What do you think the world will be like in 50 years time?

[NotExactlyOptimistic]

Doubt it'll be my problem by then but what do you think? Will life be sunnier or more depressing? Will the NHS still exist? Will covid STILL be around our necks? Will it be prison time by then if people refuse their 43457875th booster? Will there still be a royal family? Will house buying be a possibility? What trades will have died out by then? What gadgets or Internet platforms will have been invented that people can't do without? Does Facebook still exist? There will be an international superstar who's parents haven't even met yet. What clothes will people be wearing? What global events will have happened by then? Imagine how big the list of things people are offended by will be by then... if you could take a peek would you be excited or too shit scared to look?

Too scared too look 😳

I think it's best not to think about it! It's funny isn't it, because you don't really notice the change as its happening then one day you think 'hang on, ten years ago none of this existed...'. It's a bit mind blowing. So ignorance is bliss!

People do like a bit of doom and gloom though, and complain that the world has never been worse than it is now. My grandmother raised her children during the second World, and my mother raised hers through what was effectively a civil war. Both would be if I started moaning that my life is harder than theirs was. Different certainly, harder in some ways and easier in others. But life has been hard throughout time.

Oh same mate. I already wish I could pack up my loved ones and fuck off somewhere secret away from most of society as it is, I don't want to imagine how horrendous things will be by then!

If I’m still around I’ll be smarting about not living ling enough to get a gander at the Prince Philip files.

Can’t say for sure, but I've been to the year 3000, Not much has changed but they lived underwater.

Odd you haven't mentioned climate change.

If the governments of the world don't get their act together and enact major policy change nowish, we're looking at significant global warming.

The effect of this will include rising sea levels meaning lots of coastal towns underwater, including a lot of the East Coast of America. Plus large parts of the planet being uninhabitable due to heat. Ecosystems will collapse, there will be mass crop failures, drought and famine.

It will mean civil unrest, wars and quite possibly the entire breakdown of society, and the beginning of the extinction of much of life on earth.

Hopefully this won't happen but it is a very real possibility.

I love thinking about what life will be like in the future. I’d give anything to time travel 100 (or 1000!!!) years into the future.

I must admit I feel powerless in the face of the huge challenge that is tackling climate change, but putting our heads in the sand completely and pretending it isn't happening is childish behaviour IMO.

Our DC need us to be the adults here, however terrifying it is.

@invisiblecats sadly you've got it about spot on. And is realistically where we are headed. If we aren't headed there it means that all of humanity needs to drastically change its way of life almost immediately and so life as we know it will change imminently.

That's very unlikely though. Especially without china.

I listened to an interesting podcast yesterday, about AI. The person being interviewed is a former chief business officer at Google X - the top secret r&d arm of Google /Alphabet. He reckons that we will reach ‘singularity” - the point where machines are more intelligent than humans - in around 2029, and from then on all bets are off. We have no idea what these machines will be capable of, or whether we can control them. In his view it’s just like humans out- evolving the apes and becoming the most intelligent sentient beings on the planet. AI will become sentient (or at least close enough that there is no practical difference), and super intelligent - and we will be the apes.

He wasn’t entirely gloomy about it, but the impacts on work, society, etc are going to be huge.

Just read the climate gloom and doom posts (which I agree seem very likely atm). Maybe we can ask the machines to sort that out for us - put their super-intelligence to good use and come up with solutions we puny , feeble-minded humans can’t even conceive of?

Who can say?

I have been in organisations where they try and make 2 year, 5 year and 10 year plans.
I now sigh. Because we never get the 2 year plan right. And as for the 10 year one..!!

I would like to think we would have more advanced healthcare and the the world would be more equal. Technology would make certain jobs redundant but new ones will appear. Automated vehicles would be the norm. Better support for SEN kids. Gender will be obsolete. - ooo think I’m having a ‘glass half full’ day

Yes I agree with the recent posters. Climate change is going to be the thing which makes the future look very different from now.

Well here in the South Island of NZ we are expecting "the big one" (earthquake) within the next 50 years - that's enough to be worrying about for now. As for global warming, I can't begin to imagine, especially if we continue on the path we are on at present.

@invisiblecats

Odd you haven't mentioned climate change.

If the governments of the world don't get their act together and enact major policy change nowish, we're looking at significant global warming.

The effect of this will include rising sea levels meaning lots of coastal towns underwater, including a lot of the East Coast of America. Plus large parts of the planet being uninhabitable due to heat. Ecosystems will collapse, there will be mass crop failures, drought and famine.

It will mean civil unrest, wars and quite possibly the entire breakdown of society, and the beginning of the extinction of much of life on earth.

Hopefully this won't happen but it is a very real possibility.

All of this. In 50 years I will be dead, so possibly won't have to reap the worst of it, but given that our current government is ok with pumping human sewage into our rivers, I don't hold out much hope that there's going to be some collective volte-face in the near future that pulls us back from the brink.

Successive governments just hand the poisoned chalice over to the next lot safe in the knowledge it won't be their problem.

It's a huge part of why I chose not to have children - and I absolutely despair on here when posters say "well I don't suppose me having one more child is going to make much difference!" It's exactly the same fingers in their ears la la la thinking.

So yeah, if you've seen or read The Road, it'll be like that, with bells on.

Hopefully assisted dying will be a thing by the time I'm properly old, because what the world could become like very quickly is not a happy prospect.

Anyhoo- happy Wednesday!

I'll be honest I'm very uneducated on climate change and global warming, I really should read up on it. Although on second thoughts maybe ignorance is bliss!

I was watching something last night, I think it was regarding climate change or something, and they said that in 29 years such and such a thing should happen. It suddenly struck me that I would be 80 then, and how we will never know what the possibilities are. What will be invented, if/how it will all end.
We can read about the past, but we will never know the future.

Doubt it'll be my problem by then but what do you think?

I'll be very dead, so certainly not something I'll worry about.

I think they will have found a way to implant our brains into robot-like bodies. So that we never die. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I imagine designing my new face and body .

@DedalusBloom Totally agree. I would be too full of guilt to bring children into the world currently. The lalalala thinking is spot on.

I predict a lot of civil unrest, that AI will have transformed the job market as another poster said above, I hope the NHS is still around for a lot more years to come but who's to say? It frightens me to be honest.

I'm not complacent about climate change and when I said ignorance is bliss I didn't mean I stick my head in the sand and ignore it. I meant that even with the best science and predictions in the world, we can't possibly know what life will be like.

When I was at school in the 80s our geography textbooks were teaching us, as fact, that the world's oil supply would have run out by now. When my older sisters were at school in the 70s, they were learning that we'd be living a life of leisure now because robots would be doing all the work for us. Both those predictions seem hilarious now. Since as long as humans have existed, people have been predicting that society has reached the end of the line and extinction is imminent.

I think tackling pollution, waste, climate change etc are very important things. I just don't believe that we can say for certain that in 50 years X will have happened because we just don't know.

Agree re climate, its terrifying. We would certainly have lost some of the lower lying land.
I think about my not quite 50 years, and how much has changed since we were kids. The world was certainly safer.
I'm currently watching The 100, which doesn't necessarily feel that far fetched!

It's going to be hotter that's for sure! And radically more unstable, both in terms of climate and geopolitics as huge areas of the world become too hot to live and grow food.

Does anyone else worry that if China doesn't commit to action soon, this could potentially lead to war? (Sorry for the derail)