I don’t actually believe the naively extrapolated future is the most plausible outcome—more on that later—but I do think if you asked most people what they expect the world to look like a thousand years from now, they’d predict something like it.
Suppose that humanity does not go extinct, but survives for a very long time. How good do you think that the world will become in that future, compared with the present world?
Results:
Participants believed that provided that humanity will not go extinct, the future is going to be roughly as good as the present (1 = much worse than the present world, 4 = about as good as the present world, 7 = much better than the present world; M = 4.48, SD = 1.57)...
In a recent paper, we asked participants:
Results: