What Will the World Look Like in 2050?

By Kevin Jennings

Even under the best of circumstances, predicting the future is incredibly hard. For example, in 2008 I said that Bitcoin was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of and that it would never take off. While I’m still right about that first half, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have indeed taken off in a big way. But they’re still stupid.

I’m not the only one to make failed predictions, either. Anytime people try to predict 100, 50, or even 25 years into the future, most of what they guess is wrong. And like I said, that’s under the best of circumstances. Arguably, we are currently experiencing the worst.

The world has currently reached a number of extremely volatile tipping points in global politics, economics, technology, climate change, and medicine. Add into that the fact that AI is getting its grubby little six-fingered hands into everything, and it’s easy to argue that the developed world is set for some major, transformational changes.

But it’s also important to remember to be reserved with our predictions. After all, 25 years isn’t that much time in the grand scheme of things. I don’t have access to Simon’s demographic info, but I’m guessing that the majority of people watching this are at least 25 years old. So think about your childhood home and the surrounding neighbourhood. How much has really changed in the past 25 years?

For me, it’s surprisingly little. The Blockbuster that used to be across the street from my parents’ house has rather fittingly been replaced with an activity center for the elderly, but little else has changed. The streets aren’t filled with flying cars, and kids aren’t hopping on hoverboards to take their robotic dogs for a walk.

The most dramatic changes over the past 25 years have all been related to the internet. It’s speed, how we use it, and its ubiquity thanks to the invention of smartphones. There have been other changes as well, like how MP3 players were both created and made obsolete in a span of little more than a decade, but nothing terribly dramatic. The world of Blade Runner still looks like a very distant future, despite the movie taking place in 2019.

But even though the future is impossible to predict, we’re going to try anyway. And what makes this even more fun is that you’re probably going to get to hear Simon disagree with a lot of what I’m saying, so you’ll get twice as many predictions for your dollar. At least hopefully that will be fun for you, but depending on the extent of your parasocial relationship with us it may feel like watching mommy and daddy fight. Don’t worry, we’ll kiss and make up afterwards.

With that said, let’s get on to some wild speculation about 2050! And we’re going to start with a wild prediction that there is no chance Simon is going to agree with me about.

AI Will Be Everywhere, But ChatGPT Is Going to Be Illegal

For better or worse, there’s no question that artificial intelligence is going to be a big part of our future. The technology that was once only used to embarrass human chess players has expanded rapidly, and it will continue to do so. And honestly, there are a lot of great things that can be done with this. From manufacturing to supply chain logistics to medical diagnostics to even education, there’s pretty much no limit to the number of ways we’ll be able to use AI to improve the world around us.

That said, and I want to be very clear about this, everything we use is still going to be narrow AI, the type of AI that is trained to do one very specific task really well. We will absolutely not have general AI by 2050. There are people out there that think general AI could arrive within the next year or two, but I cannot possibly overstate how wrong they are. Hell, some even say we’ll have artificial super-intelligence by 2030, which is insanity.

General AI, or AI with human level intelligence across all applications, is simply not possible yet. You’d basically have to create a digital version of a human brain from scratch to make that possible, and we don’t know anywhere near enough about how our brains work to do something like that. I could go off on a really long rant here about how narrow and general AI work and why general AI is probably at least 100 years away, but I’ll refrain.

However, despite the myriad of ways in which AI is going to be integrated into people’s daily lives, I suspect that things like ChatGPT and other generative AI will either be highly regulated or completely illegal. I know that idea breaks your heart, Simon, as I’m pretty sure you love ChatGPT more than you love your wife and kids, but there is a very legitimate reason that this would happen. Also, the issue is technically more about other generative AI rather than large language models, but I assume those would get caught up in any legislation anyway.

Either way, we are currently living in a post-truth world. This phrase actually goes back about two decades, though it became more widespread in 2016. Basically, we are living in a world where reality is much less important than what people choose to believe, and politicians around the world have been playing into this by knowingly repeating easily disprovable lies as facts.

This became even more prominent with the creation of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. The majority of deep fake content that currently exists is fake celebrity porn, but where porn goes, the rest of the world follows. Seriously, why do you think we all used VHS instead of Betamax and Bluray over HDDVD? It wasn’t exclusively because those were the formats backed by the porn industry, but the industry did play a major role. Where porn goes, the rest of society follows.

Regardless, generative AI has been used to create deep fake content that supports the narratives pushed by misinformation peddlers, making it easier for nefarious actors to undermine society by creating an alternate, AI reality. You may think that AI images and videos are easy to spot, but remember: AI generated content is currently the worst it will ever be. The technology is only going to improve, and it will be harder even for intelligent and skeptical people to tell the difference between authentic and artificially generated content.

This presents a major problem for civilization. We have seen a global rise in authoritarianism, and these strong men have heavily relied on telling the population to believe what they say rather than the things those people see with their own eyes. Thanks to generative AI, they no longer have to do that as fake content can be created as proof of the authoritarian lies.

Realistically, the best way to combat this problem is to put an end to free speech absolutism. It’s hard to imagine the United States ever going for that though, certainly not by 2050, so the next best step is to either heavily regulate or completely outlaw generative AI. Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle. Even if the technology was outlawed, it wouldn’t be able to put a complete end to the problem of deep fake content muddying the waters of reality.

Governments Will Finally Take Climate Change Seriously

Speaking of post-truth reality, there are a lot of politicians talking about what they refer to as the climate change hoax. This is honestly a shame, because it’s pretty incredible what humanity can do when they actually make a concerted effort.

Remember that massive hole in the ozone layer? Some of you watching might have said “no”, because you’re too young to remember when that was a big deal. The hole in the ozone was discovered in 1985, and the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 to address the problem. It banned the production and use of CFC’s except in very niche scenarios, and since then global production of CFC’s decreased by over 99%. The hole isn’t fully fixed, but it’s been healing and is expected to be completely gone in the next few decades.

Unfortunately, because big oil has a lot more money to throw at lobbyists than big refrigeration did, we did not see a similar global agreement to fully transition to clean and renewable energy with any sense of urgency. The result has been global temperatures rising at faster rates than scientists originally anticipated, accompanied by increases in both the frequency and severity of natural disasters. This is only going to get worse in the coming years, but by 2050 we can expect to see governments finally taking the problem seriously.

Of course it will be too late by the point this finally happens, but we can expect it to finally happen because of some major ways the world is expected to change. For example, do you currently live in New Orleans or Miami? Well you won’t in 2050. The ocean levels are currently projected to rise by a full 12 inches by 2050, and that number may even go up as the effects of climate change continue to outpace scientists’ projections.

Neither of these cities is going to be fully submerged ala Atlantis, though parts of New Orleans will be permanently flooded. However, Miami, which is already subject to frequent flooding, will be flooded even more often from storms and high tides. The levees that keep New Orleans dry will also be under increased stress, dramatically increasing the risk to the city if one of them breaks.

When coastal cities start to become uninhabitable, governments will have no choice but to finally address climate change. Or maybe not. People keep rebuilding houses in areas of California that are prone to wildfires, so maybe living in a house that periodically is completely submerged in the ocean will be considered a small price to pay for a beautiful, coastal property.

It’s unlikely the world will be off of fossil fuels by 2050, as it still provides about 80% of the world’s energy. But by 2050, that number will be under 50%, and ideally as low as 20% or so. Honestly those numbers may be overly optimistic on my part.

There will be another major change to how the world looks though. Currently, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. However, as coastal cities flood and warmer climates become more arid and prone to extended periods of drought, urban areas are expected to become flooded with “climate refugees”. Estimates vary, but from the numbers I’ve seen people seem to agree that 68-75% of the population will live in urban areas by 2050, as large areas of land become essentially uninhabitable.

Cities will not only be more crowded, but likely much more vertical as well. There are already skyscrapers and high-rise apartments, but we can expect these to become taller and more abundant. The high-rise residential areas, anyway; I don’t think there’s any reason that commercial skyscrapers would need to get taller, but they may do it anyway just to remind the general public how much more important they are.

Of all the things that will change by 2050, the increased urbanization would be the most visible to a time traveler. Unless they time traveled to 2050s New Orleans, that would be notably different. But for non-coastal residents of the world, the increased density in urban areas is going to be the most obvious change.

World War III Will Still Not Have Happened (In a traditional sense)

Finally some good news. There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years (and realistically over the past 80 years) about the possibility of World War III happening. While there have been times in recent memory where that seemed like more of a real possibility than any other time of my life, it is unlikely to have happened by 2050. And it’s all thanks to Oppenheimer. And the 129,000 other people who worked on the Manhattan project including hundreds of other scientists, but mainly Oppenheimer.

On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the United States dropped Fat Man and Little Boy on the Japanese population, killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians. It was a devastating attack, and one that changed the world forever. Other countries raced to build their own nuclear weapons, and to date there are nine countries known to have nukes.

While that can feel terrifying at times, it has actually worked to prevent another large scale global war thanks to your friend and mine, mutually assured destruction. Since the development of nuclear weapons, there has not been a single large scale conflict between nuclear powers. India and Pakistan have had a number of brief but intense skirmishes, and at times it seemed that they were extremely close to a large scale conflict, but thus far it has been averted.

In all likelihood, this trend will continue through 2050. The fear of World War III will never fully go away (as the entire principle of mutually assured destruction as a deterrent is based on having rational state actors), but it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, barring the takeover of a nuclear power by a government of ideological extremists who genuinely don’t care whether they live or die. Those people do exist, but they tend to be non-state actors.

But with global tensions rising with regards to certain nuclear powers, what we are much more likely to see instead of World War III is an escalation of proxy wars. These allow nuclear powers to provide support to opposing sides of a conflict without directly engaging one another. That’s no different than what happens today, but like I said in the introduction: it’s only 25 years. The world isn’t going to be radically different in most respects, and honestly I’ll take increased proxy wars over a full scale nuclear conflict any day.

Obviously I’d rather have neither, but I am trying to keep these predictions within the realm of possibility. But speaking of the potentially changing face of global geopolitics…

The United States Will Be the New France

Alright, this probably needs some explanation, as I’m certainly not suggesting that the French are going to conquer the United States.

Once upon a time, long before any of us were born, France was the most powerful country in the world. They were the largest economy in the western world, the only part of the world that was considered to matter back then, and French was the language of diplomacy for centuries. But over time, that all came to an end. Now, the French are just the butt of various jokes and racial stereotypes. Sure, they’re still one of the world’s nine nuclear powers, but who gives a shit? It’s just France.

Alas, this is the way the United States is headed as well. But hey, we had a good run. I mean, sort of. We became the largest world economy in the 1890s, and since World War II we have largely been considered the most powerful nation in the world. And since the fall of the USSR, there hasn’t even really been a debate about who was number one.

But by 2050, all of that may come to an end. Some of it definitely will, and that’s not even really speculation. By 2050, the United States is projected to only be the third largest economy in the world, behind both China and India.

China is already considered a near peer to the United States in many regards, and the United States is in the process of losing a lot of its soft power, one of the areas in which it had China handily beaten. That’s not to say that better diplomatic direction couldn’t restore some of that soft power, but many countries see the US as being politically volatile, so there is the understanding that all things with the US may be as temporary as four years (or less in the event of death or resignation).

There is also speculation that the US dollar will no longer be the global reserve currency by 2050, although it’s harder to say whether or not this will be the case. While there’ll be plenty of reason for countries to want to abandon the US dollar, there isn’t really a single currency that could serve as a suitable replacement.

It’s also sort of a Catch 22, as if a nation were to try to dump all of its dollar reserves, that would cause the dollar to go down in value thus losing them money. There are theories about either a multi-currency reserve or some sort of globalist currency, but those are complex enough solutions that I doubt they’d be worked out by 2050.

Barring some major global event like World War III, which we already said is unlikely, at least English is likely to remain the language of diplomacy. From a purely selfish standpoint I find that to be really important, because I don’t want to have to learn Chinese. It’s not that I’m opposed to learning a new language, and Chinese is extremely literal so it’s honestly a good fit for my personality. I just can’t be bothered to learn a new alphabet, especially one with over 50,000 characters.

Admittedly, the United States will never truly be France, not while we’re still spending a trillion dollars per year on the military. But after decades of enjoying the role of the world’s only true superpower, having to share first place or even potentially being dethroned as the most powerful nation in the world is certainly going to be a massive adjustment for many Americans as we approach 2050.

I guess all that’s left to do is enjoy global supremacy while we still can. As a rather depressing aside though, there are currently turtles in the world that were born before the United States rose to dominance and that will still be alive after we have been overtaken.

The First Moon Base Will Have Been Built

Enough boring shit like geopolitics, let’s get to the stuff you actually care about (and probably expected when you requested this script): cool future tech. There are currently two different projects to build bases on the moon. One is by China and Russia, and one is the international Artemis program being led by the United States. Both are planned to be built by the late 2030s, and while we can definitely expect there to be delays, it’s a pretty safe bet that at least one will be up and operational by 2050.

Does this mean we are about to witness the golden era of galactic human expansion? Of course not, don’t be silly. That would be cool and all, but we probably need world peace and a post-scarcity society before anything that ambitious can become a reality. The moon bases being built are just intended for research purposes and for mining resources from the moon.

Basically, these are going to be a lot like the International Space Station. There will be astronauts up there doing their thing and it’s going to be really cool at first, but after a few years you’ll stop thinking about them entirely.

Seriously, how often do you think about the ISS? When news broke last year about those two astronauts being stranded up there, did you think to yourself “oh yeah, I forgot the ISS was still a thing”? Okay, maybe you didn’t, Simon, cause you’re a science nerd, but I assure you a lot of people had that reaction. Whatever your reaction was though, that’s exactly what these moon bases will be like.

But even if we won’t be fully colonizing the moon or other planets, you’ll still have your opportunity to go to space. And by you I mean Simon, not any of the plebs watching this video. Space tourism isn’t new, as Katy Perry can attest to even if people wished she wouldn’t, but it’s expected to be a major commercial industry by 2050 rather than a sort of fringe thing mostly featuring celebrities. In fact, some speculate that the space tourism industry is going to be the main way that legitimate space exploration and research is funded, though I’m personally a bit skeptical about that.

However, while space tourism is expected to become far more common, it’s still going to be a luxury service only available to the mega-wealthy. And honestly, I’m totally okay with that. I’m sure most people aren’t, and for very understandable reasons, but I like being here on the ground. If something in my car breaks while I’m driving, then oh no, I’ll have to walk. Or probably ride in the tow truck. But if my plane or spaceship breaks down mid flight, well I guess I’m dead.

Besides, remember all the hilarious memes about those rich assholes that died in the Titanic submersible? That was only funny because it was billionaires. If it had been some random couple from Ohio who saw the movie Titanic on their first date and saved up to ride in the submersible for their 10th wedding anniversary, that would’ve been a tragedy.

In short, space exploration won’t have progressed too much by 2050, but it will be heavily monetized. Don’t get me wrong, building a base on the moon is a pretty big step, but considering the 65+ year gap between walking on the moon and building a base there, don’t expect anything too major within your lifetime.

I’ve seen some so called experts predicting that humans will have launched a deep space probe at 15% the speed of light by 2050, and as cool as that would be I have no idea where the fuck they came up with that. The fastest probe ever built by humans is the Parker Solar Probe, and after spending multiple years slingshotting around Venus to build speed, it topped out at 430,000 mph, or 0.064% the speed of light. How we’re going to make something that goes 234 times faster than that in the next 25 years is beyond me, but maybe I’m just being a pessimist.

The First Transplant of a Complex Bioengineered Organ Will Have Taken Place

Let’s move from pessimism to optimism, as this next prediction could truly revolutionize the world of healthcare. Organ transplants are a tricky thing. To start, you need organs to transplant, which means a person needs to die. That’s not a great starting point, especially since you generally want to harvest organs from young, healthy people who died suddenly in a car crash or something.

We do still take organs from people who die of old age, especially if they were in generally good health, but these are usually used for people who will have a short life expectancy even with a transplant.

Getting the organs is just the first step, though. You need an organ that is the right size, right blood type, and that is geographically close to you as organs for transplant have a very short shelf life. This creates the frustrating problem that people have to wait years for an appropriate organ to become available, despite the fact that about 20% of donated organs go unused because they expire before they can be transplanted into someone.

And even if you do get a donor organ, there’s still the issue of rejection. Our bodies reject anything that isn’t supposed to be inside them, which includes organs from someone else’s bodies. People who receive organ transplants typically have to spend the rest of their lives taking expensive immunosuppressants to prevent rejection, but these drugs also increase the risk of other illnesses since their entire goal is to weaken the immune system.

But what if there was a better way? What if you could receive a new organ that was made using your own cells, thus eliminating the risk of rejection? Not only would these organs be a perfect match, but they wouldn’t be reliant on lucky timing in order to receive a transplant because they’d be made to order.

Well that is what researchers have been working on for the past several years, and by 2050 it may be a real possibility. There are a couple ways to grow these organs. One is to create an artificial scaffolding in the shape of the necessary organ, the other is to take an existing organ flush it with detergent to remove any cells, then use that as scaffolding.

In the 2000s researchers from Japan figured out how to turn a person’s skin cells into stem cells, so by cultivating a person’s stem cells inside the scaffolding they can be used to grow an organ specifically for that person. And since the scaffolding will either be artificial or from one of many hollowed out organs, finding one that’s the right size will no longer be an issue.

While this research has been promising, actually growing a full organ has been difficult. And the more complex the organ is, the more barriers there seem to be in making this dream a reality. Currently the two biggest issues are scale and functionality. Growing a bunch of stem cells in a Petri dish is easy, but getting them to grow on the scaffolding has been quite a bit harder. Researchers have been able to grow miniature pieces of organs, but not really a full organ yet.

Even once it’s grown, it still needs to work. It’s believed that they need to find a way to replicate the conditions of being inside a person’s body to stimulate these organs to actually function instead of just being blobs of cells, but so far this hasn’t happened yet. It will probably still be in experimental phases rather than common practice, but by 2050 it’s likely that researchers will have made the necessary breakthroughs to perform the first transplant of a complex organ that was engineered in this way.

As promising as that sounds, unfortunately it does not mean you’ll get to live forever. I’ve seen some wild predictions that by 2050 modern medicine will have made humans biologically immortal, and that’s downright silly. There’s a whole lot of research into aging and how to prevent it, and current data shows that, no matter what we do, the human body has a roughly 125 year maximum lifespan.

It might push as high as 150, but even that is doubtful. Even if we can constantly swap out aging body parts for new ones, you won’t get to live for thousands of years as some sort of modern Ship of Theseus. I mean, unless we can also swap out your brain for a new one, but that new brain wouldn’t have any of your memories or knowledge, so you’d essentially be a new person.

And if we could figure out how to copy memories, we’d probably be building ourselves cool robot bodies that were far more sturdy than the fleshy husks we currently occupy. Again, though, anything like that is deep into the future, not something we’ll see by 2050.

The Metaverse Will Be a Thing (But Not Facebook’s Version)

Sorry, Zuck, but Facebook’s Metaverse sucks and nobody wants it. But that doesn’t mean people don’t want something along those lines.

We can expect to see a huge explosion in augmented reality services, as well as increased interest and uses for virtual reality. Honestly though, I think augmented reality has more legs because of how much easier it is to use.

For many people, their first experience with augmented reality was Pokemon Go. You got to travel out into the real world with your phone and capture wild Pokemon that appeared on your screen, but augmented reality has a lot more practical uses as well.

Have you ever been wandering around a furniture store wondering what something would look like in your living room? Or maybe you purchased it, only to then discover that it didn’t fit in your room the way you expected or that the particular shade of green didn’t quite match the rest of your décor. Well there is already a solution for this problem, at least if you buy your furniture from Ikea.

Ikea has an AR phone app that allows you to see exactly what furniture will look like inside your actual house. It properly scales the objects as well, ensuring that you don’t buy a couch that’s wider than your room is. Multiple companies like LensCrafters offer similar apps that allow you to virtually try on different pairs of glasses to see what style looks best on you.

That’s already pretty cool, and we can expect to see this technology go much further by 2050. By 2050, you may actually be able to use an AR fitting room to try on different clothes from the comfort of your own home. I know that doesn’t sound like a big step up from virtually trying on glasses, but apparently the amount of processing power required for this is immeasurably higher. There are websites that allow you to choose from premade mannequins of different body types to try to get an idea how clothes will look on you, but to genuinely see how clothes will fit your actual body is a much harder task.

While I do believe that we will see AR branch out into other aspects of life besides just shopping, there will be a large increase in VR use by 2050 as well. There will even be a version of the Metaverse, though it will likely be much more like a VR version of Second Life rather than Zuckerberg’s dream of us attending office meetings in poorly rendered conference rooms.

Still, the main uses of VR will continue to be gaming, fitness, education, and training in tasks that would be too dangerous to try in a “hands on” setting without enough virtual practice first. Even though there has been a lot of interest in creating VR worlds for several decades at this point, the somewhat cumbersome headsets required to interact with virtual reality will continue to prevent it from exploding in popularity the way some people would like.

There is a fundamental limit to how lightweight you could make a VR headset while still having it function, and the requirement to wear a headset will remain a barrier to entry that limits the growth of fully immersive VR. It’s much easier to just use your phone or even a pair of Google Glass style glasses to augment the world around you, barring some sort of direct brain to computer interface. And it is extremely unlikely that we will see such an interface come into existence before 2050, at least not in the sci-fi sense people are thinking of.

However, by 2050 the use of direct brain-computer interfaces will be much more common for people suffering from paralysis or missing limbs. This technology is currently in the early development stages, but it has shown a lot of progress. Within 25 years we can expect this to be one of the standard options given to people with those conditions, assuming they can afford it.

The United States Will Have a Leftist Party

This all brings me to my final prediction for 2050, which is by far the boldest prediction in today’s episode.

The idea that the US would ever have an actual leftist party seems fundamentally un-American. While we claim to have a left wing party and a right wing party, on a global scale we have a moderately right wing party and a far right party. And seeing as “socialism” is still considered a dirty word in the US, it seems unlikely that such a thing would ever change.

However, politics tend to act like a pendulum. It’s not exact, as swings in direction don’t change with specific regularity nor is each swing of the same magnitude, but the general principle still applies. One party takes control of the government, people become disillusioned either with their inaction or with policies they disapprove of, then the other party gets voted into power.

This may be a hyperbolic overreaction on my part, but I expect a massive and arguably disproportionate pendulum swing between now and 2050. As a statement of objective fact, the US is currently flirting with authoritarianism in a way that has never been seen in American history. This, coupled with the end of American economic supremacy that we discussed earlier, could cause an unprecedented level of disillusionment. And from that, I predict an actual left wing movement will form at a meaningful scale.

Whether this represents an evolution of the Democratic Party or a new third party that is actually capable of competing with the current institutional giants on a national level, I can’t say. Because the idea of a two party system is so fundamentally ingrained in the identity of the US, much to our detriment and despite the explicit warnings of George Washington, it is more likely that the Democratic Party will have to change to fulfill this role.

That’s not to say that the United States is going to become some sort of socialist state by 2050, because that is definitely not happening. But I suspect the political pendulum will swing far enough left that the United States will actually have a party in power that would be seen by Europeans as “left-wing” rather than “slightly less far right”. It’s even likely that by 2050 we may see legislation for a New New Deal, though I pray to God they don’t actually call it that. If I had to guess, I would expect such legislation in either 2044 or 2049, as far from the next presidential election as possible.

I know that to many Americans this sounds like a terrifying prospect, and flirting with authoritarianism and fascism is far more appealing than flirting with socialism and communism. And to them I would say not to worry, as this is actually the only way to achieve their end goals.

The entire “Make America Great Again” movement is predicated on the idea that the US needs to return to the way it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when the world was a better place. And while we often say the past was the worst, they do have a point that, in many ways, the US was a much better place back then. It was absolutely worse in a lot of ways as well, especially if you weren’t a white man, but it really was better in very meaningful ways.

There’s a missing piece to that puzzle though, an important causal factor that explains precisely why life was so great back then for (white) Americans: a top marginal income tax rate of 94% for any income earned above $200,000 (about $2.5 million dollars today). It was because of this downward redistribution of wealth that Archie Bunker was able to own a house and support a family as a high school dropout working on the docks. He wasn’t even a manager, just a random dockworker, but he could afford a life that most college graduates today could only dream of. And while the US won’t be back to that by 2050, it’s likely that legislation to make that American dream a possibility again will either be in the works or in the process of being implemented.

But for all of you watching, there will be one drastic change to the world by 2050 that will affect every one of you: Simon will no longer be running his fact based YouTube channels. Sure, he’ll still be on YouTube, but he’ll just be livestreaming himself golfing and playing shuffle board, or whatever it is that retired people do. As an American born after 1980, I don’t expect to ever know what people do with their retirement.

Frequently Asked Questions

What role will AI play in 2050?

AI will be integrated into various aspects of daily life, including manufacturing, supply chain logistics, medical diagnostics, and education. However, it will still be narrow AI, not general AI.

Will generative AI like ChatGPT be regulated or illegal by 2050?

Yes, generative AI like ChatGPT is likely to be either highly regulated or completely illegal due to concerns about misinformation and deep fake content.

How will climate change be addressed by 2050?

Governments will finally take climate change seriously, with significant reductions in fossil fuel use and increased urbanization due to climate refugees.

What will be the state of global conflicts by 2050?

World War III is unlikely to have happened in a traditional sense, but there will be an escalation of proxy wars between nuclear powers.

What will be the economic status of the United States by 2050?

The United States will be the third largest economy in the world, behind China and India, and may no longer be the global superpower it once was.

Will there be a moon base by 2050?

Yes, at least one moon base will be operational by 2050, built by either the international Artemis program or a joint China-Russia project.

What advancements in organ transplants are expected by 2050?

The first transplant of a complex bioengineered organ is likely to have taken place, using the patient’s own cells to eliminate rejection risks.

What will the Metaverse look like in 2050?

The Metaverse will exist but not in the form envisioned by Facebook. Augmented reality will be more prevalent, with practical uses in shopping and other areas.

Will the United States have a leftist party by 2050?

Yes, there will be a leftist party in the United States, either through the evolution of the Democratic Party or the emergence of a new third party.

What will be the impact of climate change on urban areas by 2050?

Urban areas will become more crowded and vertical due to climate refugees fleeing uninhabitable regions, with 68-75% of the population living in urban areas.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: What Will the World Look Like in 2050?
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.