CRYSTAL BALLS

MC Escher

Part 3 of 4

According to the World Future Society, 2013 will provide us all with some exciting challenges and opportunities.  

As far as healthcare is concerned:

Drug-delivering nanorobots built from DNA could be approved for use in humans within 20 years. Medical nanorobots that carry molecule-sized payloads and can detect and attack cancer are being developed.

Humans could one day reach longevity “escape velocity.” Continuous rejuvenation therapy that focuses on repairing cell damage before it accumulates, causing pathologies, may one day allow people to live for a thousand years.

Full-body firewalls will be necessary to prevent hackers from tampering with your implants. Wireless medical devices designed to manage and monitor drug-delivery systems and other implants are vulnerable to interference.

Cancer survivorship may strain future health-care systems. More people are beating cancer and surviving longer and healthier—that’s the good news. The bad news is that elderly cancer survivors will still need more medical services.

Smart helmets will rapidly detect brain injuries. Contact sports will become smarter and less dangerous, thanks to helmets that detect concussions.

Better health, but fewer doctors. A projected shortage of more than 90,000 doctors by 2020 will drive technological innovations such as low-cost, point-of-care diagnostics. 

Disease detection may soon be but a breath away. A Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer is under development.    

As far as information is concerned:

The future Internet could connect the world at the neural level. Advances in neurotechnology will make it possible for us to link our minds, share our emotional experiences, and even feel changes in the collective state of mind.

Legal-expert systems will make laws easier for laypersons to understand. “Conversational law” will incorporate statutes, interpretations, precedents, and other elements of the law; the system will query users about their particular situation and provide clear answers on how the law applies.

Minority languages will disappear with minority populations. Of the 6,900 languages spoken today, more than half face extinction in the next 100 years. Reason: 95% of the world’s population speak one of just 400 languages, and the remaining 5% of languages are scattered among fewer and fewer speakers.

Mobile phones may contribute to political reform in Africa. Web-accessible mobile devices have proliferated in Africa, where text messaging and social networking are giving low-income residents more opportunities to watch their governments.

The last newspaper and book will have been printed in 2020. Information formerly contained by print products will be rented by users rather than owned, and will be accessed from the cloud via 3-D mobile media

Tablet PCs, netbooks, and laptops will be extinct by 2022. Instead of relying on hardware, workplaces will become ubiquitous computing environments, where everything around you (door knob, coffee pot, window) has connectivity and computing capabilities.

Communication will become increasingly image-driven. Thanks both to the proliferation of video and to smaller screens for computing and communication devices, graphics and images will be more heavily relied on for ordinary communication.

By 2020, data will have a life of its own. Algorithms will talk to other algorithms, things will connect with millions of other things, and sensors will gather even more data, processed by more computers, all scarcely discernible to humans.

Online pornography will become more graphic and more pervasive. As with any stimulant, pornographic imagery must become more intensive as users become less sensitive to its effects.

Part 4 of 4 on 1-23-13