“If you think we’re electronically dependent now, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Wireless communications will dominate everything, everywhere.

“Humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in all of human history.”

From the web to wildlife, the economy to nanotechnology, politics to sport, even transforming what it means to be human.

In my last three post I addressed the subject of Society changes due to Technologies : The Internet, Big Data, and Smart Phones.  So it would seem remiss of me not to inform the sixteen years old of today what is in store for them when they are, lets say 65.

It’s hard to focus on the future when the present is changing so rapidly before our very eyes let alone what will happen in 50 years’ time.

I could predict that this and that is going to happen.

From the capturing and digitizing the entire information content of your brains to chips that will eventually may have the ability not just to store information, but to learn and remember, just as real brain cells do to create complete copies of our brains’ content.

I could draw up a list of WHAT IF’s:

Like: Like what if you could finding a method of copying and uploading human consciousness into a machine, or even a holographic virtual body — basically, a software replica of a person. Or what if Traditional pharmaceuticals is replaced by hyper-individualized medicines that are manufactured at the time they are ordered, or that most people will have stopped taking pills in favor of a new device that causes the body to manufacture it’s own cures.

I am sure they are (without looking) many sites that are doing exactly this; covering Science, Nature, Transport, Medical, and every other aspect of Life.

Happiness is a direction, not a place or perhaps it is dark matter yet to be discovered.

One way or the other it’s pretty clear that the future remains radically uncertain, and there’s not much we can do about it.

Living a public life is the new default.

It is not possible to live modern life without revealing personal information to governments and corporations. Few individuals will have the energy, interest, or resources to protect themselves from ‘data surveillance’; privacy will become a luxury.

It is also clear that there will be a need for a trusted infrastructure to be created in order to prevent massive fraud and massive public distrust in online transactions, and in online life, in general.

We will have to reinvent the entire Internet as we know it, shifting power from a few American tech companies to the individual who creates, and therefore owns, the data.

It is also clear that greed makes monsters of men and unless we put a harness on greed and make it serve the needs of humanity the next 50 and beyond will not be worth living.

We will need to create a personal dashboard, a safe haven, for every individual’s dossiers, transactions, money, and profiles.  In this dashboard, you could set your privacy and communications settings.

All of this will create a big struggle about the question: Who owns (my) data?

My statement:

There is no way the world’s varied cultures, with their different views about privacy, will be able to come to an agreement on how to address civil liberties issues on the global Internet.

In 2065, we will have a post-Facebook and post-Google world.

We will have new business models in which facilitating data is more lucrative than owning data. As I have said if we do not make this transition, we face a privacy and fraud nightmare in which our lives are dominated by a few global tech companies.

We will have new generations of psychoactive drugs and eventually emerge, cognitive technology is likely to really, really rock our world.

We will run out of resources. We will have Climate change. We will have wars, and massive inequality, we will get humans to the nearest stars, we will be using English if not in the same form.

We will be wearing smart cloths connected to the internet (and even have linked stuff inside their bodies), we will be walking into internet-connected rooms and down networked streets, driving in the connected cars and public transit, get food and other goods from smart refrigerators/toasters/ovens, move through spaces bristling with connected sensors, and monitor remote places via apps and cameras.

The backlash against this most egregious privacy invasions will bring a new equilibrium between consumers, governments, and businesses—and more-savvy citizens will get better at hiding things they do not want others to see.

However predicting how it will all shake out is just fantasy.

Governments trying to protect themselves and their cultures might split the global internet into divided mess of networks.

The situation will worsen as the Internet of Things arises and people’s homes, workplaces, and the objects around them will ‘tattle’ on them.

The incentives for businesses to monetize people’s data and governments to monitor behavior will become extremely potent.

On the other hand citizens and consumers will have more control thanks to new tools that give them the power to negotiate with corporations and work around governments. Individuals will be able to choose to share personal information in a tiered approach that offers varied levels of protection and access by others.

The constellation of economic and security complexities will get bigger and harder to manage, belittling micro religions and what it means to be ‘educated’ will be replaced by other capacities.

People will get used to this, adjust their norms, and accept more sharing and collection of data as a part of life—especially Millennials and the young people who follow them some will complain but most will not object or muster the energy to push back against this new reality in their lives.

Society’s definitions of ‘privacy’ and ‘freedom’ will have changed so much by 2025 that today’s meanings will no longer apply.

We will certainly leave nothing behind that survives long in the digital age other than a future of “unevenly distributed” one with more social fissures might arise, presenting hurdles to people who do not have the resources to afford the gadgetry or the skills and tech-literacy to navigate the more complicated environment of 2025 never mind 2065.

Over 50% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will have disappeared.

The terms of citizenship and social life will rapidly change.

70% of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation, with most coming back in different forms in different industries, with over 50% structured as freelance projects rather than full-time jobs.

50% of traditional colleges will have collapsed, and India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world.

Advocacy groups, service providers, large e-commerce companies, Google/Amazon/Facebook/Twitter, secret services, security officers in companies and consultancies, and individual Internet users… will  also be very much involved with ongoing tension between these groups,

We’ll play games to solve problems.

There will be an extensive rise of anti-capitalism.

The Future will be an eerie spot.

Predicting the Future is much like predicting the weather, the farther we move into the future, the less accurate our predictions become. So why do we make them?

So we don’t wake up one morning and get a shock.

Feel free to giving serious consideration to each of them and deriving your own conclusions for good or bad.