That’s an ambitious headline isn’t it? Yet I think the question is a helpful one. I’m sure Donald Trump and Taylor Swift will have their moments in the headlights. There will be World Cups & another Olympics, there will be outrages, successes, failures, life and death. We know all this, we just don’t know whose life or death, or what exactly will cause the outrage. Most of those events will not change the world or move the needle in any substantive way, they will be blips on the historical record. There are trends, or forces, already at work in the world & they are what will shape your life and the world to come. Some of these are well known and others less so.

Some of these forces will cooperate with each other, some will clash, others will be evident only in some parts of the world and others will shape the whole world whether we like it, or more likely, not.

AI

There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle. As they keep saying, AI is currently as bad as it will ever be, and yes it can still be very bad. We’re approaching super-human driving & maths & it’s getting pretty good at philosophy. Over the next five years AI will get more and more embedded into the things we use every day (the internet, your phone, your TV, your watch, your house, your work, your car) and some of this will be fine and other things not so much. It will cause us huge problems because most of us won’t be able to tell when it’s wrong and our trust in it will be far too high. There will be so many ways this technology could exploit the vulnerable (and we’ll all be vulnerable sooner or later). Deadbots anyone? AI is already in the religious space and we will also lose out at church when AI sermon generators really get going. I’m expecting at some point a correction, probably not a crash, in the AI market as investors cool on it a little but probably not so very much.

Populations Declining & Ageing

Currently there is no evidence to show that this is changing. Instead the opposite, the trend seems to be accelerating and spreading leaving policymakers confounded. Basically after a long population boom this has almost topped out and in most countries there aren’t enough babies being born. This coupled with longer life spans and often long years of being unhealthy stresses health & welfare systems. You need enough workers paying taxes and being economically productive to support children at school and increasingly retired people going to the doctors a lot.

For the last decade or so governments have responded with the only viable solution: immigration. There is no shortage of people in different parts of the world looking for a shot at life in the richer bits. They still don’t have any better options. So expect the cultural aspects to rise, anti-immigration parties to continue to thrive in an environment of grievance and for immigration to continue unabated.

One theory is that the path to starting a family is now extremely difficult. Finding a good partner is hard, buying a home in which to have a family is harder still, persuading women to give up the life they had been promised without the ‘burden’ of motherhood is trickier still.

The future has a lot less people in it.

Migration

This is linked to the above trend. There are many, many governments facing the twin pincers of falling birth rates and ageing populations. Where they previously had five workers to pay for a pensioner now they’ll only have two. But being for migration is often extremely unpopular but believing your government is deliberately lying to you about it is even more unpopular. And an election campaign of managing your nations slow decline is hardly inspiring. Unless you can crack the birth rate conundrum (and no one outside of Africa has yet) then all you are left with is a choice between extremely unpopular social reforms or extremely unpopular immigration policies.

The other key factor is that there is only region of the world that is primed to export human capital at scale and that is Africa. The question then is to what extent will Africa influence the rest of the world?

The end of transgenderism

I mean not totally but as a political force. At least that’s the claim that Louise Perry makes. The tide is turning and the conflicts of holding a patently irrational position seems to be unsustainable. There has been significant cooling of government’s enacting pro-trans policies, the Cass review showed the trans-emperor had no clothes and no one liked what they were looking at. The stories and legal cases of people harmed by it, primarily teenage girls with mental health instability, are rising and we’ll hear more of them. The people who most benefited from the changes (middle-age men) get exposed for their reliance on extremely male-coded tactics to win. At the same time the support of someone like JK Rowling and the canary issue of women’s sports is slowly shifting public perception. In the US the politically devastating Trump slogan, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” means it will be increasingly unlikely that politicians (a group not known for their moral backbone in the face of unpopularity polls) are going to die on this hill.

This is interesting because it suggests, at the very least, a limit to the progressive regressive agenda and that may be its first substantial setback in 50 years.

The culture of death spreads

This one has a way to go to before (or if) we see any change of course. Western governments are still dominated by the ‘choice’ philosophy (see above) but on this one largely feel they have public support. Abortion rights will remain firmly entrenched and may get written into some constitutions but also expect euthanasia programs to expand, spread, and become normalized.

In one sense it is a perfectly rational policy in the light of ageing populations and over burdened healthcare systems and it is one that can be marketed as both compassionate and liberal. It’s a win-win. Unless of course you happen to be someone slowly manipulated into an early death.

From a Christian point of view we have an opportunity to put clear differences between ourselves and our secular neighbours. As Stanley Hauerwas famously said, “I’d say, in 100 years, if Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we would have been doing something right. I think in the name of compassion, we’re living in a social order that will increasingly not know what to do with those born dying.”

What have I missed?

There’s a case to be made for topics like war, nationalism, polarization, climate all to be included but maybe there’s something else you see at work in the world. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.