by Caleb Peter

In the year 2067, 50 years from now, the world will be different. Futurists predict that the world population will be over nine billion. I will be 67 years old and I imagine my future self cranky about living with that many people. I might be one of those old guys that yells at those kids to get off their lawn. If there’s going to be two billion more people, that’s a lot more mischievous whippersnappers on my lawn.

In 50 years, we’ll have to make our food sources more efficient. We’ll have to form a more efficient way of consuming energy with all of that carbon dioxide going up in the air, and from what I’ve heard, a lot of carbon dioxide in the air is bad. Plastic waste is filling the ocean in some parts of the world. Scientists predict that the Dead Sea will dry up, and the polar ice caps will lose a lot more weight from this danger called Global Warming, if you’ve never heard of it.

It seems like everyone subconsciously makes out the future to be very bleak, but there’ll certainly be good things too, right? Technology will be way more advanced. Forget flying cars, I am more excited to see self-driving cars in the future. Can you imagine taking a long road trip and just sitting back and enjoying a long nap? With these near-perfect computing cars, we wouldn’t have to worry as much. Imagine how much lives would be saved on the road if human error never occurred. This could be very possible in the near future. Advances in technology can save us.

Robots will be strong enough to dig into rubble and save lives. Artificial Intelligence will be able to compute problems that would take years for humans to, which could mean great things for us. IBM Watson, a computer that beat the human champions of Jeopardy!, has been put to use diagnosing cancer. IBM Watson’s accuracy rate for lung cancer is 90%, whereas for human physicians it’s only 50%. Imagine where this technology will be 50 years from now. It could be ten times the power of where it is now, or more. Let’s hope that if IBM Watson becomes self aware, it won’t see any of “The Terminator” movies and get the wrong ideas.

Looking into the future, we should be a little afraid, but there are ways to build a good one, and once we solve it, peace may be near. Advanced technology including AI and robots can fix many problems if we set them in the right path. Luxuries arise from advanced technology, such as self-driving cars, but who knows? Maybe AI could do something amazing like cure cancer and find a more efficient way of energy. As for the now, I am excited to be living in this world, even though there are many problems, because they can be fixed, and it will be a future to live for.