Will globalization continue to make the world’s countries more alike? Will the Internet be the same or even still around in the same way? Will the Earth be richer due to economic growth or poorer due to depletion of resources?
How much global warming will take place by then? Will genetic engineering of humans be commonplace? Will racism be nearly extinct?
Keep in mind that although 2060 sounds like a long time from now, it’s only 44 years in the future, the same distance 1972 is from today.
Personally I don’t think 2060 will be vastly different from today. There will probably be about 10 billion people, multidimensional poverty will be mostly eliminated, there won’t be any more elephants, and temperatures might be 2 degrees warmer. Virtually everyone will be on the Internet as opposed to half the world now. Crime will continue to fall as policing and mental health treatments improve. National borders will still be guarded similar to how they are now in terms of visiting and immigration. WW3 won’t happen.
I think the style of things like computers, cell phones and television will change but I think today is already closer to 2060 than it is to 1972.
I don’t think 2060 will be too different from today. Ever since the invention of the PC and Internet, human invention has kind of entered a “cruise phase;” like how an airliner takes off quickly and climbs steeply but then just cruises. There’ll be moderate inventions and improvements, but nothing spectacularly changing or ground-breaking.
Societally, I think 2060 will be a much more liberal version of today. Democratic socialism will be the norm. Atheism may be the strong majority in nearly all Western countries. The GOP of today will be virtually unheard of.
I think medicine and technology will have improved in amazing ways by that point, no more face transplants or prostheses, teeth will be able to be regrown, the little cilia hairs in your ear will be able to be restored, and a cure for balding will be found, if you lose a limb, they will be able to regrow it, if you need a transplant, they will be able to regrow your own, this will probably only be available in rich countries though, there will still be a lot of poor. The U.S. will continue to drain the brains of the best and brightest from other countries. Countries like China and India will be heading into bad times because of both overpopulation and global warming may start causing real problems, maybe famines, and incredibly destructive droughts and hurricanes and shit like that. The differences between rural areas and suburban and urban will be even more pronounced than they are now.
In 2016 I’ll be a spry lad of 97, in 1972 I was 9. From a sex standpoint (and everything boils down to a sex standpoint) it will most likely be the same on both ends - Probably physically capable of sex but unable to find anyone with which to prove the theory.
I mean, who gives a damn about flying cars if one is unable to make out in the back seat?
Fusion and Quantum Computing: the world will be amazingly different in many ways.
China will be the world’s leading superpower, and the U.S., Europe, and Russia will be arrayed against it in a very comfortable cold war. Comfortable, because everyone’s economy will depend on everyone else, and no one wants to topple the cart.
I think by 2060 we will be facing a fundamentally different world, with the start of it showing up in the first world, if not globally just yet. We’ll call it the post-labor age. Computers and robots will be able to do virtually every task that humans do and usually do it better. You’ll start seeing laws that prevent many jobs from being done by anything as unreliable as a human being. I’m not sure what solution we will arrive at, but it will likely be some sort of socialist or communist end product in which people have their needs provided for without having to work to earn a wage. People who want to work will probably have to do so through a virtual reality simulation, because there’s just so little real work available for mere humans.
I remember reading a very similar argument, about how nothing really new had been invented since the 1950s (barring the laser). It was written in 1986 or thereabouts :).
I’m voting that 2016 will be more like 1972. The big game changer will be when a way to reverse the aging process is invented. I’m not sure that will happen by 2060, but whenever it does happen it will be the most important invention since we started inventing things. My guess is that at most it’s 100 years away, but it could be sooner.
I’m not sure how valid it is, but I read an article claiming the machine intelligence revolution is the third great technological revolution humans will undergo. The first was agriculture which birthed the neolithic revolution. The second was the industrial revolution that started in the 18th century. Both opened up huge new aspects of culture, science, travel, communications, etc and both caused economic growth to accelerate by a factor of 10-100.
So in theory, if the machine intelligence revolution actually pans out the world of 2060 will start to seem as foreign as the world was before the industrial revolution.
There will be a larger gulf between the haves and have nots. I foresee a much sadder future for the have-nots. They will slowly lose out in employment to the technology revolution. TPTB will use technology to reach deeper into the wallets keeping the poor poorer and easier to control. At the same time that same technology will be used to spy on, control, and soothe the populace. In short 1984 IMO was about 50-75 years early in its predictions of societal control.
It won’t be like either option in the poll. Our present society is unsustainable; whether it collapses or not, it’ll be different. I feel the three likely possibilities in no particular order are:
Post-apocalyptic collapse due to any number of scenarios.
Tyrannical dystopia of one variety or another. An essentially invincible tyranny due to the technology that will be available, everything from omnipresent surveillance to unquestioning robotic enforcers to genetically engineering the newer generations for subservience.
A world that’s been technologically transformed enough that we wouldn’t recognize or understand it.
If you transported someone from 1972 to the present (without going through all that muss of living through the intervening years), they’d find it utterly incomprehensible. Likewise, if you transported someone from now to 2060 in the same way. The transition from 1972 to now only seems like it was comprehensible, because we all took it gradually, and similarly, the transition from now to 2060 will seem comprehensible.