Random Thoughts And Predictions

* Fraternity gang rape was a widely acknowledge problem thirty-five years ago when I was in college. Apparently, nothing has changed.

* People in the developed and developing world are having fewer children. The extent to which this is happening and the pace at which this is happening is something that most people, even educated elites, don't fully really comprehend. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Resources will be spread over fewer people, allowing the people who are around to face less scarcity. But I'm not sure anyone has really carefully thought through how it will change society, even though, in a lot of ways, it is a very predictable thing.

* One counterbalancing factor is that I don't think people really appreciate the extent to which medical advances will transform society either. People will live longer and will be healthier during their lives. Sickness and injury, even old age, are fundamentally solvable problems.

* Much of Africa, and pockets like Afghanistan and Gaza elsewhere, are still basically undeveloped. But those pockets will predictably experience economic development and demographic transitions too, just a bit later than the rest of the world. Indeed, the rate at which they experience economic development, once it really gets going, may actually be faster, because they can learn from the rest of the world's experience.

* Fossil fuels will become irrelevant, or at least much less economically important, with renewables, a mild resurgence of nuclear power, and EVs. This will topple a lot of autocracies. This will allow global warming to level off - still at a much hotter level, but that trend won't continue forever.

* The U.S. may be a generation or two behind Western Europe in secularizing, but its getting there. How will Christianity transform as it becomes a minority religion despite being the plurality religion of theists in the U.S. for the foreseeable future?

* Maybe AI will be a transformative technology, maybe it won't. Ditto for quantum computing. 

* There will be bumps along the way, but we do seem to be on a path towards mass production scale self-driving vehicles that make a large share of all vehicles.

* So far, the path towards urbanization has been steady for two or three centuries. Will remote work change that? I don't think that remote work is going away and I expect it will only become more common.

* Will falling birth rates take the economic pressure off of a switch away from red meat, which takes the most land and water per pound of any kind of food?

* Climate change should eventually push people away from the Southern U.S. and further north, particularly to the water rich Midwest.

* It won't take too many generations for mixed race "mutts" to become the norm and for single race people to become much less common, and this will probably drive changes in the way that we classify race socially. In much the same way that Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, English, and Scottish people all collapsed into a broad "white" category in which lots of white people don't even know which European countries were home to their ancestors, I think that we'll see similar collapsing of categories now thought of as distinct into a general "brown" category that is a bit analogous to mestizos in Mexico, but with significant East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian contributions in addition to European and Native America, and with non-negligible African ancestry contributions.

* We've seen the future of war in Ukraine. It is hard to say if it will be stabilizing or destabilizing. What does equilibrium look like in a spy v. spy escalation of drones and AI?