bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
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Maybe.Current life in the US is far removed from what it was 75 years ago, which was far removed from 150 years ago.
50 more years will make it unrecognizable - again.
Since the Industrial Revolution we have seen so much rapid change in lifestyle that it feels as though rapid change is normal, even inevitable. But it's really not; An ordinary working man from 1700, transported to 1900, would be astonished at the marvels and wonders his counterparts of 1900 took for granted. But a working man from 700 wouldn't notice a huge difference if transported to 1700. The wealthy had some impressive new luxuries, but the ordinary life of a labourer was much the same.
I think we are already seeing the collapse of the age of rapid change; It's possible that things will turn around, and society could rapidly return to a pre-industrial technology level (with the concommittent rapid decline in population); But my guess is that instead we will see another long period of stability, with each century much like the last.
Population is stabilising, and so is technology - we are still seeing lots of innovation, but no longer much improvement. In the 1980s, you could fly from London or Paris to New York in a couple of hours; Today, it takes twice as long. Windows XP enabled people to be dramatically more productive than Windows 3.1 did; Windows 12 is no better than Windows 7, in terms of user productivity.
Technology companies are all looking for the next big thing, but what they are delivering is the last big thing in a shinier box.
It's a bad idea to bet on the indefinite sustaining of exponential growth, whether in population, CPU density, travel speeds, GDP, or anything else. It's also historically unusual for the entire world to suffer dramatic declines; Setbacks tend to either be local, or brief, or both.
We talk a lot about the collapse of Rome, but that's because we don't really have an example of a similar collapse more recent than 1,500 years ago. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires fell without casting their ordinary citizens into a dark age of poverty, lawlessness, and technological decline; Russia has had two empires collapse in the space of less than a century, but they still have cars and computers and electricity - which they didn't have under the Tsars.
The access to technological quality of life factors may well decline somewhat in the US, where these are currently most ubiquitous, but a "decline" to the levels seen in Western Europe would be far from catastrophic.
I suspect that our technological systems are less fragile than many people fear they might be. We recover rapidly from setbacks due to natural disasters. Whether our political systems are similarly resilient remains to be seen, of course.