The world around us is rapidly changing with technology becoming more and more advanced with every day that passes. Looking back 25 years, mobile phones were a relatively new concept that a lot of people felt would never take off and become hugely popular. Fast forward to today where everyone in the western world has a smartphone which contains more technology than the first rocket that flew to the moon had! Now that’s a huge advancement! But what is still to come…?

In this article, we will be looking at how some people think the future may evolve over the next 30 years to the year 2050.

Cars:

Even at the moment in the year 2020 we are seeing a large rise in the number of electric and hybrid cars. As time goes on, every new car coming off the assembly line will have an electric engine or another source of renewable power. Diesel and petrol cars will be phased out in an attempt to combat climate change and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere resulting in cars with diesel/petrol engines to become obsolete or “vintage.” Unlike 50 years ago when people thought flying cars were going to be an everyday occurrence in the year 2020, we will likely all be driving cars that are simply more fuel efficient and potentially fully autonomous.

In the same way, petrol stations will become less common as people will not need to top up their cars with petrol on a regular basis but will instead on the whole use charging points at their homes. There would of course be charging stations for drivers to use when their car gets low on power. We have already seen market leader Tesla develop charging station at rest stops that can change cars in a fraction of the time as to be more time efficient and this is only likely to improve further as time goes on.

Houses:

When we look at homes and property over the past few decades, there have been huge advances and changes. These changes are not only cosmetic in terms of design, but are also structurally more sound and include a new technology that help save the homeowner money as well as automate the home to make life more convenient for the occupants.

In terms of design, the houses will be built with environmentally friendly materials and will likely consist of a lot of glass to give a better feeling of space – especially with a growing population that will only get larger, meaning many people will likely have to reside in smaller accommodation. The houses will be eco friendly and rely heavily on renewable power sources such as solar panels that would be positioned on the roof. The technology that will be incorporated into the homes will also be far superior to what we currently have. Futurology conducted a report to find out how homes will change by 2050 and some of their findings are as follows:

• Letterboxes will be replaced by smart delivery boxes which can receive registered deliveries and store valuable parcels
• As climate changes, homes of the future must react, with improved responsive cooling and heating techniques
• Smart homes could monitor health and activity, such as reminding the occupant to take medication or warning of scalding water or an overflowing bath

“In the next 30 years we will witness substantial changes to home-life through technological advancement in response to societal, demographic and climate changes. Thinking ahead and considering on a regular basis how the homes we build will need to change to accommodate those demands is a good way to ensure that we are not taken by surprise.”

NHBC’s Head of Standards, Innovation and Research Neil Smith

Technology:

Technology as we know is constantly evolving and changing with new developments and advances being made every day. This therefore means that over the next 30 years this will only increase further beyond what we can fully comprehend at the moment.

The number of devices each person will own will increase with Quantum Run predicting that each person will own on average 25 connected devices and the global number of Internet connected devices will reach 237,500,000,000. A mind-blowing number.

There are of course some fears over the future of technology with artificial intelligence being one threat. As AI becomes more advanced, the fear is that the intelligence would become far superior of any human and could potentially result in an artificial superintelligence forming which humans would have to combat and overcome – not too dissimilar to the movie iRobot! This however all stems back to the idea that artificial intelligence would learn from humans, and therefore the way to stop it would be to stop humans from being “evil” which unfortunately will never globally happen.

Another form of technology which will definitely evolve several times over by the year 2050 us personal tech such as smartphones and wearable technology. Since the Smartphone was first introduced by apple in 2007, the technology and capabilities of such phones has improved and advanced on a colossal scale. By 2050, it is expected that neuroscience will become an everyday part of life, with humans having microchips embedded into their body so they quite literally become their own Smartphone. The concept of this is not quite clear yet as nothing has been attempted, but it has been speculated that in the future humans will be able to communicate through neuroscience without having to move a muscle. This will also be the same with receiving news updates, taking phone calls and organising day to day activities. The idea of technology being embedded within the human body has actually already be trialled and tested. Since the introduction of NFC (Near Field Communication), products have actually been created that involve being inserted into a persons hand. These tend to be small microchips similar to those used in contactless payment cards meaning a person can use their hand to pay. This technology does however extend to other uses as the chip can be programmed for other functions such as unlocking doors, turning on lights without making physical contact and other day to day functions to make life that little bit easier.

So overall, even though these are simply predications as to what the year 2050 may be like, we as a human race get to decide the future we live in and it is our actions today that pave the way forward to the future of tomorrow.