r/RealisticFuturism

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I've been thinking about the current state of the world and why it feels so different from what previous generations told us the future would look like.

I'm not saying the world has never been divided, unstable, or dangerous. Obviously it has. What feels different to me is the scale, speed, and interconnectedness of everything.

So I started looking at the period from roughly 1870–1910, when America was going through industrialization, mass communication, railroads, huge corporations, immigration, urbanization, economic crises, labor unrest, political violence, and major changes in government.

Then I started comparing it to 2008–today.

Not because I think history repeats itself exactly. It doesn't. I'm more interested in whether the patterns and mechanisms repeat.

Here's the comparison I came up with:

Industrial TransitionDigital Transition1873: Panic of 1873. Railroad speculation and financial instability contribute to a major economic crisis.2008: Global Financial Crisis. Housing/financial speculation collapses and causes a worldwide recession.1877: Great Railroad Strike. A labor dispute spreads across the country and federal troops intervene.2011–12: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Economic inequality and distrust of institutions become mass political movements, amplified by new communication technology.1881: President Garfield is assassinated.2013–14: Snowden revelations, growing surveillance concerns, smartphones and social media becoming dominant.1886: Haymarket Affair. Labor conflict becomes associated with radicalism, political violence and fears about social order.2015–16: Trump, Brexit, populism, immigration politics, and social media becoming a major political battlefield.1890: Sherman Antitrust Act. Government starts realizing that industrial corporations have become powerful enough to require new rules.2017–19: Governments increasingly confront the power of major technology platforms and the question of how to regulate companies that have outgrown old frameworks.1892: Homestead Strike. Armed conflict between workers and private security.2020: COVID, economic shutdowns, mass protests, political conflict, misinformation and institutional distrust all collide.1893: Panic of 1893. Severe depression, banking failures and unemployment.2020–22: Pandemic recession, inflation, supply-chain disruption and economic instability.1894: Pullman Strike and Coxey's Army. Economic frustration becomes mass political action, with federal intervention.2021: January 6 and the aftermath. Political conflict turns directly toward questions about the legitimacy of government and elections.1896: McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan. A huge political realignment centered around economics, populism and competing visions of America.2024: Trump vs. Harris. Another intensely polarized election centered around economics, immigration, institutions, national identity and competing visions of America.1898: Spanish-American War. Foreign conflict, nationalism and mass media combine, and America becomes a much more significant global power.2022–26: Ukraine, China/U.S. rivalry, Middle East conflicts, cyberwarfare and AI competition increasingly interact with domestic politics.1899–1901: U.S. expands its global role. McKinley is assassinated; Theodore Roosevelt becomes president; U.S. Steel is created.2025–26: AI becomes a major economic, political and geopolitical technology. We don't know what comes next yet.

The individual events aren't equivalent. A labor strike isn't the same thing as a pandemic, and a telegraph isn't the same thing as social media.

What's interesting is the sequence:

New technology → economic transformation → enormous concentrations of power → inequality/disruption → political polarization → distrust → social conflict → major shocks → government struggles to adapt → new institutions and rules.

That's what makes me wonder if we're somewhere in the middle of a similar transition.

And I think 2008 is a better starting point than 2000 for this comparison.

The internet and globalization were already transforming society before then, but 2008 is where several trends started crashing into each other in a way that became impossible to ignore.

After 2008 we got:

The financial crisis

The rise of smartphones

Social media becoming the primary information environment

Increasing political polarization

Brexit

Trump

Increasing distrust of traditional institutions

COVID

Mass political unrest

Supply-chain disruption

Inflation

Ukraine

Increasing U.S.-China competition

AI going from a specialist technology to something ordinary people can use

And now we're adding AI on top of an already unfinished transition.

That's what scares me.

We've never had this exact combination before.

We have instant global communication, nuclear weapons, cyberwarfare, satellites, autonomous systems, global financial markets, biotechnology, AI-generated information, and billions of people carrying supercomputers in their pockets.

So I don't think we should blindly say:

"The 1890s happened and everything eventually worked out, so we're fine."

That's too simplistic.

The destructive potential today is vastly greater.

But our ability to respond is also vastly greater.

The more useful lesson from the 1890s is that societies can spend decades feeling like the old rules don't work anymore before eventually creating new institutions around the new technology.

The people living in 1893 didn't know they were living through "the Gilded Age."

They just knew the banks were failing, people were losing jobs, politicians were screaming at each other, labor conflicts were becoming violent, newspapers were blaming different groups, and nobody knew what was coming next.

Historians get to look backward and connect the dots.

We don't have that luxury.

We're the idiots currently standing in the middle of the construction site.

So I've started thinking about the present differently.

Instead of asking:

"What disaster happens next?"

I'd rather watch for escalation between systems.

For example:

Economic problems → political radicalization

Local conflict → national/global information crisis

Political disagreement → political violence

Foreign conflict → domestic polarization

New technology → institutions unable to regulate it

Emergency measures → permanent government powers

Information uncertainty → competing realities

And especially:

multiple problems happening at the same time and reinforcing each other.

That last one seems like the biggest warning sign.

One recession isn't necessarily catastrophic.

One political controversy isn't necessarily catastrophic.

One technological disruption isn't necessarily catastrophic.

But if you get:

economic instability + political legitimacy crisis + geopolitical conflict + information chaos + technological disruption

all at once, that's when the historical analogy becomes much more concerning.

And that's also where the analogy eventually stops being useful, because modern technology gives us entirely new possibilities.

So I'm not trying to predict that "1898 happened, therefore X will happen in 2028."

I'm trying to use history as a crude forecasting framework.

And if the comparison is even remotely useful, there are a few things I'd expect to watch over the next several years.

2026–2028: AI becomes political infrastructure

The argument probably shifts from:

"Is AI useful?"

to:

"Who controls it, who benefits from it, who loses jobs to it, who pays for the infrastructure, and what happens when it influences politics and information?"

AI regulation, data centers, energy use, copyright, surveillance, national security and employment could increasingly become mainstream political issues.

2027–2030: The economic consequences become clearer

The biggest thing I'd watch isn't simply whether AI makes companies more profitable.

I'd watch who gets the productivity gains.

If AI substantially increases productivity but the benefits concentrate among a relatively small number of companies and people, expect enormous political pressure over:

automation

wages

unemployment

taxation

redistribution

labor protections

corporate power

If AI instead creates enough new industries and jobs to broadly raise living standards, the political reaction could look completely different.

The distribution of the gains may matter more than the technology itself.

2028–2032: Political realignment becomes possible

This is another thing I'd watch closely.

AI could create strange political alliances that don't fit neatly into today's Democratic/Republican structure.

People could find themselves agreeing across party lines about:

AI regulation

automation

privacy

surveillance

monopolies

data centers

energy

employment

The existing political coalitions aren't guaranteed to survive a major technological transformation.

That's exactly what happened during previous periods of economic and technological change.

Early-to-mid 2030s: Institutional restructuring

If the historical pattern holds, this is where I'd expect society to increasingly develop rules for the new system.

That could mean:

new AI regulations

new labor laws

new approaches to education

new social programs

new antitrust rules

new media standards

new international agreements

new approaches to privacy and surveillance

new political coalitions

Basically, society figuring out how to operate the machine it accidentally built.

But there's another possibility.

The transition could be interrupted by a much larger external shock, just as previous transitions were affected by wars, depressions, pandemics and political crises.

That's why I don't think we should try to predict one specific event.

I'd rather watch the conditions that make major events more likely.

The five things I'd keep an eye on are:

IndicatorLower concernHigher concernEconomyGrowth broadly sharedSevere unemployment + wealth concentrationPoliticsFierce disagreementOpponents viewed as existential enemiesInformationCompeting opinionsPeople can't agree on basic factsTechnologyInstitutions adaptingTechnology advancing faster than institutionsGeopoliticsCompetitionMajor powers directly confronting each other

The really dangerous situation isn't necessarily one of these becoming severe.

It's several of them becoming severe at the same time.

That's the lesson I'd take from the late 1800s.

The Gilded Age wasn't scary because America experienced one terrible event.

It was scary because economic, technological, political and social stresses repeatedly reinforced one another.

And that's what I'd watch today.

Not whether the next event looks exactly like something from 1894.

Instead:

Does it reinforce an existing problem?

Does it spread faster than institutions can respond?

Does it cross from one system into another?

Does it create a new political movement?

Does it cause people to lose trust in institutions?

Does another crisis hit before the first one has been resolved?

That's the closest thing I can think of to a historical early-warning system.

Maybe we're not watching the end of the world.

Maybe we're watching the old version of the world become obsolete while the next version is being built.

And if that's what's happening, we're probably going to spend a while feeling exactly like the people living through 1893, 1898 or 1901:

confused, divided, technologically overwhelmed, and completely unable to see what the next chapter looks like.

The difference is that someday, people will look back at 2026 and probably see a pattern that seems obvious in hindsight.

We just happen to be the idiots currently standing in the middle of the construction site.

Will humans look different in 2226? Will nutrition and environmental factors alter us physically? Will genetic engineering change us? Fashion? Or will the average human look similar to us today?

I'm not asking whether our future will literally be cyberpunk. My question is about what the future will look like visually.

Long before the 2000s, the way people imagined what the future would look like was already strongly associated with neon, glowing technology, futuristic buildings, cars with unconventional designs, and, above all, the aesthetic we now call cyberpunk. These ideas were created in the past as a representation of how people imagined the future.

What's interesting is that, even decades later, we continue to use exactly this imagery to represent what is "futuristic." This is already happening today: buildings, stores, cars, technological environments, and various other designs use neon, colorful lighting, and visual elements associated with cyberpunk precisely because these things seem futuristic to us.

So I started thinking about a somewhat strange possibility: could our real future end up having some of this appearance precisely because this is the imagery we have of the future?

Not necessarily because the future would naturally have neon and a cyberpunk aesthetic, but because designers, architects, companies, and other people may continue using these elements precisely because they associate them with the future. In that sense, an aesthetic that originated in the past as a prediction of the future could end up becoming part of the real future.

At the same time, there is another possibility: perhaps, as time goes by, a completely different aesthetic will emerge, one that we can't even imagine today. Maybe we'll be able to move beyond this "futuristic" look that is, ironically, already a rather old idea of what the future should look like.

So my question is: will the future inevitably incorporate some of the aesthetic we currently associate with the future, such as neon and cyberpunk, or is there a good chance that it will end up looking completely different from what we imagine today?

I keep wondering about something that feels increasingly uncomfortable:

Do we actually need to advance this fast?

Technology has always moved forward, and I’m not arguing that we should stop innovating. AI has genuine applications in science, medicine, accessibility, research, engineering, and countless other areas.

But somewhere along the way, innovation itself seems to have become the goal.

We are integrating AI into almost everything simply because we can. Writing emails. Generating mediocre images. Summarizing things that take 30 seconds to read. Replacing simple human decisions with models. Automating tasks that perhaps never needed automation in the first place.

And behind every one of those seemingly insignificant interactions are physical resources: electricity, computing infrastructure, water for cooling, hardware, data centres, and enormous amounts of human and natural resources.

So I wonder:

Is it ethically defensible to consume all of that for things that are, fundamentally, unnecessary?

Take software development.

Why does every developer need to become dramatically more productive every few years? Why must a task that once took a week now have to take a day, and then an hour, simply because technology allows it?

What happens to the people whose jobs disappear in the process?

Perhaps we could simply accept a more natural pace of development. Build good software. Improve efficiency where it genuinely matters. Let humans remain part of the process instead of treating every minute saved as another opportunity to increase output.

And if someone wants to generate AI slop, automate something trivial, or run an unnecessarily expensive model for entertainment, why does that computation necessarily need to happen in a gigantic data centre?

Why can't we first make our technology radically more efficient, so that unnecessary computation happens locally on our own machines rather than consuming infrastructure at planetary scale?

Maybe AI is inevitable. Maybe technological progress is inevitable.

But is acceleration inevitable?

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether the period between roughly 2000–2014 had something we have gradually lost: a sense that technology was supposed to serve life, rather than life constantly reorganizing itself around technology.

Maybe progress isn't always about moving forward faster.

Maybe sometimes progress means knowing when faster isn't actually better.

What do you think?

Are we genuinely progressing or have we simply become addicted to acceleration?

# Every generation who ever lived thought that they were the most advanced, modern ones. (There were exceptions, of course. Sometimes people looked up to their ancestors because they were superior)

I'm not saying that we don't have room for growth.

But I think we've reached the limit where we can go a little bit further (special thanks to AI) but not totally beyond. We've come a long way in terms of science, civilization in general, hygiene and human rights, etc.

It seems we've just reached the summit and are now going downhill to.... where?

What do you think?

Edit. going downhill not because we're most advanced but only because this is as far as humanity can go on their own.

Credible figures in AI like Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis take seriously the possibility of human-level or superhuman AI arriving within years or decades rather than centuries. If AI can substantially automate AI research itself, the interval between AGI and much more capable systems might be surprisingly short. Rapid scaling, automated AI research, and algorithmic breakthroughs could compress the window for AGI –> superintelligence into the late 2020s or 2030s.

If we can bias the odds of artificial superintelligence achieving true supermorality, a utopia of radical abundance may then be a highly likely outcome – or at least a more likely outcome than without supermoral ASI. A supermoral ASI might regard engineered scarcity, extractive monopolies and preventable deprivation as moral failures. It could drive the marginal cost of many essential goods and services towards zero, while managing the forms of scarcity that cannot simply be engineered away.

By “supermorality”, I mean moral understanding and judgement superior to humanity’s best, combined with the practical capacity and stable motivation to act on that understanding.

Supermoral ASI could automate the entire supply chain using advanced robotics, cheap clean energy (such as fusion or collecting the Sun’s energy with a Dyson swarm), and molecular manufacturing, driving the marginal cost of producing goods down to near zero. A supermoral ASI would also have to solve the distribution problem, ensuring that production abundance reached everyone.

Supermorality implies that the ASI would deeply understand and act upon what is genuinely valuable, including the importance of increasing wellbeing and reducing suffering across sentient life.

On top of that, a supermoral ASI would likely place enormous weight on reducing involuntary suffering and expanding the conditions for flourishing. Beyond this, it could prioritise curing disease, reversing ageing and stabilising the climate, while building far greater civilisational resilience against asteroid impacts, engineered pandemics, internal conflict, rogue technologies and other hazards. This could bring civilisation closer to existential security while creating an abundance of health, longevity and general wellbeing.

An ASI may also be capable of exploring the landscape of possible value far more deeply than we can. Rather than producing a shallow utopia full of quivering bliss-addicts slouching on lotus hoverboards, it could help create a deep utopia: a world that expands the range of meaningful lives, worthwhile projects, relationships, discoveries and forms of flourishing beyond anything we can currently imagine.

If sufficiently advanced superintelligence eventually becomes impossible to control reliably, we should strive for a superintelligence that is more moral than us – which would make the kind of utopia we would want to inhabit far more likely.

What do you think needs to be true for this vision to unfold?

Should control be treated as the final solution, or as a bridge towards systems whose motivations are worthy of the power they may eventually possess?

Watching all the tech YouTubers and news of AI, how likely is it in 50 years by the time the millennial generation is dwindling that all consumer PC hardware is obsolete?

Everything is on the cloud servers and we pay access to login? It's funded by company/government monthly stipends.

I always assumed becoming an interplanetary species was eventually necessary because Earth would run out of resources.
But the more I think about it, the less that seems like the main reason.
Even if fossil fuels become scarce, we don’t necessarily run out of energy. Solar, nuclear, wind and other sources don’t depend on continuously digging up fossil fuels.
A lot of metals can also be recycled instead of being permanently consumed.
And compared with Mars, Earth is ridiculously habitable.
Even a badly damaged Earth would still have an atmosphere, oceans, comfortable gravity, radiation protection and natural resources that Mars doesn’t give us for free.
So colonizing Mars seems less like:
“Earth is almost empty, we need somewhere else to live.”
And more like:
“We should create a backup for civilization.”
If humanity had completely self-sustaining populations on multiple planets, one disaster on Earth wouldn’t necessarily mean extinction of the whole species.
To me, that’s a much stronger reason for becoming interplanetary.

AI could make the economy far more productive while making human labour less necessary. If the gains go mainly to those who own the technology, what happens to workers' bargaining power and their share of that wealth?

The decline of the horse population offers a striking historical parallel.

[removed]

Elon Musk

🚨 Time remaining, maximum 3 years.

During this period, it will still be possible to earn money through "human labor."

But after that,

Most jobs that have been compensated with a salary up to now will be automated. The work that generates money will come to an end.

The "sense of paying money to humans" will disappear.

This system that has existed for 200 years 👇

"If you lend us your time for 40 years, we will pay you a salary"
This will end... Work will end

In other words, the greatest "transfer of money" in history will occur.

What is the situation now?

👉 Some people have realized it and taken action
👉 Many people are "waiting until it is explicitly stated in the news"

This "time difference in realization" is everything.

So, what needs to be done during these 3 years?

Very simple 👇

"Transform your own time into an asset that machines cannot take away from you"

Specifically, these 👇

\* Scarce digital assets like Bitcoin
\* Real assets like land or energy
\* Computers or infrastructure
\* Connections with other people (network)
\* The ability to produce food or things necessary for living

So, what really is a salary???

👉 "Just for having lent your own time"

If the value of that time,
Becomes cheaper and superior thanks to machines...

👉 That value will suddenly collapse

In the end, the only thing that will remain is this 👇
"What you own (assets)"

In these 3 years

👉 Those who can transition from
👉 "Wage worker" to
👉 "Asset owner"

In 2035-2036
Will be the "ones who saw the future."

After that

👉 Salaries will not increase
👉 Over time, they will become irrelevant

The only thing left will be "who owns what" 👇

The door of opportunity is open right now.
But it is closing faster than everyone thinks.

AI is gong to reduce humans, at least their thinking and communication abilities. Future belongs to the stupid and averaged.

This is the final step in the rise of the machines. Machines first took our physical power, then our craftmanship. Now AI is going to reduce our cognition, as any organ you do not use for at least 6 months gets atrophied.

Everything is taken form us, or we have chosen to give everything away. Pornography took our sex drive, sport events on TV took our playfulness together with video games. Dating took away our desires for contact, social networks are instead of friendship.

It is easy to see, but difficult to explain.

A spectacular fall of the Prometheus, I would say.

So, in order to survive we have to reject the civilization, but we cannot live without the cage where we are imprisoned.

But there is hope. Not for us but for few un-contacted peoples who still live like in stone age. They shall wait out our shameful civilization, our dirty progress.