Know-how in 2050 – specialists give their predictions

The final 25 years has seen some mind-bending technological modifications.

In the beginning of the century, most computer systems related to the web with noisy dial-up connections, Netflix was a web-based DVD rental firm, and the overwhelming majority of individuals hadn’t even heard of a smartphone.

Quick ahead two and a half a long time, and improvements in AI, robotics and far else in addition to are rising at an unbelievable price.

So we determined to ask specialists what the subsequent 25 years may carry.

Listed here are their predictions for the know-how we’ll be utilizing by 2050 – and the way it may reshape our lives.

Science fiction set within the 2050s is filled with examples of people utilizing technological enhancements to really feel fitter, happier and extra productive.

Within the 2000 hit sport Deus Ex – set in 2052 – the participant can inject themselves with tiny robots known as “nanites”.

These microscopic robots manipulate matter on atomic ranges, giving superhuman talents equivalent to enhanced pace and the power to see at nighttime.

It seems like one thing from the distant future, however nanotechnology – engineering at a scale of millionths of a millimetre – is already utilized in numerous on a regular basis real-life tech.

In actual fact, it’s powering the best way you’re studying these very phrases proper now – each smartphone or pc is run by a central chip made up of billions of tiny transistors – electrical parts constructed on a nanoscale to hurry up knowledge processing.

Professor Steven Bramwell on the London Centre for Nanotechnology informed the BBC by 2050 we must always anticipate the strains between machines, electronics and biology to be “considerably blurred”.

Meaning we may see nanotechnology implants by then – however extra to “monitor your well being or support communication” moderately than to look invisible, as in Deus Ex.

Drugs may additionally make frequent use of machines at a nanometre scale to “ship medicine to precisely the place they should go”, mentioned Professor Bramwell.

Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick is equally all for finding out augmentations, going one step additional than most.

In 1998 he grew to become the primary human to have a microchip implanted into his nervous system, incomes him the title “Captain Cyborg”.

Professor Warwick believes by 2050, developments in cybernetics – the science finding out the hyperlinks between pure and mechanical programs – may result in trailblazing remedies for ailments.

He predicts the usage of “deep mind digital stimulation” as a partial therapy for some circumstances equivalent to schizophrenia, moderately than medication.

He provides it’s possible we’ll see extra cybernetic enhancements of the sort he has already trialled himself, in order that “your mind and physique may be somewhere else”.

And what if we wished to check out how the newest enhancement, and even new weight loss program labored on our our bodies, with none dangers of experiencing the unwanted effects?

Professor Roger Highfield, director of the Science Museum Group believes “digital twins” – digital variations of a bodily object, up to date utilizing actual time knowledge – may change into an everyday characteristic in our lives.

He imagines a world the place every of us may have “hundreds of simplified twins”, utilizing them to discover how “totally different medicines or way of life modifications have an effect on your distinctive biology”.

In different phrases, we may preview our futures earlier than we dwell them.

Many know-how companies, together with Google and IBM, are presently locked in a multi-billion greenback race to revolutionise how we push fields like AI even additional – within the type of quantum computing.

Quantum computer systems are machines which may do very advanced calculations at extremely quick speeds – for instance, simulating molecular interactions to design new medicine quicker.

In January 2025, Jensen Huang – boss of the main chip agency Nvidia – mentioned he believed “very helpful” quantum computing would are available 20 years.

AI itself will undoubtedly proceed to loom massive in our society as we journey in direction of the half century mark.

Futurist and writer Tracey Follows, who helped write a authorities White Paper on UK training in 2050, believes studying will happen throughout “digital and bodily realities” utilizing AI academics which “modify in actual time”.

Quite than textbooks, she predicts kids will use “immersive simulations”.

In the meantime, training can be much less standardised, with every kid’s particular person DNA or biometric knowledge studied to know how they be taught finest.

The author Invoice Douglass is well-versed in making compelling forecasts – in 2000 he received a $20,000 (£14,800) international futurist writing contest entitled “The World in 2050”.

Whereas he nonetheless agrees one in every of his authentic predictions – pilotless planes – will come true by 2050, he believes we’ll first see extra advances in driverless automobiles, making visitors congestion “largely a factor of the previous”.

“Vehicles will drive a lot nearer to one another than they’ll now,” he informed the BBC. “And if one has to brake, all of them brake.

“On non-public toll roads for autonomous autos, there isn’t any cause visitors cannot go as much as 100 miles an hour or so – you will see mortality from visitors accidents plummet.”

Away from Earth, the area race will equally proceed at pace, journalist and co-host of the Area Boffins podcast Sue Nelson informed the BBC.

She says in 25 years, it’s possible there can be a habitable base on the Moon, and a few industries may very well be nearly totally based mostly in area.

For instance, she believes we might even see pharmaceutical corporations making the subsequent era of medicines in microgravity – which means on board an orbiting spacecraft.

It is because, she says, crystals grown this fashion moderately than on Earth, are “typically bigger and higher high quality”.

The movie Minority Report, based mostly on a novella by science fiction writer Philip Ok Dick, was launched in 2002 and set within the 12 months 2054.

Three years earlier than manufacturing started, director Steven Spielberg invited fifteen specialists, together with the founding father of digital actuality Jaron Lanier, to a three-day summit to replicate on which applied sciences may probably exist within the 2050s.

The discussions formed most of the improvements featured within the movie.

If the occasions of the Tom Cruise-starring science fiction thriller are to be believed, by the mid-2050s we’ll all be utilizing gesture recognition (and fancy gloves) to swirl by way of movies on our clear displays, whereas policemen on jetpacks struggle impending crime with the assistance of vomit-inducing batons.

Like a lot science fiction within the arts, the movie paints a dystopian view of our future years.

It is a feeling which some specialists have begun to echo in our present timeline – with some going even so far as to recommend that synthetic intelligence may result in the extinction of humanity.

Maybe earlier than getting too despondent about what might await us in 2050, it is price returning to the phrases of Philip Ok Dick himself.

“I, for one, wager on science as serving to us,” he wrote in his 1968 private autobiographical essay Self Portrait.

“Science has given us extra lives than it has taken,” he mentioned.

“We should keep in mind that.”