In the past, we’ve had issues with women suffrage, slavery, and sanitation, among many other things.
Today we have gun control, AI, intended/unintended false information, vaccines, etc. as consistently hot topics.
In a few decades’ time, what views do you have now that may spark major social debate in the future? What conservative and/or progressive stances do you take today that might be too far on either extreme in the far future?
A person’s right to assisted suicide.
A few countries have this already, and I think 1 or 2 states may have it decriminalized. But I wish it were less of a taboo subject.
It’s ok and even seen as being responsible when we make these decisions for our pets, yet if you want to make the same decision for yourself, you must not be thinking straight.
I have not had and do not have thoughts of suicide, but I have been caregiver to several family members and been witness to the end of life stage.
We should be able to decide for ourselves at a certain point that it’s time to go.
The right to privacy. Just because I don’t want someone watching me 24/7 doesn’t mean I’m up to no good
Here’s an issue that people won’t talk about that they need to: the right to commit crimes. Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s immoral, and the growing belief on multiple fronts that a criminal justice system should be “perfect” is what’s driving a lot of the erosion of privacy rights, among other things.
Circumcision is immoral, religion can be a serious social harm, the use of AI in art should be prohibited or at least frowned upon
I fervently believe that the best if not only way to reliably reduce crime (including that committed by abusive cops) is restorative justice, but the vast majority of people still consider the necessity of penal justice (and in some places like the US even penal SLAVERY) to be so absolute that it might as well be a law of nature rather than the system that best serves the rich and powerful.
You habe to have both. People mold their behavior around incentive structures. If you give them the incentive to commit crime, they will commit crime. If you give them the incentive to do better, they will do better.
Then again you also shouldn’t have bullshit laws that punish people for things that hurt no one but themselves, like the war on drugs. If they do something to hurt someone while doing drugs, that’s what we have all the other laws for.
You really don’t have to have both, though.
Incarceration and (in especially barbaric jurisdictions) penal slavery, torture, and state-sanctioned murder are largely ineffective disincentives against doing bad or otherwise undesirable behaviour that do nothing to incentivise good or otherwise desirable behaviour.
In fact, they often directly or indirectly CAUSE more of the former while making the latter much more difficult if not impossible.
By taking drugs, people are teaching children that drugs are cool, incentivizing them to ruin their lives. And they give money to drug dealers, who try to get as many people addicted as possible.
Some drugs can help people and heal them physically, emotionally, spiritually, and some drugs will destroy your life in a downward spiral of physical addiction.
Kids reading this: don’t do heroin, meth, cocaine, opioids, random prescription meds, alcohol, or cigarettes.
Do however do pot and magic mushrooms. Buy federally legal hemp flower if you live in non-legalized pot state and grow your own mushrooms from spores. DARE and the war on drugs was a failure, use your own judgment and be responsible adults.
Disability rights, equal access to nutrition (not just edible items but actually nutritious food), equal access to electricity especially for cooling.
I suspect the resource wars will ramp up with climate change, driving a lot of international conflict of all types.
Bit late to this, but I have a couple of big ones:
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Once brain uploading becomes a thing, the code/data of an uploaded person should be sacrosanct. You can’t look at it, you can’t fuck with it, unless they give you consent to do so.
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Once it becomes a possibility, every human should either move off-world or revert back to a hunter-gatherer existence. Humans in general have been a disaster for the biosphere, but especially once we started settling down and farming, and even more so once industrialisation became a thing. Earth needs time to heal from the damage we have done to it, and that means most people + all our industry and technology fucking off into space. Namely into space colonies, big rotating cans of steel the size of large islands, filled with dirt, air, water and artificial biospheres.
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Stance: Progressive global taxation of all wealth
Social issue in the future: If the planet’s ecosystems and the capitalist trends permit it, the vast majority of humans will demand global taxation of all wealth. Some extractive and regressive pockets will fight to the death for that not to happen.
Religion gas to go. The way we rarm animals is barbaric. People should be able to pull the plug if they don’t want to live anymore.
My hope is politicians and, overall, rich people and corporations getting away with everything. It’s crazy what money ans influence can do to cover up/minimize the damages that people and corps should receive for doing the shit they do just for profit and personal interests.
Honestly, not that far into the future I think more and more people will be consuming various forms of media acknowledging in very scientific and real terms the end of the human race.
All the attempts at curbing global climate change will finally be acknowledged as being a pipe dream and even the ultra wealthy will come to see that they won’t survive in their bunkers and instead will die like the rest of us.
I also hold a very dark view that the end of human existence is not the end of human suffering, but that’s a tale for another day.
Personally I’m the opposite, I feel like even if we can’t stop CO2 emissions fast enough, there is always geoengineering to counteract it, and human brain uploading will probably be a thing by the start of next century? At which point humanity can basically live until the heat death of the universe, because of how durable electronics can be compared to squishy human flesh.
I also hold a very dark view that the end of human existence is not the end of human suffering, but that’s a tale for another day.
And today’s that day! Go on…
I believe that the suffering you impart on other beings during your lifetime is directly experienced after death.
Oh, so karma, Buddhist style?
More or less, but not so direct. The dark part is that I don’t believe you have to have had a direct involvement with the suffering, it can be very indirect and you’ll still go through the suffering anyways.
The right to work from home. Many people have jobs they could do from home if their employers would let them, and I think people will be granted the right to choose in at least some countries/sectors.
On a more personal level, I think (or hope) access to education and work for people with disabilities, is something that will improve a lot in my country. There are currently a lot of barriers and counterproductive laws, that I think will be viewed as inhumane in the future.
Almost all our social systems are built on the young providing for the old under the assumtion of generations growing. The population collapse we’re currently starting will be the biggest issue in the future. (alongside the loneliness epidemic, but that’s a different issue entirel)
We’re in for a like a 45% reduction in generation size each generation. And this trend is only increasing rapidly. All the causes of this are deeply entrenched economically and socially, so we won’t be able to turn them around on a dime.
Unless we find some social, economic or technological solutions, we are all majorly screwed. Eveyone who won’t die within the next 30 years or so will be majorly affected by it.
And no, immigration can’t fix it long term, because all the rest of the world is experiencing the same thing. They are just at different stages. India, China, the Americas, Europe are below replacement rate and dropping. All the other regions are are slightly above replacement rates and dropping, except Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan African women are having one less child every 10 years, so they will be below replacement rates within a generation. More and more people having internet access will only rapidly increase these trends.
So in 20-30 years, it’ll be a zero sum game who can most effectively steal each other’s populations.
The only groups that are still growing normally are highly conservative religious groups. Israel is one of the only developed countries that still have normal fertility rates, and they are slowly being taken over by the ultra orthodox.
Maybe life extension or AI can save us, while generally keeping the social order in tact. But all the other solutions don’t look very appealing. You could have A Handmaiden’s Tale, or government/corpo created babies with artificial wombs, like Bladerunner or Brave New World…
You can’t run a society on old people and for those saying it’s good because climate change, you won’t be able to fix climate change if everyone is in total chaos and only concerend with immediate survival. It’ll be like “everything is fucked and YOU want US to stop burning coal, yeah nah”.
Well maybe it won’t be that bad, but it’ll certainly be a huge social issue.
I’m going to be plenty sarcastic and start by flipping the “eat less avocado toast” argument.
Most of the problems are with the boomers, and if they actually wanted a better future then they should have cared more about it. Almost all of the American problems are from boomers being too selfish.
What’s that one quote? “A good society is one where people plant trees that they will never know their shade?”
Boomers took the ability to live on minimum wage, after they benefited from it. Boomers took the ability to get promoted after healthcare kept them alive. Boomers are hoarding more wealth than ever and everyone is worse from it.
If the lower classes had the ability to spend any meaningful amount of money then we could easily support people after retirement. But now we have some of the most stagnant economies, and it will only get worse before it gets better.
The earth could easily support more if people actually cared by doing things like stopping coal power plants. But now instead of creating solutions we have people like you who want to force pregnancy on people for your own selfish WANTS.
I mean, it’s not just boomers, because it’s a world wide problem. But in general inequality is more or less the biggest problem. After every financial crisis birth rates drop and stay down.
All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971 when we introduced the FIAT money system. Basically ever since then the entire system is set up to steal from anyone who can’t benefit from debt and give that money to those who can. Any savings and income is constantly eroded away steadily making the bottom ~80% poorer. Then we also started artifically lowering interest rates, which made the stock market and real estate markets go nuts, making everyone who already had assets rich and those who didn’t even poorer.
Boomers didn’t really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means, they just passively benefited from it, because they already had assets. It’s more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system in 1971. The entire financial and monetary system were reengineered to benefit the rich.
Mark Blyth frames it as a revolt of capital in his book Angrynomics. Basically before that workers benefited hugely from the system, because wages were constantly rising in line with productivity growth and cumulative inflation was so low that you would actually save. There were no crazy real estate bubbles created by the central bank like we see today. That stopped after 1971.
I wouldn’t say Boomers did this, because they were way too uneducated to even notice what happened, because they got all their news from the same people that stole their children’s future. You can blame them for being to stupid to stop it, yes.
There’s some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues, but inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest. It’s pretty much clear as day in the data if anyone cares to even look. It’s not some big mystery, it’s just going completely ignored, because it would be a huge problem for the people in power.
Oh yeah, and the reason why this problem is world wide is because we exported that same system all over the world to pretty mich every country on earth. Ghadaffi wanted to break that system with an African stable gold backed currency and that’s why Libya was destroyed. It would completely invalidate our imaginary money like the Dollar or the Euro and the powerful couldn’t steal from the rest of us every single day.
I appreciate you responding, even if most of what I was doing was screaming into the void.
FIAT and gold standards will have similar issues, and where they differ FIAT is better. Unless you want degrowth, then gold standard is better. Our current economy is built on growth. Without growth you die.
All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971
I do feel it being correlation and not causation with line go down and FIAT. I can more easily point to legislation than I can gold.
the entire system is set up to steal
The system was set up to steal before too. It’s just now a more shuffle assets around and magic presto you now have more money.
Boomers didn’t really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means
Lol, fair enough.
It’s more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system
You kind of lost me there. I strongly doubt there are people who planned 4d chess and have it to roll out like this. Look at Elon, who has been failing upward his whole life. Look at Bill Gates being a big baby with copy righn. In most cases it seems to be people arguing for immediate short term benefits to themselves while disregarding the future.
were no crazy real estate bubbles…before 1971
If you’re talking about raw size, sure. People use to also be much quicker to violence. You used to have striking union workers getting gunned down by the state for a 40hr work week. We are much more tolerant to being abused.
There’s some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues,
Moving to cities have generally been what made most human technological progress. Cities are much better than suburbs.
Ghadaffi…[wanted gold standard]…and that’s why Libya was destroyed.
Well, that is certainly a view. I think we’ll just talk past each other on that one.
Seems like conspiracy statutes tend to cover lying pretty well, and lying under oath is perjury. What other ways could lying be covered?
