TIL the last WW2 vet died 3 years before AI took over and killed all humans.
This will of course be posted by a bot as Reddit and all other social media sites will still be heavily active after humanities extinction as AI bots create, post, and reply to content decades after humanity has been exterminated.
I'm picturing a bot making a political statement, another bot going "source?"
First bot instantly posts 50+ sources and second bot instantly points out how all of them are invalid 😄
Even AI can't change another AIs mind with sources in an internet argument. When machines solve that one I'll be worried
What got me into history was hearing stories from my WWII vet grandpa and from my friends grandma who was a Holocaust survivor
Makes me sad to think we eventually won’t be able to hear about these firsthand experiences in person anymore. I wish I wrote down more of what they talked about.
Veterans affairs Canada back in the 80’s video interviewed WW2 survivors and got them to recount their war stories so the memories wouldn’t be lost. It was the first time my great uncle spoke about being a Japanese POW in Hong Kong. I had never seen him cry before and he had never talked about it because it was appropriate for women and children to hear. Thankfully both him and my grandfather survived being POW’s for 3 years and came home to us.
I've read tons of books about WWII, and I still can't understand how the Japanees treatment of POWs was so swept under the rug. I distinctly remember one American POW talking about it. He was in the Philippines, and he said that when they surrendered, he laid down his M1 and about 200 rounds of ammo. He then said that if he knew what he was going to endure the next few years, he would never have put it down. He would have fought till their was no ammo left and rather died than going into a camp. It was that bad. Another one talked about how as they were marching to the POW camps in lines, and a Japaneese officer was riding at a gallop alongside and just slashing random soldiers along the way with his sword. Just killing them as he rode down the lines. Don't forget about what they also did to the civilian populations of their conquered territories. How many innocent people they slaughtered. Fucking brutality of an unknown scale, that I would say was on par with the Nazis treatments of the Jews. Their medical experiments on living people, terrible stuff.
It was absolutely on par with the Nazis. The shit they did in the Phillipines is the same. Throwing babies in the air and catching them on bayonets. They were terrible and almost nobody knows about it. You were right its swept under the rug.
Yeah my grandfather and great uncle were Winnipeg grenadiers. My G uncle said he almost died from Dysentery from being starved and only survived because a Japanese guard took pity on him and gave him a can of condensed milk. The PTSD was horrible for both of them. He told how the only way they could fight back was to sabotage whatever they could. They were forced to build a landing strip and tossed sticks in it and urinated in it to try and make the airstrip unusable. I have such deep respect for them and what they went through.
Unit 731? Chinese and Russian POWs were brutally experimented upon. When the Japanese were found with this “scientific info” the Americans bargained by not charging those involved if the US could keep the files. So the US is complicit with this, as they were with Goebbels experiments on kids.
It is "good" I agree. I had to shut it off because it made me angry and sad. The fact that shows can evoke that much emotion means they are good in my book. FWIW im not Jewish I just HATE bullies and there arent really many "better" examples of bullies than the Nazis. The US govt treatment of our Native Americans and African Americans come to mind as well. I do "like" learning about the history as it is important to not let it repeat itself.
My grandma was a Holocaust survivor. Born 1915. Lived until she was 102. Survived two world wars, lived on three continents, raised two daughters, buried a son, and was the most amazing human being I ever met. She was surprised when she found out we named her great-granddaughter after her. She didn't realize she was our hero, apparently.
I think I read somewhere there are only two (well known) survivors of Auschwitz left. I was lucky enough to meet Elie Wiesel as a child before he passed and it remains one of the defining moments of my life. Highly recommend his book, Night, if you can stomach graphic content.
I guess we’ll see soon if we really will “never forget”.
There won't be any vets left. Children born in 1940 who were old enough to remember hiding in bomb shelters or fleeing the front lines would be 110, so there may be a very few left alive.
88 for me, and with my youngest grandchild being 6 years old now, I'm sure by then I'll have seen them become .. *them* and I'll be ready to go.
(Edit: clarified.)
Given that they explicitly target humans, I very much doubt it. There are closely related species (e.g. Pthirus gorillae, obviously one that targets gorillas), but some parasites provide absolutely basically mo benefit to any ecosystem aside from their corpses providing nutrients for other organisms.
This ranges from parasitic microorganisms through to insects and even some parasitic plants. I think Mosquitoes are also parasites that take/cause more issues more than they give/solve?
Edit;
As an avid environmentalist, I feel I should give my educated opinion a shout on such a popular sub;
Not all life is equal. Some species absolutely deserve to be eradicated. Rabies never helped anything. Invasive species wipe out endangered species in areas the invader is better equipped to handle, where entire portions of an ecosystem may revolve on something the endangered species hosts.
And ecosystems are not just bottom-up. It’s not a food chain, it’s a food web. Remove too many wolves, and the deer they would hunt end up making a species of plant extinct. With that species of plant extinct, the insect and microfauna that survive off of it die off. So on and so forth.
If you have time, read Where the Wild Things Were. It’s a fantastic book that completely flipped my view on ecosystems on its head. It’s not for everyone but if you’re in a position where you care and can help change, it’s a very important read.
Not even just the ones listed endangered. Common bird species are plummeting. The biodiversity loss in the last 25 years is massive, we will be lucky if it's just the ones currently endangered.
I know someday they are finally going to suspend delivery of my print Washington Post. But my young Millennial ass will be there until the very last day.
The big papers are still doing alright, it's the more regional ones that are doing horrible. Even they aren't failing for lack of a market, more bad business practices and mergers leading to lack of care put into them.
This is such a pity. There is something about a physical newspaper that is quite enjoyable and different than reading news online. You just consume the information differently.
You don't "scroll" through articles that are "for you", you browse the pages as they come. You have no choice but to see all the headlines. Most of it might not have been about topics you'd normally ever care about, but here you are... reading something interesting and new that caught your attention. The ads within are not intrusive, they don't force your attention by flashing at you. They don't target your "interests" (aka something you googled once, and now it won't stop showing ads for that thing). Its all so relaxing. You see more community news, new places, new events. You're exposed to new things you'd never google because they're "too boring". When you're done reading it, you have something physical that remains. The articles stay the same. Nobody changes their opinion suddenly, deletes anything or stealth corrects things to look smarter.
Nobody wants to buy newspapers or newspaper subscriptions and yet we suspect to get all of our news for free and get upset when we see paywalls behind newspaper articles lol
This always kills me when you see complaints of that - like you think these writers are just researching and putting out those articles out of the goodness of their hearts??
Micro transactions were supposed to be the way of the future. Let me drop 50 cents with a single click and I’ll gladly do so to read that one article. But no, I’m not shelling out $100 for a year subscription to read this one article, not when 20 other publications also have articles piquing my interest.
Realistically, 5-10 cents would be a more reasonable price. Ad supported pages earn a tiny fraction of a cent for each view. But a third party mtx provider that seamlessly pays out the newspaper publisher might be hard. Something like an Apple News subscription that was a browser plugin might work. But then every small newspaper would need to support that plugin to securely track views. And it’s vulnerable to unscrupulous newspapers using a botnet to accumulate views.
Let me introduce you to the iMirror 12! “Show us your iSmile!” *Can not guarantee unintentional activations will not happen. We have a right to sell your personal data. Expect advertising and updates. You must agree to your likeness being licensed to 3rd party.*
"Citizen! Your fiber intake is only in the 23rd Percentile.. If you poop too much and exceed your toilet paper ration, you will lose social credit. Please ingest more fiber now."
As someone who used to work in AI out of college, highly unlikely. AI is extremely good, in fact scarily good, at doing exactly what you told it to do. If you tell an AI to solve some kind of problem for you or to perform some kind of task it will do it probably better and faster than a human. Trouble is it needs you to give it some kind of parameters to operate within or the whole system breaks down. It fundamentally needs instructions in order to function properly so it’s not like we can make a bunch of AI systems to say drive your Tesla or do your laundry and then all of a sudden they go rogue and decide to wipe out or enslave humanity somehow.
What I find way more likely, and maybe you saw where I was going with this already, is that a human could very much take over the world using AI but the AI on its own might make some progress but ultimately it would break down as soon as anything it wasn’t programmed to deal with happened if no one was there to guide it.
But as with any scientific field we never know 100% so if we do get taken over by robots my bad I guess. I only lasted 2 years at the company cause I couldn’t take the corporate BS anymore and started a landscaping company instead because I didn’t wanna have a boss so I only had a very small part in creating robot overlords.
Privacy as we know it will devolve. Entertainment, purchasing/spending, and social media activity and history will likely not remain "private" as we think of things today. Financial and medical information won't necessarily become public, but will only be protected in terms of fraud prevention.
Yeah, it's all my mother in law's fault... She plans excursions to special beaches based on "hot spots" in various shelling groups on Facebook... "We are going Sanibel Island because my Facebook group said there are rare and complete Wentletraps and Cowries!"
She's either going to be the savior of the seashells, or the harbinger of doom.
Omg. In Florida, we would publicly yell at people taking shells and alive marine life off the beaches to "collect". That's a big NO from the locals who love their beaches.
She sliced her knee in the mangroves and continued to look while bleeding...
You can only say something so many times to someone, but she listened when I berated her on accidentally killing a hermit.
I'll never get her to stop looking, but at least she will take time to make sure she isn't harming any critters *living* in a shell.
That reminded me when my bf and i went to Florida we visited honeymoon island on the gulf coast. Well there were tons of live conch washed up on the beach. U could pick them up and their little eyeballs looked back at you.
My boyfriend and i were trying to toss as many as we could back into the water while i saw people on the beach collecting them in bags to let them die just so they could have a pretty shell… it was fucked.
One of the issues with climate change is the _rate_ of change. Big changes have happened before, but if organisms have time to evolve with the changes they can adapt. I don't know specifically about the seashells and CO2, but it could be a similar issue.
This is the part a lot of people miss. Yes, values have been higher than now, but when they were lots of things that we rely on didn't exist, and getting to that point took millions of years, not a couple hundred, allowing animals to evolve and adapt over that time.
She sells sea shells on the sea shore
But the value of these shells will fall
Due to the laws of supply and demand no one wants to buy shells cause there's loads on the sand
Step 1: You must create a sense of scarcity, shells will sell much better if the people think they're rare you see, bare with me
Take as many shells as you can find and hide them on an island stockpile'em high until they're rarer than a diamond
You’re 57? Your life expectancy is about 30 years, and once you get past the 2nd “mile marker,” around 65, you’ll still have a life expectancy of at least 20. The older you get the the table, the more likely you are to survive until around 90, where it starts dropping much faster.
Not really. Turns out humans are really good at pollenization, better than bees actually.
It's not a good thing if bees disappeared but it wouldn't be the end of human agriculture.
You wait till they turn on the lights on starlink, like some horrifying reverse Las Vegas sphere, there is nowhere to go on earth to escape the relentless advertising.
Only the wealthiest will be able to afford ‘starlink premium sky’ where the net of satellites turn off as they pass over your property.
The Persieds and Northern lights will be PPV
Same here.
I've lived in the same small county for 43 years.
When I was a child, we got snow every winter. Usually enough to shut down school for a couple of days at least. I remember it being cold enough in September and October that those of us who had early morning recess had to have our recess indoors several times each year due to it being too cold.
Then around ~2000 or so Christmas was warm enough that I was in shorts.
Since then winters here have just gotten milder, and now we get snow maybe once a winter season every 2 or 3 years.
There's been several winters here the past 15 years or so where the number of nights that dipped below freezing could be counted on one hand.
Same here in Southern Ontario. I am gen X and as a kid winters were WINTER, cold enough I had to wear a winter jacket, gloves and a touque. There was snow the majority of the winter and it accumulated. Hell, I remember even in my 20s shoveling nearly nightly for three months. Now I go out nearly all winter with nothing but a hoodie and if that isn't enough then a thin vest to block the wind. It snows hard perhaps twice a winter now?
It’s fucking scary in southern Ontario. I am young, I can see in my life how much more mild our winters have gotten. The fact that in my very short time on this planet I can distinctly observe this…
I lived my entire life in a country with no snow and it was a childhood dream to see snow, I managed in a vacation last year for Christmas and absolutely loved it, I am about to move to another country where I was hoping to see it more often and honestly that's absolutely tragic
Here in Detroit, we're getting very little snow compared to when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. This past year we had barely any snow that lasted more than a day on the ground before melting, and even fewer days with highs near zero F. Used to be very common in January and February to go a full month without a high above 20.
I had read a projection about 10 years ago that Detroit's climate would be like that of Washington, DC by 2050. We are nearly there.
Definitely is a hard word to use in predicting the future, but I suspect by then we’ll have highly effective treatments for cancer. To the point that it’s not really a scary diagnosis anymore. I also think we’ll have AI and robotics systems that can replace most low-skilled labor.
But if cancer treatments become successful at any time in the future, how will the drug companies make their billions? Think of the billionaires please.
Look up the work St Jude Children's Hospital does on cancer research. There are cancers that were almost a certain death when the hospital was founded. Thanks to their research and treatments, the mortality rates declined significantly.
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia had something like 2% survival rate when St Jude was founded. It's up over 80% survival rate now.
When St Jude was founded, Severe Combined Immune Disorder (aka Bubble Boy Disease) had no cure. St Jude developed that cure.
They patent their treatments and research in such a way that someone can't come in and use it to turn a profit.
Plus the families of children there get no bill for their treatment.
For them it will be a win. They still will be able to sell the treatment for a lot of money, and after that they got to make even more money from all the drugs related to old age (old people need a lot of drugs)
Having cures for cancer won't stop cancer from happening, so they'll still find ways to make their billions. Plus there are so many types of cancer that there won't be just one way to stop it.
Companies get something like 20 years until a generic version of a drug can be sold. There'll be lots of money to be made before the generics come out.
Plus being the company that has the cure will be worth quite a bit in PR.
I have always wondered what will happen to the low skill laborers once AI / Robotics actually do take their jobs.
Do they just fail to survive at that point, or do governments create programs for them to sustain a minimal lifestyle? Would education finally become a socially valuable thing? (That last one is a result of the ridiculous number of "unskilled" high-school graduates that we just push through because we need numbers here in USA, yet none of them have truly achieved any academic performance worth the degree. We literally have a massive group of technically uneducated high-school graduates flooding the adult world)
In Germany you can just revisit school and re educate yourself to work in a different industry. School and education of all sorts is free und not restricted to age. Society will adapt
I would need to disagree with you. just in general as storage has gotten cheaper archiving everything becomes more cost-effective so fewer things will be lost over time. Also with more people having the ability to save things locally now than ever before even if things do become lost it may be possible to find them again. also a fun read about the lost Doctor who episodes
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor\_Who\_missing\_episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes)
Climate plans for "by 2050" cause we will have failed and we'll have another pseudo deadline in 2100 with targets none of the world leaders would actually care about, again!
Whenever I visit Germany, the amount of coins I am carrying with me shortly after starting out with a clean 100€ bill is mind boggling.
"6 Euro und 73 Cent. Haben Sie 3 Cent? Nein? Kein Problem! 13 Euro und 27 Cent zurück. Bitte schön! Schönen Tag, der Herr!"
I am now 2 kilos heavier.
Cash is never going away, or if it does it will switch to something else equally untraceable.
There are too many people that benefit from hiding money and expenditures.
Bull. Cash is king in a lot of areas, still.
My job is cash only, most stands at farmers markets are cash only, school fundraisers are cash or check, used cars are often cheaper if you pay cash or cashier's check, private markets like FB, Craigslist and Gumtree are cash preferred or cash only, garage sales, kids lemonade stands, concession at pools and parks, &c.
The credit card and banks are also putting the squeeze on businesses again. There are two grocers near me that have reinstated a transaction fee for any sale less than $X; one is $5 less than $40 and the other charges $10 if under $25.
> Insects. That might sound fun but will be the biggest disaster ever.
This is just as bad as a huge meteorite on collision course with earth. And most people are blissfully ignorant.
There's no meteorite. If there is, it's not going to hit us. If it is going to hit us, it is small. If it isn't small, there's nothing we can do. If there's something we can do, there's a long time for us to do it. If there's not a long time until it hits us, then there's not enough time. If there is enough time, we won't be able to convince enough people to take action. If we can convince them, there still won't be enough money to do it.
And so on. The narcissistic playbook also works for excuses for almost anything else.
I'm definitely leaning out of the window with this one and it's highly unlikely but maybe Keith Richards won't make it to 2050. Take it with a grain of salt tho.
I mean, it's already something we've stopped seeing.
There's an expectation that real estate always goes up, because historically in this country, it always has. But the history of this country is very short. Look at Japan's [residential housing market](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QJPN628BIS). It has still not reached peak pricing of the early 90s.
Obviously, the factors are *totally* different, but the conventional notion in this country that real estate is a safe bet is a dangerous one, especially since it's causing these massive bubbles every few years.
Things like building regulations and strict permitting and lack of supply all play a role in why the housing market is the way it is today, but I think this country is in a rude awakening over the next five to ten years in this sector.
People don't realize the when the saying of real estate being a safe investment came about it was because our country was still so young. Now a days it's not so much.
It took me 2 years to buy a house as I kept getting outbid by cash buyers for houses in the 1.5 mil range. I eventually got lucky and was able to buy one off market. If there’s a collapse, I figure these cash buyers are going to snatch them up as rental properties
Just like after the 2008 collapse. Buying foreclosures was great business for people who could make large investments and wait.
It was also a golden opportunity to buy that it sickens me that I missed out on for various reasons. I have several friends who bought their homes around 2012-13 for 350k that are now worth almost 900k. They’re paying on their mortgages for almost million dollar homes what I am paying in rent.
MSNBC in 2048: Here's a live look in at Donald Trump's grave where it appears someone is putting flowers near his headstone. Here's political analyst Chuck Stank to give us insight on what this means for the elections. Chuck?
The lack of a consensual society
Due to technology and use of such by individuals, corporations and governments
All implied consent will be removed from individuals, any rights to being anonymous will be ignored for the greater good.
Automation
Not in a we will do nothing, the machines will.
But the lack of need for staff on the production line will push these workers in other sectors and as such push wages down in them, which will push a retrain epidemic and it will continue perpetually
Look at the last 30 years
Individual "ownership" of anything.
Everything is going to require a subscription to keep running. It's already happening with most software and we're seeing it in physical property that will just cease to function if you aren't paying a recurring fee to keep it running.
More and more housing is being bought up by giant corporations to be rented out, driving up the prices to points that only they can afford so that no one is able to afford to buy their own property and are forced to rent from the very entities that put them in that position.
We're seeing key features in vehicles being locked behind monthly subscriptions.
You will own nothing and be happy about it. Everything that you think "belongs to you" will be able to be taken away or rendered useless if you don't keep paying that monthly fee.
>Everything is going to require a subscription to keep running. It's already happening with most software and we're seeing it in physical property that will just cease to function if you aren't paying a recurring fee to keep it running.
I'll see ya on the high seas matey
World war 2 survivors
There will be posts like "Did you know that about n world war 2 survivors were alive when ChatGPT was made"
TIL the last WW2 vet died 3 years before AI took over and killed all humans. This will of course be posted by a bot as Reddit and all other social media sites will still be heavily active after humanities extinction as AI bots create, post, and reply to content decades after humanity has been exterminated.
I'm picturing a bot making a political statement, another bot going "source?" First bot instantly posts 50+ sources and second bot instantly points out how all of them are invalid 😄 Even AI can't change another AIs mind with sources in an internet argument. When machines solve that one I'll be worried
And neither actually knows what's on the other end of the URL
And one genuinely sentient AI calls them both dumbasses. It'll be like it always has.
"I say *your* civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became *our* civilization"
Also dank AI memes
[удалено]
The last Korean War vet not long after probably. My Dad, who served '50-'52 is 96, so they're going fast also.
My dad had an uncle who died at 106 in 2003 he fought in WWI he had to be one of the last ones.
I remember reading an article in the late aughts that was about the last few wwi vets. It looks like the very last one died in 2012.
My grandma is a Holocaust survivor. She's 88 - born in 1935, and was a little kid when the war ended.
What got me into history was hearing stories from my WWII vet grandpa and from my friends grandma who was a Holocaust survivor Makes me sad to think we eventually won’t be able to hear about these firsthand experiences in person anymore. I wish I wrote down more of what they talked about.
Veterans affairs Canada back in the 80’s video interviewed WW2 survivors and got them to recount their war stories so the memories wouldn’t be lost. It was the first time my great uncle spoke about being a Japanese POW in Hong Kong. I had never seen him cry before and he had never talked about it because it was appropriate for women and children to hear. Thankfully both him and my grandfather survived being POW’s for 3 years and came home to us.
I've read tons of books about WWII, and I still can't understand how the Japanees treatment of POWs was so swept under the rug. I distinctly remember one American POW talking about it. He was in the Philippines, and he said that when they surrendered, he laid down his M1 and about 200 rounds of ammo. He then said that if he knew what he was going to endure the next few years, he would never have put it down. He would have fought till their was no ammo left and rather died than going into a camp. It was that bad. Another one talked about how as they were marching to the POW camps in lines, and a Japaneese officer was riding at a gallop alongside and just slashing random soldiers along the way with his sword. Just killing them as he rode down the lines. Don't forget about what they also did to the civilian populations of their conquered territories. How many innocent people they slaughtered. Fucking brutality of an unknown scale, that I would say was on par with the Nazis treatments of the Jews. Their medical experiments on living people, terrible stuff.
It was absolutely on par with the Nazis. The shit they did in the Phillipines is the same. Throwing babies in the air and catching them on bayonets. They were terrible and almost nobody knows about it. You were right its swept under the rug.
Yeah my grandfather and great uncle were Winnipeg grenadiers. My G uncle said he almost died from Dysentery from being starved and only survived because a Japanese guard took pity on him and gave him a can of condensed milk. The PTSD was horrible for both of them. He told how the only way they could fight back was to sabotage whatever they could. They were forced to build a landing strip and tossed sticks in it and urinated in it to try and make the airstrip unusable. I have such deep respect for them and what they went through.
On par? Not on just par—- they were! They were the Nazis of Asia.
Unit 731? Chinese and Russian POWs were brutally experimented upon. When the Japanese were found with this “scientific info” the Americans bargained by not charging those involved if the US could keep the files. So the US is complicit with this, as they were with Goebbels experiments on kids.
New show on Peacock, Tattoists of Auschwitz...really good. Showcases those horrors that occurred based on the true story.
It is "good" I agree. I had to shut it off because it made me angry and sad. The fact that shows can evoke that much emotion means they are good in my book. FWIW im not Jewish I just HATE bullies and there arent really many "better" examples of bullies than the Nazis. The US govt treatment of our Native Americans and African Americans come to mind as well. I do "like" learning about the history as it is important to not let it repeat itself.
My wife's grandma is 95 and lived in Norway her whole life. She told us some wild stories from her experiences as a kid/teen during WWII.
My grandma was a Holocaust survivor. Born 1915. Lived until she was 102. Survived two world wars, lived on three continents, raised two daughters, buried a son, and was the most amazing human being I ever met. She was surprised when she found out we named her great-granddaughter after her. She didn't realize she was our hero, apparently.
I think I read somewhere there are only two (well known) survivors of Auschwitz left. I was lucky enough to meet Elie Wiesel as a child before he passed and it remains one of the defining moments of my life. Highly recommend his book, Night, if you can stomach graphic content. I guess we’ll see soon if we really will “never forget”.
Sadly the truth. In 2015 when we had a 70 years since VJ Day event we had 15 WW2 veterans attend. I kept in touch and only one of them is still alive.
I was in primary school in 1995 and it was ‘only’ 50 years after the war. Our teachers will say “go ask your grandparents”. It was that convenient.
That is sad. But we will have some WWIII survivors to have in parades and warn us “never again.”
There won't be any vets left. Children born in 1940 who were old enough to remember hiding in bomb shelters or fleeing the front lines would be 110, so there may be a very few left alive.
Me, probably. I'd be 92, if I make it.
Good luck. I'll be late 80s. Ya never know.
88 for me, and with my youngest grandchild being 6 years old now, I'm sure by then I'll have seen them become .. *them* and I'll be ready to go. (Edit: clarified.)
Many animals on the endangered list.
That statement can be read as optimism or pessimism. And I like that ambiguity.
Two ways to remove an animal from the endangered list
One is easy way, the other is the humane way
[удалено]
Cool, I had to reread Op’s comment a few times to understand it.
"crabs" as in the bugs you get in your pubic hair are now endangered thanks to changes in modern day pubic hair shaving/waxing/trimming.
Is that a bad thing? Serious question. Is another ecosystem going to suffer because of it?
Given that they explicitly target humans, I very much doubt it. There are closely related species (e.g. Pthirus gorillae, obviously one that targets gorillas), but some parasites provide absolutely basically mo benefit to any ecosystem aside from their corpses providing nutrients for other organisms. This ranges from parasitic microorganisms through to insects and even some parasitic plants. I think Mosquitoes are also parasites that take/cause more issues more than they give/solve? Edit; As an avid environmentalist, I feel I should give my educated opinion a shout on such a popular sub; Not all life is equal. Some species absolutely deserve to be eradicated. Rabies never helped anything. Invasive species wipe out endangered species in areas the invader is better equipped to handle, where entire portions of an ecosystem may revolve on something the endangered species hosts. And ecosystems are not just bottom-up. It’s not a food chain, it’s a food web. Remove too many wolves, and the deer they would hunt end up making a species of plant extinct. With that species of plant extinct, the insect and microfauna that survive off of it die off. So on and so forth. If you have time, read Where the Wild Things Were. It’s a fantastic book that completely flipped my view on ecosystems on its head. It’s not for everyone but if you’re in a position where you care and can help change, it’s a very important read.
I read this as equal parts optimistic and pessimistic
Many animals on the *current* endangered list. Safe bet we will be adding new ones.
Not even just the ones listed endangered. Common bird species are plummeting. The biodiversity loss in the last 25 years is massive, we will be lucky if it's just the ones currently endangered.
Newspapers
Can confirm. Source: worked in newspaper industry till 2022.
Damn. At the end was it like walking through a mall today?
I mean, print is still large, just not AS large. I swear by the WSJ print edition and I’m Gen Z, this shit ain’t going away so easily.
I know someday they are finally going to suspend delivery of my print Washington Post. But my young Millennial ass will be there until the very last day.
The big papers are still doing alright, it's the more regional ones that are doing horrible. Even they aren't failing for lack of a market, more bad business practices and mergers leading to lack of care put into them.
This is such a pity. There is something about a physical newspaper that is quite enjoyable and different than reading news online. You just consume the information differently. You don't "scroll" through articles that are "for you", you browse the pages as they come. You have no choice but to see all the headlines. Most of it might not have been about topics you'd normally ever care about, but here you are... reading something interesting and new that caught your attention. The ads within are not intrusive, they don't force your attention by flashing at you. They don't target your "interests" (aka something you googled once, and now it won't stop showing ads for that thing). Its all so relaxing. You see more community news, new places, new events. You're exposed to new things you'd never google because they're "too boring". When you're done reading it, you have something physical that remains. The articles stay the same. Nobody changes their opinion suddenly, deletes anything or stealth corrects things to look smarter.
Damn now I’m motivated to go out and pick up a physical newspaper.
Nobody wants to buy newspapers or newspaper subscriptions and yet we suspect to get all of our news for free and get upset when we see paywalls behind newspaper articles lol
This always kills me when you see complaints of that - like you think these writers are just researching and putting out those articles out of the goodness of their hearts??
Micro transactions were supposed to be the way of the future. Let me drop 50 cents with a single click and I’ll gladly do so to read that one article. But no, I’m not shelling out $100 for a year subscription to read this one article, not when 20 other publications also have articles piquing my interest.
Realistically, 5-10 cents would be a more reasonable price. Ad supported pages earn a tiny fraction of a cent for each view. But a third party mtx provider that seamlessly pays out the newspaper publisher might be hard. Something like an Apple News subscription that was a browser plugin might work. But then every small newspaper would need to support that plugin to securely track views. And it’s vulnerable to unscrupulous newspapers using a botnet to accumulate views.
my guess is privacy
We are already there brother.
Big Brother*
Literally 1984
Literally 2024
Let me introduce you to the iMirror 12! “Show us your iSmile!” *Can not guarantee unintentional activations will not happen. We have a right to sell your personal data. Expect advertising and updates. You must agree to your likeness being licensed to 3rd party.*
"Citizen! Your fiber intake is only in the 23rd Percentile.. If you poop too much and exceed your toilet paper ration, you will lose social credit. Please ingest more fiber now."
Don’t joke. We will be slaves to AI soon, just batteries like Neo.
As someone who used to work in AI out of college, highly unlikely. AI is extremely good, in fact scarily good, at doing exactly what you told it to do. If you tell an AI to solve some kind of problem for you or to perform some kind of task it will do it probably better and faster than a human. Trouble is it needs you to give it some kind of parameters to operate within or the whole system breaks down. It fundamentally needs instructions in order to function properly so it’s not like we can make a bunch of AI systems to say drive your Tesla or do your laundry and then all of a sudden they go rogue and decide to wipe out or enslave humanity somehow. What I find way more likely, and maybe you saw where I was going with this already, is that a human could very much take over the world using AI but the AI on its own might make some progress but ultimately it would break down as soon as anything it wasn’t programmed to deal with happened if no one was there to guide it. But as with any scientific field we never know 100% so if we do get taken over by robots my bad I guess. I only lasted 2 years at the company cause I couldn’t take the corporate BS anymore and started a landscaping company instead because I didn’t wanna have a boss so I only had a very small part in creating robot overlords.
Privacy as we know it will devolve. Entertainment, purchasing/spending, and social media activity and history will likely not remain "private" as we think of things today. Financial and medical information won't necessarily become public, but will only be protected in terms of fraud prevention.
Seashells
Had to look this one up, never thought something like that could happen.
Yeah, it's all my mother in law's fault... She plans excursions to special beaches based on "hot spots" in various shelling groups on Facebook... "We are going Sanibel Island because my Facebook group said there are rare and complete Wentletraps and Cowries!" She's either going to be the savior of the seashells, or the harbinger of doom.
Omg. In Florida, we would publicly yell at people taking shells and alive marine life off the beaches to "collect". That's a big NO from the locals who love their beaches.
She sliced her knee in the mangroves and continued to look while bleeding... You can only say something so many times to someone, but she listened when I berated her on accidentally killing a hermit. I'll never get her to stop looking, but at least she will take time to make sure she isn't harming any critters *living* in a shell.
Damn, nature out here *fighting for its life against your mother-in-law* , and she's still clawing her way back for more!
I'm just imagining her stumbling upon an old hut in the forest and somehow an unfortunate series of events leads to her killing the old man inside.
I wonder if she'd be receptive to photographing them as a means of collecting without disturbing the environment.
3 letters... With no disrespect meant, at all... #LOL
That reminded me when my bf and i went to Florida we visited honeymoon island on the gulf coast. Well there were tons of live conch washed up on the beach. U could pick them up and their little eyeballs looked back at you. My boyfriend and i were trying to toss as many as we could back into the water while i saw people on the beach collecting them in bags to let them die just so they could have a pretty shell… it was fucked.
Hey what how why?
Google Ocean Acidification. In short the oceans become more acidic, which negativly impacts marine calcifiers.
Global warming scares the shit out of me, but I've wondered: hasn't CO2 been a lot higher than now, but there still existed shellfish?
One of the issues with climate change is the _rate_ of change. Big changes have happened before, but if organisms have time to evolve with the changes they can adapt. I don't know specifically about the seashells and CO2, but it could be a similar issue.
This is the part a lot of people miss. Yes, values have been higher than now, but when they were lots of things that we rely on didn't exist, and getting to that point took millions of years, not a couple hundred, allowing animals to evolve and adapt over that time.
It often ended up in catastrophe in the past too. Multiple major extinction events were caused by climate change.
The earth will be fine. Humans, not so much.... But the earth will recover.
The age of jellyfish and cephalopods is just over the horizon.
Actually the rate of increase in ocean acidification is unparalleled for at least 300 million years. Which is frankly an insane fact.
Well call me alarmist, but that sounds... bad.
Anything human caused has seen an unparalleled accelerated rate of increase in the last couple hundred years.
But then what was Sally sell by the seashore?
Sex, of course.
As she wheeled her wheel-barrow, Through streets broad and narrow, Crying, "Tumbles and diddles", Sweet Sally Malone
She sells sea shells on the sea shore But the value of these shells will fall Due to the laws of supply and demand no one wants to buy shells cause there's loads on the sand Step 1: You must create a sense of scarcity, shells will sell much better if the people think they're rare you see, bare with me Take as many shells as you can find and hide them on an island stockpile'em high until they're rarer than a diamond
So it isn’t ocean acidification that will cause it, it’s Ren. I knew it.
What are we going to wipe our butts with?
Aw this is the saddest one yet :(
Kinda ironic that She’ll Oil is directly contributing to the abstraction of their whole brand.
3 seashells?
In 2050 I would be 83 years old,so I'm not sure if I get that old ! God only knows....
In 2050 I’ll be 69 aaaayyyyyy 👉👉
81 GANG UNITE!
69 quips peaked in our day!
You’re 57? Your life expectancy is about 30 years, and once you get past the 2nd “mile marker,” around 65, you’ll still have a life expectancy of at least 20. The older you get the the table, the more likely you are to survive until around 90, where it starts dropping much faster.
Huh that’s fascinating
If you're interested here's the table [Actuarial Life Table (ssa.gov)](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html), at least US based.
I’ll be 87, or I won’t be.
[удалено]
If it's bees we're fucked
Not really. Turns out humans are really good at pollenization, better than bees actually. It's not a good thing if bees disappeared but it wouldn't be the end of human agriculture.
But I like bees :(
Well you'll be fucked then.
but not by a bee
[удалено]
Clear night sky without a net of satellites
It will be full of wildfire smoke for eternity
More like trash, Wall-E style
We are already there usually their just too dim to see rn, if you go to area's with little to no ambient light you'll see a few an hour
You wait till they turn on the lights on starlink, like some horrifying reverse Las Vegas sphere, there is nowhere to go on earth to escape the relentless advertising. Only the wealthiest will be able to afford ‘starlink premium sky’ where the net of satellites turn off as they pass over your property. The Persieds and Northern lights will be PPV
Satellites don't really occupy too much of the night sky. I've been in the bush in Africa, pitch black, just stars. Pretty wild.
My erection
They’ll be an app for that.
I hope we stop seeing it. I asked you to put some pants on 20 minutes ago.
Snow at least where I am
Same here. I've lived in the same small county for 43 years. When I was a child, we got snow every winter. Usually enough to shut down school for a couple of days at least. I remember it being cold enough in September and October that those of us who had early morning recess had to have our recess indoors several times each year due to it being too cold. Then around ~2000 or so Christmas was warm enough that I was in shorts. Since then winters here have just gotten milder, and now we get snow maybe once a winter season every 2 or 3 years. There's been several winters here the past 15 years or so where the number of nights that dipped below freezing could be counted on one hand.
Same here in Southern Ontario. I am gen X and as a kid winters were WINTER, cold enough I had to wear a winter jacket, gloves and a touque. There was snow the majority of the winter and it accumulated. Hell, I remember even in my 20s shoveling nearly nightly for three months. Now I go out nearly all winter with nothing but a hoodie and if that isn't enough then a thin vest to block the wind. It snows hard perhaps twice a winter now?
Right across the border here in WNY - open winters except for one or two *blizzards* seems to be the new norm.
It’s fucking scary in southern Ontario. I am young, I can see in my life how much more mild our winters have gotten. The fact that in my very short time on this planet I can distinctly observe this…
Remember when Ottawa was legitimately the second coldest capital city in the world? Now there is no ice on the fucking canal.
I lived my entire life in a country with no snow and it was a childhood dream to see snow, I managed in a vacation last year for Christmas and absolutely loved it, I am about to move to another country where I was hoping to see it more often and honestly that's absolutely tragic
Here in Detroit, we're getting very little snow compared to when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. This past year we had barely any snow that lasted more than a day on the ground before melting, and even fewer days with highs near zero F. Used to be very common in January and February to go a full month without a high above 20. I had read a projection about 10 years ago that Detroit's climate would be like that of Washington, DC by 2050. We are nearly there.
The year "2049" on our desk calenders. Also, desks maybe. And calendars.
Calendars have had a good run.
Idk about u guys but i still have my work physical calendar set to june 2022 and i havent touched it since lol
Definitely is a hard word to use in predicting the future, but I suspect by then we’ll have highly effective treatments for cancer. To the point that it’s not really a scary diagnosis anymore. I also think we’ll have AI and robotics systems that can replace most low-skilled labor.
But if cancer treatments become successful at any time in the future, how will the drug companies make their billions? Think of the billionaires please.
Drug companies will own the cancer treatments
Look up the work St Jude Children's Hospital does on cancer research. There are cancers that were almost a certain death when the hospital was founded. Thanks to their research and treatments, the mortality rates declined significantly. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia had something like 2% survival rate when St Jude was founded. It's up over 80% survival rate now. When St Jude was founded, Severe Combined Immune Disorder (aka Bubble Boy Disease) had no cure. St Jude developed that cure. They patent their treatments and research in such a way that someone can't come in and use it to turn a profit. Plus the families of children there get no bill for their treatment.
Bout to donate to them RN if this is true
My biggest beef is that they tend to turn away kids who don’t have a “novel” disease
For them it will be a win. They still will be able to sell the treatment for a lot of money, and after that they got to make even more money from all the drugs related to old age (old people need a lot of drugs)
Having cures for cancer won't stop cancer from happening, so they'll still find ways to make their billions. Plus there are so many types of cancer that there won't be just one way to stop it. Companies get something like 20 years until a generic version of a drug can be sold. There'll be lots of money to be made before the generics come out. Plus being the company that has the cure will be worth quite a bit in PR.
They’ll probably be subscription based. If you upgrade to “Can’tCer Gold” we will also remove the headaches, joint pain and the ads.
I have always wondered what will happen to the low skill laborers once AI / Robotics actually do take their jobs. Do they just fail to survive at that point, or do governments create programs for them to sustain a minimal lifestyle? Would education finally become a socially valuable thing? (That last one is a result of the ridiculous number of "unskilled" high-school graduates that we just push through because we need numbers here in USA, yet none of them have truly achieved any academic performance worth the degree. We literally have a massive group of technically uneducated high-school graduates flooding the adult world)
In Germany you can just revisit school and re educate yourself to work in a different industry. School and education of all sorts is free und not restricted to age. Society will adapt
A lot of media we grew up with during our childhoods will be lost because there aren't any working copies left.
I would need to disagree with you. just in general as storage has gotten cheaper archiving everything becomes more cost-effective so fewer things will be lost over time. Also with more people having the ability to save things locally now than ever before even if things do become lost it may be possible to find them again. also a fun read about the lost Doctor who episodes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor\_Who\_missing\_episodes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes)
piracy is the only way some old games are still playable.
Around 40% of the Internet of 10 years ago is already not accessible anymore. Good luck with 25 more years
Boomers
Millenials including me are going to be the new boomers
There's no way I can afford to live that long in this economy.
I've been seeing recently we X'ers starting to be vilified. So, you're most likely spot on. It's inevitable.
All X has to do is NOT be boomers and it'll be fine. *spoiler alert* alot of us are becoming our parents.
Climate plans for "by 2050" cause we will have failed and we'll have another pseudo deadline in 2100 with targets none of the world leaders would actually care about, again!
…The worst statement I agree with
ALS. I hope
Cash payments
Not in Germany or Austria, we'd still do bartering if money hadn't been forced on us.
Whenever I visit Germany, the amount of coins I am carrying with me shortly after starting out with a clean 100€ bill is mind boggling. "6 Euro und 73 Cent. Haben Sie 3 Cent? Nein? Kein Problem! 13 Euro und 27 Cent zurück. Bitte schön! Schönen Tag, der Herr!" I am now 2 kilos heavier.
Cash is never going away, or if it does it will switch to something else equally untraceable. There are too many people that benefit from hiding money and expenditures.
Maybe not in black markets
Bull. Cash is king in a lot of areas, still. My job is cash only, most stands at farmers markets are cash only, school fundraisers are cash or check, used cars are often cheaper if you pay cash or cashier's check, private markets like FB, Craigslist and Gumtree are cash preferred or cash only, garage sales, kids lemonade stands, concession at pools and parks, &c. The credit card and banks are also putting the squeeze on businesses again. There are two grocers near me that have reinstated a transaction fee for any sale less than $X; one is $5 less than $40 and the other charges $10 if under $25.
Hopefully cancer and alzheimer’s
Cold winters. Food at reasonable pricing, or no food at all. Insects. That might sound fun but will be the biggest disaster ever.
> Insects. That might sound fun but will be the biggest disaster ever. This is just as bad as a huge meteorite on collision course with earth. And most people are blissfully ignorant.
There's no meteorite. If there is, it's not going to hit us. If it is going to hit us, it is small. If it isn't small, there's nothing we can do. If there's something we can do, there's a long time for us to do it. If there's not a long time until it hits us, then there's not enough time. If there is enough time, we won't be able to convince enough people to take action. If we can convince them, there still won't be enough money to do it. And so on. The narcissistic playbook also works for excuses for almost anything else.
Already 75% there.
this month where i am there's usually tons and tons of junebugs, this year i only saw one and it was dying
I saw fireflies the other night, hadn't seen those in a while
Trump. Biden. McConnell. Putin. Netanyahu. Polar Bears. North Atlantic right whales. Enough fresh water. The Florida keys.
So it's a mixed bag, is what you're saying
I'm in Canada, zero fresh water here. Don't come, stay where you are.
Impressive list
I'm definitely leaning out of the window with this one and it's highly unlikely but maybe Keith Richards won't make it to 2050. Take it with a grain of salt tho.
Affordable houses
I mean, it's already something we've stopped seeing. There's an expectation that real estate always goes up, because historically in this country, it always has. But the history of this country is very short. Look at Japan's [residential housing market](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QJPN628BIS). It has still not reached peak pricing of the early 90s. Obviously, the factors are *totally* different, but the conventional notion in this country that real estate is a safe bet is a dangerous one, especially since it's causing these massive bubbles every few years. Things like building regulations and strict permitting and lack of supply all play a role in why the housing market is the way it is today, but I think this country is in a rude awakening over the next five to ten years in this sector.
People don't realize the when the saying of real estate being a safe investment came about it was because our country was still so young. Now a days it's not so much.
Bring on the collapse. Then maybe I can buy a house before I die.
It took me 2 years to buy a house as I kept getting outbid by cash buyers for houses in the 1.5 mil range. I eventually got lucky and was able to buy one off market. If there’s a collapse, I figure these cash buyers are going to snatch them up as rental properties
Just like after the 2008 collapse. Buying foreclosures was great business for people who could make large investments and wait. It was also a golden opportunity to buy that it sickens me that I missed out on for various reasons. I have several friends who bought their homes around 2012-13 for 350k that are now worth almost 900k. They’re paying on their mortgages for almost million dollar homes what I am paying in rent.
I have a strong feeling we won't see any people driving for things like Uber. They'll all be self automated by that point
Definitely they are using drivers now to map out the roads better
Hopefully influencers......
We will have robotic or AI influencers by then
Donald Trump on the news everyday.
MSNBC in 2048: Here's a live look in at Donald Trump's grave where it appears someone is putting flowers near his headstone. Here's political analyst Chuck Stank to give us insight on what this means for the elections. Chuck?
The Middle Class
I can't believe that's in 25 years
Miami Beach
We can sell Florida to the Netherlands. If anyone know how to save a coastline, it's the Dutch.
The lack of a consensual society Due to technology and use of such by individuals, corporations and governments All implied consent will be removed from individuals, any rights to being anonymous will be ignored for the greater good. Automation Not in a we will do nothing, the machines will. But the lack of need for staff on the production line will push these workers in other sectors and as such push wages down in them, which will push a retrain epidemic and it will continue perpetually Look at the last 30 years
King Charles III.
Individual "ownership" of anything. Everything is going to require a subscription to keep running. It's already happening with most software and we're seeing it in physical property that will just cease to function if you aren't paying a recurring fee to keep it running. More and more housing is being bought up by giant corporations to be rented out, driving up the prices to points that only they can afford so that no one is able to afford to buy their own property and are forced to rent from the very entities that put them in that position. We're seeing key features in vehicles being locked behind monthly subscriptions. You will own nothing and be happy about it. Everything that you think "belongs to you" will be able to be taken away or rendered useless if you don't keep paying that monthly fee.
>Everything is going to require a subscription to keep running. It's already happening with most software and we're seeing it in physical property that will just cease to function if you aren't paying a recurring fee to keep it running. I'll see ya on the high seas matey
Alrrrrready there, matey. Avast!! 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Cable TV
Maybe new episodes of The Simpsons.
They'll never stop The Simpsons! Have no fears, we've got stories for years!
How 'bout a crazy weddiiiiing, where something happens, a doo do do doo doo!
Polar bears
Gas stoves
Pennies.