Horizon 2050: “We have two possible avenues: the apocalypse or innovation”

“We have two possible avenues: the apocalypse or innovation,” says Alain Giguère, president of the CROP consulting firm, as part of the 200^e podcast episode Question of interest hosted by Gérald Fillion.

An expert in consumer psychology and its impacts on markets, Alain Giguère has been surveying the Quebec population on various subjects for decades.

To the affirmation The world is heading towards catastrophe, we will not exceed 10 or 20 years without any major upheavals having occurred, 54% of Quebecers agreed with that 10 years ago. It’s at 66%worries Alain Giguère, citing a study conducted by his firm with 3,976 respondents last spring.

Also, 41% of the population feels excluded from what is happening. It was 30% 10 years ago. These people have seen their social and economic status decline in recent years. […] Their life has lost part of its meaninghe notes. This trend, according to him, fuels a form of inevitability within a large part of the population.

This is a trend that the CEO of the Institut du Québec, Emna Braham, also observes: I completely understand the perception, this loss of control, these fears. But in reality, we rarely hit a wall.

For the economist, the outlook is not so gloomy. It’s going to be fine. I know I’m going to get tomatoes thrown at me because we’re all traumatized by that expression. Yes, there are disruptions, there are crises coming, but 2050 will also be made up of what we decide collectively.

The future is neither dystopian nor utopian. In general, I would even say that we are moving in the direction of progress. We can also change the trajectory of this future.

Between optimism and pessimism, the futurist and strategist Joëlle Vincent describes a nuanced vision of the transformations that the planet will undergo within 25 years. There will be collapses which may not lead us to the apocalypse, but rather to a very great simplification of our world. […] The end of abundance.

Associated with the management consulting group Coboom, Joëlle Vincent predicts that Quebec and Canada will have to face real disruptions. We will not escape major trends. The end of GDP growth and everything related to deglobalization is something that is happening. There is going to be an energetic descent, a material descent, that’s for sure.

In 2050, we will no longer live in the material abundance we know today. That’s the only certainty I can offer you for 2050.

The end of an economic era?

After decades of economic growth, are we about to hit a wall?

It is certain that a decline awaits us in economic terms. We experienced fireworks in economic terms for humanity. We arrive at the end of a model. We will have to mournargues Joëlle Vincent, who believes in the emergence of a new economic model, created from scratch, which would move away from capitalism and communism.

Emna Braham also expects, inevitably, a slowdown in economic growth similar to population growth.

We already have a significant level of development and population growth will slow down. […] This is a public finance issue, because we have services that we want to offer to increasingly older citizens. We need economic growth to generate revenue and provide these services.

With a population that will continue to age, a major challenge arises: How to ensure that taxpayers are [en nombre] enough to generate revenue for health care and long-term care for older people?

According to Emna Braham, instead of perpetually increasing the quantity of services offered to the population, governments will be called upon to concentrate more resources to improve their quality. We will perhaps produce more goods and services which are in line with what we need, which will be more aligned with planetary limits.she says.

Will this model be one of decline? Should we abandon GDP and productivity growth targets?

Nonbelieves Emma Braham. The rate of growth will be lower. Economic decline, I think it’s a concept that can be attractive in environmental terms, but no one is ready to lose quality of life. And that’s what degrowth means.

Towards a demographic reversal?

The population of Quebec is expected to cross the 10 million people mark in 2050. As has been observed since the beginning of the century, the share of the population aged 65 and over will continue to grow in the coming years. years, going from 21% in 2023 to 25% in 2050.

Today, we are observing the cohort of baby boomers retiring. Aging, we really feel it in the job market [avec] labor shortages, labor scarcity, difficulty recruiting… There are more people retiring than young people entering the job marketexplains the CEO of the Institut du Québec.

This phenomenon is expected to reverse within the next 25 years. We will have approximately as many young people entering the job market as people leaving it.predicts Emna Braham.

For her, we must expect that Quebec’s demographics will be greatly influenced by the immigration policies that future governments will adopt. Immigration is currently the only engine of growth for the Quebec population. And that will continue to be the case.

According to Alain Giguère, we must expect that factors such as the climate crisis and armed conflicts will push a significant proportion of the world’s population to move in the coming decades. On the planet, up to 1.2 billion (New window) people may have to move due to the effects of climate change by 2050.

By what means will governments succeed in controlling a migratory flow which is expected to be increasingly significant? This is the question that Alain Giguère asks himself. There is going to be an international migratory flow to countries like ours and there are going to be terrible political battles. Currently, most elections around the world are driven by immigrants.

Will the past be a guarantor of the future? Will the way governments have previously managed immigrant reception policies be the same 25 years from now? Prospectivist Joëlle Vincent doubts it.

We must no longer base ourselves on what we have known in the past to create our scenarios for the future. It is true that in the past, immigration was due to our reception policies. In the future, it will most likely be due to elements beyond our control.

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Artificial intelligence: will we be dominant or dominated?

For Joëlle Vincent, the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the trajectory of our societies still remains nebulous. In the next 10 years, there will definitely be progress in AI. Then, there will be major transformations in the labor market, that’s for sure. How far will it go? It’s a nice surprise box.

In Canada, the impact of the development of AI on the labor market will be very significant. In Quebec alone, 810,000 people, or about 18% of the province’s workforce, hold jobs vulnerable to the progress of AI, according to a study by the Institut du Québec.

We often overestimate the immediate impact of this technology on our jobs and underestimate the much more profound changes that will take place in our business models, in our ways of doing things and which will gradually transform our jobs.analyse Emna Braham.

Several concerns come to Alain Giguère’s mind when it comes to discussing AI. I think we should try to regulate it. Are we capable of it? I think that innovation moves faster than the reaction of our institutions. The first thing that comes to mind, [c’est] how will we differentiate between the true and the false?

The inability to differentiate between truth and fiction is also one of the main disruptions that Canada may have to prepare for in the coming decades, according to the federal strategic foresight organization Policy Horizons Canada.

Expect the unexpected

From the outset during the interview, the experts wanted to recall the difficulty of projecting oneself into the future in such an uncertain and volatile world. Predictability is no longer there, so we must move towards foresight. It involves possible future scenarios that allow us to envisage what is coming, then adapt accordingly.explains Joëlle Vincent.

As an economist, we like to make forecasts, because we need to know a little about the demographic, economic, inflationary, unemployment trends… We need to have this compass to know where things are goingbelieves the CEO of the Institut du Québec, without taking for granted its constantly updated forecasts and trends.

I think we can do scenarios. On the one hand, there is the apocalypse, but there may be innovations that will change the situation. But we can do several scenarios on what is possible to happenconcludes Alain Giguère.