The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today

KurzweilAI.net, April 17, 2008
In the new book The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today: 60 Of The World's Greatest Minds Share Their Vision Of The Next Half-Century (Thomas Nelson, April 2008), Mike Wallace asks a group of visionaries, including 15 Nobel Prize winners, to describe the next half-century.

Among the forecasts:

- Our grandchildren will live to be 140 years old.
- Diseases such as breast cancer and heart disease will be preventable or even wiped out.
- Each of us will have a copy of our own complete DNA sequence, incorporated into a highly accurate electronic medical record and can be accessible from anywhere.
- Schizophrenia and bipolar disorders will be well understood and treatable.
- People will be forced to marry others based on genotypes and those who are not authorized will be subject to tremendous tax burdens for any sick or disabled children.
- Humans will have exhausted most of the coal and oil reserves of the planet and added many pollutants to the environment.
- We may have lived through a nuclear war.

Essayists in the book include Nobel-prize-winner George Smoot, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Internet co-creator Vint Cerf, and futurist Ray Kurzweil.