And as someone with a limited intelligence, I can't even imagine what will happen as soon as you do this. And obviously, the more you augment intelligence, the more that you can learn how to augment intelligence, and increase lifespan, and do digital and biological integration even more.
So these things I see as some form of a trend. We'll see how it all plays out, and hopefully it plays out in kind of the feel-good Care Bear version versus some type of crazy society and we all turn into the Borg in some way. Now, the other trend, and these are the things that just popped into my brain today when I pressed record, but the other trend that I think is interesting is some of the things that we've taken for granted in terms of how nations interact with each other, and nation states in particular interact with each other.
And just as a kind of an overview, so there's a notion called a nation state. And in everyday language the word nation and the word state almost means the same thing, but they kind of mean different things if you want to be a little bit more formal about it. And that's why people use the word nation state.
That's like to a lot of people, hey, doesn't that mean saying like state state? The difference between a nation and a state is these are a group of people that feel some type of common identity.
It could be a language. It could be a culture. It could be a value system. So this is some kind of common identity. And it often is somehow associated with geography, but it does not have to be associated with geography. It could even be a religion, or it could be whatever else. That's what a nation is. A state is a formal governance structure that makes the laws and has the institutions to make society function.
Now, a nation state is what most of us live in today because it both has an identity and some type of formal institutions. So a very pure nation state would be some place like Japan, where there's relatively uniform, in terms of ethnicity and religion, and in terms of culture, and you have that same group of people are governing themselves.
In a place like the United States ethnicity, religion, that's diverse, but what gives identity is a notion of shared values and a notion of maybe a common history or whatever else, or a certain kind of world view.
And obviously there's a formal state structure. Now, what I think is going to be interesting here, and I actually have no idea how all of this is going to play out, but when you see things like some of the revolutions in the Middle East due to things like people being able to communicate irrespective of the traditional media, I think there's going to be some interesting questions on what happens to the nation state, especially nation states that are able to secure their power by kind of having a bottleneck on access to information.
And all of that is, I think, going to change in a very dramatic way as you have more and more integration between people, cross-border communications, when people realize that the people on the other side of the border really aren't that different than themselves. And another interesting thing, even the notion of democracy-- and once again, I don't know how it's going to play out-- but all notions of representational democracy that we have today are somewhat based on geography.
They're somewhat based on geography. And that's because when the major representational democracies came about that was the best way to represent each other.
Hey, let me pick some representatives from our county or from our region, and they'll go elect other representatives, and they'll go to the national government. But now that we have this instantaneous communication with people you might be able to have different types of a representational democracy, or maybe you could even have more direct democracies.
And then the other way that I think nation states are, the way they fundamentally interact is going to change is actually in things like warfare. And once again, already seeing this trend. In particular, I think developed countries are not going to have humans on the front line. And depending on your point of view, this could be a very good thing or it could be a kind of a scary thing, because if you have no humans on the front line, and you're already seeing things like this with these predator drones and you see these robot bomb detectors, and things like that.
And it doesn't even have to be these big things. There's already a DARPA funded project to work on miniature insects that could be used as some form of reconnaissance, or you could imagine eventually they could have these little things on them that could knock someone out, or who knows what they do. The exciting thing is that all of a sudden a human won't be there to get shot.
And so hopefully military casualties would go down. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system.
Taken from to in New York and Beijing, these photographs reveal how the average person is likely to look in the future. Perhaps Cyjo is saying that by marrying outside our race, we defy antiquated racial categories and in fact undermine them altogether. In , the U. Census Bureau started letting respondents identify themselves as more than one race. And 6. Half of Millennials identify as political independents , but tend to support liberal issues, vote Democrat and responded overwhelmingly to the left-leaning rhetoric of Barack Obama — twice.
How this holds for future elections is yet to be seen. But it's increasingly clear that conservative politicians have their work cut out securing our votes. Generation X-ers fall around the national average, suggesting that religion — and the ideological baggage that comes with it — may be witnessing a decline. Also notable is the expansion of atheism and agnosticism, which 3 of 10 unaffiliated Millennials identify as subscribing to.
And what would a list outlining the differences between old and young be without mentioning technology? Millennials have often been called "digital natives," the first generation to grow up under the hopefully benevolent gaze of the Internet.
Our primary mode of communication is social networking and, as a bonus statistic, we average Facebook friends, which seems a conservative estimate. Image Credit: The Age. That older generations exhibit lower degrees of tech savvy only contributes to our ideological and communication differences. How can we "talk it out" if we're on the Internet while they're still jabbing at landline dials with applesauce-coated fingers?
So what do we have to look forward to? To hear the study tell it: Racial diversity, high rates of intermarriage, more immigrants, left-leaning politics and an impending battle between young and old that could radically impact whether we choose to take care of our parents or ship them to cheap retirement homes. Hopefully we reconcile our differences before things get really ugly. Either way, it's a fascinating and exciting future to ponder. And with the benefit of the Pew Center's research, we should now be significantly better equipped to prepare for it.
By Zak Cheney-Rice. According to the study, here are nine trends that will inevitably define our nation's future — for better or for worse: 1.
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