Civilization is a mere 5000 years old. A small fraction of the age of the human race, a very small fraction of the age of genus Homo, and a tiny sliver of the geologic age of the Earth. It is clear that the history of the human race is not at any sort of equilibrium and a lot of change will happen in the years to come.
In my opinion, eventually some sort of equilibrium will be reached in human society. Technological change will slow and some sort of demographic balance will be reached. How long that will take is unknown. I am not even sure that the equilibrium human society will be a good or bad one. It could be one of overcrowded masses of powerless poor ruled by a rich and technically sophisticated elite, as has happened often in the past.
But if somehow our future descendants got things right and we end up with a society that most rational people would consider good, what would it look like? I will speculate on how it would look, using both my idea of what a “good” society might be, and science might be able to provide.
There will be fewer people in the world then there are today.
Purely as a guess, I will put the world population at about half of what it is today. This will have huge benefits to the environment. It will be much easier to control carbon emissions, human caused climate change, and all other forms of pollution. Agricultural land and the oceans will become far more sustainable. It will be easier for everyone to have a good standard of living and still have a sustainable environment.
Women will have full civil rights and control over their own reproduction.
Full civil rights for women is morally required for a good society. Recent history has shown that population growth levels off when women have rights and access to birth control. If women have that control, repressive measures such as China’s one child policy will not be needed for a stable population.
Everyone will be able to choose their own culture.
Trying to force everyone to fit into one culture ends up being repressive. But having multiple cultures sharing a society can lead to conflict. If society is set up to allow people to move between cultures, then cultural diversity can still exist, but the movement and mixing will force most people to be more tolerant. This may mean that various rules for what kind of clothing to wear, arbitrary dietary rules, and other customs meant to separate members of a culture from other cultures will fade out or be optional.
Religion will be private and personal.
Society mandating religion is repressive and often leads to very nasty conflict. The founders of the United States were aware of the bad results of mandated religion from the history of Europe, and tried to create a secular nation. In a utopian society, no one can expect any sort of social enforcement of religious conformity. If a person wants to break away from the religion of their parents, they will have the right to do so.
There will be no extremes of wealth and poverty.
Some people, whether by ability, effort, or luck will still have more influence and power than others. But the sort of unaccountable wealth represented by the Koch brothers will be impossible. For most of human history, it was impossible for most people to live in any other condition than what we would call poverty. But technology will make it possible to eliminate poverty. Everyone will have decent shelter and enough to eat. Education on any subject will be available to everyone who has the interest.
Radical transparency will increase accountability.
I believe that today and in the future technology makes it difficult to keep secrets. So I have become persuaded that the ideas of SF author David Brin on transparency are on the right track for preserving freedom. There will be fewer secrets. Especially, organizations and governments will have far fewer secrets. Money in particular will usually be public information. The owners, stockholders, or controllers of any organization will be known. Ownership or control of any sort of corporation or business will be easily traceable by anyone back to individuals. Any sort of resources used to support a political campaign will be traceable to the source. If some sort of police or intelligence agency wants to look at everyone’s phone calls or messages, it will be public information that this is being done. Anyone can find out who, if anyone, owns deadly firearms or explosives.
Money and finance will still exist, but in a different form.
In any sort of technological economy, you have to have something like money to transfer resources to different uses. The purpose of a financial industry is to allocate resources to the most productive uses. That purpose has been lost in the current financial industry, which instead tries to skim off money from the flow of money in the economy, as shown by the rise of exotic derivative investments and high speed trading. The form that money and finance will take in a utopian society is still unknown. But the sort of “zero sum” trading that occurs so much now will not be a part of it. If there is still stock share ownership of corporations, trading in such stock will be much slower and less volatile, with the value corresponding much more closely to the economic productivity of the corporation. Economic organizations will have a longer term outlook in their decisions. Economic ecosystems, needed for making complex products such as computers, aircraft, or autos, will be much more valued.
Most people will be what we now call mixed race.
Racism has proven to be an intractable problem. The social pressures caused by race have forced many people to have a cultural identity tied to the race they were born to. Biologically race is a very fuzzy concept, though. If most people have ancestors from multiple races, maybe it will be easier for society to make race less important when judging and accepting people and cultures.
Most of the time, technological change will be slow.
People have gotten used to the rapid technological change that has taken place in our lifetimes. But I don’t think most people have realized that technological change has slowed for the present. The book The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth by Robert J Gordon makes a persuasive case that we are at such a technological plateau. Moore’s Law has hit the wall, as it was bound to do sooner or later. There could be very major technology leaps in the future. The most likely one in the near future would be advances in artificial intelligence that make many jobs obsolete. Another possibility would be a greatly increased control over biology leading to a medical revolution. Another, maybe a bit farther out, would be a radical increase in potential human lifespan. But I am convinced that sooner or later the human race will reach a point where technological change will slow down. It can’t increase exponentially forever.
Society will be able to manage a slow growth economy fairly and efficiently.
Since the ultimate limit on economic growth is technological improvement, society will have to manage a no growth or slow growth economy. As Thomas Piketty demonstrated with his r > g thesis, this will be hard to do without increasing inequality. Even in a slow growth economy, our technology already allows our economy to be very rich. But our current economic structure cannot deal very well with a slow growth economy. Our utopian society of the future will have to have some arrangements to make sure everyone has a decent standard of living even if growth is slow.
I hope these ideas stimulate debate, and helps us to look at long term goals that we should be aiming for.