Ian Bremmer is a big brain I got to know while covering North Korea as a foreign correspondent. He speaks really quickly and he is one of the sharpest riffers on any subject so he’s one of the first voices I reached out to as I begun this reporting. His official bio: He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. Once dubbed the “rising guru” in the field of political risk by The Economist, he teaches classes on risk as a professor at New York University. His latest book “Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism” is a New York Times bestseller.
I wanted to speak with Ian because I need a more specific frame for my exploration and I thought Ian might lay down some theses to help get me started. Boy, did he.
Atmospherics: Spoke by phone, Ian was in a car so he couldn’t record myself. My shipment from DC was getting delivered to my new house in LA so I was sitting on a cobwebby camping chair I found in a backyard shed to conduct this interview. As I was speaking with Ian, my friend Nick came over to give me cash to tip my movers, and my realtor came over to walk around and do the move-in inspection for my landlord. The movers were, meanwhile, moving. A lot was going on.
Loose Notes:
Me: I’m working on a vertical that I thought up, about the world in 2050. It will be expressed in various ways, namely my home platform, video, but many parts on audio too, and maybe I’ll write pieces or a book one day. I picked 2050 because it’s soon and yet far enough away — it’s when today’s babies will be 30.
Ian: 2050 is a long time in a world where technology is changing at an exponential rate. You know about Moore’s Law and singularity. Changes appear to happen slow but you have technological change happening exponentially, especially as they reach scale. So history doesn’t tell us anything about the future, because you have so many hockey sticks. “Weak signals become strong signals fast.”
The idea that capitalism works will be tested. Labor and capital may no longer have a relationship to one another, as we’re seeing artificial intelligence rise. “Yes the industrial revolution led to more jobs, but not for horses. Why couldn’t that happen to people?”
That might divide humanity. By 2050 you could take a subset of humanity and it might create intellectual capacity way beyond what humans are capable of now. I’m thinking memory recall, pattern recognition. As usual companies will own these ways to augment your capabilities, not everyone gets access. So then you could have one subset of intellectually capable superhumans, and one subset with today’s human capability. Human history would indicate we won’t treat the normal intellectually capable human beings as human beings.
Government, economic and socio-cultural models will be fundamentally tested. I‘d argue the issues around geopolitical developments are much more pressing than climate change because with climate change we have a little bit of time to adapt except for the poorest parts of the world, i.e. Syria, Yemen, sub-Saharan Africa, where that’s already the case. “The last twenty to 40 years were really hopeful for humanity and that seems to be continuing, and yet there are many signs the wheels are coming off.”
There are two places the future really plays out, or is playing out already: China and Silicon Valley. “So you’re in the right place to be in California.” Who are those people, who are setting up the future? What are those systems and models they’re working under? Where is there discontinuity?
Missing Ideology of 2050
The world today has no ideology. That will change, but not sure how. What brings people together and divides them in 2050? What spurs them to action? It’s not going to be capitalism, necessarily. Nor a protestant work ethic. Or liberal-democratic values, even.
Watch the techno-utopists in the Bay Area. “There really are a lot of people up there who believe technology will fix everything.” Understand those people. What do they care about? What is the world they see? What is the reaction to that? Who is disenfranchised by this kind of thinking? Are they just anti-state people? Anti-capitalist people? Who are the anti-tech people who will bring them down, besides negative actors like Russia, Iran.
The future Humans
Humanity will change through genetic modifications. How will technolgoy be used for good/bad here? Look at soldiers who get heightened mental/physical acuity right now, who can work without sleep, tweak their personalities with drugs, etc. Look at three areas:
Changes in emotional/mental capacity
Heightened ability to work/longer attention span
Functioning without sleep
“These will be tweakable changes that a lot of people don’t have access to.” Recommends the 9.9 percent piece in The Atlantic, as he believes these people will make sure they and their children are “on the right side of the gates.”
Societal changes
What is the next thing that keeps society held together, when technology has proven so divisive to society?
Then I had to get off the phone because too many people were over. And Ian is a busy dude who had a hard stop anyway. I’ll speak with his colleague Andrew, next.
Future Human 