What will happen in 50 years

Broadly speaking, the future is going to be delicious, if for no other reason than that more and more people are going to demand food with flavor and nutrition, and food with a story. There is no turning back to the food I grew up with in the s and s, which was about overly processed and packaged foods. More specifically, the future is going to bring plant breeders into the conversation.

Plant breeders, the people who create new varieties of fruits, vegetables, and grains, are the real architects of our food system. Unfortunately, much of their work is dictated by the handful of agricultural giants who control the seed industry. That means selecting for yield and uniformity above all else—a seed planted in New York is expected to perform the same as it does in Mexico or even China.

In the future, we will be breeding fruits and vegetables that are better suited for their local ecology, better adapted for organic farming systems, and of course, for better flavor. Fresh and organically-grown food will really become a luxury, even more than now. The Jetsons-style add-water-and-stir nightmare will be sold as affordable and convenient, while real texture and flavor may become things only real money can buy.

As such, perhaps the real luxury will be food that can rot. More plant-based options. Real meat will be treated as a delicacy to be enjoyed sporadically.

For health reasons, we will integrate more plant-based options or meat alternatives into our daily diets. We will have the equivalent of the replicator of Starship Enterprise Star Trek and we would be able to print food customized to our specific diet, palate, and nutritional needs. A more limited diet, meat and fish for the wealthy, rationing for the less wealthy. More homegrown food as climate change hits large agriculture.

People will eat less meat, and far less industrially-farmed meat as safer alternatives get more traction. I believe unconventional food sources will become more conventional, and that nutritious, plant-based food will replace animal products in a lot of ingredient lists. I also hope we will grow food in even more sustainable ways, that urban farming will grow, as will more regenerative farming practices that adapt to local ecology, enhance biodiversity, and draw down carbon from the atmosphere.

So I think there is going to be a push for more awareness around the US food industry and a better understanding of how our food is made. That will lead to better global health. Hopefully, more plants. As the health benefits of a local, seasonal diet become more clear, we should be taxing the environment a lot less as well.

Food will be designed not just for our taste buds, but our microbiomes—the bacteria and other microbes that inhabit the human body. Nutrition will be revolutionized as medical research that better understands how the human body is not a single organism, but a colony of millions of organisms that affect immunity, disease, and longevity. There will be no eating, no breathing, no drinking, no using the bathroom. The flesh will be gone, paving the way for the exploration of how intelligent we can become.

When it comes to our ability to control what diets do to our bodies, we are much more advanced than our Iron-Age ancestors. Over the years, the fads have come and gone, but one desire has been fairly constant: foods that actively condition the body chemistry. In that regard, two main areas of exploration have been most intense: mood enhancement foods that make us feel good about ourselves and metabolism regulation foods that leave little trace on our physical form.

The esoteric and obscure sources of the ingredients serve to mask their artificiality. Food will in fact look and feel remarkably similar to what we eat today—but will come from radically different sources. We will eat meat and dairy grown in alternative forms, produced and scaled through plants and bioengineering processes.

Agriculture and food will change more in the next 50 years than they have in the last 10, years. We now have the tools to engineer slaughter-free meats and fish. Cell-based meats sometimes called lab-grown meats will be commercially available at competitive price points in the next five to 10 years.

Food production technologies will continue to improve, with hydroponic farms like Plenty producing incredible, fresh produce not grown in fields sparing both the beneficial insects and animals. Inexpensive, delicious, and incredibly nutritious foods will be expected and delivered on even the most meager budgets, thanks to technology and biotechnology worldwide.

With the rise of intelligent AI, we will more and more come to appreciate the difference between intelligence and consciousness. Although animals will increasingly be recognized for their own forms of intelligence, their right to life springs from their sentience, their status as conscious creatures. Our diets will be a mix of natural and synthetic foods.

Red meat consumption will be curbed to reduce methane emissions, and we will eat more plant-based foods. Cows and pigs will become more companion animals, admired for their intelligence and connection to humans, than livestock. While meals as social rituals will continue, in 50 years, designers will be creating new modes of dining, like personalized elixirs and plates, based on precision nutrition. Inspired by foods as new materials, designers will entrench what we eat into our immediate environs.

No longer just relegated to backyard gardens, our shift to plant-based diets will be embedded in our everyday spaces. Public schools will be on farms, where, as part of new federal nutrition programs, kids will take home produce for dinner.

Rather than snacking from vending machines, cities will have buildings covered with vertical gardens, where passersby can pluck fresh snacks. After we eat all the animals there will only be vegetables left to eat. Some people will live on pill supplements.

A lot more plants. We will eat plants that provide the same proteins you get now from dairy and meat. Someone is going to figure out how to put B12 in a crop. It will be in mung beans, something akin to that—a legume. That research will be done by big agricultural companies, in my prediction, it will not be done by hippies in a garage.

It will be high-tech research that will lead to these developments in agriculture. We will eat FAR less meat for reasons of cost including the price on carbon that will absolutely be in place in 50 years. Society will have immense awareness of the animal experience in the human food chain and increased empathy for animals, thus, decreasing demand for meat—even in China. In the future, we will need to take more supplements because of depletion in the soil where we grow our food.

While soil condition is slowly on its way back to health, climate impacts like drought will mean we need more synthetic vitamins and minerals for normal human development. As we become more aware of potential food shortages and more self-reliant, things we now see as unusual, like eating from rooftop and pocket gardens, will become more common.

Meat grown in laboratories from animal cells will have replaced meat from factory farms and live animals. This cultured meat will also revolutionize cuisine. There will even be a fringe movement to embrace Ethical Cannibalism. We will have a choice of how long we live. Two hundred years ago, the average global life expectancy was about Today it is 72, and over 80 in some wealthy countries. In 50 years, as life extends ever further, many more generations will exist alongside each other.

At the same time, instant, universal, and rich communication technologies will ensure that a wider matrix of bonds is made constantly present and vivid. Instead of lamenting the decline of the two-generation nuclear family, we will speak of the explosion of the five-generation extended family. Death will come to us all, still.

But it will take longer, and there will be more people at our funeral, albeit many via hologram. We will choose whether we want to initiate a lightweight legal process that enables us to terminate our own life with dignity, control, and minimal discomfort. Solar flares, supervolcanoes, and asteroids, since genetic diseases, accidents, infections, and probably aging can be eliminated.

I guess how we die depends on who we are. The majority of deaths will be climate-related. Cholera in flood zones, mass murder of migrant populations, starvation, and heat-related deaths. If we assume that the vast majority of the planet will be facing the direct brunt of the climate crisis, that will be most of the deaths. I suppose people in other regions will be dealing more with the spread of diseases— things from Ebola to mad cow disease.

With dignity. We will enjoy our final years in our homes and communities, surrounded by caring people who understand that aging and dying are a part of life.

There will be no death, even if we want to die. We will be able to turn ourselves off for periods of time, but even through quantum archaeology, we may be recreated many times, in many realities. We will still die. But we will die much older than we are now, by as much as one or two decades. In short, we will run and run like the Energizer bunny, for the most part healthy and strong, until we suddenly stop at perhaps as much as years. We will achieve this through: a detecting and preventing chronic diseases far earlier than we do now, before they wreak irreversible destruction in our bodies; b a deep understanding of the processes and functions by which aging happens, which in turn makes us susceptible to chronic disease; and c using that understanding of aging to develop key factors like proteins or small molecules that we will use to dramatically slow down or stave off aging for much longer.

Finally, when we do die, thanks to the decentralization and unbundling of all the functions of the hospital as we know it today, we will die at home, in our own beds, peacefully surrounded by family and monitored and supported by a fabric of invisible technology woven into the home all around us.

We will still die of accidents, suicides, homicides, advanced old age, plus new and occasionally old diseases. But death in 50 years will be a very different experience.

The reasons why we die today—of cancer, infectious disease, and organ failure—will be, in many ways, treatable. I expect humans to regularly live to plus years of healthy old age, perhaps even exceeding several hundred years of age. But as always, as medicine evolves, new diseases do emerge and new infectious diseases evolve too. With medical advances over the last century or so, death has, for the most part, been removed from our daily lives and pushed into the hospital for our final moments.

Between climate disasters and the growth of end-of-life care, death will become less something to be feared. The stigma around death will have passed; instead, death will become as celebrated as birth. The funeral industry disruption that started when millennials began burying their parents will continue, becoming more human and family-centered through design.

Expensive caskets and practices that take advantage of grieving families will become a thing of the past. As millennials face the last phase of their lives, composting burial suits will become the new normal. Death doulas will help people who have the means to navigate their options, while more economical burials might take the form of group burials. Cemeteries will be forests, where trees are planted with the ashes or buried bodies of loved ones.

There will be DNA freezers. Digital afterlives will be offered in countless forms: bots modeled after the personalities of our loved ones. New discoveries in memory and neurology will give people a chance to reconnect with their deceased loved ones in their dreams. Most people will die from heat exhaustion if we don't move to a green economy in the next 10 years. Personally, I will die meditating. In the same ways, where you get old and you run out of steam. Cancer will not be the killer that it is now.

People have been dying for a long time. And 82 and seven weeks, you know, is a pretty good run. But at a typical football stadium, there are 70, seats. Certainly not in a uniform way. Those who die in conflict, barring a radical transformation in how wars are waged, are likely to be innocent civilians.

A century ago, those killed in battle were soldiers. Now—and in the future, I fear—ordinary women, men, and children will overwhelmingly be the majority of victims. Jumpsuits and overalls, which will finally be recognized as the greatest unisex clothing for anyone and everyone.

Hopefully, in sustainable and recycled materials. The actual real thing will be separated from us by money. I feel like we are evolving from fast fashion.

Customers are starting to look for clothing that has lower environmental impact and where workers are paid a fair wage. I think we will see the emergence of extra-slow fashion. Every two years, designers will come out with new silhouettes for fall and spring. In the interim seasons, they will sell dyes and other bits and pieces to transform the products.

The original piece hardware is made from premium fabrics and materials. It can essentially last a lifetime. Pieces need to become more of an investment. For this, branding, marketing, and storytelling become very important. People will pay for this fashion with microloans. In Mauritius, the banking system is so advanced that you can buy food from the supermarket on credit. Now throughout Africa, people receive microloans on their phones and they pay them back gradually over time.

Something similar can be developed for fashion outside the use of credit cards. People could pay for part of their new clothing with their older clothing.

Perhaps we would need a used textile processing plant. We will have 3D printers where we will select and purchase our desired brand garment in colors and styles we can manipulate and custom print to our body.

We will each have a 3D-image file, which will be used by the system to customize the garment to our specifications. Dashing boiler suits that reflect the sun and maintain a cool body temperature. Hats, too, and Wellington boots that mold to our feet.

Outfits that look like a second skin in a color of choice and that fool identity-recognition technology. This allows rapid adaptation ranging from communication to camouflage for a variety of settings. I think we will still wear clothes. More used and locally made clothing. We will see more unique and expressive styles that celebrate our diversity! All with sun protection because it will be very, very hot.

We will take for granted clothes that keep us at a consistent temperature and that adjust to us. I think they will be able to detect things like our blood pressure and our heartbeat, and they will be much more useful to us than they are now. The design industry has been really slow in thinking about tech and clothing. Two trends will heavily impact the design and manufacture of fabrics that make our clothing: our improved understanding and capacity to manipulate nanomaterials with specific effects on the microorganic environment, and the steady improvements in our ability to program probiotic mechanisms.

Clothing will be designed to serve as barriers against some diseases, to provide early warning diagnostics and as much as possible to align with dermal microflora in order to improve both comfort and wellness. There is already underwear on the market that addresses some of our growing needs for contingent microhealth support. Fashions and designers from the Global South will inspire our sartorial decisions.

We will embrace future-oriented, simpler, wears made of different fabrics and textures that derive from the imaginative local cultures in continents like Africa and Asia. Getting dressed has become something that feels overwhelming and emotionally fraught and it can be easy to fall back on failsafes.

I think women in particular are tired of being shamed for their bodies, of being told what to look like, and of having to navigate inconsistent sizing options. My hope is that we can change the way so many women and men shop and think about fashion, and make it a positive and empowering experience. Clothes will continue to evolve, but the real revolution will come in body modification—moving tattoos, glow-in-the-dark skin achieved with jellyfish DNA and CRISPR programming , genetically created furry tails.

In much more spiritual, subjective, and intangible ways, like astrological synastry, using ancestor communications through seances, etc. Matchmaking by professionals who understand compatibilities not so much by parents to align family interests, even though this will also resurge and arranged pairings will also become even more popular. I also think that Zillenials and those who come after them will be less and less invested in blood as a way of forming family: People will do much more choosing in that regard, from much earlier on in life.

Improved connectivity will also mean that the pool of potential suitors has widened. More people may decide to date in perpetuity. We will have online avatars who can meet and interact to determine if we would like to meet in person. Sex will remain quite popular as the route in.

Of course, algorithms will take that into account when identifying your most likely flings and long-term relationship matches. But the evolution of lust and love will still depend on surprise, delight, and exhilarating difference, discovered in the lived experience of all-too-human and unpredictable coupling.

Our intelligent assistant will dialog with other intelligent assistants online. In addition, videos, images, and bios are automatically vetted and corroborated to minimize surprises when we finally meet IRL.

I believe choosing a partner will become an informed, data-driven decision. That probably sounds unromantic! That, I believe, is the true potential of dating apps. I met my husband because his mother cut out a newspaper clip for him about how I was starting Teach For America. Love in a romantic way will cease to exist. We will only be willing to communicate with the nearly all-knowing AI that we are connected to—which, in fact, is one with us.

However, this AI will be connected to everyone else too, so we will always be interconnected in a sort of hive mind. They want an unbundling.

Because the decision-making would require more data than is currently available, UI and UX maestros shall have the time of their lives trying to make all that seamless.

I also think some of the consequences of increased virtual engagement will be a lack of intimacy and decrease in sex. Matching algorithms will of course be vastly more effective due to a plethora of data. They may even know our preferences better than we do. The final frontier, however, will be smell—the ability to analyze pheromones and crack the code of attraction. There will also be a clearer distinction between and understanding of who is an attractive one-night proposition versus who might make for a successful long-term partner.

Matchmaking will thrive in After major social networks and dating sites get hacked out of existence, digital methods of meeting new people will become socially taboo. As a result, personal networks and in-person connections will be the preferred way to meet both romantic partners and new friends. Some of the most avid matchmakers will be retired millennials who saw this coming and also want grandchildren. Also, with terrorism at an all-time low, bomb-sniffing dog breeds will now be trained to sniff out pheromone matches, working at airports and parks to bring together potential matches.

While the early internet matchmaking boom was based on crude algorithms that matched people by their race, occupation, or interests, this era of Applied Social Chemistry will build on intersections of biology, psychology, data science, and behavioral economics to bring together new matches based on a more holistic set of characteristics and aspirations. Architects, urban planners, and designers will round out the creative matchmaking industry. Neighborhoods, transportation, and public spaces will be designed to help people forge real connections.

Stores and libraries yes, they will still exist will be designed to increase the likelihood of serendipitous encounters. Instead of finding a match on Tinder, as their grandparents had, people will find love on exit So you can alter the face of your partner to look like anyone—including current celebrities such as Blue Ivy Carter.

Stories of delight, war, love, survival, and of what used to happen before the internet. Audiovisual content will still be king in many different ways—I think different populations of people are now in a space where they are looking for content that reminds them of themselves, and that will become even more focused and deliberate.

At the same time, there are parts of the world that have not met each other yet, especially in the South. All our diasporas scattered across the world have such stories to tell.

That will be an interesting place for content and narratives to explore. The stories we share will recall how, as a society, we were able to harness tech to serve the greater good. We will remember, but not miss, a world in which we were uncertain of our cybersecurity and of the veracity of online information.

The same 12 stories that humanity has been telling in different forms since the Stone Age, only in another media. Stories of love and conflict, joys and sadness, and overcoming obstacles.

Those stories have been told for centuries, and I really think they will continue to find a place in the future. We will celebrate superpowers that help people both honor our differences and understand our shared values and fate. We will always be telling stories about relationships, because relationships are the most crucial factor in everything.

We will tell the stories that always keep us engaged, which are the great stories of passion, betrayal, war, love, family, and money. What the social media boom has shown us is how much we humans love to dramatize the mundane. People want to turn their humdrum lives into their own signature movies well, some people do.

But we also want fantasy and rule-warping freedom to escape the boring and the repetitive. We want some social conventions to remain to make our status anxiety worthwhile. In a few years, the tools for crowd-narrated stories will be much better. Our most engaged discussions about our cultural lives seem to have diverged from the social and political matters that animate us the most.

New technologies will enable us to wield our angst into crowd-spun tales of suburban woes and the perfidies of the political class. Expect a Kickstarter-type co-creation medium for tubecasting that tilts heavily towards hyperlocal stories of resistance and redemption, told with snazzy effects and with patronage in the millions.

We will mark the qualities of that era i. The types of entertainment we enjoy depend first on the available technology and the economic structure of content businesses that produce that entertainment. The invention of film, coupled with cinemas where hundreds of people can gather, enabled the two-hour film format to flourish. The invention of television, paid for by advertising, allowed for the rise of episodic half- and one-hour TV.

Once people were able to record episodes, television became serialized, with story and character arcs able to develop in an almost novelistic way. The future of content will be shaped by the same forces. VR allows for truly immersive experiences and it challenges some of our instincts including that stories need to be told linearly.

There has been debate for millennia over how much of our storytelling instincts are ingrained—hardwired biologically or through deep archetypes—and how free we are to reinvent storytelling. I predict that the novel will continue as it is today—as the preeminent medium for exploring the intimate. At the same time, our urge for spectacle, fuelled by the most advanced technologies of the day, will continue to reinvent itself in One of the challenges we faced was finding character and story arcs that could resonate with Western audiences as well.

We will have more stories of loss—the end of species, end of languages, end of the industrial age. But we will also have more stories of invention: life on new planets, ways to finally reuse all the plastic in the ocean. We will continue to use stories to grapple with our wrongs, and hold on to stories we find hopeful.

The chase against fake news will continue. While the topics may not change drastically, the how and context of stories will be different. Stories will not just be a form of entertainment. Implanting new narratives will be a new non-expensive procedure, wholly personalized. The patient, clinician, and designer specializing in ritual and narrative will together craft the narrative, which will be a powerful antidote for anything that undermines our mental health.

Humans will be the same. Magical thinking will still be everywhere, people will still believe in crystals and haunted houses and ghosts and all that stuff. But I think fundamentally the world will become more divided—the rich will keep getting richer and the poor will keep getting poorer.

We will be much more risk-aware and how we share our folklore will reflect it. Even on an individual level, people and institutions will be facing the true cost of their risks. Telling stories about how we manage our risks as families and individuals—how we reduce the risks of floods, adapt to storms, contend with heat—will be as mundane as talking about the weather.

Furthermore, stories of shared experiences related to humanitarian conflicts, natural- and climate-driven disasters will become ubiquitous and no longer the exclusive domain of specific geographies or communities. Stories of suffering, sacrifice, and compassion.

People will continue to be fascinated by our shared human experience, and continue to be drawn to tragedy and hope, laughter, and sadness. I think the most important question is who will give us information. That should trouble us more than it does.

Another important development is of illusions and deepfakes—it is possible to generate events that seem to be real life but did not actually happen. This has far-reaching political, economic, and social ramifications. This, together with the possibilities to both block and hijack the internet for entire countries can have serious effects on who gets what news.

Depends who we are: the elite will meet face-to-face with specialists, politicians, and decision-makers, but the rest of us will be subject to a barrage of deepfakes, troll farms, and detention if we try to spread alternative narratives. Just like the present day, our main source of news, media, and information will come from the internet.

However, we will no longer worry about the authenticity of our news, and have normalized fact-checking tools that ensure the transparency and truthfulness of the media.

I also predict that online outlets will be smaller and more localized, circulating information tailored to communities and their particular civic, social, and political circumstances. This local journalism will inform and inspire communities to advocate for changes they want to see in their niche areas. Information will be easier to get than ever because the internet will be connected to everything, but having a trusted source will be even more important than it is now.

We will constantly build out networks and use of the quantum world outward. This will increase our intelligence all the time, every moment. That is the real goal of this new world—as much power and intelligence as possible.

We must conquer the universe. I do think there will be huge advances in how we get information, including headphones and some form of eyewear. I think there will be much more information coming at us on our headphones. And the combination of glasses and headphones, or headphones and camera, will become the norm. What the big apps have shown, though, is that they can heavily contain our experience of it. They can manipulate the edges of our consciousness and force us to limit our exploration to the lens they provide.

Still, two visions contend: the Googleplex dominion of highly-curated, de-personalized, ranked truths and the Facebookdom of hearsay and sentiment sensing. What kinds of information are we going to want the most? As more of the important day-to-day services in our lives move to hyper-connected platforms capable of pulling in data from all manner of sources in anticipation of our needs, we are less consciously searching for information independent of the flow of our actions.

Unless an individual is in a line of work that requires seriously original thinking, curiosity is increasingly more oriented toward understanding the viewpoints of others and the nuances of social belief than it is toward dry facts and curated opinion. Structural recall may already be on the downslide. It seems to me that in the near future, systems that enable more unstructured peer learning and immersion, like the next generation of WhatsApp groups, shall acquire higher stakes in our contested attention span than the systematic search engines in vogue today.

The most significant change in access to information will be moving from a pull to a push. Instead of us asking for information, we will have information pushed to us, as needed, just in time.

Infinite storage capacity combined with unlimited data feeds and sophisticated AI algorithms will predict our needs better than we can. Massive databases can combine data on billions of people and give us answers to questions we have not even thought of, but should. While this can lead to massive efficiencies, it assumes we are all, at the essence, the same. We like to think of ourselves as unique, rational, different, creative, and special but all these concepts will come under threat as data proves to us that we are not.

Everyone will have a chip inside their head and they can think and blink eyes to order what they want to know. I think it will be on our wristwatches. I think that technology—Google Glass, remember those glasses?

That will be figured out. People will be able to put on a pair of sunglasses and read and so on. I think, in the cities, in the developed world, people will not drive. The taxicabs, or the taxi pods, will be automated. It must have been chaos! In 50 years, we will be much better trained in how to discern the veracity of information from all kinds of outlets and sources.

Preschoolers will be trained to discern trusted sources of information as a daily activity along with learning their letters and numbers. Sources of information will be essential to safety and security as disinformation is increasingly a weapon in political and social discourse. We will have internet-equipped contact lenses that will fact check every statement we hear in real time.

It will make presidential debates much more honest. Our feet and bicycles mostly. We will live closer to where we work.

Cars will be obsolete. Planes and trains will be faster. I truly hope people will have figured out teleportation by then, or have made astral projection a mass affair. Considering all the accidents that happen among vehicles on land, flying cars with thousands of human beings whose road rage will have become air rage is truly a bad idea.

The use of sophisticated holograms will become far more common, and autonomous vehicles will be used as a last resort. Driving will be an unusual, somewhat expensive, and highly regulated hobby—similar to hunting today. Public transportation has the potential to grow in importance and be used throughout the US.

In addition to its environmental and logistical benefits, public forms of transportation have immense potential for technological innovation. The positive impact we can create as a community driven by public transportation is one we cannot overlook. Those who are blessed with the ability to walk will be walking more. Cities and towns are becoming more friendly to bikes. This must continue. Buses will become electrifyingly fun to ride. Self-driving cars will become the norm.

As for the skies, I believe we will still fly. But by , the industry will have changed beyond recognition—aviation itself will come under increasing pressure to reach net zero emissions and point-to-point travel could drastically reduce flying time. The fastest will be at the speed of light via VR and drones—including anywhere on land, sea, and air.

The farthest will be lightyears away, which we will access by setting up an outpost on nearby solar systems using nanogram-scale living space probes. The year will mark the 50th anniversary of the first host-to-host internet connection. Please think about the next 50 years. Where will the internet and digital life be a half century from now? You can tackle any dimension of this question that matters to you. What changes do you expect to see in the apps and features that will ride on the internet?

How will digital tools be integrated into everyday life? What will be entirely new? This is a non-scientific canvassing based on a non-random sample. Thus, the results are not projectable to any population other than the individuals expressing their points of view in this sample. The optimists responding to the better-worse-no change question expressed hope that in the next 50 years digital advances will lead to longer lifespans, greater leisure, more equitable distributions of wealth and power and other possibilities to enhance human well-being.

In short, these experts argue the future is up for grabs and some argue key decisions need to be made soon. Others echoed this point.

What we are seeing is an increasing affordability and availability of technologies that only were available to large nation-states 20 years ago. The commercial sector now outpaces the technology development of nation-states, which means groups can have advanced disruptive technologies that can be used for good or bad [and] that can massively impact global events. This trend will continue and will challenge the absorptive capacity of societies to keep up with such technology developments.

No longer do we have five to 10 years to assess the impact of a technology and then incorporate norms, laws, etc. Do we have the collective wisdom to educate the next generation to do better despite our own poor example? Rather than organizing information in the form of URLs, apps and websites, our digital interactions will be conversational, haptic and embedded in the world we live in even, to some extent, in ourselves.

As a result, the distinction between the physical and digital worlds will largely fall away. Prosthetics, imaging, disease and pathogen detection, and brain science identifying, understanding and perhaps even modifying the workings of the brain will all see advances far beyond what we can imagine today.

Our ability to understand weather and the natural world at scale will be immensely powerful, driven by advances in machine intelligence and networking. Yet all of these innovations will mean little if the algorithms and technology used to develop them are not applied with the same attention to human consequences as they are to innovation.

This is also true in education, health care, our financial system, politics and really every system that uses data to generate predictions about the world and the future. This is not at all to say that we should retreat, but rather that we should embrace the opportunity intelligent technologies give us — to see and better understand our biases so we can optimize for the world we want, rather than a more efficient version of the world we already have.

That said, as with any major advancement, there will be winners and losers. The losses will likely come in the form of jobs, autonomy and even freedom. But, perhaps for the first time, we are in a position to mitigate these losses because we can predict them.

And if we begin solving the problems we have with technology today, it will help address the problems of the future. Certainly, there have been several near-cataclysmic events over the last two year cycles, and we are currently undergoing the slow-moving technologically motivated disaster of the anthropocene. But over time these technologies have helped to enable more freedom than oppression, more abundance than deprivation and more creation than destruction. I would bet on that future.

We adopt them quickly and then work out the disadvantages, slowly, often prioritizing on litigious risk. The internet has been a wonderful summary of the best and worst of human development and adoption — making us a strange mixture of connected and disconnected, informed and funneled, engaged and isolated, as we learn to design and use multipurpose platforms shaped for an attention economy.

Maturity will bring ubiquity, understanding, utility, security and robustness. In the beginning, keyboard-based devices were the primary way of communicating with a computer. Today, natural-language devices Watson, Alexa, Siri are becoming the norm. The younger generations are using more and more conversational methods to communicate with their devices. Descendants of the Google Glass-style devices displaying info using augmented reality techniques will become the normal way of accessing and inputting information.

I suspect that governments will find themselves at odds with the corporations that collect this data. It is said that the bold predictions of futurists before the millennium have not come true. Smart robot servants or flying cars of the s have not appeared as we saw in the famous animated sitcom "The Jetsons" in the s. However, recent technological developments show that we will be able to make predictions much more easily in the coming years.

It is possible to say that these predictions will be true to a large extent. A group comprising of academicians and futurists in the U. This group prepared a report under the sponsorship of Samsung and shared its results. Here are 10 predictions for the future world:.

Underground roads: Underground means of transport that are capable of traveling at the speed of sound will be developed. These roads established on the tube system will be linked to each other. For example, this tube system will connect the U. Underground skyscrapers: These multistory buildings that will be built underground will be earthquake resistant and offer many living spaces like home, office, shopping centers and gyms.

Self-cleaning houses: When you are not at home or you are sleeping, technology will be developed that will clean the house via a button. Space hotels: Journeys to the moon and other planets will be possible.