Slashdot Mirror
Gov't Report Predicts Cyborgs, Rise of China for 2030
colinneagle writes "Yesterday the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which is made up of 17 U.S. government intelligence agencies, released the 140-page report Global Trends 2030 Alternate Worlds. In all four of the alternative visions of the future, U.S. influence declines and it may be regarded more as a 'first among equals.' By 2030, the West will be in decline and Asia will wield more overall global power than the U.S. and Europe combined. 'China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030,' the report states. 'Megatrends' include an overall reduction of poverty and the 'growth of a global middle class.' NIC also sees a potential world of scarcities as the demand for food and water increase as the world's population swells from 7.1 billion to 8.3 billion people. Advances in health technologies will help people live longer, but 60% of the world's population is expected to live in an urban environment. The report also addresses technological augmentation: 'Successful prosthetics probably will be directly integrated with the user’s body. Brain-machine interfaces could provide “superhuman” abilities,enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.'"
Not yet? Then fuck it.
Have gnu, will travel.
More people + less resources = less poverty
Fail.
Debt will certainly cause decline in the West. It's happening now, and poverty is increasing considerably.
Countries running account surpluses will be the largest economies over time.
BlameBillCosby.com
I believe the scarcity line more. Everything we need in terms of material (many metals, oil, etc) is being consumed at a crazy pace. Usually with these mining scenarios, you go from super high grade (ore) scenarios to poorer and poorer ones. Think about all the gold rushes where the miners initially found huge nuggets fairly consistently and up in Alaska I was told it was so rich right off the bat it was $2,000 a shovel full to lesser and lesser grades until we're using several loads from a caterpillar 797s to get a fraction of an ounce while we turn mountains into holes in the ground.
It's not so much that we can't keep getting the same amount of material needed, but it consumes ever more energy to do so.
That wouldn't be so much of a problem if our oil wasn't starting to look like every other resource. The conventional oil is the rich ore, with initally 1 barrel oil needed to get 300 out (say, like the Ghawar oil fields when first found) and now the ones we have are around 8-15:1. As that is dwindling and not meeting our demands, we're going to fracking and tar sands that have lower yields still (and likely a lower field life as well).
And yeah, we have Natural Gas. But that's a lower density energy form. In human history, we always went for higher density stuff, from wood->charcoal->coal->oil. Ever see an NG gas tank? Or the trunk of the car using it?
The middle class may grow but it will have a lower standard of living than a generation or two previous. It will denote more a relative position than an absolute one.
I most certainly do not welcome any new Cyborg overlords.
Speak for yourself; if they all look like Summer Glau, I can't wait!
China is running a trade deficit with most other countries supplying it with raw materials. It runs a surplus only with a few western countries. And Japan-China hatred goes back several centuries. These complex interactions do not lend themselves to extrapolation on a graph sheet easily.
Anyway, even if it does come to pass, it is just reversion to pre 18th century world power balance. Till about 1750s, 25% of world GDP came from India and another 25% from China.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hell, my mother has cochlear implants, she's already a cyborg.
People will eventually learn
That's where you're wrong.
My Canadian and Australian friends get paid more and have a much better standard than here. IT wages (just 1 example) have not risen at all in 10 years. In Australia you can net 6 figures like it is 1999 again after only 10 years! I see people with 10 years here who make maybe 65k. They can get homes that are more affordable too.
In Canada you can make up to a huge $40,000 salary fresh out of college! States? Here is your headphone set for your call center job. The pay is $10/hr or $17k a year! I do not know anyone who makes as low as Americans if you do not have experience not to mention the college costs are 1/8th of here so you do not have to live at home with Mommy and Daddy with $900 a month student loans while you work as a doorman at BestBuy to pay for it. ... and they do not have to pay healthcare costs which save another $500 a month too on top of that. The US is crap man unless you are a middle manager to CEO. Everyone else is fighting for scraps it seems since 2002.
I am right now about to take a new job that pays more than my 2000 did. About damn time and yet sad after 12 years. For the average Joe we are certainly in decline and poorer as inflation that is not counted as health care costs, gas, food, mortgage, rent, auto insurance, and other things have gone up a very LARGE margin in 12 years.
http://saveie6.com/
The problem is that people *can't* work for less. Inflation has been way ahead wage growth for decades now, and isn't going to change soon. China gets away with it because, as a nation, they seem to be rather accepting of having 98% of the population living in literal poverty. That won't fly here in the U.S. and a lot of the political unrest we've had in the last 10 years is one side effect.
As for bond investors leaving the U.S. market, that's also not going to happen any time soon because, as bad off as we are, there are still no better alternatives for bond investments. It doesn't matter how economically powerful China gets, there's still way too much government corruption, lack of fiscal transparency, and a propensity to mess with their exchange rate to suite their needs. That's not an ideal alternative. The UK failed because the U.S. was right there ready to step in and take over, with an emerging democratic economy and a thriving industrial base.
Simply put, America becoming a stronger economy was beneficial to the rest of the world, including China, partly because is created a strong consumer-driven economy. China becoming a stronger economy won't have that effect because they lack any sort of middle class; the super-rich can only consume so much. Like it or not, as the U.S. economy tanks, the rest of the worlds will follow (and is following) until either we right our ship, or another similar economy is ready to step up and be the dominate consumer-driven economy, or the world economies all start to fracture and become more isolated again, at least for a while.
My grandmother has bilateral knee replacements. Cyborg. She also has eyes in the back of her head, but I think that's maternal evolution.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Last year National Geograhic posted a nice video on YouTube to talk up their theme for the year: there are 7 billion people on the planet. A few highlights:
It would take 200 years to count from 1 to 7 billion.
7 billion steps would take you around the globe 133 times.
It took thousands of years to get to 1 billion, but just 130 years to double that, and just 44 years to double that. In the last 12 years, we've added a number of people equivalent to the entire global population in 1800.
1800: 1 billion
1930: 2 billion
1960: 3 billion
1974: 4 billion
1987: 5 billion
1999: 6 billion
2011: 7 billion
It's leveling off, but we may still hit 9 billion in 2045.
Every second 5 people are born and 2 die. There are over 100 more people on the planet now than when you started reading this post.
In 1960, the average person lived to be 53. In 2010, the average was 69.
In 2008, for the first time ever, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
In 1975 there were three cities in the world with populations of over 10 million: Mexico City, New York, and Tokyo. Now there are 21 cities that size.
By 2050, 70% of us will live in urban areas, but we don't take up as much space as you'd think. Standing shoulder to shoulder, all 7 billion of us would fill an area the size of Los Angeles.
So it's not space we need. It's balance.
5% of us consume 23% of the world's energy. 13% of us don't have clean drinking water. 38% of us lack adequate sanitation.
We already recycle most of our metal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_recycling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Recycling
In the future, scarcer metal supplies will probably lead to even better recycling technology and more incentive to save or even recover already disposed of metal.
Fully recycling plastic and producing synthetic oil and oil products is expensive, but quite possible. Once extracting oil becomes expensive, we'll lean on and improve these technologies more and more.
Material isn't the problem, energy is...and really that's not too big of a problem between nuclear, coal, natural gas, solar, and eventually fusion.
The main potentially troublesome thing is our environmental impact (especially if we don't use nuclear and thus end up leaning heavily on coal), as this issue is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation, and we humans are terrible at dealing with those.