Future Progress: Our Current Comforts Are Poverty by Tomorrow's Standards

Humanity today enjoys unprecedented comfort, a stark contrast to past centuries. We possess amenities like electricity, running water, climate control, and abundant food, conveniences unimaginable to most in 1800. Yet, our current comfort may someday be viewed as a form of relative impoverishment. If technological progress continues its exponential trajectory, our descendants could live lives of unimaginable richness, perhaps recoiling at the thought of us succumbing to cancer, toiling in factories, or losing homes to natural disasters. This highlights a crucial point: our collective vision for the future often remains modest, focused on mitigating negatives rather than boldly pursuing positive, transformative advancements.

What if we dared to dream bigger? History shows that what once seemed like science fiction—from heavier-than-air flight to handheld communicators—can become reality. Moreover, seemingly minor conveniences compound over time to create profound societal shifts, just as incremental agricultural improvements eradicated famine. A truly ambitious future would involve humanity achieving comprehensive mastery over nature itself, across multiple domains.

Consider mastery over biology. We are already making strides against leading causes of death like cancer and heart disease, with future breakthroughs potentially involving advanced therapies or direct DNA editing. Genetic and neurodegenerative diseases could be eradicated, and metabolic conditions overcome. Beyond curing illness, we could unlock optimal nutrition and end pandemics through technologies like Far-UVC light or advanced immune system augmentation. The ultimate biological frontier lies in curing aging itself, granting individuals indefinite healthy lifespans. This mastery extends to human enhancement, potentially elevating average individuals to exceptional levels of strength, intelligence, and resilience, and optimizing crops, livestock, or even synthesizing entirely new foods and materials.

Mastery over information, driven by artificial intelligence, promises a new economic era. AI could democratize professional services, making top-tier legal or medical advice accessible to nearly everyone. Personalized AI tutors could tailor education to each student’s interests and pace, maximizing individual potential. Creative endeavors, from filmmaking to music, could become vastly more accessible, while language barriers might dissolve entirely through universal real-time translation. Mathematical challenges could be “completed” through computation, and a new generation of robotics, combined with advanced AI, could automate virtually all physical labor. Beyond screens, AI could integrate into wearable devices or even brain-computer interfaces, extending our cognitive abilities.

Our mastery over space would redefine human mobility and reach. Just as powered vehicles dramatically shrunk travel times on Earth, future advancements could usher in supersonic passenger flight and personal “flying cars,” combining convenience with unprecedented speed. Autonomous vehicles, already demonstrating superior safety, could transform ground and air transport. Beyond Earth, rocketry is finally surging forward, driven by innovations like SpaceX, dramatically lowering launch costs to potentially $10 per kilogram. While current economic incentives for space remain limited, the inherent human drive for exploration will inevitably propel us beyond Earth orbit.

Achieving such ambitions demands immense mastery over energy. Historically, energy consumption has been viewed with skepticism, but from a techno-humanist perspective, energy is the fundamental enabler of progress. Stagnation in energy per capita, observed since the 1970s, correlates with broader economic stagnation. With abundant energy, we could solve global water crises through desalination, and overcome material resource limitations by extracting elements from common clays or even landfills, ensuring no shortage of any resource. Greater energy density also enables the creation of lighter, tougher materials. The rapid growth of AI and robotics, projected to consume significant portions of global electricity—with AI alone potentially drawing 12 terawatts if it reaches a 100-to-1 ratio to humans—underscores this need. Such a future necessitates a transition beyond finite fossil fuels towards superabundant sources like solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy.

This leads to mastery over matter, culminating in atomically precise manufacturing, or nanotechnology. Imagine machine parts as individual molecules, or complex robots the size of cells. This technology could enable everyday objects to shape-shift, integrate vast computing power, and even synthesize goods directly from raw materials. In medicine, nanobots could perform non-invasive surgery, repair tissues, destroy cancer, and enhance our natural biological functions, potentially granting immunity to all infectious diseases. Super-strong materials like graphene, hundreds of times stronger than steel, could facilitate monumental structures, such as a 100-kilometer-tall “space pier” for ultra-cheap space launches, or even a fleet of stratospheric diamond balloons to precisely regulate Earth’s climate.

Finally, mastery over environment would see our ambitions scale to the planetary level. We could control weather patterns for optimal agriculture and eliminate hazards like hurricanes. We could reshape landscapes and waterways, clean all pollutants from air, water, and soil, and protect or even “de-extinct” species. Ultimately, this mastery could extend beyond Earth, enabling the terraforming of other planets, creating entirely new, thriving ecosystems.

This comprehensive mastery over nature would usher in a life free from pain, suffering, and death, yet it would not be a static utopia. The ideal future is not a final, problem-free state, but a dynamic “protopia”—a continuous process of improvement, always better than yesterday. In such a world, people would not be idle but would pursue knowledge, create art, explore the galaxy, solve increasingly luxurious problems,