Writing for Fast Company, Cascio explores what he considers to be the most likely ways in which our economic systems will mutate and evolve in the 21st Century:

The social and economic structures underpinning the modern world are constantly evolving, and there will very likely soon come a point—probably in the next generation or so, if history is a guide—that we no longer see the socioeconomic world as belonging to the same "species" as back at the beginning of the 21st century. Instead, we'll probably see a period of experimentation with diverse economic forms; indeed, the mid-21st century could well be a truly exciting time for wonkery.

Cascio comes up with three possibilities:

1. Brittle Strength: The current global economy seems to exaggerate booms and busts, and the ongoing consolidation of corporate actors into "too big to fail" entities means that when busts happen—and they do—the system tends towards failure rather than "soft landing." It's getting harder and harder for governments to step in and serve as safety nets to prevent total collapse; the current economic downturn may well be the last one the system can stand.
2. Griefer Economics: Information is power, especially when it comes to finance, and the increasing use of ultra-fast computers to manipulate markets (and drive out "weaker" competitors) is moving us into a world where market position isn't determined by having the best offering, but by having the best tool. Rules are gamed, opponents are beaten before they even know they're playing, and it all feels very much like living on a PvP online game server where the referees have all gone home.
3. Robots Stole My Job!: Think you can't be replaced by a machine? Think again. Robots are becoming more dextrous, able to do a growing number of tasks requiring precision and strength, and computer systems are becoming smarter, able to tackle jobs needing pattern-matching and creative skills. Humans are still cheaper, for now, but this puts downward pressure on wages—and the old rule that new technology opens up entirely new fields of human labor won't hold true forever. Smarter, more capable machines will snap up those jobs, too.

Of those three, Cascio calls the final "what we all want, ultimately. C'mon, admit it," and speculates that Europe would be where it'd happen first, but not without trouble:

The U.S. slowed down, Japan took control, and Europe... well, Europe got wired. Or got weird, depending on your perspective... The big problem, though, is that everybody wants in. The EU borders are effectively closed to migration (with a few humanitarian exceptions, and basic "keep the population steady" immigration), patrolled by drones and the military. Every year, at least a hundred people are killed trying to get in. It's like the ultimate gated community, and nobody here likes it—but nobody has been able to figure out another solution.

The more we think about it, we're not sure that we agree with the Robonomics model is even necessarily a best case worst case scenario... and not just because we're always concerned about robotic overlords and the worshiping thereof.

Three Possible Economic Models Part 1 and Part 2 [Fast Company]

Cascio's basic premise is this:

Here's an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don't have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

Most people don't realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it's happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity . . . And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today's technologies seem primitive . . .

Scientists refer to the 12,000 years or so since the last ice age as the Holocene epoch. It encompasses the rise of human civilization and our co-evolution with tools and technologies that allow us to grapple with our physical environment. But if intelligence augmentation has the kind of impact I expect, we may soon have to start thinking of ourselves as living in an entirely new era. The focus of our technological evolution would be less on how we manage and adapt to our physical world, and more on how we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we've created. We can call it the Nöocene epoch, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the Nöosphere, a collective consciousness created by the deepening interaction of human minds.

You can read the whole article in The Atlantic.

There's clearly a competitive aspect to this enhancement, and that disturbs many of us. The use of cognitive drugs is driven, at least in part, by a perceived need to keep up with colleagues and rivals. The fear is, how much longer will it be possible for someone to reject the use of these drugs and still maintain competitive parity? If everyone else vying for the promotion uses modafinil to stay awake for 20 hours/day, can you afford not to? Given that the long-term effect of these drugs is still poorly-understood, however, is it at all ethical to allow this kind of "slippery-slope" scenario to come about? Even a broad national consensus against using cognitive enhancement drugs may crumble if another country chooses to accept—even encourage—their use. We may face a choice between altering our brain chemistries and falling behind in the global economy.

Check out the whole article at Fast Company.

Though it launched just last week, Superstruct is already getting raves from mainstream outlets like CBS news, as well as obsessive gamer sites like ARGNet. As much an experiment with futurism as it is an engrossing game, Superstruct is designed to teach people to prepare for a worse future — and to come up with realistic ways to fix it.

Each player must do a series of tasks, beginning with a detailed description of what you think you'll be doing in 11 years and ending by working with other players to create new social/political/economic superstructures that could save the world before the 2040s collapse. In the process, you'll read news headlines about the future world, immerse yourself in the life stories of your future neighbors, and participate in detailed world-building with thousands of other players. Your tools will be familiar: blogs, wikis, websites. And you'll gain points by completing tasks, as well as earning "raves" from your fellow players.

Superstruct will only last six weeks, but you still have plenty of time to sign up and join the serious fun. Essentially, the game is an act of collective world-building with a specific, ethical purpose in mind. We recently had a chance to talk about this purpose with one of the game's creators, Jamais Cascio, a futurist and writer. Here's what he told us.

It seems as if Superstruct came along at the right time, when the globe is in the middle of a massive crisis and governments are reevaluating what to do in the future.

After 9/11, interest in the market for foresight thinking collapsed. Companies went out of business, and I didn't get any work doing this stuff for over a year. Nobody wanted to think about the future. But this time, with a bigger crisis, the financial crisis, thinking about future is what a lot of people want to do. Superstruct hit at the right time. A population is out there who want to think about future but don't have a lot of practice at it.

A lot of people think the future is too big to think about and it doesn't matter if they think about it anyway. We're trying to say that your choices do matter, even the small choices you make in daily life – everything we do casts a shadow into the future.

So in the future you've created for 2019, we're dealing with what you call superthreats. This isn't a happy world.

It's important to remember that the five superthreats aren't five separate futures. They're five overlapping crises. Like today's financial crisis overlaps with the war in Iraq, and with AIDS, and the election. All these things you can look at in narrow silos and look at as overlapping.

Why didn't you offer the possibility of a happy future where we've made the right choices?

Right now I'm working on a section of the game called 21st Century Ideas, which is a page where we talk about the toolkit of solutions [to the superthreats]. We chose to start by focusing on the negative aspects of the foresight experience because [the game] is following a dramatic arc. When you go to the movies and see an adventure it usually stars with the bad stuff before you see the heroic team put together a solution. If you start with all the great stuff, then go to the crisis, you don't really see the crisis at all. It seems like it's already been solved.

There was an early consensus among the design team that we needed to give players a sense of terror and fear, and a sense of hope that it can be changed. We're not saying, "Here's the rock slamming into planet — it's too late." We're saying collapse is not inevitable. This is not the singularity or the rapture.

Did any science fiction stories influence the world you created for Superstruct?

I can tell you that one movie that influenced my thinking about how this world looks and feels is Children of Men. There's a short subject on DVD that talks about how they developed their [near future] scenario, and that's what we did too. We were world building. Setting aside narrow plot, think about how that world in Children of Men looks – that was what came to mind immediately. The US in Superstruct's 2019 has that look of being advanced but exhausted.

It's important to remember that we are not doing prediction, here. The Superstruct world that we built is not our or IFTF's vision of what 2019 will look like. It's not about us telling you what will happen, but you running through a scenario and figuring out if this world is where you want to go. It's also about clarifying and demystifying capacities for changing the world.

Everybody in the game has to choose a superthreat to focus on. What's the most popular superthreat so far?

Outlaw Planet [the world of information scams, surveillance, and data overload] seems to be most popular. Even if this game is nothing like World of Warcraft, I think we have a wave of people who were conversant in that world who picked it. Of the 5 it's also the one that seems to be the least depressing. The others would clearly make people's lives miserable: starvation, lack of health care and housing. Outlaw Planet, at least superficially, is about making people's lives annoying. The threat is more about how easy it is to endanger the sinews and communication networks of society.

What are some of your favorite creations you've seen in the game from participants?

People are making interesting videos and flickr streams of photoshopped 2019 images [many of which we've used to illustrate this post]. One person is gathering air samples from around the world — sending a jar around, having people open it and send it back. It's metaphorical rather than scientific, but it's about creativity in the creation of artifacts. There is a lot of artifact creation going on here. Many people have set up websites for organizations that will exist in 2019.

There's definitely a strong scifi narrative aspect to this, but it's more like a game than a novel because we're creating the board where people play. There's no lead story running through. The parallel here would be scenario books, a module in an RPG. that's a better analogy than you might think because IFTF is planning to spin out the process to other areas.

Businesses and organizations will use this same platform as a collaborative idea testing process.

When people are asked to describe their future selves, which is the first task in the game, did you find people were inventing fantasy futures for themselves or were trying to be honest and realistic?

I was expecting scifi exaggeration and wish-fulfillment. But most people seem to be thinking seriously about what they would be like in this world. Some of the most powerful have been focused on little stories, family stories. One person wrote about how they would tell their kids they only have 23 years left. That's a big question.

For me, the notion of telling someone, “Here are the constraints and challenges you'll face,” is the first step to thinking about what you can do about it. You're not just saying, "The world is ending — good luck.” That would be unethical. I think a lot about being an ethical futurist and I think it has to do with making clear the responsibilities people have. And that's what we hope to do with Superstruct. We want to say, "This is in your hands." Ignoring that is also making a choice.

Post-industrial building via Mita.

Thames rising via Elaine Alhadeff.

Condo boom via reBang2019.

ReDS poster via lhall.

Cascio writes:

The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere or how many toxins we dump into the soil and oceans, given enough time the Earth will recover.

But human civilization is far more fragile.

Human civilization could not withstand and recover from the same kinds of assaults the planet itself has shrugged off in eons past. We remain entirely dependent upon myriad Earth services and systems, from topsoil and clean water to carbon cycles and biodiversity. Activities that undermine those critical services and systems quite literally threaten the survival of human civilization. The fundamental resilience of the Earth's geophysical systems simply means that, when we ignore our effects on the planet, we're simply making ourselves disposable, just another passing blip in the planet's long history.

In trying to minimize the harmful impacts of human activities upon the global ecosystem, environmentalism supports the continued healthy existence of humankind.

Earth will be just fine, thank you [Open the Future]

"It's only a matter of time before the world's militaries learn to use the Earth itself as a weapon," Cascio writes. He speculates about how climate change and global warming could also be weaponized:

The offensive use of geoengineering could take a variety of forms. Overproductive algae blooms can actually sterilize large stretches of ocean over time, effectively destroying fisheries and local ecosystems. Sulfur dioxide carries health risks when it cycles out of the stratosphere. One proposal would pull cooler water from the deep oceans to the surface in an explicit attempt to shift the trajectories of hurricanes. Some actors might even deploy counter-geoengineering projects to slow or alter the effects of other efforts.

Battlefield Earth [Foreign Policy]

What the Heck? [Open the Future]

Disabled users require developers to innovate away from general user interfaces. So you get a computer that recognizes you're there even if you don't touch it, or that can shift from not making sounds to making them as needed [for the blind]. But ordinary consumers want those features too. And so now developers are asking, What if there was a ring or glove that let you write with one finger on the palm of your hand? Your body would become pointer and interface.

Sounds just like Vernor Vinge's latest novel Rainbows End, where everybody types on computers woven into their clothes by moving their bodies sort of twitchily. Cascio is hasty to point out that any body-based interface would have to involve people touching themselves "only in publicly appropriate ways." Image by Odd Andersen via Getty.