This is an overview of future technology for consideration by the European Commission's KT (Knowledge Triangle: Innovation, Research, and Higher Education) 2050 Scenarios Group.

1. Some Future-Significant Technologies by 2050
For the EC KT 2050 Scenarios Project
Jerome C. Glenn The Millennium Project
www.themp.org

2. Increasingly Significant Technologies for 2050
•Synthetic Biology
•Artificial Intelligence
•Computational Science
•Pure meat, leather, without animals & augmenting medicine
•Tele-Everything & Tele- Everybody, the Semantic Web
•Augmented Reality, Tele- Presence, Holographic Communications
•Quantum computing
•Increasing individual and collective intelligence
•3-D Printing biology as well as materials and 4-D Printing
•Nanotechnology
•Robotic manufacturing
•Conscious-Technology Civilization potentials

3. Synthetic Biology – mixing species DNA
Microprobes to eat the plaque in your brain? Produce hydrogen instead of CO2 in plants?

4. Artificial Intelligence: technological capacity to act based on its own understanding and reasoning

5. When this begins to happen, the speed of increasing AI’s intelligence will be far faster and produce more change than Moore’s Law
by responding to feedback from sensor networks worldwide,
will accelerate AI’s intelligence worldwide… moment by moment
Artificial Intelligence … that can autonomously “write” and improve its code…

6. Computational Science
Computational biology
Computational Chemistry
Computational Physics
All accelerated with Moore’s Law AND
autonomous AI programing worldwide

7. Growing Pure Meat without Growing Animals
August 5, 2013 a London chef cooked and served hamburgers without growing/killing a cow.

8. Tele-Everything, Tele-Everybody, and the Semantic Webs

9. Example of Tele-Everything/Everybody
Bio-tech clothing

10. Augmented Reality, Tele-Presence, and holographic communications

11. Quantum Computing … D-Wave Developments today

12. Increasing Intelligence:
both Individual and Collective Intelligence
EU, US, China Human Brain Projects; Google & IBM artificial brain projects

13. Collective and Individual Intelligence

14. 3-D Printed Kidney, 4-D Printed self-assembly

15. Could nanorobotics, 3D printing, and AI make this obsolete?

16. Nanotech-Everything

17. If Then
Nano-
technology
Synthetic Biology
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
3-D Printing
Augmented Reality
Nano- technology
xxx
Synthetic Biology
xxx
Artificial Intelligence
xxx
Robotics
xxx
3-D Printing
xxx
Augmented Reality
xxx
Emerging Technologies Table

18. Will 2050 technology begin to leave us behind? Or will we shake hands, and then merge with Technology?
If you can’t
beat ‘em…
why not join ‘em?

19. Humans becoming cyborgs
1985
2000
2015
2030
Conscious-Technology
Built environment becoming intelligent
When the distinction between these two trends becomes blurred, we will have reached the
Post-Information Age

20. Simplification/Generalization of History and an Alternative Future
Age / Element
Product
Power
Wealth
Place
War
Time
Agricultural Extraction
Food/Res
Religion
Land
Earth/Res
Location
Cyclical
Industrial
Machine
Nation- State
Capital
Factory
Resources
Linear
Information
Info/serv
Corporation
Access
Office
Perception
Flexible
Conscious- Technology
Linkage
Individual
Being
Motion
Identity
Invented

21. Some questions to consider for KT 2050 Scenarios…

22. Our eye glasses, microscopes, telescopes have affected our consciousness for years –
How might future technologies affect our consciousness?

23. Will we create Floating Vertical Farms and
Carbon Sinks?
(as we have windmills in the oceans today)

24. Could the integration of synthetic biology, AI, and nano-robotic manufacturing produce Vertical Farming, Carbon Sink, transportation structures like these?
Vincent Callebaut

25. Will we create our own Avatars to be our Cyber-selves?
Could this be our future “immortality” in Cyberspace?
Your own cyber clone?

26. Will we Succeed in creating Eco-Smart Cities and retrofitting cities?
Integrates physics, biology, engineering, archeology, and artificial intelligence

27. And create these?
The DESERTEC 100 GW of solar power throughout Northern Africa for 15% of Europe’s energy demand
Space elevators and Solar Power Satellites

28. Robot Farming replacing how many farmers?
This capability exists today.
What integration of nanotech robotics and synthetic biology by 2050?

29. By 2050, could there be more drones then people?

30. Will we apply advances in Materials Science to re-build our built environment ?
And produce more “miracles” between 2015 and 2050 than was produced between 1980 and 2014. Today UCLA’s Solar Cell Windows could be used to retro fit buildings for energy production

31. By 2050 everyone is connected to the future Internet and everyone is surrounded by a
9.6 billion person market
Will we teach people to find markets worldwide
for self-employment ?

32. One-Person Businesses
Find markets around the world for what you are interested in doing
not non-existing jobs
What could this look
like in 2050?

33. Will synergies among AI, robotics, nanotech, synthetic biology, and quantum computing create more jobs than they eliminate?
If not, then long-term structural unemployment is inevitable, unless we create new concepts of work and possibly guaranteed income for all.

34. 36 Years from Now (2050): What will be emerging? And from what?

35. To keep track of it all, and improve foresight, a European Collective Intelligence System (E-CIS) is needed that can:
1.make it easier for a “Whole-of-Europe” response to European challenges
2.make trans-disciplinary innovative research easier to accomplish and break down some of the academic barriers
3.give experts and creative people a common platform to engage in building a European “brain”
4.increase the internationalization of research as an E-CIS can connect local challenges with global challenges via other CISs around the world to build – eventually - global brains for a better civilization
“Research and Innovation in the service of Economy and Society-European Neighbourhood and the Black Sea region” 29 & 30 May 2014, THESSALONIKI, GREECE

36. For further information
Jerome C. Glenn
The Millennium Project
4421 Garrison Street, NW,
Washington, D.C. 20016 USA
+1-202-686-5179 phone/fax
Jerome.Glenn@Millennium-Project.org
www.StateoftheFuture.org
www.themp.org (Global Futures Intelligence System)