The World When Millennials Grow Old…
Last week, my Grandpa celebrated his 94th birthday. As we talked, he flicked between photos of his grandchildren on Instagram, pointed out the exact spot of his old shop on Google maps and recounted stories of growing up in East London and being a morse code operator during the war.
As he did this, I smiled at the contradiction and began to wonder what life might be like when I celebrate my 94th birthday in 68 years time — February 7th 2083.
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Much has been said and written about the characteristics of my generation, the ‘Y generation’, but what will the world look like when we millennials reach old age?
There is some precedent for making predictions decades in advance, though those that are remembered, unsurprisingly, tend to be the ones that turn out to be right! Nikola Tesla, the scientist and inventor, famously foresaw the advent of smartphones and ‘a huge connected brain’ aka the internet back in 1926. In an interview in Colliers magazine in January 1926 he predicted:
“When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”
Even if you look back at the world before I was born, just 1 month before Tim Berners Lee ‘invented’ the internet, few people would have predicted the seismic changes that have occurred in nearly every industry from retail to security, banking to music and telecoms to travel. It is almost impossible to imagine a time not so long ago when our parents went to work and communicated via snail mail and landlines and without the ‘luxuries’ of laptops, smartphones and e-mail.
And just 10 years from now, already the world could be unrecognisable from today. Zack Kanter’s superb article predicts the impending (and very plausible!) ubiquity of Uber’s autonomous cars in 2025. Being able to travel anywhere for as little as $0.50 a mile will transform the way we travel, cause unprecedented job losses, prevent thousands of road deaths and fundamentally change the economic and environmental conditions that we live in.
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So if that is just 10 years from now, looking 70-odd years ahead requires some imagination, leaps of faith and a little ‘exponential’ thinking. It is with that disclaimer and some trepidation that I look ahead to what life might look like on my 94th birthday…
Population
According to the UN, the world population will be nearly 11 billion by 2083 with a radically different distribution than today. Asia and Africa will be the powerhouses of the world with populations of about 4.5 billion EACH whilst Europe and North America combined will have a population of just 1 billion.
Thanks to vast improvements in healthcare and medical science, the life expectancy in the UK will be up from about 77 today to at least 90 years old for females and up to 150 years old for some. Combined with a low fertility rate, this will mean that more than a quarter of the population is over 65 by 2083.
With a small, ageing population, the UK (if still independent) will struggle to compete with the growth in the asian and african economies and will, somewhat ironically, find themselves competing hard with the other European nations to offer incentives that tempt young migrants to come to live, work and drive growth.
Communication
For over 2000 years, humans have communicated by moving their lips, their heads and their hands. The internet age didn’t change that, it just meant that you could use these body parts to communicate with people the other side of the world and in real time, whether that be using your hands (Whatsapp), your head (Facetime) or your lips (cellphones). By 2083, these body parts will be a mere friction in the user experience and new products will eliminate the need to use them to communicate in the same way that Uber removes the need to pay cash for taxis.
By 2083, the remote controls, keyboards, sensors and touch screens of the late 20th and early 21st century will be long gone. Humans will communicate with each other and the devices around them almost exclusively through brainwaves.
The self driving cars that Kanter describes will not be summoned and routed through antique smartphones but rather controlled by the thoughts and brainwaves of the rider!
Space
By 2083, NASA will quite possibly have completed their mission of making an interstellar space voyage through the stars and who would bet against SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), recently given a gigantic $100million boost from Yuri Milner, successfully identifying life on one of the billions of possible planets in our Milky Way or neighbouring galaxies.
There will surely be a small self-sustaining city on the Moon. Mars may still be under development but both will be just a few hours away from us either by rocket, space elevator or maybe a combination of both with an overnight stay at a space platform en route.
By 2083, a 6-month trip to the Moon will be as popular and easy for 20-somethings as a gap year in Australia is today.
And for those who still choose to take a gap year in Australia, panoramic views and supersonic flights will have long been the norm.
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So, whatever you make of these predictions, the world will undoubtedly have changed by many orders of magnitude by the time our generation reaches old age and these changes will be so exponentially greater than pretty much anything we can imagine.
In the words of Peter Diamandis, the co-founder of the Singularity University:
“Human development over 150,000 years has been local and linear. Your brain is programmed to be linear. But in these next few decades the rate of change is growing so fast that almost everything we can conceive can happen. Every industry is potentially disruptable in the near future. And if you’re not excited or scared, you’re asleep at the wheel.”
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