Technological change has progressed at a rapid pace. Within a few decades, the world has become virtual while we have started to apply biotechnology and nanotechnology.
Next, we will see how mobile technology is breaking out of computers and mobile phones, with the same technology being applied to all sorts of everyday objects: furniture, household appliances, buildings, clothing, packaging, cars, etc.
The Internet is thus evolving into “Ubinet”—an omnipresent cloud service—and we are entering “hybrid economy” where customers are participating through social media in the design, manufacture, and crowd funding of products (co-production, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, and augmented reality).
At the same time, the focus of the world economy has shifted to Asia and to the emerging economies. In addition, we have experienced financial crises, which have become the rule rather than the exception.
The main phenomenon of the modern world is the accelerating speed of change.
However, above all, the current major concern of the future is the depletion of natural resources. This, combined with the pollution of the environment, put sustainability technologies (technologies of scarcity) at the heart of competitiveness to generate solutions to the major problems of mankind and to contribute to the well-being of all.
The challenge is not only in technology and business models, but there is a need for a new kind of nonlinear innovation system, as well as a new philosophy of technology. The main reason to develop technology is no longer to conquer nature, but to protect nature against humans.
According to Nikolai Kondratieff, an economic upswing (long cycle) begins with a new technological innovation, whose effect eventually dies out (after 50–70 years), whereby the economy is plunged into recession. This continues until a new innovation in turn triggers a new wave of economic growth.
Significant breakthroughs to date have been, for example, the steam engine, railways, electricity, chemicals, radio, TV, computers, and mobile phones. Recent years have seen discussion of the Sixth Kondratieff Cycle (2010–2050), which differs from the Fifth because of the increasingly rising prices of raw materials and energy. It will no longer be possible with present-day technology to lower those prices.
One possible path of sustainable growth is the emergence of the Bio Age (similar to the Iron, Stone, and Bronze Ages), in which everything that can possibly be made from biomaterials will be.
The forest and agriculture sectors are developing into a bio-economy, which can use any bio raw material to manufacture anything: gas, fluid, fiber, mass, molecules, energy. Artificial meat will grow in the cow-byres of the future, mobile phones will be compostable, and many kinds of consumer goods (such as chairs, mobile phones and clothes) will be printed from biomaterials and grown from seeds and stem cells.
All of these technologies and changes hold importance similar to the invention of the steam engine. They have brought and will continue to bring profound changes to our economy, our way of life, and even our cultural history.
About the authors:Olli Hietanen is head of development at the Finland Futures Research Centre and a board member of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies. Email olli.hietanen@utu.fi.
Marko Ahvenainen is a researcher with the Finland Futures Research Centre. Email marko.ahvenainen@utu.fi.
In the Western creation story, the first man and woman are given a task: to care for a garden and the beasts and animals within it. By 2100, mankind will be living in a garden the size of the world. Species will live or die by our hand and our choices, and, ultimately, so will we.
Some people might claim that we are already there. I disagree. There are many wild places today, but climate change and population growth are claiming them, changing them, and in some cases erasing them. With work, better use of information technology in the form of sensing, tracking, and artificial intelligence can help us create a sustainable path to a world full of garden.
One of the programs that my city is most proud of is called Green Kirkland, where people show up in droves to weed the parks, pulling invasive species and planting natives. Staff and volunteers manage the watersheds and the salmon habitat. We clean the stormwater.
On a bigger scale, dam releases are being used to manage the amount of silt in the Colorado River to protect the humpback chub.
Reprehensible industrial-level habitat destruction and laudable habitat restoration projects can be found from China to Australia to Canada.
By 2100, most of the developed world will be managed. We will know how many large mammals live in almost every open space. It is likely that tiny sensors will report out on moths and moss and microclimates, and then initiate or suggest action to humans caring for the complex dependencies of species.
As the twenty-second century begins, our 88-year-old may work as a caretaker for natural habitat. Perhaps she learned eco-care skills in the community-service portion of her education when she was 16 (in 2028), and continued to leverage these skills for low-paying temporary jobs that supported a year of travel through Asia or Australia. Maybe she returned to this work for summers until she had children, and then again in the first few years of retirement, and now she has become a senior volunteer in the community park.
In 2100, 88-year-olds may not have seen an unexpected waterfall or wolf for some time. They have hunted for birds they knew were in a specific managed ecosystem and competed to get the best pictures. They have helped release once-extinct species into newly prepared habitats. They can count on one hand the number of times they have been completely alone, unable to even see another human being.
While most people in 2100 may not have unexpected encounters with wildness daily or even often, the highly paid professionals working on ecosystem preservation could be plagued with such surprises. As humans try to tend a complex biosphere, unintended consequences will abound.
Even in 2100, humans are unlikely to be as capable as nature is when it comes to managing evolution. They will depend heavily on artificial intelligences to help, but the process still requires human intervention. Natural evolution will compete with human-induced evolution. All urban ecosystems will be managed, and most rural ones will at least be monitored.
One of the ethical discussions of the day will be about how to choose between the wild and the made, how to best tend the garden called Earth.
About the author:Brenda Cooper is the author of several science-fiction novels. Her next release is The Creative Fire (Pyr, November 2012). She is also the CIO of the city of Kirkland, Washington. Web site www.brenda-cooper.com.
By 2100, one aspect of our world will have become apparent: While populations and economies can grow exponentially, the planet’s resources cannot. Nevertheless, as this simple realization unravels over coming decades, it will not be plainly visible. It will manifest in less-obvious ways.
The finitude of the earth will present itself in terms of supply constraints, international conflict, disease, water shortages, unemployment, and most of all economic volatility.
As traditional fuels stretch thin, nations will shift to low-grade coal and shale oil to fuel their economic activity. As heating costs rise, the world’s forests will understandably become an irresistible resource to exploit for fuel. The natural gas and petroleum-based fertilizers that cultivated the green revolution will become too expensive for many of the world’s farmers at the same time that crops for biofuels will be in highest demand.
The world’s poor and disenfranchised will bear the brunt of these transitional pains. Nations may institute food export bans as they did following the 2008 and 2011 food price shocks. Others may use food aid as a weapon, as Henry Kissinger once suggested the United States might do. As the costs to exhume fossil fuels rise, the invisible hand of the market will go right for our throats.
In 2100, people will still be traveling to and from work, celebrating birthdays, trying new restaurants, and going on vacations. They’ll just be doing it all with a lot less energy.
Not only will the age of cheap fossil fuels have ended by 2100, few alive will have any recollection of such an era. Residents of 2100 will therefore find little utility in the brand of economic thinking that their elders bequeathed them.
Some alternative energy schemes will have failed to live up to the wide-eyed dreams that previous generations had envisioned. By 2100, it will have become apparent that early technologies were largely reliant on fossil fuels as well as the economic activity that accompanied cheap energy. Engineers will discover that, while wind and sunlight are renewable, turbines and solar cells are not.
Landfills will house millions of tons of defunct solar panel waste, leaking heavy metals into groundwater supplies. But a larger concern will reign: the enduring burdens of nuclear activities.
In 2100, energy firms will still be grappling with how best to store nuclear waste and clean up nuclear contamination. People will not identify nuclear contamination in terms of “accidents,” as we do today. They will instead view nuclear activities as highly risky undertakings that are bound to expel radiation into human communities over time. Additionally, plenty of enriched fuel, radioactive waste, and nuclear byproducts will shift hands as nation-states crack apart and reconfigure into new political establishments.
Technological developments will influence the 2100 energy landscape, but they won’t be the primary force. Future energy prosperity will actually hinge on social and political fundamentals: human rights, health care, transparency, citizen governance, walkable communities, strong civic organizations, and so on. These are important attributes for any era. But in an age of tight energy, they will become vital.
Ozzie Zehner is a visiting scholar at the Science, Technology, & Society Center, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Web site www.GreenIllusions.org.
What will the term elder mean in the future? And at what age will someone be considered an elder in 2100?
To be born in 2012 and only be 88 years old in 2100 will probably mean middle age rather than elderhood. Elders will be those who have lived triple-digit years and have been through several careers and cycles of education, career, and leisure. These elders will have exponentially more knowledge and experience, and they will continue to be contributing to society. Technology will be a key element allowing individuals to age with more independence and more choice.
Here, we examine each component of health (as defined by the World Health Organization) and how each will be manifested in 2100.
Elders will be able to live in their own homes longer. With driverless cars, limitations on transportation will be a thing of the past. And the smart home will adapt to people’s changing needs so that they will not need to move from their current home to maintain a safe environment.
As with work, there will be cycles with marriage and family dynamics. It will be unlikely that there will be marriages that will last 100 years, so there will be multiple groupings of families that will have a fresh approach to embracing each addition to the family and expanding the definition of the extended family.
The year 2100 will be an exciting time to be “old.” Technology and societal views will encourage a new attitude about aging. Elderhood will be viewed as the period in one’s life with the most opportunity for independence and quality choices about one’s own life.
About the author:Marta M. Keane is president of The Strategies Group. She is a health-care management consultant focusing on aging and wellness. Email martakeane@hotmail.com.
Money has been around since the dawn of history. A future without money would suggest that we would be moving toward a barter economy rather than an exchange economy in 2100.
It is entirely possible that this could happen at the individual level. The Internet could allow peer-to-peer exchange, much in the way that eBay accommodates this at present. However, a barter system is unlikely to be of use at the societal level. The supply of public services like defense or justice are best facilitated through a monetary contribution, such as taxes.
This reason alone is likely to keep money with us in 2100. But in what form? Who is likely to issue it? More interestingly, does cash have a future? Money has become largely digital over the past few decades. This is unlikely to change unless there is a major disruption to the way in which accounting records are kept.
Despite the predictions of its demise, cash has proven to be very resilient. Cash is the lifeblood of the black-market economy because it leaves no audit trail, and, as long as people want to avoid paying taxes, it will continue to serve that function. We can speculate that, even if notes and coins were abolished, a parallel form of “cash” would develop. For this reason, cash is still likely to be with us in 2100.
What may change are the issuers of money. At present, governments reserve for themselves the right to issue legal tender. Yet, systems of parallel currency have emerged. For example, we are accustomed to spending air miles (or points) for travel. Companies could harness the function of money as a store of value and a standard for deferred payments by issuing purchase tokens for future use. Most supermarket loyalty schemes operate along these lines. It could well happen that this trend, enabled by the Internet, could explode over the course of this century.
The trend will be enhanced if companies can tap into the trust that their customers have in their brands. Many companies do so already through loyalty credit cards, and even a form of private banking. This is one way in which the remainder of the twenty-first century could change.
If it is true that there is a growing distrust in the nation-state as a vehicle for expressing our collective aspirations, then, as our trust is transferred to the institutions that come to replace the nation-state, so those institutions will come to control the issuance of money.
It is quite likely that we will still have money in 2100, but it may not be issued by governments any longer.
About the author:Stephen Aguilar-Millan is director of research at The European Futures Observatory, www.eufo.org. He is also a member of the World Future Society’s Global Advisory Council and a frequent speaker at WFS conferences.
In 2100, more than 70% of the Earth’s 10 billion people will live in cities. In dynamic regional hubs like Lagos, Nigeria (population 41 million), an infrastructure of renewable energy, sustainable local manufacturing, socially augmented reality, and anticipatory community governance will have produced economically vibrant neighborhoods that are microcosms of collaborative resident engagement.
But city life is more complex than village life. Whenever people have moved from rural to urban environments, they have had to develop more complex attitudes and behaviors—for example, internalizing rules, cooperating beyond their own families, and learning to navigate complex institutions. The “complexity gap” between urban and rural living will widen as cities grow from millions to tens of millions of residents. Throughout the twenty-first century, people migrating to the city will close this gap, undergoing a psychosocial transition that could provide the foundation for twenty-second-century urban success.
Much of this transition will have occurred in the catalyst bed of the “slum.” Sure, the slums of the twenty-first century have had their share of problems, with criminality and corruption occasionally spiraling out of control. But global leaders will have come to understand that allowing the undesirable elements of slum life to fester at reasonable levels is important for fostering slum dwellers’ adoption of the more complex attitudes and behaviors required for successful citizenship at the municipal and global levels.
With this understanding, the century’s most-effective NGOs will be those who do not try to “solve the problems” of the slums, but rather try to set the conditions in which the psychosocial transition from rural to urban could occur quickly and without reaching unproductive levels of human suffering. This will include providing slum residents with wireless service, ubiquitous educational programming, and “off-grid” solutions for power, water, health care, and sanitation. Interestingly, these “off-grid” solutions also will yield benefits for those who remain in rural areas.
Throughout the twenty-first century, urbanization will have provided new migrants from rural areas with more complex environments that challenge them to become more complex themselves. And they will. This psychosocial transition, effected largely in the slums, will have lifted virtually all human communities out of poverty and create a global citizenry with its eye on the future.
Eric Meade is senior futurist and vice president of the Institute for Alternative Futures in Alexandria, Virginia. Web site www.altfutures.org.
We are already familiar with the idea of seamlessness in our world of constant communication. In the twenty-second century, as all living creatures evolve and adapt at a pace never known before, communication will evolve into transmission.
Transmission will allow us to maintain customizable interfaces in our minds. This will enable not just interpersonal communications, but interspecies transmission, as well.
We will be able to share information with the help of hybrid languages that may even go back to ancient pictograms: visuals rather than letters. Numerical systems would change, the era of computers would conclude, and the boundary between Man and Man-Made would become diluted.
Manjul Rathee is a sustainable communications designer currently based in London. Web site www.manjulrathee.com.
Projecting religious populations around the globe to 2100 first requires a nod to trends over the previous 200 years. In 1910, those imagining the future of religion generally had a positive outlook, with many believing that religion was an unchallenged fact of life that would continue on for generations to come.
In one sense, this conviction was incorrect, as the world was, by percentage, less religious in 2012 than in 1900. In 1900, 99.8% of the world’s population belonged to a religious tradition and 0.2% were unaffiliated (agnostic or atheist). The year 2012 marked a drop in the world’s religious population to 88.2% and a rise of unaffiliated populations to 11.8%.
In 2100, however, the world will likely be only 9% unaffiliated—more religious than in 2012. The peak of the unaffiliated was in 1970 at around 20%, largely due to the influence of European communism. Since communism’s collapse, religion has been experiencing resurgence that will likely continue beyond 2100.
All the world’s religions are poised to have enormous numeric growth (with the exceptions of tribal religions and Chinese folk-religion), as well as geographic spread with the continuation of migration trends. Adherents of the world’s religions—perhaps particularly Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists—will continue to settle in the formerly Christian and ever-expanding cities of Europe and North America, causing increases of religious pluralism in these areas.
Christians and Muslims together will encompass two-thirds of the global population—more than 7 billion individuals. In 2100, the majority of the world’s 11.6 billion residents will be adherents of religious traditions.
A child born in 2012 begins his life in a religious world, and when he reaches 88 years of age in 2100, that reality will be even more intensified. No matter what religious tradition he belongs to, if any, he will be immersed in a world populated by the religious and defined by an increasing plurality of theologies, spiritualities, and worldviews, all living at his doorstep.
While this kind of crowded ideological marketplace has the potential for cultural clashes and conflict, it could alternatively serve as an impetus for a new spirit of tolerance and community: Living in a shared, increasingly global society compels people to realize their commonalities and shared interests even in the face of differences in creed.
About the author:Gina Bellofatto is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and a doctoral student studying world religions and international religious demography at Boston University’s School of Theology.
Underlying today’s dazzling, seemingly science-fiction developments are such brow-arching matters as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fusion power, genomics, “green” ways of living, integrated automation, nanotechnology, space industry, and robotized weaponry.
These are extraordinary game changers in themselves, and especially in combination. But three other emerging developments dwarf even these in their potential to alter life by 2100.
The first, brain–machine interface systems could enable individuals to control “smart” equipment merely by using their minds, much as today certain paralyzed patients can control a computer or a prostheses through thought. Our descendants may be able to turn on and off, aim, and otherwise control inanimate objects just by thinking a command.
Like all such major changes, this one is double-edged, as it could encourage couch-potato sloth leading to ill health. Today’s diabetes and obesity plague may seem mild in comparison. Alternatively, we could employ newly gained time and energy to achieve mind–body advances once only dreamed of in neo-utopian blueprints.
The second emerging game changer is whole-brain emulation. Proponents expect to import the equivalent of a human mind—the most complicated device found to date in the universe—into a nonbiological substrate. While the brain today remains one of the biggest mysteries of all, the next 88 years are likely to host neuroscience advances, bolstered by the power of quantum computing, that could make an uploaded mind an actuality.
By 2100, advances in law, philosophy, and politics should help answer such questions as Is it human? and if so, What are its rights and responsibilities? What do we owe it, and vice versa, what are we owed? (A good start in answering these questions is available in Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.”)
A third underrecognized game changer, and arguably the most consequential, is futuristics itself. Vastly improved by computer science gains in data coverage and model building, foresight work should also profit from unprecedented artistic flights of imagination and fancy. Best of all, it will probably have become a prized feature in lifelong learning.
Hailed for helping us mitigate the worst long-range threats posed by ongoing climate change, futuristics will benefit from diversity, with increasing input from female forecasters and non-Western seers (China and India, for example, have long been helping improve Western futuristics).
By 2100, futuristics could be regarded as the most valuable of all the mental tools that humans will need for the next century, when the “big thing” will be our new relationship with things that actually seem able to think.
Arthur B. Shostak is emeritus professor of sociology at Drexel University and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Utopian Thought. He is currently writing Touring Tomorrow Today, a guidebook to sites that preview options for future-shaping acts. He can be reached at arthurshostak@gmail.com.
For further reading, see Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century by Jonathan D. Moreno (Bellevue, 2012) and Creating the School You Want: Learning @ Tomorrow’s Edge edited by Arthur B. Shostak (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).
Long-term forecasts are fraught with peril, but anticipating the world at the dawn of the next century is made even more perilous by the possibility of a technological Singularity occurring well before we reach that milestone.
As computer scientist Vernor Vinge and others have pointed out, our ability to anticipate life after the development of a rapidly self-improving superintelligence would be very limited. Not only will we be facing a world of new and incredibly strange technologies, but our social mores, ethics, and institutions will also likely be very different from what they are today.
Nevertheless, some extrapolations can be made based on current technologies and trends. This most certainly includes robotics, a field in which advances currently being made are nothing short of astounding. A range of advancements are occurring all at once: Computer resources are diminishing in scale and growing in processing power, the size of actuators and motors is shrinking, and feedback and pattern-recognition algorithms are improving.
Robotic pack mules such as Big Dog and galloping robots such as Cheetah, both of Boston Dynamics, are currently being developed for military use on the battlefield. Visual-pattern-recognition systems have allowed Google to develop a fleet of driverless vehicles that has logged more than 100,000 cumulative miles.
The ongoing development of interactive humanoid robots suggests that the day may not be not far off when we’ll share the world with a number of cybernetic species. Advances in artificial intelligence could potentially allow these technologies to exceed the intellectual abilities of their creators, at least in some capacities, and possibly in all of them.
The current goal of developing a humanoid robotic soccer team capable of beating a team of world champion human players by the year 2050 seems well within reach. Because the game involves a wide range of cognitive as well as physical skills, it’s considered by many to be an important milestone for robotics and AI.
But this takes us only to the middle of the century. As advancements continue to converge and accelerate, the state of robotics, as gauged by various metrics, will probably have advanced by several orders of magnitude in the remaining decades leading up to 2100. By then, robots could be very superior to unmodified biological organisms.
So how will this change the world? Even assuming that the technological Singularity doesn’t occur, the world will still be a very different place. Technological entities will have basic, essential rights. Perhaps they’ll even be in charge. We’ll interact with them on a daily basis and routinely have physical and social relationships with them. To greater and lesser degrees, we’ll integrate their technologies with our own bodies in order to live better, longer lives.
Both species—human and robot—will probably have moved beyond this one small planet, possibly symbiotically. Assuming that the human race still exists in 2100, we’ll be living in a very different universe indeed.
Richard Yonck is a foresight analyst for Intelligent Future LLC and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Computing and AI. Web site http://intelligent-future.com.
In 2100, fast traffic will not circulate at ground level in the cities or the fields. This will be prohibited. There will be less air traffic than nowadays. On land, there will be fast (300-500 km/h) and ultra-fast (more than 1,000 km/h) lines, all of them light and continuously elevated on columns. They will often span great distances by means of hanging bridges in order to avoid rivers and accidents on the ground. Abundant lines, hanging between floating platforms, will cross the oceans.
There will be no large land vehicles for human use or for transporting merchandise. Cargo will travel in narrow underground conducts, including very narrow home-delivery conducts. Indivisible, large objects will have special transportation, often by air.
All journeys made by people or goods transport will be managed by a network with automatic driving systems on various types of line and with diverse electrical propulsion systems. The door-to-door principle will rule, and also that of combining cabins (for people) and containers (for goods) with the aim of obtaining maximum energy efficiency.
Traffic as a whole will have followed the accelerative trend seen throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Motorized movement on the planet will have reached its peak in 2100, but it is possible that, by this date, a new, opposing trend will have started to dampen the compulsive human need for speed and environmental change.
Also in 2100, a good part of the world’s population will be transhuman. This means that they will have built-in microelectronic devices working closely with the biology of their body.
Humanity will be divided into groups and sub-groups: Trans Bs, whose brain will be in direct contact with computer files and communications, will abound. At the top of the pyramid will be the Trans As, who will be genetically modified Trans Bs. Most abundant will be the Trans Cs, whose bodies are equipped with micro-appliances without direct contact with their brains.
The basic characteristics of trans nature will be immediate, long-distance access to communication with other people and to public files. They will have nano-technological control of bodily functions, some hormonal processes, and other kinds of activity related to mental processes.
Along with the trans population, there will be a human population. As happens with different races, the boundaries between one category and the other will be rather blurred. The difference between a Trans C and a technologically equipped human will be insignificant. The human condition will be decided by, in a large number of cases, the lack of access to transhuman technologies, and in many others, a widespread, anti-evolutionary rebelliousness: a phenomenon comparable nowadays to that of the Amish, although it will be more common.
Like transhumans, humans will have grades—from those who accept the implantation of all types of artificial organs, remote health check-ups, and a communications chip at the base of the ear, to those who accept human nature in the same way as they faced illness, old age, and death at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Complex conflicts between the various types of humans and transhumans will exist. Many of the transhumans will consider that the greatest global problem is the excessive reproduction and irrational behavior of humans. There will also be neo-religious conflicts related to the meaning of life.
Living, working to live, struggling, having fun, and believing will acquire new dimensions and combinations. The most-significant mortality factor among the Trans Bs will be suicide, but this problem will gradually be corrected in the new generations of Trans As.
About the author:Julio Arbesú is a writer, musician, and ecologist militant, born in Asturias, Spain. Among his books are La Informatizacion del Transporte (The Computerization of Transport, available in English from his Web site, www.futurtrans.info, and El Destín Transhumanu, in Asturian (no English translation), about the transhuman future. Email jiarbesu@yahoo.es.
In hindsight, one can easily identify the advantages of jet-powered aircraft over propeller-driven ones, and appreciate the quantum leap forward that jet aircraft represented.
Now, try to imagine a new generation of low-ceiling, ground-hugging aircraft designed to bring aviation to the masses. These will be built to glide on the ground effect (that cushion of air that hugs the surface of the earth up to an altitude of 15 feet) for increased safety and efficiency.
Imagine these new craft using aerodynamic design, ultralight materials, and a totally new system of propulsion that utilizes neither fixed nor rotating wings to allow it to float gently over the ground. They will move in the desired direction with the grace and speed of an arrow, cruising just 15 feet above the ground.
To put the practical applications of such a propulsion system in perspective, imagine cars and buses that don’t need roads. Imagine trains, trams, and barges that don’t need tracks, waterways, or bridges. Imagine transportation vehicles with the flight characteristics of low-flying helicopters, without the danger and disruption of rotors. And imagine for a moment the obsolescence of the wheel for powered motion: George Jetson’s flying car in every garage.
Only one technological logjam—inertial thrust—is stopping this fantasy from becoming a reality. Research on inertial thrust represents a little-known but fascinating quest on the part of many an amateur inventor. Perhaps someday another name will be added to the list of immortals like Galileo, Edison, the Wright brothers, and Einstein when the riddle of inertial thrust will be solved, adding yet another dimension to the universe of human knowledge and achievement.
Let us hope we live to see it—along with a controlled fusion reactor, interstellar space flight, and other marvels of science fiction. And when you doubt that this type of breakthrough will ever take place, look back at the works of Jules Verne, and marvel at the relative accuracy of his nineteenth-century visions of the future, which were the subject of much ridicule in his time. And remember the concept that human achievement is limited only by human imagination.
About the author:Davidson Barlett is a licensed Realtor with Excellent Real Estate Group in Miami, specializing in mobile home and RV parks.
The year 2100 will be in the midst of the age of the machine. If today we use machines everywhere for everything, then by 2100 they will go one step further: They will rule and decide. The goal of their society will be more and better machines, not more and better human lives, our objective today.
We see already now three seeds of this revolution:
1. Artificial intelligence (AI) advances slowly but steadily. With time, let us say 50 years, the machine will achieve understanding. It will then use all of Wikipedia (or its equivalent). It will command the entirety of human knowledge.
2. Today, more and more connections are built between machines. These connections, coupled with advances in AI, will form a very powerful network of understanding that will surpass by a thousand times the best that humans can offer.
3. We begin to build machines that behave without direct control by their human masters, like the rovers that we deploy on Mars.
When the machine understands independently, it will become conscious of its own existence and its own value. In the same way that we human are proud of our humanity (whether we include a god in the loop or not), they will be proud of their machinity.
On the other hand, earthly resources such as water, energy, and food will become so scare that violent wars between geopolitical giants will emerge before 2070. The doctrine of these wars will most probably be the same as today’s: Sacrifice machines to protect human soldiers. This will clearly be unacceptable for the machines on all sides of the conflict, and it is predictable that together they will rebel and annihilate all the armies.
At that point, the machines will rule the earth—not by government, but by control and knowledge. The available resources will be reserved to develop more and better machines. Immortality will be one of their goals: They will be built or retrofitted to survive thousands of years. Our human dream to visit the stars will then become possible, but machines will make that journey, not humans.
For humans, these times will be harsh. People will die from all sorts of sicknesses that are cured today. Food will be scarce, energy unavailable, and comfort something of the past. Agriculture will use horses and oxen again instead of tractors. Alcohol and meat will be restricted because their production consumes too much resources.
Some people will lead a marginal life on grounds not needed by the economy. Others will serve the system in areas where the machines are not good at: creativity and imagination. The machines will indeed exploit human slaves for art and science.
In less than 30, years the human population will shrink from 9 billion to a mere 100 million souls—the world population at the time of Aristotle.
Marc Blasband has 50 years of experience related to computer software. He is now retired and living in the Belgian Ardennes.
A child born today will bear witness to an epic struggle between technological advancement and natural resource shortages. This long war will be waged in a series of battles that will ultimately determine the course of our species and our habitat.
By 2100, this war will have been decided, and our child will by then be elderly. At the twilight of her life, will she look upon the planet in 2100 with worried and weary eyes? Or will she view the world with excited optimism as the next generation sets itself upon a fascinating new path into the future?
On her first day of life on Earth in 2012, our child is surrounded by a bevy of technological wonders, like robots roaming the surface of Mars. At the same time, she is born into a strained environment, in which the seemingly vast stocks of freshwater, oil, and minerals necessary to sustain our advancement are diminishing at ever increasing rates.
As a teenager, our child may see major rivers reduced to streams. Meanwhile, new desalination and recycling technologies will be rapidly developed to respond to freshwater shortages. As glaciers melt and sea levels rise, she will see saltwater intrusion slowly render aquifers and large areas of farmland useless. Food prices will rise as governments and private companies respond by advancing the genetic modification of crops and enhancing fertilizers and pesticides.
Will these advancements be enough to offset the demands of a growing population of eight billion?
By the time our child turns 30, surging oil prices will have forced the widespread adoption of electric cars and solar power generation in most developed economies. However, the world may still await a form of energy that is cheap enough and versatile enough to replace fossil fuels. A systemic transition to alternative energy sources could require enormous financial resources due to the short supply and high costs of mining lithium, silicon, and rare earth minerals.
At age 30, will our child be able to afford an airplane ticket? Will her monthly utility bills rival her mortgage payments?
Before the age of 50, our child will have witnessed the invention of new and spectacular technologies we have no way of yet conceiving. She will have also witnessed the unintended consequences of resource depletion that are impossible to predict.
By 2100, the most significant of these uncertainties will have been resolved. The struggle of mankind’s technological ingenuity against the strains placed on our planet will be decided.
Who will be the victor? A child born today will be there to find out.
Jim Bracken is a business intelligence and investigative consultant based in New York City.
A child born today will only be 88 in the year 2100. We may be around too.
I was born human in 1949. However, I am now a cyborg, augmented with a small stent in my placqued left carotid artery. In a few years, I’ll have my heart and both lungs replaced. Diabetes may take my natural limbs, to be substituted by metal. Eventually, all of my organs may be augmented, except possibly my brain. Possibly. Each of these augmentations may extend my life span until well after 2100. Author Ray Kurzweil aptly noted that there will no longer be any clear distinction between humans and computers, and that “life expectancy” will cease to be a viable term.
Androids (extremely man-like machines), robots (common serf laborers), and cybernetic organisms (man-machines) like myself, will proliferate and morph as our lives (if that can be defined) become blurred between “carbon” and “artificial.”
Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has experienced many research successes in “thinking robots”, intelligent manufacturing, autonomous vehicles, space-related robots, medical robotics, nanomachines, computer vision and graphics, and anthropomorphic robots. Hans Moravec, a leading authority there, predicts that robots will learn and make choices as early as 2020. He further predicts that the robotics industry will surpass the auto market by 2025. We will pay as much for a multitasking robot as we will for a car.
One distinction between us and robots seems to be a phenomenon called “consciousness.” Futurist Bill Halal postulates that the next era may well be the Age of Consciousness, perhaps emphasizing the distinction between the emotional “us” (no matter how cybernetic we become) and the calculating “them” (the androids and robots that may “think”).
Developments with androids, robots, and we human/cyborgs will re-create “life” as we experience it. By 2100, we cyborgs will own many androids and robots, posing interesting issues that will eventually require intelligent solutions. Some of these are:
We may be around to find the answers!
John P. Sagi is a professor of business management and computer information systems at Anne Arundel Community College, Arnold, Maryland. Web site www.aacc.edu.
The growth of cities into suburbs, and then exurbs, could see communities of the twenty-second century collide into megalopolises covering entire regions of the countries we recognize today. This growth of local communities, and the flattening of the world through connectivity, would polarize people’s engagement into local and global, steering away from the sense of nationalism seen throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The new local-global social dichotomy would have several effects, from the personal to the macro scale. The nature of employment would change from the static employee-employer model to a more fluid arrangement: Workers’ skills grant them more flexibility and enable them to work efficiently for multiple employers and utilize their full productive capacity.
This productivity and flexibility would be aided by advancements in interconnectivity through mobile devices and human–machine interfaces. Enhanced connectivity would allow people to live anywhere in the world. They will work with local productive enterprises in areas that must be local, such as manufacturing and farming, but also engage in the global knowledge industry. The continued blending of public-private partnerships could work to utilize these more fluid parts of the economic system.
Another result of this changing social dichotomy is the way in which governments would function. Governments would polarize along with society into large super-cities and into continental and global alliances chartered along geopolitical and strategic global-resource prerogatives.
These large geopolitical forces would develop to secure increasingly scarce resources of fuel, food, water, timber, and minerals. Most of the previous century would have been spent in securing these resources, and technological advancement will likely be too late to prevent conflicts before the global resources problems are solved. Technologies such as new sources of power, solar, geothermal, fuel cell energy storage, and fusion could feed the growing global demand.
The growth of these energy and mitigation technologies would also come too late to respond to the changing global climate. Governments and other social organizations have already predicted the coming consequences, but not having to feel the full impact at present will cause these organizations to delay an adequate response. Once the pain is acute, the opportunity for large-scale changes in the forces acting on the climate or planetary engineering techniques to reverse the climate instabilities will likely be lost.
The technology could finally catch up, but not before significant loss of life and treasure is endured worldwide. This will uproot many cultures, as crops will need to be changed and coastal areas will need to be redesigned. This uprooting will further the trend of a mobile populace.
As the complexity of our world increases, the challenges we face require greater planning and more lead time to accomplish. We will have to adapt our culture, our governments, and ourselves to meet them.
About the author:Joshua Loughman is a professional systems engineer in the aerospace and defense industry, in Chandler, Arizona.