Scenario 511

I engage with a few members of a group out of Scotland known as the International Futures Forum (IFF).  Among other things we discuss what the future of humanity might, could, and perhaps should look like.  I have a good friend who does very impressive work looking at the future through the lens of energy and materials.  My pre-retirement engagement with this group was pretty weak, but I’m hoping to step that up now that I have different constraints on my time.  What follows is a submission for their consideration.

When I was 12 years old, in addition to stock market paper trading, I engaged in an exercise to graph world population growth.  This was well before the Internet.  In those days it required painstakingly extracting data from various editions of the World Almanac and sketching on engineering graph paper.  Unfortunately, those sketches are probably lost to the ravages of time unless they’re in a box somewhere, but I’ve always been interested in viewing the future through the lens of population.

One of the frameworks that the IFF uses is the Three Horizons Model. This is a somewhat more formal approach to a generalization that I made while working; all planning roadmaps follow the pattern of now, next, and someday.  Looking at the future through the lens of human population using the three horizons model I’ve crafted the scenario sketched here. 

Scenario 511

This is almost certainly not the future, but it is a plausible one.  The point of scenario work after all is not to predict the future, it’s just to be less surprised when you get there.  I've dubbed this Scenario 511 to give it a handle that minimizes any weighting that a "Scenario A" or "Scenario 1" might impose.  I'm looking forward to contrasting scenarios emerging.  I've thought of several just sketching this one out.

The point of this scenario exercise for me is to examine the relationship between overall human population and the three-horizon model.  It seems like aggregate population may be a trailing indicator of where we're at in this timeline. My friend Nancy provided me with some population growth graphs that seem to me to capture the essence of the feedback loop that enables a form of increasing efficiency in H1. 

(Chart from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#/media/File:Population_curve.svg)

Without balancing forces human population growth would asymptotically approach vertical where the total population of humans would dramatically increase from one moment to the next.  I suppose this could be viewed as an aspect of Kurzweil's singularity.  Playing it out would be a very interesting and informative scenario exercise that might inform a lot of the decisions that we make today.  Its greatest benefit might be to give us a better handle on what absurdity really looks like.

I'm not aware of any real-world system that doesn't have balancing forces. There are no straight lines in nature.  In fact, an exponential curve is an exponential curve because a balancing force exists (otherwise it would be a vertical line).  The real question is are there forces of moderation that eventually balance and then counteract the forces of growth.  If there was only one, then you might end up with a nice clean S-Curve perhaps stabilizing in some plateau or eventually declining.  I'll assert for now that there are many increasingly forceful balancing forces (and many secondary growth forces) that are out of phase.  This creates the chaos at the top of my scenario curve and some of the chaos in the actual population growth curves.  It's interesting to observe that energy enabled technology is the fuel for the increasing potency of these various forces (e.g. agriculture, manufacturing, communication, transportation, etc. for growth, global transportation for pandemics, social media for rampant stupidity, etc.).    This oscillatory/chaotic phase could plausibly go on for an indefinite period of time.  This, too, would be an interesting scenario to play out. My guess is that we might tag it "Peak Human Misery".  Wellbeing from one time period to the next would be very uncertain even though there would be a mix of good times and bad times.

The steep decline in the latter half of H2 would be the result of a balancing force that overwhelms the growth forces that have maintained the chaotic level but would also not cause extinction.  Examples might include certain impacts with celestial bodies of just the right size, pandemics caused by germs that are just virulent enough, various forms of climate change, or global war.  This suggests a set of questions such as; is this really still part of H2, is this really the beginning of H3 or is it an additional untagged phase?  Some scenario questions that would be useful to explore might be: What mix of forces need to exist to avoid extinction?  What would or could humans be doing during this event (e.g. hunkering down and riding it out or innovating their way to the next form of survival)?

H3 for me is intended to identify a new and better managed stability.  A challenge I see with the earthbound only variation of this is that I just don't see humans being able to pull it off psychologically.  There's likely a nice 80/20 split where 80% of the population could be trained to be fine with it but the other 20% would just find reasons to cause disruption.  I propose off-planet colonization as an outlet for this.  The alternative would at best be the chaotic stability that's shown at the beginning of H2.   This suggests a couple more H3 focused scenarios that could be explored.

An interesting alternative scenario at the Scenario 511 scale would be some form of diagonal "quantum tunneling" through the H2 hump.  This might capture population management "soft landings" (e.g. how do you deal with labor over-supply until it naturally goes away?).  Must "naturally go away" be explicitly managed? 

There are very hard questions that will be answered whether humans intentionally choose to answer them or not.