The Not So Distant Future

Over the past 4 weeks I have become interested in the new television series called ‘Cosmos: A space-time Odyssey’ hosted by one of the great ‘intellectuals’ of the modern era Neil deGrasse Tyson. A show that a takes a shot on scientific storytelling to reveal the grandeur of the universe and re-invent the original series which was hosted by Carl Sagan. The show itself essentially tries to explain how the universe works to a wider audience not just science buffs. An interesting tool they use in the show “Ship of the Imagination” goes to far out galaxies and even shrinks down to the size of an atom to show how the universe works with special effects and CGI. The reason I mention this ship of the universe is because I wondered what the future will be like in our lifetime. Seeing as how we went from flying in 1903 to landing on the moon in 1969. It took the human race just 66 years for that to happen. We are growing at an exponential rate. Computers are become faster, smaller and cheaper. Advances in medicine and technology are allowing us to discover and advanced even further. So with all these advances I wonder how will the future be like for me and my generation who grew up with technology around us.

(Image by Stefan Krause, Germany (Own work) [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ritchyblack )

How will the future be like for me and my generation?

To answer this question I went to google.com and started browsing -- one YouTube video that intrigued me was a talk done by Dr. Peter Diamandis. The World in 2050

It’s a great talk about technological advancements that have occurred already and where they will be heading in the near future.

Some points from the video that I found very interesting are:

Auto driving cars will be everywhere; Google has already using an auto-driving cars for Google maps. All automakers are researching auto-driving technology to implement in the very near future.
It is expected that computers will have the computational ability of humans (in processing) by 2023. It is expected that a single computer will be able to match all human cognition by 2050.
Artificial intelligence (AI) combined with robotics will impact our service industry. Robots will impact our every day lives. They can stock shelves, make Big Mac’s, do your taxes, etc.
24/7 planet wide satellite surveillance is also coming.
It is expected that within two years a device will exist that will be able to diagnose conditions better than a team of medical professionals.
It is expected that 100 will be the new 60 within the next twenty years. Due to developments in healthcare and disease prevention.
3D printing will drop the cost down to that of the cost of materials and energy to produce them as well as causing prototyping to accelerate the rate of innovation. As of right now you can 3D print houses, wrenches, cakes and in the future even organs. 200 different materials you can 3D print with.
Labor will be roughly equal to the cost of electricity in the next 30 years because jobs will be done by robots.

With all these technological innovations many questions must be answered, about privacy and what governments are going to do about joblessness. Be assured the job culling is coming. In my next blog I will go a little more in depth about this specific topic because of the implications. Either way, we are entering into an era of innovation and can’t wait to see what the human species does next!

(All credit and accolades for this tremendous blog post are for Saad Ghayas who is the author and content creator.)