តើជីវិតប្រចាំថ្ងៃនឹងទៅជាយ៉ាងណានៅឆ្នាំ ២០៥០?

I'm bored and have a lot of time. Let's break it down! We can't predict the future, but we can look at trends. The only problem is that we can't predict completely new technologies; people before the transistor or plastic couldn't predict it, but they did have the insight to predict something similar.

Culture

I can tell you what won't change is human culture. It seems no matter how much our technology progresses, humanity has always been bogged down by tribalism and Dunbar's number. We'll be far more connected, which means we'll hear more of humanity's atrocities, but not much will change, since it will continue to be "not my problem." Save some huge, earth-shattering event, we'll continue to see race/religion/gender/social status wars. However, the question of solving poverty will be a question of "when" instead of "how" at this time, similar to America adopting universal healthcare.

Communication

Phones have gotten smaller, faster, and smarter ever since they cut their cords in the 90's. Your nokia is now the galaxy. That was 20 years of tech. Put in 150% of that time. Phones will shrink into nothingness, and are likely to be completely integrated into clothing (like a headset or hearing aid), wearable as a tattoo, or completely integrated into the body.

Screens will be displayed onto contacts or a google-glass alternative, or bionic eyes (although that may be a bit far).

With current trends in AI and speech recognition, all texting and navigation will be done through speech. Possibly through thought commands (further out).

Another alternative is just to have a small device that provides a direct link to your home computer, like in the movie Her.

Energy

Full on, non-nuclear renewable. No doubt about this one. Oil will stick around for niche applications. If government takes control, energy will be plentiful and easily obtained. If corporations are in command, we will likely see the same prices/BS we have today. One thing is that the Middle East will no longer have the power it once did, but I'm not sure what will happen with that. However, we will absolutely have less carbon emissions and more capability to expand our energy needs as we go on. Fusion power is leaving the labs, but is still in its infancy. I'd be really excited to see northern Africa become a huge solar power.

Transportation

Obviously we will have self-driving electric cars. Whether we'll all be taking robot taxis, or Elon's "buy and rent out" plan, hard to say. Expect congestion to get lower, and a whole lot of growing pains for the auto industry. No comment on the hyper-loop or mag-levs. I have no clue.

Commerce

I fully expect the stock market to be fully controlled by high-level AI by now, as a good portion of it already is. Not really sure what that means, but could result in better valuing of companies? A lot of people are claiming that bit-coins will replace money, or that plastic will replace it as well, but I'm highly skeptical about this. Paper money has huge advantages over digital and I don't think people are going to be easily swayed towards it. I could definitely see smaller countries like Iceland adopting it, though.

Civics

I'm a huge believer in the future of 3-D printing. I think the majority if not all of the low-to-uppermiddle income houses will be "printed" by robots, with final touches being done by humans. This allows for customization, affordability, and safety that was previously unheard of. This, with the awesome transportation we will have, will likely result in another suburban boom.

Most food will be grown in sterile environments, with minimal impact on actual nature. Meat will go first, as the energy and moral cost of it is high and will be readily adopted. By 2050 we may have anywhere from 20-80% of the farms we already have, but we'll certainly see large amounts of hydro/aeroponics in progressive cities. Eventually artificial plant growth will win out completely. A huge advantage of this is a LOT of land can be given back to nature. Logging will slog into the future, as creating the amount of wood humanity needs on a daily basis in a lab will still be impossible at this time, but research is progressing.

War

Brutal, efficient, terrifying. 1st world country will probably have shifted entirely to robotics or at least human-commanded robots. Very minimal actual people on the ground. Railguns will obliterate targets with pinpoint precision from hundreds of miles away using base metal slugs. Lasers will destroy anything in the sky in seconds. 1st world naval fleets will be OP AF. 3rd world countries will still be fighting with outdated technology (unless we sell the good stuff to them). Bio-terrorism may or may not be huge; people have access to pretty nasty stuff right now and all we see is a couple of scares every couple of years. If CRISPR and gene editing become childs-play, and bacteria or viruses can be manufactured to do our bidding, shit is gonna get scary.

Police will be using drones and robots, no question. People will continue to hate the police in America.

Kids and Education

I'm gonna say it's going to be full on GATTACA. No question in my mind will the rich genetically enhance their children, and there will be another reason to have a race war. Maybe even to the point of having test-tube babies. Because of culture, colleges will likely still be around, but because of widespread access to online classes (and millenials, now adults, disenchanted from the college system), the education system will be a clusterfuck of self-taught people demanding degrees or jobs while colleges try and keep their noses aloof and above water for as long as possible. Eventually the college system will collapse, but that will take another 50 years at the least.

Health

This one can be anywhere. If there's anything I learned about the human body around here, it's that it is strange. Injecting young blood into old bodies make them young again? What the hell? It's pretty easy to imagine injecting a zygote with new genetic information and seeing the results, but who knows what will happen when we use genetic enhancements on adults. We could become immortal, or cure all diseases, or become super beautiful, strong, and intelligent, or none of that. Our kids, however, will be in a totally new world. I just hope we don't open a can of worms like accidentally sterilizing an entire generation.

Care from accidents will probably get a lot better. Expect tricorder-like technology. The rich will have their organs 3-D printed, while the poor rely on organ donors (which are in a little better supply now). Most people will have 3-D printed skin grafting available, maybe even over-the-counter.

Nanomachines, son

There's a lot of talk about nanobots building things, fixing our bodies, and doing other amazing things but I haven't seen proof even in lab right now. As of now, our nanobots are extremely dumb and can only perform actions like swimming or spinning. Make no mistake, nanobots ARE the future, and WILL be huge, but I don't expect smart nanobots to become commercially available until 2075 or later.

AI

Ah, the elephant in the room. I'm going to be frank, I completely believe in The Singularity, and that it will change the meaning of the universe as we know it. Let me just give you this anecdote: I did work with a bunch of top-notch particle physicists for a couple of years. I'm talking bleeding-edge understanding of how we see physics today. But no matter how smart one guy was, a whole room of them was astronomically more intelligent. This was because one human has only so much time to research a small portion of their field. And they have to retain that memory. And they have their inherent human biases. Even in a room together, they had to communicate. With language. And argue. And prove. You see where I'm going with this?

Give me a computer that has equal brain processing power of one human. Just one. Then download all the knowledge past and present into its memory. History, engineering, art, economics, politics, physics, chemistry, math, biology,programming. One brain that can tap into any piece of information and understand it like how we understand 2+2=4. That changes everything. That brain is now the smartest person on the planet by millions of degrees. It will solve so many problems. Then it will program something better, because it knows all the AI projects that have ever been done up to that point. I'd give it a week to a year to do this.

You now have a brain that can think better than we can. What does that even look like? It's unfathomable. Like trying to imagine a 4th dimension. This brain will solve problems and create technology in ways we will never understand as long as we stay in our current biological form. At this point we are fucked. The future spirals outward into so many possible directions it's impossible to know.

You want to know where I think we'll be in 2050? We will all be gods or we will all be dead. Or something in between.