Technology in 2050 – experts give their predictions

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

Firstly 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 many years, and improvements in AI, robotics and far else moreover are rising at an unimaginable fee.

So we determined to ask specialists what the following 25 years might carry.

Listed below are their predictions for the expertise we’ll be utilizing by 2050 – and the way it might 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 referred to as “nanites”.

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

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

In reality, it’s powering the best way you might be studying these very phrases proper now – each smartphone or laptop is run by a central chip made up of billions of tiny transistors – electrical elements constructed on a nanoscale to hurry up information processing.

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

Meaning we might see nanotechnology implants by then – however extra to “monitor your well being or assist communication” fairly than to seem invisible, as in Deus Ex.

Drugs might additionally make widespread use of machines at a nanometre scale to “ship medication to precisely the place they should go”, stated Professor Bramwell.

Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick is equally fascinated with 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 methods – might result in trailblazing therapies for illnesses.

He predicts the usage of “deep mind digital stimulation” as a partial therapy for some situations akin to schizophrenia, fairly than medication.

He provides it’s doubtless we’ll see extra cybernetic enhancements of the sort he has already trialled himself, in order that “your mind and physique will be in other places”.

And what if we needed to check out how the newest enhancement, and even new weight-reduction plan labored on our our bodies, with none dangers of experiencing the unwanted side 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 information – might turn into a daily characteristic in our lives.

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

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

Many expertise companies, together with Google and IBM, are at the moment 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 complicated calculations at extremely quick speeds – for instance, simulating molecular interactions to design new medication quicker.

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

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

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

Relatively 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 information studied to know how they be taught greatest.

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

Whereas he nonetheless agrees one in all his authentic predictions – pilotless planes – will come true by 2050, he believes we are going to first see extra advances in driverless vehicles, making site visitors congestion “largely a factor of the previous”.

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

“On non-public toll roads for autonomous automobiles, there is not any cause site visitors cannot go as much as 100 miles an hour or so – you may see mortality from site visitors accidents plummet.”

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

She says in 25 years, it’s doubtless there can be a habitable base on the Moon; and a few industries might be virtually fully based mostly in area.

For instance, she believes we may even see pharmaceutical firms making the following era of medicines in microgravity, i.e. on board an orbiting spacecraft.

It’s because, she says, crystals grown this fashion fairly than on Earth, are “usually bigger and higher high quality”.

The movie Minority Report, based mostly on a novella by science fiction writer Philip Okay Dick, was launched in 2002 and set within the yr 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 mirror on which applied sciences might presumably exist within the 2050s.

The discussions formed lots 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 are going to all be utilizing gesture recognition (and fancy gloves) to swirl by movies on our clear screens, whereas policemen on jetpacks battle 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 counsel that artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity.

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

“I, for one, guess 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 stated.

“We should keep in mind that.”