Almost every comment I've seen sees the future as hopeless and I'm going to largely chalk that up to the postmodernism/realism consciousness in our society at this time period.

I think the future will be a utopia, and there isn't a long term (I mean centuries or millenia long developments) reason to think otherwise. The idea of utopia has pushed civilization to confront power structures and create new ones, to rethink what was impossible, too difficult to accomplish, etc. The many rights, freedoms, and ideas that many around the world take for granted today began as people envisioning a utopia and trying to make it happen. These ideas can't be done away with as Alexis De Tocqueville saw.

Right now there are problems for sure, and I personally think liberty and egality are only a parody of utopia at this point, but that'll change over a long time.

Human civilization is only 6000 years old! We're still working with the brain of primitive humans, and we aren't even toddlers yet in the grand lifespan of Earth. I think people tend to forget that sometimes.

We'll get to a better place, and our consciousness is always changing to confront the problems we face today (biosphere collapse, resource hoarding, infighting, etc).

Democracy took centuries to develop coherently, and even then it failed MANY times at first. But look at it now.