Difference between revisions of "Future world scenarios"

Latest revision as of 14:21, 3 November 2024

Meta: About formulating scenarios

Coming up with realistic scenarios for the futures (both desirable and undesirable ones) is a very difficult thing to do.
Using plural here as society is a big thing and different parts may end up at very different futures.
Plus some futures may still have been likely despite not coming up at all in any of our experienced realities.
Even for today there is the saying "The future is already here it's just not very evenly distributed" (William Gibson).

Present as a problematic bias

Predicting realistic futures is not only all about
hard concrete future physical technology but also about social systems, culture,
economics, and governance (or ecovernance if these last two start to merge and become hard to tell apart).
Lot's of things go beyond gemstone based APM technology. Beyond the core focus of this wiki.
Still the author has some thoughts and ideas maybe worthwhile to present.

Predictions of the future can easily end up way off due to being too caught up in the present.
That is: Extrapolating too much and too directly from the presence to the future.

More or less random examples for that bias

On the technology side one example coming to mind is that many (if not most)
of the already few hard SciFi space operas (that aim at some realism)
assume similar materials and manufacturing techniques as the ones found today.
But the same goes for aspects that are today considered semi- or nontechnical / social.
Assuming hard long persistence of big general problems like humanities issue with burning carbon.
Or social things like predicting that overblocking, shaddowbanning, adpocalyps(es),
and generally ensittification (yes this term is on wikipedia) is getting worse and worse.

Overlooking that really bad entirely new problems may arise (gem-gum waste crisis, population implosion , … ?)
and that ones that are currently really bad really bad ones may get surprisingly squashed

Scenarios

Fundamental option to start with is aim:

• 🤩 really good one to strive for
• 🤔 balanced one to give a realistic most believable picture
• 😰 really bad one to strive against

Trying to put several extensive world-building scenarios here would explode this page several times over.
So the author won't even attempt doing so.
Instead he's going for hypothetical future experience essays.
Collected on the page: Story scenarios

Not necessarily exclusively, but
focus of short story essays will be mostly really good hopeful story scenarios 🤩
as a focus on the bad scenarios ones will come fro many authors naturally (and proactively).
Too proactively and way overblown misled sometimes. See: Grey goo horror fable)

Some positive scenario
– not focusing on inhabitants
– but focusing ion the landscape/environment
can be found here on the page: The look of our environment

Looking "away from the horizon" closer to small things an objects:
See page: Likely visual appearance of gem-gum products

Fore some topics clearly not related to gem based APM but only management of society (economy, governance, …)
See page: A better internet

Related

• World building
• Story scenarios
• The look of our environment (Likely visual appearance of gem-gum products)
• A better internet
• Ecovernance … A hypothetical future where economy and governance merged so far that they are no longer clearly/simply separable
• Gem-gum waste crisis

External links

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
• https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adpocalypse (Italian page. No English one as of time of writing 2024.)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_filter#Overblocking
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning