So it’s fairly customary for a lot of media to make predictions for the future before
the New Year.
We don’t usually do that here, since we talk about the future every episode.
In fact we did a year end special a couple years ago on all the unpredictability about
the future rather than predicting it.
But I was contacted a few weeks back by Kaspersky Labs about a project they were doing called
Earth 2050 to celebrate their own 20th anniversary.
As a cybersecurity company predicting the future is what they do to, especially threats
awaiting us tomorrow, and most of the folks there, like all of us here, have that love
of science fiction and crave to see what’s beyond the horizon.
So they approached a lot of futurists and other experts asking for a prediction of something
that would happen by 2050 to post on their Earth 2050 website.
There’s some great predictions up there, and I’ll link it in the video description.
The mission of this project is to sum up the mosaic of different options about the future
from world famous experts and futurists.
As you’ve probably guessed, they asked us for a prediction or two, and I sent them around
a half-dozen that I hadn’t seen anyone make already to choose from, and they decided to
post them all.
I consider this a great honor because there are some real giants on the list who I respect
a lot.
I thought we’d take a few minutes to go over our own hypotheses today, and we might
give one or more of these their own bonus episode down the road.
This will be a pretty short episode by SFIA standards, as we’ve already discussed some
of these before in other episodes like Quiet Revolution.
Given the time of year, when we often wear a lot of layers of clothes and tend to cram
the pockets full of gadgets, I thought we’d begin with the concept of Augmented Apparel.
We have a tendency to incorporate circuitry into devices.
By 2050 the improvements in miniaturization, production cost, and durability will have
extended this to most clothing, either interwoven into garments or as routine accessories like
buttons or belts.
Probably small and subtle inclusions, rather than something like Batman’s Utility Belt.
It will be fairly normal for cameras, data storage, wifi & phone antennas, and even limited
power production & storage to be worn rather than carried, such as micro-solar panels built
into clothes or generators tapping body motion.
See the Portable Power episode for some of the options and challenges we face trying
to carry around mobile and useful power supplies.
Combined with Augmented Reality and Cloud Computing, this would mean most people carried
their computer and interface with them, and those interfaces would begin to switch away
from keyboard, mouse, and touchpad to speech, body gestures, and eye motions.
Sensor packets built into the garments would heavily enhance medical monitoring, remote
control of drones & devices, and allow constant recording of day to day events, with an additional
positive effect on emergencies involving accidents & crime.
We’ll have search engines devoted to indexing and searching those recordings, to the point
that they essentially become “Second Memories”.
And that is our second prediction by 2050, but also one we already have to some degree,
this concept of a second memory.
From the first written logs and journals we’ve stored memories outside our own brains, and
almost from the outset we started having problems indexing those so we can recall them quickly.
It’s no good leaving yourself a note about where you stored something in your house if
you have to read an entire book to find that note.
And we’ve seen this expand a lot into social media and the cloud, tagging photos or messages
or video to make it easier to find things.
That search and indexing capacity is at least as important as the stored data, and will
only grow with time as that amount of data increases, potentially to being high-resolution
audio and video of your whole life.
All automatically tagged by object or voice recognition.
Enhancements in the cost, durability, and miniaturization of recording & storage medium
will result in most people casually recording events around them almost continuously, with
serious positive and negative effects on everything from crime & health to privacy & social relationships.
Because this would be a digital and chronologically stored archive, search engines would be tailored
to index and locate data in a fashion more consistent with human memory and objectives,
such as a rapid search and recall of where you left your keys, how many times you ate
a given meal, how many calories you consumed or steps you have taken this month, or what
that joke was that a friend told you at a party last year that you can’t quite remember.
Further ahead in time, improvements in Artificial Intelligence or Mind-Machine interfaces could
cause this to be more like a personal assistant or a direct interface into your normal memory
and recall.
See the episodes Cyborgs or Mind Augmentation for further discussion of that topic.
But enhancements to our own minds, via direct augmentation or add-on assistants, is just
part of that future.
We are interested in robots we can control at a distance, or sensors or displays we can
use at a distance - Telepresence – as well as machines that need little to no oversight,
such as more complex drones, and that’s our third prediction.
By 2050 virtually all delivery and hazardous environment operations will be conducted either
by automated drones or telepresence.
It is quite likely that sensors built into apparel will allow fast and intuitive control
of such drones for everything from surgery and bomb disposal to controlling robots in
orbit or on the moon.
While this could result in a shift of drones and robots more toward the human-shaped robot
of classic science fiction, it may also mean people become very used to controlling robots
of very non-human design, which mostly operate autonomously but which can be briefly overridden
when a person feels a need for assuming direct control.
See Attack of the Drones for more discussion of that.
But while having good robots in space or on the moon that we can control by telepresence,
or which can mostly operate on their own, will be a huge boon to developing space, people
will still want to travel there themselves and of course in the long term, as handy as
robots will be for space, we’ll still want to go there ourselves.
Our fourth prediction is that by 2050 we will have much larger space stations with spin
gravity and a growing Space Hotel industry.
By 2050 there will be a space station with a section under rotation to produce artificial
gravity by centrifugal spin.
The first one is likely to simulate either the Moon’s or Mars’ gravity to test the
long term health effects of low gravity, and likely be partially funded by or later converted
over to a space hotel.
While commercial travel to space will include a space hotel to allow people to experience
zero-gravity, most people will probably find lower gravity more appealing after initially
experiencing weightlessness and prefer to take their rooms in low rather than no gravity.
The number of people traveling to space in any given year will exceed the total number
of astronauts to visit space in the entire 20th century.
See our Upward Bound series for more details – particularly the episodes Space Ports,
Orbital Infrastructure, and Kickstarting Space Industry.
Another topic we’ve discussed a lot is future medicine and extending the human life, and
that’s our next prediction.
By 2050 improved health monitoring & cancer treatments will have largely eliminated early
cancer deaths and, combined with other medical improvements, will have increased the average
human lifespan to nearly a century if not longer.
Life extension technology will be one of the most heavily funded areas of research.
This may also result in funerals featuring freezing as a common alternative to burial
or cremation.
You can see our episode Life Extension for a discussion of how massively extended lifespans
will impact our own civilization, and our recent collaborations with SENS Research Foundation
for a discussion of the Science of Aging.
I’m not sure we’ll have completely eliminated cancer, let alone achieved biological immortality
by 2050, but we’ll have made some very real progress with very real benefits by then.
Those medical improvements will hardly be limited to Life Extension and Cancer though,
and will help with a lot of quality of life issues, and one of those will be true replacement
prosthetics or implants for folks who have lost a limb, their eyesight, or hearing.
By 2050, improvements in interfacing devices with the nervous system will allow replacements
of lost limbs with pressure & temperature sensitive prosthetics which will allow amputees
to wear a prosthetic with a true sense of touch and reflexes sufficient to catch a ball,
feel the difference between silk and sandpaper, and wield tools with able agility and responsiveness.
We’ve already made such huge progress on these in the last decade, and I’m confident
that trend will continue.
We may be only a generation away from being able to almost entirely restore functionality
and sensations to those who have lost limbs or senses.
So there are SFIA’s prediction for the year 2050, and don’t forget to check out Kaspersky
Lab’s Earth 2050 for more predictions of what awaits us in the decades to come, again,
linked below in the video description, and also don’t forget to leave your own predictions
for 2050 in the comments below.
As always, we’ve got our regularly scheduled episode coming out this Thursday, where we’ll
be exploring some emerging technologies for industry and production like the 3D Printer
in “the Santa Claus Machine”, and next Thursday we’ll close out 2018 with “Seeding
the Stars”.
For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel
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Until next time, thanks for watching, and let’s see what the future has in store!