Outline

End State 2030

(First draft - 02 October 2023) (Last updated -11 January 2025)

The primary conjecture of the End State theory is that we will reach an end to the development of new technology by the year 2030, and that this will lead to the stable and optimal end state of human civilization. Here are eight significant things that will happen around this time.

The End of New Technology in 2030

By 2030, all significant technology will have been developed. The rate of technology development will decline rapidly after 2030 and will come to a complete end by 2040. While design, exploration, and discovery (such as in archeology and palaeontology) will continue, the invention of fundamentally new technology will come to an end. The buildout, adoption, and implementation of technology will continue beyond 2030, reaching a high level of implementation and adoption by 2040.

The Perfection of Technology

By 2030, technology will reach a functional end state, meaning it will perfectly suit its function leaving no room for further functional improvement. For example, once video games are indistinguishable from reality, no further improvement will be possible. Unlimited stories and designs will be possible, but the underlying technology will have reached its limit. Similarly, once autonomous vehicles no longer make mistakes or have accidents, it will not be possible to improve them further.

Between 2030 and 2040, there will be rapid implementation of end state technologies. There will also be rapid improvement in the quality of products , bugs will be removed from software, and all products optimized for maximum performance. However, these will be small improvements. By the technological end state in 2030, the perfection of technology will be largely complete.

The Economic, Social, and Political End State

The widespread adoption of new technologies will propel society toward a final stable and optimal end state on economic, social, and political issues. We will see significant progress in this direction as we approach the technological end state in 2030. It will take several more years for all economic, social, and political issues to reach a stable end state. This stable end state will be reached by no later than 2040.

Super-Abundance

As the year 2030 approaches, humanity will witness an unprecedented acceleration in economic productivity. This transformation will see a dramatic lifting of limits on productivity. Artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robots will make labor limitless. This will dramatically lower costs of services and manufactured goods as well as dramatically cut the costs of distribution and delivery.

Since technology will have reached a stable state, factories and product lines will no longer need to be updated. Once production equipment has been paid off, production can continue far into the future with no further capital costs.

Without the need to update to newer technologies, durable products will last a long time. The need to buy new products will be reduced.

Unlimited Clean Energy

Solar power, combined with battery storage and long-distance transmission networks, will meet all human energy needs. As we approach 2030, the cost of solar power will steadily decline, while the rate of buildout will accelerate. After 2030, the cost of solar power will drop even more due to the complete adoption of robots and autonomous production technologies in manufacturing. In a few years, capital costs will be paid off, dropping costs even more. By 2040, almost all energy needs will be met by solar power, although there will continue to be some wind and hydroelectric power. 

End-State Technologies

Several technologies will only become practical as we approach the technological end state. Autonomous vehicles, for example, will only be fully practical when they operate without accidents.

Some other technologies currently have limited markets, due to high cost or low performance, and will only be widely adopted once the underlying technology becomes perfect. These include artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, VR/AR, electric vehicles, solar power, large-scale battery storage, and electric autonomous VTOL aircraft.

While reaching an end state implies a limit, these new technologies will bring dramatic improvements to human quality of life. The end state will not put a limit on human potential since all human wants and needs will be met, liberating humans to achieve their higher potential.

Perfect Health

At the end state, we will have developed cures for all human diseases, along with advanced tools to prevent disease.

Autonomous vehicles will dramatically reduce deaths and injuries from accidents.

While the technology to cure every disease will be developed by 2030, completing clinical trials and ensuring global access to these treatments will take additional time. We can expect this to be largely accomplished before 2040.

Contact With Other Civilizations

Since we will reach the optimal limit to technology, we will have the same technology that extraterrestrial civilizations have had since they reached technological maturity. This will eliminate the risk that existed at earlier periods of our development of harmful technology transfer resulting from contact with more advanced civilizations. 

Beyond 2030, as we rapidly approach a stable economic, social, and political state, war will become obsolete and social strife will be a thing of the past. This combination of technological and social stability will create the conditions under which other civilizations will be able to contact us without placing an unreasonable burden on them or causing a harmful disruption to the natural pace of our own development.

Simultaneously, the advanced technology available to us at the end state should allow us to detect other civilizations in our galaxy. If we detect them, it will be a moral obligation for them to contact us to show that they have no hostile intentions.

It is conceivable that other civilizations have already deployed unmanned spacecraft within our solar system, potentially observing us for millions of years. Therefore, initial contact may originate within our own solar system, connecting us to a vast database containing information from all known civilizations in the Galaxy and historical data about the Earth collected over millions of years.

While contact could occur sooner, it is more likely to happen when we have had time to implement new technologies which will allow us to detect extraterrestrial civilizations, and when we have had time to reach a more optimal, and fully stable, social and political state. This should be achieved by the mid-2030s or 2040 at the latest.

Impacts of the End State

We have talked about eight transformations that will happen as we approach the end state, now let's look at eight of the most important impacts from these changes. 

Better Life for the Elderly

People can expect a healthy life throughout their lifespan due to medical innovations and improved understanding of health and longevity.

Autonomous vehicles will enable continued mobility at any age.

Autonomous delivery will make it easier to shop without leaving home.

Humanoid robots will provide at-home assistance with household tasks, attendant care, and safety monitoring.

Artificial intelligence and advanced at-home diagnostics will enhance health care and health monitoring.

Human contact will be supplemented by video calls and telepresence.

With work no longer being a central focus of life, societal attitudes will shift to value the elderly and engage them more in family and community life. This will improve enjoyment of life and extend lifespan.

Low Stress and Quiet

In urban areas, the adoption of autonomous electric vehicles will significantly reduce surface street noise and improve safety. Surface travel will likely be limited to low speeds to reduce noise and improve safety, while autonomous electric cars will move at high speed through a network of underground tunnels.

Moreover, the widespread use of autonomous on-demand transportation, will eliminate the stress associated with finding parking, parking meter anxiety, and parking tickets.

Further, autonomous transportation will eliminate driving stress, road rage, drunk driving, most accidents, and negative interactions with traffic enforcement.

The cumulative effect of these changes will be a significantly quieter and less stressful urban living experience.

Transportation Transformation

All vehicles will be autonomous and electric. The construction of tunnels will be low-cost due to the availability of autonomous construction equipment and humanoid robots. As a result, highways in cities will be eliminated and replaced with a dispersed network of underground tunnels. The network of main surface streets will be moved underground, and speeds in these tunnels will be increased, making separate highways unnecessary. It will be possible to start and end a trip from the basement level of many buildings. On-ramps and off-ramps to the tunnels will feed communities, where surface speeds will be limited for quiet and safety.

Electric bicycles will expand the use of bicycles for transportation.  Areas formerly taken up by main surface streets and highways will be converted into dedicated bicycle and pedestrian pathways.

Autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft will see limited use in cities, as autonomous vehicles in tunnels will provide fast transportation and delivery. Autonomous VTOL aircraft will see extensive use in rural areas, providing transport from the countryside to towns, between towns, and into cities. It is possible that these aircraft will replace all rural ground transportation, making surface roads outside of towns and cities unnecessary.

Major cities will be connected by high-speed electric tube transportation. These tubes will carry all passenger and freight traffic, making inter-city highways unnecessary. Flights between cities with tube connections will become unnecessary except for oversize cargo. Long-distance flights will continue across oceans.

Passenger and freight train service will initially become uncompetitive due to the lower cost of autonomous road vehicles. Cities that have a high-speed  tube connection will no longer need rail connections.

Optimal Mental Health and Wellbeing

Super-abundance will meet all material needs worldwide. Time and money will be available to focus on mental health and wellbeing. People will become more concerned with mental health and wellbeing, as improving mental health and wellbeing will be one of the few remaining ways to improve and optimize life outcomes when the need to earn money is no longer a focus of life.

Cures for mental health issues will come from a combination of medical technologies and a better understanding of mental health.

The reduction of depression and anxiety will make life more enjoyable, both for the people who previously suffered from depression and anxiety and for those who have suffered along with them.

Reduction in narcissism will alleviate the problems and stress caused by narcissists. The burden and suffering of mental illness on families and society will be lifted, resulting in a higher state of happiness and wellbeing for all.

Religion and Worldview

The end of unmet material needs and health problems will result in a transformation of worldview. There will be less suffering, and God will seem less cruel and capricious. People will find meaning and purpose in simple things. Human connection and harmonious human relations will become an important focus.

Contact with extraterrestrial civilizations will have a significant impact on worldview. These civilizations will have established a common and stable understanding of the universe. This understanding will be very compelling and will be rapidly adopted on Earth. Some people with contrary or conflicting worldviews may struggle to adapt.

End of War

As we approach the end state, nations will increasingly adopt a common solution to economic, social, and political issues, leading to a stable end state on these matters. Common solutions to these questions will reduce the sources of conflict between nations and make war less likely.

We will eliminate nuclear weapons and make any attack by one country on another illegal. This, along with the reduction of underlying causes of war, will make it possible to have smaller military forces or none.

Autonomous technology and artificial intelligence will result in automated surveillance systems and autonomous weapons platforms, including humanoid robots and drone swarms. War will become more precise, faster, and less lethal to humans. Wars will be won by technology. The winning side will be the one with greater production resources and larger robot armies at the beginning of the conflict.

War will be less likely in the long-term, beyond the end state. However, war is increasingly likely in the transition period leading up to the economic, social, and political end state — a period during which these technologies will be developed and used.

End of Dictatorship

The economic, social, and political transition will end with all countries being free-market democracies. Countries that are not already near this end state will have to undergo a transition over the next few years. The pressures underlying this transition will increase as we approach the 2030 end state and will become intense thereafter.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will result in conflict and unstable conditions as dictators and elites try to maintain power. International conflict will become more likely as dictators use external conflict to distract from internal problems and build patriotic support for authoritarian rule. Overthrow of dictators and undemocratic elected governments will be a common occurrence during this transition period.

As we transition through the end state, nuclear war remains a risk, and is the only risk that could set back the progress of civilization.

Contact with extraterrestrial civilizations will remove all doubt that free-market democracy is the economic, social, and political end state of all civilizations. This will accelerate any remaining social and political transition and help finalize the stable and optimal end state of human civilization.

End of Elite Control

True democracy does not currently exist. Power is held by groups of elites and interest groups which have disproportionate influence. These groups operate and coordinate internationally, taking real power away from elected governments at national and lower levels. Decisions are made undemocratically and imposed through manipulation of public opinion and electoral systems. The electorate has power but is one source of power and influence among many.

As information technologies proliferate worldwide, the ability of elites to hide and manipulate from behind the scenes will be rapidly diminished. As the electorate becomes more informed, educated, and aware of power, control by the electorate will increase, and elite control will diminish.

In the near-term, there will be social and political conflict as elites struggle to stay in control while the people gain more power and influence each year. A stable end state will emerge as people become more informed and politically active, ultimately overtaking elite power and control.

Predicting the Future

There is a Limit to Technology

Everything has a limit. No theory of technology development is complete without estimating when the end of technology development will occur and the conditions of technology and society at the end state. 

The end of technology development can be predicted, as there are a finite number of technologies and technology applications that are possible. Once all technologies have been discovered and all technology applications have been implemented, there will be no further technological innovation. Engineering and design will continue, but will only be able to use existing technologies beyond the end state.

Manufacturing Technology is Limited

It is not only technology itself that is limited. There are also a limited number of practical manufacturing processes. Nano robots, for example, have been predicted by some as a future technology that would enable the production of almost any structure at a microscopic scale. However, there is no working prototype of a nano robot. Even if it were technologically possible, the only way to manufacture nano robots would be using other nano robots. The first nano robots would have to be custom built, bringing us back to the problem that no prototype exists, and it now seems clear that no prototype will exist.

Integrated circuits (ICs) are the only significant technology application, outside of chemistry and biology, that exists at a nano scale. The integrated circuit is produced using photolithography. Photolithography was used when the IC was first developed in 1958, it is still used today, and it will continue to be used when we reach the limit of IC technology by 2030.

The conservation and limitation of this single production technology is remarkable. Before ICs were developed, computers were made with transistors, which were mounted on printed circuit boards produced using photolithography. Even earlier, photolithography was used—and is still used today—to produce etched plates for the printing press.

There are a small number of possible manufacturing technologies. To be commercially practical, a new technology must be both possible and manufacturable.

Physical and Functional Limits

Integrated circuits have been approaching the physical limit of the atomic scale for some time. This limit will certainly be reached by 2030. Sixty years of continuous shrinking of the scale of the components on an IC have reached a point where further reductions will become impossible, due to the need to maintain a scale that includes enough atoms in each component to maintain the desired functional and electrical characteristics.

Other technology applications are reaching functional limits beyond which no further technological innovation will be necessary. For example, when a television has a resolution high enough that any increase in resolution would not be visible to the human eye, a practical limit has been reached. Much higher density displays are needed for cell phones, and even higher density for the tiny screens in Virtual Reality devices. However, these are also reaching functional limits beyond which further innovation will not be necessary. 

Physical and functional limits are being reached for all technologies and technology applications and will be reached no later than the year 2030.

The End is Now Visible

It is possible to project the development of all technology applications into the future based on current and expected rates of development. There are no known technology applications that will not reach their physical and functional limits by 2030.

It is possible that there are some technology applications that are not yet known or anticipated, but these would be few and can be expected to follow the same rate of development as known technology applications.

There are two possibilities to explain why some technologies have been predicted to arrive beyond the year 2030. The first possibility is that these technologies will never happen. High-temperature fusion reactors are probably in this category. The other possibility is that these technologies will be developed by 2030. Some people predict, for example, that fully autonomous cars will only be possible by 2050 or 2100. However, based on realistic projections of current rates of development, fully autonomous driving will be possible by 2030.

Humans Think in Stable States

Humans are very bad at predicting things that occur at an accelerating rate. The reason is likely that we evolved under conditions that changed very slowly, or not at all, for thousand of years. Our brains expect things to stay the same. Because current conditions are an environment of constant change, our brains expect constant change to continue indefinitely.

This is why we are so reluctant to imagine that we will reach an end to our current rapid and accelerating change and will arrive again at stable conditions. However, when we do arrive at stable conditions again, it will seem completely normal to us since our brains are well-adapted to stable conditions.

This assumption of stability also makes us rapidly forget past conditions. Our brains default to thinking that the future will be the same as today and that the past was always the same as today. A few years before the introduction of smartphones, for example, the smartphone would have been unthinkable to most people. Now, when everyone is using smartphones, it feels to us that this is the way it has always been.

Our assumption of stability also applies to the rate of change. Many analysts make the mistake of predicting adoption of technology in a linear way instead of correctly applying acceleration to the rate of development and adoption.

Current Issues

No Climate Change

Carbon dioxide emissions from human activity will reach insignificant levels by 2040. There will be no need for subsidies or policy interventions to achieve this. It will happen through the free market due to improvements in technology that will make solar power and battery storage the best and least expensive source of energy.

Universal Basic Income

At the end state, there will be rapidly increasing economic productivity combined with rapid unemployment for workers replaced by AI.

Data centers will be able to perform work equivalent to billions of office workers. AI will quickly replace all human office workers and provide labor equivalent to many times what has been possible with human workers, resulting in a dramatic increase in productivity and corresponding dramatic reduction in costs of services.

AI, implemented in robots and autonomous vehicles, will provide physical labor equivalent to many times that of former human workers, at a fraction of the cost. It will take longer to manufacture robots and autonomous vehicles than to replace office workers. However, production and implementation will ramp up sharply in the years approaching the end state and will continue to increase at an unprecedented rate thereafter, resulting in a many times increase in worldwide manufacturing, manual labor, and construction production within a few years.

With rapidly increasing productivity, it will be easy for governments to increase sales and corporate taxes to raise revenue and provide income to those who become unemployed. Employment will no longer be necessary to have an income, and human employment will no longer be possible because AI will do all jobs more effectively than humans.

No Existential Threat from Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence will not be a threat to human safety and security, except where it will be used by people for illegal acts or by governments.

The most advanced AI by the time we reach the end state will not have free will or independence.

An AI can only act in the world with resources that are allocated by humans. Humans will only allocate resources to AI according to human wants and needs, which are largely determined by the market economy.

AI that can act in the real world, through autonomous vehicles and robots, for example, will need insurance coverage. To get insurance, companies must ensure that their systems cannot be hacked and that safeguards and overrides are in place to prevent human injury.

Computer systems are constantly becoming more secure. The ability of  AI to take over other computer resources, even if directed to do so, will be limited and will be corrected if it does occur. AI will also be employed in finding and fixing security vulnerabilities and in making systems more secure.

There will be no sudden, uncontrolled surge in the ability of AI.

AI will contribute to the development of technology and the further development of AI. However, this role will be limited since the most capable AI will only be available near the end state. By that time, humans will have already developed most technology and will have solved most social, political, and economic problems.

AI will act as an accelerating and enabling force to help transition through the final stage of the development of human civilization. This acceleration will be important, since the transition from humans working, to all work being done by AI, must be fast to avoid a difficult phase of overlap, where some people are receiving UBI while others still have to work. AI will also guide organizations and governments through this transition.

Social Justice Overshoot

We reached an optimal state on most social issues in the mainstream population of developed countries in the 1980s. Radical progressive forces have promoted the continuation of ‘progress’ beyond this optimal state. Progress beyond the optimal state on any social, political, or economic issue results in suboptimal outcomes, just as falling short of the optimal state results in suboptimal outcomes.

We are closer to optimal outcomes on these issues than it may appear. This is due to confusion and misunderstanding about what the optimal outcomes are and how to achieve them.

Conservative forces will react to harmful change that is too progressive. However, conservatives may overreact, preventing necessary and beneficial progress. There will be a process of progressive action and conservative reaction until a stable state on social, political, and economic issues is reached. This stable state will not look very different from the underlying social conditions we have today in developed countries, or that we had in the 1980s.

Social, political, and economic conditions will become more chaotic as issues rise to public attention to be exposed and resolved. This chaos will continue and worsen as information technologies result in a more informed public as we approach and exceed the technological end state in 2030. This chaos and conflict will ultimately resolve in a stable and optimal social, political, and economic end state by 2040.