Prophecy

Over the last 25 years, there have been a few changes in the world—agree or disagree?  Homes and offices and libraries and cars became computerized, phones became mobile.  Americans became fat.  Words like “blog” and “tweet” and “e-zine” and “phablet” and “Belieber” came into general use.  Bookstores and one-hour photo labs and print shops vanished en masse, and commerce in general moved “online.”  Shopping malls, once the throbbing heart of American teen and suburban society, withered away to the point that the operators had trouble giving space away, and stores like Banana Republic and Radio Shack stepped up to serve as the “anchor stores” of what was left.  Entertainment became largely home-based, with big HD TV screens, satellite reception, wireless speakers, i-tunes and i-pods, game consoles, Blu-Ray discs and video-on-demand.  (Just as well, in a world where it now can cost hundreds of dollars to take the kids to a football game, or a thousand bucks to go to a Madonna concert.)  The youth of America donned urban gang attire and pop “music” became first shouting into microphones in badly-metered “rap,” then repeating the same lines over and over and over again in a singsong monotone  with the assistance of a “vocorder.”  Illegal aliens voted in elections, served on juries and joined in huge rallies to demand the rights and privileges of citizens, while the U.S. government commissioned a really tall wall (to keep them from leaving, I guess.)  Healthcare became outrageously high-tech and expensive, and the illusory “right to privacy” died once and for all with credit bureau rating checks, unsolicited offers of credit, robocalls, social media sharing, government communications monitoring, face and voice recognition technology, online “cookies,” computerized medical records, e-books, credit and debit cards, YouTube and interactive TV.  Censorship became en vogue, with campus “speech codes” and book-burnings sponsored by Tipper Gore, helped along by the public’s fear of religious fanatics who blew up abortion clinics, crashed loaded jetliners into tall buildings, surgically implanted suicide bombs and stabbed to death filmmakers whose work they didn’t like.  Full-body scans and cavity checks lengthened the wait time at airports, as did universal overbooking of flights and cancellation of service to small, unimportant cities.  Legroom was at a premium, once you made it onto the plane, increasing the risk of deep vein thrombosis.  And we were at war almost the whole time, without ever declaring war, utilizing everything from “surgical strikes” to “black ops” to “multi-national coalitions” to huge invasions to “regime change” to “nation building” to “drone” robots to further our incoherent foreign policy, with the U.S. military maintaining a presence in over 200 countries, just in case.  The Soviet Union collapsed, but the “peace dividend” was spent before we had time to realize it, and the U.S. is now the biggest debtor nation on Earth. 

Demographics in the country are shifting to the point that European Americans will no longer be a majority well before mid-Century, more and more people are claiming "mixed" racial and ethnic roots, and the foot traffic in cities like LA looks like you're in some exotic foreign clime.  Not only are the people getting to look the same everywhere, with a McDonald’s and a Starbucks and a Kentucky Fried Chicken on every corner pretty soon there won’t be any point to traveling around anymore because everyplace on the planet is going to look exactly the same.  But since a lot of Americans stay at the Marriott when they travel, anyhow, it may be a while before people even notice that there's nowhere to go.

It’s easy to sit back now and say that you could see it all coming, the seven billion people, the drowning polar bears, the rocket fuel in the aquifers, the Global War on Terror, the first (almost) black President, DNA crimesolving (at least on TV), Twitter, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report supplanting the network news, legal “gay marriage,” the burgeoning lists of “threatened” and “endangered” species, Mars rovers, Chinese spaceflights, Americans hitching rides in Russian space capsules because otherwise they’d have no way to get to the International Space Station because all the American shuttles are either blown up or in museums.  The rise and fall of Amy Winehouse, River Phoenix, Bernie Madoff, Anthony Weiner, Paula Deen, Barry Bonds, Paris Hilton, Marion Berry, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, Sarah Palin and, of course, Justin Bieber and his mom… not to mention the Kardashians.  You get the idea.

So, since everybody will claim to have seen all that coming, the only way I can make this interesting will be to try to predict the next 25 years, instead.  Here goes:

1.    We’ll discover proof of the existence of life on other planets (life now, not at some time in the distant past.)

2.    Somebody will clone a human being, whether it’s legal for them to do so or not.

3.    The world’s population will increase to at least nine billion, despite massive die-offs from increasingly aggressive “superbugs” (courtesy of our obsession with “factory farming” and persistent misuse of antibiotics.)

4.    At least a quarter of the species of plants and animals now in existence will become extinct in the wild, including some favorites such as pandas, tigers, gorillas and orangutans.  (Countless others will, of course, take their place   on the “endangered” and “threatened” lists.)

5.    There won’t any longer be any “Islamic” governments... anywhere.

6.    All official U.S. government documents will be “printed” or published online in three languages (English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.)

7.    The U.S. Constitution will be amended so that a foreign-born person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Justin Bieber can be elected President.

8.    All infants will be “chipped” at birth, signaling the end of Social Security cards, picture I.D.’s, credit and debit cards, etc… and even the pretense of privacy.

9.    Robots of all types will assume ever more prominent roles in our “service-oriented economy.”  It will become a novelty to interface with a human bank teller, grocery store cashier, doctor, lawyer or librarian.  Police and military functions will continue switching over to the tin men, too.

10.Fossil fuels will become first, very expensive, and then, passé, at least in the “developed” world, as alternative power comes online.  A regional nuclear conflict, fueled by Saudi and Irani fanaticism,  will end the sad saga of the Middle East.

11.Scientists will prove that the human personality a) is not rooted solely in the brain; and b) persists, at least for a while, after clinical death.  This will result in an uptick in executions, as people realize that death is really just Round Two, and there's no more room to keep people in prison, anyway.

12.There will be a Second (or Third, depending upon what part of the country you live in) American Revolution, this one predicated on class warfare, a la the French.  The 98^th percentile will assume control when the dust settles;  the  99th percentile (the fabled 1%) will no longer be with us, one way or the other.  But the economic stratification of our society will persist.

13.With the elimination of the need for human workers, unskilled and skilled alike, as the result of advances in robotics and computerization, there will no longer be a useful function for many people born into our Brave New World.  Only the elite will have what we now call “jobs” or “careers” or “an education.” Whereas philosophers used to dream about the benefits to philosophy and the Arts that might accrue if everybody had more leisure, the devaluation of the Humantities and the Arts as worthy subjects for study in favor of math and science (so that we can compete with the Chinese, as the politicians tell us) will have left us with a population of idle, ignorant, unimaginative people with those not athletically “talented” enough to play professional sports or good-looking enough to appear in pornos having nothing to do but hang out, get high, watch pornos and reproduce.

14.All restrictions on abortion and euthanasia will disappear.  You won’t even need a scrip from your doctor in most states (and your doctor will probably be a robot, anyway.)  Instead of saving for retirement, which would just be more of the same for most people, people will save up to take the Big Sleep early.  You’ll get coupons for it from the robot at the grocery store, too.

15.Written language will follow the path to extinction taken by the protractor and the slide rule and the pencil.  Everything will be video.  Just as kids today don’t learn how to write (or read) cursive writing, the kids of the near future won’t even bother to learn how to text (or to read anything at all).

16.We’ll have regular occurrences of mass food poisoning as the factory farm food distribution system collapses, and then we’ll switch to meat grown in the lab from stem cells… just one step away from Soylent Green.  Then cows and sheep and goats and pigs and horses can go extinct, too.  (They take up too much space, anyway, the argument will go, just like criminals and the genetic culls who opt for euthanasia, and unwanted foetuses, etc.)

17.People will fight primarily over food and water, not oil or religion.

18.The weather shift brought on by “global warming” will continue, rendering the Great Outdoors ever more hostile and making it very dangerous to live on the Great Plains… or on the coast… or near any seismic fault.  Radiation levels will become so intense, courtesy of the porous ozone layer,  that it won’t be safe to go outside without protective goggles and clothing, including a ridiculous-looking, tin-foil-insulated floppy fisherman's hat which, on the plus side, will also keep alien thought-readers out of your head.

19.Congress will pass legislation creating an official American history, a version of events that will be required to appear in all online encyclopedias and any educational videos for the few kids still going to school.  It will be updated hourly, with all amendments having to pass muster before a secret educational court.

20.Genetic engineering will progress to the point that prospective parents (with lots of money) will be able to specify the height, weight, hair and eye color, gender, gender preference, skin shade and I.Q. of their bundle of joy, not just name them.  It won’t take more than a couple of generations of this before we’ve laid the basic foundations of a divided society much like that of the Eloi (the selected) and Morlocks (the random) as depicted by H.G. Wells in his classic, "The Time Machine," and won’t that be fun!

Now, all this might sound a little bleak to you, but I think these are pretty conservative prophesies, just extrapolations of currently observable trends and technologies.  The real "future history" will undoubtedly contain many surprises (including, hopefully, some positive ones) that will act as game changers.  But still, probably wouldn't hurt to hoard some canned goods or move into a bunker or something, just in case.