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 that they may fail sooner or later. Misconceptions often lead us to wrong conclusions as Pinker and Rosling, among others, have shown.

Trends

People become wealthier and healthier.

There are fewer wars and fewer victims of natural disasters.

Education has never been more widespread.

Information has never been more evenly distributed.

The people have never been more connected than they are today.

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 and attract people in need of security. 

Universal values are spreading more and more.

Collaboration and competition are still two of the most important ways to generate new ideas and innovations.

Other trends concern the 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.

Education is the universal means for young people to climb the (ever-increasing) knowledge pyramid.

Access to information is a key issue. New technologies continue to emerge to facilitate our connection to people and the world.

Innovation proves to be the only way to switch to the noble energy: electricity.

Countries are becoming more and more secular and religions are being reduced to the private world.

Failure

Of course, instances of the evolution are difficult to see emerging as this imagination of the personal computer in 1954 reminds us.

How a Home Computer Was Imagined in 1954

Who could have forecast the fall 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The Third Evolution is the new evolution that is happening now: the DNA-based evolution was too slow and has been replaced by the human-based fast evolution.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 features 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)