The Stuff You Should Know podcast for Dec 28 ("How Primitive Will Our Descendants Find Us?") was a really good one in which they guessed what things we do today that people in the future will consider barbaric or primitive (similar to how we think of people from the middle ages somewhat barbaric for violence, treatment of women, etc).
https://stuffyoushouldknow.com/episodes/
A summary of the things modern people do that they guessed will be considered barbaric, based on statistics, trends and scientific evidence:
-spanking children
-chemotherapy (not that it's bad, just that we're trending towards better alternatives)
-organ transplants (not that they're bad, just that future people will probably grow organs from cells instead)
-treatment of animals (soon we'll have lab-grown meat instead of raising animals for food)
-privately owned vehicles (soon transportation-as-a-service will take their place)
-using GDP (i.e. the growth or shrinkage of the stock market) as a measure of economic wealth
-burning fossil fuels
I agree with their assessment of all of those things. I also have a couple more guesses, but they're not nearly as assured or based on science and I'm not nearly as confident in them compared to the above:
-Working office jobs 40+ hours per week to survive. No matter whether climate change forces us to go back to a simpler, more agrarian / DIY way of life, or whether AI ends up providing our basic necessities, I can't forsee a future where working your whole life for corporations doing menial work will continue, and believe future generations will see it as slavery.
-Countries / corporations / systems where a few elites control the population authoritatively. I believe future generations will see us as having little control in our lives the same way kings controlled people's lives in the middle ages. I don't know how or when this will change to be more democratic / autonomous, but I don't think people will put up with it forever. In other words, I believe future people will not call voting for representatives who make all their choices "democracy", but will have a much more democratic way of life. And they won't call the ability to buy things that are all the same as each other from a few corporations who have all the power "free trade", but will have much more freedom in how they get resources.
