We’re lining up a new of futurism Brain Parades this November and we’re kicking it off with a series of Pet predictions.

Putting aside a comprehensive vision of the future, do you have a single “pet prediction” of something that you think might happen over the next decade or two?

The weather was crap today so I’m going to fire off a cynical one on the west’s collective response to Global Warming. Assuming that we’re not headed for an immediate Lovelock style catastrophe and that the next decade or two sees the west suffering very few adverse effects to Global Warming (and in some cases such as the English wine industry some benefits) then I expect that our response to Global Warming is going to largely consist of gesture politics. I just can’t see the west making a combination of massive capitol outlays and lifestyle sacrifices until such a time that it becomes painfuly obvious that Global Warming is going to hurt them. I’m very skeptical of Lovelock’s The End is Night prognosis but I think he’s ring on one score, the Developing world isn’t our problem, we’re theirs.

On the plus side I suspect we’ll probably switch away from fossil fuels by 2050. Fossil fuels will simply not be able to remain cost competitive or viable by then.

Now onto our commentators:

I predict that the birth rate in industrialized countries will
decrease dramatically as the socially-networked adults of the future opt for raising virtual progeny in fully immerse online worlds (the derivatives of SecondLife and World of Warcraft) rather than going through the commitment and stress of doing so in meat space. My 8 year old already prefers her Nintendog to the real thing…
Jonas Lamis, Founder of Singularity University

Young people everywhere will be grossed out to discover that the world’s largest population of “swinging singles” will be over age 65. The Boom generation is aging in a healthy way all over the world, and between divorce and the death of a spouse, single retirees will be looking for companionship.

Since pregnancy will not be an issue, carelessness on the part of older lovers will lead to increased rates of sexually transmitted disease. This will then cause both contraceptive companies and drug manufacturers to focus on the geriatric sexual health market. And teenagers everywhere will hate to watch those commercials. [Ack, in twenty years I’ll be that target market. Here’s hoping those pills work wonders. - Ed]

Daughters, lock up your mothers.

Eric Garland (Washington, DC) is a professional futurist. He is an advisor to executives at top corporations and government agencies as an expert in futures research and competitive intelligence. His dozens of major clients include Ford, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Wyeth, and Goodyear.

There’s more predictions to come as I’m in the process of asking this question of people in all kinds of fields. But I’m going to leave you today with a link I poached off Velcro City Tourist Board. It looked like one of Science Fiction’s cheesiest predictions might in fact me coming true. Remember the non sentient computers that gave plain english answers to to plain english questions? My favourite example was the computer named “Mother” in Alien where the captain would have to venture into a special room to talk to the computer and get spooky advice. Apparently in Space not only can you not hear screams, it’s also a bitch to set up LANs.

Anyways… apparently researchers are having sucess with a system that gives semantic answers to questions based on mining the the world wide web. This could get very weird and wonderful. Let’s hope it’s more useful than Ask.com.

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