How will your technology be in 50 years

As a question it’s simply dull, but as an assertion it would be senselessness.  However, this is the audaciousness of a book I have purchased today in the library. It has been written by a journalist named Mike Wallace whose intention does not lead us to an “oracle time” but invites to wonder about what might happen in the next 50 years keeping an initial retrospective of what had happened in last 50 ones.  Just ask your grandpa if he imagined that, in 1947 there would be a cell phone with including camera as it was invented in 1997.

The book’s title is “A future view to our world in the next 50 years”, and it is based on interviews with persons who won Nobel prizes in Scientific Innovation Area or had been models in different areas cracking knowledge paradigms. Paradigms actually known as common use technology such as energy, telecommunications, medicine, economy or in more general term, scientific advances.

This theme started a discussion with my son, who wondered if I could know how the future will be after reading it. At last, we did a deal: if in 50 years on, when I’ll be scratching more than 80 (if I get it) and he will be reaching over 60, we will uncover the book’s dust from our library returning to the ancient practice of “reading”; looking through its pages and guffawing together again… as we did today while he was having fun with his Nintendo’s new magazine edition and my 6 years old daughter was excited (a Spanish idiom: “comerse las uñas”) viewing another magazine cover which contains the characters of “High School Musical”.

This will be so, because it’s a technology reckless to say for example, how will Google Earth be within 5 years, or how many GB of RAM will AutoCAD 2015 take for. We just only have to see how was cartography 60 years ago.  It’s certainly the same to forecast about next 50 years.

But this book is not a wasting time. Here we can read different opinions of persons such as:

• Vint Cerf, Google Vice President; known as “The Internet Father”
• Kim Dae-jung, the former President of the Republic of Korea
• Ronald Noble, Interpol’s General Secretary
• Norman Borlaug, Nobel Prize winner; he’s called the “Father of the Environmental Revolution”
• Craig Newmark, Internet pioneer and founder of the craigslist

These opinions could give us a great motivation. After all, if we read blogs like this one which now takes you nearly 32 minutes…  Here I leave you some highlight lines I found attractive although I hardly revised it completely:

You can connect your car at night and recharge the battery, using electricity when energy in your local plant has less demand.

Malcolm Bricklin, Subaru and Yoke America founder.

Computer games and Virtual Reality could improve so much their quality that people could find most of their entertainment there rather than travelling, reading, attending concerts, theatre or other amusements.

Gerardus ´t Hooft, 1999 Physics Nobel

The capital flow and economic growth will be less concentrated in the West. China and India are likely to be equal competitors, but the true is that they will be global economic leaders.

Among the greatest challenges we’ll confront in the future lazing loving society, there will include lifestyles and behaviors associated with economic solvency like obesity, stress and exercise absence.

It is so a nice reading, that I recommend for your next library visit.