When storms and heat waves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask which only some can afford.
There few people work outdoors anymore, and even indoors the air tastes slightly acidic, making you feel nauseated throughout the day. China has experimented with seeding rain clouds— the process of artificially inducing rain— hoping to wash pollution out of the sky, but results are mixed. Seeding clouds to artificially create more rain is difficult and unreliable, and even the wealthiest countries cannot achieve consistent results.
As a result, crops are increasingly grown under cover to protect them from the weather, a trend that will only get stronger. Our world is getting hotter. Over the next two decades, projections tell us that temperatures in some areas of the globe will rise even higher, an irreversible development utterly beyond our control.
Oceans, forests, plants, trees, and soil had for many years absorbed half the carbon dioxide we spewed out. Now there are few forests left, most of them either logged or consumed by wildfire, and the permafrost is belching greenhouse gases into an already overburdened atmosphere.
The increasing heat of the Earth is suffocating us, and in five to ten years, vast swaths of the planet will be uninhabitable. By , Australia, North Africa, and parts of the western United States might be entirely abandoned. Now everyone knows what the future holds for their children and grandchildren: tipping point after tipping point has been reached until eventually there will be no more civilization.
Humans will be cast to the winds again, gathering in small tribes, hunkered down and living on whatever patch of land might sustain them. The planet has already reached several such tipping points. First was the vanishing of coral reefs. Some of us still remember diving amid majestic coral reefs, brimming with multicolored fish of all shapes and sizes.
Corals are now almost gone. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the largest aquatic cemetery in the world. Efforts have been made to grow artificial corals farther north and south from the equator where the water is a bit cooler, but these efforts have failed, and marine life has not returned. Soon there will be no reefs anywhere— it is only a matter of a few years before the last 10 percent dies off.
The second tipping point was the melting of the ice sheets in the Arctic. There is no summer Arctic sea ice anymore because warming is worse at the poles— between 6 and 8 degrees higher than other areas. The melting happened silently in that cold place far north of most of the inhabited world, but its effects were soon noticed.
The Great Melting was an accelerant of further global warming. More moisture in the air and higher sea surface temperatures have caused a surge in extreme hurricanes and tropical storms. Recently, coastal cities in Bangladesh, Mexico, and the United States have suffered brutal infrastructure destruction and extreme flooding, killing many thousands and displacing millions.
This happens with increasing frequency now. Every day, because of rising water levels, some part of the world must evacuate to higher ground. Every day the news shows images of mothers with babies strapped to their backs, wading through floodwaters, and homes ripped apart by vicious currents that resemble mountain rivers. News stories tell of people living in houses with water up to their ankles because they have nowhere else to go, their children coughing and wheezing because of the mold growing in their beds, insurance companies declaring bankruptcy leaving survivors without resources to rebuild their lives.
Contaminated water supplies, sea salt intrusions, and agricultural runoff are the order of the day. Because multiple disasters are always happening simultaneously in every country, it can take weeks or even months for basic food and water relief to reach areas pummeled by extreme floods. Diseases such as malaria, dengue, cholera, respiratory illnesses, and malnutrition are rampant. Now all eyes are on the western Antarctic ice sheet. If and when it disappears, it could release a deluge of freshwater into the oceans, raising sea levels by over five meters.
Cities like Miami, Shanghai, and Dhaka will be uninhabitable—ghostly Atlantises dotting the coasts of each continent, their skyscrapers jutting out of the water, their people evacuated or dead. Those around the world who chose to remain on the coast because it had always been their home have more to deal with than rising water and floods— they must now witness the demise of a way of life-based on fishing.
As oceans have absorbed carbon dioxide, the water has become more acidic, and the pH levels are now so hostile to marine life that all countries have banned fishing, even in international waters.
Many people insist that the few fish that are left should be enjoyed while they last— an argument, hard to fault in many parts of the world, that applies to so much that is vanishing. As devastating as rising oceans have been, droughts and heatwaves inland have created a special hell. Vast regions have succumbed to severe aridification followed by desertification, and wildlife has become a distant memory. These places can barely support human life; their aquifers dried up long ago, and their groundwater is almost gone.
Marrakech and Volgograd are on the verge of becoming deserts. Hong Kong, Barcelona, and Abu Dhabi have been desalinating seawater for years, desperately trying to keep up with the constant wave of immigration from areas that have gone completely dry. Extreme heat is on the march. If you live in Paris, you endure summer temperatures that regularly rise to 44 degrees Celsius degrees Fahrenheit.
This is no longer the headline-grabbing event it would have been thirty years ago. Everyone stays inside, drinks water, and dreams of air conditioning. You lie on your couch, a cold wet towel over your face, and try to rest without dwelling on the poor farmers on the outskirts of town who, despite recurrent droughts and wildfires, are still trying to grow grapes, olives, or soy— luxuries for the rich, not for you. You try not to think about the 2 billion people who live in the hottest parts of the world, where, for upward of forty-five days per year, temperatures skyrocket to 60 degrees Celsius degrees Fahrenheit — a point at which the human body cannot be outside for longer than six hours because it loses the ability to cool itself down.
Places such as central India are becoming uninhabitable. Mass migrations to less hot rural areas are beset by a host of refugee problems, civil unrest, and bloodshed over diminished water availability. Inland glaciers around the world are almost gone. The millions who depended on the Himalayan, Alpine, and Andean glaciers to regulate water availability throughout the year are in a state of constant emergency: there is no more snow turning to ice atop mountains in the winter, so there is no more gradual melting for the spring and summer.
Now there are either torrential rains leading to flooding or prolonged droughts. The most vulnerable communities with the least resources have already seen what ensues when water is scarce: sectarian violence, mass migration, and death. Even in some parts of the United States, there are fiery conflicts over water, battles between the rich who are willing to pay for as much water as they want and everyone else demanding equal access to the life-enabling resource.
The taps in nearly all public facilities are locked, and those in restrooms are coin-operated. At the federal level, Congress is in an uproar over water redistribution: states with less water demand what they see as their fair share from states that have more. Government leaders have been stymied on the River and the Rio Grande shrink further. Looming on the horizon are conflicts with Mexico, no longer able to guarantee deliveries of water from the depleted Rio Conchos and Rio Grande.
Similar disputes have arisen in Peru, China, and Russia. Food production swings wildly from month to month, season to season, depending on where you live. More people are starving than ever before. Climate zones have shifted, so some new areas have become available for agriculture Alaska, the Arctic , while others have dried up Mexico, California.
Still others are unstable because of the extreme heat, never mind flooding, wildfire, and tornadoes. This makes the food supply in general highly unpredictable. Global trade has slowed as countries such as China stop exporting and seek to hold on to their own resources. Disasters and wars rage, choking off trade routes. The tyranny of supply and demand is now unforgiving; because of its scarcity, food is now wildly expensive. Income inequality has always existed, but it has never been this stark or this dangerous.
Whole countries suffer from epidemics of stunting and malnutrition. Reproduction has slowed overall, but most acutely in those countries where food scarcity is dire. Infant mortality is sky high, and international aid has proven to be politically impossible to defend in light of mass poverty.
Countries with enough food are resolute about holding on to it. In some places, the inability to gain access to such basics as wheat, rice, or sorghum has led to economic collapse and civil unrest more quickly than even the most pessimistic sociologists had previously imagined. But exactly how much contact tracing and isolation is required to contain an outbreak effectively? Source: Data from ref. For now, mitigation efforts, such as social distancing, need to continue for as long as possible to avert a second major outbreak, says Bhatt.
It is clear now that summer does not uniformly stop the virus, but warm weather might make it easier to contain in temperate regions. In areas that will get colder in the second half of , experts think there is likely to be an increase in transmission. Many human respiratory viruses — influenza, other human coronaviruses and respiratory syncytial virus RSV — follow seasonal oscillations that lead to winter outbreaks, so it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 will follow suit.
Evidence suggests that dry winter air improves the stability and transmission of respiratory viruses 8 , and respiratory-tract immune defence might be impaired by inhaling dry air, she adds. In addition, in colder weather people are more likely to stay indoors, where virus transmission through droplets is a bigger risk, says Richard Neher, a computational biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
The risk to adults who have already had COVID could be reduced, as with flu, but it would depend on how rapidly immunity to this coronavirus wears off, says Neher. To end the pandemic, the virus must either be eliminated worldwide — which most scientists agree is near-impossible because of how widespread it has become — or people must build up sufficient immunity through infections or a vaccine.
Unfortunately, early surveys suggest there is a long way to go. Estimates from antibody testing — which reveals whether someone has been exposed to the virus and made antibodies against it — indicate that only a small proportion of people have been infected, and disease modelling backs this up. Many vaccines provide protection for decades — such as those against measles or polio — whereas others, including whooping cough and influenza, wear off over time.
Likewise, some viral infections prompt lasting immunity, others a more transient response. One study 15 of recovering patients found that neutralizing antibodies persisted for up to 40 days after the start of infection; several other studies suggest that antibody levels dwindle after weeks or months.
Still, antibody production is not the only form of immune protection; memory B and T cells also defend against future encounters with the virus, and little is known so far about their role in SARS-CoV-2 infection.
In that case, the virus would become endemic, says Pulliam. If the virus induces short-term immunity — similar to two other human coronaviruses, OC43 and HKU1, for which immunity lasts about 40 weeks — then people can become reinfected and there could be annual outbreaks, the Harvard team suggests.
Yet these scenarios remain only guesses, because this pandemic has so far not followed the pattern of pandemic flu, says Osterholm. Mounting evidence suggests coronavirus is airborne — but health advice has not caught up.
In that case, even without a vaccine, it is possible that after a world-sweeping outbreak, the virus could burn itself out and disappear by However, if immunity is moderate, lasting about two years, then it might seem as if the virus has disappeared, but it could surge back as late as , the Harvard team found.
That forecast, however, does not take the development of effective vaccines into account. Even a vaccine providing incomplete protection would help by reducing the severity of the disease and preventing hospitalization, says Wu. Still, it will take months to make and distribute a successful vaccine.
Regions with older populations could see disproportionally more cases in later stages of the epidemic, says Eggo; a mathematical model from her team, published in June 18 and based on data from six countries, suggests that the susceptibility to infection in children and people under 20 years old is approximately half that of older adults. There is one thing that every country, city and community touched by the pandemic has in common.
Rahmandad, H. Google Scholar. Your boss and teammates will be more empathetic about your work-life. They will more deeply understand what it takes to orchestrate your personal life from cooking to supporting kids in their school work. In addition, they will have a refreshed level of appreciation for the ways family and friends are critical to life and happiness. Work will become more flexible. Many companies have been resistant to letting employees work from home, but this unexpected global work-from-home experiment has forced companies to accept it as a legitimate option.
Companies have put greater technology systems and support in place to facilitate mobile working. Teams are figuring out how to collaborate at a distance and leaders are improving their ability to manage based on outcomes and objectives rather than presence.
Companies will expand the acceptability of remote work, and they will provide more choice and flexibility to employees to work wherever they can get their best work done, including away from the office.
Your office will get better. When employees go back to the office, employers will be forced to re-think their approach to the workplace. Companies will need to consider enhanced cleaning techniques, more distancing and increased choices for employees across a campus providing places for focus, collaboration, learning, socializing and respite. In addition, all the things employees loved about being home—comfortable places to relax between meetings or personalization for example—will create new demands on the office.
Organizations will have a new appreciation for the importance of the office, the critical nature of face-to-face interactions and the ways their workplaces must support employees. In addition, your company or neighborhood may have upgraded their infrastructures, creating a better pipeline and more streamlined and user-friendly interfaces, making technology easier to live with and ensuring it creates less friction in your day. Speed will increase, and bureaucracy will be reduced.
While these are necessary, the downside can be the unintended slowing of progress and increase in bureaucracy. The COVID crisis has led many companies to reduce or eliminate unnecessary systems and has caused organizations to streamline processes to respond more quickly to coronavirus-based needs.
In addition, many companies have had to delegate decision making to enhance speed—resulting in increased empowerment for employees. Whether they are HR systems, development systems, manufacturing systems or customer-response systems, the ability to respond quickly is likely to have a positive effect in the future.
While working from home or remotely under different scenarios is not perfect or anywhere near as good as it could be, it is here to stay. Many firms are discovering it is very cost-effective. The jury is still out on the true impact of productivity gains or losses due to working from home. This will continue to provide funding for more innovations in the communications technology sector — we are already seeing improved security and some small advances in user interface and user-experience improvements we may finally get real spatialized audio.
We seem to also be getting more serious about security. Longer-term it is clear, of course, that society will continue to increase its dependence on digitally intermediated systems for every facet of life: health care, education, shopping, groceries, entertainment, transportation, work and finance — that trend is unstoppable.
At the same time, we are a social species and we crave social interaction — risks will not sway us. I find it interesting that many modern efficiencies are based on getting many people physically close together. Transportation, sports events, restaurants, education, work teams, hospitals, city parks, gyms, places of worship, Fifth Avenue, etc. Who and where do we each trust to get close to others? How will we meet new people?
Will it be much more localized, like to our neighborhood? I expect a real increase in social isolation, especially for those older, or less tech savvy, or with few resources to connect virtually. From wikis and such to continuous virtual conferencing. I worry about the availability of accessible, stable and secure bandwidth. There are too many dropped calls, glitchy video, audio drops every other word and a lack of scalability for group discussions.
Privacy is also certainly an issue. If these are not addressed well it will increase social isolation. Many jobs are simply disappearing under the twin engines of small-business destruction and enterprise-scale automation. More job providers are already seeking the security of automation to hedge against the next crisis. This will take 10 years at least. With such strong economic challenges, it is unclear if nationalism will retain its influence or if there will be a mandate for a more technocratic and educated leadership.
In short, a five-year horizon will likely still feel disrupted and degraded for most, while a year horizon may see some of the sea changes underway that were only amplified by COVID start to yield meaningful results. There will be a rocky transition to the next stable state. Companies substituting technology machines and algorithms for human labor. We will be able to scale up productivity to new heights by applying software and data to all areas of economic activity.
Tech will also be on the front lines of responding to climate change. But tech will continue to foment huge problems like misinformation and social platforms that drive people apart. And in tech will be the vital ingredient of a new class of weaponry without safeguards to control it well.
It will also be seen in greater social and civic responsibility, including new controls on policing and greater access to services for minorities and underserved populations. And it will be seen in a wider recognition of social responsibility, for example a return to more progressive taxation, especially corporate taxation, as a response to income inequality.
The idea is that instead of depending on a specific social media application to connect with friends and colleagues, people could use the application of their choice and use a common messaging standard. This makes it more difficult for platforms to shape discourse using algorithms and to monetize discourse using tracking and advertising.
The current structure of dialogue and media privileges extreme and provocative content, which tends to polarize society and to make it more difficult to come to consensus on social issues. Discourse that is more cooperative and creative enables constructive responses to be adopted society-wide to pressing issues of the day, including but not limited to equity, environment, prejudice and policing. With common communications protocols, solutions to pressing issues will begin to emerge.
Common protocols also enable greater security, through such mechanisms of zero-knowledge proofs, for example. This allows better insight into the effectiveness of social programs and enables governments and critics to evaluate innovation on more than merely financial or economic criteria. Before the pandemic, there was no incentive to support widely accessible cross-platform video conferencing.
Then we had Zoom, a simple tool everyone could use, and suddenly we could work from home, learn remotely or host conferences online. Having learned how convenient and efficient so many online services have become, we will be much less likely to commute to work, attend residence-based campuses or fly to conferences.
This makes the world of work, learning and commerce much more accessible to large populations who previously did not have the resources to participate, and greatly increases our efficiency and productivity.
When technology divides us, it also disempowers us, as everything about us becomes subservient to the conflict. Our agency, our identity, our activities — all these become the means and mechanisms for one faction to fight the other. These factions may be defined politically or may be defined by class or race, by economic status or by power and control.
Technological dystopia occurs when one faction uses technology against the other, perhaps by means of surveillance and spying, perhaps by means of manipulation and misinformation or ever by means of hacking and disruption. By we will have a clear idea whether we are slipping into technological dystopia. The more difficult we find it to interact on an equal basis with people from other countries, other cultures, other political beliefs or even other platforms or social networks, the less likely we are to be able to find common solutions to global problems.
The more prevalent surveillance and control through technological means becomes, the less likely a less-powerful people can redress the excesses of the more powerful. These, eventually, will manifest in physical symptoms of dystopia: shortages, outages, civil unrest, open conflict. There will be greater societal demands for public health and safety protections supported by governments.
There will be a widespread demand for more effective leadership of government institutions. People will demand more and better leadership traits in their elected leaders. A greater societal awareness of need to rely on truth-telling online, especially the major influential sources Facebook, Twitter, etc.
There will be a movement from the essential lawlessness of the internet to a demand for a more civil and civic discourse approach. Much of the social media space is essentially the Wild West: no laws, no rules, hate speech is permitted if it supports advertising revenues, etc.
Life may seem to speed up, and new technologies that were supposed to still be in development for a decade will become available sooner. In-person social life with a human touch will be restricted and perhaps even mistrusted.
The packed pub or tea house will only be open to those who can provide proof of vaccination. Face coverings will be commonplace, and each person may be embedded with an ID chip that can be tracked on the street. Outward appearances may appear to be the same as today, but the underlying monitoring of each person will be much greater. People will trade privacy for a semblance of the old normal.
People will become more aware of their actions and feelings and be knowledgeable about repercussions. It is possible that brain waves will be used to monitor the emotional space of the public so as to predict behavior of crowds.
We may see new forms of safeguards or barriers in projections via holograms which will also be common at business meetings. People will become more managed, spontaneous behavior will be discouraged, although creativity at work will be encouraged.
Humans will be replaced in many settings by robots, forcing them to compete; economic security may become something of the past unless the state provides universal benefits. People will guard their minds as if they are a gold mine as that will be the ticket to their individual sustainability. Items such as clothing, footwear, nutrition, household goods, vehicles, etc. Waste minimization, safekeeping, comfort, specification and adaptation will be key. Minimizing expenditures will be key for the average working person, hence technologies that assist with that goal to produce the product or service at little cost the consumer will do well, hence the trend to AI-driven technologies for production, etc.
Wearable technologies will be important, as people keep all their possessions close to them for safekeeping, hence there will be more and more micro products and perhaps the use of holograms to assist with screen display. Voice and sound technology will assist the elderly and disabled in a very beneficial manner, as will text-to-speech and speech-to-text.
These applications will be developed further to assist with everyday work productivity. The need to remember things will be something of the past. Data risk management in an ethical manner is critical. Standards will lag behind new technical developments. The even greater risk will be the lack of transparency around emerging technologies, and thus the lack of feedback from the public to mitigate the risks of these new developments until an event occurs.
A few companies will have data concentrated in their hands and any mismanagement, including poor ethical standards, could have serious outcomes. Linear thinking and highly individualistic, reductionist approaches to society and the planet will shift towards communitarianism. The myth of social atomism is being broken and more will observe the harm of that model on individual belonging and health as well as social and planetary cohesion and survival. That being said, privacy will continue to slide away as a mythical value.
Algorithms will continue to rule our lives but will be questioned as to their validity, bias and rules for human appeal. We will also have quickly discovered before that we over-indexed for how we thought the pandemic would change our view towards health in our surroundings.
Instead of the overarching narratives about how offices and architecture will never be the same, we will have found common ground with the human experiences of — where everyone quickly returned to their normal social habits. Cutting down on the need to commute, making schedules flexible and increasing the ability for employees to be caregivers and parents while working will be helpful. The greatest single improvement I hope for is increased access to reliable broadband internet for the purposes of remote work, as well as the more efficient coordination of aid and resources in response to weather crises or public-health crises.
Enabling competition and appropriate government subsidies and other support will likely play a central role in keeping prices down and keeping capacity rising. I worry that processing power and widespread data sharing will make it increasingly easy for individual privacy to be eroded, not least through technologies like facial recognition but also through traffic analysis and aggregation of individual transactional patterns.
The amount of processing power this kind of monitoring and tracking of individuals will require is already here. Even if the impact of medical science on politics may be short-lived and ambiguous, the impact of digital technologies on society is enormous and will continue. Both in the private and the public sectors, in education, health care, research and other areas, organizations of all kinds have realized that home office, virtual delivery of services and products, virtual collaborative work, new work and decentralization function very well and reduce costs as well as solve pressing environmental problems.
This becomes even more apparent when we consider that the shift of more governmental and business activities into the cyber realm will bring greater dangers of cyber criminality and cyber warfare, which in turn demand much greater investments in cybersecurity, or indeed, entirely new concepts of security and accompanying social and organizational changes. There is a clear need to reduce bureaucracy and cut red tape, not only in health care but in all areas of society.
The virus has disabled not only many people, but also many traditional convictions about social and economic order, about the way things have to be done. Already many accuse China of dangerous censorship and secrecy with regard to information about the outbreak. Scientists have joined in a worldwide exchange of data and research. Publishers have torn down paywalls. Open access to information of all kinds is considered a priority.
Intellectual property claims are becoming suspect. Taken together, it appears that in the wake of the pandemic, we are moving faster towards the data-driven global network society than ever before. This information must be analyzed and used as quickly as possible, which spurs on investments in AI and big data analytics. Calls for privacy, for regulation of tech giants and for moratoriums on the deployment of tracking, surveillance and AI are becoming weaker and losing support throughout the world.
Perhaps traditional notions of civil liberties need to be revised and updated for a world in which connectivity, flow, transparency and participation are the major values.
The sections of this report that follow organize hundreds of additional expert quotes under the headings that follow the common themes listed in the tables at the beginning of this report.
Fresh data delivered Saturday mornings. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions.
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