Predictions for the World in 2030

http://www.ilookforwardto.com/2010/11/10-predictions-for-2030-that-may-sound-outrageous-today-but-will-not-in-the-future1-by-2030-learning-a-language-will-no-lo.html#more

by olalonde • 15 years ago

39 56 15 years ago

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shawnee_• 15 years ago

3. By 2030, only 2% of the world's population will live in extreme poverty.

The eradication of extreme poverty will happen in our lifetime. In 1990, 42% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.25 (constant 2000 dollars, PPP). In 2005, that number had fallen to 25%. The UN estimates that by 2020, only 10% of world citizens will live in absolute poverty. My bold estimate is that by 2030, only one in 50 will.

Would be awesome, but it won't happen if the world population keeps increasing at the rate it is increasing. We've already surpassed 7 billion people, which wasn't originally projected to happen for at least a couple more years.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

The rate is already falling, isn't it?

derleth2• 15 years ago

Precisely, and the Malthusians are just torn up to absolute tears over it.

sp30002• 15 years ago

Human population growth peaked in the early 1960s and has been declining ever since. Current estimates are that the world population will hit its peak of about 9-11 billion by around 2050. You might not think so today, but this is a reasonable population for the earth to support by that time.

thomasknowles• 15 years ago

I can't see self driving cars being commonplace in 19 years time. People tend to like control.

olalonde2• 15 years ago

Seconded. Most likely won't be a technical issue but more of a social issue.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

I am so getting one as soon as they're legal. A road trip with a book to read? Heaven!

ido2• 15 years ago

I already get that experience by using revolutionary 19th century technology - the train.

gst2• 15 years ago

Those things change fast.

I remember when in the 90s most people preferred POP3 (for mail transfer), because for privacy reasons they didn't want their provider to have access to their mails. And quite a large number of people used encryption, even if they weren't technically inclined.

Today almost no one cares about privacy anymore. Expectations have completly changed within a century. Today it's, e.g., common for most people to store all of their chat logs on Google's server, without regularly deleting them. Or another example: Today we have much more advanced surveillance systems used against the general population than the techniques used in the DDR. For most people back in the DDR those surveillance systems where not acceptable. Today most people accept them if it helps the government "to find terrorists and criminals".

If privacy expectations can change within a century, why shouldn't the expectations on one's car change?

joeyo• 15 years ago

  > And quite a large number of people used encryption, even
  > if they weren't technically inclined.

I agree with your broader point that expectations and perceptions can change fast, but I don't ever remember a time when "quite a large number" of people used email encryption. Perhaps a larger group of users then than now had a desire for email encryption.

pbourke• 15 years ago

People are also willing to cede control in favour of attributes that they value more such as safety, convenience and shorter trips (in duration).

russell2• 15 years ago

Google already has self driving cars that can safely navigate city traffic. I would say that 20 years is plenty of time to resolve the remaining technical and social issues.

lwat3• 15 years ago

You don't have to use the autodrive if you don't want to

prodigal_erik3• 15 years ago

That's an open question. An autodrive in traffic might be much more practical if it can either predict or communicate with the autodrives in all the other cars, rather than having to adapt to our erratic meat-oriented behavior.

protomyth• 15 years ago

Didn't we have a long thread on #4 (By 2030, the best food will be grown in skyscrapers) and had a pretty big majority conclude it was bull?

olalonde2• 15 years ago

Yep, I think this is what you're referring to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1701724 & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024252

gst2• 15 years ago

By 2030 we have long passed peak oil, renewable will not be able to provide sufficient amounts of energy, nuclear power will not be used in many countries because of irrational fears, and we will destroy the climate by using coal to produce energy.

Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe (but still a lower standard than today's standard in US/Europe).

arst• 15 years ago

Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe

How does that follow? Do you expect China to surpass the US and Europe not just in absolute terms but also in per capita income by 2030?

j_baker3• 15 years ago

By 2030, China will be a humanitarian disaster area. They're doing ok now simply because they have such a massive workforce, but their notorious one child per family policy is rapidly reducing the working age population.

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

Most developed nations have population growth less than the replacement rate. They will have fewer workers supporting more retirees, who happen to be living longer and wanting more expensive medical care.

After a few generations of "one child per family" (by law or by choice), most kids won't have siblings or aunts or uncles!

ytkliu• 15 years ago

In 2030, Diablo III will finally be released.

j_baker3• 15 years ago

The real question will be if Duke Nukem Forever will be released.

city41• 15 years ago

2030 is less than 20 years away. Can we look back on 1990 and really feel like an equivalent amount of innovation happened? I feel like these predictions are too optimistic. Not to mention just because we have the technology to do something doesn't mean it's practical, desirable, profitable or many other things that are required for something to become reality.

endtime• 15 years ago

In 1991 (20 years ago), DOS 5.0 was released.

In 2005 (14 years later), autonomous robotics cars successfully navigated a course in the desert. Two years later, they did the same in a city, with no traffic violations.

In 2007 (16 years later), for a few hundred bucks you could carry several orders of magnitude more computing power in your pocket, with remote access to the sum of all human knowledge.

Today, we have affordable 3D printing and are on the cusp of quantum computing. Cryogenic preservation is offered at feasible prices by multiple companies. Political revolutions happen with live commentary which is beamed through space into my pocket. Several new nanotech-based products are released to market every week. If you don't stop and look around, it's easy to miss the fact that we live in the freaking future.

That said, I'm not sure I buy that space tourism will be that big in 20 years, nor that poverty rates will be so low. But the rest don't seem outrageous at all.

sp30002• 15 years ago

If I told you twenty years ago that you would be able to pull a handheld device out of your pocket and access the sum of all human knowledge instantaneously that would be crazy. But wait… you can also listen to your entire music collection, or any digital music ever produced, watch movies, play complex games, read any book, have GPS tracking, take pictures, made videos, make phone calls and video calls... all on one device. I think the average person would call you insane back then.

Its easy to say now how it was bound to happen but as the recent Katie couric and gumbel clip shows they didn’t even know what the internet was in 1994! In 1990 most people didn't even have computers. Cell phones didn't even start becoming commonplace in the US until less than 10 years ago. As we move through life gradually we don’t notice as much the continuous change that occurs all around us everyday. But if I transported you directly from 1990 to today, you better believe you would be astonished.

Humanity in general progresses at an exponential rate. More change happened in the 20th century than all of previous history. More change will probably occur in the first 25-30 years of the 21st century than the entire 20th century.

So yes, a lot of these things are possible. And other , much more interesting things we can't imagine or even comprehend now will be around in 2030, too.

AndrewDucker• 15 years ago

In 1990 the Internet was not a flicker on the radar of business.

Nowadays, it's accessible from a computer I can fit into my pocket, and it affects pretty much everyone on the planet.

I think people underestimate how much change has happened in the last 20 years.

kenjackson• 15 years ago

There's a great book by someone, whose name I can't remember, who talks about how technological advances are continuous, but change industries. Right now we're in the midst of the mobile/internet age. This book talks about how there were periods in the past with cars (flying cars and crazy gas mileage that never panned out), buildings (skyscraper height, after YoY growth, just went flat), planes (there used to be talk of multi-mach commuter planes).

The thing that consistently doesn't get predicted is where the next big tech spike will occur. In 1990 wired house phones were still common. The iPhone would be crazy to see.

No one can predict these things, but my guess is that the next big jump will be in medicine. People will say, "can you believe 20 years that people went to the doctor to diagnose things? This device you stand in front of (and can talk to) is about 20X more accurate than the best human doctor".

raphar• 15 years ago

1990 predictions by Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Intelligent Machines. Strangely (or on purpose) some topics are also in the OP:

Early 2000s

. Translating telephones allow people to speak to each other in different languages.

. Machines designed to transcribe speech into computer text allow deaf people to understand spoken words.

. Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk.

. Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call's nature and priority.

. "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads.

Early 21st century

. The classroom is dominated by computers. Intelligent courseware that can tailor itself to each student by recognizing their strengths and weaknesses. Media technology allows students to manipulate and interact with virtual depictions of the systems and personalities they are studying.

. A small number of highly skilled people dominates the entire production sector. Tailoring of products for individuals is common.

. Drugs are designed and tested in simulations that mimic the human body.

. Blind people navigate and read text using machines that can visually recognize features of their environment.

2010

. PCs are capable of answering queries by accessing information wirelessly via the Internet.

2020-2050

. Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of both people.

. By 2020, there will be a new World government.

2020-2070

. A computer passes the Turing Test, becoming the first true Artificial Intelligence.

taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...

cletus• 15 years ago

My thoughts:

1. IMHO learning a second language will largely be no longer necessary because English will increasingly be the lingua franca. That being said, on the fly translation will clearly continue to get better.

2. 150 year life expectancy? This one I don't buy. Medicine here has to be differentiated in two areas: curing and preventing the causes of "premature" death (eg disease) that stop us reaching a "natural" age when we die. That lone won't get us to 150 years. We're probably not far off that limit now. To get to 150 we need to extend the age to which humans can live, which is getting into some fairly serious genetics. I can see such technology coming about but IMHO will be the province of the wealthy for some time and will probably take longer than expected (again IMHO).

3. I disagree with this. Despite all the efforts to stop poverty, even in developed nations, there is a segment of the population who remain poor. It might be controversial but a certain segment (IMHO) are poor and remain poor because they make poor choices.

Also, the definition of "poor" constantly changes. Poverty in the developing world is lack of access to basic health care, food and clean drinking water. In the developed world, poverty seems to mean your iPhone is two generations old.

And yes I realize there is true poverty in the developed world. There are people who are homeless but the scope of "poverty" in such discussions extends way beyond those when we're discussing social policy.

4. Possible. Food production will need to change.

5. Agreed. I think future generations will look back on this age of manually driven cars as being somewhat barbaric, especially considering the number of people who die on the roads.

6. I also agree that the world's will become increasingly urbanized and you will see "mega-cities" as a result. There are efficiency advantages in concentrating populations in such cities.

7. I was just having a conversation with a colleague at work on Friday about flying cars. My position was (and is) that personal flying vehicles won't happen before driverless cars. Humans won't simply be able to reliably fly such vehicles. Also, the energy costs I believe will possibly scupper such plans so we need to find a far cheaper source of energy for this to happen, especially considering we've probably passed peak oil production.

8. This too is dependent on finding a new, cheaper energy source. Without that space travel will (IMHO) still be too expensive.

9. I think this will be partially true but human labour is extraordinarily cheap and will be incredibly hard to completely displace. It's the same reason we still have humans doing incredibly menial work even when such work could be done by robots, that are comparatively much more expensive.

10. Probably true.

Predicting the future is hard. 1900 to 2000 had a massive amount of change, unparalleled in human history. Think about it: we went from the birth of the automobile to handheld computers, putting a man on the Moon, the global Internet and cheap, almost ubiquitous air travel. How much of that could've been predicted?

What's more, how much of that is on the back of cheap non-renewable energy that is ultimately unsustainable? Not just energy, but other resources like metals. The rate at which the world population is growing and using resources is unsustainable so something has to change: whether it be new energy sources are found or the population problem corrects itself.

I seriously urge you to watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

if you haven't already.

If you think of sci-fi as a predictor of the future (which it has been in many ways), we've vastly exceeded predictions in some fields (eg computers) and vastly underperformed in others (eg space travel). I heard Jerry Pournelle talking abot this with the predictions from the Mote in God's Eye. The handheld computers exist now, being smartphones, less than 40 years after the book was published. But in space travel terms, we're, if anything, behind what we were in the 20th century.

To me the predictable aspects of the future are:

1. Urbanization;

2. Ubiquity of computing and networking;

3. Genetic engineering.

Other things depend on the big question mark that is cheap and abundant energy. We may not find anything, in which case the future will be bleak. If we find something however the world will change beyond recognition.

bergie2• 15 years ago

It will be interesting to see if urbanization of the third world will have positive impact on the environment. Better efficiency and less human intrusion on natural habitats

manifold• 15 years ago

I agree that a 150 year life expectancy is very unlikely in the next 20 years, but the possibility of people who are alive in 2030 reaching 150 seems plausible. I think that's the argument de Grey was making, and their source article had confused the two issues.

acangiano• 15 years ago

I believe most of these points will become reality, but some of them by 2120 not by 2020.

Symmetry2• 15 years ago

2. Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments? Its quite likely that some number of people won't have access, but most new medical technologies are available to most people because the largest cost of any new medical technology is its development. For some disease that everyone suffers from I wouldn't expect the treatment to end up costing more than, say, your typical run of chemotherapy. Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance.

3. He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction, and while I agree that completely eliminating poverty might be impossible getting it down to 1 in 50 seems doable.

EDIT: Edited for clarity.

derleth2• 15 years ago

> Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments?

To begin with, the companies providing them will have to reach break-even and, in a field like biotech with huge up-front costs, that means making a lot of money from the first clients. Rich people have a lot of money.

> Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance.

Then we're talking about different things. How often does health insurance pay for treatments that are still somewhat unproven in the real world?

> He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction

Right, and everyone seems to ignore the fact that, as measured on an objective scale, how a culture defines 'poverty' creeps up that absolute wealth scale as the culture's wealth grows. For example, at one time kings and rich industrialists could die of appendicitis; now, only the most desperately poor are so deprived of healthcare that having an inflamed appendix is a death sentence.

Mz• 15 years ago

2. 150 year life expectancy? This one I don't buy. (etc and stuff about "only the wealthy"...)

I don't know. I have a condition with a life expectancy of 36 or 37 and I'm 45. I nearly died at age 35 1/2, then was finally diagnosed shortly thereafter and have spent the last almost ten years reversing the damage. I'm currently healthier than I have ever been. I'm not wealthy and never have been.

I think the information is already available to do amazing things in that regard. Most people just don't believe it and don't pursue it.

bergie2• 15 years ago

In 2030, we still need to code exceptions for IE6 (I hope not)

iron_ball• 15 years ago

If businesses haven't upgraded after 12 years, why would another 18 make any difference?

I'm beginning to think that IE6 is the new COBOL -- something that's locked into irrevocably locked into business practices. I'm working on a B2B site that is less than 10% IE6 in its day to day traffic, but when a major marketing event brought a flood of potential investors and customers, IE6's share spiked to 25%.

Our only hope is that companies will at least install an additional browser, and train their employees that IE6 should be used only for the legacy apps.

philwelch• 15 years ago

5. By 2030, driverless cars will be commonplace.

I think peak oil, the rising cost of energy, and increasing urbanization might actually increase the usage of mass transit compared to any type of car. What cars remain, however, very much may be driverless.

9. By 2030, most film actors will be out of work due to competition from cheap computer animated actors.

11. By 2030, a large number of people will have robot lovers.

I'm sure robot lovers and CGI actors will exist, but I can't see them entirely displacing their human counterparts. Those are two places where most people will want an actual flesh and blood human, even if the alternative is indistinguishable.

russell2• 15 years ago

One good rule of thumb is that a transforming technology was in existence 15-20 years before it became revolutionary. Applying that to this list:

1. Machine translation already exists and is getting better. Will it be ubiquitous? Unlikely. Only tourists and those interacting with them will normally carry them.

2. No way. We cant even see the way to go. Cure a disease and another pops up to take its place. By 2030 we may know enough to start.

3. Another no. If people have the freedom to make bad choices, there will always be extreme poverty. Will the police do daily roundups to force people into shelter, into mental helth facilities? Singapore maybe.

4. No, except for a few exceptions, like pot. It's economics. Who is going to grow wheat in Manhattan?

5. Of course. Google already has the prototypes.

6. Yes, but somewhere along the line technology will enable the trend to reverse,

7. I dont think so, even if the technology. We wont see flying cars because of cost and liability issues and the publicity of even infrequent crashes. Airliners will still have pilots because of public confidence. It's possible that cargo planes will perhaps have ground based pilots/monitors. In the military, of course.

8. No way. The economics arent there, except for a few hundred rich people per year. The experimental technology doesnt exist today.

9. Yes for low budget films and a lot of TV. Blockbusters will use actors, because stars sell films. We still have theater, opera, and concerts an films will still have actors.

10. Probably so.

11. If large numbers means several of your friends, even hackers, the answer is no. I dont think having a robot, can compare to having a real girl tell you she loves you. And I dont think a real girl will put up with the competition.

nostromo• 15 years ago

I believe the most impactful event that is likely to happen in our lifetime isn't listed here. It's the peak of human population and even possible decline. (Even if it doesn't happen world wide in your lifetime, it will very likely happen in the country you live in, and already has in Japan, much of Europe and Russia.)

Urbanization and rising out of poverty drastically reduces population growth, often times below the replacement rate. It will be interesting to see what happens if/when for the first time in human history, the number of people on the planet goes down.

jacobolus• 15 years ago

> first time in human history

The black death in the 14th century made the number of people on the planet go down quite dramatically, as did the plague of Justinian in the 6th–7th.

If you’re willing to look at geographic regions smaller than the whole world, populations have been quite frequently ravaged by disease and invasion.

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

For more discussion about the consequences of a shrinking populations, I recommend the following Long Now talk about "The Depopulation Problem".

http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-pr...

It is full of rethink-the-news sentences like: “Notice that Japan’s lengthening recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size.”

“People a century from now will have so few blood relatives I think it could be very lonely.” The audience, convinced by then, was utterly still.

Symmetry2• 15 years ago

I wonder what it says that out of that entire list of predictions I find the ones about industry in space the least credible - the very ones which people in 1950 might have predicted for 2010.

m0th87• 15 years ago

I have a prediction: 20 years from now we'll look back at articles like these and think "wow those were stupid predictions," in the same way that we look back at those Popular Mechanics articles from decades past that foresaw pill food and robot maids.

Devilboy3• 15 years ago

Robot maids are coming though. Pill food didn't catch on because food is tasty.

j_baker3• 15 years ago

To be fair, I bet a list of predictions from 1990 wouldn't have been too far off the mark. I would imagine they probably would have said something like:

1. The Internet will grow.

2. Computers will become more common.

3. Computers will become smaller.

Of course I'm sure there would have been a ton of dumb predictions as well, but I think it's easier to predict 20 years in the future than 50 years in the future.

herval• 15 years ago

I don't buy any of that. Unless, of course, the number of people playing WhateverVille games stops rising so fast, in which case some of those things might actually be possible :-)

IOW: By 2030, we'll have single Farmvilles producing more food than the entire world today, and CityVilles bigger than New York, sucking up most people's times faster than any other diversion in history of mankind

Predictions for the World in 2030

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