The Future

 It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.

Predicting hard facts about the coming years, decades, or centuries is generally presumptuous. 

We can project trends, but we know they will fail sooner or later. Misconceptions often lead us to the wrong conclusions as Pinker and Rosling, among others, have shown.

Trends

People are richer and healthier.

There are fewer wars and fewer victims of natural disasters.

Education is more widespread than ever before.

Information has never been more evenly distributed.

People have never been more connected.

Resources have never been more in demand by an energy- and mineral-hungry humanity. 

Religions and ideologies continue to adapt to the modern, changing world, attracting people in need of security. 

Universal values are spreading.

Cooperation and competition remain two of the most important ways of generating new ideas and innovations.

Other trends concern population growth and the climate change.

Projection

The health and economic condition is increasing for the whole world population.

Wars, as a means of solving domination issues, disappear. Instead we have instances of dispute resolutions at various regional and global levels.

The health and economic conditions of the entire world population improve.
Wars as a means of resolving issues of domination are disappearing. Instead, we have instances of dispute resolution at various regional and global levels.
Education is the universal means for young people to climb the (ever-growing) knowledge pyramid.
Access to information is a key issue. New technologies continue to emerge to facilitate our connection with people and the world.
Innovation is proving to be the only way to switch to the noble energy: electricity.
Countries are becoming more secular and religions are being reduced to the private sphere.

Failure

Of course, as this vision of the personal computer in 1954 reminds us, examples of evolution are hard to come by.

How a Home Computer was Imagined in 1954

Who could have forecast the downfall of Kodak paper photography?

The Third Evolution

The Third Evolution is the new evolution that is happening now: the DNA-based evolution was too slow and has been replaced by the human-based fast evolution. Humanity is not the center of this evolution, but it is the engine of it, just as DNA genes are the engine of the Second Evolution. Institutions are the new emerging appearance of how this new evolution is organized. The characteristics of this new evolution are exactly the same as those previously described in this blog: inheritance (things do not arise spontaneously), digital characteristics, diversity of the environment, unicity (human-driven evolution), blindness, and randomness.

Ref: 

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018)

Hans Rosling Factfulness (2018)