The Future

Technology has played a significant role in human evolution and has become one of the most important agents of change regarding human behavior. Technology has promoted certain forms of social and personal behavior encouraging individuals to leave behind some ways of acting, making them to become old-fashioned, and enabling new forms of interaction among persons. Although some people might have a negative perspective of technological advancements, on the other side many agree that technology has really improved our thinking skills and life quality of ordinary people by solving problems that have plagued us for many years and therefore allowing us to defy new and more complex challenges.  I believe that the present shape of the world is explained by all the technological devices that are available for us today.  Consequently if you want to guess how the world would look like in the future, you should try first to foresee the upcoming technological changes.

Of course we are experiencing tech advancements in many different fields. For example, with regard to transportation between cities separated by long distances or among countries, it´s likely that we will have, in a relative short period of time, the chance to travel using supersonic planes that will fly at higher speeds than sound and will hence reduce substantively the amount of time we invest today in moving from one place to another.  If we consider another area of development like exploration of the universe, we can also see some amazing progress. NASA is currently working on new technological devices that will ease the sending of humans to explore the solar system and collect valuable information. Thus we could expect that landing of humans on Mars will be accomplished soon.  On the other hand, the problem of energy and its relationship with environment is currently one of the most urgent issues in which scientist from all over the world have been engaged. The challenge of producing efficient power through a sustainable mechanism has been continuously addressed by governments, universities and research centers which have devoted important amounts of their budgets in order to move forward on this issue. As you can see there are many areas which will surprise us soon with astonishing advancements.

Despite of the overwhelming amount of technology improvements that we could imagine, I believe that there are two main areas which will lead the stream of upcoming technological developments.  One is related with the understanding of human body operation. Tissue and organ biosynthetic generation will enable the possibility of replacing an old organ or one severally damaged by a particular disease by a new organ fully designed and cultivated in a lab. The more comprehensive understanding of the process of cancer formation will allow us to prevent this widespread disease in a much effective way.  These advancements in biology in addition with upcoming discoveries in brain science that will reveal the present mysteries of brain operation will literally integrate the human body with computers. Blindness, deafness or even complete muscular paralysis would be solved with the help of microcomputers inserted somewhere in our bodies that will send electrical signals to the brain or allow muscular locomotion using advanced electromechanical methods.  In order to achieve these great triumphs over human nature new materials will be required and therefore the advances in nanotechnology will play a crucial role.  These new materials provided with amazing properties regarding electromagnetic conductivity and structural capabilities will have a broader range of application that will go beyond biology. They will be incorporated in industrial process which will become efficient and therefore in the long term a set of new products and services will be available for consumers at lower prices.

At the same time technology regarding integrated circuits will continue following Moore’s Law which states that the amount of transistors placed in a certain volume gets doubled every year. This means that both speed and process capacity of circuits will maintain its present growth at exponential rates and consequently integrated circuits will become more powerful, smaller and cheaper. They will be in some sense omnipresent and almost every object will have a card attached to it with a message such as: “Intel Inside”.  In order to continue with Moore’s Law quantum computing will be essential because it will allow the processing of much higher volumes of information. This constitutes the second key area around which technology will develop at very fast rates.

The capability of processing gigantic amounts of data through quantum computing and the ability to connect computers to our brains and bodies will have an enormous impact on our lives that will reach almost any human action. Communications will be dramatically transformed from holographic projections and learning processes will evolve in such way that memory as we understand it today will be useless. The availability of information as we are currently seeing it will continue its growth but we won´t need to be carrying any notebook, Ipad or smartphone with us because a microcomputer connected to the cloud will be attached to our bodies.  Working routines will be very different and remote work will increase. Therefore the whole structure of corporations will also change and smaller companies will appear. In the long term we will have to accept that each individual itself will be considered as a corporation. Even more, governments will progressively lose their capacity of taxation and thereby governmental action will begin to decrease.  As the entire world will be connected some native customs will completely disappear, languages will unify and free-market economies will be developed everywhere. The present notion of countries will probably be affected and will evolve towards a concept of universal governments. In such a world, how are we going to resolve our problems? Who will administer justice? There will be wars although any country will have the power of destroying the entire world? In some strange sense the future entails a contradiction regarding concentration of power. Technology will help to distribute it among individuals by giving them a sort of infinite power. It seems that as more technological advancements help us to solve our problems and improve our skills, higher ethical standards will be demanded in order to manage these amazing but potentially dangerous technological tools.