Life in 2050
By mid-century there will likely be 9 billion people on the planet, consuming ever more resources and leading ever more technologically complex lives. What will our cities be like? How will we eat? Will global warming trigger catastrophic changes, or will we be able to engineer our way out of the climate crisis?
Making predictions is, by nature, a dicey business, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Smithsonian magazine Big Think asked top minds from a variety of fields to weigh in on what we might expect our world to be like 40 years from now. The result is our latest special series, Life in 2050.
Demographic changes will certainly be dramatic. Rockefeller University mathematical biologist Joel Cohen says it's likely that by 2050 the majority of the people in the world will live in urban areas, and will have a significantly higher average age than people today. In the U.S., cities theorist Richard Florida thinks urbanization trends will reinvent the education system, making our economy less real estate driven and erasing the divisions between home and work.
And rapidly advancing technology will continue ever more rapidly. According to Bill Mitchell, the late director of MIT's Smart Cities research group, cities of the future won't look like "some sort of science-fiction fantasy," but it's likely that "discreet, unobtrusive" technological advances and information overlays will change how we live in significant ways. Charles Ebinger, Director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution also thinks that by 2050 we will also have a so-called "smart grid" where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems, allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand.
Meanwhile, the Internet will continue to radically transform media, destroying the traditional model of what a news organization is, says author and former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who believes the most common kinds of news
Making predictions is, by nature, a dicey business, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Smithsonian magazine Big Think asked top minds from a variety of fields to weigh in on what we might expect our world to be like 40 years from now. The result is our latest special series, Life in 2050.
Demographic changes will certainly be dramatic. Rockefeller University mathematical biologist Joel Cohen says it's likely that by 2050 the majority of the people in the world will live in urban areas, and will have a significantly higher average age than people today. In the U.S., cities theorist Richard Florida thinks urbanization trends will reinvent the education system, making our economy less real estate driven and erasing the divisions between home and work.
And rapidly advancing technology will continue ever more rapidly. According to Bill Mitchell, the late director of MIT's Smart Cities research group, cities of the future won't look like "some sort of science-fiction fantasy," but it's likely that "discreet, unobtrusive" technological advances and information overlays will change how we live in significant ways. Charles Ebinger, Director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution also thinks that by 2050 we will also have a so-called "smart grid" where all of our appliances are linked directly to energy distribution systems, allowing for real-time pricing based on supply and demand.
Meanwhile, the Internet will continue to radically transform media, destroying the traditional model of what a news organization is, says author and former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent, who believes the most common kinds of news