Life in 2025
Futurists are reluctant to predict more than 5 years out in this millennium because the rate of change is accelerating so fast. The phrase that I often hear from people in tech is that they don’t expect anything really new, but that what we have will finally work better.
For instance, the advances in aviation over the past decade include glass cockpits, carbon fiber as the dominant material but the plane form of most commercial jetliners is still at tube with swept wings. Where is my flying car? What happened to the SST? But enter SpaceX and Blue Origins and suddenly you have rocket ships that can land themselves. And I bet Richard Brandon has enough vision to see that while Virgin Galactic’s little lob in space might be a nice amusement park ride, it’s not too much more effort to have that lob take passengers from NYC to Tokyo in about an hour. It’s as if the pause button was taken off the future and fast forward was selected.
There are a plethora of technologies, data sciences, nimble work methodologies and investment capital to see the next decade really take off.
So what does 2025 look like?
Autonomous Vehicles Will Be Among Us
Autonomous vehicles are already being tested on public roads. Time frame to refining safety measures and public acceptance is about 10 years at the minimum, but once the stats start coming in acceptance will accelerate. They are going to have a profound impact on the urban landscape and lifestyles. Over time it will mean less cars, less need for parked vehicles, more one-car families. Busses will be smaller and more nimble and frequent. Traffic flow will be coordinated and expedited around trouble spots. Aircraft have been partially autonomous for decades and Cat IIIc landings are handled by autopilot all the way down to runway. It’s not a big leap to see them fully autonomous within a decade. The barrier will be societal and regulatory not technical. Aircraft traffic is doubling at pretty quick rates.
Faster Mass Transit
Vertical Takeoff and Land [VTOL] will begin to connect urban centers to airports by 2025. That will include an array of helicopters, drones, and yet to be built aircraft that will close the “safety perception gap”. Airport security will be increasing automated and use technology as fingerprint and facial recognition. And flying cars and SST will be making their redux.
Hyperloops will begin to connect metro centers, especially ones that are within 500 miles proximity. Airport surface transportation will vastly improve. LAX, one of the largest airports in the world will have Phase 1 of their integrated people mover with car, bus, and light rail completed and the other phases well along.
Back to the neo-aerospace guys, SpaceX and Blue Origin, Space X expects to have landed unmanned capsules on Mars by then. Expect the lion’s share of US space shipments to be handled by them.
Home & Life
Smart homes will be the new norm and voice recognition will increase in accuracy and cognition. Many interfaces now that are visual will be accessible through voice. Siri, Echo and Alexa will take on many tasks and delegate some to R2D2 type droids that will handle cleaning the Roomba and emptying the dishwasher. Already there are bots to fold your clothes.
Drones and Robots will be to take over the more risky tasks that currently fall to humans.
There will be at least 50% if not 70% of the entire planet connected to the internet. A huge increase of resource and innovation to that will produce an ever increasing data and content pile as well as market place. Alphabet , Facebook and SpaceX all have programs to put drones and satellites to beam internet connectivity to areas now without.
IOT will see an explosion of devices, with all the benefits and concerns that entail this wave of connectivity. Usher in nascent AI and the stage is set for the singularity, and right on schedule for 2045 according to Kurzweil. In 2025 AI will be easing into a number of functions like traffic control, fire suppression, search and rescue, smart buildings especially of a large size will be AI connected.
3D printers will be larger, handle more materials and begin to distribute goods easier than that existing factory to home model.
Wearable technology will be better integrated with fashion and far more prevalent. Augmented Reality will be available in certain segments and will be far less geeky looking.
Health and Medicine
Medicine will see some radical new techniques. New materials, 3D printed organs, nanotechnology will be key drivers. Advances in neurosurgery coupled with advanced prosthetics will allow better integration of man-machine interface. There will be hints in research of the ability to regenerate limbs. Wearables will provide a constant stream of data
Impacts
Now the price of this will be a ever growing number of unskilled laborers displaced by technology. Add that to the ever increasing erosion of privacy and autonomy. And so the number of people undergoing future shock will drastically increase.
So not quite 10 years to see if this is an accurate prediction, we’ll have our early indicators by 2020.
