The Next Fifty Years
The most prudent people among us think about and
plan for the future. We save and invest. We avoid long-term risks. We try to
arrange things so that our family will be in a better position in the future
than it is now.Mostly, when we do this
sort of thing, we extrapolate from the past. We assume that the next fifty
years will be pretty much like the last fifty years. Some ups, some downs, some
surprises -- but for the most part life in 2056 will be similar to today, just
as life today is mostly similar to life in 1956. And life in 1956 isn't that
far from life in 1906.We know that
things will change -- technology will continue to advance, populations will grow
and move, and business and politics will evolve. But when we plan for the
future, we assume that these changes will be gradual and not substantially more
earth-shaking than those of the
past.For example, I invest money for
my retirement. I draw little graphs of my money growth over time, and try to
make sure that I'll have enough to meet my family's
needs.Historically, people who plan
this way end up prosperous compared to those who only think of instant
gratification -- though the gratification junkies have a pretty good time along
the way.I pretend that the next fifty
years will be like the last. But I know it's probably not
so.It's possible that the oil crunch
will become so severe that our society finds itself incapable of funding the
capital investment needed to shift to other forms of energy. We have tons of
spare energy now, based on cheap fossil fuels. When those run out, we'll need
alternate supplies -- but to build those alternates, we need to invest lots of
energy. It's expensive and time-consuming to build solar or nuke plants, and if
you listen to the Peak Oil
alarmists , we'll be too busy trying to get enough food and water to
worry about longer-term issues.It's
also possible that technology could
advance to the point where life becomes essentially heaven -- the
most-desired resources become so cheap and common that scarcity is a thing of
the past. It sounds crazy, but as our lives become more digital, the benefits
of Moore's Law start becoming exponentially better. And the spillover from
those increases could make a lot of our critical concepts, like governments and
money, seem quaint.Most likely,
neither one of those scenarios will happen exclusively. It'll be a little of
both. Some things will be great, while other things suck. Things will feel
like they're mostly the same, because we'll have a couple of years to get used
to the changes before the next changes happen to sweep them aside. Maybe the
good and bad outcomes -- which both largely render all our "planning for the
future" pointless -- will sort of balance each other out, and the planning will
pay off.But it ain't a sure thing, by
any stretch. The future is likely to be pretty different, in ways we can't
guess now.But I'm still saving and
planning.
Filed Mon - February 27, 2006, 02:08 AM in
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