Future Intelligence The World in 2050 - Enabling Governments, Innovators, and Businesses to Create a Better Future (Tamás Landesz, Sangeeth Varghese, Karine Sargsyan, 2023)

 

Future of Leaders

• Latest neuroscience research to integrate mindfulness strategy to enhance performance and resilience.
• Evaluate engagement and behaviour change strategies in one personal and professional lives.
• Be aware of methods of manipulation, it is important for responsible leaders to remain ethical and use their talent for good.
• Transition towards flat organic network organisations based on 'connected autonomy' providing new and gigantic opportunities to improve our ability to scale.
• High performance and outstanding leadership by nurturing lifelong performance and resilience.
• Protecting one main asset: oneself.

Future of governments, politics and democracy

• Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Democracy, characterized by decentralization of power and self-organized communities.
• Private Algocracy, large digital organizations enforce their power over citizens  and governments.
• Super Collaborative Government, high level of collaboration andco-creation  between citizens, governments and other stakeholders.
• Over Regulatocracy, characterized by over-protection by the government by  over-regulating with the aid of technology.

Future of Geopolitics

• Future politics will move away from right and left towards more openness or resistance to change—a sort of worldview struggle.
• China will become the world’s largest economy and a more significant political actor.
• The proportion of ‘less free’ economies with a high degree of state ownership and control is predicted to increase sharply.
• In addition to traditional powers like China, India, USA and possibly Europe and Russia, emerging power hubs by 2050 will possibly be Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam, all with large populations and economies.
• Warfare is transitioning from regular armies to freelance contractors, militias, special, robotic and cyber forces, making nations’ traditional military less relevant. Future conflicts will be more about spheres of influence, water, resources and supply lines and less about territory.
• Technological, ecological, social and cultural soft power will most probably become more important than economic and military hard power.

Future of Healthcare

• Healthcare trends—In 2004, we spoke about personalized medicine, and several years ago, the term precision medicine came out and started to, even more, tend healthcare to a single person. The preventive enhancing approach, digital healthcare, integrated (into daily life) medicine, etc. will become usual. The future is not about how we treat diseases but how we prevent them from occurring. 
• Health system challenges—We must fight the idea of seeing a hospital as a business. We need to enhance affordability. In the future, we will overcome the problem of payability and affordability. The system will change in favor of health accessibility, system and best quality sustainability, integrative health patient experience, and simply better health. 
• The enablers like regulatory enhancements, researching and curing medicine symbiosis, new integrative organizational and business models, and healthcare  platforms (technological) will make future medicine more accessible if politics  keep the speed of technological and curative development.

Future of Energy

• Global energy demand will continue rising at an average annual growth rate to 2% with most of the increased demand coming from South Asian and African countries which experience significant economic growth during these three decades.
• Population growth and economic growth in non-Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries will mean that their share of global energy demand and global GDP begins reflecting their share of world population better, whereas the OECD countries are overrepresented in these metrics right now.
• Most of the increased demand of energy will be in the form of electricity, and efficiency in electricity production, storage and transportation will become absolutely crucial.
• Almost 77% of new energy demand is predicted to be met using solar and wind energy production, with some help from biofuels and nuclear energy.
• Even in the baseline, non-optimistic scenarios of things continuing mostly as they are, renewable energy is predicted to account for 27% of the world’s energy consumption in 2050, primarily driven by governmental policies and technological innovations.
• Without significant leaps in clean energy production, storage and transmission, natural gas will retain its share in energy usage due to its lower relative price compared to renewable energy technology and its stability which means weather patterns cannot cause disruptions in its supply.
• The realization of a net-zero future requires the adding capacity for 630 GW of solar power and 390 GW of wind power generation every year, mass electrification of vehicles to increase electric vehicles’ share of global sales from around 5% presently to 60% by 2050 and significant improvement in energy storage and transmission.
• Specifically, development of long-duration energy storage technologies is crucial to make solar and wind power stable sources of energy which are not massively disrupted by weather patterns. Developing extensive power grids that cover large areas will also be necessary to ensure regions can substitute for each other in power production.
• Carbon capture, storage and use technologies will be very important and pro-moted through government taxation, in order to get private industries to also  adopt them.

Future of Climate Change

• Global warming will most likely be limited to 1.5 °C with a less than 30% chance of overshooting this target. The warming will continue at 0.1–0.3 °C per decade in the next three decades, with the optimum target being 1 °C.
• Human activities like industrialization have been the cause of 1 °C warming above pre-industrial levels in the last century alone. Even after cutting down to net-zero emissions, the accumulated effect of persistent greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide will remain.
• Arctic, Antarctic, Small Island Developing Nations and coastal regions of countries or continents will be the worst affected.
• Warm water coral reefs and fisheries are bound to be severely impacted, while flooding becomes more common both from oceans and internal river systems.
• The pathway to 1.5 °C warming is one of net-zero emissions by 2050–2055. This makes it necessary for widespread adoption of clean energy through electricity, much higher adoption of electrical vehicles, massive progress in clean energy technology like storage and transportation and mass adoption of carbon capture and use systems.
• Mean temperatures of all regions will rise, with extreme hot day temperatures rising by almost 3 °C, while cold nights become warmer by 4 °C. Sea levels will rise to threaten coastal areas with expected sea level rise ranging between 26 and 77 centimetres.
• Globally, 6% of insects, 8% of plants and 4% of vertebrates are predicted to lose their ecosystems and possibly go extinct or have to evolve rapidly. Forest fires will become more frequent, while the threat of zoonotic diseases in humans increases.
• Almost 1.5–2.5 million square kilometres of tundra and permafrost area will thaw, whereas we will lose 70–90% of the global coral reefs. Many species may shift latitudes upwards, especially in marine ecosystems.
• Agriculture will be severely impacted by climate change, as it is one of the major contributors of greenhouse gases, and erratic or extreme weather patterns will severely affect productivity in countries where agriculture is reliant on weather patterns.
• Human dietary patterns would have to become more environmentally conscious by shifting away from ruminant meats to other animal-based meat or the most carbon-efficient plant proteins. Livestock consumption and production will need to be curtailed as that process is a major source of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, we will need to reduce food waste and loss by at least 50%.
• Large-scale climate migration is quite likely with an estimated 216 million people across the world becoming internal climate migrants. The worst affected regions will be North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.
• The causes of large-scale migration will include food insecurity, water scarcity and threats of flooding which will become common in coastal areas due to sea level rises.

Impact

• Temperature extremes: Heat waves will become more intensive, more frequent and longer lasting, as cold weather episodes decrease. Daily minimum temperatures will rise rapidly, while the number of frost days reduces in higher latitudes.
• Precipitation: Rainfall will increase substantially in tropics, decrease in the subtropical areas and increase again for higher latitudes. Higher global average temperatures will mean more water evaporation and, consequently, more precipitation. Extreme precipitation events like droughts or floods will increase in frequency across the world, but specifically for mid- and high-latitude areas.
• Snow and ice covers: Global warming will reduce the snow cover and sea ice cover to a large extent as glaciers and ice cap lose a lot of mass due to longer periods of melting in the summer and shorter winter precipitation to compensate for it. These processes are also what would lead to the inevitable increase of sea levels across the world, with ice melting from the Arctic and Antarctic significantly adding to global mean sea levels. Meanwhile, permafrost regions are also expected to experience widespread thawing due to the warmer temperatures.
• Regional monsoons: Asian monsoons are likely to become more extreme and witness increases in precipitation. Similarly, the African and Australian monsoons are also expected to increase, whereas monsoons over Mexico and Central America are likely to reduce. Asian monsoons will be significantly impacted by carbon aerosols whose impact remains hard to predict, and uncertainty prevails about their future.
• Ocean acidification: Higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the air is associated with more acidic oceans with the pH level predicted to fall by 0.14 to 0.35 units in the twenty-first century. The surface waters of oceans will be immediately affected, while deep ocean areas will be only marginally impacted.
• Sea levels: The average rate of increase of sea levels will exceed the historical rate average for 1961–2003, with an estimated rise in sea levels of 3.8 mm/year. The melting of glaciers, polar ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet will all be significant contributors to rising sea levels.

Future of Transport

• Navigation with technological support
• International public transport for diverse customers
• More service possibilities with connected and automated system vehicles
• New dedicated devices for short journeys
• The use of drones to support future transport missions
• Transport using alternative fuels

Future of Communications

• People can get help with real-world tasks from remote users (e.g., MR surgery possibilities are already existing and are used).
• Virtual people will be placed in real space.
• Support for the transition from collaborative artificial reality (AR) to VR.
• The use of MR images to enhance remote communication signals.
• Providing users with the possibility to share their points of view and see everything through the eyes of another person.
• Establishing a connection between the task space and the communication space.
• Support for natural spatial signals for remote communication.

• Natural communication: With the increase in communication speed, it becomes possible to expand the communication experience (not only audio signals but also gestures), leading to more natural communication.
• Experience recording: A technology is being developed that will allow people to capture their surroundings and experiences. That is, there is a transition from photography to record three-dimensional scenes.
• Latent understanding: Computers will begin to understand more about users and their environment. This will allow them to understand hidden behaviors, such as the direction of a person’s look.

Future of Sex and Gender

• Humans will fall in love with robots, humans will marry robots, and humans will have sex with robots, all as (what will be regarded as) ‘normal’ extensions of our feelings of love and sexual desire for other humans (Levy, 2007).
• Erogenous zones and orgasms are simply the product of chemicals firing in the brain. If scientists can replicate that feeling by firing signals from an implanted chip or a brain wave headset, then it might even be the end of sex altogether (Istvan, 2014)
• Dream sex.
• New productive revolution.
• Shifting gender roles.

Future of Consumption

• Retails will be greatly affected as consumers will purchase everything from the comfort of their habitats.
• Instead, retailers will charge for entering physical retail space with unique experience.

Future of Food

• Animals will continue to obtain legal rights that will limit the current processing methods.
• In 2050, only the super rich will be able to afford to eat animals, perhaps even on a clandestine basis.
• The protein we need, we will get from insects and synthetic processes.
• We will become a more vegetarian society, and our pharmacopeia will be delivered mostly in the form of smart foods.
• Agricultural production will move back where people live, e.g., horizontal agriculture, rooftops, synthetic biology, genetically modified plants, organic base  materials, etc.
• Genetic understanding will bring us closer to understanding our food and energy needs.

1. Step One: Freeze agriculture’s footprint; avoid further deforestation as a top priority. 
2. Step Two: Grow more on farms we’ve got; using high-tech, precision farming systems, as well as approaches borrowed from organic farming, we could boost yields in less productive farmlands—especially in Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe—where there are “yield gaps.” We can be more efficient about where we grow, what we grow, and how we grow. 
3. Step Three: Use resources more efficiently; advances in both conventional and organic farming can give us more “crop per drop” from our water and nutrients. 
4. Step Four: Shift diets; today, only 55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly; the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent). Finding more efficient ways to grow meat and shifting to less meat-intensive diets—at least in countries with already a meat-rich diet—could free up substantial amounts of food across the world. 
5. Step Five: Reduce waste; an estimated 25 percent of the world’s food calories and up to 50 percent of total food weight are lost or wasted before they can be consumed. Of all the options for boosting food availability, tackling waste would be one of the most effective.

1. Creating robot farmers and carrying out monotonous tasks conventionally done by humans with greater accuracy and less waste. 
2. Preserving precious dirt, by using smaller, lighter robots to do the jobs currently performed by tractors. 
3. Giving waste a second chance; as according to the United Nations, an estimated third of all food produced ends up rotting in the bins of consumers and retailers. One brilliant idea is using apps like “Too Good To Go,” which enables retailers to shift food destined for the bin—but still perfectly edible—to customers at a reduced cost. 
4. Slowing the aging process, for instance, in bananas by modifying their DNA, so that they produce far less ethylene. 
5. Making smarter choices and building a world fed by sustainable agriculture is a daunting task and will require all stakeholders to come together.

Future of Family

• Cyber family.
• Traditional families will perish.

Future of Homes

• Safe from intrusion.
• Customisable.

Future of Work and Business

• Europe and the United States will face a decline in population and a shortage of manpower, whereas the population in Africa and Asia would continue to grow and act as a source of manpower for these regions.
• Africa and South Asia would continue to be plagued by the absence of infrastructure and capital. Labor force from these regions would migrate to the developed regions in search of better opportunities and improved livelihood.
• The unemployment among the youth would increase multifold.
• Millions of youth would go through severe psychological, financial, and health trauma.
• Youth unemployment would lead to severe political and social unrest, resulting in disintegration and implosion of many nation states.
• Organizational democracy where all members are equally involved in the decision-making and working of the organization would become more prevalent.
• Organizations would revert to social capital—trust and goodwill between individuals and their communities—to coordinate business activities compared to the current formal systems like business contracts, management policies, hierarchies, and bureaucratic rules.
• All businesses would just be digital platforms, with no physical offices or infrastructure. Nothing would be permanent, but businesses would be on board staff, resources, and infrastructure on demand.
• No individual will be rooted to a single job or location but would choose what they need, when they need on demand.
• Large multinationals would be replaced with micro-multinationals with no fixed assets.
• Business reputation would emerge as a key factor to reaching and retaining customers in the future world.
• Every business decision would be driven by real-time data analysis and predictive and actionable data.
• Robots would work alongside humans, improving productivity substantially for both humans and robots.

Future of Learning and Education

• According to “A Scorecard for Humanity,” a report from the Copenhagen Consensus Center, our world gains every time an individual is educated, and our world pays a price when people go illiterate. The report suggests that in 1900, when 70% of the world was illiterate, we lost a whopping $240 billion or 12% of the global GDP because so many remained illiterate. Currently, that loss is around 7%, and in 2050 when illiteracy falls further, the cost would have further reduced, but that loss would still be around 4% of the global GDP. In the future, those regions and nations of the world that manage to educate its people would gain, whereas those that do not pay much attention to this crucial aspect would continue to suffer losses, hidden in plain sight. Some of the interesting predictions for 2050 include:In 2050, though the world would have made tremendous progress in basic education, illiteracy would persist with almost 500 million uneducated in the world. Illiteracy shall be most concentrated in the regions of Africa and South Asia, whereas most other nations would move toward a total eradication.
• In 2050, there would be a systemic change in the higher education sector across the globe, as the age cohort of 18 to 24 years in Europe would shrink, but in South Asia and Africa, this would continue to grow. Many higher education institutes in Europe would face shutdown or takeover, mainly in the Eastern blocs. In the United States, the demographic composition of students in higher education would change, where it would tilt toward more non-whites and immigrants. African higher education in 2050 would be focused on digital content rather than high-cost physical infrastructure-driven ones. By 2050, Asia would emerge as a superpower in higher education led by China catering to nearby regions.
• In the future, there would be a disruption of the current pedagogic and regimental learning systems toward flatter, flexible, and open systems based on research in learning sciences.
• In 2050, education would be driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and big data— resulting in complete personalization of curriculum and methodology focusing on each individual's minute needs. All mundane tasks in education will be performed by AI.
• In 2050, compared to the traditional didactic pedagogy, education would move toward project-based learning, based on practical experience and learning. Life-long learning would become a norm, where every experience would be driven by a micro-certification.
• In 2050, educational spaces would evolve to be like superlabs—multidisciplinary, microschools with individual attention and personalized learning compared to those closed factorylike atmospheres with focus on adult control and surveillance.

Future of Religion

• Artificial awakening

Future of Entertainment

• Hologram.
• Memory implantation.

Resetting the Future: World 50.0

• The United Planet (UP) Game, founded by Lucian Tarnowski, is a civilization design game. A time traveling immersive reality where participants create as their timeless selves. The game unites athletes of transformation as Gaians, together designing a thriving civilization in harmony with life. It is based on the premise that it is more effective to cooperatively reverse engineer solutions from the future than it is to build incrementally from the mess of the present. The community unites geniuses, artists, musicians, elders, and wisest most innovative, visionary people from around the world to create the “Age of We.”
• Futurians cofounded by Georgie Benardete and David Hanley are gathered at inflection points in time, using their leverage to shift the world to a more favorable axis. They are leaders, thinkers, and creatives with a vision for a bluer, greener future to catalyze the actions needed to realize that future.
• Regenopolis founded by Diane Binder builds on the premise that the majority of people do want positive change, but there are no sufficient physical locations to gather in a trustful and creative environment, allowing for transformational experiences and serendipitous collaborations.