Predicting the Future (2025 to 2050)

 

 

PREDICTING THE FUTURE

In 1999, a vast cross-section of Americans were asked to predict the future. Nearly a thousand who were surveyed revealed what they thought the USA and the rest of the world would be like in the year 2025. Now (actually 26 years later), it’s time for a final grade and the report card. How did they do on their predictions?

We may not realize how much our lives changed in the last quarter century. Back in 1999, the internet was just taking off as a source of information and communication. Smartphones had not yet been invented. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was something robotic in a lab. No one had ever heard of COVID. Donald Trump was only on his second wife–and third bankruptcy. 9-11-01 and 1-6-21 were just numbers. Boston Red Sox still hadn’t won a World Series in 87 years. The Chicago Cubs last championship was 92 years ago. How much did they get right, and where were they wrong?

Surprisingly, Americans got many things right:

— the rich will get richer (TRUE)
— the super rich will become insanely rich (TRUE)
— the poor will struggle and increasingly fall into debt (TRUE)
— mainstream society will become more tolerant towards non-traditional lifestyles and alternative beliefs (TRUE, but now possibly backsliding)
— the first-ever racial minority will be elected President (TRUE, though most respondents thought it would be a Hispanic man, not a Black man)
— technology will become indispensable in all of our lives, taking over many daily tasks to the point of being disruptive (TRUE)

 

Here at are the things they got wrong:

— we will land the first human on Mars (FALSE)
— people will live longer (FALSE, some demographic groups are actually declining in life expectancy)
— dreaded diseases like cancer will be cured (FALSE)
— a woman will be elected President (FALSE, scoreboard reads 0-2 so far)
— crime will worsen (FALSE, violent crime rates have declined steadily for two decades, though white collar crime has now become an epidemic)
— Russia and Eastern Europe will enjoy a new renaissance of democracy and personal freedom (FALSE)
— Japan will become the most significant challenger to American economic international dominance (FALSE)
— China will explode in population growth (FALSE, China’s population growth has slowed dramatically and turned negative, with declines due to low birth rates, high death rates, and a legacy of family planning, leading to an aging society–as in Japan)
— there will be a major nuclear or biological attack, perhaps both (FALSE)

 

Looking at all these different topics, here are my predictions for the United States and the world at-large 25 years from now (the year 2050):

— After making a surprising revivification the last decade in many regions of the world including the United States, nationalism will again wane as a majority of peoples and nations will realize the essential need for international cooperation, bilateral agreements, free trade and commerce, and other facets of exchange.

— The power void left by these nationalistic governments will be filled by multinational corporations and giant conglomerates. This will create oligarchical dominance in many nations. A few wealthy and powerful individuals will control and essentially suffocate all messaging, public perception, and policy decisions by virtue of their iron-clad ownership of all the major social media platforms, high-tech providers, and mainstream communications.

— Wars will continue in regions where conflicts already exist, but will increasingly be contested by drones, robotics, and new technologies yet to have been invented (Note: AI is already inventing stuff). Given there is actually less *human* cost, that makes warfare a more acceptable option, which could be a very serious problem. Military decisions will rely on impersonal gadgets of automation, which will become the auto-pilots of attack and counter-attack. In short, conflicts will increasingly become dehumanized. And, if you’re wondering about the answer to the big question — yes, we will at some point reach a “Fail Safe” crisis, and perhaps even a “doomsday machine.”

— I don’t believe in conspiracies, and reject the proliferation of crackpot medical conspiracies (many posted online). However, fighting disease is astoundingly profitable. Obscenely so. This is what happens with profit-driven health care. It’s far more profitable for companies to manage sicknesses rather than cure them. A major scientific breakthrough will happen at some point in our future which might be that cure for cancer, or another dreaded disease. That future discovery is most likely to come from a managed health care society where medicine and treatment aren’t segregated by competition, patents, lawsuits, and other deterrents of progress. Bolder Prediction: Someplace in Asia will make a major breakthrough due to government support, wealth, need, and a concentration of medical brain trust.

— Organized religion will stabilize its number of believers/followers, but will also go through noticeable phases of decline in some regions and periods (such as the plunge among Catholicism in Ireland during 1990-2020). Access to communications around the world will create more religious intransigence and intolerance among followers, but this will be likely be counterbalanced by larger numbers of people, especially young people, who doubt ancient belief systems and reject traditional the hierarchical forced-systems of spirituality. Access to rationality and realism cannot be stopped nor diverted.

— Another minority will be elected President (though the “minority” group may not be as outnumbered as today). Politics will increasingly become colorblind, though there will always be a discriminatory racist strain, especially in American society.

— A woman will *not* be elected President within the next 25 years. There, I said it. And so, the USA remains as it is — one of the few so-called “modern” nations never to have elected a female premier. After the two losses in 2016 and 2024, I’m convinced there’s a significant enough number of Americans who simply will not abandon misogynistic attitudes. Perhaps this percentage is small and gradually reduces in size, but given the close margins of most elections, women presidential candidates enter any race with a ton of bricks on their shoulders (and I say this as an opinion of shame).

— Crime will linger throughout all sectors of society though it will also stabilize. Internet-based crimes will increasingly become more sophisticated and costly. Victims of violence will continue to be the targets of domestic abuse, petty thefts-done-wrong, and a society with a pervasive obsession with gun culture. In short, crime rates will remain about the same, though high-tech crimes will become an epidemic. Look for troll farms and scam centers (mostly in third-world nations) to explode in size and find plenty of unsuspecting victims susceptible to the damage they do. Societies will become less tolerant of crime and will resort to more spartan means of “correction and rehabilitation.” Unfortunately, there will be a disproportionate criminal justice on physical criminology which will thereby diminish the risks of white-collar criminals, scammers, and those who victimize others through high-tech operations. In short, it’s a positive expectation and lucrative venture to screw people using technology, and lax regulatory societies.

— Many cities with effective civic leadership and constructive partnerships with businesses in the purest “democratic-socialist” sense will thrive, and this will come at the expense of other cities which will see steady abandonment. We will see more gentrification in older urban areas, though some cities — especially in the rust belt — will lose their populations at an alarming rate as people move elsewhere and there’s no one to replace them–specifically a dearth of new immigrants. The growth of many sunbelt cities (especially in the West and South) will be stymied by declines in the basic quality of life, environmental disasters (think of rising water levels in Florida and a shortage of water in many states in the West). In short, cities around the Great Lakes are in trouble. Coastlines will always be popular and expensive, but there’s going to be major shakeups in South Florida and California. Texas too, will be crushed under the weight of new arrivals from all borders, but horrific leadership unlikely and unwilling to meet the needs of this influx.

— Women will continue to be second-class citizens in a patriarchal society. Some states will reverse restrictions on women’s reproductive rights after years of disastrous fallout (note: unwanted children who grow up in a forced-birth society tend to create problems–catastrophically so). It would take a swing to the Left among the Supreme Court to restore Roe v. Wade. Trouble is — most of the reactionary far-right appointees are relatively young and likely to be on the Court for 20-30 more years).

— The Cleveland Browns will not win a Super Bowl. The United States will win the World Cup, likely 20 years from now. Baseball, the so-called “national pastime,” will be far more popular in many other countries than the United States. The Olympic Games will become nothing more than multinational corporate showcases, propped with quasi amateur athletes.

— Keith Richards will father his sixth child, and tour America on his fifth “farewell tour” as the last Rolling Stone in 2043 on his 100th birthday.

Agree? Disagree? Please share your thoughts and predictions in the comments section.