Vision(s) of the Future (June 2025)

Peter Thiel once said that there aren't many widely accepted visions for the future in mainstream society. I thought about it and I could only come up with three.

There's a post-apocalyptic vision where everything goes to shit and humans are hanging on by a thread like in Terminator, Mad Max, Last of Us, and the Matrix. Then we have a techno green utopian vision where everyone is living in glass houses and driving electric cars surrounded by nature. And finally there's a Star Trek vision where people have wrist computers or neural links and live in space.

I was surprised I couldn't think of more widely accepted visions. Predicting the future is hard, sure, but there are thousands, maybe millions, of unique visions in science fiction books and movies and people's brains, and yet, not many of them have caught on in mainstream culture. Why?

Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Maybe we're implicitly trying to align on a single vision for all of humanity because we assume, as I did for most of my life, that the world is going to continue getting smaller as it has for most of modern history. But what if we've reached peak globalization, at least for now, and the world is going to start fragmenting again?

It's impossible to predict these things, but in 1992 Fukuyama wrote, "The End of History" which many people assumed was correct in arguing that western democracy won and everything would more or less be the same from here. It would be funny if in a few hundred years we looked back and realized that that book marked the peak of convergence, at least in the current epoch. I mean, there are signs: Brexit, polarization, re-shoring manufacturing, reduced trust in the UN/WHO, media fragmentation, immigration, and just, like, the general vibes, man.

Most people would agree that nature is diverse. You have so many different types of plants and animals and insects and other stuff I can't think of (is fungus a plant?) living in autonomous groups, and yet, they are also interdependent. Aspens grow in groves and wolves live in packs and fish swim in schools and yet they are all together. Nature is not beautiful because it has all evolved into one thing, it's beautiful because so many uniquely incredible forms of life exist in distinct groups.

Lest we forget, humans are part of nature and perhaps we long for the same thing. Maybe, if we're forced to pick between two futures, one where everything converges into a one world government with one leader and one culture and one vision, and another future where there are thousands of unique groups of humans, all with their own cultures and their own visions for the future living in autonomous groups among each other, we'd opt for the latter. I would.

Maybe the reason I could only think of three visions is because those are the only ones that could work assuming humanity keeps marching toward convergence. I mean, there's just not space on the planet to support indefinite population growth, so the most obvious visions that can literally accommodate everyone, assuming we can only have one, are post-apocalyptic, green utopian, and space.

But if humans start to fragment into smaller autonomous groups again, and the interplay of population growth and technology stabilize at a level where there's space and resources for everyone, I can immediately start to think of more exciting visions. The most exciting of which is that the more visions different groups of humans get to try, the more likely we all are to discover some awesome ones that we could have never thought of ourselves.