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In 2050, things will be pretty much the same as they are today. Except for...
There will be solar panels built on the blades of wind turbines. I will have the patent for that when I get the bugs worked out... hopefully by then.
Politics do not change, they never change.
Economically you'll see a renaissance of the rust belt and the southwest will have grown to its limit without stealing water from the Great Lakes, which will be a big issue then. There will be a migration from the Southwest to Buffalo.
Socially, television will be grabbed online, but you'll have to belong to some internet/cable company to get the channels you want.
There will be a revolt against smart phones and landlines will make a comeback. Dial phones will be the retro fad.
Music will have died from lack of harmony, melody, soul, rhythm, and talent. Except for one type of music out of the Missouri/Arkansas Ozarks that involve banjos and maracas.
I believe a Third World War will occur before 2050. WW3 will decrease the population drastically. 7 Billion (present) - 3-4 Billion (after ww3). The USA will be no more. I feel that Canada, USA, and Mexico will form the North American Union. The USA dollar will be replaced. Cities will be the most popular habitat.
I'm not as pessimistic. I think the teens and maybe the 20's will be hell on wheels and challenge the existence of civilization, but I think we'll get out of it and find a new golden age by the 30's and 40's.
I think that technology won't be as advanced as people hope it will be, perhaps with the exception of computer power. Just look at the difference between now and 1960... despite our cell phones and computerized gadgets, very little has changed in our day-to-day lives. We still live in houses in the suburb, watch TV, drive to work, get our food in the grocery store; someone dropped in today's world straight from 1960 would hardly be out of place at all.
Now compare that 100 years ago when cars were a novelty, electricity was new, most people lived in the countryside and most didn't even have flushing toilets; such a person would be totally lost.
New technology starts by drastically altering human life, but eventually comes to a plateau where it just can't get anymore useful than it already is. The automobile with an internal combustion engine is a good example of this; the widespread use of the automobile completely and radically altered life in the world, but once people broadly adopted the technology, change slowed to a crawl. Cars today don't generally go any faster or allow more mobility than they did in 1950; reliability and comfort improved more gradually and today's automobile model changes are now purely aesthetic; pretty much every new car made is very reliable and very efficient (at least to the limits of the concept of the internal combustion engine) because the technology has plateaued. It just doesn't get any better. The same goes for firearms; the concept completely altered the organization of the world and our ability to counteract a hostile environment, but at this point we are still using a 100 year old browning machine gun design in the military and the M-16/M4 rifle is now almost 60 years old. Once you get a series of projectiles to shoot down a barrel quickly, reliably and accurately, there isn't much left to improve on in concept.
Look at today's tech and you can see the same; Today's HD televisions have such a high resolution that any higher resolutions are pointless because our eyes can't tell the difference. Cell phones are already as small and portable as is practical with more options and plug-ins than we know what to do with already. We talked about cars; the same goes for jet aircraft, architecture and modern appliances and a host of gadgets and appliances that already do the job they are intended for as good as is realistically possible.
Barring new and unforeseen concepts (like anti-gravity, working nanotechnology or inter-dimensional travel) the only current technologies with plenty of room for improvements are the Computer and Health Care; more computing power means more information transfer and storage, better programs and more practical uses, and better health care means less pain, better and longer lives.
I foresee a world that hasn't changed too much on the outside, but that has spawned virtual worlds indistinguishable from reality that exist only on massively powerful computers and hospitals where people can order new organs, body parts and maybe even bodies when their own bodies wear out. Perhaps people will elect to download their brains onto computers and live in the virtual world full-time. Maybe it's already happened... today's world could be "The Sims 304983233" being played on a quantum computer in the 29th century for all we know...
Energy will be in ample supply due to the confluence of green energy, efficiency, and more drilling. Most cars will drive themselves upon being programmed with the destination. Computers will be unrecognizable compared with today's. The US-Mexico border will be gone after governments gave up trying to patrol it. China will no longer be our major rival; that place will be taken by various African countries.
Politicians will still be crooked. Some things never change.
If automated factories are still producing mass market consumer good somebody will have to figure out a way for the mass of consumers to pay for the stuff.
During my more pessimistic moments I consider some form of a world wide plague, most likely avian influenza, will devastate the human populations in the next 30 years.
... Computer processors may become so fast that they will reach a peak speed, in which all computations will be instant. ...
I know a thing or three about CPU architecture. It is a trivial exercise to model a system where computation is instantaneous - and you bump up against other constraints such as I/O and memory and other system and network components.
The gain isn't very impressive. Think about it this way: the CPU in your computer right now is mostly idle and rarely pegged at 100% - which is another way of saying that most of the time your computer is acting the same way it would if the CPU were infinitely fast. With infinitely fast computation, mostly your computer would just wait faster.
There is a reason that CPU architects moved from single core to multi-core systems. It is not that difficult to model heat dissipation in a microprocessor. Remember: a CPU uses energy (watts), almost all of which is turned into heat with just a tiny bit turning into "work". Then, you use almost the same amount of energy to dissipate that heat (cool the processor). It doesn't take a rocket scientist to forecast the heat (energy dissipation) of an infinitely fast microprocessor: it takes a solid state physicist. Cranking up the speed of the single core processor, fairly quickly (within 10 years) the models showed you end up with the surface temperature of the processor exceeding the surface temperature of the Sun.
So.... we went to multi-core systems, but that brings about its own challenges. Imagine, now, a multi-core computer system with an infinite number of cores. Again, this is not that hard to do - you can write the equations on the back of an envelope. At the end of the day, system-wide, performance increases.
The gating factor is the extent to which anyone can ever take advantage of such highly parallel processes. It is easy for software engineers to create linear execution. We mastered non-linear hardware out-of-order execution 17 years ago. The challenges in achieving more throughput with highly parallel cpu systems is, well, a challenge. I wouldn't go so far as to say it can never be solved, but we can model the results if it actually is solved.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Last edited by SportyandMisty; 10-28-2011 at 10:37 AM..
Personally, I see us being much less capitalistic in 2050. As robots and AI take over more and more jobs, even the jobs that have yet to be thought up/created, there will be less for people to do. Unless they want a revolution on their hands, the govt will have to make changes to the basic way our society works.
As such, I see the republicans falling out of favor (or drastically changing their platform).
At 2050, I am optimistic. Between here and there, not so much...
Other thoughts?
I'm with you on this one. I think 2050 will be more wonderful than any of us can currently imagine. But we're going to have to go through an unimaginable Hell before we get there. Humans generally learn in 1 of 2 ways---the hard way, and the very hard way. I think the latter option is going to prevail this time around, although I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
About 40% of the population will be speaking Mandarin. About 40% will speak Spanish. The other 20% will speak one of the Southern US dialects because the Southerners will be the last ones fighting the takeover.
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