A range of technical advances sit on the cusp of widespread introduction or are already spreading fast. These include AI, driverless cars, lab-grown meat, cancer vaccines, green tech and a new set of frontiers for space exploration. A number of these innovations have the potential to render irrelevant many of the assumptions on which current political debates are based and have been based for decades. They will drastically alter labour market rules, city planning, rural policy, climate change, energy policies, longevity and the collective mission of our society. And that’s before we even get to questions such as the implications for GDP growth, tax revenues and government debt. Smart political parties would be thinking now about the implications. But our politics is way behind.
Consider lab-grown meat. Replacing our current slaughter meat with lab-grown meat would free up vast amounts of land currently used for grazing that could instead be used for housing or for reforestation to deliver carbon capture. Our rural landscapes would look completely different, for one thing. And reforesting the UK’s grazing lands would capture carbon equivalent to about 10 years of emissions, with huge impacts for ambitions such as Net Zero.
What lab-grown meat might change about our rural landscapes, driverless cars may do for our cityscapes. The widespread use of autonomous vehicles would free up parking areas in cities for alternative uses, and reduce the number of cars by perhaps up to 80%. In addition, our roads and pavements would need reconfiguring to allow the much greater speeds autonomous vehicles could travel in urban areas, along with the obsolescence of roundabouts and most traffic lights, as autonomous vehicles achieved interleaving. Cities will look very different and urban plans based on current concepts are likely to be totally left behind.
AI is already boosting productivity, but in the future it may well revolutionise a range of currently high-skill tasks. We assume many professions require accreditation and certain qualifications, and we may have policies that encourage practitioners to immigrate from abroad. But AI might mean that these roles can be performed with little to no expertise, or may not even require proximate human involvement at all. We assume that consumers need protection and we have regulations that mandate disclosure and transparency of certain forms, such as the way prices are quoted or the presence of alternative options, to aid the competitive process and protect consumers. But consumers who have personal AI butlers to buy their products may be able to search the entire internet for information, rendering all that protective and pro-competitive framework otiose.
Our assumptions about late-life care and the challenges of an increasing ‘dependency ratio’ between older and younger citizens may be overturned by medical advances increasing longevity. This would allow older people to stay healthy and alert, and thus able to work until much later in life than policies currently assume. Green technologies may transform our approaches to energy – will it even still be seen as a scarce resource, let alone an environmentally dirty one?
From the 13th century until the 20th century, exploration was a major teleological driver for our civilisation. Discoveries in science and engineering allowed faster, safer and more reliable exploration. People aspired to be explorers. As our last goals were ticked off in the 20th century – North-West passage, North and South Pole, Everest, the deep ocean trenches, the moon – our civilisation’s era of discovery came to a close. For over half a century, discovery has not been of teleological significance. But if current ambitions to land on Mars within four years come to fruition, our civilisation will suddenly gain a whole new set of ambitions.
Overall, our politics has also grown used to the assumption that we need to deal with the challenges of low growth. But if economic growth were to become much more rapid, that would present an entirely new palette of political options.
A world in which our cities and countryside look totally different, jobs involve profoundly different acitivites, expertise and competition change completely, we live and work much longer, energy is neither scarce nor dirty, our eyes reach up to that red dot in the sky with the collective ambition to conquer and remould it and economic growth is rapid will be a world of politics unlike anything we have known since the 19th century. If our politicians do not adapt, they could soon be left behind.
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