The Millennium Project, a think tank belonging to the World Federation of United Nations Associations, in its State of the Future 19.1 report (2017), proposed three Global Scenarios/Future Strategies, all looking back from the year 2050. Each of the three projected a total increase in the worldwide workforce, broken down by Employed, Self-Employed, Informal Economy, and Unemployed. The conditions leading to the statistics in each scenario were anticipated and explained, the technology path to each was surveyed, and the dangers of hypothetical missteps were discussed.
First Scenario - “Mixed Bag”
In this scenario, the prediction of massive worldwide unemployment did not come to pass, but its contemplation led to useful mitigations.
From a starting point of around 2020, the worldwide workforce of just under three billion had expanded, along with the global population, to more than twice that. The breakdown of that workforce was as follows:
Employed: 2 billion
Self-Employed: 2 billion
Informal Economy: 1 billion
Unemployed: 1 billion
While AI removed hundreds of millions of jobs from the global economy, several new technologies filled in the gaps, most notably synthetic biology – the 3D printing of human organs and bones, sparking new industries. Self-employment increased dramatically with government support for education and retraining, particularly in STEM (given the increasing barriers to college education). Government subsidies for citizens made it possible for many to subsist with lower incomes, when they had to change careers or take new, less lucrative employment due to AI encroachment.
Autonomous transportation, powered by hydrogen rather than fossil fuels, eased some of the burden on the economy, and synergies between cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and nanotechnology brought about the anticipated advent of AGI (artificial general intelligence) in the 2030s. While this hastened the annexation of more jobs by AI, it also served to diminish authoritarianism in the world as autocrats who fought the introduction of these technologies (and their economic benefits) in their countries and territories found themselves diminishing in power.
Some of the wealth accruing from synergetic technologies was invested in correcting environmental damage, which relieved more economic burden in many area. Public programs for coastline plantings and other repair operations created many thousands of jobs for young people in many nations.
The advent of quantum computing made it possible to regulate and monitor the evolution, deployment, and impact of AGI and other technologies, leading to a reduction in fraud, cybertreachery, and election tampering. This self-policing also facilitated improved prediction of the speed and vectoring of technology growth and future deployment.
Acknowledgment of long-term structural unemployment in the 2020s led the labor unions of the times to build and deploy massive training databases used to anticipate and preemptively react to shifts in job distribution in advance, bolstering the security of many workers. This led to the innovation (among many others) of many truck drivers of the day, facing obsolescence, to individually and collectively invest in their own replacements, purchasing and managing self-driving rigs.
Overall, the “Mixed Bag” scenario could be summed up as “could be better, could be worse.”
Second Scenario - “Future Despair”
This scenario is decidedly worse. In this projection, “political leaders were so mired in short term political conflicts and me-first, selfish economic thinking that they did not anticipate how fast artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D/4D printing, synthetic biology and other technologies would make business after business obsolete dramatically in the late 2020s and early 2030s. Too many economists and lawyers who knew little of the coming technology-induced unemployment crowded out those with knowledge of what was coming.
“Corporate lobbyists protected short-term profit decisions. Most of the political/economic systems around the world did not reward long-term strategic planning but rewarded short-term profits and immediate political favors. Hence there were no long-term strategies in place to reduce the devastating impacts of the dramatic growth in unemployment around the world, especially in high- and middle-income countries.
The breakdown of the global workforce in this scenario was as follows:
Employed: 1 billion
Self-Employed: 1 billion
Informal Economy: 2 billion
Unemployed: 2 billion
“The concentration of wealth continued during the first half of the 21st century as did the widening income gaps and employment-less economic growth. The return on investment in capital and technology continued to be far more than on labor, and the number of persons per services and products has dramatically fallen. Even though these problems were clear to all leaders as early as the 2010s, the political gridlock taking many forms (progressive vs. conservative, fundamentalist vs. liberal, scientists vs. populists...) around the world had become so bad that by the 2020s intelligent discourse about economic policy was dead.”
Population growth added to the imbalance of new jobs vs. unemployed, and workers around the world began to publicly demand that their governments take action and find ways to sustain them. Crimes of theft increased everywhere, and protests often turned violent. Civil unrest surged, and crime families proliferated in many countries.
“The failure of national governments and international organizations to make serious decisions has made them nearly irrelevant. As people began to take the law into their own hands, government crackdowns increased. Large corporations have hired legions of mercenaries to protect their businesses and many moved to small islands and ocean habitats (and other safer locations). Many believe large corporations are controlling the world today with greater influence than nation-states.”
Social Darwinism becomes the law of the land, and survival at any cost the rule Martial law, the suspension of civil rights, and unrestrained surveillance prevail. The trends toward world democratization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are reversed. Information warfare between nations is commonplace. Paranoia rules, climate change surges, and geopolitical turmoil proliferates.
In this “Future Despair” scenario, “post-Future Shock anomie seems to be increasing with no end in sight.”
Third Scenario - “The Self-Actualization Economy”
If the second scenario is emphatically worse, the third is emphatically better.
“For the first time in history, humanity is engaged in a great conversation about what kind of civilization it wants and what we, as individuals and as a species, want to become. Movies, global cyber games, UN Summits, VR News, flash mob cyber teach-ins, and thought leaders probe the meaning of life and the possible future as never before. The historic shift from human labor and knowledge to machine labor and knowledge is clear: humanity is being freed from the necessity of having a job to earn a living and a job to achieve self-respect. This is initiating the transition from the job economy to the self-actualization economy.”
The breakdown of the global workforce in this scenario was as follows:
Employed: 1 billion
Self-Employed: 3 billion
Informal Economy: 1 billion
In Transition: 1 billion
This transition got underway in the 2030s as AGI came into the foreground, with the universal basic income experiments of some Western nations providing a template for wider deployment. This safety net in turn brought about measurable improvements in per capita health and education, while reducing crime, spurring increased public demand for such accommodation. Paradoxically, self-employment increased everywhere, contradicting the naysayers who predicted that UBI would make everyone lazy.
“As the world became increasingly aware in the 2020s that growth by itself was no longer increasing wages and employment, thought leaders began to call more loudly for new economic assumptions.”
As AGI took hold, transportation became autonomous and “smart cities” became the new paradigm, causing the cost of living to fall throughout the Western world. AI-driven advances in the material sciences and computational physics relieved strains on resources and raw materials, lowering the costs of production (and, in turn, the cost of goods) universally. It became easier for governments to provide UBI for citizens, while still providing training and transition assistance for those remaining in the workforce – and corporations were allowed to continue to profit.
The biggest changes, however, are cultural.
“More and more people around the world are beginning to see the purpose of work is self-actualization in harmony with the social and natural enlightenments. Work becomes a pleasure, a method for self-actualization, and a way to create meaning for one’s life. Since the various forms of universal basic income reduced anxiety about basic financial needs, it freed people to explore what they think is their purpose in life.
“As a result, the majority of humanity has the time to pursue causes that have helped build a better future, whether they have chosen a rural lifestyle living off-grid, or living at sea in floating or cruising communities, or living for the excitement of intense urban encounters.”
This final scenario is summarized as follows:
“By 2050 the world had finally achieved a global economy that appears to be environmentally sustainable while providing nearly all people with the basic necessities of life and the majority with a comfortable living. The resulting social stability has created a world of relative peace, exploring possible futures for the second half of the 21st century.”
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