The Roman sage Marcus Aurelius said we should never let the future disturb us. But then he never had a conversation with the futurologist Nick Bostrom about the state of the world in 2050.
“There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers,” Bostrom said in an e-mail. “Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.”
Time to rethink your career options, Nature readers!
150 years of Nature — an anniversary collection
To adapt a cliché about computer models, predictions of the future are usually wrong, but some are interesting. And Nature has a long history of seeking stimulation in forecasts, projections and auguries about how research might unfold in the coming decades. Most notably, the journal marked the end of the twentieth century and the onset of the twenty-first with supplements dedicated to scientific soothsaying, and a bold prediction, from then-editor Philip Campbell, that life based on something other than DNA would be discovered by 2100. (It was a statement he called foolish then, but stands by today.)
So, with peer review suspended and Nature’s stated aim of discussing the “interpretation of topical and coming trends” firmly underlined, let’s set the controls of our (stubbornly still undiscovered) time machine for 2050 and take a cautious peek outside. Prepare for technological leaps, solving the puzzle of dark matter and perhaps being able to study enough people to wave goodbye to many diseases.
Hot times
You should probably brace yourself before opening the door. “It will be worse than we had anticipated in terms of climate change,” says Guy Brasseur, a modeller at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
The world will have barrelled past the crucial threshold of 2 °C of average warming above pre-industrial levels by 2040, he suggests. (To avoid that, given the inertia in the climate system, the International Panel on Climate Change says that global emissions needed to peak in 2025 and then decline sharply; see go.nature.com/4prom5j.) So, by 2050, political debate on the reality of a warming world could have melted with the glaciers.
Arguments might rage instead about whether or not to try to cool the planet, most probably by injecting shiny particles into the upper atmosphere that keep sunlight from hitting the surface. Although this geoengineering technique is unproven and untested at significant scale, severe climate impacts by 2050 could encourage an affected nation or even a company to stage such an atmospheric intervention.
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