What Will the World Look Like Fifty Years From Now?

(4- 5 minute read)

What will the world look like when America celebrates its 300th birthday in 2076?

That question occurred to me during this year's 250th anniversary celebrations, and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that before we can predict where we're going, we first need to understand the extraordinary journey that brought us here.

Over the coming weeks I'd like to try something a little different from my usual newsletters. I'd like to explore the future itself. We'll look at climate change and energy, medicine and longevity, robotics, space exploration, demographics, the future of work, and many other subjects that will shape the next half-century.

Finally, we'll bring all of those strands together by looking at what may become the greatest technological revolution of them all: artificial intelligence. AI doesn't exist in isolation. It has the potential to accelerate almost every other field, from medicine and scientific discovery to energy production and even our expansion into space.

Before we can look forward, however, I think we should spend a few minutes looking back.

Imagine stepping back to 1776, the very first year that America existed as an independent nation. There were no electric lights, no telephones, no radio, no television, no airplanes, no antibiotics, no computers and certainly no internet.

In 1776, a message from London to New York travelled at the speed of a sailing ship and might take six to eight weeks to arrive. Today, the same message can cross the Atlantic in little more than one-thirtieth of a second. That represents a speed increase of more than ten million times.

I’ve been lucky enough to have visited more than eighty countries around the world. Most people in 1776 lived and died within a few miles of where they were born and would never see another country.

Life itself was harder, shorter and far more uncertain than it is today. Historians estimate average life expectancy for men in Europe and North America was fifty years, while in many parts of Asia it was between thirty-five and forty.

Those figures were heavily affected by the tragic number of children who never reached adulthood, but they remind us how different life once was. Infectious diseases that are easily treated today were often fatal. A poor harvest could bring famine. Childbirth was dangerous. Simple injuries could become life-threatening because there were no antibiotics.

Compare that with today, when life expectancy in many developed countries is over eighty years or more, millions of people survive diseases that would once have been a death sentence, and increasing numbers are living into their nineties and even beyond one hundred. (My own mother was ninety in April, and shames the rest of the family by still going to the gym three times a week.)

These transformations didn't happen because of one great invention. They happened because thousands of discoveries built upon one another over generations.

Perhaps no single development was more important than the widespread use of electricity. We rarely stop to think about it because it has become so ordinary, yet almost everything around us depends upon it.

Every computer, every hospital, every factory, every communications network and every scientific laboratory begins with a reliable supply of electricity. Like artificial intelligence today, electricity became a technology that enabled and underpinned almost every other technology.

Communication followed a similar path. The telegraph shrank continents. The telephone allowed people to speak across hundreds of miles. Radio connected entire nations. Television brought the world into our living rooms. Then the internet connected billions of people in ways that would have seemed almost magical to previous generations. Today, someone sitting in Australia can hold a live conversation with someone in Canada while sharing photographs, videos and documents instantly. That would have been indistinguishable from science fiction only half a century ago.

Medicine tells an equally remarkable story. Vaccination eliminated smallpox from the natural world. Antibiotics transformed healthcare. Organ transplants, MRI scanners, keyhole surgery, cancer treatments and genetic medicine have all extended and improved millions of lives. We often focus on the diseases we still can't cure, but we sometimes forget how many we have defeated.

History is also full of predictions that turned out to be spectacularly wrong. In 1798, the economist Thomas Malthus argued that population growth would inevitably outstrip food production, leading to widespread famine.

Nearly two centuries later, Paul Ehrlich's bestselling book The Population Bomb warned that hundreds of millions of people would starve during the 1970s and 1980s because the world's population was growing too quickly. Instead, advances in plant breeding, fertilizers, irrigation and agricultural technology dramatically increased crop yields. Humanity certainly still faces problems with hunger and food distribution, but they are very different from the universal famines that many people once believed were inevitable.

In a twist that few would have predicted, many developed countries now face the opposite challenge. Instead of worrying about not having enough food, we struggle with obesity and diseases linked to overconsumption.

Medicines such as Wegovy and similar treatments are helping people lose weight on a scale that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago. History has a habit of surprising us in ways that almost nobody expects.

Other horror stories have also not come to pass. During the Cold War, millions genuinely believed that nuclear war between the superpowers was not merely possible but inevitable. Schoolchildren practised emergency drills and families built nuclear shelters.

While the danger has never completely disappeared and remains a serious concern today, it is now more than eighty years since nuclear weapons were last used in war. The fact that they have not been used again is one of history's greatest achievements, even if it is one we rarely celebrate.

None of this means the future will be easy. Climate change presents enormous challenges. Many developed countries have rapidly ageing populations and falling birth rates.

Governments face difficult questions about pensions, healthcare and taxation. Immigration is becoming both an economic necessity and a political battleground in many nations. Cyber warfare is replacing some forms of conventional conflict, while advances in biotechnology raise ethical questions that previous generations never had to consider.

Yet history leaves me with a sense of optimism rather than pessimism.

Every generation believes it is facing unprecedented problems, and in many ways every generation is right. The problems change, but they never disappear. What history also shows, however, is humanity's extraordinary ability to adapt. We invent. We discover. We cooperate. We argue. We make mistakes. We learn from them. Then we build something better than what came before.

Perhaps the greatest reason for optimism is that there are now more scientists, engineers, doctors and researchers working around the world than at any other time in human history.

Every day they are making discoveries that may never appear on the evening news but will quietly improve our lives over the coming decades. The pace of scientific progress is accelerating, not slowing down, and each breakthrough creates opportunities for the next.

As a science fiction writer, I find that endlessly fascinating. The world of Return to the Galaxy is fictional, but many of the questions explored in the series are becoming increasingly real.

How should humanity use advanced technology? What responsibilities come with greater power? How do we balance scientific progress with ethical judgement? Even characters such as Jera and Sovas were created to explore questions that are now beginning to emerge in our own world.

Over the coming weeks I'd like to continue this journey with you. Rather than simply looking fifty years into the future, we'll examine the major forces that are likely to shape it. We'll begin with a subject that seems particularly appropriate after the recent heatwaves we've experienced here in Britain: climate change and the future of energy.

Can humanity provide abundant, affordable, clean energy for a growing world while protecting the environment? History suggests that innovation has repeatedly surprised us. The question now is how it will do it next time.

Till next time,

Brian

BA Gillies

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