# Future

## Things that Might Look Weird in the Future

History teaches us that in 100 years from now [[Openness|some of the assumptions we believed will turn out to be wrong]]. A good question to ask is "What might we be wrong about today?". These are a few things that future humans might see as weird behavior:

- Eat animals.
- Drive manually.
- Give birth without advanced assistance.
- Not caring for all the [animal suffering in the wild](https://longtermrisk.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/).
  - Nature is not safe! The default is suffering. The current mentality is that nature is good and disruptions from nature are bad.
- The ignorance of [[Social Media Issues|Social Media]] and its [full impact on society](https://twitter.com/M_B_Petersen/status/1483457679800651787).
  - Is "being bad for society" an emergent property of social networks as they grow?
- Current Voting Systems.
- Not relying more on tools like Prediction Markets (e.g: [to spot papers that might not replicate](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/11/09/infofinance.html)).

## Predictions

- More [[Experimentation|experimentation]] around [[Politics|governance]]:
  - Charter cities.
  - [Holacracy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy).
  - [[Decentralized Autonomous Organizations|Cooperatives/DAOs]].
- Cities are friendly to humans & wildlife, not cars.
- More experimentation around [[Learning]] and education (e.g: [teaching game theory](https://twitter.com/BoyanSlat/status/1469063939417907204) as a subject [in the modern curriculum](https://seths.blog/2021/09/the-modern-curriculum/))
  - More people aware of the tricks our minds play on us ([Mind Field](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZRRxQcaEjA4qyEuYfAMCazlL0vQDkIj2) and [The Story Of Us](https://web.archive.org/web/20230129233043/https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html)) as well as [how diverse humans are](https://youtu.be/fC5qucSk18w).
  - More people are aware of [how cool win-win games are](https://nonzerosum.games/)!
  - More interactive explanations like the ones the awesome [Nicky Case](https://ncase.me/) does!
- More concern around [[Systems|systems]] with weird [[Incentives|incentives]] causing large amounts of pain (Moloch).
  - E.g: Criminal system rework. Focusing on the system and not on individual punishment.
- Work valuation changes (plumbing more expensive than some software development) due to [Moravec's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox). We will automate making a full app before a robot is able to master physical arms and legs like a 5-year-old.
- [[Open Data]] will be more important as it can produce better models and help coordinate people providing shared context.
- The current [[Decentralized Protocols|decentralized protocols]] ([[IPFS]], ActivityPub, ...) need to evolve more. Especially around UX. People don't care about decentralization, they care about UX. [Centralization is inevitable](https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/centralization-is-inevitable).

### Exciting Software Engineering Ideas

- [Common Digital Infrastructure](https://andrewconner.com/common-digital-infrastructure/)
  - If you work in tech, this is a fun thought experiment. Imagine you don’t need any money and can devote your time to benefiting everyone by building common digital infrastructure. What would exist in a better future?
- Content-addressed data + immutability
- CRDTs
- WASM. Especially Pyodide.
- Distributed / decentralized data storage systems.
- Multi-party computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), trusted execution environments (TEEs), ...
- Prolly/Merkle Trees
- Differential/Timely Dataflow
- Zero-knowledge proofs
- Have a market of ML/AI models each competing to predict an outcome. When the outcome actually happens, rank them on a leaderboard by how close their predictions were and reward accordingly.