These 5 technologies will change the world by 2050

Possibly changing the way we live just as profoundly as the internet did. ________ Since 1996, the number of people using the internet has climbed from about 40 million people to about 5 billion—or 60 percent of the world’s population. There’s internet access in the city slums of India, the rice terraces of Vietnam, and the favelas of Brazil. That’s a massive shift in 27 years—or my entire lifetime. Venture capitalist Paul Graham recently asked on Twitter, “What do 36 million people use now that eventually 5 billion will?“ Here are my predictions for five technologies that could overtake the world by 2050, possibly changing the way we live just as profoundly as the internet did, and solving some of our most vexing problems, which almost always happens through creativity and innovation, not through regulation or government spending. *** When French artists envisioned the year 2000 in the year 1900, they were too conservative with their predictions, unable to imagine a world that had done away with clunky propellers, electrical wiring, and bulky machinery in favor of more streamlined, more efficient tools for housework, transportation, and food production. Everyone also seemed to think that blimps would be a really big deal. Nobody anticipated the massive shifts that would come because of exponential increases in computing power especially. Perhaps these predictions are also limited by our imagination. The details are hard to know, but I’m confident that by 2050 technological creativity will have made mundane tasks obsolete, freed us from the constraints of biology, and collapsed distance and time in ways that make the constraints of the physical world increasingly irrelevant. Writing by Liz Wolfe; Cameras by Jim Epstein; Editing by Regan Taylor. Music Credits: “Stutter Island,“ by Ros-e via Artlist; “Youth,“ by ANBR, via Artlist; “Metaverse,“ by Lux-Inspira via Artlist; “Polygons,“ by Evgeny Bardyuzha via Artlist; “Lost,“ by Ramol, via Artlist; “Still Need Syndrome,“ by Yarin Primak via Artlist.