangers inherent in a statement like:
‘ Unless the needs of a population can be monitored in real time and requirements met before a disaster happens, a high-density population isn’t sustainable. History teaches us this. ‘
Then you need to read more science fiction.
‘ A future with a shrinking human population would have to be anti-capitalist. Which would be great but it’s not going to happen anytime soon. My assumption about continually increasing population comes from the needs of capitalism, nothing else. ‘
I think this is a misunderstanding of capitalism. What the author is describing is not actually capitalism, it’s feudalism.
@22 (and in some way @48) People had to migrate from the country to cities because their lands were taken away, on the contrary, automation will take the thing from people the one thing that is valuable for the market, that is, labor. As @46 says, people can have jobs but not enough money for property.
One may not agree with Marx’s politics but his analysis of early industrialization is completely right.
@40 The Time Machine answered that, they didn’t have the possibility of choosing NOT to live underground.
@53, Actually feudalism would be much healthier that the capitalist system we have. While many feel it was a one way street as to power and control, it only worked if those at the top CARED about those under them. Otherwise, they would go somewhere else, or get a new boss! Our present system of commodity labor, where even skilled workers are viewed as interchangeable, has led to the complete break between the boss and employee. Why care about a cog or drone in the hive, if you wear this one out, just get a new one!
I like the title of your article. I think Ursula Le Guin said something similar a few times, maybe not quite so definitely. One thing that grieves me about most of the discussion in response to your piece is the anthropocentric-ism that is rampant here. It sounds like most people, even Millennials (especially Millennials?) live with the assumption that humans are paramount, that most other species are either pleasant but unnecessary, or necesssary but only in terms of how they provide for our survival. I’m sad to see very few people speaking about other species in terms of perhaps their ‘rights’ to exist, or at least their vital contributions to the diverse (and beautiful, even sacred?) complexity of ecosystems.
I grew up and live in rural/regional Australia. I am seeing radical changes to our cities, towns and ecosystems just in the past 5 or so years, as Australia’s population booms – not with the birthrate, but with an increasing influx of migrants. It is hard to raise this as an ecological or social issue without coming across as racist or elitist. It’s awful feeling yourself backed into a corner like that, forced into an either/or argument. Maybe that’s part of why our shared imaginations are not firing on this level currently?
When I was in my early teens I used to pass this one particular cleared bit of land near the coast and ritually imagine it as the verdant rainforest it once was. That hasn’t happened to that piece of land as yet, but wondrously, many other pieces of cleared land in the area I live in, have been lovingly replanted and regenerated. Places that were empty of anything but grass and cows in my childhood are now tall young diverse forests and habitats. But then also, just a bit further up the coast, at the sub/urban sprawl of the Gold Coast, I’ve seen the opposite. Land that was covered in the mysterious tangle of melaleuca (paperbark) forest, and koala feed-trees in my childhood, is now covered in concrete and tar and brick.
So, I’ve witnessed first hand the power of human imagination to shape our lives and the lives of other species. We all have witnessed this. I have been fortunate to live in a place where those peace and love and mung beans boomers congregated and connected with the land, the ancient Indigenous cultures still living here, and gradually over a generation or two, start to tend and heal towards a more collaborative relationship with the local ecology. This is the future i want to imagine, one where this gentle process continues to deepen and set down roots and spread. Like Joanna Macy imagines with her ‘Great Turning’.
I want to see cities covered in foliage, with clear streams running between leafy, lichened towers run by solar, wind and our own biofuels. I want to see wild places restored and honoured. I want to see us all living within our means, simple, joyful lives that are so rich with meaningful activity and connection to eachother and ecology that we don’t need all the crap that is fed to us currently as a pallid replacement. Goodbye Capitalism. Goodbye Power-plays. Hello Healing. Hello Homecoming. To our planet, our souls, our soils, our bodies.
Yes, i guess I am a Gen-Xer and a Dreamer and proud of it!
@54/palindrome310: “[…] they didn’t have the possibility of choosing NOT to live underground.”
The article doesn’t mention that, it only mentions in passing that two of the three types of cities are situated underground.
@55/CharlieE: In feudal societies, serfs were tied to the land and couldn’t simply go somewhere else.
@56/sally: The future you imagine sounds wonderful. But the reason why nobody in the discussion talks about plants or animals may simply be that the original article doesn’t, either.
@57 You are right, it wasn’t mentioned in the article. I was talking about “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells, some people lived underground but they were forced to live like that.
@58/palindrome310: Yes, I remember. Weren’t they descendants of 19th century factory workers?
What baffled me about the article was that the underground cities came out of nowhere. Here we are, talking about current trends like growing affluence, urbanisation, and population growth, and then the author introduces the Earth of 2267, which has all these things, but in underground cities. So… what happened? Did people choose to live underground? That would be weird. Or did some major catastrophe force them underground? In this case, does extrapolating current trends even make sense? It’s a bit confusing.
When I read the title, my first reaction was, “God, I hope not!“ By now, human civilization would have been destroyed by: a) alien invasion; b) nuclear war; c) pollution; d) overpopulation; e) global cooling; f) global warming; g) apathy; etc., etc.
Age does tend to bring pessimism with it and, yes, some Boomers are disillusioned by the knowledge that this wasn’t “the dawning of the age of Aquarius“. But whether Boomers in general are more pessimistic then Millennials, I’m not sure. After all, they lived for decades under threat of nuclear destruction, and know we got out of that situation without having to go the howling mutant wilderness route, or going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. And they’ve seen many other dooms fizzle (Y2K, peak oil).
“We also acknowledge that a high population confers economic power. A city with a growing population is booming, and a city losing population is busted.” That actually reverses cause and effect: people move to areas that are booming to get good paying jobs. For example, parts of the Dakotas are booming and growing in population because of fracking.
“To survive climate change without having human culture slapped back to a pre-industrial state …” I kind of go with the late Stephen Jay Gould on this. If rainfall patterns change, that’s serious, because millions of people live where the rainfall is now. If sea levels rise, that’s serious, because we will have to protect some areas, and abandon others. But (he continued) when a paleontologist like him hears global warming doomsday stories, he smiles: because he knows how warm the Earth was during some of its most verdant periods; for example, when big-eyed dinosaurs roamed the forests of Antarctica.
@55, Actually in feudalism people were forbidden to go elsewhere, as in serfs. This didn’t stop the more daring from doing so of course but most were tied to a specific piece of land. It is true that Manors were not the top down dictatorships formerly imagined. The customs of the manor established rights and norms and those customs were interpreted by juries of villagers. The Lord had force on his side but the majority preferred to negotiate as dead peasants do nobody any good.
The system finally crack d and crumbled after the depopulation of the Great Plague but it had been moving steadily towards a money economy for decades before that.
Since reading this article I’ve been imagining a depopulated future dotted with ghost cities where families are rare and most children are raised in creches feeding the anomie in a vicious circle.
I guess I’m a boomer, but I agree with most of your observation. I’m glad to see that others see our world as “post-scarcity” and you are right, in our current world there should be no hunger, we make more than enough food.
Re: “the future is urban” – I could imagine a technology that would make this irrelevant, if we could travel from place to place real fast (eg. Star Trek transporter). If I can get to anyplace in the world in less than an hour, would cities still be important?
John Maynard Keynes, of all people, saw something like this coming. Yes, that Keynes. The Keynesian economics guy, who ruled the economic roost from the great depression, through WWII, and into the 70s.
If I were listing candidates for utopian idealism—it’s not that Keynes would be low on the list. He wouldn’t be on the list at all. They don’t call economics the Dismal Science for nothing.
Then I read his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
My purpose in this essay, however, is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?
His thesis?
From the earliest times of which we have record-back, say, to two thousand years before Christ—down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change. Some periods perhaps 50 per cent better than others; at the utmost 100 per cent better—in the four thousand years which ended (say) in A. D. 1700.
Keynes calls this pre-industrial condition the economic problem. The scientific-agricultural-industrial revolutions were game changers. in the long run, what does the new game mean for us?
I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race.
As a political prophet, Keynes makes a good economist.
Set the attempts of the 1% to hijack the world aside.
Say the problem of resource distribution is solved. The machines do the work. The resulting wealth is equitably shared.
What then? How do we comport ourselves then?
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
How dismal.
I’m glad I read this article, because I just finished reading (listening to, actually) Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, and was wondering why it seemed to be such a harsh critique of Baby Boomers. Now I get it.
Keynes was an ass. In fact the standard of living rose steadily over the middle ages as can be easily proven by wills and nanorial proceedings after deaths.