Many, many years ago, I was deep into studying singularitarian/transhumanist shit, technocracy, the Venus Project, et cetera. By around 2013, I'd determined a few things.
Let us assume that the richest and most powerful people in society believe that there is an impending ecological collapse that will occur sometime in this century. The biggest problem is actually not "climate change" at all. It's a combination of fresh water depletion, soil depletion, phosphorus depletion, and ocean acidification. Simultaneously, there is increasing populist discontent all across the globe over declining wages due to outsourcing and automation. People are upset, and justly so, that the economy appears to have left us behind. We are not actually receiving any of the benefits of GDP growth. They aren't materializing into higher standards of living for a large number of people. In fact, an increasing number of people are living paycheck to paycheck and are incapable of saving enough money to buy a house. Where does this lead?
These were the scenarios I predicted:
- New welfare-statism; universal basic income is used to replace wages lost to automation so people have enough money to keep consuming and keep propping up the illusion of growth.
- Democracy collapses into neofeudalism. The middle class is utterly wiped out. Economic classes become a fixed caste system of the ultra-wealthy and their plantations of helpless debt-serfs. Compliance would be ensured by Orwellian tracking and censorship, and perhaps even some sort of mind control tech.
- Massive and genocidal population culling to reduce mankind's ecological footprint and conserve resources for the offspring of the billionaires.
- Some horrific and dystopian combination of the above.
People really, really didn't like being told any of this. They thought it was an illiberal and misanthropic vision of the future that painted our leaders as craven and diabolical monsters.
Eight years later, I am watching it all unfold.