Debateable
- the real question is whether it is voluntary
Far and away, and easily, developments related to who we are as human beings–genetic engineering and the ability to fix, retard or prevent what mother nature hands us in our genes and environment.
This technology is close enough to fruition to meet the 50 year window.
By changing who we are we change the world. Application of this technology will create enormous gaps between the engineered humans and the ordinary, and in doing so change the dynamics which drive society and culture.
Within the next 50 years we will eliminate most diseases, retard or prevent aging, and be able to create genetically superior humans.
Most of the rest of technological developments (in energy, e.g.) will require time to replace the current infrastructure with their more advanced alternatives.
1984 was too optimistic a timeline and too pessimistic an outcome, but the next 50 years will see the technology be effected.
Endless electronic sexual stimulation.
i.e. the Fucks Capacitor.
Dammit, Ekers! 
I mean, I was one measly post away from making some sort of “Orgasmatron” joke and you had to go and steal my idea! 
Er… to answer the question, the Singularity.
Or a black hole that gets dropped in the Earth. That’ll be fun. 
If we can finally perfect Fusion, it will be huge. 50 years may be too soon.
Nanotube base technologies could yield a vehicle that is very strong, very light weight, has an outer skin that is a solar collector and 1000s of small highly efficient electrical storage devices built into and spread through the body of the vehicle. Again 50 years, may or may not be too soon.
Advances in medical science could lead to a much longer lifespan and more importantly a much long period of good health. This seems like a good possibility within 50 years. This might be considered the most important by those that can afford it.
Human to Computer direct interfaces, seem a little overrated to me. It is nice, but quicker access to Google and better cell phone dialing is only a small improvement and I see large areas for abuse with such technologies. Think controllable endorphin highs.
Cheaper and more efficient Solar Panel technologies are probably only 10-20 years away. This will start providing power to places in the third world where Electrical Distribution is and always will be an iffy proposition.
Jim
The combination of ubiquitous wireless internet, dirt cheap sensors, and dirt cheap data storage. These technologies are already here, but the combination is going to change our social structure more than anything. New power sources or materials are nice, but they don’t change our society that much.
But cameras and sensors everywhere, all linked into the internet, all dumping data into giant cheap databases? That means the end of privacy. It means the end of anonymity. Walk down the street with the right glasses on and you’ll get real time identification of everyone as they walk past. Everything they’ve ever done. You want to call up home movies of that hot chick you noticed? Her home movies will be searchable, you can be watching them in a few minutes. Not just home movies…public recordings of everywhere she’s ever been, everything she’s ever done will be available for your viewing pleasure.
Of course, if you’re a cyber voyeur, the same ubiquitous data gathering will identify YOU as an annoying pervert, to be avoided at all costs. Say goodbye to anonymous voyeurism, say hello to public unembarassed in-your-face voyeurism. You’ll be able to cyberstalk that woman with ease…but the cops can track your perverted cyberstalking with ease too.
Our concerns about privacy will seem as quaint as medeival theologians arguing over angels dancing on pins. The end of privacy will be a brute fact that no amount of wishing will make go away, no amount of technological restriction will cover up. Privacy will be over, the only question will be how to make society tolerable, given that privacy is impossible.
Damn! He’s on to us! 
This is unlikely without some massive unforeseen advances in the field. Even the Lawson critierian for an ideal D-T reaction has an energy requirement of about 3.5Mev/charged particle for sustainment, which is huge. We can get over unity gain factors in plasma confinement systems now, but only at great expense (in terms of energy input) and only for fractions of a second. And it seems the more we learn about managing high energy plasmas and fusion, the more challenging it becomes. I hold out hope that we can have working fusion by the turn of the century, but I doubt we’ll see it much before then. (I also hold some small amount of interest in [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion]]muon-catalyzed fusion*, which is entirely workable with conventional technology but seemingly incapable of delivering an over unity gain due to the instability of muons.)
Count me in with others who suggest that the most important technological development is probably some unimaginable change, but if pressed I’d have to point to either revolutionary advances in medicine involving direct cellular or genetic repair or reconstruction (which we’re already seeing in very, very crude form as stem cell therapy to regenerate damaged heart or nervous tissue) or expanding computer integration, communications, and control in ways barely imaginable by the most speculative science fiction.
I doubt that direct neural interfaces will be possible in the next five decades, seeing as how crude our understanding of the brain still is, but I think interface by existing sensory channels (sound, vision, tactile stimulation) will become commonplace; say, an embedded projector that displays information directly on the retina or which modulates signals directly into the cochlear nerve at sufficently high fidelity to be indistinguishable from normal “hearing”. The greatest beneficiaries of this will be entertainment and marketing industries.
Computers will continue to become ubiquitious while simultaneously becoming transparent, to the point that the notion of having a “desktop” computer or even a portable laptop will become laughably antiquated for most people, with only technical people involved in low level programming or application development will actually deal with anything resembling a general personal computer. The actual computing systems for communications and entertainment systems will disappear into the background the way that they have with portable music players or digital video systems, and computeried information reference systems will become so integrated into how we function that it will be impossible to be competitive or knowledgable without them.
Stranger
Of the possible technologies seen on the horizon, I would pick nanotechnology as the one that would have the greatest impact on society.
I doubt that. Even if it happened, it would be unsafe for general use. Failures can always happen, and if your cellphone battery has 50 times the energy and it “vents” while it’s in your pocket you may never have children again.
If anything the Beanstalk will be on mars not earth, just not this century.
Declan
Teleportation. You’ll be able to get from here to there in a flash. Then maybe something will come along to make that out-dated. I can imagine people voluntarily living physically isolated more and more from each other, but they won’t seem to be isolated. They will be virtually present anywhere.
Long life spans. That will make avoiding terrible accidents and murders really important.
Gotta be genetics. I don’t know if we’ll develop to such an extent even in 50 years, but think about it this way…
Forget any philosophical pondering about what it is to be human because people have cyborg bodies, forget the social ramifications of AI, direct neural interfaces, or a cyber-voyeur world. Forget utopian power sources too. Let’s face it, 50 years is a very short time table for any of the likely next (major) steps in space travel, beyond getting a man to mars, which isn’t all that big in-and-of-itself.
When we can literally redefine what species we are (becoming as different from Homo Sapiens Sapiens as we are from the Neanderthals), at will, there can be no greater change because of technological development except something that would wipe us all out.
Resistance is futile…
Internet 3.0
You forgot to say just before that, “We are the {SDMB} BOARDS…” :eek:
True Blue Jack
Human unhappiness will be a thing of the past-mood-altering drugs will be developed which will be safe and non-addictive. Somebody like the VT killer will never have to resort to violence-he can just pop a few pills, and be instantly happy-no humiliation over that girl who turned him down for a date-he will never miss it. The prisons will be empty, as criminals self-medicate themselves into peace and happiness. To quote the Rolling Stones" its just a shot away"
One thing you can be sure of, it will not be self medication.
On sight of negative vibes unit R124C-008843 will get a shot of current to his his ‘happy cells’ and if the feedback does not work he will be recalled for technical maintenance.
I suppose the material sciences will give us low-cost solar cells and improved batteries, as well as non-silicon computer chips.
Computer science will give us really massive non-mechanical computer memory. At least some applications of computers with no moving parts. Computer speeds and memory size will become so massive as to become meaningless.
Physics? Hard to figure. New discoveries here are all ‘important,’ but not to the average Joe.
Biological sciences? Practical cloning of food animals. At least some artificial meat products. Some recovery of lost species. Some custom-made medicines based on personal DNA and stuff. Lots of new tests for genetic diseases. Some cures.
Convergence will be the biggest thing. Nanotech and biotech are almost the same. Nanotech uses microscopic structures and it is assembled using a DNA scaffolding. So with Synthetic Biology we’ll see a new level of structures using elemental compounds that are not found in nature configured in such a way as to provide structural stability at the molecular level. So imagine superlight yet super strong materials. With that we’ll see a rise in space factories, where structures will be assembled without the drawback of Earth gravity warping the form.
As some people mentioned, increases in battery life and solar technology will be major influences. These are already occurring and are being driven by nanotech. A guy created something using tiny balls that roll back and forth against each other with almost no friction, making what is essentially, a smaller more efficient mercury switch. Another person has invented something that reclaims power from ambient vibration. Expect these technologies to start hitting your cell phones sometime in the teens. Having full video conferencing capability from your cell phone nearly anywhere in the world will change things pretty dramatically.
Fusion is a major advancement, and it is closer than probably many people realize, though farther than optimistic futurists believe. I think that the improvements in other power collection sources will probably come in under the wire before Fusion making Fusion unecessary for power generation here on Earth, as we move away from centralized structures. Fusion will probably have more impact after 2050 in that it will be what gives us the power to send probes beyond the solar system as solar panels will lose effectiveness the farther they get from a star.
Sapo I think that a Snow Crash future is a foregone conclusion. I started a thread to that effect, but nobody really bit. Open Source War. I’d recommend reading John Robb, he’s got some interesting things to say about decentralization, one of the things that I think is the most immediately applicable is that Wal Mart and Blackwater responded better and faster to Katrina than the government was able to. He talks a lot about how the decentralized insurgent structures move far too quickly for the bureaucratic centralized state systems to keep up. He compares this movement to the Open Source movement in software. To be honest, I think that this innovation will be the most important innovation over the next few years, but the average person tends to be more aware of technological innovations than social/cultural ones. You can’t touch a decentralized society in the same way you can a cell phone that never runs out of energy, however, they are linked together. Look toward society making a shift toward a systems based architecture a la the internet. Remember General Bob’s army in Snow Crash? Think of Blackwater as “General Erik’s Army”. The war on drugs and the war on terror have driven innovation in decentralization, now it’s only a matter of time until we see Snow Crash become a reality. Did you see the article in wired about the robot in Osaka that is pimping a sex club? Shades of Ghost in the Shell?
We are only in the beginning stages of the information age. The 21st century was the age of physics, look for the most dramatic innovations to be systems based. We live in the age of a Smart Mob, where SMS text messaging can change the outcome of elections like they did in the Phillipines a few years ago.