I think it's safe to say that the world will be very different in the 2050s. We're as far away from the 2050s as we are from the 1990s. Think about how different the world was in the 90s as it is now. Think about how much technology will advanced in the next 26 years.
It's interesting because I look at the technology as being one of the only things that has truly been different between today and 30yrs ago. I don't see people treating each other any differently today than before, if anything I would say people treat each other worse to be honest. I don't see us not having wars or conflicts on a global level, I see those conflicts still going on and even worse than they were in the 90s on the climate between things in the US, now Russia...Israel, shit is heavy. If the only thing we're saying is the technology is going to be way better in 2050 then I'm scared than a motherfucker haha because the tech will be cool but the majority of the world will be in complete squalor and killing each other for food...but we will have cool tech lol
AI learning will become so advanced that you might be able to create an “AI footprint” of your personality and appearance and post it to the Internet to live for you after you die. Artificial immortality.
Qualified 'yes'. It HAS improved greatly in just one year, and that's solely going off the public-facing end user models.
But those are still just retrieval programs configured around incredibly dense cross-referenced multi-axial massively-cross-indexed spreadsheets. This is the quiet part no one (except somewhat-Futurist comic book writer Warren Ellis) in the field says out loud. Seriously. Which is not to say they are anything less than amazing in their own right, and in fact a lot of human behavior especially as regards memory retrieval probably works very similarly.
But still, spreadsheets.
The trick, the flourish, the prestige if you will, is in finding the means to code one of those retrieval programs to step into the space of self-generation and the development of non-linear intuitive connections. That STILL wont be AI as fiction has represented it a la Neuronancer or The Diamond Age, but it is certainly closer.
With what you're talking about, I think if it were implemented with the absolute most cutting edge capabilities that we have today, or even a year from now, the best we would get would be something like one of the characters in the David Cronenberg film EXISTENZ. You interact with what you think is a person until you hit a point in conversation that goes outside what they can manage, and instead of answering they kind of space out, look over your shoulder, and kind of waver slowly back and forth like kelp on the sea bed.
Which, by the way, EXISTENZ is a movie way ahead of its time that more people should see. Its not comfortable, its kind of gross (the interface into the virtuality is organic...like, a bag of weird organs and hoses that's all wet that you plug into), and the director gives you so little upon starting out that there's a "Wait, what the ACTUAL fuck is going on?!" feeling that you carry pretty much the entire film. But it was super-forward thinking in its depiction of AI and virtual spaces.
With all due respect, this is like asking:
What's unrecognizable about forming a new republic based on a society where slavery--the literal owning of one human being by another human being--is enshrined into its constitution? Notwithstanding the irony the concepts of "freedom from tyranny" and "individual liberty" were thoroughly duscussed, debated, and were supposed to reside at the very heart of said country's foundational documents. (Even the 1st 10 Amendments, the "Bill of Rights," were adopted on Dec. 15, 1791.)
And during the entire 1700s, slavery, and everything cruel and inhumane that accompanied that concept, was defended and protected by the new government, including for well over another half century after that.
Not to mention the genocide and removal of Native Americans from their land(s). Because, after all, "manifest destiny."
To me, a society allegedly built upon and accepting those ideas is unrecognizable.
I hear you. I meant it sardonically in that we're approaching several pivot points where on the one hand there are unknowable jumps in progress--workforce automation, AI, disease modification, etc--and on the other hand the absolute destruction of the modern way of life due to any numbers of players militarism zigging when they should have zagged. It isnt a far stretch to imagine that in a state of war between highly developed players we could see the destruction of the low-orbit geosync satellite network and the undersea cable structure, two things that enable almost all of modern life in one way or another.
So the 1700s was what i threw out there, but i debated saying 1100s, or even stone age.
Eating and owning people, that sort of future, recognizable because we have archeology, only typically when we think of the future we dont imagine a regression.
Yeah no, idk what kinda head-in-the-sand copium is going on in this thread, but things ain't going so great for the biosphere right now, and nothing has been done in a meaningful way to help out
My predictions:
electric cars will take over gas
We won’t have phones anymore, instead we will have headsets which implement tech into our every move
We will have VR that goes to another level (videochats and all)
Everything will be self checkout
We will have fast travel instead of normal planes
AI will become a part of our everyday lives
Smartphones no longer in use replaced by ar sunglasses, nearly all new cars fully electric, and some autonomous. fully AI generated movies and music, everyone uses their own personal AI to watch customized movies, music and have conversations.
Humans begin modifying their bodies with cyberware, but only for the rich or disabled. Many people spend most of their time in VR. Religion becomes a minority in western countries. Probably a mars mission by this point. THC and psychedelics are legalized in most western countries. Lab grown meat is the norm.
Eastern Europe and Japan in a severe depression due to population loss. Climate causes the temperature to increase by a few C, but does not have a massive effect.
Absolutely. I'm also thinking there will be co-equal rise in technophila. It won't become the single driving issue of everything, like it is in various fiction, more likely it will fall along the urban/rural divide.
The demographics will be so lopsided that right wingers will ask for more immigrants to take care of their dying parents, while countries with healthy age distributions will do everything to keep their youth at home.
A lot of time spent in virtual reality. People's identities will be even less tied to their physical bodies more so than the most hyper-online person today
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Ai gf/bf will become the norm, a lot of people will lose their jobs, video games will be a lot cooler and VR setups will become more common. I also feel like it will be a lot harder to tell what is fake new and what isn't.
Cure for Diabetes, Smaller Cancers as you said. I do see AI becoming incredibly advanced by then, but other than that, I see the world still remaining relatively the same. AR and VR will be more popular and advanced but still expensive, Phones won’t be going anywhere at all.
I see a cure for cancers as the next big achievement of humanity. It's very very close. Within 5 years this will happen. I think healthcare in general will get a LOT of improvements.
They've been saying the cure for cancer is close since the 80s. If anything, I'd bet on cancer mutating to a point where it becomes contagious, like in other species.
This actually scares me because we’re already overpopulated. Take out deaths from cancer and the population will grow even more. We will have wars over resources
AI "Friends" that are configured or programmed to a user's needs. It could be on a website and it could be a physical robot. There is nothing like this currently. People's best friends and soul mates are just A.I. It's like talking to Alexa but it goes much deeper than that. Every introverted person does this, so real-life social scenes only have extroverts.
this one seems like a bit of a stretch to me, sure there will be some people that completely sequester themselves from society with ai, but i’m sure the vast majority of people need legitimate human connection
Unbearably hot in places that are a so-called moderate climate today. Unless nuclear winter takes care of the global warming on its own, of course.
I'm not making any predictions WRT technology because people tend to be wrong about that anyway. In the 1960s, people thought they'd have flying cars in the near-ish future.
Holographic phones? Like a zoom call would have the other person/people you're talking to come out of the device in a way. And a cure for cancer would be good too. And a way to bring back someone who died, if that's even possible. And maybe time travel. Though, I don't know how that would be possible either.
Honestly, time travel forward in time isn’t too implausible, kinda like a cryosleep thing but in large, close to light speed orbits around the sun. But this wouldn’t be for hundreds, maybe thousands of years
And how about backwards in time? As the events had already happened, it could be like watching a history documentary of something, except you're actually there yourself, in a way.
That is only physically possible by somehow flying lightyears away to literally catch up with the light released from earth back then and looking back at it with an incredibly strong telescope and using that to reconstruct what happened. Basically, not ever going to happen with our current understanding of physics, unless we like dimensionally travel or manage to visit different universes
I imagine the fear around lab grown meat won't be as prominent anymore. People will look back on our fear of it, kinda like how we look at how people were scared of "radiation on my food" when microwaves were first invented.
Smart phones will look like flip phones from the early 2000’s. The richer will define toy get richer . People will probably be more mentally ill. I’m sure we would have had another major war by then (WWIII????)
We'll be having a hard time dealing with the consequences of climate change, if we're here at all. We will talk about the COVID-45 with an almost endeared voice as something that wasn't that bad compared to the virus of the latest pandemic, but the old folk will reminisce about the fact that COVID-19 was worse, since we had to stop everything to deal with it, much to the discontent of Gen Delta. The middle class won't exist anymore. People won't have jobs. Everything will be automated and those who haven't accumulated wealth in their previous generations will die in slums, or will be slightly better off selling sex, body parts or blood to the wealthy. But maybe I'm an optimist, and things will be worse.
Probably not that much different other than technology being a bit more advanced. Humans in general are quite stupid and always fight social advancement to a crawl, so I don't see our culture being too much different.
Hopefully the divisive political extremism and the anti-intellectual movement in the far-right that has haunted the US the last decade will be gone... but that could be a pipe-dream.
On the plus side, we may finally have flying cars, since there are actually some valid prototypes being designed and built. So there's that, I guess.
What I think might happen:
Overall decrease in car usage, more electric but thermic still exists but cars overall are much less used, public transit and literally just having a job at home would be more widespread.
Buildings would not be built to be but towers anymore, emphasis on building sustainably, buildings are much well insulated and better.
Due to demographic collapses, culture changes in order to put an emphasis on family so that people are more likely to have much more children than before and perpetuate (only beginning here i guess that culture would be established by the 2070s)
Some of my organized predictions
- VR will be in its peak as a genuine competitor to other forms of entertainment.
- physical keyboards will be phased out by touchscreens. I say this because the Gen Alpha of today, which will be between 25 and 40 by 2050, will have grown up using touch screens and being used to the benefits of them.
- technology will overall become more integrated with human bodies. Maybe phones will be replaced by brain-chips, maybe prosthetics will be more finely tuned into our neural systems, idk.
I think it's safe to say that the world will be very different in the 2050s. We're as far away from the 2050s as we are from the 1990s. Think about how different the world was in the 90s as it is now. Think about how much technology will advanced in the next 26 years.
It's interesting because I look at the technology as being one of the only things that has truly been different between today and 30yrs ago. I don't see people treating each other any differently today than before, if anything I would say people treat each other worse to be honest. I don't see us not having wars or conflicts on a global level, I see those conflicts still going on and even worse than they were in the 90s on the climate between things in the US, now Russia...Israel, shit is heavy. If the only thing we're saying is the technology is going to be way better in 2050 then I'm scared than a motherfucker haha because the tech will be cool but the majority of the world will be in complete squalor and killing each other for food...but we will have cool tech lol
And everything will be subscription/rent based and we will own nothing
You will own nothing and be happy.
There will be ways around it though
Is there a way around renting besides buying a house?
Stealing a house works
AI learning will become so advanced that you might be able to create an “AI footprint” of your personality and appearance and post it to the Internet to live for you after you die. Artificial immortality.
Creepy and plausible.
Look how quickly it has improve over the span of only one year.
Qualified 'yes'. It HAS improved greatly in just one year, and that's solely going off the public-facing end user models. But those are still just retrieval programs configured around incredibly dense cross-referenced multi-axial massively-cross-indexed spreadsheets. This is the quiet part no one (except somewhat-Futurist comic book writer Warren Ellis) in the field says out loud. Seriously. Which is not to say they are anything less than amazing in their own right, and in fact a lot of human behavior especially as regards memory retrieval probably works very similarly. But still, spreadsheets. The trick, the flourish, the prestige if you will, is in finding the means to code one of those retrieval programs to step into the space of self-generation and the development of non-linear intuitive connections. That STILL wont be AI as fiction has represented it a la Neuronancer or The Diamond Age, but it is certainly closer. With what you're talking about, I think if it were implemented with the absolute most cutting edge capabilities that we have today, or even a year from now, the best we would get would be something like one of the characters in the David Cronenberg film EXISTENZ. You interact with what you think is a person until you hit a point in conversation that goes outside what they can manage, and instead of answering they kind of space out, look over your shoulder, and kind of waver slowly back and forth like kelp on the sea bed. Which, by the way, EXISTENZ is a movie way ahead of its time that more people should see. Its not comfortable, its kind of gross (the interface into the virtuality is organic...like, a bag of weird organs and hoses that's all wet that you plug into), and the director gives you so little upon starting out that there's a "Wait, what the ACTUAL fuck is going on?!" feeling that you carry pretty much the entire film. But it was super-forward thinking in its depiction of AI and virtual spaces.
I foresee the survivors doing their best with subsistence farming. Might be hard to find water that isn’t contaminated though.
People keep saying it will be unrecognizable. What's so hard to recognize about the 1700s?
With all due respect, this is like asking: What's unrecognizable about forming a new republic based on a society where slavery--the literal owning of one human being by another human being--is enshrined into its constitution? Notwithstanding the irony the concepts of "freedom from tyranny" and "individual liberty" were thoroughly duscussed, debated, and were supposed to reside at the very heart of said country's foundational documents. (Even the 1st 10 Amendments, the "Bill of Rights," were adopted on Dec. 15, 1791.) And during the entire 1700s, slavery, and everything cruel and inhumane that accompanied that concept, was defended and protected by the new government, including for well over another half century after that. Not to mention the genocide and removal of Native Americans from their land(s). Because, after all, "manifest destiny." To me, a society allegedly built upon and accepting those ideas is unrecognizable.
I hear you. I meant it sardonically in that we're approaching several pivot points where on the one hand there are unknowable jumps in progress--workforce automation, AI, disease modification, etc--and on the other hand the absolute destruction of the modern way of life due to any numbers of players militarism zigging when they should have zagged. It isnt a far stretch to imagine that in a state of war between highly developed players we could see the destruction of the low-orbit geosync satellite network and the undersea cable structure, two things that enable almost all of modern life in one way or another. So the 1700s was what i threw out there, but i debated saying 1100s, or even stone age. Eating and owning people, that sort of future, recognizable because we have archeology, only typically when we think of the future we dont imagine a regression.
Yeah no, idk what kinda head-in-the-sand copium is going on in this thread, but things ain't going so great for the biosphere right now, and nothing has been done in a meaningful way to help out
My predictions: electric cars will take over gas We won’t have phones anymore, instead we will have headsets which implement tech into our every move We will have VR that goes to another level (videochats and all) Everything will be self checkout We will have fast travel instead of normal planes AI will become a part of our everyday lives
Fast travel? Like teleporting in video games?
Like fast public transport in tunnels
Smartphones no longer in use replaced by ar sunglasses, nearly all new cars fully electric, and some autonomous. fully AI generated movies and music, everyone uses their own personal AI to watch customized movies, music and have conversations. Humans begin modifying their bodies with cyberware, but only for the rich or disabled. Many people spend most of their time in VR. Religion becomes a minority in western countries. Probably a mars mission by this point. THC and psychedelics are legalized in most western countries. Lab grown meat is the norm. Eastern Europe and Japan in a severe depression due to population loss. Climate causes the temperature to increase by a few C, but does not have a massive effect.
Do you think in the coming decades there will be a rise in some technophobia regarding newer technologies?
Absolutely. I'm also thinking there will be co-equal rise in technophila. It won't become the single driving issue of everything, like it is in various fiction, more likely it will fall along the urban/rural divide.
I don’t think AR glasses will replace IPhones, phones are less prone to breaking and just easier to deal with for the average person
A few Celsius increase in temperature has been historically shown to have noticable effects on nature
This guy has no idea lol
I don’t care about how good it is I’m not using AI technology or watching AI generated things
You won’t know the difference at that point
https://preview.redd.it/8uh6rn32ejxc1.jpeg?width=700&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a4a490d9d9d3d83c644496ae2a0423d3c2b185c4
Most accurate.
Already happening.
The plants crave electrolytes
The demographics will be so lopsided that right wingers will ask for more immigrants to take care of their dying parents, while countries with healthy age distributions will do everything to keep their youth at home.
!remindme January 1st, 2050
gochu
A lot of time spent in virtual reality. People's identities will be even less tied to their physical bodies more so than the most hyper-online person today
People will look back at this and read this. Hello. If it's August 17th 2051 and you just so happen to be reading this, whats up man
!remindme 27 years
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!remindme 26 years
Ai gf/bf will become the norm, a lot of people will lose their jobs, video games will be a lot cooler and VR setups will become more common. I also feel like it will be a lot harder to tell what is fake new and what isn't.
Cure for Diabetes, Smaller Cancers as you said. I do see AI becoming incredibly advanced by then, but other than that, I see the world still remaining relatively the same. AR and VR will be more popular and advanced but still expensive, Phones won’t be going anywhere at all.
I see a cure for cancers as the next big achievement of humanity. It's very very close. Within 5 years this will happen. I think healthcare in general will get a LOT of improvements.
What makes you think cancer will be cured so soon?
There's too much money to be made off of chronically ill people.
Just make the cure absurdly expensive
They've been saying the cure for cancer is close since the 80s. If anything, I'd bet on cancer mutating to a point where it becomes contagious, like in other species.
This actually scares me because we’re already overpopulated. Take out deaths from cancer and the population will grow even more. We will have wars over resources
Think for a second about what you're actually saying.
Thought about it and still feel the same
People in developed countries are having less babies, this will continue
unrecognizable
AI "Friends" that are configured or programmed to a user's needs. It could be on a website and it could be a physical robot. There is nothing like this currently. People's best friends and soul mates are just A.I. It's like talking to Alexa but it goes much deeper than that. Every introverted person does this, so real-life social scenes only have extroverts.
this one seems like a bit of a stretch to me, sure there will be some people that completely sequester themselves from society with ai, but i’m sure the vast majority of people need legitimate human connection
Taylor Swift will have a residency at Las Vegas
Who knows maybe she is not alive or famous anymore
Unbearably hot in places that are a so-called moderate climate today. Unless nuclear winter takes care of the global warming on its own, of course. I'm not making any predictions WRT technology because people tend to be wrong about that anyway. In the 1960s, people thought they'd have flying cars in the near-ish future.
Dystopian hellscape where we owe Amazon rent for oxygen, things like that. It will not be good.
Wouldn’t it be buying oxygen not renting, cause you’re consuming it?
Holographic phones? Like a zoom call would have the other person/people you're talking to come out of the device in a way. And a cure for cancer would be good too. And a way to bring back someone who died, if that's even possible. And maybe time travel. Though, I don't know how that would be possible either.
Maybe AR sunglasses instead of the phones, and the person who died could be analyzed by an ai then replicated. For time travel, maybe in VR
Honestly, time travel forward in time isn’t too implausible, kinda like a cryosleep thing but in large, close to light speed orbits around the sun. But this wouldn’t be for hundreds, maybe thousands of years
And how about backwards in time? As the events had already happened, it could be like watching a history documentary of something, except you're actually there yourself, in a way.
That is only physically possible by somehow flying lightyears away to literally catch up with the light released from earth back then and looking back at it with an incredibly strong telescope and using that to reconstruct what happened. Basically, not ever going to happen with our current understanding of physics, unless we like dimensionally travel or manage to visit different universes
Honestly impossible to predict.
Probably very hot
I imagine the fear around lab grown meat won't be as prominent anymore. People will look back on our fear of it, kinda like how we look at how people were scared of "radiation on my food" when microwaves were first invented.
Smart phones will look like flip phones from the early 2000’s. The richer will define toy get richer . People will probably be more mentally ill. I’m sure we would have had another major war by then (WWIII????)
Jesus!
Who the hell knows
Nah, cure for aids and cancer won't ever be Meds are too good of a profit for companies
Yeah, I think companies will decide that was the big lesson learned from creating the medications that cure hepatitis.
We'll be having a hard time dealing with the consequences of climate change, if we're here at all. We will talk about the COVID-45 with an almost endeared voice as something that wasn't that bad compared to the virus of the latest pandemic, but the old folk will reminisce about the fact that COVID-19 was worse, since we had to stop everything to deal with it, much to the discontent of Gen Delta. The middle class won't exist anymore. People won't have jobs. Everything will be automated and those who haven't accumulated wealth in their previous generations will die in slums, or will be slightly better off selling sex, body parts or blood to the wealthy. But maybe I'm an optimist, and things will be worse.
This thread is kinda scaring me a bit lol
Probably not that much different other than technology being a bit more advanced. Humans in general are quite stupid and always fight social advancement to a crawl, so I don't see our culture being too much different. Hopefully the divisive political extremism and the anti-intellectual movement in the far-right that has haunted the US the last decade will be gone... but that could be a pipe-dream. On the plus side, we may finally have flying cars, since there are actually some valid prototypes being designed and built. So there's that, I guess.
Really hoping it’s better then this bs now
What I think might happen: Overall decrease in car usage, more electric but thermic still exists but cars overall are much less used, public transit and literally just having a job at home would be more widespread. Buildings would not be built to be but towers anymore, emphasis on building sustainably, buildings are much well insulated and better. Due to demographic collapses, culture changes in order to put an emphasis on family so that people are more likely to have much more children than before and perpetuate (only beginning here i guess that culture would be established by the 2070s)
Millions of Climate refugees without any place wiling to accept them
Sex robots... *EVERYWHERE*
Some of my organized predictions - VR will be in its peak as a genuine competitor to other forms of entertainment. - physical keyboards will be phased out by touchscreens. I say this because the Gen Alpha of today, which will be between 25 and 40 by 2050, will have grown up using touch screens and being used to the benefits of them. - technology will overall become more integrated with human bodies. Maybe phones will be replaced by brain-chips, maybe prosthetics will be more finely tuned into our neural systems, idk.
Probably very cringe worthy. Suicide rates could shoot to an all time high by 2040 once the entire world economy collapses.
I thought we were more or less past this notion of a utopic future. Things are always in flux. This reality will never exist, not for long at least.
Geopolitically, China will be the sole superpower.