In a previous post I wrote about a possible future that awaits us as the rise of China, automation and climate change continues on the pace we are currently seeing. I presented a very pessimistic view of the future from the standpoint of us in the West where China had risen to the top of the financial world, gaining the military and political clout along with it and relegating the West to second world status and widespread poverty, in the West, for all but a very small elite. I posited that the very small elite had already seen this future and were diligently working at concentrating money and power into their hands in order to insulate themselves from the worst of the transition.
This post is a more optimistic view of that possible future. As with the pessimistic view, climate change will inevitably impact our world but we as a species will be able to mitigate that impact so that our species and our civilization will survive. As well, as with the pessimistic view, automation will change the nature of work in the world, leaving billions without any form of meaningful work.
It is climate change and automation which is a cause for optimism. The reason is China will not be immune to their effects and in order to mitigate their effects a global effort will need to be undertaken to do so.
Make no mistake, without those two trends the Chinese would reach the pinnacle of the international community, carrying most of Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East with it. The world would be divided into a dominant Eastern Block lead by China and a smaller increasingly weaker Western Block, consisting of increasingly poorer people lead by increasingly autocratic governments working at the behest of rich and powerful elites.
However, with climate change and automation in play China will not have the luxury of trying this approach. China has the same interests in trying to mitigate the negative impacts of these two trends as the rest of the world and that gives them an interest in working with the rest of the world to do just that. So, although the processes used to achieve the objective of mitigating the negative impacts of the two trends will be not always be easy or selfless they will achieve the desired effect. Further since these two trends are not going to end any time soon the efforts to mitigate their negative impacts will be ongoing with no real end date. That is, the world will need to continue to cooperate on these two issues for decades and no country or block of countries will be able to accomplish what needs to be accomplished by going their own way.
As a result we can conclude that one optimistic view of the future will see China rising to the pinnacle of the international community. I believe that is essentially inevitable. They will use their new found power to create a new international system that better serves their interests but they will not be able to change it so much that it will harm the former great powers. China will need to ensure the cooperation of the former great powers in the continuing efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and automation so they will have an interest not to let them fall as far as they could fall.
Further, the pessimist in me sees the trend towards the concentration of wealth and power in the West and I do not believe that those who would take a much different approach have what it takes to reverse that trend before it becomes irreversible. However, we are starting to see the reaction to this trend within the Western world so there is cause for some optimism that those who would take that different approach will get their shit together before it is too late.
One other note. For all of human history it has always been a requirement that if you wanted to survive you had to work. Whether it was hunting and gathering, working in the fields, working in a factory or working in an office we have always had to do some kind of work to allow us to acquire the necessary resources to eat and put a roof over our head.
Automation could be an opportunity to change all of that. Automation could very well make work voluntary. We may no longer need to work in order to survive. We would let the machines to the work for us and we would reap the benefits. Yes there are a whole host of issues around the dangers of technology, with Hollywood providing us with many of the worst case scenarios. However, if we did it right we could launch the human species into a whole new era. Without needing to work to survive the human species would be free to use its intelligence and cognitive abilities to explore all sorts of things, within us, on the planet we live on and the universe about us. There is no telling where we could end up as a species with this freedom. Sure it could kill us all but it could also allow us to transcend the boundaries we currently find ourselve operating under.
The truly optimistic view of the future is that one. We gain the upper hand on climate change and its impacts, which nation leads the worlds becomes largely irrelevant and humans begin to reap the rewards of not having to work just to survive.
So, which of these two views of the future do I believe will come to pass? Right now I would say I am heavily leaning towards the pessimistic view. Hopefully, I will be proven wrong.
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