What Will Happen in the 2030s

The admirable futures and business writer Art Kleiner has a long post on his Substack outlining what he thinks we already know about the 2030s. He’s not making predictions, exactly. More just pointing out that we can see right now some deep and strong drivers of change that seem unlikely to reverse or deflect their direction in the next decade.

In suggesting this, he is drawing on the notion of the “predetermined element”, or “predetermineds”, that were part of the way in which the Shell scenarios analyst Pierre Wack analysed factors of change.

The way Wack described these was by analogy to the River Ganges, and indeed, there is an account of this in a chapter on Shell in Kleiner’s excellent book, The Age of Heretics. Kleiner more or less replicates this in his Substack post:

If there are heavy monsoon rains over the Himalayan headwaters, you can tell with certainty that there will be a flood five days later at Allahabad, which is 650 miles downstream. Five days after that, he said, the floods would reach Benares.

“Now the people down here in Benares don’t know that this flood is on its way,” he said, “but I do. Because I’ve seen it! This is not fortune telling. This is not crystal-ball gazing. This is merely describing future implications of something that has already happened.”

Predictive capacity

All the same, when you read this, you think it’s just a metaphor to help people get to grips with a difficult idea. Because although futurists spend their lives explaining that they don’t do predictions, predetermineds can seem to have quite a powerful predictive capacity.

Peter Drucker, the management theorist, had a similar concept, of “the future that has already happened”, whose effects were still working themselves out and were not yet fully visible. And the black elephant in the “futures menagerie” has a similar function. The elephant is coming towards us regardless of what we choose to do, or not to do.

Kleiner suggests that these predetermined elements map out the playing field:

When we recognize the true certainties, we can leap ahead to framing our choices and modulating our expectations. For example: We know it will take a long time to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, so we invest accordingly in renewable energy. We also know our efforts to manage artificial intelligence need to happen practically overnight, so we work to rapidly build the necessary skills.

First-order elements

Kleiner makes a distinction between first-order and second-orderpredetermined elements. The first order elements are those events that have already happened, like the flooding of the Ganges, whose consequences are working themselves out. These might be children being born (or not being born), or parts per million of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

The second-order elements are consequences of the first-order. They are less predictable than the first order elements, but they create pressures in the system that can be anticipated.

For reasons of length I’m just going to list out these predetermined elements, summarising Kleiner’s notes on each:

The climate crisis gets worse. Enough carbon has already accumulated that the global average temperature will cross 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by the early 2030s. Extreme weather events will be more intense and more frequent.
Water shortages increase. Enough groundwater is being permanently depleted, and enough reservoirs and snowpacks are being drawn down or shrinking, to make this a driving force.
The planet’s biological impoverishment continues. Humanity will continue to encroach on the carrying capacity of the planet. Species extinction will continue to run orders of magnitude above the natural background rate. By the 2030s, we are likely to be personally affected by food shortages or loss of habitat.
The human population balance tips. Enough of the world will have aged, enough birth rates will have fallen below replacement, and enough young people will have been born in sub-Saharan Africa that the species will be simultaneously old and young as never before. By the mid-2030s, almost all the net growth in the young-adult workforce will be African.
The energy system flips. In general, adoption of new technology is determined not by innovation itself but by factors related to demand. These factors all favor renewable energy. Various renewable energy technologies are moving forward rapidly enough to become the largest single source of fuel for the global electric power system.
Digital technologies keep maturing. This sea change in human activity began with the semiconductor 75 years ago, and its basic dynamic—broadening of computer use with decreased costs at a compounding rate—is predetermined to continue for at least another 10, probably longer. We don’t know which will be truly transformative, in negative or positive ways: Robotics? Prosthetics? Digital fabrication? Surveillance? The pace of change and the sophistication of the tools will increase.
Medicine gets personal. A cost curve steeper than Moore’s Law is at play: sequencing a human genome cost roughly $100m in 2001 and a few hundred dollars today. Enough personalized medicine capability exists that treatment tailored to an individual’s genetic profile will be increasingly standard in oncology and rare disease by 2031.
The fiscal vice. Enough sovereign debt has been issued, and enough of the cost of aging populations has landed on public budgets, that governments across the world will continue to face structural pressure on their finances. The debt itself is predetermined: the bonds are sold, the deficits are structural, the pension and health obligations are fixed by populations already born. What is notpredetermined is whether this becomes a crisis or merely a condition.
Human capability rises overall. This trend is barely recognised, but the global generation reaching adulthood by 2031 will be the most schooled in history. In general, the overall calibre of human skills is rising.

Of these, the only one that feels less substantive than the rest is the personalisation of medicine. The effective way to transform population health is by a combination of public health measures and aggregate population level data. I believe that personalisation is a predetermined event, but that its impact will be at the edges.[1]

Cross-impact analysis

This is followed, in effect, by a cross-impact analysis of what happens when these trends intersect. There’s too much to share, but there are some themes worth drawing out.

Ageing populations create labour market gaps, and digital technologies substitute for labour that is scarce, not common. This includes the question of who looks after the old. (We’re already seeing this in Japan, one of the edge cases of an ageing world.) Children become more special, and there is greater investment in them. An ageing world is also a world in which growth slows, so sooner or later there will be debt write-offs, through defult, inflation, or jubilee. (But it matters which of these it is.)

The largest cities in the world will be in the global south, especially in Africa—Lagos, Kinshasa, Dhaka. Whether these are livable depends on whether energy is cheap enough and plentiful enough to desalinate water. So this amounts to a bet on the future costs of solar energy. Elsewhere, some cities, perhaps most of them, will start to shrink.

There is no shared source of truth, which should create a premium on the verifiably human. The Fizz was working on a scenario last week in which verification was baked into infrastructure. More information makes the activities of the elite more visible, without making its members more accountable. But politics, and money, favour the old.

We have a globally shared incentive to work against catastrophe, but as the futurist Peter Senge has said, “We have no history of doing this successfully”. The cost curve of drones and autonomous weapons (and potentially, bioweapons) is heading downwards fast. Fewer, and older, people mean that the human cost of war becomes unacceptable.[2] As Kleiner writes, “People become targets, not soldiers.” In other words, the century long shift in which civilians are the main target of war continues.

A map of the terrain

The implications of this, as Kleiner writes, is that the first-order elements create a map of the coming landscape. They map the terrain of the future. The interplay that we see in the second-order elements are the places where we can act to influence outcomes for the future. Regular readers will know that although I have run scores of scenarios projects over the past 25 years (I’ve lost count) I also think that scenarios are over-rated as a futures tool: they have fewer valuable use cases than futurists tend to imagine.

The map that Kleiner creates here has similarities with the Futures Landscape model that was developed at The Futures Company when I was there. This seems to make it easier for people to decide how to act. As I say, perhaps too often, “We make our own futures, but not under conditions of our own choosing.”

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[1] Looking at this again later, the real driver of health is going to be cost management, given the ageing population and the fiscal vice. This looks like one of those elements that looks more important in the US insurance-driven health market. Because there’s also a risk that individualised health profiles increase health costs rather than reducing them.

[2] Russia seems to be an exception to this, or perhaps its assault on Ukraine is the last gasp of an old model.

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

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Previously Published on thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com with Creative Commons License

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