Post-pandemic before/after speculative prediction/forecasting thread. Will try to capture ideas that occur to me in a non-valuative way (ie, avoid tagging as dark age/return to light)
Conversation
Viewed as a network, the UrbanNet will start shifting from big "cloud datacenter" metros to "network edge fat client" small cities of < 0.25m. Logistics will rewire from hub-spoke to p2p.
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Supply chains will start shifting to intermediates that can be assembled last mile. This is a swing that has had complex cycles before, due to railroads, refrigerated rail cars/trucks, containerization, Chinafication etc. Currently it's finished consumer goods, b2b intermediates.
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So it won't just be hipsters making their own bread. We're making our own alcohol wipes from... 70% alcohol and tissues. If you try this btw, regular 80 proof alcohol won't do. You need everclear or something. People are posting recipes (mostly bad) for home-made hand sanitizer.
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In general, small scale network-edge manufacturing lacks efficiencies of scale, and is harder to automate, but is more agile/flexible ("fat"). There will be demand for high-skill staffed job shops for "semi-homemade" things. Kinda like old-school compounding pharmacies.
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Public health administration will be heavily deregulated and we'll move from a mainframe to PC era of "personal health management" with a lot more of the care and risk management happening at the level of non-professionals. Amateurization in all its good+bad embodiments.
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Political ideologies will swing towards greater openness to euthanasia and quality-of-life utilitarianism. Managing societies to acknowledge not just capacity for survival/adaptive fit, but desire and quality of the survival. Opt-in administrative darwinism basically.
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Societal futures will start to resemble Asimov's Spacer civilization in allegorical form. A longevity/self-segregation based mansion elite with low evolutionary viability, high QoL + a declining life-span/dense living mass population with high evolutionary viability but low QoL
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We will come to see brute force societal microbial barrier enforcement via mass sanitization as unsustainable. Castle-and-moat perimeter defense of “civilization” will give way to a zero-trust networking approach to managing the microbial interface. stratechery.com/2020/zero-trus
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I'm not sure why this would happen. It seems like the current moment is emphasizing the externalities on other people, of one's personal health choices.

