A Centrist View of the Future

From someone with questionable centrist credentials who is just as bad at predicting the future as you

It is prediction season, Look-Forward and Look-Back Time.

Here are mine. I am poorly qualified to offer these, but so are most of the prognosticators who have deployed their click bait under you nose. I promise that mine is worth reading because, along with having no authority to predict, I am attempting to not write wish-fulfillment nor anxiety-script. Instead, I am considering what I know and they way I think systems work. This will be a bit different sort of prediction blog from an under qualified hack.

Aspects of Centrism for this little project

Interchanges such as between beliefs, groups, and times
Trust in the delegated responsibility necessary in civil society
Strong opinions held loosely

And now the predictions

Prediction: Art

Great films, books, and visuals are being made right now that you will soon get to see. More and more great works of our time will be emerging.

It has been a great few years for some of the arts. Artists have produced some of the best books and movies of my lifetime in the shadow of authoritarianism, human substitution, digital debasement, and global disease. They will continue to do so.

The bubbling cauldron is making our next batch of talent. As much toxicity and addiction as there is on social media systems like Substack, there are also great writers making their learning mistakes very effectively. Some of them will rise from this mire and make meaningful works that endure.

Prediction: Democracy

The American Republic will stand and bend back toward Democracy.

Writing this is difficult and against my instincts. It helps me understand why politicians say such silly things in their predictions. As an activist, I feel a desire to not tell you that everything will be more OK in the future.

I would prefer to say that it will be determined by your action. Because it does. If you are afraid or passive, Democracy will not survive. The Fascist moments rely on us shrinking from their power.

But you won’t. That is my prediction. You will foster your bravery and find energy and display your will for a free society. That is what people have done historically and that is what people around you are doing.

Prediction: AI

AI will be useful and cost effective, though also used for a bunch of evil stuff like marketing intelligence.

First, a short lesson for Sam Altman from the show Silicon Valley.

The habit of over-leveraging and making yourself the Buzz Aldrin moonshot captain of whatever industry one is CEOing within is high risk and generally not good for the other humans around you.

Now, I am not going to predict the outcome of markets. I will say that it is irresponsible and tragic that people feel a need to undermine what is sanitarily called our economic system but is in fact the well being, health, and potential happiness of millions of their fellow humans.

Instead of predicting intangible stock market outcomes, I predict that tools using the outcome of neural net language models (the underlying process of making ChatGPT and the other LLMs you use) have a place in our tech future.

Eventually there will be some actually good designers, software makers, researchers, and business people who will create things using language models and machine learning.

User interfaces, for instance. You could use normal language to control complicated software. That is a big problem everywhere. We try to use credit card company web portals to redeem our points. We try to do some unusual process with our small business accounting software. We go to a government website to get a permit application.¹

AI will still be also used for nasty businesses like tracking us and chasing after us. Every technology will until we create a right to privacy.

Prediction: Society

We will learn and teach habits for maintaining society amidst the surrounding technology.

I don’t need to support this claim. It is a waste of my time and yours. You either believe in the ability of humans and society to find beneficial equilibrium or you believe in the fallacious Stanford Prison Experiment and the thin veneer model of humanity.

If you believe in the former, you know that we modify how we live to keep society civil. “We” have modified how “we” function for technology before: cars, printing, currency. We do lose a lot of our natural experience each time but refashion civil society and maintain a space where it is possible to live beautifully and create beauty.

We will keep doing that.

Prediction: Billionaires

The wealth divide will somewhat recede sometime in the future.

I have been listening to a fabulous podcast, “The Rest is History.” in which two blokes with alluring British accents jabber through the stories of Queen Elizabeth, Ancient Greece, and Victorian England. One thing that I have noted (other than how I giggle whenever they say “that’s bonkers”) is that all emperors and kings and oligarchs fear the people and try to keep them happy.

We are not happy, and we have a whole lot more power than the folks Emperor Augustus was wary of. We won’t stand for nesting yachts for long.

And Flying Cars

Of course, we will all get flying cars in the future. I am certain of it. Absolutely certain. No doubt in my mind.

See you in the future

I hope these predictions are enjoyable to read. Most of the scrying you read are from a person who has a dog in the fight, a reason to look at the future one way or another. They are CEOs of a company selling you on their future. They are political figures selling you a fearful future for them to save you from.

I am both of these, on a very small scale, so equally untrustworthy. Maybe you are disappointed that I am so pessimistic. Maybe you think I am a sucker to be so optimistic. Whatever. I put this article together not with a mind of what I want but of what I see through a centrist lens; a lens that takes in as many light sources as possible rather than starting with a thesis.

Regardless of how accurate I am, I hope we can all work together to make life more pleasant for more people. For that, I look to our interchanges, build trust with the delegations we need for a civil society, and hold my strong opinions loosely.

Joel Byron Barker is the author of the novel Clear and Sane: The Craft of The Green Paintbrush which you might enjoy reading the first chapter of for free.

1. Hopefully government AI interface applications don’t come about until we have something far more reliable and accountable than anything I have seen so far.