I'm going to list this in a way which's based on actual historical evidence:
- Most of the things we forsee happening en masse, will not occur
- A startling breakthrough of some sort will completely revolutionize the way we see something
- The breakthrough will add a completely new market which didn't even exist today
- By the end of 50 years from now, the new market will have taken full hold and we will wonder how we lived without it
- The world will be nothing like we imagined
Basis in past: the breakthrough of the microprocessor. By the creation of this, home computers became a new market which didn't even exist previously. In under 50 years, it became a standard part of life.
Previously, assembly lines were another breakthrough, whot used to take specialized labour years of effort, could instead be converted into cheaply trained labour to mass produce large amounts of complex things in a short time, revolutionizing the production rates and dropping the costs of manufacturing for the regular people to use.
The breakthrough of indoor lighting allowing people to make use of the night hours constructively. The breakthrough of farm machinery allowing people to branch off into other areas of study for their professions.
Every decade or two a new massive breakthrough occurs which changes everything, and there's no way to know whot that breakthrough would've been until after it occured, nor how it would impact the world.
As such, I'm a bit more vague in my vision of the future than most. I don't neccesarily see us backing up our brains on computers, robotic servants, or flying cars. However, I do know that *SOMETHING* in the next decade will occur, something so massive and groundbreaking that we cannot even imagine it's rammifications at this point in time. And within 50 years from now, that 'something' will have taken root and hold in our civilization so deeply that our entire culture will have changed due to it.
For now, there's a few things that I can think of that would classify as this 'breakthrough' to come about... but the most likely one, is one which only happened recently; the ability to transform fat cells into behaving like stem cells. With stem cell research being able to make use of this new breakthrough, and being able to use these fat cells productively in a fraction of the time that would normally be required for traditional stem cell useage... chances are 50 years from now, diseases and injuries that we consider 100% untreatable, will be easily repaired. Our lifespans may very well exceed 200 years, though we wouldn't see such results immediately.
Spinal cord injuries will likely be able to be repaired in less time than it takes to heal a broken leg, rather than take years of therapy for minor benefits. Blindness and other untreatable damage will likely also be able to be repaired.
And we'll have things like the integration of the brain into a machine, at least in part.
Cybernetic enhancements which can amplify the body's natural abilities rather than mock-attempts to emulate them.
There's alot of things which could very well occur, but it's hard to tell without seeing all the breakthroughs. Anything that happens that's major in the next 10 years could completely change our world 50 years from now, and I can't see which breakthroughs will happen in the next 10 years, so I literally can't accurately predict ^.^
