How to justify Modern Stasis in the near future

Some of the future histories that I'm trying to make are set towards the end of the 21st century, and would be much easier to do if I had a way to justify having the future world remain largely if not entirely similar to our modern time frame in terms of technological advancement, but I'm not sure what kind of global event (or combination of events) would be plausible to cause most technological progress around the world to stagnate for several decades that doesn't involve something as fantastical as Reality Warping or an Alien Invasion enforcing such stagnation. For example, unless I'm very mistaken, a World War III scenario whose damage is severe enough to cause such damage to humanity's technological advancement would just essentially send the world back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels at best.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Either a worldwide pandemic, or a major international economic depression, would be plausible reasons.

Depends what you're trying to do in the rest of the story, but I'm partial to 'nope, the industrial and information revolutions are unique. You picked that fruit and now you're going to get incremental improvements, not transformative changes.'

To add to Demarquis' good answer:

Because of COVID, a lot of university biology research labs had a hard time finding technicians and materials because they all went towards COVID testing

During the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, a lot of companies laid off their research scientists but the bean counters mostly kept their jobs. This had lasting impacts; STEM fields became unpopular college majors for a decade

"Enshittification truly is how platforms die"-Cory Doctorow

No more resources to use anymore.

@De Marquis & minseok42: Well, I was going to have both of these happen anyway, along with a wave of superstorms, earthquakes and other natural disasters wrecking havoc on vital parts of the global economy with little to no time between them for proper recovery, so that's a relief.

That's way too extreme; it will basically lead to a typical post-apocalyptic setting.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

"along with a wave of superstorms, earthquakes and other natural disasters wrecking havoc on vital parts of the global economy with little to no time between them for proper recovery"

Sheesh. Yeah, that'll do it.

How does that setting not lead to an Post-Apocalyptic scenario?

Easy: They don't happen all at once, and they don't ravage every place on the planet. Just in enough critical places to cause enough damage at the "worst" time possible that, combined with the other events before and/or after them, set off a big domino effect.

Edited by MarqFJA on May 20th 2022 at 9:05:02 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

You don't really need anything big and dramatic, if you're willing to make some (not terribly implausible) assumptions:

• Quantum Computing never really pans out, or is really only useful for certain niche problems.
• Semiconductor transistors end up being impossible/impractical to reduce in size and power consumption from something near their current levels, and no practical replacement is ever found. This completely ends Moore's Law expansion regarding computing resources. (Note: Even today, upper-end cell phone processors can only be run at full capacity for a few seconds at a time. Otherwise, the chip would melt itself - or the phone body - due to lack of cooling. The software industry is already pivoting from a "Throw more hardware at it" model of upgrades to "Make more effective use of our existing processing capacity")
• Per-capita energy availability caps out somewhere, possibly due to a combination of limited renewable sources, limits in storage density, and Fusion ending up being trickier than we currently expect.

This puts some caps on what is and is not possible:

• Autonomous robots like the Boston Dynamics robo-dogs would probably be more common, but not light-years ahead of what we can already build
• Space infrastructure is quite possibly much more extensive, but not really all that much more advanced. (Note that the most advanced civilian projects currently in development would have been technically possible decades ago, just not economically feasible.)
• Electric autonomous ground vehicles are much more widespread if the population is still using personal vehicles.
• Personal aircraft/flying car stuff on the other hand is still expensive, and probably has a lot of restrictions on airspace and traffic lanes. The vehicles themselves are much more refined, but they still take a huge amount of energy, which limits their applicability.
• Overall, expect much broader market penetration for what is currently "High-Tech"

Could just have it that they hit a wall with their technology, and couldn't find a way around that wall in the intervening time.

Like if us developing FTL drives needed a special kind of element, which was mined out by aliens or Neglectful Precursors, meaning that we were more or less stuck. We're already reaching limits in transistor density, simply due to the laws of physics.

The wall could also be legal or cultural. The Voth in Star Trek: Voyager, and the Time Lords in Doctor Who became stagnant for millions of years, the former due to adherence to Doctrine, and the latter from become too comfortable and decadent in their position as undisputed masters of the multiverse.

In My Hero Academia, it is mostly legal. After everyone initially got superpowers, they nearly caused the collapse of civilisation. As such, laws were passed to limit the use of those superpowers, and everything has only just returned to a 21st century level of technology, despite being some 300 years ahead of us now.

IIRC the Modern Stasis of the MHA setting has more to do with just how long the post-Quirk emergence upheaval throughout the world had lasted and and how damaging it was, in no small part due to the Greater-Scope Villain Diabolical Mastermind using his extensive resources and grossly OP Quirk for the deliberate fomenting of societal collapse in favor of an extreme "might makes right" environment. And where the hell did you get the 300 year figure from? There's only been about 150-ish years since the emergence of the first Quirk ^note Inko Midoriya is a fourth-generation Quirk bearer; multiply that by 25 years as an average value and you get 125 years as an average estimate of how many years has it been since her first Quirk-bearing ancestor, at most (and this deemed very unlikely) 200 years.

Edited by MarqFJA on May 31st 2022 at 5:20:43 PM

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

How about "energy crisis, it tokk 50 years to convince politicians to yang lobbist (for non renewable energies) and the transition period to electric/nuclear had growing pains but it was done (we even have nuclear energy that lacks nuclear waste now).

So yeah, make that line to say "this is what politicians got people busy as a distraction".

Make some lines about "the new cell phone improved model 2120 now with extra [insert current feature x 30] and call it the "economical series".

And the ocasional line of "the rest of the world got a tiny bit better in quality of life/equality and call it a day.

Just keep on mind a few weeks ago a man discovered a way toake internet like a "million times faster" so expect computers to have video games described as "4k ,120 fps , demolition/physics simulator" as an Indie game option

WTH does "yang lobbist" mean?

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

its clearly the antithesis of the yin lobbists ofc :V

Thoughts:

• Possible disasters:
  • Massive, massive earthquake in the San Fransisco Bay Area devastates Silicon Valley, where a lot of major US tech companies are located. Obviously not all, and most of them will have significant assets elsewhere, and some sort of earthquake resilience plan, but surely is going to deal them a major blow, and leave a lot of resources gone and talent dead.
  • Three Gorges Dam in China breaks, flooding the Yangtze river basin, killing millions and wiping out some 15% of global manufacturing, not limited to but including tech. Major disruption to supply chains, possibly setting things back years and causing a major downturn in the global economy.
  • Solar storm/coronal mass ejection? Could cause major disruption to power and telecommunications systems and cause major economic damage. (Will it affect R&D? well, that requires resources and the ability to communicate information, so yes, even if it provides an incentive to "build back better"...)
  • Cascade of destruction by space junk debris (a.k.a. Kessler syndrome) which devastates satellite infrastructure and may leave Earth orbit impassible. Major blow to space exploration and the commercialization of space, as well as things like telecommunications.
  • Something else which might affect telecommunacations. There were fears that Russians might bomb undersea cables that the West relies on for the internet, for example.

Even aside from R&D, affecting supply chains and telecommunications is going to have a big impact on what technology is used and how. Imagine people and businesses alike still relying on old legacy tech simply because the new stuff is just too expensive. Imagine people simply finding the internet is too unreliable and thus books and print media, paper records, physcial media, "snail mail", paying with cash etc. starts becoming more relevant again. In terms of IT, maybe there is a trend towards LANs and walled-garden intranets, making local backups onto high volume storage media instead of the cloud, and so on.

• Other possible factors:
  • Societal backlash against technology? Already thinking of things such as opposition within the green movement to nuclear energy and ; the religious right to things like embryonic stem cell research, anti-science attitudes like creationism, etc.; general concerns over the impact of AI on jobs and humanity as a whole, the impact of the internet and social media, etc. Obviously if you want to keep things broadly the same you don't want these tendencies to cause us to regress back to some low-tech primitivist "utopia", but you could have a growing distrust in progress (perhaps say when AI really starts to affect people's livelihoods, or the impact of scams, misinformation etc. becomes too much) enough to cause a political impact that puts strict regulatory roadblocks to further progress, cuts to science funding, etc.
  • Possible effects of changes to economic systems. Thinking really of how totalitarian centrally planned economies (often lazily described as simply communism) tend to discourage innovation except perhaps in certain situations
  • Ageing societies might entrench certain ways of doing things (possibly already happening somewhat in Japan?) which might affect the uptake of some new technologies.

• Possible concerns from the point of view of realism, as regards some of the above suggestions):
  • Relying on technological roadblocks (e.g. to quantum computing, artificial general intelligence, the inevitable limits to Moore's Law, and the like) is simply going to lead to I Want My Jetpack more than anything; it doesn't stop innovation from happening in other areas. Maybe we don't get The Singularity (which is probably the real reason a writer will want to invoke Modern Stasis, let's be honest!) but you still have [Job-Stealing Robot developments of existing AI tools causing mass unemployment]] or advancements in biotech which look like science fiction today.
  • Relying on resource crises (and, closely related but distinct, environmental crises) are likely to produce more innovation to counter them, not less- or otherwise will have a profound impact on the way we use technology not really compatible with strict Modern Stasis. (Perhaps for example instead of having self-driving electric cars driving us around the same old suburban sprawl, we'll all be walking and biking in dense mixed-use neighbourhoods and self driving vehicles exist in other capacities. Perhaps instead of drones bringing your Amazon packages from fully-automated fulfilment centres, we'll just be buying less crap. And so on. Again, I Want My Jetpack?)

As an addendum, no, I don't think the Internet will easily disappear, given it is designed to be resilient to such shocks. And I am sure many tech companies have contingencies to prevent data loss (I know Google does). Furthermore, a major solar storm knocking a lot of stuff out is rare and unlikely to present the same major risk more than once (but will that be enough to make it hard to rebuild?) I am talking about trust in these systems to be reliable.