The future of the world is a topic that never ceases to excite people’s imagination. It also dominated one of the major TED conferences at the end of 2019.
The moderators interviewed their authoritative speakers and guests about how they envision our lives in 30 years. We have collected some bright forecasts.
Reading tablet
Nicolas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab
We use information too much through the eyes and this is probably a very inefficient channel. I say that we will learn to absorb information. For example, if you take a pill and you will already know English, take another pill and study Shakespeare. All this will happen through the bloodstream: as soon as the substance enters the blood, it reaches the brain and when it realizes that it is already in the brain, it will upload information to the right places. I’ve talked about this with Ed Boyden, Hugh Herr, and many other people … It’s not such a fantasy.
Personal medicines for everyone
Dorin Lorenzo, president of the online service Quirky
What will amaze me for the next 30 years is the ability to diagnose the disease even before you notice that something is wrong with you. And, of course, to heal yourself with the help of drugs made especially for you, destroying the disease forever. The concept of health and portable technologies are pushing us in this direction.
Chip mounted in the body
Gregory Miller, co-founder of Spacebar Mobile Radio and former managing director of Google.org
We will be able to install a chip in our body – a sensor that monitors our health and will be able to detect our diseases at an early stage. It will provide information about our location to people we allow to see this data, as well as provide various real-time data. Initially, these technologies will benefit the biggest enthusiasts, and then the rest of the people.
We are generally not very worried that insurance companies will have access to such data. If their prices fall, they will work much fairer, without unnecessary detours, and will be more affordable. We will give as an example several companies (tomorrow’s Google, Facebook, and Twitter), access to which is associated with a lot of personal data to better integrate their products into our daily lives. We may not like it at first, but the Supreme Court will allow the police and rescuers to use our microchip data wisely.
In addition, we will be able to listen to live music at any time using a specific adapter in the inner ear, similar to today’s Google Glass. This way we will be able to listen to both street musicians from Ghana and a band playing in a bar in Reykjavik while we sit quietly and have lunch in San Francisco. This music will bring the next generation together and give it faith in world peace. The answer to dreams
Geraldine Carter, co-founder, and director of the charity Climate Ride
We will understand how dreams are created. We will learn why we see vivid details, and why the stories in our dreams seem so meaningful, but when we wake up they seem like complete nonsense. And last but not least, we will find out what events in our daily lives affect our dreams, as well as what worries us. All this will become clear and we will no longer be so surprised why we see very strange things in our dreams or dream a nightmare.
Autonomous transport
Bran Ferren, co-chairman of the investment company Applied Minds
This idea is from the late ’30s, which is reborn every decade. Our lives are largely built around roads and transportation. You know, they were the key to the success of the Roman Empire. And while this is not obvious, today autonomous cars will become the main technology for restructuring our cities and our civilization. When they appear everywhere, they will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and one million worldwide. And from there, electricity consumption and air pollution will be sharply reduced. Street traffic jams will disappear. New ideas will emerge about how the city, our work, and our lives should be built. When we travel, we will reach our final destination faster, and society will receive huge reserves of time and energy, which today are spent on our movement from point A to point B.
But why now? Why do we think we are ready for this? Because over the last 30 years, people outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions to create this marvel of technology. The DARPA boys, the university professors, and the company managers needed to realize the following: if one acts wisely in one’s affairs today, it is possible to take autonomous transport tomorrow. A personal bubble for everyone
Forrest Norrod, vice president of Dell
Over the next 30 years, people will increasingly integrate technology into their bodies for information and entertainment purposes. In 2044, teenagers will be amazed at how free our bodies were from technology in 2014 and how we lived in general.
People will live in a “bubble” of a personalized experience, where what everyone sees and hears will be quite different from what others see and hear. There will be several factors that will play an important role in this, the main one will be personalized advertising and the evolution of electronic devices.
By 2040, we will be surrounded by personalized advertising messages and offers that constantly lie to us. Many surfaces will be activated and display content depending on who is watching them. They will even be able to show different images of different people at the same time.
In addition, we will complement our worldview with personal electronic devices. Glass-like devices that will project the image into our eyes will be connected by audio and tactile feedback devices to help us receive information, as well as remind us of our important meetings, affairs, and, of course, to communicate with other people.
As a result, each of us will be able to perceive a completely different reality. In many ways, this will benefit us, allow us to live more informed, to communicate more with others. But this individualized experience can increase the risk of social fragmentation. We will be informed by the media, which strengthens our beliefs and interests, which, however, will lead to increased polarization in society. Perhaps this trend will intensify over the next 30 years.
The flight of generation Z
Ryan Kugler, director
Over the next 30 years, we will be severely affected by the growth of Generation Z and its contribution to society. This is the first generation to have constant access to advanced technology from birth. I saw how children like my godfather, who was born in 2011, were able to control the tablet even before they spoke and knew how to compose sentences. I think that this early acquaintance with computers, tablets, smartphones, and social networks from childhood changes their brains and when this generation grows up and starts to take leadership positions, we will be able to observe incredible breakthroughs in all aspects of life that are somehow connected with technology. Earth twins
Shohini Gose, physicist, and teacher
We will find the “twins of the Earth” – planets that revolve around other stars, about the same size and at the same distance from their stars as the Earth. We will be able to understand what is on their surface, what is their atmosphere … and finally, we will begin to answer the question: “Is there another life in the universe?” And on Earth, quantum physics will bring us new technologies that will transform the security of communication and confidentiality.
Google in the brain and nanobots
Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, technical director of Google
In five to ten years, search engines will be built not only on the principle of finding combinations of words and links but also on reading and understanding billions of pages on the web and in books. Imagine walking down the street and suddenly Google says, “A month ago, you were worried that your glutathione supplement didn’t get into your brain from the blood. So, 13 seconds ago, a new study emerged that proposed a completely innovative approach to glutathione intake; Now I’m going to outline it for you. ”
In 20 years, we will have nanobots that enter the brain through capillaries and connect to our synthetic neocortex to “cloud” services, becoming an extension of our brain. Today, you have a computer on your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers in a few seconds to perform a sophisticated search, you can instantly access them in the cloud. In 2030, these computers can be connected directly to the brain. For example, Chris Anderson comes to me and I have to come up with something clever to tell him. I have three seconds and my neocortex can’t do that. I need a billion seconds. And I’ll get access to it in the clouds. Our thinking will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking.
