IMO this trend toward hard right conservatism will backfire and we’re going to enter a highly liberal and progressive time. I believe, especially in the US, massive economic hardships are coming over the next decade before a reset. Europe will face hard times against Russia.

Considering that we could just end up with covid 2 tomorrow it seems that any answer is going to be arbitrary so might as well give an optimistic one. The West’s slide to the right is prevented by a leftist surge as parties such as Labour and the Democrats realise that they can’t win by trying to attract the right, and so instead double down on progressive policy - which works for them as they’re able to reform their image and start really appealing to the people.

AI slop starts to falter as it feeds off of self-produced training data until it becomes literally incomprehensible, meaning that it can be easily ignored or not understood by the majority of people, as well as being banned on the rising stars of the internet: federated social media, independent streaming services (think Nebula, Dropout), and newly-independent news sites, like Giant Bomb.

The climate change issue is now taken more seriously, as the generations unfamiliar with the internet who could be sucked into misinformation rabbit holes start to die off, and policymakers who have grown up understanding the existential threat it poses to all of us take power.

The workplaces of large corporations start unionising, even illegally at first, and establish strong community centred power bases which are used to demand better treatment not only in the workplace, but also to bargain with the government. A focus returns to the local community.

(I know all this is very wishful thinking, but figured the thread could use some more positivity 🫶)

Ads will be hijacked into any media content through AI. Watching a video essay on YouTube? Ha! YouTube will seamlessly hijack 1 minute of this video and now your favorite essayist will talk about how great Dunkin Donuts is. All without their consent.

Internet will be truly dead. Nothing is authentic anymore. Everything will be AI slop. If it isn’t AI slop, then it will be injected with AI slop ad reads sooner or later. Some ads will be injected by the service provider. Others will be injected by the web browser. Maybe some even by the operating system itself. Even comments like this one can turn into an AI slop ad read. It reminds me of the unbeatable experience I had the other day in Dunkin Donuts. I don’t know what it is, but something makes Dunkin Donuts that much better. Does anyone know what it can be? IMO, everybody deserves to treat themselves with a little Dunkin in their lives. So good!

We will all be older compared today and some of us probably dead by then.

At a high level, the same

Hotter, stupider and angrier.

I bet you 10 bottlecaps it’ll be worse

I guess the only way to answer that is to ask what things were like 10 years ago and where they are now and then project that another 10 years forward.

Misinformation will be worse and people will be dumber. It will be a “choose your own reality” type situation where any claim can be opposed with a mountain of manufactured evidence. Institutions like Wikipedia and public broadcasters and the internet archive will be hollowed out and corrupted.

Financial mobility will be nil. If you don’t get support from your parents then you’re basically slave class. Work an awful job your entire life in order to not starve when you’re too old to continue working. Wealth will be a lot more concentrated and classes will be more ingrained between the haves and the have-nots. A lot of medical interventions like growing new organs will be available to the haves but permanently out of reach for the have-nots.

Climate Change will have progressed much faster than we predicted (that’s what’s been happening). Mass extinctions and climate change starting to make critical food sources (like fisheries) unstable. Bullshit weather events like drought and flood making broad acre farming unstable. Plastic.

There are some positives. Advances in medicine, progress towards net zero carbon emissions, DJT probably being dead.

Not trying to be too dismissive, but anyone in 2019 who guessed what the world would be like in the future was terribly mistaken, at this point I’m just hoping things don’t get too hot.

Still bad. Different kinds of bad for sure, but definitely still bad.

AI will have been added to everything, even cardboard and there will be nothing left but to add more AI to AI.

At lot hotter as much as people want to claim “climate change isn’t real” and “it’s always been this hot”

Much like it is now, but worse.

Fucked & hot, not in the good senses of those terms.

People online will be even MORE sensitive than they currently are! Don’t ask hypothetical questions, or even THINK about joining a conversation. Everyone will say how wrong and stupid you are without even really trying to read what you typed.