From family holidays in space to robot doctors and an end to work… Four experts predict what life will be like 30 years from now

Earlier this year, the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku published a book, The Future of Humanity, in which he grappled with a question central to most of our lives: what will our future look like? Kaku is a popular scientist. He has a knack for studying today’s trends in order to hypothesise what might come tomorrow – how we’ll live, where we’ll live, whether or not an almighty AI might soon rule over us. And he’s not the only one. Futurists have been conceptualising our potential fate for centuries, sometimes successfully. Perhaps, as we stumble through uncertain times, their work is more important now than ever. So what will the world look like in 2050? We asked Kaku and three other futurists to share their predictions.

Michio Kaku

A theoretical physicist and futurist, Kaku is the author of several books of popular science, including the New York Times bestseller, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind.

By 2050 we’ll be able to send memories, emotions and feelings across the internet. Brain science will have exploded, and it will have revolutionised communication. Teenagers will love it. Instead of putting an emoticon at the end of every sentence, they’ll use an emotion: anger, happiness, excitement. This will replace entertainment; movies will become obsolete. I’m talking about telepathy, really. We’ll still communicate the old-fashioned way, but communicating telepathically will reduce the obstacles between people. Our grandchildren will wonder, What is a keyboard? We will enter the age of the “brain net”.

Medicine will develop exponentially, too. We will have cured certain forms of cancer, and we will have begun to treat the disease like the common cold. We’ll live with it. It will no longer be lethal. We won’t fear it like we used to. Technology will help in this respect. Smart toilets will perform liquid biopsies – which are already available – to detect cancer cells, genes and enzymes. We’ll catch tumours years or even decades before they form, when they’re just small colonies of several hundred cells circulating in the blood. Smart objects will measure our biometrics automatically. The iPhone can already calculate a pulse. In the future, our clothes will detect the beginnings of a heart attack, and advise us to seek treatment immediately.

This results, naturally, in longevity. I don’t think we’ll be immortal by 2050, but we’ll be setting the foundations for immortality. We’re gradually discovering the genes that control the ageing process, and we’ll soon understand how to repair the biological damage inflicted on our bodies over the course of our lives. In this way, medicine will move past simply providing a cure, and will help move humanity closer to biological perfection. We will become gods. We’ll have the immortal body of Venus. The speed of Mercury. The power of the mind of Zeus.

But what use is longevity without eternal youth? That’s where the idea of a human body shop comes in. We’ll grow organs to replace those that wear out. We can already use human cells to grow skin, cartilage, noses, ears, heart valves, bladders… In the future? We’ll grow the liver, the kidney, perhaps the pancreas. By 2050 I suspect we’ll be able to grow many of the vital organs of the body and, rather than allow the organs we’re born with to become old and decrepit, we’ll replace them. That’s all coming. And it doesn’t take much imagination to realise it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist and author deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York. His latest book is Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military.

If you were to create a settlement on an another planet, here’s the problem. In the old days, when settlers landed in some new place, they could breathe the air. They could repair their ships with wood from trees. Fruit grew on plants. Basic life support existed. But it won’t for the new generation of settlers. You cannot breathe on Mars, so you will need to seed the soil, generate oxygen – terraform it. That’s not an inconceivable future path for us, but it is a level of geo-engineering we’ve yet to master. When you’ve terraformed a planet, OK, we can talk about moving there. But until that happens we’d be living in a habitat that’s simulating Earth. And what’s the point in doing that? Antarctica is balmier and wetter than Mars, and you don’t see developers clambering to build condos in Antarctica.

By 2050, I can imagine Mars becoming a vacation site. Instead of going to the beach, people will spend money to go and hang out in space. I’d do that! But that’s a business model that has yet to be set up. There’s no infrastructure. No way to make food or fuel. How would people get back to home-base Earth?

If humanity wanted to – if we had the motivation – we might be able to turn at least the near solar system into our backyard. It will be difficult. Elon Musk famously said: “How do you build a small fortune in space? Start with a big fortune.” But if we were to manage it, we’d have access to what are essentially unlimited resources. Asteroids are rich in various metallic and mineral ingredients – rare Earth elements – that are fundamental to modern civilisation: gold, silver, platinum, iridium, cadmium, osmium. Comets have unlimited supplies of water. The world’s first trillionaire will be the first person to exploit these resources. Imagine having the capacity to distribute those resources where they are most needed around the world? Something like a third of conflicts are based on the limited access to resources. If, by 2050, we had unlimited global access, would those wars still exist?

This all points to the growing importance of space, particularly for commerce. The future value of space assets won’t be measured by the amount of hardware that’s orbiting the Earth, but by the amount of commerce that hardware enables. Think about Uber. Its entire business model is founded on the existence of GPS satellites. Or Tinder. Want to date someone nearby? You’re relying on GPS. Satellites generate hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce. That’s a kind of power; governments might call it “soft power”. So by 2050 space will have become a hotly contested zone.

If there is conflict in the future, a nation’s best move might be to take out its enemy’s space assets, bringing down its economy. But would you use space to wage war on Earth, rather than to mine its resources and grow the world economy? Wherever you have a healthy economy, people tend to live longer and be happier. For 2050, that’s a noble goal.

Faith Popcorn

A best-selling author and futurist, Popcorn is also the founder and CEO of BrainReserve, a future-focussed strategic consultancy established in 1974.

Human doctors have a problem: they’re human. They make mistakes. They don’t show up. They get sick. So algorithms will replace them, providing patients with the function of a doctor 24/7. Artificial intelligence will inform us very early on in our lives what we are allergic to, what our sensitivities are, how much exercise we require, what our stress levels are.

We’re already finding that AI psychologists are extremely effective. They’re able to measure a patient’s responses to questions. They understand which questions provoke stress. They measure a patient’s biometrics during sessions. Human therapists can’t do that. They can’t take all that information in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Baby grow: ‘Pregnancy will have become outdated. People will have babies in labs, or their living rooms, in what look like fish tanks,’ says Faith Popcorn. Illustration: Phil Hackett

This might all have happened by 2030, let alone 2050. By that point, science fiction will have become just science. Everything will be implanted: the ability to dispense medicine (the “robo-release”), the ability to predict cancer, the ability to measure the function of our heart or lungs. Tiny chips will be implanted within our bodies at birth, around the same moment you cut the umbilical cord. We will store our medical records in our fingertips.

We won’t be having babies naturally by that point. Pregnancy will have become outdated. People will grow babies in labs, or their living rooms, in what look like fish tanks. And gender will have become irrelevant.

We’re already witnessing gender fluidity. Facebook has 71 kinds of gender; 48% of millennials believe that gender is a spectrum – they don’t identify as strictly homo- or heterosexual. All of the traditional grounds for gender – the idea that one gender takes care of the other, or bosses it around, however you see it – will disappear. We are at a mid-stage now – and it’s sticky. The “left-behinds” will be those people who can’t adapt or don’t want to – the Luddites. White men in their 50s and 60s. The whole white male thing is going to fall over.

Race will become obsolete, too. I predicted in 1988 that everybody will be brown, eventually. But what won’t become obsolete, and what could become problematic, is intelligence: how smart you can become through the AI you can buy, how many drugs you can afford to micro-dose throughout the day, to make you sharper and more able.

There will be many people who don’t have the money to access new kinds of medical enhancement. There will be the people with, and the people without – unless a social class develops that decides to save those without. That could happen. Hopefully.

Amy Zalman

A global security futurist and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, Washington DC, Zalman is the founder of the Strategic Narrative Institute, a futurist consultancy. Between 2014 and 2016 she was the CEO of the World Future Society.

There’s a lovely phrase, attributed to the futurist Roy Amara, that goes like this: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” With this in mind, let’s consider work. We’re already discussing what kinds of jobs will be affected by automation. We know that some of the losers will be those with white-collar qualifications whose work is relatively routine: accountants, much of the work of lawyers, some of the work of journalists. But by 2050 we’ll begin to see paradigmatic changes. We have all these assumptions about how work and the world is shifting. But the changes occurring now are too incipient for us to get our heads around. It’s not that automation will change work. It’s that work will change so drastically that we’ll need to give what we do an entirely different name.

The winners will be those people in jobs we don’t even know about yet, at the intersection of technology and other fields. Data and criminal justice. Data and homewares. Data and medical services. Data and biotechnology. It will be an exciting time for philosophers and ethicists. We’ll quickly realise the need to understand how we treat, use, manage and live with artificial intelligence. We’ll need philosophers and ethicists to legislate ourselves into the future.

If there is a significant displacement from automation, we’ll require a tweak in the social services system. We’ll send people back to school. We’ll find new ways for people to make money. There will be experiments in the universal basic income. Eventually, we’ll create new forms of work. We’re kind of an ingenious race that way.

But the one thing that seems unlikely to change in the next 30 years is wealth inequality. This will reverberate across generations. Some of us will continue to become really rich; some of us will continue to become very poor. Inequality won’t rise from automation alone. It will continue to develop from the kind of economic reward system we’ve already established: that money makes money. That will lead to a biological divide in society, too. There will be a class of people able to enhance not only their education, as people have been able to do for decades – you go to a private school, you get a better education – but their own bodies, through other kinds of augmentation. Genetic enhancement, let’s say. Biological augmentation and enhancements are coming – a tattoo that acts as a system that monitors the body, for example. That could be expensive, and not necessarily available to all. In the future, only some people will have access.

@alex_moshakis