World in 2069

"The more unpredictable the world is the more we rely on predictions."  

"Future" was always erratic. It's difficult to envision a world fifty or a hundred years from now.  Starting from the core of civilization to technological advancement, everything is erratic. The only constant thing is change. If you time travel to the mid of the 19th century and exchange words with a stranger and tell him that in 2020 we can have a virtual face to face conversation with anyone around the globe, he would contemplate for a while and will regard it as preposterous. He would think in terms of the then technological state and the idea of having a virtual face to face chat with anyone around the globe will be beyond the scope of his thinking. The same goes for people living in 2021. If a time traveller from the early 22nd century tells us that there is no concept of 'life expectancy' and anyone who wishes to be immortal will be able to achieve immortality by paying a price for it, we would reject the idea as absurd and impossible. Because the idea of immortality seems preposterous for us(when we think in terms of today's technology). As I said in the beginning, the future is erratic but the probability for this to happen is not nil. On the contrary, if the population continues to boom at an average of 1.1 percentage it would result in ~10.5 billion people and would result in resource conflicts. I fear that this would result in behavioural sink' (an experiment known as "Universe 25" conducted by John Calhoun on the rodents which resulted in the civilization collapsed due to overpopulation). 

          The next awaiting revolution will be in the field of money. It is optimistically predicted that the cryptocurrency would take over fiat currencies. It would function beyond the purview of any world governments and it would be difficult to overvalue or devalue the crypto for the needs of the various economies. Of course, with ample speculation abounding that the cryptocurrency industry is a bubble that is destined to pop, it’s also possible that predictions of a crypto future could be overblown. If that happens, the monetary transactions will be hard to monitor and the traditional currency would lose its shine and will be as good as toilet paper.

           The pace of innovation in the field of biotechnology and Artificial intelligence (AI) is exponential. Many kinds of research are moving exponentially in the field of biosensors. Calibrated and designed to track various biosignatures such as blood pressure, pulse, breathing, and body temperature, biosensors will revolutionize how we monitor our health. This might sound like a good thing to happen but if this tech is misused then the implication would be drastic. If the government gets to have access to such technology, then the concept of over-the-skin surveillance will become "under-the-skin" surveillance for its people. Considering the growth rate of 400 per cent in this field, anything is possible like manipulating the humans digitally to dance to the tunes of the ruling power. Another such threat is the pace of innovation in the field of Artificial intelligence. AI's are programmed to have an intelligence superior to that of the summation of all human knowledge. Connected to the internet, it would constantly update itself and it would take over the machines worldwide. A superintelligence taking control of the digital world would be as scary as a natural catastrophe. The result of such a takeover is erratic. It would either be beneficial to humans collectively or it would be the end of humanity. The probability for the latter is more high and likely to happen. It is easy to explain the cons of the AGI takeover with an analogy. We build roads, dams, bridges etc for the betterment of 'human life'. But at the same time, we will kill millions of Ants unknowingly to build the same. The motive of humans is not to kill Ants but to build the roads. The same goes for AGI take over. The motive of the AGI will not be the extermination of the Sapiens but it would do so because we are a 'hindrance' in its path to somewhere.

Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 165 million years until a meteor wiped them out. Homo sapiens are on this earth for 300,000 years which is considered a fraction of dinosaurs timeline and the threat of civilization collapse is already evident. Let's hope that human innovation won't turn out to be it's own 'meteor' that would decimate the sapiens from this world. Let's hope that the 'great leap forward' that happened around 65000 years ago that made who we are today, will not go in vain.