What’s on US?

The forces shaping our future are not inevitable in the sense that they are ‘preordained’ or irrefutable. Rather, they are inevitable because:

1. They’re already happening, have been ‘happening’ for more than thirty years, and will keep happening;
2. They are fundamentally driven by the underlying dynamics of technology itself, determined by mathematics and physics.

While Kelly in his book  The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future builds a vision of ‘life with technology’ that is brilliant, grand and highly optimistic, he doesn’t take into account the technological capacity for mass destruction and the evolutionary cycles of human history that make civilizations disappear and new ones emerge. This is illustrated in following table that compares the the social processes that steer civilizations with the universal biological cycle.

Social Entropy is very high in the USA and may be approximated using a Boltzmann type equation, resulting into the following graphic:

The mathematical model of the evolution theory indicates that the USA, as a nation system, drifts towards its senility phase and this might find its ultimate expression in the amount of entropy this nation system contains.

Any political system that permanently violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics, contributes itself to increase its Social Entropy. In other words it forces itself to its end. Following diagram shows clearly that the USA as an envelope for human civilization has entered into its senility phase. It seems to be a law of nature that the faster a civilization reaches its peak, the faster it descends into oblivion.

The contemporary Chinese Republic is an amalgam of the tension field between communism, capitalism, information science and traditional values. The diagram forecasts how the Chinese are fast closing in on a stagnating Western civilization. This is mainly done with utter disrespect for the notion of intellectual property and by taking the findings of Western science and technology to a higher level while waging an aggressive socio-economic expansion policy.

In the context of the growing tensions between China and the USA, an exponential growth of the armament levels can be observed (within a finite time span) even when the two systems are not linked. We are dealing here not with mutual interactive stimulation but entirely with self-stimulation. The driving force behind the burgeoning of the technology of destruction may not even be the perceived as an external threat, but merely the self-stimulating demands of the technology itself. This model could be illustrative for the Chinese attitude to whatever other superpower. China is already since years expanding its weapons’ production and has launched its first series of self-build carriers .

Since wars are basically a system failure, a World War is a big system failure. Statistical data about those phenomena are scarce, but if we analyze the historical data, we can discern five recurring factors preceding a massive system failure that in the past have provoked a World War.

1. A prohibition on alcoholic beverages (narcotics?)  in the US
2. A pandemic crisis causing a string of bankruptcies
3. A Great Recession .
4. An agricultural depression .
5. A crazy dictator of an industrialized country who goes unchecked because everybody is fixated on his own problems.

The nearby future prospects of the millennial look bleak, although at this stage only point 3 seems a looming perspective.