Elmer Adler is one hundred and four years old. He is in a nursing home. He is dying. He is not aware of this fact. Like many other geriatrics, especially the senile ones, Elmer has been spending most of his time in virtual reality. Up thirteen hours a day. He’d go higher, but his body can’t take that much time awake. Elmer seldom thinks of life outside of his virtual world. His body has failed, his physical needs are attended to, and he has a world of his own. It doesn’t really matter that it’s not encoded on the same substrate that he is.

The nursing home was a real high-class place. It had an unlimited subscription to Meta’s VR “eldercare” package. That included an “end-of-life service”, guaranteeing one final perfect day. Cameron—a VR event organizer for Meta —was assigned to Elmer’s final twenty-four. The nursing home predicted it for a three-week window. He’s part of a pool of event organizers assigned to hospice. On day four of the window, the nursing home calls him on day one and tells him that their diagnostic software predicts that Elmer’s hedons are going to drop off a cliff in two days. They’ve already dosed him with a controlled cocktail of psychedelic drugs and painkillers. Cameron gets out of bed, opens his computer, and gets to work.

A field of patented, proprietary colors appear before Elmer’s eyes. Lavender Blush Purple. YInMn Blue. Papaya Orange. The blend is predicted to induce a sense of calm for him when he wakes up. Elmer feels like he got a perfect night’s rest. He did. It was measured. He still doesn’t know this is his last day.

Elmer is not alone in VR, not unless he wants to be. It’s 2045, after all, and almost everyone has a rig that can connect to the metaverse. For Elmer, VR is his source of connection and community that would otherwise be absent with his decrepit bodily state and lack of descendants.

But, not everyone in Meta also exists outside of it. New and exciting relationships are possible with bots. There are avatars of the famous, contemporary, nostalgic, historical, and fictional. This was the culmination of Ray Kurzweil’s life’s work: to bring his dad—or at least a good enough simulation of him—back to life. (It was also one of the only successful partnerships between Google and Meta in the twenty-first century.) Most people describe their experiences with Kurzweilian avatars as deeply meaningful. Elmer spends most of his time with his deceased wife Elina. Even though he knows she’s dead most of the time, Elmer finds great comfort in her presence.

Cameron’s plan is for Elmer to spend his last day with Elina in a perfect simulation of their favorite beach from when they lived together in Delaware. Cameron has taken care of all the details with a bit of research: crashing waves, the distinct smell of the Atlantic, and the warmth retained by the sand at each minute of the day. Elmer and Elina spend their morning together over tea in their garden. They converse on art, history, and philosophy, and gossip about their friends. Elina has just enough new dirt to make things interesting without edging into stressful. Relaxed, but stimulating. Honest, but punctuated with jokes at the right intervals. Occasionally dead serious, but not dwelling on anything too troublesome. When Umwelt, the GPT-6 level system powering Elina couldn’t keep up with the intellectual demands made on it, Cameron would set off a diversion. The wind blows away the napkins. A particularly entrancing songbird appears. That sort of thing, about eighty-percent moments of beauty and twenty-percent minor inconveniences. This prevents Elmer from walking along any of the few remaining dimensions of his hedonic treadmill. Elmer is completely immersed. He’s with the love of his life. Death is far away. He just watches life happen.

An alert notifies Cameron that he had six hours left. Excitement. There’s always a high budget for the finale of an end-of-life service. Not just funding, but the use of tools that wouldn’t otherwise be available at all. With no future to plan for, it’s possible for customers to live in the moment, doing things that could otherwise have unpredictable long-term effects on user engagement.

Cameron’s job as an event organizer comes down to crafting this final moment. In order to meet his KPIs, Cameron has to build an experience that triggers the thought “I can die happy.” Cameron’s got a couple of special tricks for this. They usually work. He decides to use “Requiem”, an AI-powered music service that creates personalized audio for the dying. Meta recently acquired it from Alphabet, and Cameron’s only used it about ten times before this.

Elina suggests to Elmer that they take a walk to the beach. They walk, in the same pattern of conversation as before, and arrive. Elmer knows the beach well. He came here as a kid, then bought a house nearby as an adult. The sun is setting in a glorious but cliched way calibrated to max out Elmer’s aesthetic discernment. Vivid colors. Clear sky. Peace. They lay down, close their eyes, and listen to the waves.

Cameron’s already queued up Requiem. Now he triggers it. To him, it’s just elevator music, since he’s not allowed to hear the actual composition, but to Elmer, it sounds like he was deaf his entire life, and now can finally hear. He holds Elina’s hand. Tears stream down his cheeks. Happy. He dies knowing he lived a good life, and that he was loved, even if only by another of the dead. Cameron waits, turning a knob to time dilate this moment while he watches the countdown. The avatar of Elmer slowly fades. Cameron saw the look of contentment on his face and knows he did a good job. He just hopes that before he’s in Elmer’s condition he’ll know more exactly what sort of a good job.

A. Family. Debundling education from childcare and rebundling child care with senior care spread virally after Covid and reached ubiquity well before 2045. People today hope to be rich. People in 2045 hope to have devoted grandchildren. Hyperinflation and crypto, among other disruptions, have scrambled economic fortunes enough to make those seem ephemeral. Families, by contrast, have come to play a much larger role in individual flourishing.

Once institutional credentialism was recognized as classist and Kahn Academy skill profiles became more prestigious than high school diplomas, competitive parents withdrew their kids en masse and left them with the grandparents during the day. A decade later conformist parents had done the same and the schools, in some cases abandoned since Covid, have become public community centers where certain nerdy kids with relaxed parents actually do send them to take classes every day because economic life is assumed to be easy enough that you can let kids be kids.

Marketing asserts that grandchildren are so much fun that you should have them first if possible. Stem-cell technologies make it possible. Multi-generational embryo selection was initially marketed to same-sex couples couples, then the menopausal, and eventually became the Trojan Horse to bring polygenic mutli-generational embryo selection to the masses. In addition to allowing for more selection, this enables prospective custodians to share the expense of child-rearing, as well as that of screening and implanting numerous embryos across more adults, and the simultaneous addition of new children to a family involves economies of scale.

A. Superior in most regards to small molecule drugs, mRNA technology is a new pharmacopeia. Manufactured on the Moon, coil guns send mRNA therapies to Low Earth Orbit to be sold on standard intercontinental rocket flights which themselves cost slightly more than private jet flights today. For the less affluent, much cheaper providers offer unofficial versions of the same or superior treatments, but caveat emptor. Information markets are very imperfect in 2045, so the future isn’t evenly distributed.

OTOH, commodity markets impact everyone. The cost curves on solar, wind, and batteries have continued, disrupting the global energy market, the monopoly power of which funded authoritarian regimes. Electricity at peak costs a few cents an hour, and off-peak it’s free. A self-driving cab costs the equivalent of ten cents per mile and produce is shipped from remote farms to distant farmers’ markets or customer’s driveways. Shipping on land and to remote locations begins to approach the cost of shipping to major ports. Less frugal passengers spend the savings from cheap energy to travel faster, reaching an equilibrium where depreciation on vehicles and increased insurance premiums put a brake on things.
The most affected are high-cost high volume energy producers, especially Russia, where the state has largely collapsed due to the loss of oil and gas revenues. SpaceX is in negotiations with Russia to extend Mars’ sovereignty to bases on Russia’s surface and all of the volume >2km below the surface in exchange for recognition of Martian independence, humanitarian relief, and defense systems.

A. Democratic State capacity has declined, to where popularly elected officials are better able to accomplish agendas by delivering their voter blocks as early adopters than by mandating for bureaucracies officially run by the government to do one thing or another.

Tech companies have increasingly come to monetarily dominate a mostly tenure-free academia, leading to a world of ‘Alphabet Track’ and ‘Apple Track’ academic careers. Tesla and Meta largely manage to recruit paths parallel to academia. This and the development of AI have brought the social sciences to become much more technical, with concepts such as ‘ideology’ referring to high dimensional observables with high inter-observer reliability between both humans and machine classifiers. ML can track changing meanings for the concept of ‘narrative’ by year, geographic region, or academic affiliation like ‘Ithaca’ can do today.

This abstract perception applies to domains like political science. Claims that a certain political party promotes freedom, equality, or any particular political metric of the sort, can be measured relative to other claims of those kinds, although the complexity of market sentiments, artistic movements and the like is still being assessed. So the consequences of consuming porn, video games, or particular sub-genres of media are increasingly predictable and controllable. This, overall, has a large effect on how people are governed as it greatly increases understanding our how people react to ideas, information and experience.

A. During Covid, the African American population entered the ‘Early Majority’ phase in the ‘Adoption Cycle’ for homeschooling. The public school system had long been acknowledged to be failing them and news got around that Kahn Academy did a lot more for their kids than their schools had. As study after study showed that online native forms of education lead to higher performance in standardized tests and in the more objectively measurable professional positions, activists denounced the classism of offering professional benefits for the institutionally educated and eventually education joined the numerous categories of personal information which employers, licensors and distributors of credit were banned from making use of.

Once this occurred, the advantages of internet-native education became overwhelming for everyone, and the majority of the population adopted it. Unfortunately, the distinction between education, marketing, and ideology is only apparent to those educated to recognize it. While relatively crude indoctrination towards making in-app purchases is only an order of magnitude more effective than traditional brands such as Pokemon, beliefs about respectability, professionalism, economics, and even history and scientific credibility are downstream of education and have measurable long-term impacts on consumption and especially on investment behavior. Some economists are concerned that the convergent attractor in the educational sector is to indoctrinate students in self-reinforcing systems of beliefs and to use this to sell them subtle pyramid schemes. Still, the direct economic benefits of rapidly scaling training in whatever skills are most in-demand far exceed the costs of long term economic imprudence.

A. Most of the wealthiest 1% of the population lack the combined wealth and data curation required to make use of state-of-the-art medical technologies. Objective facts barely affect the decisions of either bureaucrats or consumers, so although designer proteins and genetic vectors could, with ideal implementation, add fourteen years to the life expectancies of the wealthy compared to today, the actual increase in life expectancy has been half of that, driven by automotive safety, environmental and nutritional improvements and demographic changes in which populations are wealthy. The latter has increased the correlation between wealth and life expectancy simply via China’s continued economic rise.

The global poor have gained far more rapidly because their access to information has improved much more while less targeted disinformation is applied to them. They also know what improvements they need, namely, things the wealthy had a long time ago and better control of tropical diseases. Their life expectancy has thus risen slightly more rapidly, by a total of nine years, even as their nominal wealth has continued to fall behind the global rich.Once this occurred, the advantages of internet-native education became overwhelming for everyone, and the majority of the population adopted it.

Unfortunately, the distinction between education, marketing, and ideology is only apparent to those educated to recognize it. While relatively crude indoctrination towards making in-app purchases is only an order of magnitude more effective than traditional brands such as Pokemon, beliefs about respectability, professionalism, economics, and even history and scientific credibility are downstream of education and have measurable long-term impacts on consumption and especially on investment behavior. Some economists are concerned that the convergent attractor in the educational sector is to indoctrinate students in self-reinforcing systems of beliefs and to use this to sell them subtle pyramid schemes. Still, the direct economic benefits of rapidly scaling training in whatever skills are most in-demand far exceed the costs of long term economic imprudence.

A. Regarding article 1, ML can predict which humans will act ‘as if’ “free and equal in dignity and rights”, and for whom and under what circumstances the concepts ‘reason’, ‘conscience’, ‘brotherhood’ and for that matter ‘should’ are valuable for predicting their actions. Metrics associated with all these abstractions are improving, and their rise is an objective of official Alphabet policy. Metrics over most other ‘process’ rights, numbers 2-12, especially those to an effective remedy by competent national tribunals and protection against arbitrary attacks on reputation are falling. In both cases, initial values are far lower in the US than in China or in independent Taiwan.

Changes in government policy largely stripped right 17 away for non-crypto users. Alphabet policy has not recognized any natural classification or dimensionality reduction as corresponding to ‘the will of the people’ invoked in article 21. The satisfaction of rights in articles 23-27 has been improving rapidly due to modern monetary theory, crypto, basic incomes, pronatalist policies, and the increasing use of ML in monetary policy.

Saudi Arabia is the major outlier, allocating rights to an ‘everyone’ more inclusive than ‘all human beings’. It has become, according to itself, the world’s only Democracy, and it rebukes other countries for continuing to deny the personhood of artificial persons. Its state-mandated educational curriculum produces near-universal, apparently sincere acceptance of this doctrine among its youth. In light of cyber-theocracy, other UN rights are of limited relevance, as they are only pursued at the discretion of the electronic religious authorities.

A. Embraced into adulthood by all demographics who grew up with them, electronic games are by far the most lucrative and influential branch of entertainment and the cutting edge of performance optimization. Elite gamer communities optimize in-game performance with productivity software which very slowly percolates into the business community until Meta and Microsoft roll out their own branded versions. Abuse of performance-enhancing protein complexes causes the most elite gamers to suffer substantial hits to life expectancy at essentially no cost to reputation and once safety issues have been largely worked out, militaries deploy their protein regimes on a population-wide scale.

Deployed in stripped-down form by the military-recreational complex, AR gaming tools percolate into domains such as construction and ecosystem management, and the aggregated behavior of large AR populations is used to train bots in what patterns they need to recognize in order to optimize ecosystem services. Large networks of such bots under human management implement and evaluate projects such as the first efforts to reduce wild-animal suffering, a vocational interest known to strongly correlate with personal expressions of fulfillment in polls and with lower levels of stress hormones and higher sleep quality.

Pronatalist policy-makers continue to decry lying flat, hikkomorification, and other synonyms, but time spent gaming correlates positively with life expectancy and with most direct indicators of life satisfaction. It correlates negatively with income, but a supermajority of the population has negative net worth and continues to be allocated credit as a matter of economic policy.