If you’re going to make bold predictions about the future, you might as well go big or go home.
And it seems the Adam Smith Institute have taken this well on board with their thoughts on what will be happening in 2050.
They imagine a world dominated by robot cars and planes, lab grown burgers and even the end of some of the world’s most horrific illnesses.
Best of all they think we will all be living it up like millionaires, because robotics will give us a huge helping hand and allows us to access more ‘real wealth’. Result!
The researchers declared:
Many of today’s teenagers will be millionaires, not perhaps before they reach the age of 35, but over their lifetimes. Again, this is not in depreciated currency but in real wealth. They will enjoy the living standards of today’s millionaires.
As well as being a lot better off, the researchers predict we will have a lot more time for leisures and be much healthier. With many of todays diseases defeated and new organs being routinely grown in a lab.
The President of the Adam Smith Institute, Dr Madsen Pirie, even goes as far as predicting the return of the dinosaurs.
Executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, Sam Bowman, said:
Futurology can often tell us as much about the present as it does about the future. In this paper we have shown just how many of our current problems are on their way to being solved, not by changing people, but by changing the world around us. Dr Pirie’s vision for the future is an optimistic one that sees human ingenuity as the key to improving people’s lives around the world. The future often looks bleak because we focus on the negatives – but the reality is that things are getting better, much better, all the time.
Here’s their predictions in more detail. When it comes to healthcare, they predict the NHS will no longer exist, but neither will cancer, AID’s, dementia or malaria either.
Despite the health care system becoming privatised, it will be topped up by the state and help most people live to 100.
Scientific breakthroughs won’t just be made in healthcare either. They predict scientists will have learned how to find dinosaur features inside living bird DNA and recreate a few species of dinosaurs to walk the earth once again. Yeah, because that worked out so well in Jurassic Park.
The bloody ‘orrible commute will become a thing of the past as well, apparently. Free renewable energy will transform transport as we know it, with robot cars becoming the norm.
Instead of driving, car owners will simply tell the car where to go and then you can just crack on with some work, or more likely grab a few more minutes kip.
All in all these sound like pretty exciting times, but you just can’t help but think these predictions are a bit too optimistic.