Some 30 years ago one director did the unthinkable and jumped the space-time continuum to bring us the 1985 classicBack to the Future. The movie had it all: time travel, great tunes, time travel,brilliant characters and time travel.
It’s a day future fans have been waiting for with bated breath. In fact, they were so eager that many mistakenly celebrated the wrong day in 2010. And with celebrations now in full swing, comparisons have been scattered across the Internet, from Jaws now being in 3D but lacking a 19th sequel, to there actually being more TV’s than is physically possible to watch.
With that in mind, we did some digging of our own to see whether we could dodirector Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Galeproud in predicting what will happen in 2045.
It seems that several experts foresee “talking” buildings in the future, which would have windows replaced by augmented reality screens. One such futurologist is Ian Pearson, who believes buildings will have artificial intelligence personalities.
Cities will be made from living materials that respond to the environment. They breathe in pollutants, clean wastewater, and use sunlight to make useful chemicals, energy, heat and vibrant vertical gardens, he explained.
Homes and offices will collect and process data from various sensors to flag up when repairs are needed or when the heating needs to be turned on. As such, Pearson explained that, much like the human nervous system, there will be no switches and manual controls. He also suggested that builders would wear exoskeletons akin to Ellen Ripley’s in Aliens.
That just sounds like there needs to be a new elevator system! Unless these suits come closer to being one of Iron Man’s demos, then there would be no way of getting to the top of a building if need be. And upon further research, we actually found that German engineers from ThyssenKrupp had been trying to sort that very problem out. The company has started working on magnetic levitation that would enable even cars to travel vertically inside buildings.
In comes as no surprise then that Pearson expects buildings to be taller than the world’s tallest building the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and that they would be mini cities in their own right.
Furthermore, Hamza Bendemra, a research engineer at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University, believes that advances in software will likely make pilots obsolete in 2045 thanks to breakthroughs in jet propulsion. Airplanes will be lighter and embedded with sensors that will allow them to repair themselves. Chemists from the University of Bristol have already developed a self-healing compound that could enable wings to heal themselves in a similar way to how human skin does!
Communication technology was one of the predictions that Back to the Future II made correctly. In the film, Marty Senior is shown talking to a co-worker on a video call, while Doc Brown had a facial-recognition machine and a brain-wave analyser. Philip Branch, a senior lecturer in telecommunications at Swinburne University of Technology, said that by 2045: “Doc Browns brain-wave analyser will be perfected, making telepathy a feasible network interface. This technology is surprisingly advanced. It has been possible for some time to control machines through brain control.”
It looks like we’ll have the contact lenses seen in TV series Torchwood, which transmits everything the wearer sees, soon enough! In Torchwood, the character Gwen Cooper is able to receive information via a special pair of contact lenses.
This very contact lens has been created by researchers at the University of Washington and Aalto University in Finland, and it consists of an antenna that harvests power sent out by an external source, as well as an integrated circuit to store this energy and transfer it to a chip containing a single LED.
However, Branch is not convinced the technological breakthroughs we’ve seen over the past three decades will continue into the next. He said: “There could even be an economic, social and environmental apocalypse. Perhaps change will continue at a much slower pace than the past few decades. Maybe we will see a return to evolutionary rather than revolutionary change and the technologies we have now will still be around much faster, more sophisticated and ubiquitous of course, but still recognisable.
“Or maybe some combination of economic, social and environmental apocalypse will cause the collapse of existing infrastructure and telecommunications will be back to pencil and paper or something even more primitive.”?
Are we heading the way of TV series Revolution, wherebyelectricity stops working, thus plunging the world back into the dark ages Hopefully not, because based on the few episodes I’ve seen there will be a lot less use of pen and paper and more henchman shooting muskets.
According to social entrepreneur Charles Leadbeater, however, the web, as a single space largely made up of webpages accessed on computers, will be long gone. We will be sharing videos, simulations, experiences and environments, on a multiplicity of devices to which we’ll pay as much attention as a light switch. Yet, many of the big changes of the next 25 years will come from unknowns working in their bedrooms and garages. And by 2035 we will be talking about the coming of quantum computing, which will take us beyond the world of binary, digital computing, on and off, black and white, 0s and 1s.
But Russell Davies, head of planning at the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather Is convinced that the realm of advertising will see the most change. He suggested that there will be products consumers will be allowed to buy but not see advertised.
He said: We’ll end up with all sorts of products in plain packaging with the product name in a generic typeface as the government is currently discussing for cigarettes. But it won’t stop there. We’ll also be nudged into renegotiating the relationship between society and advertising, because over the next few years we’re going to be interrupted by advertising like never before.
Read on to find out about the UK’s economic structure and the future ability to buy emotions.
NeuroscientistDavid Eagleman is of the belief that despite calls that robots will take most jobs, we’ll be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex and thus far surpass artificial intelligence. The way he describes it, it sounds like a scene out of the movie Limitless.
He said: I’d like to imagine we’ll have robots to do our bidding. But I predicted that 20 years ago, when I was a sanguine boy leaving Star Wars, and the smartest robot we have now is the Roomba vacuum cleaner. So I won’t be surprised if I’m wrong in another 25 years. Artificial intelligence has proved itself an unexpectedly difficult problem. We will have cracked the secret of human memory by realising that it was never about storing things, but about the relationships between things.
“Will we have reached the singularity the point at which computers surpass human intelligence and perhaps give us our comeuppance We’ll probably be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex for those who want it badly enough to risk the surgery. There will be smart drugs to enhance learning and memory and a flourishing black market among ambitious students to obtain them.”
Similarly, Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, suggested thatAI will find the answers to many of the humanity’s biggest questions. However, by 2045, despite not yet achieving human-level artificial intelligence, we will have intelligent tools that augment our abilities to an unprecedented degree.
What’s perhaps more surprising is the fact that consumers will be able to purchase “high-quality emotions” online. This is according toAlex Ayad, head of Imperial College London’s Tech Foresight Practice, who said: “Imagine your friend at Glastonbury can post a photo on Instagram and with it comes bundled a faint twinkling of what she was feeling right there in that moment, so you too can share emotionally in her social experience.
Similarly, your phone, car or home will be able to read your feelings and adapt accordingly. At the moment machines can work out where someone is, who someone is and perhaps what they are doing or “like” but thats about it.
Richard Watson, founder of online magazine Whats Next, claimed that the next stage will be for machines to intuit human feelings. This can be done by “harvesting” facial expressions, body language, heart rate, voice and so on, he said. If you are typing text into a computer, the computer might consider the speed you are typing, decide you are stressed and conclude that this isnt the best time to allow you to read negative emails.
“If you are driving a car, the car might consider how you are driving and infer certain conclusions,” Watson said. “If the car decides you are angry and in danger of driving unsafely it might adapt itself to make things safer.
Some, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, have predicted that technology may go beyond understanding us to leading a revolution specifically when it comes to nanotechnology. He believes that such tech will allow computers to become so powerful that they will lead to a new kind of medicine on a sub-cellular level that will allow us to abolish ageing and death. And the subject of nanotechnology can’t be discussed without referring to movie Big Hero Six, which highlights the astonishing feats minus demolishing a city and presumably out of the hands of a slightly mad professor that can be done with nanotechnology.
This was echoed by Richard Jones, vice-chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Sheffield, who claimed that despite Kurzweil’s “technological singularity” perhaps never coming to fruition, nanotechnology will lead to some genuinely transformative applications. New ways of making solar cells very cheaply on a large scale will offer us the best hope we have for providing low-carbon energy on a big enough scale to satisfy the needs of a growing world population aspiring to the prosperity we’re used to in the developed world, he said.
One of the biggest predictions for the UK, however, comes from Will Hutton, executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation, who suggested that in 2035, there is a good prospect that Britain will be the most populous, dynamic and richest European country the key state in a reconfigured EU.
“Our leading universities will become powerhouses of innovation, world centres in exploiting the approaching avalanche of scientific and technological breakthroughs,” Hutton said. A reformed financial system will allow British entrepreneurs to get the committed financial backing they need, becoming the capitalist leaders in Europe. And, after a century of trying, Britain will at last build itself a system for developing apprentices and technicians that is no longer the Cinderella of the education system.
What I’m keen to find out though, and am expecting with great relish, is whether Back to the Future II’s Black & Decker Hydrator invention will pop up before 2045. This kitchen device turns raisins back into grapes and stale pizza into a freshly delivered snack. We may even see many kitchens kitted out with a 3D printer that can turn out a fairly respectable pizza. After all, NASA is already experimenting with 3D printed food for missions to Mars and beyond.
