A vision of 2050: Part II
Technology game changers and more free time
Armed with insights and knowledge of mega trends, future enablers and burning topics, let’s start to imagine what all this means for the future.
Before we go into specifics, let’s talk about a couple of technology advancements that if they become reality will impact the wider range of future applications and become true game changers.
Digital assistants
Assistants that actually assist you in every way imaginable.
On your behalf they will connect products and services around you. Just as today’s assistants you will use them to control your smart home, check the weather or buy things online, but their intelligence will be superior.
Your digital assistant will be able to perform conversations on your behalf, and even make decisions by itself. Give it an order such as “find me the perfect romantic restaurant for Friday night’s date”, and it will on its own find the restaurant and negotiate the reservation based on what it knows about you and your date. Ask it to summarise the news and it will instantly collect and condense what it knows to be relevant to you.
Building e-com or service applications tomorrow will not only be about the perfect “shopping basket/checkout flow”, but building the perfect interface for people’s assistants to jack into.
Personal, portable cloud computing
Interfacing with your digital assistant will no longer require a computational device such as a smartphone (even if a portable interface of some sort might still be relevant as to not have to resolve to speech all the time). High speed networks will allow everything that you today carry around with you in your smartphone or laptop, become instantly accessible to you via any interface you carry or come in contact with.
Cheap tech can be infused with clothes and wearables (or maybe even via implants), and coupled with biometric security used to access everything you need in terms of apps and data.
As for screens (if and when you need them), even if you don’t carry one with you they will be all around. Many times invisible, integrated in picture frames, walls, desks, windows etc. And sometimes even purely holographic.
Since many screens will be communal, biometric security will allow anyone to interact with them and project content. With the help of your digital assistant and an identifier (yourself plus smart clothes, wearables etc.) any content from your personal cloud can easily be projected onto them.
Hackernoon: What’s next for personal computing
Next: After the smartphone? Ambient computing…
Digital identity with biometric security
One of the biggest challenges that has to (and will be) solved is your digital identity and security. Something that will be required for both virtual services as well as physical access.
Access to your personal cloud, as well as allowing seamless payments for goods and services will need to be tightly secured. So does access to spaces such as your home or office, or using services you paid for such as an autonomous taxi ride.
Next generation security will most likely combine custom hardware and software (blockchain?) coupled with the proximity of biometrics such as your fingerprints, face, or maybe even your brain waves.
Time to spend
So what will change in our lives? First of all, it is very likely that we will have more time on our hands.
Automation will have an immense impact on our professional, as well as private life. And in both cases the result will be more time on our hands to spend as we see fit.
Privately
Digital assistants, Autonomous vehicles, overall Automation and Smart homes will all make our lives more effective and thus provide more time on our hands for leisure.
Professionally
While the argument that jobs taken over by automation will be replaced with new jobs are true to a certain extent, many futurists believe that the amount of new jobs created will not come close to the amount lost. And many of them believe that the only way to maintain an equal, functioning and economically sustainable society, is to introduce a Universal basic income of some sort. As many of us see our jobs as a defining factor of who we are, how will we define ourselves in the future if there are not enough jobs for all of us?
Read about how our lives will change in part III.
