The Final Crash #2: How Do You Feel About Your Future Right Now?
If you missed Part One of the Final Crash series you can find it here: The Final Crash #1: The Making Of A Global Takeover
How do you feel about your future right now?
You’ve heard the warnings: an economic bubble forming, the climate beyond its tipping point, rising tensions between superpowers, billionaires consolidating power, and the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the world.
It’s overwhelming. We’re living in an age when there is a confluence of highly disruptive events affecting nearly every aspect of the human experience: technological, economic, environmental, political, and cultural. Each is growing in its ability to disrupt our world at an exponential rate. Climate change is displacing millions, fueling a refugee crisis, and spreading disease. This stokes division, which leads to a rise in nationalism, rejection of the truth, and a failure to address the climate crisis. The cycle repeats.
Our system and our way of life seems better at creating problems than solutions. Yet, we keep adding new complexity to a seemingly broken system: cryptocurrency, colonizing space, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI). As global inequality increases, poverty rises, and wars blossom. How much more can our species stand before imploding, or rendering our planet inhospitable to us?
Imagine a curve rising exponentially as its value becomes infinite, like the COVID-19 statistics you might check daily. Maybe, you’ve seen the chart of income inequality over time. One hundred thousand years ago, humans were relatively equal. Now, Jeff Besos has 1 trillion times more wealth relative to those living on less than a dollar per day. The concentration of wealth is rising. Currently, the top seven wealthiest people have as much money as the bottom 50 percent. What happens when the gap reaches the zenith, the event horizon, when the richest person has infinitely more wealth than the poorest? And thus, infinitely more power.
There are other growth curves you might’ve seen. One shows the exponential rise in carbon dioxide output over time. It maps directly, though offset, to the rising temperatures, burning forests, and melting glaciers. If we don’t flatten our carbon emotions immediately, we may pass a point of no return. The tipping point, where a runaway greenhouse effect occurs, will be like what turned Venus into a 470-degree celsius sauna. Carbon emissions are being fueled by another exponential curve: global plastics usage. We’re finding nano-plastic particles in basically everything. This will poison humans for thousands of years and seep deep into their bodies. Yet, our consumption continues to rise.
As each of these growth curves reach their peak, their effects are becoming increasingly erratic. In the middle of the COVID-19 epidemic, as the death curve climbed into the millions and the American stock market reached record highs. The globally-connected system is clearly out of tune and perhaps poorly constructed to begin with. The system is being stress tested and we continue to add new complexity to it. Our advances in technology are increasing the potential for problems at a faster rate than we’re solving the problems we currently have. We’re in the process of integrating a new, purely digital, unregulated, decentralized currency into the global financial system in the middle of a pandemic that’s disrupting economies around the world.
Climate change, poverty, disease, crime, war, have never been technological challenges. They are social problems that emerge as a result of the way we organize ourselves. We don’t need new technology to address them. We never did. The wealthiest amongst us plan to colonize the infinite resources of the solar system. Instead, they could be focussing their wealth and ingenuity towards ending poverty. It’s becoming clear how the wealth gap could one day be infinite.
Some see the growth curves as beautiful and representative of humanity’s ascension to the stars — the realm once held by gods. Others see them as prophetic symbols of doom. Two equally plausible futures await us but there can only be one path forward. This leads to uncertainty, which fuels division. Problems of this scale require unity. How can we achieve it when we keep pouring fuel on the fire? Without fundamentally altering the system, we will ultimately drive ourselves into the Final Crash.
UP NEXT
In the next article, The Final Crash #3: The Hyper Economy Booms, we explore the roaring 2080’s, and specifically the year 2084. The colonization of the solar system has created over one billion billionaires and helped the global populace forget about decades of climate austerity. Many thought technology had ensured the party would never end.
Scott Nihill is a futurist, storyteller, entrepreneur, and artist. He’s currently developing Future Now, a sci-fi worldbuilding web series. Co-produced the hit science & technology web-series What If, and co-created What If Kids. He dedicates his free-time to supporting creators from concept to completion through his arts organization, Maker Boost. Learn more about his activities and interests at https://ca.linkedin.com/in/scottnihill
