PREDICTIONS OF THE MONTH
To celebrate PC Pro’s 25th birthday, we asked tech experts, futurists and more for their predictions about the world 25 years from now. Here are 25 predictions for what 2044 will look like, from AI to interfaces and beyond
Will AGI be powering our lives in 2044? What about quantum computers? We speak to futurists, PC Pro readers and industry bigwigs for their insights into the world 25 years hence.
It’s almost impossible to predict anything 25 years away – it’s like forecasting the weather for next January. So much has changed in the past two-and-ahalf decades that the only prediction we’re sure of is that more change will come. Still, our (more than) 25 experts were willing to take a punt on predicting what 2044 could bring. Here’s what they said about AI, science and more.
All cars will be driverless Let’s get this one over with first: plenty of tech industry experts are certain that driverless cars are only a matter of time, but what that means for our commutes remains to be seen. “Car sharing will explode – even by as early as 2026 it’s predicted that more rides will occur with ride-sharing than privately owned vehicles,” said Dan Bladen, CEO and co-founder of Chargifi. “And, by the year 2044, car ownership in urban areas will collapse, ride-hailed, connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will be commonplace and it will be illegal to drive manually on certain roads.”
By 2044, autonomous vehicles will be fully integrated into our lives, said Margaret Campbell, assistant curator of contemporary science at the Science Museum – and it will extend beyond cars. “Driverless technologies will… improve the lives of people around the world by doing dangerous jobs, like clearing mine fields, and providing better access to medical supplies for people in remote areas.”
We’ll have general AI…
General AI are smart systems that think and make decisions in a human way. “The future of data control will be entirely automated, with what we know now as AI having advanced to human-like AGI (artificial general intelligence), and on its way to becoming godlike ASI (artificial super intelligence),” said Jon Lucas, co-director at Hyve Managed Hosting.
And that will change how we do business and live our lives, says Rajen Sheth, vice president of product management at Google Cloud AI. “This is a fundamental shift similar to what we saw with the internet, and similar to what we experienced with PCs before that. AI is going to change how we live, travel, and work, supercharging many of the decisions we make. We’re just at the very beginning with AI.”
…or maybe AI will specialise
Sue Daley, associate director of techUK, doesn’t believe we’ll have AGI thinking for us by 2044, but does predict specialist AI will be part of everyday life. “While general AI will remain the fascination of science fiction writers, AI technologies will have become integrated into every aspect of society and will be part of normal everyday life for every UK citizen and business,” Daley said.
Duncan Stewart, an analyst at Deloitte, agrees. “We will not have strong AI by 2044 – a computer that is as smart as or smarter than a human – but what weak AI, the stuff we are doing today with machine learning and neural networks, will be doing will be astonishing stuff. So astonishing I can’t even try to predict it 25 years out.”
Martyn Leman, CEO of Cloud Perspective, predicts AI will have a massive effect on businesses including his own, but it will remain “weak AI”. He said: “I don’t think we will have crossed the AI singularity and sadly for all his correct predictions and inventiveness, Ray Kurzweil will have passed away by then too, but there will probably be a statue of him outside the Google Campus.”
“Ride-hailed, connected autonomous vehicles will be commonplace and it will be illegal to drive manually on certain roads”
Machines at work
AI won’t take human jobs but augment them, predicts James Gin, chief scientist of DataSine, with humans acting as conductors, controlling an orchestra of smart, connected systems. “For example, a software developer might instruct a computer to solve a problem by voice, and then correct and evaluate the system through natural dialogue,” he said. “An artist might instruct a creative machine to imagine landscapes, and alter them through dialogue and gestures. Writers could instruct an AI copywriter to research several sources before drafting an article, and change the style through a quick discussion.”
Matthew Sparkes, former staff writer on PC Pro, had a less positive take on Twitter: “In 2044 the 50th anniversary article will be written by an algorithm.” No wonder he left journalism.
There’s no question that robots will continue to edge into the workforce, and Martin Port, founder of BigChange, argues that robots could mean workers such as engineers need not travel to different locations to do their jobs, with robots instead undertaking tasks autonomously or via remote control. And they could join the shared economy. “Those engineers, autonomous vehicles and robots may not even be employed or owned by your organisation,” Port said. “To maximise the efficiency and value of their operations, organisations will share resources to an evergreater degree over the coming decades.”
WHAT’S NEXT FOR COMPUTING?
The dawn of quantum Forget old-fashioned processors – the future is quantum, says techUK’s Daley. “Digital computer processing will have been overtaken by quantum computing, with the UK a world leader in the development, adoption and deployment of quantum-based services, systems and products,” she predicted, adding that will help spur on further developments in tech, such as AI and perhaps even 7G networks. Futurist Tom Cheesewright agrees, saying the newly coined “Neven’s law” suggests we’re entering the dawn of the age of quantum computing. “The data is limited at best right now, but it suggests that quantum processing power is advancing at a doubly exponential rate – dramatically faster even than ‘Moore’s law’,” he said. “If this is true, then by 2044 we will all be using hyper-powerful quantum computers. Even your phone might be quantum-powered.”
Sentient tools
Futurist Brian David Johnson has spent his career predicting technology
to help Intel with its road map. “In the next 25 years we will be living in an age of sentient tools,” he forecasted, saying the combination of AI, IoT, robotics, computational power, high-speed connectivity and autonomy will create tools that can think and react. “We will have entered an age of emotional and behavioural computing. You will be able to program your system by simply living with and interacting with it.”
That includes the emergence of self-replicating computational systems or biological machines. “The veil separating the digital from the biological will come down, giving rise to machines and data that can freely move between the two realms,” he said. “The engineers and designers who will capture the full potential of these technologies haven’t even been born yet.”
DEVICES OF THE FUTURE
Easy enough for adults to use Andrew Herbert is the chairman of The National Museum of Computing. He predicts that visitors to the museum in 2044 will marvel at the clunky gadgets in the 2020 exhibit, wondering “how people used such primitive clunky devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones, and why we needed to set up our own networks for homes and offices”. He adds that, in 2044, “adults won’t need to ask a child to set up their gadgets for them. Gadgets will be smart enough to work without any setup.”
Mind control kills the keyboard
The death of the keyboard has been long predicted, so will we finally ditch typing by 2044? Futurist William Higham suggests it may be possible as interfacing technologies take off. “We’ve seen the huge popularity of voice-activated devices, biometric developments – such as fingerprint unlocking on phones,” he said. “Combining this with developments in computing, AI, biotech and more means we’re likely to see more ergonomic, biometric, intuitive devices, meaning more gestureactivated computers, voice-activated products, mind-controlled products – the Chinese have already created a very basic mind-controlled car.”
Justin Wheatley, head of core technologies at ONVU Technologies, believes we’ll get information via a “mind/machine interface reading your thoughts and projecting the visuals via a worn device”. He adds that information won’t be on-demand, but predictive: “Humans will have developed how we interact with technology, without having to refer to a device to get the answers or initiate actions. We’ll just act.”
Laptops will live on
“I will still be alive, and so will the laptop,” predicts Deloitte’s Stewart. “It might be called something else by then, but a battery-powered, connected device with a large keyboard and large (11in plus) screen is simply too useful a form factor to go away. We will use mobile devices more than we do today, and we will use voice command more then than we do today, but for a number of tasks or pleasures (think gaming or watching video) a thing that looks enough like a laptop to fool you at a glance will still have over a billion device userbase in 2044.”
Mobile materials
New materials mean mobile devices will evolve, said Cheesewright. “The last 25 years have seen technology drive lots of changes in the way the world works,” he explained. “Breakthroughs in materials science promise lots of changes in the way the world looks. We can make things thinner, lighter, stiffer than before and we can integrate multiple functions into a single material, allowing the creation of clothes, vehicles and devices that take us much further into the realms of science fiction.”
Better batteries
If we want all this tech to work, we’ll need to solve the challenges of energy supply and battery life, Higham believes. “Recent tech breakthroughs suggest this might be feasible, at least for personal tech, with ‘living’, algae-based batteries, solar power, micro energy supply [and] smart roads that can power streetlights and charge our phones as we drive,” he said. Data collection will be so thorough that we’ll all have digital twins, making modelling and prediction a doddle. “Britain will be a nation connected and enabled by digital twin technology,” explained techUK’s Daley. What exactly is a digital twin? “[They are] real-time, living, interactive computer models of every aspect of our national infrastructure that can be accessed by both public and private sector organisations to help plan, predict, understand and respond to issues affecting physical, but smart, assets such as transport systems, utilities services and buildings, which will still be critical in our digital future.”
Healthy data
“Adults won’t need to ask a child to set up their gadgets for them. Gadgets will be smart enough to work without any setup”
Intel believes the digitisation of healthcare data will finally pay off. “Imagine what a machine learning or deep-learning system could do with several decades of healthcare data,” said Jonathan Luse, general manager of the IoT Group at Intel, suggesting researchers could spot trends and patterns in how disease develops over decades using neural networks to sift through petabytes of data. “They’re going to be able to detect how the lifestyle decisions you make in your 20s affect you in your 60s.”
Digital exchange
“The biggest change in our experience will come not in the underlying technology but how we interface with it,” predicted Cheesewright. He believes that by 2044 we’ll barely
notice the difference between what is physical and what is digital. “Our worlds will be filled with as many digital artefacts – people, creatures, robots, objects, billboards and screens – as physical.” Or as PC Pro reader Martin Brindley put it on Twitter: “I think we will all be working remotely and communicating through holographic augmented reality; à la Princess Leia.”
BETTER UNDERSTANDING
Talk to the animals Cancel your German classes, instant translation is on the way. “The majority of people will have smart, real-time simultaneous translation devices built into their mobile devices, enabling them to travel the world and chat to locals almost anywhere [and] by 2044 we might even start translating non-human communication… yes, there’s a chance you’ll be chatting to your dog,” said Higham. Some would say he’s barking…
What did you say?
Computers are already good at speech recognition, but they still need to work at understanding what our words mean, said Dr John Yardley, founder of Threads Software. “It will take all of 25 years for the technology to catch up. But when it does, you can expect that anything that can be recorded… will be recorded and will be understood. You will be just as likely to receive an alert telling you that you have just said something politically incorrect as that you are late for the dentist.”
Smart code
When AI starts writing code, human developers will be left in the dust by generative code engines, believes Andy Harris, CTO of Osirium. “Initially this will create tight, fast, concise code that will be utterly unmaintainable,” he said. “This will cause products and companies to fail; the gradual improvement will come from meta code, which will embody rich outcome definitions to drive the generative code engines. Then meta code will be called declarative programming and become the code that humans write.”
LIFE IN 2044
Home shopping Forget the high street: shopping will move into your living room. “Smarter homes will have augmented reality enabling a very real experience of shopping – at home,” said ONVU Technologies’ Wheatley. “You can click on a ‘Next store’ button and be immersed in a virtual store where you can try clothes in your home environment, automatically adjusting the lighting and size.”
And when you do head to the high street, shopping will become “frictionless,” said Intel’s Luse. In the future, the store will know you and your preferences, perhaps suggesting a tie for the suit you already have. “Having a store that can make recommendations on what I already have, that personalisation gets better,” he said.
“It will be impossible to simply walk around in any city… without your voice, face, or other biometrics being captured”
Cash is dead
Cash will finally die, but it won’t be replaced by Bitcoin, explained Temtum CEO Richard Dennis. “I’d be very surprised if we have to do anything as taxing as touching a card or anything – it will be done with facial recognition,” he said. “[There will be] no more banks in the way we have them today – everything will be online. There will be a global currency – something like a US dollar equivalent – not asset backed and not a stable coin. Blockchain will not be the architecture but an evolution of cryptography-based storage will be.”
Getting around
More of us will live in cities by 2044, and we’ll need new ways to get around. “Unmanned drones will be the way products and services are delivered and, thanks to quantum computing and AI working together, advancements in battery technology will mean connected autonomous vehicles are not just on the roads but in the skies with flying drone taxis overtaking road traffic,” predicted techUK’s Daley. “This will have a profound impact on what our cities will look like.”
Truly smart cities
Smart cities will make better use of visual technologies, believes Intel’s Luse. Right now, a smart, connected camera lets us know that a bin is full, but in the future the system will not only spot the overflowing bin but automatically deploy an automated lorry for a pickup – all without asking a human. “They can understand a problem, and devices can opt in to solve that problem,” he said. Luse offers another example in which driverless cars’ cameras could be borrowed by police to spot a car with an abducted child.
WHAT ABOUT US?
Privacy and security get serious Jon Lucas of Hyve believes the flow of data means privacy as we know it will become an “ancient concept”. Shona Ghosh, a former PC Pro staff writer, suggests that digital privacy may become a luxury that only the wealthy can afford. “It will be impossible to simply walk around in any city, bar perhaps the least developed or populated, without your voice, face, or other biometrics being captured by a system. The plus side of this will be complete convenience,” she predicted. But avoiding the downsides will come with a cost. “The super-wealthy will pay to access the few natural spaces where there is no technology or cameras. Those will be closed off to the rest of us without the money.” All of this makes security even more important, predicts Osirium’s Harris. “Cybersecurity failures will cause injury and death,” he explained. “People will be kidnapped due to vulnerable autonomous car software.”
What it means to be human
The pace at which these changes will occur means we need to decide now what we want from these technologies, said Dr Chris Brauer, director of innovation at Goldsmiths,
University of London. “Every facet of our lives will be augmented by technology so the main challenges will lie in defining what matters to us individually and collectively and how to harness the power of these technologies to achieve our goals,” he said. That means tech companies need to start considering people, rather than just revenue. “The quality and diversity of lived human experiences will become the ultimate return-on-investment in technology. Put differently, we’ll need to continue to focus on optimisation and efficiency in the way we do things, but will be challenged to ultimately define what it means to optimise not just the bottom line, but our humanity.”
“Technology platforms are reshaping the boundaries of our minds and the borders of our world,” added Jennifer Grygiel, assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University. “Cognitive life and countries will be remixed and not necessarily for the betterment of humanity or happiness.”
Should we fear the future?
What of sci-fi dystopian futures? Brian Runciman, head of content at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, has this vision: “By 2044, an AI will have taken inspiration from the Stuxnet virus and decide to remotely trigger the ecological apocalypse. It will set up a series of GANs [generative adversarial networks] competing on pointless tasks… take the results and form a huge blockchain with them. Every server farm on earth will be called into action. Humans will have no access to computing power, and the power drain with its attendant ecological impact will trigger the apocalypse.” He called this prediction “tongue in cheek” – here’s hoping it doesn’t prove true.
Indeed, futurist William Higham says all of the above predictions make a certain assumption: that we’re even around in 25 years. “Finally, all the above is dependent on mankind surviving safely into 2044, and there’s no guarantee of that,” he said. “Looking at the way the world is now, there’s a chance that nuclear war or massive climate upheaval could render all of the above entirely theoretical.” Not a cheerful thought.
Think positive
We need not be so negative, argues former PC Pro staff writer and current IT Pro features editor Jane McCallion. “While I don’t think we will have solved all the world’s problems, I hope that we will have found technological solutions to at least some of the most pressing ones – clean energy, both in the form of renewables and modern nuclear power plants, less polluting or environmentally costly transport systems, and better ways of building urban environments.” She points to new targeted treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease, as well as lab-grown meat and space travel – tech touches on all these varied areas, and by 2044 we might have genuine progress on such fronts. And that’s progress worth waiting for.