Futurespection: How do we get better?

The hot new journal, Evonomics just ran my appraisal of how Advertising is failing the Internet.   I explore how a real Web economy might replace the maelstrom of ads. Could simple micro-payments work, paying pennies for what you use? I’ve been working on this analysis for 3 years. A two-parter with major implications for your future online.

Today we'll wander a bit around a central question... can human beings and/or their civilization improve?

Of course, this is a premise of Futurespection -- a word that I just coined.  So let's launch this session with a piece on Gizmodo by George Dvorsky ranking the “20 Crucial Terms Every 21st-Century Futurist Should Know," including coveillance, eroom's law, the proactionary principle and more...

Okay so has progress occurred? Harvard professor Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature discusses how one could quantify the degree of human progress: “Most people agree that life is better than death, health better than disease, prosperity better than poverty, knowledge better than ignorance, peace better than war, safety better than violence, freedom better than coercion. That gives us a set of yardsticks by which we can measure whether progress has actually occurred.”

Backing this up, here's another optimist looking at the big picture. From The New York Times:  Is Humanity Getting Better?  "The world now is a thoroughly awful place, compared with what it should be. But not compared with what it was. Keeping both eyes open gives depth to our perception of our own time in history, and makes us better able to see where paths to more progress may be open," writes Leif Wenar.

== Criticism & positive reinforcement ==

A fascinating observation: educators have long opined that positive reinforcement is better than negative, Sometimes liberal types take this obvious truth to an extreme that gets downright silly, emphasizing feel-good praise-for-nothing and shiny trophies for attendance.  

Still, such PC absurdities aim in better directions than traditional methods that are still used all over the world, hammering kids with punishment for failure. Indeed, experts in animal training will tell you that negative reinforcement is iffy, at best. Creatures ranging from otters to dolphins to horses react much better to praise than to rebuke. Dolphins will throw tantrums when told they were wrong, much like a human 4 year old. Think Billy Mumy in that chilling Twilight Zone episode.

This provoked in me an interesting thought… that human beings may be exceptional in our ability to grit our teeth and accept “no!” as useful feedback. (Dogs, after 50,000 years of selection, can do it, too, though very grudgingly.) We hate criticism! And human leaders do everything they can to avoid it, which explains the horrid governance of most feudal societies. Yet, many of us are capable of clamping down and listening - actually listening - to unpleasant but useful feedback.

CITOKATE … Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.

So. Are we all similarly capable of doing this?  Of course not. Indeed, I’ll wager it is related to positive-sum thinking, of which dogma-drinkers in both today’s far-left and entire-right are clearly incapable, helping to explain our current civil war. 

In order to benefit from useful criticism, you must first admit the sacred mantra of science: “I might be (at least partly) wrong.” And to be clear, even scientists, who are raised and disciplined to be able to recite that holy catechism have to struggle, daily, to live by it.

No, to me the miracle is that any of us can do this, at all!  Gritting teeth and paying real attention when someone else credibly rattles your favorite notion with: “No! You’re wrong and here’s proof!” 

Then adjusting to that critique, and adapting and improving till it all pays off with ideas, inventions, policies, attitudes that are better for the battering. 

It is the way to win. Let me reiterate: it is the way to win, over the long run. And we appear to be a species that is capable – if barely – of using this greatest of all delusion-piercing tools.

== Threats and worries == 

Some examples of "oops!" criticism?

The British medical journal The Lancet reports state-level data correlating gun-related deaths and 25 state-specific gun laws. 

Researchers identified three laws that were most strongly associated with reductions in overall gun-related mortality. These state measures were: laws requiring firearm identification through ballistic imprinting or microstamping, ammunition background checks, and universal background checks for all gun purchases. 

Federal implementation of all three laws would be projected to reduce the national mortality rate -- 10.1 per 100,000 people in 2010 -- to 0.16 per 100,000, the study says.   

Gadzooks. This is astonishing in several ways. First that such modest measures  have such large effects… I’d wager there’s also at least a small average psychological and social and cultural difference in the states that have such laws – a calmer mentality perhaps – that I wonder how you’d control-for. Still, what I find most astonishing is simply that these “Canadian” style measures would be so adequate to reduce the plague of firearm deaths by 80%.

Note that Canadians can still have firearms, and unregistered ones! None of the three laws in question inconvenience legal gun owners a scintilla or lead to registry or confiscation, even in theory. None of them lead to a “slippery slope.” In other words the absolutist, never-compromise-a-bit NRA mentality is exposed for what it is… both impractical and insane.

See elsewhere my own proposal for a positive sum, win-win way that gun rights believers could better protect those rights while treating personal weapons more like cars.  

== Transitioning thru technology ==

Speaking of cars... This article asks about self-driving cars and profound effects on the economy – for example “truck driver” is the most common lower-middle class job. And the first to be rendered obsolete. Worrisome. Except that Safety Backup Driver could wind up being the ideal job for painters and artists and novelists who want to work on solitary creative projects, only taking over from the auto-drive robot only at long intervals.

Speaking of drives... Gene drive is a molecular technique that slips a new gene into an organism and guarantees that it will be inherited by offspring and by subsequent generations, by destroying competitors of that gene. Thus, the new trait is “driven” through a population. Potential positive uses would be to push into mosquito populations a trigger for their immune systems destroy the malaria parasite.  Alas, all such techs are “dual use,” meaning they might be applied to malignant ends.

Speaking of malignant users... I’ve been talking about this sort of thing for years… how we absolutely rely upon the ratio of good tech users to evil ones steadily rising across time. This ratio can be measured and the good news is that it does indeed rise, in open societies where smart people both have access to information and in general feel vested - that they are better off with a functioning civilization than without one.  Heaven help us, if that confidence is shaken.

And. Speaking of faulty predictive coding... Virginia Postrel offers an interesting riff on why “wearables” will remain pretty much vaporware (vaporwear?) for a while yet. Oh, you’ll get all the keen stuff I showed you in Existence. After a while. 

Okay though. Speaking of cool things we want… jetpacks are just a little closer.  

And that, even all by itself, will make us better!

== Our genes speak == 

Are smarter people nicer? Here's an interesting article on IQ and strategic "cooperation" - why do subjects who score higher also behave much more cooperatively or generously in "prisoners' dilemma" type tests?  I think this author zeroes in a bit too much on the "IQ" aspect.  But the variety of test-games he describes is fascinating, as well as how the more strategic player generally winds up being warily and guardedly... "nicer."

Aging researchers found that by killing senescent (aging) cells, middle-aged mice lived 24-27 percent longer. The only drawback is that senescent cells are a part of wound healing, so any therapy that targeted aging cells would need to cease if the person needed to have an operation or was injured.

Epigenetics — the study of inheritable changes in gene expression not directly coded in our DNA — has resurrected the long despised Lamarckian notion of passing down acquired characteristics. Our life experiences may be passed on to our children and even further! Studies on survivors of trauma suggest stress may affect subsequent generations.  Now scientists think they’ve spotted the “how” of it. Your life experiences may be passed on to your children and your children’s children. Studies on survivors of traumatic events have suggested that exposure to stress may indeed have lasting effects on subsequent generations.  In future, people under stress may take a drug to inhibit the passing on of consequences.

Fascinating. Human jaws and teeth got small at least a million years before we had fire to tenderize meat, which is very hard to swallow raw.  Apparently though, simple stone slicing tools made a crucial difference.

What is the minimum number of genes that can control a fully functioning and self-replicating cellular organism?  Researchers at San Diego’s Venter Institute started with a very spare bacterium then started throwing away genes to see which ones qualified as absolutely essential.  They announced a single-celled organism that has just 473 genes — likely close to the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain its life.  They still don’t know what 200 or so of them do.  That’s next.  

And finally...

This fossil revealed a wonderful pre-insect life form that hauled its young around at the end of tethers, like kites of balloons… a first for sci fi!  

A story about a math problem on a standardized test should not inspire laughter and admiration and anger all at once. This one did. And while the father-author is at one level a hero, and a paladin for the rights of his exceptional whiz daughter… he’s also an arrogant prick. Ah well.  We need to have the kind of society that we do. Where this kind of tale is viewed as reinforcing our love of exceptional excellence and equilibrium disturbers. 

The value of pessimists… the necessity of optimists

I have long maintained that the greatest blessing and curse of humanity has been our near infinite capacity for delusion.  To firmly believe things that are illogical or improbable, or even decisively disproved by blatant facts.  This gift is what empowers great art -- and we fiction authors have learned to weave ornate incantations, catering to a public need to believe (temporarily) in imaginary events. 

Alas, the downside of this talent is obvious.  We are terrible at perceiving and appraising our own delusional mistakes – witness the almost unalloyed litany of horrid statecraft perpetrated by kings, lords and priests, when their delusions could go unquestioned and unaccountable.

We’ve found a partial solution.  Criticism is the only known antidote to error. If you are blind to some mistakes, others may not be, and they will often be delighted to point out those errors of yours, without charge! (Will you listen: even gritting your teeth?)

The greatest advantage of a free and open society is not the pleasure of liberty (though that’s great). It is the high proportion of disastrous blunders that we manage to catch, in time, that led to our unprecedented ratio of success to failure. Science fiction plays a role, through “self-preventing prophecies,” like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which girded millions to fight against the worst possible failure modes. But other professions do their bit, as well.  

Especially Journalism. Yes, much-maligned (sometimes deservedly) journalism.  One of the 'expert castes' currently under attack in the War-Aganst-All-Spartypants. Individually they are as flawed as any of us. But a profession that lives by asking questions... are you sure you want to dismiss them, across the board?)

== Do warnings bring action? ==

In his book “Lights Out,” Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared. Imagine a continental blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Koppel maintains that a well-designed attack on just one of the nation’s three electric power grids could cripple much of our infrastructure. 

Let me add that terrorism isn’t the only way it can happen. A “Carrington Event” – a massive solar flare like one that fried telegraph systems in the 1850s – could have devastating effects upon our grid and unlinked electronics in the home, (possibly even zapping the rooftop solar systems that are our last bulwark against darkness, unless we learn how to buffer them well). 

Moreover, the 1850s event was apparently not as bad as they come. Studies of carbon isotope anomalies in tree rings suggest that the Sun occasionally belches prodigiously, giving our planet truly major electrical shocks. And note that I have not even discussed another threat – EMP or electromagnetic pulse – that some enemy might use to accomplish the same end.

Surely more attention should be paid to these dangers.  And I regularly consult about such threats with “agencies” who have come to appreciate the unfettered darkside imaginings of science fiction authors.  You want potential failure modes?  Ones not yet on anyone’s horizon? I got ‘em.

And yet, how to reconcile that with the rampant accusations that “Brin is an optimist”?  Easy.  Unlike the certifiably insane cynical grouches all around us, I am able to notice the clear fact that things are (still tentatively) very very good for us, right now.  That our ancestors – including the Greatest Generation so extolled by the Right – would have laughed in the faces of today’s dolor-merchants and their dismal mewlings.  Nor is the mad-right the only locus of grumpy ingrates. Civil libertarians who decry the rising surveillance state are justified (!) and useful… until they neglect to ask – “So, how did we get the present day peak of freedom that I so-worry we’re about to lose?”

Asking that one, simple question empowers us to see a simple truth.  That we did not get here by cowering and hiding.

In fact when we open our eyes to positive trends, we discover they are easily as big as any list of negatives.  From Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined to Peter Diamandis’s Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, some of the smartest people alive are pointing out the good news… and how much more there may be, if just a few game-changing breakthroughs line up.

Even in the blogosphere, where the cynical curled lip and playground bully sneer assail any hint of positivity, a few have spoken up, as in this piece listing “11 Reasons Why 2015 Was a Great Year For Humanity.” Wherein the writer, Angus Hervey, opines that: “We are living through the most astonishing period of human progress in history. And nobody’s telling us about it.”   

Indeed, he could have made it a clean dozen reasons, by mentioning something I’ve been saying for the last month or so… that 2015 was by far humanity’s best year in the exploration and understanding of space, the cosmos and our place in the universe.

And the ease of self-deception...

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, by Ajit Varki and Danny Brower asserts an answer to one of the great questions of biology; why so many species, ranging from dolphins and chimps to corvids (ravens) and parrots, sea lions and elephants, and prairie dogs, all cluster close to each other under what I’ve called theglass ceiling of sapience,” displaying similar, basic capabilities at tool-use, proto-language and self-awareness. Varki and Brower propose that there is a lethal zone, just a little higher, wherein creatures become fully aware of their inevitable death. Any species who rise into this zone lose fitness because individuals become obsessed with their own mortality, to the detriment of all other considerations, like reproduction.

Under this hypothesis — clearly influenced by the mid-20th Century Freudian “thanatos” complex — humanity burst beyond the glass ceiling by counter-balancing any thanatos obsession with another exceptional skill, that of denial.  Self-distraction, using various mental tricks to ignore — for the most part — the glaring prospect of personal doom.

Alas, my response (admittedly without yet reading the book) is that Freudian and meta-Freudian  models are artifacts of a time when we had a much less clear understanding of the workings of evolution.   In this case, we have a just-so story of creatures becoming so terminally obsessed with mortality that they neglect their offspring. Tasty... but...

Refutation is simple.  Those who find a way to prioritize their progeny higher than scrabbling for an extra few months… those are the ones who will pass on genes, including for the trait of such prioritization.  Indeed, nature is filled with examples of courageous mothers and dads who do exactly that. All that is needed is for parenthood to be an addictive high — and those channels are already present in every species that abides near the glass ceiling. Oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine levels, all reward parental care with overwhelming ferocity. At which point the thanatos distraction will have a potent rival, one far more correlated with fitness and success at the game of genetic procreation.  In other words, sorry. I’m not buying it.

There are other, more plausible, hypotheses for why humanity shattered the glass ceiling by orders of magnitude.  In nature, whenever a trait experiences rapid runaway, the first culprit to appraise would be sexual selection.  In my neoteny paper I posit a rare two-way cycle of sexual selection, in which female and male humans engaged in fierce judgementalism toward each other, demanding ever-inflating sets of exaggerated traits, foremost of which was intelligence.

Jumping to the other end… In Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky explains the science underlying human irrationality with a mix of fables, argumentative essays, and personal vignettes.  A decision theorist and researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Yudkowsky is also author of the popular amateur novel Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. 

== And Alack ==

Word arrives here about the recent or imminent passing of the great science fiction editor, David Hartwell.  I am bummed and will have more to say about this soon.

Asides: on Pax Americana, Libertarians and where the #$#! are our Roosevelts?

Mid-week, let's pause to get a few points out of the way. Below I will have some things to say about current American politics -- about "Galt's Gulch in Chile" and about... "The Roosevelts."

But first... clearly my most provocative stance is to defend the period -- post WWII -- called  "PA"… or Pax Americana.  It's a topic wherein I think we can distill what is loony about both sides in the current, re-ignited US civil war... as well as simplistic and comfortable cliches that are clutched by many of our friends, overseas.

PA has lasted all our lifetimes, since WWII saw the passing of Pax Brittanica… the “British Peace.”  "Pax" referred originally to Pax Romana or the Roman Peace that kept the Mediterranean placid and open to commerce for 600 years. Pax Sinica refers to similar epochs across China and east Asia. Pax Hispania was the greatest empire the world has ever known, in which Columbus's discoveries -- then Magellan's -- led to a "peace" that preached its own absolute goodness while it spread deliberate genocide for 400 bloody years. But at least there was no hypocrisy.  

Here is the crux. With the likely exception of Pax Hispania, almost every pax era has been better for average people on planet Earth than almost every era without a pax empire, when competing kingdoms would send armies slashing and burning and looting across each others’ territories. The Chinese, for example, admit that the First Emperor Chi'in, who unified the five warring states, was something of a murderous madman. But he also made it safe to travel and trade and paved the way for the Han Dynasty renaissance. He was hell on scholars and dissenters, but made things better for average folk who just wanted to live out their lives, pay taxes, practice a trade and be left alone.

Are there costs, whenever there is a ruling imperium? You bet! When the First Emperor crushed the Five Kingdoms, peace then reigned… along with brutal tyranny and a collapse of the vibrant, cultural competitiveness that had prevailed, before. Minorities had plenty to complain about, under Pax Parthia, Pax Alexandrine, Pax Romana, Pax Mughal etc, and homogenization under a single oligarchy is often harsh on progress. (So harsh that it might help to explain why few or no alien species made it to the stars.)  Indeed, it was when the nations of a divided Europe -- circa 1400 to 1900 -- vigorously competed that humanity made some of its greatest, if morally mixed, strides -- including strides toward both liberal enlightenment and industrial grade genocide.  

This is not a matter for taking sides, but for being open-minded about many pros and cons, so that understanding might help us to navigate a future course, between the Scylla of violent chaos and the Charybdis of stifling empire. Those of you out there who leap to just one, simplistic stance on all of this, making grand and righteous declarations, may thereby feel good, but you understand little about the complex morass that is human history.  And thus you are no help at all, in steering us toward better days.

== The current pax ==

Where Pax Americana is different is in having operated under a mythic system that -- even when it was only hypocritically paid lip service -- at least spoke repeatedly that there should be no empires. Indeed, while American commercial interests may have been predatory, during the weak end-days of the Chi-ing Dynasty, U.S. policy was always on China's side, at least officially, demanding that European and Japanese powers give back the colonial "concessions" they had wrested from the weakened central kingdom. Not one other nation in all of China's long history ever stood up for her that way.

Does imperfection disqualify everything? de Rochefoucauld said "Hypocricy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Indeed, though betrayed often, the moral stance against empire has been relentlessly conveyed in American propaganda -- e.g. Hollywood films, which portray "empires" as bad things and tolerance of diversity as the greatest positive virtue.  Indeed, those of you who are now seething in anger at me, for daring to say good things about PA... um, have you thought of where you got the value system by which you judge these things?  Can you name another major culture that preached "by all means criticize the center of power!"

Ironies abound. The best that PA can preen about is that it reduced most of the bad outcomes of a pax era. Rigid domination, imperial mercantiism and repression of diversity. A priesthood with a lock on "truth." Outright and barefaced conquest.

We are talking human nature here... what groups of people do when they find themselves in a position to dominate. Go on now and name for me one people, across all of time, who behaved well when tempted by such power. One. We can wait here if you like, all day.  The real enemy is that temptation, which seems rooted in our natures.

But it can be controlled.

My assertion has been that: 

(1) The ratio of good deeds to bad - by Pax Americana - is stunningly better than any other pax power across time…

(2) Should we expose and dissect and atone for wretched events like Vietnam and Allende -- all the way down to negligent crimes of poor supervision, like those exposed in Iraq by WikiLeaks? Absolutely! I am Mr. Transparency.  And criticism is the only known antidote to error (CITOKATE.)

But these crimes, while calling for fierce retrospection and learning, do not alter the fundamental fact, that outcomes have been vastly better, under the PA system designed by the greatest human of the 20th Century, George Marshall.  

Average humans today live in more peace than at any time in the history of our species, as shown in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, with only a few percent ever experiencing personal and direct contact with war in their lifetimes. One top benefit: Pax-protected world trade has uplifted 2/3 of the world’s children out of poverty.

(3) That propaganda campaign about tolerance and suspicion of authority and individualism may have been hypocritical! Nevertheless, it engendered people like you who are generous in your citokate-criticism and who push for exactly those values! Memes that you express, even as you fume at me for praising the pax that taught you all those values. While never once pausing to realize "Hey I am part of an organic process!  And any other empire would have killed me for this, by now."

(4) Combine all this and there may be a unique opportunity -- that we might actually tip into an era when pax law is no longer needed. An era portrayed in Star Trek, when the very idea of one dominant power is viewed by all as repugnantly retro and archaic.  No other culture ever preached that eutopian notion, though you illustrate it right now, as you seethe at these words. 

Here is more about Pax Americana: Pondering Pax Americana and the Government Shutdown.

== Basics ==

It merits reiterating. Was PA awful at times? Sure... except compared to every single other nation that was ever tempted by such power. If you make that comparison, PA is day to their night. Moreover, you know it.

Was PA drooling-insane-stupid under both Bushes? Sure. So much so that you have to wonder if that Saudi-owned family did it on purpose. (The wretched irony? That the phrase "Pax Americana" is only uttered nowadays by right wingers, who eviscerate its promise at every turn, with almost every immoral and incompetent act of foreign and domestic policy. Meanwhile the liberals who are PA's true spokesmen, glower at the one thing that made their dreams possible. Oh, we are weird, all right.)

Should Pax Americana be replaced with something grownup, at last, bringing an end to all empires? Sure! That's the idea!

Would Star Trek be better? Yep! 

Do you have a better idea? We'd all love to see your plan. But please, one that is only half impractical preaching but also looks at what progress has been made, so far, and how that progress happened.)

Will the end of all empires come, if PA simply goes away? Or prematurely stops enforcing peace? Baloney. Before you prescribe nothing as a replacement to the current pax power, please find for us, across 6000 years, a lasting era when that prescription worked well.

PA is the only empire that ever had as its (hypocritically uneven) policy "there should be no empires." And that hypocrisy has one saving grace...

...it will make itself come true.  

== Too-big means get-smaller ==

And now a couple of politically redolent items: The Federal Reserve is pushing the biggest U.S. banks to shrink so that they're less of a risk to the financial system. Fed proposals include imposing additional capital requirements for the eight largest banks — including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — that exceed the levels mandated by international regulators. “Capital surcharges" would increase in proportion to how risky the regulators deem a bank to be.

Which leads one to ponder...

Ken Burns documentaries are always a great buy, for your viewing time. His most recent — “The Roosevelts” -- focuses on Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor. Terrific. Fascinating stories. 

Only… I find my own thoughts drifting  -- and as I watch this series I can only contemplate our parents in the Greatest Generation... who overcame the Depression, crushed Hitler, prevented a mad Soviet Empire from world conquest, built a vibrant/free/open/flat/fair capitalism that created so much wealth that we could then afford to take on ancient, bad habits like racism, sexism and environmental neglect.

That generation... so admired by folks on the American Right... try asking your Fox-Watcher... "which human being did the Greatest Generation of Americans -- and indeed, nearly everyone on Earth -- adore, above all others?"

Watch them go goggle-eyed and choke. But make them say the name. Aloud.

== And finally? ==

Galt’s Gulch Chile? One common theme that spans from leftist-hippies to followers of Ayn Rand is the notion of anarchic utopianism — that those who have free spirits and the right ideology can create an ideal community, free of the ills they perceive in our complex, compromise-ridden civilization. On rare occasions, these communities have thrived… ironically those that have been run patriarchally by brilliant administrators, replicating feudalism-of-old, with a patina of egalitarian catechism. But most such experiments swiftly collapse. As in the case of the AnyRandian ideal community described here.

This is not the only libertarian dream community in the works. Perhaps more sturdy, but still problematic, are seasteading efforts propelled by Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel.

In the end, however, this is tragic for us all. Libertarianism might have served as a rational and pragmatic counter-balance to the other utopian tendency, to try solving all problems with statist approaches. It might also have held true to the sane vision of Adam Smith - to do what is needed in order to maximize the number of skilled and capable young competitors in a flat-fair-open society. 

Instead, it has been hijacked by solipsists who never, ever mention the word “competition” anymore, in their obsessive defense of towering accumulations of PROPERTY, never noticing how this serves the proto-feudal wishes of the oligarchs who were denounced by Adam Smith, and have always been the greatest enemies of markets and freedom.

See my dissection of Any Rand here: http://www.davidbrin.com/aynrand.html

==Return to Part One of this Series: An Unstable World

What big-unexpected problem we will face in coming decades? (Contest winners)

My latest novel Existence shows humanity confronting many challenges forty years in the future -- some expected and some unforeseen. Indeed, finding, revealing and exploring unexpected threats... this might be considered one of the most valuable services of good, thoughtful science fiction.

I recently crowd-sourced a question to my Facebook followers: What do you view as the biggest unexpected problem we will face in the next few decades? Many insightful and thought-provoking responses poured in, from profound to comedic, ranging from political instability to economic collapse, civil unrest to over-reliance on machines, social disruption to psychological plagues. Others dealt with problems of over-population and life extension, shortages of water and biodiversity, severe climate change, collapse of our information systems, growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, even meteor impacts.

Here I'm posting the most intriguing responses that got the most fan votes (the top two won fee copies of the brand new paperback edition of EXISTENCE! Note that I do not necessarily agree with all of the cited entries and will respond to a few of them in comments. But all of them show verve and a willingness to peer ahead:

1. What form of government will replace capitalism? This system is devolving at FTL speed, and the world is still unaware of a viable solution to it, while world situation is becoming more erratic and explosive daily. We will find ourselves in need of new ethno-national definitions very soon. Also, what will replace religion, for the same reasons. However, I feel that space exploration and the focus towards space will, at least partially, contribute to the latter. --Margie Lazou

2. Political and economic pressures from spacefaring nations to keep others from having the ability to access the almost infinite resources off-planet; extremely low cost for resources - material and energy - for the space-capable, and artificially high prices for everyone else. --David Christensen

3. Longevity due to augmentation and medical advances will create a need to migrate off planet for resources but those left behind must deal with massive social strain and change along with the burdensome question of what it means to be human. --John Berry Gosnell

4. A plastic-eating bacterium with resistance to all known antibiotics. --Martha Dunham

5. The unexpected loss of a sense of humor in people of European extraction, leading to mass suicide and the end of sit com laugh tracks. --Rhonda Palmer

6. The consequences of a universal lie detector machine. Politics and virtually every other field of human endeavor will be changed by everyone having to tell the truth. The rules that will evolve to deal with social and business situations will rapidly change society. --Kevin Settle

7. The biggest unexpected problem we'll face will be psychological. A depression plague is going to begin to eat away at modern society. We lose a sense of personal control over the modern world (i.e. external locus of control), where people believe that things happen to us, rather than "we make things happen". Apathy and self destructive behavior will no longer be the domain of emo-kids. It will threaten the viability of all societies worldwide, fueled by environmental impacts (historically, we rarely see them coming) and a growing disparity in wealth, power, and liberties. Long term ramifications will include economic collapse, famine, civil unrest and finally social atavism. --Richard Carter

8. Fresh water supplies. --David Caune

9. Biggest unexpected problems? Aren't the expected problems enough?  Biodiversity depletion, climate change, class warfare, outright warfare, the depletion of basically every resource: food, energy, fresh water, a whole whack of strategic minerals including helium, orbital debris. Hell, the only thing "unexpected" capable of killing us more quickly than we're killing ourselves would be a meteor impact or giant-ass solar flare. --Gabriel Emilio Zárate

10. The replacement of skilled and unskilled labor by automation combined with an ever-increasing population could have drastic effects on unemployment levels and civil unrest. --Eric Berman

11. Clinical near immortality will create beyond Malthusian population growth, further stressing Earth's resources. The moral question of when life "ends" will arise, for while they are able to keep the body alive, the mind still fails within 90-120 years. Discussion begins around planned obsolescence being introduced as part of gerontological treatments. --Wes Edmunds

12. The social (A movement away from sexism and tribalism. Along with an exponential expansion of global leisure and tourism.) and economic (Explosive demand and shifting of manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries.) ramifications of the children of 1/5th of the world’s population growing up as a ‘spoiled generation’ with two living parents and four living grandparents focusing all of their energy, hopes and dreams for the future, and their own personal life choices and mistakes on a ‘state mandated’ single child. --Richard Praser

13. A growing number of disruptive technologies and culture's difficulties in adapting. The biggest problem here will be the growing rift(s) between the people who use the technologies and those who don't. (Either by choice or access.) We may find that our culture is not the quickest to adapt, and the United States may be left in the wake of the world, wondering where it went without us. --Luna Rebecca Flesher

14. Collapse of our information systems due to overwhelming amounts of information from untrustworthy sources and the inability to verify sources and filter information effectively. --Eli Roth

15. Fresh-Water Scarcity and the many consequences thereof! Including massive dust-storms that will cause air-quality problems and which will contribute to erratic weather patterns in some of the most populated areas of the World ( especially in China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Middle East, North Africa and the US South-West ). And this will lead to food scarcity and pest-control problems; hence a massive increase in the risk of life-threatening/lethal disease epidemics! Hence social instability in countries that have nuclear and/or chemical weapons! ( OK: all this is actually expected...BUT...). 

But what is unexpected about this: failed states with nuclear/chemical arsenals and the dire need for the Super-Powers to cooperate on direct military interventions: so as to limit overall harm to general populations and mitigate the risk that those very same Super-Powers from going to war with one-another! Hence: a dangerous trend of ever-reduced civil liberties, freedoms and personal security! Hence: an ever-more dangerous, further erosion of trust between the general public and their respective governments! Which will lead to a massive increase in psychological breakdowns and the social disorder and related violence that will further harm our very need for social cohesion based on warranted trust: hence a whole new phenomena: psychological profiling and related witch-hunts! Hence the risk of a new dark ages. And given the kinds of dangerous technologies now in existence: a very real risk of total social meltdown and the subsequent high risk of a final, near-total, if not total, civilization collapse! --Jean-Pierre A. Fenyo

16. The development of mind-machine connections. While they will remain primitive in 30 years time, they will create a rift between those with the resources to afford their implantation and those who cannot. --Bradley Brown

17. I think the next crisis of truly global proportions will come from technologies that prolong life or even eliminate natural death. These technologies will inevitably and necessarily be restricted to a few. Not doing so would result in overpopulation, which would lead to forced birth control or mass starvation. Those who have these technologies will not want their enemies or those of whom they disapprove to live forever (would you allow a Hitler or a Stalin or even just a Castro to live forever?). Nations would want the balance of power that this brings to shift in their favor. But even in the unlikely case where none of this would happen, such technology would have to be deployed gradually and even if the intent were to make it available to everyone, those who are not at the front of the line would perceive it as hoarding and a denial of what they will surely claim is a "god given right".

 And then, of course, religions would get in the mix, calling this an evil and in opposition to the "clear" will of their god. However it happens, there will be two camps: those fervently in favor of it and those furiously opposed to it. This will lead to social unrest, widespread acts of sabotage, probably a few small wars, wildly disrupted economies, famines, plagues, rains of toads, cats sleeping with dogs, and Republicans and Democrats agreeing on something that has yet to be identified. --Claudio Puviani

18. A combination of events, which will result in over-population, lack of natural resources, an under-abundance of food stock, supply and sources culminating in a ridiciulously strained attempt to reach the stars, taking up more time, effort and money than it is really worth. --Stephen Ormsby

19. I see two upcoming problems, actually:

--The need to overhaul the global economic system. In an increasingly globalized world, "capitalism" tends to become associated solely with the U.S. model of industrialized society, while technological progress accelerates, along with obsolescence and resource depletion. This leads to disruptions due to environmental, cultural and legal differences between various countries/blocs; we will also see the need to overhaul the patent system and property rights, as well as redefine individual/collective responsibilities.

--A global religious crisis. With two of the three main Abrahamic religions in full recession - mainly in the highly-industrialized West - relegating proselytism as a secondary (less important) goal, fringe groups and extremist movements are likely to increase their public presence. The crisis of faith experienced mainly in the West will expand across the globe as more people under moderate regimes in developing nations will follow similar paths of questioning, enabled by technological progress and more discoveries in fields such as of bio logy (genetics) and astrophysics. While a truly global jihad seems unlikely, the tensions between believers and agnostics/nonbelievers will continue to grow, and this is bound to lead to cultural upheaval, with hard-to-foresee consequences. --Alex Savulescu

20. Shortages of critical materials for technology, pharmaceuticals, etc. Every environmental and problematic issue boils down to human population, however. We're trading quantity for quality, and there is nothing to stop it. You can't even bring the subject up without a volley of insipid, formulaic, unthinking responses, one of the first of which will be "Why do you want to murder people, you monster?" Given that every path to a survivable future involves some sort of conscious, deliberate action on population, like NOW, I don't see any path that saves us.  --Hank Fox

21. The biggest problem? There are two, I think, and they are intertwined. Climate change and the death of the oceans. --Michelle Connor

Thank you to my many bright readers for their wisdom and insight! We will need a generation of creative, ambitious, and far-seeing problem-solvers to face the unexpected over the next few decades. While not every suggestion was exactly "unexpected," all conveyed the passion of people who think seriously about our path ahead.  The kind of folks who read the literature of tomorrow.

My best-known aphorism is CITOKATE: Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error. Here, we have attempted to shine light into possible (potentially dark) scenarios for the future, foreseeing various obstacles and stumbling blocks we may encounter along our path to creating a brighter future.