What stance are you entrenched in today that might be a social issue in the future?
What stance are you entrenched in today that might be a social issue in the future?
In the past, we've had issues with women suffrage, slavery, and sanitation, among many other things.
Today we have gun control, AI, intended/unintended false information, vaccines, etc. as consistently hot topics.
In a few decades' time, what views do you have now that may spark major social debate in the future? What conservative and/or progressive stances do you take today that might be too far on either extreme in the far future?
The right to privacy. Just because I don't want someone watching me 24/7 doesn't mean I'm up to no good
Have you started making trouble in your neighborhood?
Well I got into one little fight, and my mom got scared
I'm not a vegan or vegetarian, but I think anything related to animal rights and eating meat will probably be controversial in the future. We can lab grow meat, but you still choose to kill an actual animal for food? Canceled in 2050. Rightfully so I'd even say.
I think most of us meat eaters are in that boat honestly, I like eating it but I'd be much happier if I knew it was cruelty free or outright lab grown. The holdouts are just going to be weirdos and/or rich people.
Although it would need MS5+ marbling for an awesome experience.
I agree, and I wonder when stuff like this will begin to happen.
Also, I think that once the average person finds out just how smart aquatic life is, we will look back at stuff like sea world with more disgust than we already do.
I think it will be within a generation or two.
I know, grandpa eats real meat, that's not nice and i don't want you to do it, but he grew up in another time, so we have to make allowances.
Yeah I'm not a vegetarian, but if lab grown meat were widely available at a reasonable price I'd think a little poorly of people that went out of their way to eat the remains of a sentient being instead.
I've already swapped a lot of my meat consumption to meat alternatives like beyond meat and impossible and so on
It's really hard to give up meat completely for me so I am trying to at least cut back by eating meat only every other day. Hopefully we can just move to lab grown meat that's not detrimental to the environment so that I can enjoy meat without guilt again.
A person's right to assisted suicide.
A few countries have this already, and I think 1 or 2 states may have it decriminalized. But I wish it were less of a taboo subject.
It's ok and even seen as being responsible when we make these decisions for our pets, yet if you want to make the same decision for yourself, you must not be thinking straight.
I have not had and do not have thoughts of suicide, but I have been caregiver to several family members and been witness to the end of life stage.
We should be able to decide for ourselves at a certain point that it's time to go.
We have it in Canada. Conservatives hate it and love to point to a small percentage of abuse of the option however it has really helped alleviate stresses for families and people suffering from terminal illness.
The ever encroaching "tough on crime" stance. Politicians push to make more and more things criminal and with worsening penalties. Many punishments seem disproportionately cruel or long for the crime. It's political suicide to say that we should treat our felons better or to reduce sentencing right now.
Yeah, we can't even agree to stop torturing inmates with solitary confinement or 110°F temperatures, and whenever I bring this up I always get pushback about how prison isn't supposed to be fun.
Well, yeah; it's also not supposed to be torture.
I fervently believe that the best if not only way to reliably reduce crime (including that committed by abusive cops) is restorative justice, but the vast majority of people still consider the necessity of penal justice (and in some places like the US even penal SLAVERY) to be so absolute that it might as well be a law of nature rather than the system that best serves the rich and powerful.
You habe to have both. People mold their behavior around incentive structures. If you give them the incentive to commit crime, they will commit crime. If you give them the incentive to do better, they will do better.
Then again you also shouldn't have bullshit laws that punish people for things that hurt no one but themselves, like the war on drugs. If they do something to hurt someone while doing drugs, that's what we have all the other laws for.
You really don't have to have both, though.
Incarceration and (in especially barbaric jurisdictions) penal slavery, torture, and state-sanctioned murder are largely ineffective disincentives against doing bad or otherwise undesirable behaviour that do nothing to incentivise good or otherwise desirable behaviour.
In fact, they often directly or indirectly CAUSE more of the former while making the latter much more difficult if not impossible.
Humans aren't the only species that have a right to the planet's resources.
Disability rights, equal access to nutrition (not just edible items but actually nutritious food), equal access to electricity especially for cooling.
I suspect the resource wars will ramp up with climate change, driving a lot of international conflict of all types.
Circumcision is immoral, religion can be a serious social harm, the use of AI in art should be prohibited or at least frowned upon
universal basic income (ubi).
it's clearly a need and like other clear needs in this country (eg health insurance) it'll continue to get ignored until it sparks some sort of revolution or our country's owners figure out to perpetually put it off like health insurance
Religion gas to go. The way we rarm animals is barbaric. People should be able to pull the plug if they don't want to live anymore.
Once lab grown meat is common, farms will seem even more cruel to people of the future.
I know religion seems like an obvious scapegoat for a lot of problems, but gassing them seems a bit extreme 😜🤣
Or maybe they wanted to be able to huff religion gas at home rather than at the restaurant/church?
First it's religion gas to go, then religion gas drive-ins and the next thing you know, people will be reheating religion gas in their own microwave, almost completely cutting profiteering billionaires out of the process!
This is an old one for many countries...but I fear a housing crisis in Germany.
Right now it's not as prevalent as in the us for example but there are no steps taken to prevent it becoming a major social issue.
- Construction industry suffers from high prices and a lack of workforce
- The only housing that is being worked on are luxury properties
- Infrastructure development in rural areas where housing is still affordable is not progressing
- Regulations and hurdles for new buildings are more difficult and complex than anywhere else
- Real estate ownership is often only possible through inheritance/generational wealth, as income is extremely highly taxed
Looks familiar. We already have the same issue in The Netherlands (Hi neighbour).
1st time buyers can't get a house as they are to expensive, current owners can't move on as they 1st need to sell before they can buy something (and hope that the selling prize covers the mortgage costs), social letting (entry level) has an issue with availability of houses and most others for the letting market are in the unregulated market and those houses are being sold off as the letting out of houses in that market is being regulated so much that it's not economical anymore.
On top of that, it's to expensive to build new houses and the country is already needs 1m houses in the next few years. Due to this the right wing is hammering on stopping refugees entering the country when they are about 5% of the immigration issue. (expats are the other 95%)
Obesity is unhealthy
My hope is politicians and, overall, rich people and corporations getting away with everything. It's crazy what money ans influence can do to cover up/minimize the damages that people and corps should receive for doing the shit they do just for profit and personal interests.
Here's an issue that people won't talk about that they need to: the right to commit crimes. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's immoral, and the growing belief on multiple fronts that a criminal justice system should be "perfect" is what's driving a lot of the erosion of privacy rights, among other things.
I love fishing recreationally but I could totally understand if it became totally taboo in the future.
Honestly, not that far into the future I think more and more people will be consuming various forms of media acknowledging in very scientific and real terms the end of the human race.
All the attempts at curbing global climate change will finally be acknowledged as being a pipe dream and even the ultra wealthy will come to see that they won't survive in their bunkers and instead will die like the rest of us.
I also hold a very dark view that the end of human existence is not the end of human suffering, but that's a tale for another day.
Climate change is real and really fucking shit up (am an Earth Scientist), but I'd be more worried about a global nuclear incident.
Climate change may do us in, but in all likelihood it will just increase the stresses on food and water supplies. Humans are extremely adaptive and will likely persist unless there is a cataclysmic event that kills nearly all food for decades or more. Scarcity of resources will dictate just how populous we will be 20, 10, 1, 0.1, 0.001 billion?
We've survived the Pleistocene when the earth was about 6°C cooler. We expanded greatly just after and have continued extremely well through the Holocene, making it our own (now Anthropocene). We've inextricably changed the environment for the worse, but it alone will probably not be the action that wipes us out.
This is very good to keep in mind. It doesn't completely refute my very negative viewpoint, but puts some realistic caveats on it and points out that it is probably unlikely. Thanks.
Personally I'm the opposite, I feel like even if we can't stop CO2 emissions fast enough, there is always geoengineering to counteract it, and human brain uploading will probably be a thing by the start of next century? At which point humanity can basically live until the heat death of the universe, because of how durable electronics can be compared to squishy human flesh.
I think in the near term there will be a lot more discourse about fatphobia/body types as a protected class.
In the longer term, I think history will look back at current factory farming as absolutely barbaric.
Bit late to this, but I have a couple of big ones:
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Once brain uploading becomes a thing, the code/data of an uploaded person should be sacrosanct. You can't look at it, you can't fuck with it, unless they give you consent to do so.
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Once it becomes a possibility, every human should either move off-world or revert back to a hunter-gatherer existence. Humans in general have been a disaster for the biosphere, but especially once we started settling down and farming, and even more so once industrialisation became a thing. Earth needs time to heal from the damage we have done to it, and that means most people + all our industry and technology fucking off into space. Namely into space colonies, big rotating cans of steel the size of large islands, filled with dirt, air, water and artificial biospheres.
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If someone injures you through a false statement of fact you can sue them for libel.
It is hard to do more than that without encroaching on free speech: people are entitled to their opinions. That said , free speech is not absolute and has linits.
Seems like conspiracy statutes tend to cover lying pretty well, and lying under oath is perjury. What other ways could lying be covered?
Stance: Progressive global taxation of all wealth
Social issue in the future: If the planet's ecosystems and the capitalist trends permit it, the vast majority of humans will demand global taxation of all wealth. Some extractive and regressive pockets will fight to the death for that not to happen.
The right to work from home. Many people have jobs they could do from home if their employers would let them, and I think people will be granted the right to choose in at least some countries/sectors.
On a more personal level, I think (or hope) access to education and work for people with disabilities, is something that will improve a lot in my country. There are currently a lot of barriers and counterproductive laws, that I think will be viewed as inhumane in the future.
Almost all our social systems are built on the young providing for the old under the assumtion of generations growing. The population collapse we're currently starting will be the biggest issue in the future. (alongside the loneliness epidemic, but that's a different issue entirel)
We're in for a like a 45% reduction in generation size each generation. And this trend is only increasing rapidly. All the causes of this are deeply entrenched economically and socially, so we won't be able to turn them around on a dime.
Unless we find some social, economic or technological solutions, we are all majorly screwed. Eveyone who won't die within the next 30 years or so will be majorly affected by it.
And no, immigration can't fix it long term, because all the rest of the world is experiencing the same thing. They are just at different stages. India, China, the Americas, Europe are below replacement rate and dropping. All the other regions are are slightly above replacement rates and dropping, except Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan African women are having one less child every 10 years, so they will be below replacement rates within a generation. More and more people having internet access will only rapidly increase these trends.
So in 20-30 years, it'll be a zero sum game who can most effectively steal each other's populations.
The only groups that are still growing normally are highly conservative religious groups. Israel is one of the only developed countries that still have normal fertility rates, and they are slowly being taken over by the ultra orthodox.
Maybe life extension or AI can save us, while generally keeping the social order in tact. But all the other solutions don't look very appealing. You could have A Handmaiden's Tale, or government/corpo created babies with artificial wombs, like Bladerunner or Brave New World...
You can't run a society on old people and for those saying it's good because climate change, you won't be able to fix climate change if everyone is in total chaos and only concerend with immediate survival. It'll be like "everything is fucked and YOU want US to stop burning coal, yeah nah".
Well maybe it won't be that bad, but it'll certainly be a huge social issue.
I'm going to be plenty sarcastic and start by flipping the "eat less avocado toast" argument.
Most of the problems are with the boomers, and if they actually wanted a better future then they should have cared more about it. Almost all of the American problems are from boomers being too selfish.
What's that one quote? "A good society is one where people plant trees that they will never know their shade?"
Boomers took the ability to live on minimum wage, after they benefited from it. Boomers took the ability to get promoted after healthcare kept them alive. Boomers are hoarding more wealth than ever and everyone is worse from it.
If the lower classes had the ability to spend any meaningful amount of money then we could easily support people after retirement. But now we have some of the most stagnant economies, and it will only get worse before it gets better.
The earth could easily support more if people actually cared by doing things like stopping coal power plants. But now instead of creating solutions we have people like you who want to force pregnancy on people for your own selfish WANTS.
I mean, it's not just boomers, because it's a world wide problem. But in general inequality is more or less the biggest problem. After every financial crisis birth rates drop and stay down.
All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971 when we introduced the FIAT money system. Basically ever since then the entire system is set up to steal from anyone who can't benefit from debt and give that money to those who can. Any savings and income is constantly eroded away steadily making the bottom ~80% poorer. Then we also started artifically lowering interest rates, which made the stock market and real estate markets go nuts, making everyone who already had assets rich and those who didn't even poorer.
Boomers didn't really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means, they just passively benefited from it, because they already had assets. It's more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system in 1971. The entire financial and monetary system were reengineered to benefit the rich.
Mark Blyth frames it as a revolt of capital in his book Angrynomics. Basically before that workers benefited hugely from the system, because wages were constantly rising in line with productivity growth and cumulative inflation was so low that you would actually save. There were no crazy real estate bubbles created by the central bank like we see today. That stopped after 1971.
I wouldn't say Boomers did this, because they were way too uneducated to even notice what happened, because they got all their news from the same people that stole their children's future. You can blame them for being to stupid to stop it, yes.
There's some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues, but inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest. It's pretty much clear as day in the data if anyone cares to even look. It's not some big mystery, it's just going completely ignored, because it would be a huge problem for the people in power.
Oh yeah, and the reason why this problem is world wide is because we exported that same system all over the world to pretty mich every country on earth. Ghadaffi wanted to break that system with an African stable gold backed currency and that's why Libya was destroyed. It would completely invalidate our imaginary money like the Dollar or the Euro and the powerful couldn't steal from the rest of us every single day.
I'm thinking all current issues will boil down to 1 major issue, to many humans on to little space. The human race is still growing in numbers while the livable space on earth is diminishing fast (even simply ignoring the dwindling clean fresh water supply and options to grow food). Either we need to stop the growth or get off this rock.
As loads of humans still think that nature doesn't include them and they are not part of the diminishing biodiversity, it doesn't look good for the foreseeable future. Maybe in a few centuries when we're either down to 1-2 billion (or less) or have spread out into the universe.
I think owning animals as pets will be seen as barbaric and similar to 19th century slavery is seen to us today. We take a conscious being and force it to be our plaything against its will.
I don't really care very much but I'm guessing where society is heading it will become an issue.
Of course privacy will be a big one. Very soon interrogation rooms will have advanced mind reading devices powered by AI. If a judge signs a warrant for your phone data, why can't they sign one for your mental data?
We already have the mechanisms in place and the technology while at its fledgling stages shows that it is certainly possible. Right now they need to scan your brain for a while and feed lots of data to an AI model and its limited to specific applications. But conceivably we are not that far away from total mind-reading like we see in the second half of 1984.
Maybe I'm too prone to conspiracy beliefs but I think federal government likely already has this technology.
I don't necessarily think your first point will happen, at least not anytime soon, but I do agree with it.
It's so weird to me that we as humans have the ego to want to control another living thing. Control what they can and cannot do, make them live in a small place, and generally just strip them from their freedom they should have as a living thing, and still feel like we're giving them a good life.
Also there are way too many shitty owners. I for real think there should be some sort of license/course people need to take before owning a pet. So many incidents that leave the pets or other humans hurt.
I don't care because the guilt I have is less than the pleasure I get from my dog's company. I love having dogs. I treat them well - feed them meat every day and they sleep on the bed with me. We go to parks, walks multiple times a day, etc.
So they are having good lives in that sense, but at the end of the day it's a subservient role where they have zero decision or autonomy. Sure, I let them sleep where they want but it's ultimately a meaningless decision. They can't consent because they are not able to make conscious decisions like we can. They are eternal children.
So maybe I'm not just enlightened enough and we will be more enlightened in the future. Having said that, our society is exploitative in nature. Most people sell their labor on threat of homelessness and starvation. Just sort of an unfortunate reality of scarcity.