This is the cyberpunk dystopia you were promised, but without all the messy brain surgery and skulljacks. Getting data across certain national borders will be difficult. Getting news out during a blackout might, in some countries, be worth your life. Most countries that style themselves as free may resist government control of the Internet, but its unlikely that they will be able to do much more than maintain zones where the old rules apply. The Great Firewall of China is going to be a popular model. Alternative national networks that are inherently biased in favor of the state might prove to be another. Even in countries that prefer to be mostly hands off about their networks, legislation and policy changes will be put in place to harden their population against psy op attacks like the one that has crippled America. The dream is already dead in 3. Drones will be ubiquitous of course, as will anti drone technologies to clear the airspace in an emergency. POLITICS Expect socialism, anarchism, and other direct challenges to capitalism to make a roaring comeback in the developed world. The Washington Consensus relied upon Washington to be a reliable broker, and the loss of faith in American leadership due to the Trump Administration will be seismic in scale. By 2. 05. 0, America has vastly degraded herself from her position of supremacy in January of 2. China, India, and the EU. The global cultural impact of a resurgent Left in the famously right wing United States may end up being one of the signature features of the new era, if for no other reason than our cultural productions might be one of our few remaining viable exports. It might not be cinema and TV shows by then. It might be hepatic enabled VR that lets YOU fight the strike breakers in front of the Ford Motor Company gates Feel that Pinkertons skull crack under your Louisville Slugger Oh yes, the resurgent American socialism is going to be drenched in Americana, tip to tail. At least it will be if I have anything to say about it But, of course, America will as usual be a trailing indicator. This shift is well underway in Europe already, and with a few more decades to develop it may become a big deal, historically speaking. I havent seen much discussion of how this dynamic will play out in Asia. It may be in places where the economy is still developing to a EuroAmerican level, these appeals will be less persuasive, but I kind of doubt it. Its going to be a major controversy everywhere. International boundaries will continue to blur but will not disappear. WAR Modern war is horrifying in its expense and violence. This will be ever more true, and the extreme costs of the highest end weapon systems might paradoxically make them less vital in a strategic sense. Sun Tzu identifies the highest form of strategy as learning how to win without fighting, and when a single squadron of fighters costs a sizable fraction of a countrys GDP, their incentive to get creative with how they achieve their contested objectives has never been higher. We see that with Russias campaign of election meddling already. This will formalize as new type of international conflict. Perhaps there will be a new word for it, or perhaps we will simply change the definition of war to a political conflict in which one side has decided the others interests are immaterial and not to be considered. When it does come to violence, I think we will see a pattern where much of the fighting will be conducted with low to medium cost weapons systems, and a few high end bits of kit meant to act as a force multiplier. How might this look in practiceConsider an urban guerrilla outfit which manufactures its own ammunition out of smuggled raw ingredients and feeds this into their 3. D printed infantry weapons. They have as many riflemen as they want, but for antitank defense they rely on foreign missiles dropped off in the night by friendly special forces helicopters. One caveat to this many of the worlds most powerful economies have been sheltering under the enormous US defense budget for generations. With Washington no longer reliable, that may not be the case for much longer. But 2. 05. 0, we may see large standing armies with fully modern equipment in places where they havent been seen in generations. If thats the case, expect the first three weeks of any major conventional war to be an absolute bloodbathand then the guerrilla phase starts. For a historical example, look at the Battle of the Frontiers in World War 1. A lot of illusions were shattered at enormous cost of human life, and both sides then scrambled to improvise new tactics and technologies to counter the revealed status quo. Think of that, but without the trench warfare. Imagine instead if France had been conquered, and then immediately gone into a kind of medium high insurrection against the occupation forces instead of surrendering. Now add in the Internet, foreign meddling, long standing internal conflicts coming to a boil, and that will be the pattern for major conventional conflict. And if fourth generation nuclear weapons ever get off the drawing boardits not gonna be pretty. ENVIRONMENT The shift to renewables will be all but complete, and pollution cleanup technologies might be a big growth industry, pushed heavily by China, who have a real strong incentive to figure out how to pull heavy metals out of the water and soil. Antarctica is past the point of no return. Many coastal cities have flooded. To openly be a global warming denialist in some places on Earth is to take your life in your hands. By 2. 05. 0, I expect at least high profile one climate related assassination to have occurred. Carbon capture technology is one of the highest priority areas of research, and scientists are also scrambling with a way to capture the other greenhouse gasses as well. Geo engineering initiatives have significant political clout by now. People see the problem and they want it FIXED. Animals are being sampled so they can be cloned back into being after they go extinct. In some places, eco preservation is almost a mania. The last few stubborn hold outs in denial are likely to be radicalized and violent by now. Configure Auto Login Windows 7 Domain. See above for how thats gonna work out for them. I dont expect the panic reactions to the Earth visibly starting to fall apart to work. Were gonna get several nasty surprises. Kim Stanley Robinsons 2. Green cities of vertical farms, a smaller human population living in automated comfort, and a re wilded countryside is an ideal thats already attractive to some. It will only get more attractive as time goes on. HEALTH The permafrost has already begun to melt. Surprise, its smallpoxOr if not smallpox, some other damn thing nobodys had to have antibodies for at any time in the past half million years. The death toll might be high, but one hopes a crash program of inoculation keeps this from being the civilization killer that some fear and others hope for. See the movie Contagion for what Im thinking will happen. We get pandemic scares all the time Weve had like three just since I graduated college nine years ago and sooner or later the bugs will get lucky. Stem cell therapy, 3 D printed organs, CRISPR, etc, are really coming into their own and helping people live longer and at a higher quality than ever before, if they have the money. I do not expect much in the way of sci fi flavored biotech, if only because the real problems that these technologies will be bent toward will be more subtle, but more important. Developing a new way to culture bacteria, for example, would be an obvious application of biotech that doesnt exactly move the average heart to excitement, and yet would be as consequential as the discovery of penicillin.