Some predictions

[xiphias]

Last night, as I was falling asleep, I thought of some predictions I'd make, about the future:

• In the future, people will invent things.


• Most things people will invent won't materially change the way that people interact with each other.


• Some things will


• The things which people expect to materially change the way that people interact with each other will only sometimes be the ones which actually do.


• The ways in which the interactions change will rarely be the way that people expect them to change.


• No matter how much things change, the people interacting will always be people, fundamental things about how they interact will be the same as they have been since before we first discovered tool-use.


• People will show great grace and kindness to each other.


• People will show unbearable cruelty to each other.


• Entities with power, money, and influence will tend to use their power, money, and influence to gain and retain more power, money, and influence. They will succeed in doing so most of the time, but not all of the time.


• People will tend to show more kindness to other people who they perceive as similar to themselves than those they perceive as different.


• People will use many different metrics to decide who is "similar" to them and who is "different".


• Those metrics will include physical appearance, such as skin color, educational level, native language, religion, the accent in which their language is spoken, their social class, their political views, their taste in art, and many other things that I do not even have the imagination to predict.


• People will tend to become more cruel, clannish, and shut-off when they perceive themselves to be in positions of scarcity.


• People's perceptions of how scarce resources are will be only weakly correlated to how scarce resources actually are.


• Entities with power, money, and influence will attempt to use their power, money, and influence to create ways of thought which place themselves as "similar" to the majority of people, and call other groups "different". They will use the fear of the "different", by managing perceptions of scarcity, to attempt to manipulate people into maintaining their own power, money, and influence.


• People who wish to challenge the power, money, and influence of empowered forces will have to use the same tactics of managing perceptions of scarcity and plenty, and manipulating considerations of similarity and difference among people. They will generally feel less comfortable doing so than the established powers will, because they will feel like they are manipulating people. They will be right: that will be what they are doing; but it will be the necessary thing to do to change power structures.


• Once those people get good at this manipulation, they will gain power, money, and influence, and will then start using it to maintain their own power, money, and influence, until someone else does the same thing to them.


• That's okay -- the world doesn't need to end up in some sort of utopia where everyone always acts in the best interest of everyone else, and, in fact, the world never will. But so long as things change, as long as things don't stagnate, it's okay.


• Paradoxically, although the use of the manipulation of perceptions of scarcity and perceptions of similarity and difference will be effective on groups, individuals will retain free will -- and, although we will be able to tell that, say, 80% of a population will act in a certain way, every single individual in that population will retain the ability to act as he or she chooses.

Those are my predictions. I feel fairly safe in making them.