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Stance: Progressive global taxation of all wealth
Social issue in the future: If the planet's ecosystems and the capitalist trends permit it, the vast majority of humans will demand global taxation of all wealth. Some extractive and regressive pockets will fight to the death for that not to happen.
Almost all our social systems are built on the young providing for the old under the assumtion of generations growing. The population collapse we're currently starting will be the biggest issue in the future. (alongside the loneliness epidemic, but that's a different issue entirel)
We're in for a like a 45% reduction in generation size each generation. And this trend is only increasing rapidly. All the causes of this are deeply entrenched economically and socially, so we won't be able to turn them around on a dime.
Unless we find some social, economic or technological solutions, we are all majorly screwed. Eveyone who won't die within the next 30 years or so will be majorly affected by it.
And no, immigration can't fix it long term, because all the rest of the world is experiencing the same thing. They are just at different stages. India, China, the Americas, Europe are below replacement rate and dropping. All the other regions are are slightly above replacement rates and dropping, except Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan African women are having one less child every 10 years, so they will be below replacement rates within a generation. More and more people having internet access will only rapidly increase these trends.
So in 20-30 years, it'll be a zero sum game who can most effectively steal each other's populations.
The only groups that are still growing normally are highly conservative religious groups. Israel is one of the only developed countries that still have normal fertility rates, and they are slowly being taken over by the ultra orthodox.
Maybe life extension or AI can save us, while generally keeping the social order in tact. But all the other solutions don't look very appealing. You could have A Handmaiden's Tale, or government/corpo created babies with artificial wombs, like Bladerunner or Brave New World...
You can't run a society on old people and for those saying it's good because climate change, you won't be able to fix climate change if everyone is in total chaos and only concerend with immediate survival. It'll be like "everything is fucked and YOU want US to stop burning coal, yeah nah".
Well maybe it won't be that bad, but it'll certainly be a huge social issue.
The right to work from home. Many people have jobs they could do from home if their employers would let them, and I think people will be granted the right to choose in at least some countries/sectors.
On a more personal level, I think (or hope) access to education and work for people with disabilities, is something that will improve a lot in my country. There are currently a lot of barriers and counterproductive laws, that I think will be viewed as inhumane in the future.
I'm thinking all current issues will boil down to 1 major issue, to many humans on to little space. The human race is still growing in numbers while the livable space on earth is diminishing fast (even simply ignoring the dwindling clean fresh water supply and options to grow food). Either we need to stop the growth or get off this rock.
As loads of humans still think that nature doesn't include them and they are not part of the diminishing biodiversity, it doesn't look good for the foreseeable future. Maybe in a few centuries when we're either down to 1-2 billion (or less) or have spread out into the universe.
I think owning animals as pets will be seen as barbaric and similar to 19th century slavery is seen to us today. We take a conscious being and force it to be our plaything against its will.
I don't really care very much but I'm guessing where society is heading it will become an issue.
Of course privacy will be a big one. Very soon interrogation rooms will have advanced mind reading devices powered by AI. If a judge signs a warrant for your phone data, why can't they sign one for your mental data?
We already have the mechanisms in place and the technology while at its fledgling stages shows that it is certainly possible. Right now they need to scan your brain for a while and feed lots of data to an AI model and its limited to specific applications. But conceivably we are not that far away from total mind-reading like we see in the second half of 1984.
Maybe I'm too prone to conspiracy beliefs but I think federal government likely already has this technology.
