What Will The World Be Like In The Future?

This is a question me and my friends have spent hours discussing in some of our more crazy conversations, but the future has always been a huge talking point for many people in the world. If we go back 20 or 30 years people were convinced that the world we live in right now would have the human, hyper speed chutes which can transport us across the world in minutes. Now we have very different views of what the future will hold.

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Driverless Cars

This is already happening now, many of the world’s leading car manufacturers have already tested driverless cars (also known as autonomous cars). BMW actually began testing these driverless cars since 2005 while Audi sent a driverless cars to the top of Pikes Peak, Colorado at close to racing speeds in 2010. This is a reality now, but in the future I predict they will be the norm in all of our lives. No more need for driving ourselves around, in my mind the future cars will operate with this kind of technology and look the same as the cars in the film iRobot.

Human Computers

The use of smartphones, laptops and tablets have essentially become an extension of who we are. Can you imagine life without your phone? Many of us can’t get by a day without randomly checking the latest texts, Tweets or Facebook messages on our phones. I predict that in the next 50 years we will essentially be human computers with information directly downloaded to us, in a way this is already about to happen with Google Glasses which is predicted to launch sometime in 2014. But the vision I envision goes beyond that, I believe that we will actually have chips implanted into us which would act in the same way smartphone does now.

Health

Predicting what our health will be like in the future is something a little more difficult, on current trends it shows that we are heading toward an unhealthy future. But I want to take a more positive view of what could happen in the future. Technology will help spread our understandings of diseases and help cure common problems, the use of stem cell’s will be prevalent in helping treating these kind of diseases and is already something which is been worked on now. I predict that we will all be more conscious of what we are putting in our bodies, smoking for example is something which is on a downward trend as more people look for healthy alternatives such as electronic cigarettes. Again this type of technology I already available and the uptake of these devices continue to grow.

Photo credit : pixbay

Robots

I am firm believer that robots will be common place in the future, whether they be like the ones in iRobot which helps with everyday tasks around the house (hopefully they won’t try and overthrow us) or ones which do certain public sector or private job. I honestly have not thought that far ahead, but in a recent BBC article even they predicted that robots would be there to help us with shopping.

Shopping

Shopping will be vastly different to what we have now. As mentioned above, robots will be a prevalent part of our shopping experience – most probably in the role of staff operating in stores. But it’s not just robots which will be the difference, we are already seeing the early uses of 3D printing. In the future I feel that 3D printing will be a vital part of our shopping experience, we can design the products we want and get them made by 3D printers.

You many feel that these ideas are just that, ideas – straight from the imagination and will never see the light of day. But the majority of the predictions made actually exist is some shape or form today. Not many people will have correctly guessed how reliant on items like smartphones even 10 years ago. Sure some of these things may be 50 or so years away, but with how fast technology is progressing can you safely say the world won’t be like this? What do you feel the future will be like?