“Perhaps the best hope for the future is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.” – Betrand Russell.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” — Henry Ford.

We stand at the crossroads of history in 2021. The world is about to undergo a fundamental technological revolution, one which will change the world forever – one which is utterly irreversible. Many of us are so focused on the now, we haven’t even begun to consider how much society will be impacted by this over the next five, ten or twenty years. However, if you think that the world remains as it is, even for a fleeting moment, you are wrong. The world is in a constant state of flux and as the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, stated, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

Society has moved through different eras, and each of these eras have been dependent upon the technological developments of mankind.  There are many different ways to measure this and this can be made infinitely more complex, so I have attempted, according to my subjective biases to order them. The different stages have broadly been as so:

The Stone Age — The Hunter Gatherer Society of cavemen and women with simple tools.

The Bronze Age — the melting point of bronze is lower than iron, so bronze was easier to develop and shape into weaponry, technological use and for religious decoration.

The Iron Age — the melting point of iron is higher than bronze, but produces far more resilient weaponry.

The Feudal Age — whereby a highly class structured society is reliant upon a peasant class at its base to support the food production

The Literate Age — following the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, the subsequent Renaissance, Reformation and Age of Enlightenment saw crucial changes in every single human field of intellectual endeavour.

The Industrial Age — whereby powerful machines can replace human labour — this led to the end of the main role of human labour being focused on agriculture and made them seek factory work in towns and cities.

The High Technological Age – the age of the internet, robotics, mobile phones, automobiles, Blockchains, nuclear capability, highly sophisticated computer programming.

These ages, as you may have noticed, pass within ever more concise time periods — thus the rate of change in human development appears to be almost exponential. I am writing this in 2021, and by 2051, I will come back and re-read this.Whether I am correct or not, well, that will be of the utmost interest. I will now list the changes I think will happen in society.

Blockchain Adoption:

One of the most important developments will be blockchain adoption. This has already happened to a fair degree with Bitcoin, an innovation by Satoshi Nakamoto. This innovation has been the most famous example of a use case of blockchain technology. But, what is a blockchain? What does it do?

“A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger that keeps a record of all transactions carried out on the system. These transactions are then duplicated to be reflected across all computer systems active on the blockchain. Every time a new transaction is carried out the blockchain stores the data on that participant’s block and is reflected across all digital ledgers on that network. All transaction data present on the systems of the blockchain can be accessed from any part of the world. 

Each time data is stored in a block it creates an irreversible timestamp when it becomes a part of the chain. Blockchain is a decentralised database and is managed by multiple participants, it is known as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).”

The fact these blockchains are decentralised is of major importance. This means that no single country or government controls it, and Bitcoin is not an inflationary product. In fact, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin (and much of it has already been lost…see here). The scarcity of it makes it a deflationary store of value which is more robust than gold and has made many millionaires and even some billionaires.

Even though the major parabolic gains have been made by Bitcoin, I can’t see it disappearing for a long time and now that nation states are adopting it (El Salvador has already done so and other Latin American countries have made positive noises about doing the same). Therefore, I am forecasting that Bitcoin will have a lot of adoption with perhaps 1 in 5 people in the UK adopting it as an asset class within the next twenty years.

Also, I would like to predict that Ethereum and Cardano will see mass adoption, too. Whilst Bitcoin is like digital gold, Ethereum and Cardano will be like digital oil. These blockchains will function to allow decentralised finance, digital art purchases via NFTs, and even use cases which aren’t financial in motive: educational records, telecommunications and health records can also be revolutionised via blockchain technology. I would imagine that Ethereum and Cardano become household names and expand massively over the next twenty years.

Automation:

The slow, prolonged death of unskilled labour has begun. Its death rattle will be heard over the next thirty years and unemployment will rise sharply. I used to work in Sainsbury’s when I was studying at University. I can remember seeing the first self-service checkout. There was a single checkout. Just one. Now, if we go into any supermarket, the self-service checkouts dominate the customer experience in their adoption: thus, the corporate shareholders are making much greater profits as the greatest expenditure of most businesses is the payroll of its employees.

Amazon and Tesco are developing just walk out shops, whereby even self-checkouts are obsolete, using bleeding edge technology of multiple sophisticated cameras. This model will save customers a lot of time — that is, unless they want home delivered shopping, which many customers moved towards during the pandemic.

When one thinks of banks — many of them have closed at a branch level, as mobile banking has eroded the need for them. An app is much cheaper for banks to manage, just think of the thousands and thousands of staff who have been made redundant over the past 15 years (and the money banks have saved as a consequence).

The real big change, which many are skeptical about, is driverless cars. However, make no mistake, it is coming and it will be trialled in metropolitan cities within the next five years. A friend of mine, who works for Openreach, has been installing 5G in lamp posts along the historic streets of London. Ultimately, it will be Uber which benefits from this. Also, it will be Uber drivers who will feel the pain of this technological great leap forward. They will come to realise that they have been working themselves out of a job. 

What is strange is that although this will be a huge breakthrough with huge adoption, I can feel many people doubting the safety of automated cars. Despite this, think of how many accidents are caused through human error every year — 1472 people lost their lives due to this precise reason in 2020. Has anyone stopped driving cars as a consequence? However, I will guarantee the first death due to driverless car technology will be over-reported amongst a huge amount of moral panic.

Nonetheless, it is the consequences of this which will be far-reaching and most significant. Due to automation, many will face the spectre of unemployment.  Where it is at 4.7% today, over the next thirty years, it may be, as a permanent feature, three, four or even five times higher than that figure. Whilst there will be new jobs and new economies, these jobs will be high-skilled, requiring a high level of intelligence and/or education for employees to access them.

It is also very unrealistic for society to expect men who have made a living as taxi drivers for Uber to become coders. The same goes for those who would choose to work as a cashier in a supermarket — most of these workers probably couldn’t learn how to work in IT as a coder.

This would then necessitate that Universal Basic Income became utterly necessary. Governments have learned some lessons from the past (the crippling economic Depression of the 1930s led to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe, mass unemployment makes young men much more likely to be radicalised). However, this brave new world, awash with brilliant technology will lead to an increase in inequality — the rich will definitely get richer and the poor will definitely get poorer.

I would think, with such a high level of unemployment, a focus on entertainment, volunteering, physical fitness and health and beauty would become paramount. Apps which create online communities would be essential for human connection and cooperation — and investment into the unemployed which gives them value would be essential (and actually create mini economies).

As for the housing market, there will be a growing disparity between those who are house owners and those who are not. This will create a lot of class tension and without a lot of investment into the proletariat, this could create conditions ideal for Marxist ideology to gain popularity. Does this mean a Marxist Revolution will happen? It’s a possibility, but capitalism has shown its resilience over the last century — the USSR, with all of its mighty power, could not export its global revolution.

A couple of other things which I forecast are as follows:

  1. Say goodbye to written exams. The written word is dying and all forms seem to be digital these days. As a consequence, all students will require computers. Textbooks will no longer be printed. Everything is going digital!
  2. Fossil fuels will be phased out. This may seem trite, but it had to be mentioned. As a consequence, electric cars will be utilised at a much wider adoption.
  3. This next notion is a little out there but Jacques Fresco’s ideas may see wider adoption. He definitely was a maverick, but his ideas are based upon sustainability, which seems to be an area we are moving towards. However, his ideas have already seen some adoption in Brazil.