America's Spooks Think the Future Is a Cyberpunk Novel
America's intelligence community thinks we're headed for an era of super-enhanced human cyborgs and giant megacities set to a backdrop of ominous climate disasters. Yeah, the CIA's predicts that the future is basically a cyberpunk novel.
America's spy community has taken a hard stare at the year 2030 and says we're headed for an era of super-enhanced human cyborgs and giant megacities set to a backdrop of ominous climate disasters.The U.S. National Intelligence Council just released its Alternative Worlds: Global Trends 2030 report, and two of its projections are grabbing all the headlines–that China will overtake the West as the world's top economy, and that the United States will become "energy independent" thanks to our deep reserves of natural gas and shale oil.
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But those are just two predictions amongst many, and frankly, they obscure the fact that our nation's spies think 2030 is pretty much going to be Blade Runner.
The Future is Cyberpunk
Apparently CIA fancies itself a futurist; they think we're two decades away from routine human bio-enhancement."People may choose to enhance their physical selves as they do with cosmetic surgery today” the report says, noting that limb replacement surgery will likely become routine in 2030. And then they go cyberpunk enough to make Bruce Sterling proud:"Future retinal eye implants could enable night vision, and neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought. Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman’ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.”Also, no surprise here: "the chance of nonstate actors conducting a cyber attack—or using WMD—also is increasing."This is, I might remind you, the American intelligence community's vision for 18 years from now. By then, they say, we'll be living in massive cities, which will have attracted the bulk of the world's population. The report claims that “megacities [will] flourish and take the lead in confronting global challenges.” Good thing, too, because the world is going to get pretty ugly–we'll need a few good urban fortresses to brunt the force of an angry planet.
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Climate Change Will Ruin the World
Climate change will wreak havoc on poor nations, and lead to resource scarcity, conflict, and increased migration, the nation's spooks project. Not a whole lot new here, but still:"Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40 and 50 per cent respectively, owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources."It gets worse: "Dramatic and unforeseen changes are already occurring at a faster rate than expected … Most scientists are not confident of being able to predict such events. Rapid changes in precipitation patterns – such as monsoons in India and the rest of Asia – could sharply disrupt that region's ability to feed its population."The NIC is actually a little rosier on climate change than other similar reports–it says that climate change doesn't necessarily have to lead to resource scarcity if good policy is put in place, and rich nations help support poorer ones. And it outlines a slew of techno-fixes for the climate-ravaged world:"Key technologies likely to be at the forefront of maintaining [energy, food and water] resources in the next 15-20 years will include genetically modified crops, precision agriculture, water irrigation techniques, solar energy, advanced bio-based fuels, and enhanced oil and natural gas extraction via fracturing."
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GMOs, fracking, biofuels, and solar may just save our asses, the CIA says.
Fossil-Fueled Future
Even while predicting a future filled with climate catastrophe and brimming with techno-advances, the NIC thinks we'll still be gulping down the fossil fuels on the cheap. It thinks the glut of shale oil and gas will drive prices down, so much so that nations that rely on exporting the resources–like Russia–will wane in power.All of which means that the sort of disasters and economic disruptions they see coming from climate change will be doubly bad by the time they sit down to write Global Trends: 2050. Of course, any good cyberpunk scenario needs a dystopia smoldering in the backdrop.So let's recap. We've got a declining superpower in the U.S. We've got climate changes rendering vast swaths of the planet uninhabitable. We've got superhuman cyborgs flocking to the cities in the shadow of the grand ecological decline. We've got a batch of advanced technologies to enlist to ensure that those superhumans, or at least the wealthier ones, survive amidst the chaos. We've got a bleak outlook, a series of predictions that things are going to get even worse. We've got cyberpunk.But hey: if cyberpunk dystopia isn't your thing, there's always that the drier, more statistical literature that says that future Earth is "more or less" screwed.You can watch a discussion of the report today at the Atlantic Council's livestream.Connections:
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