Stroud Green in 2050

krappyrubsnif

All right, you visionaries - what will Stroud Green be like in 2050? By which of course I mean what will the whole city-living trip be like 40 years hence (not just will the Noble have transformed into a trendy sushi bar). Imnagine your day. Go on. It's just round the corner, and it's going to happen to you (and me if I take the transgenetic option). Better start planning.. Here are a list of themes and some keyword prompts culled from the Interweb: Transport. Driverless cars? Robots. What will they do? Transition from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Life? Food? Pharma food - pills? Less or no red meat? More home grown food. Rooftop farms? Water. Fresh water tapped off the doomed glaciers? Will countries or corporations now rule the world? Government by corporation not politicians? In competition or collaboration? Wars - and cyber wars possible? Climate change. Unpredictable weather, flood, famine and global consequences. Health. Bio Implants? Cancer beaten? Smart drugs? Stem cell genetic engineering, genetically modified people? Genetic resets, "rewiring" of damaged genes? Nanotechnology? Human modification.....will it become difficult to distinguish between men and machines? Humans engineered for different environments. New human capabilities. Bioimprovements for ppls hands, wrists and thumbs. Implants for hearing - loss occurs at younger ages?? Transhumanism? Lifestyle .... health and exercise. Work, jobs. Unemployment, will there be jobs at all? Money. Leisure time and privacy will be the currency of being rich, not money Internet. More or less info/channels? Any unintended consequences of the Internet. The Internet controlled by corporations? Power shortages and possible rationing. Demographics - more 'elderly'. Life expectancy - 120 years? Dramatic extension of life span. How old? But what will age mean: age-engineering: the old will apprear young. Eighty will be the new 40. Long marriages (more than diamond anniversaries). Grandparents, great grandparents. Superhumans elite? Social change. Worse class, race and social divides over the horizon? Religion - more or less, move towards atheism or religious wars? Will people generally become dehumanised / sub human people? Will there be an elite of real people, the rest gamma classes? Complete lack of social interaction in the home? Privatisation of space? Arrival of xenotechnology - technology that is not originally from Earth? Education. What technology will be used in the classroom, but how will educators compete with smartphones, iPods, Facebooking? Home-schooling? and finally: Hoverboots? Jet packs? Wrist bands with built in gadgetry?

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staplejack

2050 stroud green overrun with Muntjac and Shouting Men.

Marquis

A slightly shorter-term [outlook](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/a-radical-pessimists-guide-to-the-next-10-years/article1750609/page1/), and American, but that will probably not matter by 2050. Are you gathering ideas for a specific purpose?

ADGS

Stroud Green should be pretty much coastal by then, I would think. Though how much of it will still be standing after the flood displacement riots and - if global warming goes into a feedback loop - firestorms, I'm not sure. Perhaps the meeting place at which the feral survivors exchange guarded tips about where to find the most edible algae or similar will, through some ancestral memory, still be known as 'strahdgrinaug'.

Alternately, a properly civilised society might turn up and save us from ourselves, in which case it'll presumably be a post-scarcity utopia and somewhat underpopulated since there'd no longer be any need for cities beyond the social and aesthetic.

Either way, I'd say the Budget Supermarket is in trouble.

Marquis

Which one of the two?

sincers

I'm hoping more for a Judge Dredd 2000 AD, Mega-City One type scenario.

ADGS

It may not be as bleak as my version, but Mega City One (or indeed Brit Cit) is still hardly an aspirational future...

(and I meant the one opposite the Dairy, the other is hardly Stroud Green)

Arkady

Crikey. Well, more micro-energy and food generation does look likely. I don’t think much of the 1960s-70s estates (or architecture in general) will still be around. If we’re very lucky the obvious fact that continual demographic and economic growth is both impossible and undesirable will have sunk in, and we’ll have found a way to reshape our societies to handle that. Technology will reduce the need for certain kinds of work (and reduce the number of jobs) freeing us for creative tasks, but society will need to find a way of handling the transition or meritocracy may collapse. On the other hand, the demographic tendencies of the paleo-religious, coupled with the end of secularisation due to the rise of identity politics, may lead to the end of liberal democracy (Eric Kaufmann has written some terrifying stuff about this: <http://www.sneps.net/>. States like Iran have shown us that liberal democracy is not necessary for modernity, so the future might be horrific and totalitarian. Given the tendency of totalitarian regimes generally (let alone theocracies) to ignore scientific discoveries that don’t suit them (e.g. concerning the environment), plus their desire for apocalyptic weapons, we could be faced with an actual end-of-the-world scenario. Given the existential nature of the threat I do think that we should be taking it more seriously and be much more concerned about the return of religion in Western society. I won’t labour that here though (unless provoked) as it upsets Andy, who may ban me in an ironic reverse-Marxian harbinger of the mass repression to come. I think, though, that it’s a good idea to look at the preposterous predictions being made mid-20th-century about how life would be now before assuming that we’ll all be floating brains in jars.

Marquis

Glad to hear the Woodstock Road Budget will be unaffected.

krappyrubsnif

@ Marquis, you're right, it is for a bit of a project. I have occasion to be talking to a few actual futurists about this, I thought it would be interesting to see how similar or different their predictions are to those of the good folk of 'strahdgrinaug'. I'll share the results.

Arkady

In ADGS’s post-apocalyptic coastal scenario, Andy would be one of the few survivors of the ‘old times’. Possessing the last working lap-top, a solar-panel and the stroudgreen.org forum in his browser cache he will be hailed as an oracle. The youth of the local tribe will fight off giant scorpions just to impress him. Misscara will also be around, having pickled-herself into physical immortality. I will have long-since despaired at the horror of the decaying architecture, and will have been last seen swimming towards the ruined tower of St Pancras on a dissolving raft made from precious limestone render stripped from houses on Tollington Park, chuntering away incoherently.

taff bach

I'll be living in the country after my home fell down in the earthquake.

andy

Go back forty years and you're in 1970. I think you can say, because of the pace of change in biotech, technology, energy and the environment that going forward forty years will be more like comparing today to 1900. Today's notions of privacy will be considered hilariously, extremely prudish. Kids will be posting clips of themselves having sex onto facebook and parents will just tut and roll their eyes. I think it's perfectly reasonable that we'll be able to live forever by 2050, probably in a synthetic way, by combining our consciousness with computers in some way. This technology will have originally have been designed for a video game. But it'll be a bit shit, like an Atari compared to a PS3. There will probably have been some nuclear terrorism, and probably millions of people will die in places like Lagos. No-one in rich countries will notice, or care. There will be an event where a million people die in a week, and it will be the second item on the news. There will be weird new diseases and suicide won't just be accepted, it'll be elective. We'll probably all be vegetarians, and equate eating meat today with owning slaves in Jefferson's time. A picture of someone eating a ginsters in 2006 will ruin someone's 2050 political career. All the fish will probably be dead. There won't be a post office.

andy

There won't be any child benefit. The secrets of the universe and the secrets of the mind will be shown to be the same thing. Questions about the construction of the universe, gravity and quantum theory will make sense when someone includes more information theory and the role of human consciousness. Leading physicists will need to take loads of psychotropic drugs in order to complete their PHDs. Most people will be sterile. People won't be able to write by hand. Psychotropic drugs will take a great leap forward.

ShaunG

Vista's development on SGR will be nearly finished.

Arkady

andy, that all sounds quite reasonable. You should save that post for 2050. ShaunG, you made me laugh such that I accidently swept a significant part of the pile of crap on my desk down the back off the radiator. It may well still be there in 2050, when radiators will be kitch decorations whose original purpose will have been long forgotten.

andy

I think the overwhelming emotion in 2050 will be a deep, quiet, unanswerable melancholy. The gulf between our spectacular technological capability and our emotional incapacity to deploy it will become unbearable for lots of people. Richer, healthier people with the ability to disregard the systemic causes of global sadness (currently limited to people who like to holiday in Dubai) will have wonderful lives and expensive bathtubs with expensive taps.

Papa

A family home in Stroud Green will cost £50m, people will have resorted to sub dividing flats into shelved sleeping units, and we'll all lament the days when you get a good ol' spacious one bedroom flat on just a high double salary. The Old Dairy and Stapleton will have sprawled across the road and melded into one after a vicious pub battle ended with one invading the other. The road is no longer needed as we all have hover cars and jet packs, of course. There will be rumours that the Noble is being sold and the Fullback has declared itself an independent republic, to allow people to smoke downstairs in its garden. The Park Tavern will be exactly the same. Any mention of the words Porchetta and Pappagone will still start a colossal dispute over which is best, both will still be declared to not be as good as they used to be by the odd commenter, or not as good as Venezia by Medi, who will have by then opened a string of successful BeST PizZA restaurants around the world and be hailed as an Bransonesque guerilla marketing guru. Councillors will still be glum and pointing, but in hologram form. It's highly likely nothing will be as good as it was back then - so hit Stroud Green and enjoy it while you actually are in the back then.

Lollo Rosso

Interesting question with interesting responses. There appears to be a general consensus that living conditions for people will generally deteriorate. Did people in the past also think that the future would be much worse than the present or have we reached a point where an optimistic outlook is no longer possible?

Nick10

Andy's predictions are alarmingly depressing in their plausability.

ADGS

People have always been prone to expecting the end - as Neil Gaiman says in Signal To Noise, it's never more than a hundred years 'til the end of the world.

Siolae

I'm going to be optimistic and suggest that The Rainbow will be a venue again, there will be a Lido in Finsbury Park and Waitrose will have taken over all other supermarkets and will have two bijou stores on SGR. Guess where? Oh and private education will have been banned and everyone has to go to their nearest schools. Finally, obviously, I am in charge!

ADGS

I fear there's more chance of the nutjob fundamentalists at the former Rainbow expanding into the Silver Bullet and Orleans than vice versa. But I may be biased by my reading of Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution books, set in a balkanised future London where Finsbury Park is part of a small theocracy. On a happier note, though, there's a libertarian mini-state up the road and Ally Pally is a spaceport.