If things don't go well, it will look much like it does today, in the rich parts of the world that are still habitable. The mass migration due to climate change won't be kind to most people, and billions will have starved to death.
Or, nuclear war happened, or Covid kept going, and civilization collapsed, like it has so many times before. Unfortunately this time, we've used up the irreplaceable (even on geologic time scales) coal and other fossil fuel deposits, so we would be out of the running, forever, as a multi-planet species.
Most people have quite foolish notions about the stability of civilization, even I know I'm an optimist.
"We all have these small picture plates in our pockets and they are all connected to each other via wireless telegram. And they are connected to libraries too -- you can read any book or newspaper and see any movie on that plate. You need no money as the plate is connected to a bank. You need no house keys, because the door can take orders via telegram."
"We can send telegrams to a great big wall and others can browse and read those announcements from anywhere. They are organized so that you can have public discussions on variety of subjects".
"Our biggest problem now is that there are too many libraries. Anybody can write a newspaper or book and put it into library. We do not know anymore what is true or false. Official Libraries of Truth are known to have mostly lies."
"In the next 100 years we have even bigger problem. More and more people do not live in the real world. They have such devices that they can believe they are living in a made-up story or dream. It is like a drug, they cannot do any work. If you wake them, they can go insane. Soon we have to just let them sleep all the time in large dormitories and storage rooms."
But some predictions along those lines:
- computers stopped getting exponentially faster.
- people spend a lot of time in front of screens.
- people still die.
- energy is as plentiful/scarce as today, just that it is green.
- rich people have a lot, the poor scrapes by.
- cars drive themselves, but a landmark case where a kid got kidnapped by a car and died of heatstroke lead to laws prohibiting self driving cars to drive without a person sitting in it with a self driving car licence. The exception are corporate cars making deliveries, but that doesn't change much from today.
"This is 20th century America and we're going to keep it that way"
The powerful will resist change that threatens their power. So change will only come via paths the powerful do not control. So look at everything that is not centralized and expect change to start to manifest there. Look at everything centralized and expect it to stay the same. Apply grains of salt as necessary since any generalization will always be imperfect. It's one way to think about long term change though.
AKA "Mental Myobia"