Technology in 2050: experts give their predictions

The last 25 years have been marked by breathtaking technological changes.

At the turn of the century, most computers were connected to the Internet with noisy dial-up connections, Netflix was an online DVD rental company, and the vast majority of people hadn’t even heard of a smartphone.

Twenty-five years later, innovations in AI, robotics and more are emerging at an incredible pace.

So we decided to ask experts what the next 25 years could bring us.

Here are their predictions about the technology we’ll be using by 2050 – and how it could reshape our lives.

Science fiction set in the 2050s is full of examples of humans using technological improvements to feel healthier, happier, and more productive.

In the 2000 hit game Deus Ex – set in 2052 – the player can inject themselves with tiny robots called “nanites”.

These microscopic robots manipulate matter at the atomic level, granting them superhuman abilities such as increased speed and the ability to see in the dark.

It sounds like something from the distant future, but nanotechnology – engineering on the scale of a millionth of a millimeter – is already used in many everyday technologies.

In fact, that’s what powers the way you’re reading these words right now: Every smartphone or computer is driven by a central chip made up of billions of tiny transistors — electrical components built at the nanoscale to speed up data processing.

Professor Steven Bramwell at London Center for Nanotechnology told the BBC that by 2050 we should expect the lines between machines, electronics and biology to be “significantly blurred”.

This means we could see nanotech implants between now and then – but more for “monitoring your health or facilitating communication” rather than appearing invisible, like in Deus Ex.

Medicine could also routinely use nanoscale machines to “deliver drugs exactly where they need to go”, Professor Bramwell said.

Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick is also interested in studying augmentations, going even further than most.

In 1998, he became the first human to have a microchip implanted in his nervous system, earning him the title “Captain Cyborg.”

Professor Warwick estimates that by 2050, advances in cybernetics – the science that studies the connections between natural and mechanical systems – could lead to innovative treatments for disease.

He predicts the use of “electronic deep brain stimulation” as a partial treatment for certain conditions such as schizophrenia, rather than as a medicine.

He adds that it’s likely we’ll see more cybernetic enhancements of the type he’s already tested himself, so that “your brain and your body might be in different places.”

What if we wanted to test how the latest improvement, or even the new diet, worked on our body, without risking feeling the side effects?

Professor Roger Highfield, director of the Science Museum Group, believes that “digital twins” – virtual versions of a physical object, updated using real-time data – could become a regular feature in our lives.

He imagines a world in which each of us could have “thousands of simplified twins,” using them to explore how “different medications or lifestyle changes affect our unique biology.”

In other words, we could predict our future before we live it.

Many technology companies, including Google and IBM, are currently engaged in a multi-billion dollar race to revolutionize the way we push areas like AI even further – in the form of quantum computing.

Quantum computers are machines capable of performing highly complex calculations at incredibly fast speeds – for example, simulating molecular interactions to design new drugs more quickly.

In January 2025, Jensen Huang – head of leading chip company Nvidia – said he believed “very useful” quantum computing would arrive within 20 years.

AI itself will undoubtedly continue to occupy an important place in our society as we head towards the half-century mark.

Futurist and author Tracey Follows, who helped write a government white paper on education in the UK in 2050believes that learning will take place across “virtual and physical realities” using AI teachers who will “adjust in real time”.

Rather than textbooks, she predicts that children will use “immersive simulations.”

Meanwhile, education will be less standardized, with each child’s DNA or biometric data studied to understand how they learn best.

Writer Bill Douglass is good at making compelling predictions: in 2000 he won a $20,000 (£14,800) global futuristic writing competition called “The World in 2050”.

While he remains confident that one of his initial predictions – unmanned aircraft – will come true by 2050, he believes we will first see more progress in driverless cars, making traffic jams “a thing of the past”.

“Cars will drive much closer together than they currently can,” he told the BBC. “And if it’s necessary to brake, they all brake.

“On private toll roads for autonomous vehicles, there’s no reason why traffic can’t get up to about 100 miles per hour – you’ll see road crash fatalities drop.”

Far from Earth, the space race will also continue at high speed, journalist and co-host of the Space Boffins podcast Sue Nelson told the BBC.

She said in 25 years there will likely be a habitable base on the Moon and some industries could be based almost entirely in space.

For example, she thinks we could see pharmaceutical companies making the next generation of drugs in microgravity, that is, aboard an orbiting spacecraft.

Indeed, she says, crystals grown this way rather than on Earth are “often larger and of better quality.”

The film Minority Report, based on a short story by science fiction author Philip K Dick, was released in 2002 and is set in 2054.

Three years before filming began, director Steven Spielberg invited fifteen experts, including virtual reality founder Jaron Lanier, to a three-day summit to brainstorm what technologies could possibly exist in the 2050s.

The discussions shaped many of the innovations featured in the film.

If the events of the Tom Cruise-starring sci-fi thriller are to be believed, by the mid-2050s we’ll all be using gesture recognition (and fancy gloves) to flip through videos on our see-through monitors, while police officers in jetpacks will fight impending crime with vomit-inducing batons.

Like much science fiction in the arts, the film depicts a dystopian vision of our future years.

It’s a sentiment that some experts have begun to echo in our current timeline – some even going so far as to suggest that Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity.

Perhaps, before becoming overly discouraged about what might await us in 2050, it is worth returning to the words of Philip K Dick himself.

“For my part, I bet science will help us,” he wrote in his 1968 personal autobiographical essay. Self-portrait.

“Science has given us more lives than it has taken,” he said.

“We must remember this.”