6.1 KiB
[D][BST][WIP][HSF][Q] What do you think will happen? Projecting Social Trends into the future.
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Author: u/Nighzmarquls *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3c80ll/dbstwiphsfq_what_do_you_think_will_happen/
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Score: 3
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Created: 2015-07-05T19:33:23
Post:
Yoho everyone! I just finished an update to my absurd monster girls appearing in a near future world.
But This is about more than self promotion.
Checking over and re-reading some of the critiques, one that stood out to me is 'feeling too social justice tumblr' I thought it would be good to open up discussion about what trends of social development you see honestly taking root or changing?
The annoying teenagers of today will one day be the old stodgy adults of tomorrow.
My read of things is that there is propensity in spite of everything else towards a more 'civil' and 'liberal' social landscape at least in the united states.
I fully expect that the blue and red tribes will continue to exist here, but they will take on new and weird forms to polarize the population on issues.
But they won't be the same as those right now.
What are your own thoughts on social change? I'd love some input from people living elsewhere in the world too.
What do you think the social landscape will be like given twenty to thirty years in your home?
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Charles Stross has said that building a plausible near-future should be 85% known knowns, 10% known unknowns, and 5% unknown unknowns. (He uses a slightly different formula based on how far into the future, but that's not really important.)
So ... the known knowns are your social trends. These are the things that you can predict just by looking at what we know about where things are going. We can predict that gays will be more accepted in twenty years than they are today -- this doesn't take any special insights, just a look at the trendlines. We can guess that the United States of America will probably still exist; that's not even a terribly conservative estimate.
The known unknowns are a bit more tricky; we know that there are children being born today who will be twenty years old in twenty years, and we can be fairly sure that they won't be carbon-copies of the either forty or fifty year old parents. We know that we don't know how those children are going to see the world; we do know that they'll probably have access to better wearable computers, better interfaces for interacting with those computers, some form of virtual reality, and that most of them won't be driving cars. Some of them will go further than their parents in terms of "social justice", but it's hard to come up with something that makes sense which doesn't also sound faintly ridiculous to our ears. It's also possible that the next generation (or even the current one, given time) will have some sort of backlash against current trends. This are the things that we know we don't know -- but they're still on our radar.
The unknown unknowns are a sticking point. If you were in 1970 looking at where gay culture would be in 1990, you might have imagined a television show which featured a gay main character (though you would have been a little early), or pride marches becoming a regular, well-established tradition following Stonewall just the year before. But you would have been certain to completely miss the AIDS epidemic and what that would do to both the perception of gays and gay culture itself. AIDS was an unknown unknown in 1970.
If you want to make a plausible future, you need unknown unknowns. You need some small percent of things that weren't possible to predict with any accuracy. Without them, you're just making the future "like today, but moreso", which doesn't properly sell the strangeness of the future.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+4] (12 hours later)
By the way, this is why I get stress-ball-requiring levels of pissed off when someone points at the dilophosaurs' unique fictional traits in Jurassic Park as an inaccuracy. That's among the most scientifically sound parts of the book/movie - we cannot possibly expect to know everything about dinosaurs; many features of animals simply are not preserved.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (2 hours later)
Hum, thanks for that bit. I think I have a few of those but I'll think on some more.
Unknown Unknowns is probably where I've got a pretty weak bit in my future culture prediction and it probably would be good to throw a few of those into the mix.
u/xamueljones [+3] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)
For anyone who's curious, the QR code in the mysterious letter leads to here.
u/None [+3] (19 hours later)
The better question is: what are you trying to make happen?
But let me add one thing: the world will eventually just shut up and learn to deal with financial turmoil in a sensible way. Trends that can't continue, won't; debts that can't be paid, won't be. How can a future society deal with today's nonstop economic crises (usually involving investment bankers pumping up asset bubbles or raw commodity prices oscillating) in a sensible way?
u/Izeinwinter [+3] (a day later)
"Financial Repression". Currently, finance has an utterly scary grip on the consensus economic understanding of the political class, but this is unstable, because the policies enacted run heavily counter to the obvious interests of almost the entire electorate. - Once some polity somewhere. Anywhere, Defects from TINA and regulates finance into oblivion, and prospers thereby (which they will.) a lot of governments are going to either change their tune or get voted out of existence.
This will have unforeseen knock-on effects. If the only party to run on a platform of "Nationalize the banks and end austerity" is the pirate party then that is going to lead to amusing IP laws...