Vaccines that prevent diseases such as measles and rotavirus, currently available in rich countries, will also become affordable and readily available in developing countries. Since it was founded 10 years ago, the Gavi Alliance, a global partnership that funds expanded immunisation in poor countries, has helped prevent more than 5 million deaths.
It is easy to imagine that in 25 years this work will have been expanded to save millions more lives by making life-saving vaccines available all over the world. I also expect to see major strides in new areas. A rapid point-of-care diagnostic test — coupled with a faster-acting treatment regimen — will so fundamentally change the way we treat tuberculosis that we can begin planning an elimination campaign.
We will eradicate malaria, I believe, to the point where there are no human cases reported globally in We will also have effective means for preventing Aids infection, including a vaccine. With the encouraging results of the RV Aids vaccine trial in Thailand, we now know that an Aids vaccine is possible.
We must build on these and promising results on other means of preventing HIV infection to help rid the world of the threat of Aids. Providing sufficient food, water and energy to allow everyone to lead decent lives is an enormous challenge.
Energy is a means, not an end, but a necessary means. With 6. Reducing use of fossil fuels is necessary both to avoid serious climate change and in anticipation of a time when scarcity makes them prohibitively expensive. It will be extremely difficult. This is almost entirely due to consumption in developing countries where living standards are, happily, rising and the population is increasing rapidly.
We need to go much further in reducing demand, through better design and changes in lifestyles, increasing efficiency and improving and deploying all viable alternative energy sources. It won't be cheap. Disappointingly, with the present rate of investment in developing and deploying new energy sources, the world will still be powered mainly by fossil fuels in 25 years and will not be prepared to do without them.
Chris Llewellyn Smith is a former director general of Cern and chair of Iter, the world fusion project, he works on energy issues at Oxford University. If I'd been writing this five years ago, it would have been all about technology: the internet, the fragmentation of media, mobile phones, social tools allowing consumers to regain power at the expense of corporations, all that sort of stuff.
And all these things are important and will change how advertising works. But it's becoming clear that what'll really change advertising will be how we relate to it and what we're prepared to let it do. After all, when you look at advertising from the past the basic techniques haven't changed; what seems startlingly alien are the attitudes it was acceptable to portray and the products you were allowed to advertise. In 25 years, I bet there'll be many products we'll be allowed to buy but not see advertised — the things the government will decide we shouldn't be consuming because of their impact on healthcare costs or the environment but that they can't muster the political will to ban outright.
So, we'll end up with all sorts of products in plain packaging with the product name in a generic typeface — as the government is currently discussing for cigarettes. But it won't stop there. We'll also be nudged into renegotiating the relationship between society and advertising, because over the next few years we're going to be interrupted by advertising like never before.
Video screens are getting so cheap and disposable that they'll be plastered everywhere we go. And they'll have enough intelligence and connectivity that they'll see our faces, do a quick search on Facebook to find out who we are and direct a message at us based on our purchasing history.
At least, that'll be the idea. It probably won't work very well and when it does work it'll probably drive us mad. Marketing geniuses are working on this stuff right now, but not all of them recognise that being allowed to do this kind of thing depends on societal consent — push the intrusion too far and people will push back.
Society once did a deal accepting advertising because it seemed occasionally useful and interesting and because it paid for lots of journalism and entertainment. It's not necessarily going to pay for those things for much longer so we might start questioning whether we want to live in a Blade Runner world brought to us by Cillit Bang. Russell Davies, head of planning at the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather and a columnist for the magazines Campaign and Wired.
By , we are likely to have developed no-frills brain-machine interfaces, allowing the paralysed to dance in their thought-controlled exoskeleton suits. I sincerely hope we will not still be interfacing with computers via keyboards, one forlorn letter at a time. I'd like to imagine we'll have robots to do our bidding.
But I predicted that 20 years ago, when I was a sanguine boy leaving Star Wars, and the smartest robot we have now is the Roomba vacuum cleaner.
So I won't be surprised if I'm wrong in another 25 years. Artificial intelligence has proved itself an unexpectedly difficult problem. Maybe we will understand what's happening when we immerse our heads into the colourful night blender of dreams. We will have cracked the secret of human memory by realising that it was never about storing things, but about the relationships between things.
Will we have reached the singularity — the point at which computers surpass human intelligence and perhaps give us our comeuppance? We'll probably be able to plug information streams directly into the cortex for those who want it badly enough to risk the surgery. There will be smart drugs to enhance learning and memory and a flourishing black market among ambitious students to obtain them.
Having lain to rest the nature-nurture dichotomy at that point, we will have a molecular understanding of the way in which cultural narratives work their way into brain tissue and of individual susceptibility to those stories. Then there's the mystery of consciousness. Will we finally have a framework that allows us to translate the mechanical pieces and parts into private, subjective experience?
As it stands now, we don't even know what such a framework could look like "carry the two here and that equals the experience of tasting cinnamon". That line of research will lead us to confront the question of whether we can reproduce consciousness by replicating the exact structure of the brain — say, with zeros and ones, or beer cans and tennis balls. If this theory of materialism turns out to be correct, then we will be well on our way to downloading our brains into computers, allowing us to live forever in The Matrix.
But if materialism is incorrect, that would be equally interesting: perhaps brains are more like radios that receive an as-yet-undiscovered force. The one thing we can be sure of is this: no matter how wacky the predictions we make today, they will look tame in the strange light of the future. The next 25 years will see fundamental advances in our understanding of the underlying structure of matter and of the universe.
At the moment, we have successful descriptions of both, but we have open questions. For example, why do particles of matter have mass and what is the dark matter that provides most of the matter in the universe? I am optimistic that the answer to the mass question will be found within a few years, whether or not it is the mythical Higgs boson, and believe that the answer to the dark matter question will be found within a decade.
Key roles in answering these questions will be made by experiments at Cern's Large Hadron Collider, which started operations in earnest last year and is expected to run for most of the next 20 years; others will be played by astrophysical searches for dark matter and cosmological observations such as those from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.
Many theoretical proposals for answering these questions invoke new principles in physics, such as the existence of additional dimensions of space or a "supersymmetry" between the constituents of matter and the forces between them, and we will discover whether these ideas are useful for physics.
Both these ideas play roles in string theory, the best guess we have for a complete theory of all the fundamental forces including gravity. Will string theory be pinned down within 20 years? My crystal ball is cloudy on this point, but I am sure that we physicists will have an exciting time trying to find out. When experts talk about the coming food security crisis, the date they fixate upon is By the middle of that decade, therefore, we will either all be starving, and fighting wars over resources, or our global food supply will have changed radically.
The bitter reality is that it will probably be a mixture of both. The way in which we interact with the outside world has changed SO much since the introduction of the internet, smart phones, etc. In the very near future, another huge jump will be made: integrating the information on the internet with our surroundings. By that I mean being able to look at a building, product or place and immediately seeing information about the subject on our devices and eventually just with our eyes.
This app allows you to take a picture of whatever you are looking at and instantly receive info about it on your Android phone. Like the video says, Goggle is only scratching at the surface of this technology. Until we can do this with a chip in our brain, a new device has come out that overlays video onto our normal vision using special glasses. Solar energy will soon leave fossil fuels and inefficient wind farms in the dust. Since the biggest hurdle in the path of solar power is the expensive and large nature of solar panels, these new microscopic cells will make a huge difference.
For example, current panels are massive and require large motors to move them to track the sun. Even more amazing, they can be suspended in liquids and printed on flexible materials, allowing the cells to be places on any surface.
What if your entire car was covered in these powerhouses? Bye bye, Chevron. A company called Organovo has developed the first commercial 3-D bio printer that builds custom organs cell-by-cell. Each individual cell is based upon sample cells from the body of the customer.
Organovo reports that veins and arteries will be available in 5 years, and more complex organs like hearts and livers in On a more general note, nanotechnology is revolutionizing the health world. The awesome combination of a higher understanding of how DNA works and the ability to create very small cellular parts is painting a very bright future for medicine.
Scientists are finding specific sequences of DNA that code for conditions like schizophrenia, autism and even aging. The cures are actually in sight. Speakers have got bigger too, now coming packed with integrated circuits allowing us to do our shopping from our living rooms just by talking. Over the course of the last year a number of jetpack and personal flying machines were developed and successfully flown by engineers from across the world. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player.
But he did it. And former Royal Marine Richard Browning used a jet suit he invented to negotiate one of the toughest assault courses in the military. Now he's set up a company to come up with new ways it could be used. And in Dubai, police have begun training on hoverbikes in the hope that they can help first responder units reach areas that would otherwise be difficult to reach.
The futuristic vehicles are intended to be in action this year. Professor Rachel Armstrong is a professor of experimental architecture at Newcastle University, and co-ordinator of the living architecture project.
She said:. She told Sky News:. It might not give us the answers, but it always helps me frame better questions and points of view. She added: "Back in , science fiction writer William Gibson said: 'The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Where that data goes, who uses it and for what, are new questions and raise new challenges. Are they sharing our secrets and not-so secrets and with whom? What does it mean to talk about safety, privacy, security or even trust? Yet the technology won't make a different future, we will. By we need to have halved global emissions to stabilise temperatures. Flexible working will flex further as we move in and out of hierarchy, says Burks.
Lab-grown meats, synthetic and fortified products will help save the environment but also our bank accounts and our health, says Burks. London will be a car-free city according to think tank Common Wealth.
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