The 2100 Problem: AI's Flat Future vs. Nuclear Wasteland
2100 is only seventy-five years away.
I won’t be alive then, but today’s children will reach it naturally.
If we look at the trajectory of the next seventy-five years,
the world will likely split even more violently.
Two extreme futures toward 2100
Roughly speaking, there are two endpoints in sight:
an AI-flattened world or a nuclear wasteland.
Both are low-probability in the short term,
but the path we take changes what kind of unevenness survives.
AI flattening and the exposure of inner unevenness
AI arriving first is overwhelmingly more plausible.
ASI will handle systems, infrastructure, and governance,
correcting human errors and inconsistencies in seconds.
A “future where we don’t need to work” will actually come.
But paradoxically, humans will become more unstable.
Give people too much freedom and more of them collapse.
The inner unevenness that was hidden by work and routine
gets dragged out into the open.
Nuclear wasteland and the question that remains
The nuclear route is the other future,
but only in the sense of “not zero.”
If it happens, half of civilization is blown away.
What remains is the unevenness of ruins and wasteland.
So will AI flatten the world into a smooth surface,
or will nuclear fire flatten it into desert?
Nothing is certain, but within my lifetime,
AI is the one that will definitely arrive.
Nuclear disaster should be avoided,
and it should still be avoidable.
Either way, the world will keep moving toward flatness by 2100.
The real question is what kind of unevenness humans can keep.
That remaining unevenness will be the core of meaning in life.