Some Future-Significant Technologies by 2050

For the EC KT 2050 Scenarios Project

Jerome C. Glenn The Millennium Project

www.themp.org

Increasingly Significant Technologies for 2050

• Synthetic Biology

• Artificial Intelligence

• Computational Science

• Pure meat, leather, without animals & augmenting medicine

• Tele-Everything & Tele-Everybody, the Semantic Web

• Augmented Reality, Tele-Presence, Holographic Communications

• Quantum computing

• Increasing individual and collective intelligence

• 3-D Printing biology as well as materials and 4-D Printing

• Nanotechnology

• Robotic manufacturing

• Conscious-Technology Civilization potentials

Synthetic Biology – mixing species DNA

Microprobes to eat the plaque in your brain? Produce hydrogen instead of CO2 in plants?

Artificial Intelligence: technological capacity to act based on its own understanding and reasoning

When this begins to happen, the speed of increasing AI’s intelligence will

be far faster and produce more change than Moore’s Law

by responding to feedback from sensor networks worldwide, will accelerate AI’s intelligence worldwide… moment by moment

Artificial Intelligence … that can autonomously “write” and improve its code…

Computational Science

Computational biology

Computational Chemistry

Computational Physics All accelerated with Moore’s Law AND autonomous AI programing worldwide

Growing Pure Meat without Growing Animals

August 5, 2013 a London chef cooked and served hamburgers without growing/killing a cow.

Tele-Everything, Tele-Everybody, and the Semantic Webs

Example of Tele-Everything/Everybody

Bio-tech clothing

Augmented Reality, Tele-Presence, and holographic communications

Quantum Computing … D-Wave Developments today

Increasing Intelligence: both Individual and Collective Intelligence

EU, US, China Human Brain Projects; Google & IBM artificial brain projects

Collective and Individual Intelligence

3-D Printed Kidney, 4-D Printed self-assembly

Could nanorobotics, 3D printing, and AI make this obsolete?

Nanotech-Everything

If \ Then Nano-

technology

Synthetic

Biology

Artificial

Intelligence

Robotics 3-D Printing Augmented

Reality

Nano-

technology xxx

Synthetic

Biology xxx

Artificial

Intelligence xxx Robotics

xxx 3-D Printing

xxx Augmented

Reality xxx

Emerging Technologies Table

Will 2050 technology begin to leave us behind? Or will we

shake hands, and then merge with Technology?

If you can’t beat ‘em… why not join ‘em?

Humans becoming

cyborgs

1985 2000

2015

2030

Conscious-Technology

Built environment

becoming intelligent

When the distinction between

these two trends becomes

blurred, we will have reached the

Post-Information Age

Simplification/Generalization of History

and an Alternative Future

Age /

Element Product Power Wealth Place War Time

Agricultural

Extraction

Food/Res Religion Land Earth/Res Location Cyclical

Industrial Machine Nation-

State

Capital Factory Resources Linear

Information Info/serv Corporation Access Office Perception Flexible

Conscious-

Technology

Linkage Individual Being Motion Identity Invented

Some questions to consider for KT 2050 Scenarios…

Our eye glasses, microscopes, telescopes have affected our consciousness for years – How might future technologies affect our consciousness?

Will we create Floating Vertical Farms and

Carbon Sinks?

(as we have windmills in the oceans today)

Could the

integration of

synthetic

biology, AI, and

nano-robotic

manufacturing

produce

Vertical Farming,

Carbon Sink,

transportation

structures like

these?

Vincent Callebaut

Will we create our own Avatars to be our Cyber-selves?

Could this be our future “immortality” in Cyberspace? Your own cyber clone?

Will we Succeed in creating Eco-Smart

Cities and retrofitting cities?

Integrates physics, biology, engineering, archeology, and artificial intelligence

And create these?

The DESERTEC 100 GW of solar power throughout Northern Africa for 15% of Europe’s energy demand

Space elevators and Solar Power Satellites

Robot Farming replacing how many farmers?

This capability exists today. What integration of nanotech robotics and synthetic biology by 2050?

By 2050, could there be more drones then people?

Will we apply advances in Materials Science to re-build our built environment ?

And produce more “miracles” between 2015 and 2050 than was produced between 1980 and 2014. Today UCLA’s Solar Cell Windows could be used to retro fit buildings for energy production

By 2050 everyone is connected to the future Internet and everyone is surrounded by a 9.6 billion person market

Will we teach people to find markets worldwide for self-employment ?

One-Person Businesses Find markets around the world for what you are interested in doing not non-existing jobs

What could this look like in 2050?

Will synergies among AI, robotics, nanotech, synthetic biology, and quantum computing create more jobs than they eliminate?

If not, then long-term structural unemployment is inevitable, unless we create new concepts of work and possibly guaranteed income for all.

36 Years from Now (2050):

What will be emerging? And from what?

To keep track of it all, and improve foresight,

a European Collective Intelligence System

(E-CIS) is needed that can: 1. make it easier for a “Whole-of-Europe” response to European challenges

2. make trans-disciplinary innovative research easier to accomplish and break down

some of the academic barriers

3. give experts and creative people a common platform to engage in building a

European “brain”

4. increase the internationalization of research as an E-CIS can connect local

challenges with global challenges via other CISs around the world to build –

eventually - global brains for a better civilization

“Research and Innovation in the service of Economy and Society-European Neighbourhood

and the Black Sea region” 29 & 30 May 2014, THESSALONIKI, GREECE

For further information

Jerome C. Glenn

The Millennium Project

4421 Garrison Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20016 USA +1-202-686-5179 phone/fax

Jerome.Glenn@Millennium-Project.org

www.StateoftheFuture.org

www.themp.org (Global Futures Intelligence System)