Horizons 2050: Projecting the World We Will Inhabit

Predictions about the future have a long history of humiliation, yet the confluence of scientific trends now visible on the horizon makes certain broad projections difficult to dismiss. By the midpoint of this century, remote working will have become the default arrangement for a significant portion of the global workforce, hydrogen and electric vehicles will have displaced the combustion engine, and the purchase of goods and services will be conducted almost exclusively through handheld devices. The most advanced homes will be conspicuously (17) .......... friendly, fitted with integrated (18) .......... systems capable of rendering previously (19) .......... water entirely safe and palatable for human consumption. The (20) .......... for medical science are equally sweeping: a child born today may plausibly anticipate a life (21) .......... approaching a full century. Progress in precision medicine points towards a near future in which individuals perform their own digital diagnostic assessments, generating sufficient data for remote specialists to arrive at an immediate (22) .......... of any condition warranting attention. Scientists are able to state with reasonable (23) .......... that several of these advances will be accessible to much of the world's population within the coming decades, even as the precise shape of other transformations remains, for the time being, entirely (24) .......... .