2050, The Future we all deserve!….maybe
In 1983 the personal computer being sold was Lisa. It ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 MB of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5.25-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 MB “Profile” hard drive. In 2017, you can search online and will see words like quad core, terabyte, HD Monitor and RAM anywhere from 8gb to 32gb in personal computers. That’s in a 34 year span, and as of today Moore’s Law is no longer accurate. We are advancing at a rate that really drives many possible futures. 2050, is the mid decade mark for 2000, a time when we faced world catastrophe from Y2K, to now seeing drone taxis going live in Dubai this summer.
If you have ever watched “Black Mirror,” then the mind can really imagine many of these stories being a realty. Robust health, life expectancy exceeding 100, and starvation dissolved from intelligent crops. All of these ideas are now on the table, and are currently being worked on. The possibility to living forever is now a funded program with many organizations, and many people are now accepting that one day that might just happen. But as with many pleasant ideas, there is always the other side of the coin.
The world population currently is about 7.5 billion and in 2050 it’s expected to be close to 9.5 billion. As people live longer, more of the population will be older, which is now a current trend. The first thing that comes to mind is money. Just in the United States social security is said to not be able to sustain the retired of the future. Socialist nations where health care is provided by the government will have a huge shortage of caretakers, lodging, and money to pay for the rising cost of health. What does an elderly person do in the US, when they run out of money? Is this the next homeless population as the poverty line now adds the elderly? From a technology prospective sure the future looks amazing. It’s from society that there is a lot of grey area. The current age of mortality in the US is 78. This number could rise to 83 by 2050 and that’s just an average. There have been humans that have lived to 120, therefore more people will live past 100 in the future. Will 70 be the new 40? How is it not feasible that the retirement age in America go up to 75 or even 80 due to these economic complexities. Then there’s the next possibility that humans don’t retire anymore, they work till they die. Where did the beautiful life go? Living to 120, surrounded by amazing technology, uploading your mind to a network, and your personal robot to help you into your 100s. Can such a reality really happen, or will it only be for the rich? As technology cost goes down the economy responds with more capabilities offered at a lower price. This ties back to how this article began. The question that will be asked is will it all be enough and if not will it be made available to the masses. Will your income still decide if you live such an enchanting life as it does today, or will we have solved the most complex issue still in our world; money.
In Star Trek, money is obsolete, and look how much has been accomplished in that alternate universe. We can day dream all we want about what’s coming in 2050, but as money will be part of the equation still, only a small percentage may get to enjoy such things. We will all know soon enough.
