In a series of lectures given sixty years ago, Frank Kermode spoke of the connection between the stories we tell to understand our world and our conception of the nature of time, and how the structure of our fictions tends to mirror the structures we believe to be fact. Some cultures view time as a series of repeating patterns, whereas others, notably the Western tradition influenced by Jewish and Christian thought, view time as having a definite beginning, middle, and end. The Bible starts in a garden and ends in a city: the creation myth and the prophesy of the apocalypse are the twin narrative devices that have given our culture its strong underlying sense of progress, from time’s start to its finish.
The theory that history is heading towards a terminal crisis, does not fit comfortably with the modern scientific perspective. While the universe might have started with an intense bang and might be moving towards a uniformly entropic collapse, these moments are unimaginably remote from us in time and cannot provide a suitable frame of reference by which to understand our history: they might constitute a beginning and an end, but they are not our beginning or our end. Having discovered a few hundred years ago that our planet is not the centre of its own solar system, we are slowly coming to terms with the knowledge that our history is not central to the story of the universe: is meaningful for us, but marginal in the wider context.
If we consider the way living forms evolve, adapting to the changing nature of their habitats to improve their chances of survival, and the way that social forms tend to mimic these biological processes (albeit through different causal mechanisms), this suggests an approach to history that describes the steady flow of time, but in which the flux of distinct eras are mere simplifying devices. We live in a permanent haze of perpetual change – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – in which it is unclear which contemporary variations in human society are superficial and transient and which are deep and lasting. Guesswork must suffice. My best guess is that the current rate of gradual historical change is a little faster than average, and I plan to draw attention to three ways in which incremental – but relentless – global changes will influence the future of economic and social life.
First, we are in the early stages of a green energy revolution that will give rise to a green industrial revolution. One of the great virtues of green energy is its cleanliness compared with carbon fuels and this feature is a motivating reason for hastening the transition to renewable energy. We should be moving faster and more comprehensively to net-zero economies to limit the hazardous impacts of climate change, and the growing costs of mitigating them. In the long run, perhaps more importantly, green energy is rapidly becoming much cheaper and more abundant than carbon and this has significant consequences for the global economy. The invention of coal-powered steam engines in the eighteenth century provoked dramatic social and economic change. Since then, growth in production has been consistently higher than in previous centuries, leading to huge improvements in the length and quality of human lives. Access to novel cheap energy sources allows human societies to switch their focus to other activities, suggesting that we are on the cusp of a step-change increase in economic growth. Abandoning horses for combustion engines at the start of the twentieth century led to huge productivity gains in farming and transport, so too switching from carbon to renewables will provide enormous gains in output that will make the world much richer than before.
There is solid evidence that we will be able to capture vast amounts of solar, wind, and tidal energy to produce power for domestic and commercial consumption at lower prices than carbon, and with fewer pollutants. While these new technologies require increases in storage capacity, they will lead to lower transport costs, which will support a decentralised global energy revolution. Cheap, abundant energy will allow for new manufacturing techniques using local (often recycled) materials and digital three-dimension printing technology that will reduce our reliance on cement, steel, and plastics. We will be able to make materials closer to where they are needed, using design programmes which can be shared easily and cheaply. As labour declines in importance as a limiting factor of production – in the same way that land has already done so – the key drivers of economic growth will be innovative ideas and financial capital, both of which can be moved around the world digitally, which means almost instantaneously and almost for free.
There are challenges, including overcoming those vested interests that would prefer to keep burning coal, oil, and gas, who are the intellectual descendants of those who vowed never to get off their horses and into a car, a bus, or a train. Energy grids in most countries have been designed around the fuels of the past, and need to be recalibrated for the fuels of the future. Growing demand – especially from data centres – means that the transformation of energy infrastructure is taking place during a time of limited spare capacity. As recent problems in Spain and Portugal showed us, as we become more dependent on electricity we need to make the distribution networks more robust, with an amply supply of back-up power. In short, we need to invest capital now to create the systems that will support this green energy revolution, knowing that enormous benefits will flow for many decades. Just as mid-nineteenth century investment was obsessed by railway-mania, so mid-twenty-first century capital investment will become dominated by renewables-mania.
Second, the development of artificial intelligence capabilities will rapidly lower the demand for certain forms of human work. Just as machines and factories replaced much repetitive hand-made production, and word-processors and computers replaced repetitive office work, so the new software programmes will replace many forms of intellectual activity that are repetitive and predictable. Jobs such as writing code, medical diagnosis, driving vehicles, fund management, engineering design, legal advice, data analysis, auditing, and so on, are all going to be done by machines, faster, cheaper, and with fewer errors. The introduction of physical robots has reduced the need for many blue-collar manufacturing jobs, and the introduction of AI bots will soon reduce the need for many white-collar professional jobs. The work remaining for people will be creative tasks – that is, the ability to know when the rules should not be followed – and person-centred service delivery – that is, the ability to show empathy and sensitivity to others.
These have always been the most highly rewarding jobs, if not the most highly paid in money terms. Now they will become the only jobs for most people. The growth industries of the future requiring human workers are the creative industries and the social care professions: old people’s centres, reading groups, restaurants, dance classes, therapies and counselling, music lessons, gardening, and gallery and museum tours. In addition, since the green industrial revolution will raise living standards globally and the AI revolution will reduce working hours, there will be a new category of work that comprises finding ways to occupy the substantial amounts of free time that most people will have. Leisure and tourism will boom.
Regulating what the machines are doing will require significant public policy effort. There is always a risk that the benefits of new sources of wealth are captured by an elite, rather than being made easily and cheaply available for the benefit of all. The timeframe from some new activity being the preserve of the elite to its becoming widely available to all is now very short. International leisure travel used to be restricted to “the jet set”, but today budget airlines carry millions of ordinary people to sunny beaches or busy cities for holidays, and there are as many Asians visiting Europe as Europeans visiting Asia. Likewise, only a few years ago smartphones were for busy executives, who liked to answer emails while waiting to board long-haul flights, but now they are ubiquitous on buses and trains, used by schoolchildren and pensioners alike. My guess, therefore, is that the benefits of AI will quickly be democratised and the ownership will be nationalised, to protect a key economic utility. The elites will have to find other sources of status confirmation.
Third, while there will be fewer goods flowing around the world, people will continue to do so in increasing numbers. Migration for work, plus tourism, plus flight from war, are already being supplemented by climate-driven mass population movements. Growing areas of the world are becoming too hot or too wet for sustainable human habitation, and at the same time developed economies are short of workers and tax-payers, as their populations age. They are also short of babies, as birth rates fall well below the level needed for societies to reproduce themselves. (It is possible that the green revolution in growth might provide the tax revenues sufficient for generous public childcare provision which, together with shorter working hours, might make parenthood more attractive than it has been recently.)
As people move, they integrate and intermarry, leading to a more rapid mixing of genetic material. Originally, we all came from Africa, but some groups have been stuck in the same place for so long that they have confusedly come to believe that superficial differences – in skin, hair, or eye colour – represent deeper differences in identity. Neither our blood nor our soil makes us who we are, for if we are human we are all of the same race. As people continue moving and mixing there will be growing variation in surface features and the gradual erosion of traditional identities. Soon, it will not be possible to know much about someone’s place of birth or upbringing simply by looking at a picture of them. And the fallacious idea that people who look a certain way belong at a certain level in the social hierarchy, will not survive the exponential rise of miscegenation.
In short, combining these three guesses, I think we are heading for a richer, greener future, with more leisure hours and greater mixing and jumbling of peoples and identities. Since I suspect the trend towards the growth of urban life will also continue, it seems appropriate to describe our future as a sustainable, diverse, digital cosmopolitanism. At this point, I anticipate that more than a few of my regular readers will tell me that my forecast of highly-creative, care-centred, multi-racial, urban societies, enjoying improved standards of living because of our green-powered economies, does not reflect our current experience of global politics.
But, I reply, appearances are often deceptive. Being a species of story-tellers, we humans find it far easier to concentrate our attention on spectacular moments rather than the small incremental changes that are less easily observable. Trying to discern the slow but steady melody of change is not an easy task, but we must not let the noise of daily news distract us from the signal of history.
Denying climate science and investing new resources in extractive carbon energy sources will not derail the green energy revolution, which is going to happen regardless of executive orders, except that now Europe and China will lead it. And, irrespective of what the Silicon Valley oligarchy believes, the AI revolution will primarily destroy the jobs of degree-educated professionals working in science and technology, shifting the labour premium into the humanities and the arts. Building social media platforms and running venture capital firms will be done much better and for lower cost by robots. And no-one is going to want ‘masculine energy’ in the office when a digital assistant will be cheaper, quicker, more reliable, and less likely to bully or assault you. As for human migration and ethnic mixing, no amount of wall building, visa restrictions, and deportation flights will be sufficient to stop the flows of people moving from one location to another, in search of work, safety, peace, opportunity, and love. Fantasies about racial purity and hierarchy are no match for human desire and ingenuity. Shutting down government diversity programmes is easy, stopping the spread of human diversity is impossible.
We live, as ever, in a time of gradual and somewhat random evolution, driven by changing productive capacities and the new economic and social relationships they promote. Today we are moving slightly faster than usual, and headed towards a period when we will increasingly be freed from the burden of spending our time and energy making stuff that we don’t need. Therefore we will be able to focus more on enjoying the great variety of human company and associated leisure activities. Some will scroll endlessly on their phones, while others will enjoy an abundance of opera, novels and art galleries. Whatever we choose to do, we will be able to share our enthusiasms with an increasingly diverse range of neighbours.
Learning to become successful idlers is the next great socialisation challenge for the human race.