If this is a crisis it's an amazingly comfortable one for a large chunk of the world. There is plenty of talk that the bottom has already past and that we're on our way up. (not that I subscribe to that view or the view that this is a crisis but one thing is fairly certain: during the depression people were not able to argue convincingly that they were not in a depression).
The grandparent made me start thinking: how would you define things getting worse? I think that's the core of it. For most of the world, we are entering a golden age where lifespans will dramatically improve, income will allow new luxuries unheard-of, and so on. For those in richer nations, we're also entering a new world, where your every move will be recorded and analyzed.
Depends on how you look at it. 100 years from now, however, when we're all living to 110 and we all look like fashion models, yet we're living in an Orwellian state? That doesn't look too good to me.
You certainly don't provide any information supporting your argument that society will be more oppressive and controlling.
Postmodernist views like yours are certainly in vogue today, but paradigm shifts happen and postmodernism will yield to new philosophies. Perhaps hypermodernity or transhumanism is the next big thing, they definitely have some potential to alleviate opression of the societal superstructures.
Not trying to be in vogue. If anything, my limited knowledge of history shows me that dystopian societies are far more common than liberal democracies. In fact, I'd argue that it's a cyclic thing.
And good luck with adding still more technology to the stack and expecting better things to come out of it. What's going to be required is a new set of societal mores about our interaction with tech. I have no idea how long that will be in coming, if ever. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with a new religious movement, that'd be cool.
I'm a big supporter of tech and science and an overall optimist -- if you think the human race evolving into machine intelligence and then dying off counts as optimism. As I said, that's a tough call. You could argue it either as a great thing or a terrible disaster.
I do believe that we have several inflection points ahead of us: getting off the planet, transhumanism, the panopticon, and so on. We have to make it through each of these successfully in order for the species to continue. Let's hope the answer to the Fermi Paradox isn't just that intelligent species tend to self-destruct.
While he didn't, I consider it to be an outcome with a relatively high probability, considering that China is the new superpower, and it is more oppressive and controlling (though, from a South American point of view, less hypocritical than the U.S., which is in denial of being oppressive and controlling).
Maybe not a military superpower, but depending on the definition, "a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony." (Alice Lyman Miller)
China certainly fits that bill, here in South America it has archieved a surprising influence in a very short time, and in Africa it's the dominant power.
During the last two decades, the U.S. influence has been going down in our region, while China's is going steadily up. Today China is the main trade partner outside the region (used to be the U.S. and Europe), infrastructure provider (same), etc...
According to Wikipedia, it's not a "world superpower" yet like the U.S. is, but I definitely think it's going to be one.
Well, you've gone and pointed to something that the theory explicitly doesn't model, which is "a large chunk of the world." It has to be evaluated on a per-nation basis, under the assumption that generational cohorts are ultimately connected by their local culture, governance, and economy.
To quote Douglas Adams: “Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of.”
