The world is a scary place right now. I can honestly say that I’ve never lived through a time where humanity faces such huge challenges.
Here are 7 reasons why the world is such a frightening place at this moment:
Increasing Inequality & The Cost of Living Crisis
I’ve written before about the ever increasing gap between the richest and the poorest in society (see Inequality: Making Society as a Whole Poorer). Any capitalist society seems to be destined to end up were the rich get everything – all the money, resources, property, all the assets.
To add to increasing inequality, The Cost of Living Crisis has also come along and shows no signs of ever leaving. These are both driven by that human quality: Greed. It seems for some people, enough is never enough.
Increased Control By The Powerful
It’s happening everywhere. The powerful, who rather uncoincidentally are also the extremely wealthy, are using technology to gain more control over others. This includes big multinational companies, Governments and other institutions/organisations. It feels like basic freedoms are being eroded and I think that once they’re gone, we’ll never get them back. These controls are also likely to be abused or misused by the powerful.
Depleted Resources
The world is running out of resources. Things like food, water, housing and fuel are becoming depleted. There’s absolutely no way that these resources will stretch to provide for the whole ever-growing global population.
This means that in the near future (perhaps a few years from now) there will be less available resources and many more people requiring them. If we look back at human history, in times like these conflicts arise between peoples and a lot of death follows as people fight for scarce resources.
Global Warming
Global Warming could add to humanity’s problems, by raising sea levels and putting more land under water. This would impact coastal nations initially, but eventually impact everyone. More land would be under the sea, depleting land mass and the resources we get from the land.
AI
AI (Artificial Intelligence) will continue to develop until it potentially becomes sentient, smarter and more efficient than any human. This will fundamentally change life for all. There could be some benefits, but there most certainly will be drawbacks.
In economic terms, why pay a person for their work when AI can do it quicker and better than a human? What will humans do to earn money in a capitalist society when AI-powered robots replace them?
Mass Immigration
Mass immigration could occur for a number of different reasons in the near future. Whilst not all immigration is bad, mass immigration – the movement of millions or hundreds of millions of people in a short space of time (say just a few years) would be a massive challenge for wherever they migrated to.
Aggression
We have already witnessed Russian aggression towards Ukraine. Aggression could happen in pockets arounds the world, or there could be a global conflict. The causes of such aggression and conflict could be one of the issues above or something else entirely. But aggression leads to war, death and humans exploiting other humans. It is never good.
We also carry the risk of destroying ourselves and parts of the planet through use of nuclear weapons. However, most experts think that this is unlikely to happen, as if you nuke a place it makes it unlivable and contaminates available resources.
Rather worryingly, all of these issues are global and affect everyone. They’re also complex, meaning that there aren’t any easy answers to these challenges. If we want to survive and thrive as a species, humanity must learn to overcome its differences and work together. We will need our brightest minds to work on and solve these problems. As the problems are global, so must the solutions be, with worldwide buy in by everyone.
When I were younger, I would have ended this blog post on a positive note, by writing about hope. But at thirty-nine years old the challenges seem insurmountable. Especially for a species that is divided in so many different ways.
Write soon,
Antony
