The World in 2050: Trends and Technologies Transforming Our Future

THE WORLD IN 2050 TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES TRANSFORMING OUR FUTURE A Special Book Edition by

A Special Book Edition by

THE WORLD IN 2050 TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGIES TRANSFORMING OUR FUTURE

BY ALLYSON BERRI AND ANA C. ROLD

Published with:

Copyright © by Diplomatic Courier/Medauras Global Publishing 2006-2020 All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. First Published 2006. Published in the United States by Medauras Global and Diplomatic Courier. Mailing Address: 1660 L Street, NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC, 20036 | www.diplomaticourier.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN: 978-1-942772-07-1 (Digital) ISBN: 978-1-942772-06-4 (Print) LEGAL NOTICE. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form—except brief excerpts for the purpose of review—without written consent from the publisher and the authors. Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of information in this publication; however, the authors, the editors, Diplomatic Courier, and Medauras Global make no warranties, express or implied, in regards to the information and disclaim all liability for any loss, damages, errors, or omissions.

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4 | AFTER THE PANDEMIC

CONTENTS WELCOME

THE OVERVIEW EFFECT .............................................................................................................................06

THE FUTURE OF ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES FOR A MORE CLIMATE-CONSCIOUS FUTURE...........................................08

THE FUTURE OF HEALTH

PREPARING FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC................................................................................................18

THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

TECHNOLOGIES ADVANCING THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY...................................................30

THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL CHALLENGES................................................................40

THE FUTURE OF OFF-WORLD CIVILIZATION

FURTHER OUT OF THIS WORLD THAN EVER BEFORE.............................................................50

SCI-FI VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

EXPLAINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND FUTURISTIC TROPES.....................................................60

THE FUTURE IS HYBRID

EXPLORING THE MACHINES OF TOMORROW.................................................................................72

THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION

THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION: CARS, TRAINS, AND PLANES................................84

THE FUTURE IS COGNITIVE

BUILDING THE BLOCKS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE..........................................................96

GUEST FEATURES FUTURE-PROOFING THE WORLD WITH DIGITAL COMMONS | DANTE DISPARTE & DR. TOMICAH TILLEMANN..........................................................................108 REIMAGINING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION WITHOUT CATASTROPHE | DANE ERICKSON & TYL VAN TOORN..................................................................................................114 WHY 2020 WILL BE SEEN AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT YEARS IN THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION | DOMINIC REGESTER & OMAR ZAKI..............................120 TRANSPARENCY IS THE GATEWAY TO A BETTER FUTURE | DR. MOIRA GILCHRIST..................................................................................................................................124

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WELCOME THE OVERVIEW EFFECT

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I

n 1990, NASA’s Voyager 1 Space Probe took a photo of Planet Earth at six billion kilometers away. This photo inspired scientist Carl Sagan’s book “Pale Blue Dot” in which he wrote: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

And when we view our home from outer space we experience a cognitive shift in awareness—which is well documented as “the Overview Effect.”

From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this “pale blue dot” becomes both obvious and imperative.

We know we are not unique in having wondered how humanity and Earth will coexist and what purpose do we serve. It is behind this backdrop that we have compiled the research in this special book edition to close a most consequential year.

For more than a decade, our team of futurists at our World in 2050 think tank, have been concerned with the state of the world. Our global convenings have tackled the future of diplomacy, philanthropy, connected cities, jobs and education, and much more. We don’t profess to be fortunetellers. Rather, we embrace the skills, practices, and behaviors of futurists.

As we have discussed previously through this platform, the issues which define the 21st century, are unfolding daily. As populations grow and urban centers expand, humanity’s mutual needs increasingly collide. This year and COVID-19 accelerated all these trends and challenges with mind-boggling speed. The crises confronting every nation in the world today transcend traditional boundaries. Almost every challenge needs to be tackled by a collective and inter-disciplinary approach.

At the same time—for the first time in history—advancements in technology have democratized solution-making. That means that antiquated governance models and top-bottom approaches will simply not do. Solving humanity’s greatest problems is now everyone’s business.

We are excited to present here nine chapters and four special guest editorials on the trends transforming our world today—trends, which if harnessed productively—will shape a better world for the generation taking the mantle in 2050.

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THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

TECHNOLOGIES FOR A MORE CLIMATECONSCIOUS FUTURE

As humanity’s impact on the biosphere becomes increasingly profound, the focus on alternative forms of energy intensifies. Simultaneously, scientists and innovators are working to engineer Earth’s weather and modify the environment to recreate the biosphere in a planned, precise way. Our research unveils the next age of energy infrastructure while scrutinizing the impact the industry and humanity is having on the planet.

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s far as energy solutions go, nuclear fusion seems to have it all. Like the current nuclear fission power process, nuclear fusion doesn’t use fossil fuels and produces zero greenhouse gas emissions. However, fusion is a cleaner alternative to current fission plants, which run on uranium. Nuclear fusion plants, in contrast, would be able to fuel themselves using hydrogen isotopes, which are both more plentiful and better for the environment, generating less of the harmful radioactive waste that’s produced at fission plants. The amount of energy created during a fusion process is also greater, meaning that fusion plants could potentially produce “more bang for the buck” than traditional fission facilities.

Additionally, fusion plants would be incapable of producing the dangerous chain reactions that sometimes lead to nuclear meltdowns at fission plants.

Eager to pursue fusion’s benefits, several companies think they’re getting close to developing the world’s first nuclear fusion reactor. A company called Sparc, working with researchers at both MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is planning to start building its compact version of a nuclear fusion reactor next spring. The ITER project, an international fusion energy collaboration proposed in 1985 by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, is finally scheduled to begin operations at its French facility in 2025.

However, though nuclear fusion is often hailed as the power source that could save the world from climate change, nuclear power has historically had a rough time taking off as a popular energy source. Though nuclear fission power plants are currently the safest way to make energy, the historic government responses to well-known nuclear power failures such as Chernobyl and Fukushima have left the public with the impression that nuclear power is dangerous. This stigma could very well impact public acceptance of nuclear fusion plants in the future.

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Further, nuclear fusion comes with its own challenges independent of nuclear stigma. A tokamak, or nuclear fusion machine, must create and control a fusion plasma, which is basically a volatile cloud of super-hot atoms that can destroy anything it touches. Since the plasma must be held in place using strong electromagnetic fields (it’s too hot to touch the material walls of the tokamak), successfully building a nuclear fusion machine presents engineering challenges. Additionally, certain experts think that fusion reactors might not even hold the theoretical benefits they’ve been praised for. Daniel Jassby, a former physics researcher at Princeton, notes that while a fusion reaction with pure hydrogen elements wouldn’t produce any nuclear waste, the fusion reactions produced in a reactor would require heavy hydrogen isotopes that would still produce radioactive waste as reaction biproducts.

The potential benefits and challenges that accompany the development of nuclear fusion reactors are just a small taste of the experiments energy researchers will conduct in their furious efforts to combat climate change. Climate change threatens humanity’s very existence. As sea levels rise, coastal regions could slip under water, creating millions of climate refugees. Food insecurity can also increase with warming global temperatures, which will decrease the value of staple crops such as rice and wheat. Additionally, if left unchecked, climate change could lead to drought across 40% of all land on the planet. Clearly, finding energy solutions which can help reduce the combustion of fossil fuels which are warming the planet is an imperative global goal.

Fortunately, other green solutions in addition to nuclear fusion reactors have been proposed. Floating wind farms promise to harness powerful offshore winds to generate massive amounts of energy. Cloud seeding can be used to replenish barren lands with artificially produced rains and potentially mitigate drought.

And environmental engineers are working to develop innovative energy solutions the world hasn’t yet dreamed of to tackle the climate crisis. Climate change might offer the world frightening future scenarios, but energy technology is one way states can work to improve an uncertain future.

WIND POWER THAT FLOATS Floating wind farms are another future energy solution which might promise potential climate change solutions. Current offshore windfarms are formed of turbines bolted into the seabed in shallow ocean waters. Floating wind farms are located several 12 | THE WORLD IN 2050

miles offshore to take advantage of ocean wind speeds, which are typically faster than those experienced on land. Additionally, ocean wind speeds are more consistent than land wind speeds.

Promising wind speeds that are both faster and more consistent, floating windfarms have the opportunity to generate more wind energy in a more reliable way.

Additionally, floating windfarms have many of the same environmental advantages as those on land. Floating wind farms are a renewable energy source that does not release greenhouse gases or environmental pollutants. They also can serve as a domestic energy source, which can help create jobs within a given country.

However, floating wind farms are not without their disadvantages.

For one, the impact of offshore windfarms on marine wildlife is not yet fully understood (though it’s worth noting that floating farms might interact with a thinner distribution of wildlife than those closer to the shore). Further, installing any structure offshore is incredibly expensive. To install and commission a standard offshore windfarm in shallow ocean waters costs approximately £650 million (about $856 million). However, floating wind farms demand an even higher level of investment. Additionally, consumers pay more for energy produced by floating windfarms. Though consumers paid between £36 and £45 per MWh of electricity in 2019 (between approximately $47 and $59 per MWh), electricity from floating windfarms currently sells for over double that amount.

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Despite their challenges, floating wind farms could potentially play a big role in the larger future of energy. Europe has been trying to increase its use of renewable energy since signing the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and the EU is expected to increase its use of renewables from 17% to 34% as a share of total energy by 2030. The world’s first floating windfarm (the Hywind Scotland Pilot Park) is actually located in Europe, 15 miles off the Aberdeenshire Coast in Scotland.

Hywind’s floating turbines operated at 65% maximum theoretical capacity during their first winter, outperforming non-floating offshore wind turbines by 5-20%. In 2019, a Danish company offered to buy all of the power created at Hywind for the next 20 years, indicating that floating windfarms are worth an investment.

Ultimately, it will be difficult to construct the floating windfarms that will power our future cities. However, ocean wind power may still offer an enticing (and greener) energy source. Experts note that much like with wind power on land, costs are expected to decline substantially over time. If that is the case, governments might be more willing to make the heavy investment into floating windfarms.

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CLOUD SEEDING COMBATS DROUGHT Cloud seeding offers states another inventive renewable energy option as they combat climate change. Clouds are made up of tiny droplets of water; when enough water droplets are gathered closely together, they become dense enough to fall to the ground as precipitation. However, water doesn’t always travel to where it’s needed most. Cloud seeding involves increasing a cloud’s chance of precipitation by adding particles to clouds, usually in the form of silver iodide particles, to increase the cloud’s density and spark precipitation.

Cloud seeding is currently being touted as a potential solution to the worsening droughts which have been linked to climate change.

Though ski resorts have been cloud seeding since the 1970s, the technology is now thought to provide the potential to hydrate dryer regions. In the United States, for example, cloud seeding could provide more water to those living along the Colorado River—a region where people are promised more water than is available. In Nevada, for example, its cloud seeding program at the Desert Research Institute could potentially increase the state’s snowpack by up to 10%—enough water to sustain 150,000 households. And the technology could bear widespread benefits outside of the United States. The UN estimates that half of the world’s population will be living in a water-stressed area by 2030.

However, when it comes to cloud seeding, there’s just one tiny catch: the method has never been statistically proven to work. The first studies testing the technology 70 years ago claimed that the method increased precipitation by 10%, but couldn’t back up their claims with statistical rigor. Clouds, to be fair, present a difficult control group. Once a cloud has been modified using cloud seeding, researchers do not have any way of estimating how much precipitation the cloud would have produced on its own.

Additionally, when cloud seeding is done with silver iodide, the process comes with its own environmental risks. Silver iodide is harmful to aquatic life. However, scientists have responded to this issue, and are testing materials that might enhance precipitation as well as silver iodide. Calcium chloride is one material that has proven itself to be effective and in low doses is unlikely to harm the environment.

Ultimately, cloud seeding’s potential as a future contributor to the fight against climate change is mixed. On one hand, it might provide water to the drought-ridden regions which are becoming more common as the planet warms. However, some point DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 15

out that if not well regulated, cloud seeding could create an excessive of water in dry areas, potentially leading to flooding and more environmental damage. In addition to the method’s statistical unpredictability and potential damage to marine life, cloud seeding is one method that will definitely need additional study for future use.

ENGINEERING NEW ENERGY POSSIBILITIES Cloud seeding, floating wind farms, and nuclear fusion all offer potential solutions to the energy crisis states are facing—but all with significant downfalls. Environmental engineers are one group of professionals working to imagine what other solutions to the future of energy might look like. Environmental engineers develop solutions to environmental problems, including identifying sources of renewable energy. Engineers working in this sector innovate energy solutions from renewable energy sources such as solar power or wind power.

Renewable energy engineers can be those working in mechanical, chemical, industrial, and electrical engineering. These engi16 | THE WORLD IN 2050

neers can advise as researchers or consultants to make energy extraction initiatives more environmentally friendly. Mechanical engineers in this sector can build machines which harness energy more efficiently. Industrial engineers working in renewably energy might work to make sure the cells of solar panels function efficiently within industrial applications.

So far, environmental engineers have thought up many innovative methods of harness renewable energy to power the future. Some environmental engineers are working to launch kites or tethered drones high into the sky to harness the energy from the winds that blow consistently hundreds of meters above ground. Others are working to engineer technologies more affordable than batteries to help manage renewable energy stores, which are crucial, since many forms of renewably energy depend on varying weather conditions. Additionally, environmental engineers will be crucial in reforming and tinkering existing renewable technologies such as floating wind farms. The future still holds an infinite number of possibilities for those hoping to engineer greener modes of accessing energy.

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THE FUTURE OF HEALTH

PREPARING FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC

On a large scale, humanity is constantly struggling against bacteria and disease as well as non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Today our focus is on primary prevention (intervening before a disease is developed) or secondary prevention (preventing progression of a disease when you are already sick). In the near future, we will be solving for “primordial prevention,” looking at the prevention of the risk factors in the first place, and we will treat age as a disease that not only can be “cured” but can be prevented. Here, we’ll track the research that is transforming our understanding of the human body and, ultimately, saving lives.

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he disease hadn’t been seen in people before. It had likely jumped into human populations from an animal and was causing severe respiratory illness. Health care professionals around the world teamed up together to fight the virus. Temperature scanners and masks became the norm in public places. Some governments enacted quarantines.

However, in a scene that could have mirrored the world’s current COVID-19 crisis, the world’s 2003 experience with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) came to an anti-climactic end in July of that year, when the WHO announced an end to the viral threat just nine months after the beginning of the outbreak.

There are many reasons the world had a very different experience with SARS than the experience it is currently having with COVID-19. A patient who had been infected with SARS would start exhibiting symptoms within 2-3 days; though a study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health shows that COVID-19 symptoms appear within a median of five days, some patients might not exhibit symptoms for a full 14 days after exposure. This makes COVID-19 patients much more difficult to isolate before they infect others. Additionally, unlike COVID-19, SARS was difficult to contract, and patients couldn’t spread the disease while they were pre-symptomatic. The differences between the two respiratory diseases has proven dire; while COVID-19 has infected over 43 million people worldwide, SARS disappeared from human populations after infecting a little over 8,000.

Preparing for the next pandemic is only one challenge the world will have to face in the future of healthcare. The dreaded, almost year-long nightmare much of the world has already experienced DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 21

in its quest to contain COVID-19 has given us a taste of what difficulties might lie at the forefront of a quest to contain new disease. The challenges of developing vaccines as well as the challenges of distributing vaccines within lower-income countries pose some threat to what was once dubbed “the most successful form of disease prevention available today.� Experiences with the aggressive Candida auris fungus in 2019 indicate the potential dangers that could lurk in a future plagued by antibiotic resistance.

However, the future will also feature some of the best advances in healthcare the world has ever seen. Advances in digital technologies will help promote human well-being in new and exciting ways. Genetic modification will be one of many potential solutions currently being tested to end micronutrient deficiency in the developing world. And innovative research in epigenetics might lead to the end of human aging. Though the future of healthcare is sure to have its challenges, the world has never been more prepared to offer creative solutions.

NEW DISEASE

The experience the world had with SARS compared to the catastrophe that has unfolded from COVID-19 speaks volumes to the dangers of new disease. The healthcare community still doesn’t know for sure why SARS disappeared from human populations, though the beginning of the summer as well as an easily isolated infected population might have played a role. With COVID-19, while experts know for certain which factors are leading to the longevity of the pandemic, it would have been impossible to know what those factors might be in late 2019 when the disease first emerged. The inherent ambiguity which surrounds zoonotic illness means that the havoc it can wreak in human populations is incredibly variant. This variance underscores the need in global governance to prepare extensively for future challenges in healthcare systems across the globe.

States can prepare for the threat of new disease in several key ways. Governments can use mathematical models to simulate how contagious diseases will be when they first emerge, allowing them to allocate funding most appropriately for things like vaccine research and protective equipment. Additionally, governments can fund research into which kinds of diseases are circulating in animals and are most likely to jump into humans. Lastly, pandemic preparedness is certainly an area where experience pays off. Countries like Taiwan and Singapore had such strong initial responses to COVID-19 because the region had more substantial experience dealing with SARS, which primarily affected their ability to tackle the pandemic effectively. Similarly, preparedness might be contributing to the weak pandemic response seen in the United States. Though the country was prepared for bio-terrorism threats, with vaccines stockpiled to combat anthrax and smallpox, it was relatively unprepared for dealing with respiratory illness. In the future, states will need to invest a larger share of resources towards pandemic preparedness.

VACCINES Vaccines are both a key element in fighting emerging diseases as well as a significant strategy for keeping known pathogens at bay. However, even as researchers have gotten significantly more skillful in developing vaccines, certain diseases bring specific challenges. SARS is an excellent example of a vaccine crisis that thankfully never was because a vaccine was never needed.

Though a vaccine study was started for SARS, and inoculation resulted in protective immunity, the vaccine produced an immune disease in the animals from the trial. In other cases, funding issues can halt vaccine development. The Ebola vaccine took over DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 23

two decades to develop—not because there were challenges in development, but because there were challenges in funding a vaccine that didn’t seem urgent until the 2014 West African outbreak. And the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine trial was halted in late-stage development when a patient in the trial developed an “unexplained illness” that may or may not have been related to the shot itself.

The pace of development that has accompanied the COVID-19 vaccines currently in trial has been astonishing. Typically, it takes years to develop a vaccine, and several COVID-19 vaccines are already approved or in final-phase trials. Additionally, the WHO already has a plan for financing COVID-19 vaccine distribution in countries whose governments may not be able to afford supplies on their own. The resulting program, known as COVAX, brings together more than two-thirds of countries worldwide. This solution is much needed, not just in a world that is grappling with ubiquitous respiratory illness, but also in a world that has continually failed to protect developing countries from easily preventable diseases such as measles. A 2017 WHO report showed that though close to a million more children in 68 developing countries achieved access to the basic diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine from 2015 to 2016, vaccination access remained at 80%.

Further, millions of children in war-torn countries such as Syria or South Sudan remained under-vaccinated.

Doctors, researchers, and NGOs are working to make sure vaccine access is more equitable in the future. The WHO’s COVAX program to distribute COVID-19 vaccines equitably across the world is a great example of the kind of global coordination that will be needed to fight future pandemics effectively. Further, on 24 | THE WORLD IN 2050

the state level, India’s experience distributing the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) as part of its childhood immunization program has demonstrated what future governance in healthcare might look like. As part of its plan to distribute vaccines to children across the country, India developed the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network, a program that digitally monitors vaccine temperatures and vaccine stocks along the supply chain.

Additionally, India uses vaccine distribution as a gateway into the rest of its healthcare system; doctors make sure children are upto-date on other vaccinations and checks them for malnutrition when they come in for the PCV vaccine.

ANTIMICROBIAL RESISTANCE If antimicrobials, like vaccines, proposed another solution to global health problems, antimicrobial resistance has been the backlash from their overuse. Before the 1928 discovery of penicillin, commonplace bacterial infections like strep throat, pneumonia, and whooping cough could all be fatal. Antibiotics have made it so that these basic bacterial diseases no longer spell a death sentence.

However, today, thanks to frequent antibiotic use, some strains of bacteria can no longer be treated with antibiotics. Basic bacterial infections like gonorrhea and tuberculosis are becoming harder to treat as a result. Last year, a vicious fungal infection known as Candida auris tore across the world, showing up in Venezuela, Spain, South Africa, the UK, and the U.S. Of particular note is the fungus’s resistance to common antifungal treatments.

If not taken seriously, antifungal and antibiotic resistance could cause serious problems for healthcare systems in the future. One UN report predicts that deaths related to drug-resistant bacteria could total 10 million by 2050.

Nations can mount defenses against the future threat of antibiotic- and antifungal-resistant diseases today. In the past few years, world leaders have demanded that hospitals and farms halt the “gluttonous” overuse of antimicrobial drugs. A 2018 WHO report found that out of the 154 countries studied, only 64 had policies in place to limit antibiotics used in livestock growth, and only 78 had policies designed to prevent environmental contamination from antibiotics. The CDC estimates that the most important action that can be taken to slow the spread of antimicrobial resistance is changing the way antimicrobials are used. They report that over half of antimicrobial use in humans is unnecessary.

Fortunately, the 2018 WHO report shows some signs of states DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 25

implementing policies which take this direction. According to the report, 105 countries had surveillance programs in place for reporting antimicrobial infections in humans; additionally, 123 countries regulate the sale of antimicrobials.

NEW INNOVATIONS ON THE HORIZON While the future of healthcare will feature threats like growing antimicrobial resistance and new diseases which pose challenges to vaccination, it will also include benefits to healthcare never seen before. The increased focus on wellness over the last fifty years will grow to include new technologies. Micronutrient deficiency, a chronic problem in developing countries, can be approached using new technologies. And aging, often the ultimate threat to human health, is being disrupted by methods never seen in centuries past.

Like many sectors, the wellness sector is one which currently benefits from the sophisticated digital technology of the 21st century. In the future, this digital technology is only supposed to take the industry further. In 2018, the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute collaborated with the Global Wellness Institute to predict five trends pertinent to the future of the wellness industry. The report found that technology and human wellness would likely converge; this convergence can be illustrated with the concept of a “data selfie,” or a digital profile combining heart rates, galvanic skin responses, calorie use, as well as other healthcare data used to help healthcare providers better improve individual wellbeing. Additionally, the report found that smartphones can play an instrumental role in regulating emotions, using data to understand behavior patterns and make suggestions to improve users’ wellness in real time.

While technology is creating new innovations in the wellness sphere, in the future, it will also be applied to solve age-old problems in healthcare, such as micronutrient deficiency. Though they are only needed in small amounts, micronutrients (also known as vitamins and minerals) are a critical component of human health.

Since micronutrients don’t occur naturally in the body, people must absorb them from their diets.

When people are unable to absorb the small amounts of certain micronutrients, the consequences can be large. In 1985, global health authorities agreed to a worldwide campaign for salt iodization to help billions of people suffering from iodine deficiency, which is the leading cause of brain damage. Though large salt pro26 | THE WORLD IN 2050

ducers quickly iodized their salt, smaller producers were harder to access, and as a result, UNICEF predicts that “30% of households in the developing world are not consuming (iodized) salt.”

Early solutions to micronutrient deficiency included the efforts of Micronutrient International, (now Nutrition International), a Canadian organization founded in 1992 that helped small salt producers iodize their salt. The organization helped develop valuable technologies, such as an iodization machine on wheels that was used to help iodize salt in Africa. However, salt iodization can only go so far if the population is also deficient in other valuable micronutrients, such as Vitamin A. For this reason, some organizations have developed micronutrient sprinkles, which can be distributed in sachets and add a variety of nutrients to things like baby food. Additionally, scientists can biofortify seeds for staple crops to add valuable nutrients to the foods that are the cheapest to grow in developing countries.

Lastly, aging is another area of healthcare that will be revolutionized by future technology. Amid predictions that imagine the 65-plus set as a larger share of the population than ever before, some scientists are trying to take the elderly back in time. In one 2016 study conducted at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researchers manipulated genes in mice using an approach that improved pancreatic function and rejuvenated damaged muscles.

Other researchers thought that this study was additional evidence that aging is driven by epigenetic changes—that is, changes made to a gene that affect a trait’s presentation rather than its genetic code. Whereas genetic changes change a gene’s DNA sequence, 28 | THE WORLD IN 2050

epigenetic changes might change the way a DNA sequence is read. If aging is driven by epigenetic changes, it might indeed be reversible like some researchers have suspected.

Researchers at Stanford University made more progress towards this theory last spring when they discovered a method for reversing errors in the epigenome. The epigenome is made up of chemical compounds which direct an organism’s full set of genes. Since the main cause of aging is thought to be a clutter of errors within the epigenome, Stanford researchers were able to propose a method for reversing aging by reversing these errors.

However, the real-life prospects for reversing aging lie far ahead in the future. In one early experiment where researchers erased the marks on the epigenome in mice cells, growth accelerated in the cells after they lost their identity, priming them for cancer.

And in the 2016 study conducted at the Salk Institute, mice had to be genetically engineered so that the experiment wouldn’t result in a loss of cell identity. The solutions to reversing aging through epigenetics are thus several experiments away.

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that the future of health might contain challenges for which the world hasn’t yet prepared.

However, the future of health will also contain technologies the world hasn’t ever seen. These technological innovations will help people face not only the unknowns, but also the health-related problems that have been plaguing humanity for centuries. The next several years will tell how far the world gets in conquering the healthcare challenges to come.

THE FUTURE O

OF HUMANITY

THE TECHNOLOGIES ADVANCING THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

Augmented humans aren’t starry-eyed visions of the future—they’re walking among us right now. From cochlear implants to robotic limbs controlled by our minds, the fields of biotechnology and gene editing are allowing us to dictate evolution and engineer a new kind of human. Here, we’ll take a look at the scientific and technological breakthroughs that are transforming our bodies and reshaping the future of humanity.

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he headlines shocked the world. The experiments were of science fiction proportions, the stuff of a futuristic society the world didn’t realize it was already living in. The scientist responsible was told that he would pay for his experimentation—he is currently serving jailtime alongside two of his associates. Indeed, the 2018 declaration that Dr. He Jiankui had used CRISPR to alter the genomes of twin babies shocked the world and made many weary of the potential consequences of gene-editing technology.

If CRISPR is any indication, the future will be rife with technologies humans can use to modify their genetic material and improve their natural capabilities. These technologies can be anything from gene editing to prosthetic technology to wearable technology. Additionally, outside of technologies crafted through biology or biomedical engineering, several companies are looking for new ways to get technologies to patients, or simply wondering what such rapid advances in technology will mean for the future of humanity. If advances like CRISPR and brain-powered prosthetics are any indication, this future will be nothing less of fantastic.

THE FUTURE OF GENE EDITING CRISPR has gained the most popular press discourse over the last few years for its use in gene editing applications. The technology was first discovered by accident, and at the time of its discovery, researchers didn’t even know what the repeated segments of genetic code could possibly mean. While studying the gene that converts alkaline phosphatase, Dr. Yoshizumi Ishino and his team became the first researchers to encounter what would become known as CRISPRs (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). CRISPRs are repeating DNA segments found in the genetic records of simple organisms like bacteria. In simple organisms, CRISPR proteins splice genetic information from viDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 33

ruses to boost immunity to disease. In 2012, this technology was used for the first time to modify genes, making CRISPR one of the most promising genetic tools of the 21st century.

CRISPR can be used in a wide variety of applications outside of gene editing. For some conditions, CRISPR can help researchers isolate the genetic mutations that are causing the disorder. This approach has helped scientists understand how they might treat a variety of conditions, from seizure disorders to Parkinson’s disease. However, its CRISPR’s work in gene editing applications that has drawn the most attention and concern. The most serious concerns arise when researchers talk about applying CRISPR techniques for germline cell editing, which would affect all of an organism’s cells, including its reproductive cells, meaning that the CRISPR changes would affect its offspring. Though this kind of genetic editing can help end devastating genetic diseases, it also leads to concerns about designer babies genetically engineered to be more intelligent or athletic. Part of the reason Dr. He’s designer babies were so shocking, for example, was because they were genetically engineered to be resistant to HIV– a genetic edit that many professionals viewed as unnecessary in a world where other techniques can prevent babies from being born HIV-positive.

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CHANGING TECHNOLOGY INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF THE BODY However, some bioengineering technologies have been much less controversial than CRISPR. Bionic limbs, which use muscle signals to move more naturally than traditional prosthetics, have been the site of many recent technological innovations and promise more innovation in years to come. Some of the first prosthetics which allowed users to move their artificial limbs more naturally included myoelectric limbs, which use electronic sensors to detect small traces of electrical activity in what is left of an amputated limb and sends the information to microprocessors which move the prosthetic. Traditional myoelectric prosthetics, however, require external power, meaning that users may have to carry additional batteries or plug their prosthetic into a charging unit.

Osseointegration is the gateway into the future of myoelectric prosthetics. Under osseointegration, a bionic arm is surgically attached to a patient’s bones . Older arm prosthetics need to be attached to a user’s arm via a tight compression cup, making the osseointegration method a win for user comfort. The process has provided the first opportunity for what are known as braincontrolled prosthetics. Earlier this year, Swedish researchers unveiled a bionic arm that can become connected to the human brain through osseointegration. The technology makes use of electrodes implanted in the amputee’s nerves and muscles which pick up on brain signals and allow them to use their prosthetics more precisely. A series of brain signals help guide the prosthetic and create the illusion of touch. The electrodes help move the prosthetic finger after they receive the proper brain signal instructing them to do so, and once the prosthetic finger moves, the brain signal is directed to the sensors wrapping about the nerves, which allows the nerves to send signals back to the brain, creating a “touch” sensation.

During the Swedish study, three participants were given a braincontrolled prosthetic and lived with the devices for seven years while researchers tracked their experiences. Researchers are optimistic that the technology will eventually become widely used; however, the brain-controlled osseointegrated limbs are incredibly expensive, especially in states that don’t offer robust healthcare coverage. However, as the technology becomes more widely studied at different world universities, costs may eventually be lowered as other researchers produce brain-controlled prosthetics.

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radical change inside the body. 3D printing technology gives scientists the kind of precision in technology they need to realistically arrange cells into functioning organs. 3D printed organs might also prevent the immune system rejection that can result from a donor transplant. Since the technology would use the patient’s own cells to transplant a printed organ, there is less risk that the immune system would reject the organ because it didn’t recognize it as its own. In the past few years, researchers have been able to successfully print portions of organs but haven’t yet succeeded in printing a whole organ.

One of the biggest challenges in successfully printing 3D organs is providing them with blood supply. Researchers at Rice University in the U.S. began to overcome this challenge last year when they successfully vascularized a 3D-printed lung. The year before, another research team at the Wyss Institute 3D printed a heart ventricle with blood vessels. The research results from both studies promise that 3D printed organs may be available sooner than we think.

A CHANGING WORLD OF WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY Wearables are another technology that is supposed to improve within the next several years. The term “wearable” refers to any electronic technology that can be comfortably worn inside or outside the body to track information in real time. Some popular wearables on the market currently include smart watches which allow users to receive messages and social media updates on their timepiece and fitness trackers which count calories while the user is exercising. Wearables are expected to be come less visible as they gain popularity over the next several years. Further, power methods such as energy harvesting (which consists of using body heat or solar energy to power devices) are expected to become an alternative energy source for wearables, which currently don’t have a very long battery life.

Additionally, wearables are expected to move beyond the personal device sector and into a variety of industries. Some expect wearables to converge with home security technology, allowing a user’s heartbeat signature vis a vis a wearable to unlock a front door smartlock or having a wearable interface with a thermostat to control the room temperature based on body temperature. In the medical industry, there is experimentation with health trackers that will move beyond what popular devices like Fitbit are capable of to track the effects of drugs or measure other vitals.

These devices would be embedded underneath a user’s skin to track a variety of health datapoints.

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Some even think wearables will evolve into a kind of human exoskeleton. In humans, the term “exoskeleton” refers to a kind of wearable robot that can be worn to optimize human performance. In manufacturing and industrial occupations, exoskeletons might help protect workers from injury and boost worker performance. This technology has already been introduced in some occupations. In 2018, Hyundai revealed their model of an exoskeleton that’s designed to reduce neck and back pain for automobile manufacturers. Other companies are expected to follow their lead in the next few years.

THE COMPANIES PAVING THE WAY As biohacking technologies become more ubiquitous, several companies are using the advances to help others in ways never possible before. NeuroTech is an American company revolutionizing the way electroencephalograms (EEGs) are conducted.

EEGs measure electric activity in the brain, used to diagnose conditions such as epilepsy. Some EEGs take less than an hour, but some requiring video footage, known as video telemetry, can take a few days to record and require a hospital stay. NeuroTech revolutionizes EEG testing by making it available in the home.

Technologists monitor the EEGs remotely, and they can adjust the electrodes used to measure brain activity from afar if needed. This can save users thousands of dollars in hospital stays and make EEG testing more accessible.

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Other companies seek to increase collaboration across different biotechnology industries. MedTech is an association connecting professionals across pharmaceutical companies, medical technology companies, and research universities. Together, MedTech associates work to share information relevant to future advances in biology and medicine—a crucial connection in a world that went from discovering CRISPR as a mode of editing genes to modifying human embryos in less than a decade.

Other companies in the biotech space are concerned about what the future of biotechnology might mean for humanity. Humanity+ is a non-profit that seeks to explain how science and technology will affect the future of the human race. The organization hosts international conferences, publishes a magazine, and invests in research and development. Humanity+ follows a set of philosophies broadly grouped as transhumanism, which explores the relationship between the future of humanity and rapidly accelerating technology. Of particular interest to Humanity+ is biotechnology—and with all of the advances in the sector from the last thirty years, who can blame them?

The future of humanity holds rumors of designer babies, wearable technology that can use our body temperature to lower the thermostat, and prosthetics that can allow amputees to regain sensations they thought they had lost forever. Clearly, more than one organization will have to take charge of exploring the questions that will arise as we progress towards the fantastic future of biotechnology.

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THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL CHALLENGES

Technology allows us to live longer, work less, and know more than ever before. But what will we do once most of our labor force is replaced by computers or robots?

Who has the final say in how knowledge is used and who has access to it? These questions are just a snapshot of the issues we will have to face in the future. Here, we track the policies, predictions, and philosophies that are steering us into the world of tomorrow.

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he world received its first introduction to the idea of dangerous robots in the 1921 Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Though Rossum’s robots were made of chemical batter rather than being metallic or mechanical, they ended up being much more efficient than the humans, able to do the work of “two and a half men.”

They were also more murderous, leading a successful uprising against their creators and wiping out humanity.

R.U.R. cemented the “untrustworthy machine” trope laid out in earlier literary works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is a trope that can even be seen in commentary from experts within the robotics industry. The New York Times reports that tech giants from Bill Gates to Elon Musk “are freaking out about the rise of invincible machines.” However, robot influence and power grows as the machines become more advanced. Wired magazine notes that though robot capabilities might be currently limited, we need to seriously consider how much power we want to cede to machines as they become more advanced.

Specifically, as robots become more ubiquitous, it’s important to think of the larger role they might play in the workforce at the cost of human jobs.

The growing problem of workforce automation is just one of many challenges facing the future of society. However, these future societal challenges prompt many potential solutions. Universal basic income may become one way to sustain populations that might lose employment as workforces become more automated. Blockchain, which has already revolutionized the banking industry, might be used to implement data security in applications from food safety to workers’ rights. And green IT and lab grown meat are just two innovative ways societies might combat climate change. Clearly, we haven’t seen all of the challenges the future might have to offer. However, we have only just begun imagining solutions.

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A UNIVERSAL SOLUTION TO WORKPLACE AUTOMATION Workplace automation is not just a concern for the future. Several past professions, from switchboard operators who connected our telephone calls to elevator operators who originally controlled elevators with manual levers, have become completely automated. Currently, those working as grocery cashiers, toll collectors, or factory workers are some of the most at-risk of having their occupations taken by machines. However, that doesn’t mean that everyone else’s jobs are safe. One sobering 2013 report from the University of Oxford Department of Engineering Science predicts that up to 47% of current jobs will become automated within the next decade or two. In 2017, Alex Williams reported that fields from radiology to law could be overcome by robots within the recent future.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been touted as one potential economic solution to the vast numbers of workers who are expected to be displaced by increased automation in the workforce. If a state chooses to issue UBI, it provides cash deposits to all citizens in a certain amount, independent of citizen employment. Proponents of UBI argue that it can be used to sustain populations who might become unemployed with an increasing wave of future workplace automation. Additionally, some proponents of UBI argue that the extra income support will actually increase employment in low paid or temporary occupations and may even encourage workers to pursue riskier employment ventures such as opening a business or restaurant.

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Recent research with UBI, however, shows that the policy has a long way to go. A famed Finnish experiment with the program found that though participants were happy with the program, the experiment did not in fact boost employment as expected.

One economic study published in 2019 found that the proponents of UBI haven’t been specific enough about what the policy would entail, making the proposal difficult to study. While some arguments for UBI assume that it will increase the labor supply, others assume that it will have the opposite effect and decrease employment. Because of this discrepancy, researchers are currently having a difficult time analyzing whether the results of the Finnish study are positive or negative.

However, those hoping that UBI might be the solution to massive workforce automation may not need to despair. Not every expert believes the rampant doomsday hypotheses about what robots mean for the workforce. Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg argues that it’s much more likely that humans will work alongside robots than be the victims of a robot apocalypse. Goldberg describes a situation he describes as multiplicity. In contrast to singularity, the hypothetical point where machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence, multiplicity describes a state where humans and machines work together in harmony to tackle complex problems. To illustrate this point, Goldberg points to machine learning technology, arguing that machines do well solving problems in controlled environments, but struggle to operate in uncertainty, like they would without human assistance. That would make machines unsuited for small scale management positions—much less global domination.

THE FUTURE OF DATA STORAGE

However, just because robots might not take over the workplace doesn’t mean that society won’t see huge shifts within the next several years. Blockchain, a new database technology, promises to change the way we store information, which could have positive implications in industries such as banking. In a traditional database, data is stored in tables. Large databases use servers built using thousands of computers to allow users to access its information simultaneously. In contrast, blockchain is a kind of database that stores transactions in groups of information known as blocks. When a block fills up with data, it connects to the last block in the series, forming a chain. Filled blocks form part of an irreversible timeline, and blocks are given timestamps when they’re added to the chain.

Irreversible timestamping makes blockchain an ideal database for banking. Blockchain technology was in fact first applied to Bitcoin, a banking system that uses blockchain to verify transactions and eliminate the role of banks. It would be almost impossible for a hacker to successfully steal bitcoin. In the Bitcoin system, each block in the chain contains its own hash and the hash from the block before it. When the block is edited in any way, the hash changes and errors can be detected. If a hacker tries to alter their blockchain copy, their piece of the blockchain will mismatch every other piece of bitcoin, easily identified as fraudulent activity.

Blockchain technology, however, can be used to create irreversible ledgers of other datapoints outside of banking transactions.

In the future, blockchain might be used to verify the validity of elections, since it creates records that can’t be tampered with unless the majority of computers hosting the system agree to a change. Blockchain can also be used by companies to verify where perishable food products have been on their way to their final retail destinations. This process can help verify the source of foodborne illnesses like listeria or e Coli. Additionally, blockchain might also be used to verify records, whether that be for the purpose of enforcing workers’ rights or maintaining medical files.

Clearly, we haven’t yet imagined all of the applications where blockchain can help keep accurate, secure records.

ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS In addition to harnessing innovative methods of storing information, the future will also provide environmental challenges demanding innovative solutions. Smart cities, which use sophisticated technologies to make urban life easier, provide a myriad of 46 | THE WORLD IN 2050

environmental challenges. For one thing, smart cities rely on rapidly changing digital technology. Since its estimated that 70% of the natural resources used during the lifecycle of a computer are used during manufacturing, smart cities consume more resources through their extensive use of digital technology that quickly needs to be updated. Further, if smart city technology is installed without proper design and testing, governments can waste millions of dollars and create a city full of environmental waste.

However, if designed properly, smart city technology can combat wastefulness and contribute to greener urban centers. Governments can avoid wasteful smart urban planning processes by using green IT, a method of environmentally sustainable computing.

Green IT is a necessary practice in the wake of smart city experiments that have already contributed computer waste. In Barcelona, for example, smart street lights installed in 2011 to improve energy efficiency by detecting movement and climatic conditions were out of commission in just a few years. Green IT practices include deliberately designing computer parts that can be repurposed and recycling such computer parts in new machines.

Like green IT, lab-grown meat has been proposed as an innovative solution to many of the ethical and environmental issues which spring from factory farming. Cultured meat can be produced from just a few animal cells grown into a desired shape in a bioreactor. One 2018 study found that the switch to cultured meat could potentially result in a significant reduction in greenhouse gases when compared with those produced by current livestock prac48 | THE WORLD IN 2050

tices. Today’s livestock animals release the 1.1 billion pounds of food they consume as manure, which releases methane into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Though methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide does, it is initially more devasting to the environment than carbon dioxide, thanks to its efficacy in heat absorption.

Lab-grown meat can also potentially feed more people than traditional livestock. The world population is supposed to extend to 10 billion by 2050, and the increase in population is expected to bring an increase in the demand for meat. Cultured meat can meet this demand without the large calorie input that is required by livestock. For every calorie of beef that is produced under traditional methods, a cow must be fed 25-30 calories of grain.

However, that doesn’t mean that lab grown meat is without its challenges. In processing lab-grown meat, there is a need to develop better cell lines and scale bioreactors for mass production.

Additionally, manufacturers of cultured meat might face marketing barriers. In one recent Australian study, only 28% of young adults were willing to try the lab-grown protein. These challenges must be met before lab-grown meat is used as a solution to future environmental problems.

From savvy new data storage to hamburgers prepared by scientists, the future of society will surely look much different than the past. In the years to come, the world will face challenges never before seen. However, if current proposals are any indication, the world is rife with solutions. Only the future will tell how societies will respond to the most pressing challenges.

THE FUTURE OF OFF-WORLD CIVILIZATION

FURTHER OUT OF THIS WORLD THAN EVER BEFORE: THE FUTURE OF SPACE EXPLORATION

Advancements in spaceflight are accelerating humanity faster and farther than ever before. From commercial companies offering vacations in space to the innovations that are shaping us into a multi-planetary species, we look at the missions and milestones that are leading us into the final frontier.

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n 2015, the movie The Martian imagined what it would be like if an American astronaut became trapped on Mars during an exploration mission. Though the movie sparked scientific evaluations, which noted that Martian windstorms aren’t really as violent as the movie portrayed, the 2015 work of science fiction hints at circumstances that are inching closer and closer to reality. Specifically, the possibility that human life may soon thrive on Mars is looking more and more likely. In October 2020, several countries, including Japan and the UK, signed on to a NASA agreement to build a permanent station on the moon and eventually get to Mars. And NASA itself wants to start flying missions to Mars in the 2030s.

However, Mars colonization isn’t the only out-of-this world advance expected to occur in the next several years. CubeSats promise to reduce launch costs and make collecting data in space easier. Interstellar travel is becoming less of a sci-fi fantasy and more of a distinct possibility. And a promising series of research problems seeks to find the evidence that might disprove Fermi’s theory about the nonexistence of extraterrestrial life once and for all. In the years to come, it looks like the stories that dazzled our imaginations in science fiction movies are coming closer to reality.

HUMAN LIFE ON MARS? Ultimately, human bodies did not evolve to live beyond earth.

There are many challenges that humans need to overcome if they are to colonize Mars, including a need to prime humans against radiation and ways to help human bones adjust to microgravity.

In 2015, an American astronaut helped scientists learn some of what it takes to survive in space. Though astronaut Scott Kelley was not on Mars, he lived for almost a year at the International Space Station (ISS), the international laboratory orbiting space and housing astronauts from around the world. During his time at the ISS, Kelley’s body was put under intense stress. Researchers at NASA had a unique opportunity to compare Scott KelDIPLOMATIC COURIER | 53

ley’s experiences to those of his identical twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelley. Compared to Mark, Scott’s immune system went into overdrive while he was in space. Fluids filled his upper body and head, his major blood vessels swelled, and his genes activated differently. Though most of the bodily changes Scott Kelley experienced while he was in space had reverted back to normal within a few months, his experiences speak to the need to prepare humans extensively for life on Mars.

Genetic engineering is one technology researchers think humans will need if they hope to successfully colonize Mars. Such genetic tweaking can harness the abilities of organisms who are already outfitted to survive extreme environments. Scientists have already conducted experiments where they have inserted genes from tardigrades into human cells. Tardigrades, almost microscopic creatures that resemble bears in miniature, are notoriously tough and can even survive in space. In the experimentation with tardigrade genes, the genetically engineered cells had greater resistance to radiation than normal human cells.

Similar benefits can be reaped from “extremophile” microbes with similar radiation-adverse properties.

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Further, outside of countering the human challenges of living in space, some organizations are countering the economic challenges of moving to Mars. SpaceX is one company that is leading the way to Mars colonization with its Starship rocket system. The Starship consists of a large spaceship capable of transporting 100 people attached to a massive rocket named Super Heavy. Both the rocket and the spaceship will be reusable, cutting the cost of spaceflight and making the expedition to Mars more economically feasible. In October 2020, SpaceX founder Elon Musk claimed that the company will make its first Starship voyage to Mars in 2024.

However, there is much doubt about the viability of Musk’s plans.

For one thing, the SpaceX founder is notorious for offering “overly ambitious timelines.” In one of Musk’s other companies (Tesla), shareholders have commented that they operate on “Elon time” with unrealistic and overly optimistic predictions of when new products might roll out. Additionally, though SpaceX claims that the reusable components of the Starship rocket system will help cut the costs of spaceflight, the mission is still expected to be tremendously expensive. SpaceX hasn’t ever given an estimate for how much its planned settlement on Mars might cost. Further, though NASA is plotting an eventual path to Mars, the agency has also not indicated how much such a mission will cost. During the mid-20th century, when the agency launched the Apollo missions to explore the moon, the cost of such space exploration exceed $280 billion, and in some years, NASA received more than 4% of the American national budget. Outside of the obvious scientific challenges of preparing humans for life on a foreign planet, the economic costs of a Mars venture must be seriously considered if such a program is ever to take off.

INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

Of course, one of the other large challenges to Martian travel is how long the journey would take. Depending on how the red planet’s orbit lines up with ours on Earth, the voyage could take nine months, even under ideal conditions when the two orbits are lined up for optimal travel time. However, to achieve even more ambitious goals, space travel will need to become much faster. To literally reach the stars, for example, the nearest neighbor to Earth (Proximus Centauri) is four lightyears away. The current interstellar probes that we have exploring beyond the reaches of our solar system would reach Proximus Centauri in a whopping 80,000 years if they traveled at current speeds.

The vehicle used to achieve interstellar travel would thus need to go much faster than any space vehicle is currently capable of moving. The extra speed requires extra energy, which creates additional engineering challenges. One idea is to contain the extra fuel on board the space craft, but this adds mass, making the vehicle even more difficult to propel through space quickly. The Breakthrough Starshot project has an innovative way to tackle this problem, aiming to transport a spacecraft into the stars with lasers. Breakthrough Starshot wants to use a giant 100-gigawatt array of lasers to shoot laser blasts from earth at the reflective sail of what the project is calling an ultra-light nanocraft. The sail captures these laser blasts and propels the nanocraft forward.

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There are many questions about the Breakthrough Starshot project that need to be answered to assess its viability. First of all, the laser array itself would have to generate an amount of power equivalent to what is needed to power 70,000,000 homes. Additionally, the laser array would potentially need many lasers—maybe even hundreds of millions. A single lightbeam firing that produces this much energy might cost as much as $70,000, though the Breakthrough Starshot project notes that laser amplification costs “declined exponentially” between 1990 and 2015. Further, the size of the nanocraft in and of itself is cause for concern. The crafts are only supposed to be a few hundred atoms thick and weighing just one gram. Since the nanocrafts are small, they can avoid much of the debris floating in space. If they are struck by an unluckily positioned dust particle, however, the whole nanocraft could be destroyed. Clearly, these concerns must all be address before Breakthrough Starshot is launched towards another star.

EVEN SMALLER SATELLITES However, one element of the Breakthrough Starshot project that looks much less concerning than it might have twenty years ago is the size of the nanocraft—and for that, the initiative can thank satellite technology. Inverse reports that nanocraft technology is derived from the rise in CubeSats, miniature satellites which have shown efficiency in research due to their small size. The tiny technology was inspired in part by Beanie Babies. Thinking of the small stuffed animals which inspired the hottest toy craze of the 1990s, two American professors (Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University and Bob Twiggs of Stanford University) proposed that their students design miniature satellites for a classroom assignment. The project gave students the chance to earn satellite engineering experience with a smaller model, since regular satellites were typically expensive to build.

What was once just a classroom project has really taken off in a variety of applications, both within the atmosphere and outside of Earth’s orbit. CubeSat’s are generally 10 cm cubes that weigh less that 1.33 kg (2.93 lbs). For more complicated missions, multiple CubeSat units can be stacked together. Over the last 15 years, CubeSats have been used to help researchers working on a variety of projects. On Earth, CubeSats can help meteorologists predict storms, and in the atmosphere, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative is launching student-built satellites for young researchers who say their project can help the agency learn more about space. The satellites reduce launch costs since they’re lightweight (requiring less fuel to launch) and oftentimes rocket into space alongside a larger DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 57

satellite. This makes CubeSats an ideal vessel for many research opportunities.

CubeSats, however, have also been an ideal vessel for a variety of commercial space endeavors. Working with NASA, companies such as SpaceX and the company formerly known as Orbital ATK have allowed commercial companies to send CubeSats into space as part of auxiliary payloads on cargo resupply trips to the ISS. NASA has also offered companies like Rocket Lab and Virgin Galactic the opportunity to send CubeSats into lower orbit through their Venture Class Launch Services contracts. And when Northop Grumman’s (the company that ultimately acquired Orbital ATK) Cygnus spacecraft left the ISS in 2018, it deployed six CubeSats into orbit before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. In the years to come, CubeSat missions are expected to increase in frequency and technological sophistication. With their affordability and multiple purposes, it certainly seems like CubeSats are a crucial element of future space exploration.

WHERE ARE THE ALIENS? However impressive technologies like CubeSats and nanocrafts might be, one future element of space exploration remains very much unresolved: where are the aliens? The famed Fermi Paradox (attributed to remarks made by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi at a 1950 lunch but solidified by later thinkers such as astronomer Michael Hart and physicist Frank Tipler) posits that aliens can’t exist because no one on earth has ever seen them. According to legend, in 1950, Fermi remarked that any civilization with modest rocket power and large imperialist incentives could colonize the entire galaxy. Since Earth and our solar system is within a relatively new part of the solar system, some argue that it’s odd that we haven’t been visited yet by lifeforms from older parts of the universe, which have had much more time than we have to develop interstellar travel.

Thus, thinkers like Hart and Tipler argued that since other intelligent beings haven’t visited earth, they mustn’t exist.

Future research is slowly providing evidence to doubt Fermi’s ageold paradox. In 2014, scientists using the NASA Kepler Space Telescoped reported 715 newly discovered planets, a so-called “planet bonanza.” The planets discovered within the planet bonanza were reported to be more like Earth than other planets previously found outside of the solar system. The Kepler scientists found these 715 planets using a new statistical method called verification by multiplicity. Verification by multiplicity is expected to accelerate the discovery of additional planets outside of our solar system.

Additionally, more research into extraterrestrial life is expected to be conducted within the next few years. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which will “examine planets for the chemical makeup of their atmospheres,” is expected to launch in 2021. In 2026, the European Space Agency is hoping to launch the PLATO (Planetary Transits and Oscillations of Stars) telescope, which will seek to figure out the conditions under which planets are formed and whether those conditions are conducive to life. And at the University of California, Berkeley, the Breakthrough Listen project is putting $100 million in researching funding towards the subject, intending to put in thousands of hours of telescope time into searching for extraterrestrial life.

The space exploration technology that is going to become available in the next several years is proving to be out of this world. For the first time, we may no longer have to dream of living on Mars, meeting extraterrestrials, or collecting star dust from other solar systems. If the recent advances in satellite technology, planet discovery, and interstellar travel are any indication, our next generation’s moonshots will happen further out of this world than ever before.

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SCI-FI VISIONS OF THE FUTURE

EXPLAINING THE SCIENCE BEHIND FUTURISTIC TROPES

As the pace of global innovation quickens and humanity races toward the inevitable singularity, new categories of science and technology are popping up every single day. What is the role of popular art, culture, film, and literature in solving for the future. Here, we explain the modern science behind popular futurism theories.

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n the 1985 classic film Back to the Future, teenaged Marty McFly travels back in time and almost ruins his own future, accidentally disrupting his parents’ first meeting as teenagers. However, as one 2020 paper reports, Marty might not have been in much danger after all. Researchers at the University of Queensland argue that changes made in the past can’t dramatically alter the future. The theory calls Einstein’s theory of general relativity into question, since it theoretically allowed for an individual to go back in time and interact with a past self, potentially endangering their own future.

In the future, however, other sci-fi visions might creep closer to reality. Wormholes might help researchers discover a faster way to travel in space. Additional evidence is confirming the existence of a multiverse, otherwise known as alternative universes.

And some physicists think that everything we experience in this world might be part of an elaborate video game rather than a biological world. These theories and others in modern theoretical physics bring science fiction to life. We will explain which of these theories (if any) will come closer to gaining evidence of existing in real life any time soon.

TRAVELING THROUGH TIME The original theory that allowed for the possibility of time travel is Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Einstein’s theory was a big turning point in physics, turning Newton’s idea of fixed space and time on its head. The theory of general relativity basically challenges the assumption of gravity as an invisible force that merely brings objects together. In contrast, the theory of general relativity depicts gravity as “ a curving or warping of space.”

Objects with more mass can warp more space. For example, the Earth can warp space enough to bring a moon into its orbit, but the sun is massive enough to warp enough space to bring in eight planets with its gravitational pull. Gravity can also impact measurements of time in a process known as gravitational time DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 63

dilation. NBC News Science explains the phenomenon with the following example. If your friends climbs a mountain, and you are still at the base of the mountain, your clock will be ticking slower on the ground than your friend’s clock on the peak. This is because of the difference in gravity between the two locations. When gravity is stronger, time moves slower, and this is because gravity curves space-time (reword).

What might this all mean for time travel? Under general relativity, going back in time is theoretically possible. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as a black hole, could potentially warp spacetime so much that it might turn back on itself.

This could potentially create what is known as a “closed-time loop,” a loop of spacetime one could use to travel back in time.

Within closed-time loops, a paradox is thought to exist—one where an individual could go back in time Marty McFly style and prevent their own existence.

However, the researchers from the University of Queensland aren’t convinced that such a paradox even exists. Their paper, “Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice” ultimately found that changes to events in the past couldn’t have large outcomes on events in the future. For example, if someone were to go back in time and prevent the COVID-19 patient zero from spreading the virus, they might contract the virus themselves. The idea is that the time travel paradox 64 | THE WORLD IN 2050

doesn’t exist because even if one event were to change, other events would shift to produce the same original outcome. If this theory is correct, those worried that time travel would allow someone to go back in time and kill their grandfather, preventing their own existence, have no reason to worry at all.

THROUGH THE WORMHOLE According to NASA, other modes of time travel are possible with general relativity. For example, going faster than the speed of light in a vacuum might allow for time travel, though Einstein’s work shows that the object traveling would have to “have both [an] infinite mass and a length of (zero)” (it’s worth noting that Einstein’s original math shows that it is impossible for anything to move faster than the speed of light, but some modern day researchers think that it might someday be possible).

Additionally, something called a wormhole has many implications not just for time travel, but for interstellar travel. Wormholes act as a tunnel shortcut through space time. They connect two points in space that would otherwise be very far apart.

Astrophysicist Sabrina Stierwalt says that wormholes are most commonly depicted by asking someone to imagine a piece of paper, then bending two points from opposite ends of the paper towards each other but not touching them. The piece of paper represents normal space, and the distance between the two ends of the paper once folded represents the shorter path between the two ends that might be traveled if a wormhole were to exist there.

The sci-fi solution to the time travel question ultimately has a few caveats. Though wormholes are theoretically possible, scientists have never been able to prove their existence. They have

never been observed directly or indirectly in space. Further, even if wormholes did exist, they’d likely be very tiny, so small that a person couldn’t fit inside, much less a whole spaceship.

Additionally, some physicists think that once we understand the laws of physics with more clarity, we will learn that time travel is not possible. Our current understanding of physics tells us that wormholes would have to be held open with exotic matter, a gravity-repelling substance whose properties are not fully understand. Since exotic matter usually exists only in particles, it is not yet known whether larger amounts can be assembled to form a wormhole.

Time-travel enthusiasts, however, need not despair just yet.

Even though wormholes carry some technical complications, astrophysicist Eric Davis maintains that they’re our best shot at time travel. Wormholes connecting two points in spacetime arise as one potential solution to Einstein’s general relativity field equations. Further, Davis argues that there are several spacetime geometry solutions to current problems in physics that “exhibit time travel and/or have the properties of time machines.” According to Davis, “traversable wormholes imply time machines” which are “unavoidable in our physical dimensional space-time.” If Davis is right, and wormholes really exist, we might be able to travel in ways never before thought possible.

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IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE We might not be the only universe contemplating time travel. In fact, according to multiverse theory, we might not be the only universe, period. According to physicist Brian Greene, the universe might be vast and finite, or it might be vast and infinite.

Even if the universe is infinitely large, there are only so many ways matter can be put together. So, if the universe is infinitely large, because matter can only be arranged in finite ways, there must be infinite parallel universes.

There are a number of different theories about the multiverse. Some theorists notice that some areas of the universe keeping inflating and expanding while others stay constant in size, suggesting a network of bubble universes across spacetime. Others posit the traditional parallel universe theory, noting that “with an infinite number of cosmic patches, the particle arrangements within them must repeat.”

The theory of parallel universes specifically rises from quantum theory. When the study of quantum physics began in the early 20th century, researchers started noticing that quantum particles behaved strangely. On the quantum level, particles seemed to arbitrarily switch forms. Photons, for example, the basic unit of light, can exist as particles or waves. In an idea known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, physicist Werner Heisenberg argued that we can determine the state of a quantum particle just by observation. Thus, if we aren’t observing a quantum particle, we don’t know all of the particle’s attributes, such as velocity or location, for certain.

The Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle prompted researchers to theorize that by observing a quantum object, we could affect its state. However, some researchers took this principle further and suggested that by measuring a quantum object, rather than pushing it into one state or the other, we actually cause a split in the universe. This is known as the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to proponents of the Many Worlds theory, when we observe a quantum object, we split the universe into two distinct universes to accommodate each of the observation outcomes. The Many Worlds theorem can mean that if a person was ever in a situation where they could have died, there exists a universe where they are dead, and the universe where they are alive. Essentially, the Many-Worlds theory offers an explanation for why parallel universes might exist.

If parallel universes do exist, we might face some technical difficulties if we tried to reach them. Within our universe, our vision is limited by the speed of light. Since light started traveling at the moment of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, our vision is limited to 14 billion lights years away—a distance known as one Hubble

Volume. The Hubble Volume limitation is the reason reaching a parallel universe is virtually impossible. We could only exchange communication within our own Hubble Volume, so sending or receiving a message to or from a parallel universe isn’t possible.

Of course, it’s always possible that parallel universes don’t exist at all. Some physicists point out that the finite age of the universe (14 billion years old) “limit(s) the number of possibilities for particles to rearrange themselves” within spacetime. Further, physicists who doubt the existence of parallel universes also point out that during the initial Big Bang expansion of the universe, the universe initially expanded exponentially because of a giant build-up of energy. That initial expansion has slowed, indicating perhaps that multiverses would have different rates of inflation and are thus less likely to be similar to our universe.

Both of these ideas reduce the likelihood of parallel universes.

IS IT ALL JUST A GAME? Even more mind-blowing than the idea of parallel universes is the simulation hypothesis. In its simplest terms, the simulation hypothesis is that idea that we on Earth are living in an advanced civilization’s computer simulation. In a seminal 2003 paper, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom explained this hypothesis in detail. Bostrom assumed that at least of three possibilities had to be true. In one scenario, no civilization in the universe had ever survived long enough to create simulations. In the second scenario, the civilizations that reached this level of technological sophistication didn’t bother to create simulations. And in the final scenario, advanced civilizations have the ability to create several simulations and act on this ability, meaning that there are more simulated worlds than non-simulated worlds.

The simulation hypothesis sounds fantastical, but some physicists have tried to explain what elements of our physical world serve as likely evidence. First of all, some have commented the speed of light might act like the kinds of limitations in the video games we’ve played in our universe. Perhaps such a definite physical limitation, some argue, is meant to keep human “players” from leaving the “game” in this universe.

Other researchers turn once again to quantum mechanics for an explanation. Computer scientist Rizwan Virk (who wrote the 2019 book The Simulation Hypothesis) notes that quantum mechanics is similar to a principle optimization feature within certain video games. Video games use an optimization technique sometimes which “only render that which is being DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 69

observed.” In a first-person shooter game, this might look like only showing what would be visible from the point of view of the virtual camera. Virk says that if we are living in a simulation, quantum mechanics might be something like this – not showing these tiny particles in a definitive state as an optimization technique. In other words, it be the case that our alien programmers didn’t have the computer processing power to make us see and understand quantum behavior.

Virk also explains the history of progress in physics to defend the simulation hypothesis. The first wave of physics saw everything as the study of physical objects; the second wave saw everything as a field of probabilities. The third wave has come to understanding everything as information—i.e., everything we see is the result of pieces of information. Virk’s argument is that if everything isn’t physical and everything is instead information-based, that offers even more evidence for the simulation hypothesis.

However, Virk isn’t the only authority on simulation, and others in the field completely disagree with his hypotheses. In a 2017 paper published in Science Advances, theoretical physicists Zohar Ringel and Dmitry L. Kovrizhin argue that it’s mathematically impossible for us to be living in a computer simulation. The math to get to this conclusion is supposedly very complicated, but the takeaway is actually quite simple. In order to simulate the quantum mechanical system (the basis of nature), Ringel and Kovrihzhin argue that the simulator’s computer would need more processing power than can be built with all atoms in the universe.

Of course, this doesn’t include the possibility that all of these calculations are part of the simulation. However, when Fast Company posed that question to Dr. Kovrizhin, he noted that though it was interesting, it was outside the realm of physics.

Modern physics is getting closer and closer to figuring out some of the most fantastic possibilities that have delighted science fiction fans for decades in real life. However, if you’re worried about your grandchild coming back to the past to kill you, or living a differ life in an alternate universe, or sweating about the possibilities for your character in this supposed elaborate video game we’re living in, you might not have to worry just yet. Science is still a long way away from making science fiction a reality.

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THE FUTURE IS HYBRID

EXPLORING THE MACHINES OF TOMORROW

We are constructing a futuristic society which is populated by autonomous flying machines, houses are printed on-demand, and our companions are highly evolved robots. These advancements are allowing us to re-imagine and re-engineer our world. Here we explore the machines of the not-so-far future.

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he machine was shaped like a plus-sign and filled a large room. It was composed of 400,000 transistors and more than 100 miles of wiring. The CDC 6600 was a force to be reckoned with, the world’s first supercomputer that operated at speeds ten times faster than any other computer available in 1964. Ultimately, 100 of the machines were sold, even to clients beyond the usual government and military customers. Just five years later, the machine’s faster successor, the CDC 7600, toppled the machine’s 3,000,000 instructions per second speed record.

Supercomputers are just one of the machines that will make daily life easier in the future. As machinery and robotics improve faster than ever before, the changes in technology we can anticipate in the future are impressive. Humanoid robots will help take care of elderly populations while allowing them to live more independently. Drones will make it easier to give humans eyes in fields like emergency response and agriculture. 3D printing will revolutionize everything from the medical field to the culinary industry. The future of machine will look much different from the past, but the changes it promises will make life as we know it much easier.

SUPERCOMPUTERS Supercomputers diverged from their less-super predecessors when multiple processors were linked together to perform multiple processing operations on datasets at the same time. As processor technology improves, supercomputers exhibit increases in speed. Additionally, the problems supercomputers can solve change as supercomputer technology changes. In the 1960s, the CDC 6600 offered “extremely fast solutions” to data processing problems. These early supercomputers only had a few processors; by the early 1990s, supercomputers had thousands. Today’s supercomputers can tackle a much wider range of challenges than the 1960s models. Supercomputers aid scientists in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change. They’ve helped study chemical reactions and researched anti-cancer therapies. And in DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 75

the U.S., supercomputers maintain the functionality of the American nuclear arsenal in a country where testing nuclear weapons has been banned since 1992.

The future of supercomputers likely lies in the development of the world’s first exascale supercomputer. Computer speed is measured in flops, which determine how many operations the machine can perform per second. Laptop and desktop computers perform operations are capable of several teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently the fastest computer in the world, performing operations at 150 petaflops, several thousand times faster than a household computer. However, an exascale supercomputer would be capable of a quintillion calculations per second, one million times faster than a desktop computer.

Exascale computing is expected to dramatically advance scientific and artificial intelligence research. It will help scientists solve problems that couldn’t be solved before because the computer operations ran too long. Exascale computing will also allow researchers to run very large-scale simulations. Ultimately, exascale computing will help states optimize power grid performance, forecast water resources, and efficiently research a wide variety of disease conditions.

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AN EVEN MORE SUPER COMPUTER As impressive as exascale computing might be, quantum computing will almost certainly render it obsolete. Today’s computers and supercomputers use binary bits. This means that all of their digital data are optical or electrical pulses of 1s or 0s. In contrast, quantum computers can store data as qubits, which are composed of subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Two properties of quantum computing—superposition and entanglement—mean that quantum computing has much more processing power than traditional binary computing.

Superposition means that qubit can represent multiple possible combinations of 1 or 0 simultaneously, allowing researchers to run through a vast number of possibilities in a dataset at lightning speed. Entanglement means that two qubits exist in the same quantum state at once, meaning that changing the state of one qubit “will instantaneously change the state of the other one in a predictable way.” In traditional computing, doubling the number of binary bits doubles its processing power. In quantum computing, entanglement allows increases in qubits to result in exponential increases in processing power. Together, the quantum properties of superposition and entanglement mean that quantum computing has the potential to be more powerful than any technology used in traditional supercomputing to date.

The challenges associated with quantum computing, however, are significant. Qubits are incredibly delicate, and the slightest change in their environment can stop them from functioning properly. The slightest disturbances (known as “noise”) can take qubits out of superposition before they have performed their assigned calculation. Researchers try to prevent noise by keeping qubits in vacuum chambers or super-cooled fridges.

However, noise still leads to errors in quantum computing, and the errors are difficult to fix. Manipulating a single qubit can lead to errors; when that qubit is entangled with others, the noise that results from the entanglement is multiplied. Additionally, once computer scientists master error correction in quantum computing, they will have to re-master every process they’ve already achieved in quantum computing.

If scientists are able to master a form of quantum computing that can combat potential errors like a regular computer system (despite the engineering challenges), the societal impact could be huge. Quantum computers can break decryption codes, which could hold many ramifications for data privacy and security. Additionally, with speeds “thousands of times� faster than traditional computers, quantum computers can significantly accelerate advances in AI that have been brought about by machine learning processes. Perhaps most notably, quantum computing can solve many problems that rely on detailed simulations, since the technology can simulate the behavior of matter, even at the molecular level. If researchers are able to harness quantum technology in future computing, the possibilities are endless.

ROBOTS THAT LOOK LIKE US Another technology promising to change the future of problem solving is humanoid robots. Humanoid robots are often thought to be robots that resemble the human form, but that isn’t always the case.

Some are only modeled after certain human body parts, such as a human head. Additionally, some experts say that with the cost of making robots, it would be sufficient for humanoid machines to merely relate and emote like humans, even if they didn’t look like them.

A few humanoid robots have already been developed within the last few years. Of these perhaps most notable is Sophia, the robot designed by Hanson Robotics and granted Saudi Arabian citizenship.

Sophia can express fifty emotions and exhibits a sense of humor.

Hanson Robotics notes that Sophia is designed to help people, and can be programmed to assist with “a wide range of physical interaction tasks.” And in Japan, Kodomoroid is a humanoid who works at the Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. She can speak a number of different languages and can read the news.

In the future, humanoid robots will be especially useful in caregiving jobs. They can help children on the autism spectrum learn social skills, since interacting with a robot might be easier for autistic children who are overstimulated by interaction with other humans.

Humanoid robots working in this capacity are actually more effective when they look less human. Zeno, another humanoid created

by Hanson Robotics, is currently used in autism research around the world, and has been used to help children on the spectrum learn arm motions and facial expressions. Zeno is much smaller than a person – at only 17” tall, he fits on a tabletop. Rather than looking like a person, he has a somewhat elf-like appearance, with bright green eyes and sharp zig-zags for eyebrows.

In addition to helping children with autism, humanoids can also be used to assist the elderly. Ri-Man, a humanoid built at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), is strong enough to help lift people out of bed and is designed to help with household tasks. However, unlike with robots meant to help those on the autism spectrum, robots meant to help the elderly are more effective when they look more like humans, and as a result, humanoid homecare bots have not taken off in Japan. Even though Ri-Man can complete some human motions, with his green body and lifeless eyes, it is thought that his affect is off-putting to consumers.

Before help from humanoid robots can become mainstream, however, a variety of challenges must be overcome. Humanoid robots are built with actuators, motors that help humanoids mimic natural DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 79

human movements. Actuators have to be programmed to carry a wide range of actions—dancing, throwing, walking, picking things up, etc. Humanoids additionally need a wide range of sensors to cover all five human senses. Specifically, sensors can help the humanoid make realistic facial expressions, and these sensors need to be programmed to display a wide array of emotions. Lastly, though AI technology has led to drastic improvements, the level at which humanoids can currently interact with humans is somewhat limited.

However, experts predict that these challenges can be overcome if money is invested into robot research and funding. Robots are already used in janitorial services and in hospitals. Many expect that they will become more popular within the next several years.

Perhaps in the future, humanoid robots will find ways to help more people than they already have.

SOLUTIONS IN THE SKY Drones are yet another machine that promises to change life as the world knows it. The term “drone� typically refers to a pilotless vehicle that uses technologies such as blank or artificial intelligence to operate autonomously.

The first pilotless vehicles were tested by the U.S. and the U.K. during the first world war, though they were never used operationally during the conflict. However, in years since, drones have been used in a variety of applications outside of the battlefield.

Drones can use thermal imaging to look for missing people on the ground and track animals which might carry diseases like malaria. Operating from a high vantage point, drones can help researchers study vulnerable ecosystems or can help farmers use their land more efficiently. And during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, police in Spain even used drones to enforce social distancing.

In the future, drones will take an even larger role in some of these sectors. In agriculture, drones might help farmers supervise and spray their crops. In policing, it is expected that drones will help maintain police presence at large public events in the future. Drone usage is also expected to increase in emergency response efforts as well as in conservation efforts.

Drones offer advantages over human labor in many industries.

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a person in danger from up above than first responders on the ground. Additionally, battery-powered drones are more environmentally friendly than aircrafts which use fuel and can reducing staffing costs in certain sectors.

However, there are still some challenges in drone engineering that need to be overcome if they are to play a more present role in daily life. Most commercial drones currently only have a battery life of a half hour, and it can take up to 90 minutes to recharge the battery.

Additionally, in some areas (specifically large, open areas), drones might have difficulty receiving GPS signals, which might prevent the drone from making it home safely. These problems will need to be addressed before drones can be used in industries more frequently.

PRINTING THE FUTURE When 3D printers were first invented in the 1980s, they were used to make thinks like polymer eye wash cups. Today, 3D printing is used in a wide variety of applications, to make everything from 82 | THE WORLD IN 2050

models of dinosaur bones in paleontology to airplane parts in aviation. In the future, 3D printing will likely be used for more futuristic ventures, taking over kitchens and changing modern medicine.

The first 3D printer used a technique known as stereolithography.

Stereolithography can be used to create smaller prototypes of objects so that researchers can test the objects without investing time and money into making a full-size version. Objects made by stereolithography are printed layer by layer. After words, they’re rinsed in a solve and cured with ultra-violet light. Later 3D printing technology would use lasers to fused powder polymers into objects. Today’s most common 3D printing technology, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), forms objects by heating a cable of thermoplastic and extruding the material in layers.

3D printing is powerful because it allows people to make basically anything via a simple computer file. In medicine, 3D printing is allowing doctors and researchers to make giant strides in prosthetics. In Sudan, Not Impossible Labs operates Project Daniel, an organization which 3D prints affordable prosthetics for victims of violence. Physicians can also use 3D printing to make surgical models they can practice on before going into surgery on a live patient. Additionally, the medical field has been able to produce 3D printed “hearing aids, artificial teeth, and bone grafts.” In the future, physicians hope that 3D printers will be able to produce functional artificial organs, which will be lifesaving in a world where many die on organ donation waitlists. The 3D printers that will be used to print layers of cells are already in the R&D phase. So far, researchers have been able to duplicate patches of tissue that resembles certain organs but have yet to print a full-functioning organ.

Food printing is another area of 3D printing that might expand in the future. A 3D food printer called the Cornucopia was designed at MIT, and The French Culinary Institute has used a 3D printer developed at Cornell to print “artistic delicacies.” Currently, 3D food printing is being used in German nursing home to make appetizing meals of mashed carrots, broccoli, and sweet peas for elderly residents who have difficulty chewing and have resisted unappetizing pureed food options. Further, the future possibilities created by 3D printing food are vast.

Some researchers think they could help create palatable snacks out of plentiful but currently unpalatable materials such as algae or grass. Such a technique could help offer more ecofriendly solutions to feed a growing global population.

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THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION

THE FUTURE OF TRANSPORTATION: CARS, TRAINS, AND PLANES

Flying cars, the hyperloop, intergalactic travel? These are not Sci-Fi visions of the future but the world now.

At the famous World’s Fair in New York in 1939, GM envisioned a futuristic society where highways connected the rural to the urban. With 70% of the world’s population moving to the urban sphere in the coming decades, innovating in the transportation realm will be paramount. Here we cover the innovations that are transforming this landscape and accelerating us in ways that previous generations only dreamed about.

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t was the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. Cameras made the technology possible, helping the vehicle detect objects on the road. The car was engineered with “dynamic vision,” a component which allowed its imaging system to focus on only the relevant objects in its surroundings. And in perhaps its most triumphant achievement, Mercedes-Benz’s VaMoRs self-driving car navigated the notorious German Autobahn at 60 mph speeds.

The VaMoRs was the world’s first self-driving car. While fully autonomous vehicles might still be the dreams of today’s tech giants, the VaMoRs first hit the road a whopping 33 years ago. Though the world has come a long way in terms of autonomous transportation, the future will reveal even more impressive technology.

Outside of self-driving cars, flying cars could take to the skies. On railway lines, trains could reach speeds of 650 kph; using hyperloop technology, people could be transported over land at speeds of a whopping 1200 kph. Transportation might even be able to take the everyday tourist out of this world in a space plane. Whatever the future of transportation may hold, cars, trains, and planes are about to get a major upgrade.

SELF-DRIVING AND FLYING CARS Autonomous cars are one area of transportation technology which has improved substantially in the last thirty years. The VaMoRs was a 5 ton van outfitted with bulky, conspicuous interior cameras; the Tesla Model S’s semi-autonomous “Autopilot” feature was delivered as a single software update. The VaMoRs’s computer systems could process camera data every couple seconds; today’s computers can process images every few milliseconds or even nanoseconds. Ernst Dickmanns, the engineer who designed DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 87

the VaMoRs, continued to design other autonomous vehicles throughout the 1990s. However, the cars had some issues identifying potholes and other street obstacles. Today’s Teslas come with sophisticated obstacle-aware acceleration to prevent accidental acceleration in the presence of an obstacle.

The future of self-driving cars, however, was supposed to arrive much quicker. A variety of 2016 headlines predicted that millions of autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020. That same year, then-Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx predicted that self-driving cars would become commonplace in the U.S. by November 2021.

What actually goes into making self-driving vehicles is an engineering nightmare – and is stalling the development of autonomous cars that can handle the open road. For example, even though autonomous cars’ computer imaging systems have drastically improved over the past 30 years, these vehicles still have to be prepared to operate in all kinds of weather, and detect obstacles that occur at varying levels of frequency. Self-driving cars will need to learn that it’s okay to run over leaves in the middle of the road but not okay to run over large branches. Additionally, autonomous vehicles are a long way from being able to make the 88 | THE WORLD IN 2050

kinds of judgement calls humans make behind the wheel every day, such as deciding to go first at a four-way stop.

The advances in AI technology over the last ten years drove the optimistic predictions regarding the speedy development of selfdriving cars. However, though AI training can help train autonomous vehicles using machine learning, it is possibly that such a technique can give the cars’ computers poor exposure to certain types of rare driving scenarios. Developers have tried to get around this problem by training cars in simulations and engineering rare driving scenarios that cars needed to be equipped to handle (such as an accident up ahead on the road). In the field of autonomous transportation, the cost of skimping on these training hours can be deadly. In 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars hit a pedestrian (it has been rumored that Uber’s cars have not logged nearly as many training hours as competitors such as Waymo). Additionally, the car’s system hadn’t been trained to recognize pedestrian’s crossing a street; the result of the computer error was the death of a 49-year-old woman. Such programming issues will need to be fully resolved before autonomous vehicles can safely join city streets in large numbers.

While some engineers are currently working to make self-driving cars a reality on the road, others have their eyes set on the skies.

Some companies are hoping to roll out commercial passenger drones by 2025; Uber and Boeing are hoping to release revolutionary air taxis by 2025. However, the electric battery technology required to power such vehicles doesn’t exist yet, and the current technology only allows drones to fly for 20 minutes max. In August 2020, the Japanese company SkyDrive successfully conducted a test flight of its battery-powered electrical vertical take-off and landing vehicle (eVTOL), the SD-03; however, in the test flight, the vehicle only flew for approximately four minutes.

However, for SkyDrive, four minutes might be enough. They’re planning their air taxi rides to last between 3-5 minutes to cover a distance that would take 20 minutes to travel in a car, and the company is hoping to launch the service in Osaka or Tokyo by 2023.

While the company is optimistic about the necessity of flying cars to combat dense traffic in Japan and Southeast Asia, others are not so sure that such technology would ever be needed outside of large urban centers. Even executives at companies developing flying cars argue that their products are not being created to revolutionize urban traffic. “We aren’t going to change the world in terms of traffic with flying cars,” Mark Jennings-Bates, vice president at PAL-V, a flying car start-up, told USA Today. “At best, it may displace traffic in the area, which is arguably less pleasant.”

Despite the uncertainty regarding flying cars’ necessity, some experts are certain that they will eventually “take off,” so to speak.

Making sure the cars are safe is likely to be a big hurdle. Laurie Garrow, associate director for the Center for Urban and Regional Air Mobility at Georgia Tech, argues that flying cars will have to undergo a lengthy certification process before getting approved for regular use. In 2019, expert panelists participating in a discus90 | THE WORLD IN 2050

sion reported in MIT Technology Review agreed the regulations would be the largest obstacle in getting flying taxies to the sky.

However, once the cars are approved? Panelist predictions for when flying taxies would become a regular sighting in large cities ranged from 2-10 years.

A NEW KIND OF SOLO TRAVEL In 2013, in an article entitled “Why Don’t We Have Jetpacks?,” Popular Mechanics explained why the comic-book technology had never quite made it past the printed page. Humans aren’t meant to fly on their own, the article explained, and thus required an excessive amount of force to get off the ground. Since creating this amount of force takes a lot of energy, even the best jetpacks in 2013 could only keep a person in the air for about 30 seconds.

Within just three years, one company had proven Popular Mechanics wrong. JetPack Aviation, a Los Angeles company which calls itself the leading innovator in micro personal vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) industry, developed the world’s first portable jetpack between 2010 and 2015. Its JB10 jetpack became available to a select group of consumers in 2016. Currently, two models are available for sale on the company’s website, with prices available upon request (though when journalist Rohit Jaggi test flew one for luxury lifestyle magazine Robb Report in 2019, he noted that the device cost a whopping $340,000).

JetPack Aviation’s founder, engineer David Mayman, reported earlier this year that though jetpack technology won’t be available to everyday commuters within “two to three years or five years,” it will be something that will eventually be available to the “average member of the public.” Currently, jetpacks are powered by propulsion technology. Engineers would like to use electric batteries, but they face the same challenges that the makers of other VTOLs (such as flying cars) have run into. Batteries currently can’t hold enough energy to power a person into the air using a jetpack.

Once battery technology improves, however, Mayman predicts that engineers will be able to overcome the power source problem, maybe even within the next few years.

FASTER ALTERNATIVES TO TRAINS In a world where the future of the environment looks increasingly grim, high speed rail has often been touted as a mass transit solution to the emissions woes of airline travel. Trains produce less carbon dioxide than private cars carrying the same number of people DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 91

and result in less traffic congestion. Additionally, proponents of high-speed trains argue that high speed rail could produce travel times similar to air travel with a more lenient boarding process and more space for passengers. Even the process of preparing states for high-speed trains could have benefits, producing jobs and creating incentives for tourism in areas with train travel.

However, those that envision a world where high speed trains are the future of transport are likely to find their dreams derailed within the next several years. Power poses one potential obstacle. As trains move at faster and faster speeds, they require more and more power, making it more difficult to connect trains with their power source. Additionally, as trains go faster, they face more problems with air resistance. A long-nosed design can help alleviate this issue and prevent sonic booms, the loud noise created by the shockwaves that race ahead of a high-speed train faster than the speed of sound. However, high speed trains can create other noise issues, especially in Europe, where many tunnels built in the 19th century might not be wide enough to add much-needed noise insulation. In other areas, even the land beneath the rail for a high-speed train might pose difficulties; if the ground is too soft, engineers will have to stiffen it before building railway tracks to prevent liquefaction.

Additionally, high speed trains are not without their economic challenges. Making faster trains requires more power which results in higher costs. Engineers must keep these costs in mind when increasing train speeds. Though high speed trains could theoretically travel at a maximum speed of 600kph, Laurent Jarsalé, vice president of High Speed Product Line at the French rail company Alstom, notes that trains must operate at a “technical-economic optimum,” which most often results in trains that travel at around 320 kph.

And as for the future of high-speed rail? According to Wired, there might not be much of one. In China, China Railway Corps is already struggling with ridership on its current lines. The highspeed rail network connecting the EU has been criticized as “incoherent, overpriced, and under-delivered.” And in the United States, high rail has struggled to take off in any capacity for years.

Though over $10 billion was allocated to U.S. railroads in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most projects were cancelled or severely delayed. Additionally, almost none of the projects promised investment in high speed rail and connecting the whole country to high speed rail systems under some plans was slated to cost as much as $1 trillion over several decades. Ultimately, the future of transport may very likely move along without the addition of high-speed rail.

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Of course, even if the future doesn’t move by rail, it might move by a futuristic form of rail known as hyperloop. First proposed by Elon Musk, hyperloop is a technology which removes some of the obstacles that currently limit the speed which can be achieved by train.

A hyperloop system would consist of pods that move through steel tubes where magnetic levitation and vacuum pumps have removed air, reducing the drag produced by air pressure and friction. Some say that this technology would allow the pods, carrying cargo and people, to travel at up to 750 mph (over 1200 kph).

Hyperloop technology has many potential benefits. Elon Musk argues that installing a hyperloop system between Los Angeles and San Francisco would be cheaper and faster than having a high speed rail line in the same location. He also argued that hyperloop could be self-power and less disruptive than rail travel. Other proponents of the technology argue that the vacuum technology will give hyperloop an environmental edge over other modes of transportation. The prospect of the technology has even driven the interest of several companies hoping to build hyperloops everywhere from Slovenia to Abu Dhabi.

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However, much like highspeed rail, hyperloop also has its caveats. Though rough estimates insist that the technology would be cheaper than rail, the costs of maintaining a hyperloop tube and keeping it free of air are largely unknown. Additionally, engineers will face hurdles in proving that that hyperloop is safe. And though the technology is supposed to be environmentally friendly, no one is exactly sure how much energy it will require to move hyperloop pods at speeds up to 750 mph. As experimentation continues over the next several years, the world will begin to see whether the technology is a viable substitute for rail.

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OUT OF THIS WORLD While flying cars and hyperloop are ambitious takes on transportation, space plans offer to take transportation out of this world.

Space planes are vehicles that can fly both as an airplane in the atmosphere using its wings and as a spacecraft in the vacuum using rocket propulsion (reword). Some see space places as the vehicles which could make vacation space travel a reality. Space planes have the potential to lower space travel costs from $10,000/pound for every object on a payload leaving the Earth’s atmosphere to $1000/pound.

NASA’s X-fleet spaceships were early innovators in this space and might play a key role in making space travel accessible to all. The X-fleet ships have given engineers an opportunity to study everything from how to keep spacecraft from burning up during atmospheric re-entry to how to build spacecraft that will yield lower mission costs. Beginning in the 1990s, NASA began developing the X-33 space plane with Lockheed Martin, their ultimate goal focused on sending a commercial craft into space. The X-33 was to be a small prototype for the VentureStar, which was supposed to be the first commercial craft flown in space. The project was abandoned in 2001 before the commercial craft component could ever be funded.

As space travel has gradually shifted towards the private sphere, private companies have taken up the challenge of building the world’s first space planes. The startup Exodus Space Corp. is hoping to send the AstroClipper into space. The AstroClipper will take off and land on a runway like a plane but will be propelled into space with the help of a heft booster. The company is hoping to launch a technology demonstration by 2022, with the eventual goal of taking passengers into space by 2030.

No matter whether states decide to invest in high speed rail or flying cars, the future of transportation will look nothing like the past. Workers might be transported through a vacuum tube at 700 mph to get to a meeting a few cities away. Air taxis might transport people from dinner to drinks halfway across town within three minutes instead of thirty. The next several years will ultimately reveal how close the world gets to achieving its current transportation goals.

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THE FUTURE IS COGNITIVE

BUILDING THE BLOCKS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial intelligence—which simultaneously possesses the greatest potential for evolutionary change as well as the overwhelming possibility for world destruction— is a technology that is already be upon us. In popular culture, movies and the media often portray AI in a dark and dangerous light. However, experts believe that AI will actually positively augment the human race, though how exactly is still unknown. The question still remains: do the benefits of AI outweigh the dangers? Here we track how AI is already shaping humanity.

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n 1950, mathematician Alan Turing said that computers would surpass the point where machine intelligence could be questioned when a chatbot could convince humans they were talking to another human instead of a chatbot for a full five minutes. The idea became a cornerstone in basic computer science and the basis of a 1990s competition funded by an eccentric millionaire. When a computer was able to fulfill Turing’s prophecy and trick 30% of judges into thinking it was human in a 2014 Turing Test competition, humans jokingly wrote about “welcoming their new robot overlords.”

However, humans uncomfortable with this recent descent into the uncanny valley ought to consider buckling up their seat belts for the long haul. Over the past few years, processes associated with artificial intelligence (AI) for years, such as machine learning or neural networks, left their computer science context and came to be popularly associated with mainstream technological advances such as so-called deepfakes and voice recognition technology.

From predicting and identifying disease to revolutionizing the way people work, the next few decades will tell the story of the rise of machine intelligence.

EXPLAINING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE As AI has gotten a larger and larger share of the spotlight in the popular press, news articles have thrown around terms like “neural network” and “machine learning” almost interchangeably. As machine learning and neural networks become the backbone of more and more impressive technologies (last year’s video clips of an animated Mona Lisa produced at Samsung’s AI lab in Moscow come to mind), it’s important to understand what these subfields DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 99

of AI are capable of producing currently, and what they might create in the future.

A blog post from IBM offers an excellent analogy for understanding the subfields of AI technology. Program manager Eva Kavlakoglu describes the subfields of AI existing as nesting dolls of machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks. Machine learning is the broadest subfield, referring to technologies which allow computer systems “to learn and improve without being programmed or supervised.” “Non-deep” or classical machine learning refers to processes that require human intervention vis a vis labeled datasets to learn. In applications like speech learning, classical machine learning might require something like a human speaker reading vocabulary words into the system to learn how to recognize speech. In contrast, deep machine learning applications don’t require labeled datasets, instead utilizing unlabeled data to train themselves.

Deep machine learning differs from classical or supervised machine learning in that it is unsupervised learning, using unlabeled data to teach itself how to complete a task. Deep learning is also defined by how many neural networks are involved in the learning process; an algorithm that takes advantage of more than three layers in a neural network can be considered a deep learning algorithm.

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Neural networks, the smallest subfield of AI, describes algorithmic networks which simulate the human brain. Neural networks are made up of thousands of processing nodes which receive data items at each of their connections. The node gives each connection a weight and multiplies the data item at each connection by the weight. The node then adds the resulting products together. If the sum exceeds a specific threshold value, the node passes the information along to the next layer. After traveling and transforming through multiple layers (more than three layers if it’s a deep learning neural network), very different looking data arrives at the output layer.

CURRENT AND FUTURE APPLICATIONS OF AI Neural networks can already be used in a variety of machine learning applications. For example, neural networks can be trained to sort through images and identity certain objects within each image; this process is known as image classification. More complex neural networks can identity objects even within images not intended for image classification. Neural networks can also be trained to generate text of a particular type; for example, you could feed an algorithm all of Shakespeare’s works to try to get a neural network to write like the Bard. Neural networks can even be used to generate images of a particular class – for example, photorealistic images of faces that are not actually photographs of human faces.

Perhaps the most notorious application of neural networks has been the notorious deepfake videos that exploded across the internet over the last few years. The term “deepfake” refers to fake videos made by feeding hours of real video footage into a neural network to make videos where a celebrity or public figure can say whatever the creator wants. In 2017, researchers at the University

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of Washington collaborated with researchers from the VISITEC institute in Thailand collaborate on a project called “Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync From Audio.” To make the deepfake video, researchers trained a computer on hours of footages from former U.S. president Barack Obama’s speeches and grafted the president’s mouth shape onto the head of a person from another video. That same year, Reddit became populated with deepfake porn videos of celebrities such as Gal Gadot or Taylor Swift.

In what some have already labeled a “post-truth world,” deepfakes could pose as a stealthy tool for manipulating and falsifying political discourse. However, going forward, deepfakes are just one thing neural networks will continue to master. In the future, neural networks might master improved stock prediction. They could lead to robots that can see and feel the world around themselves.

Neural networks might be able to build on handwriting analysis to automatically transform handwritten documents into wordprocessed versions. They might even be able to help researchers understand trends within the human genome and diagnose medical problems.

NEURAL NETWORKS AND SPEECH RECOGNITION Speech recognition is just one area where neural networks will help researchers develop better technology in the future. Researchers have been using technology to construct speech recognition devices since the 1950s, but the technology wasn’t able to recognize natural speech until the 1990s. In 1962, Bell Labs’ Audrey became the first computer to recognize human voice; she could recognize the numbers zero through nine when spoken out loud by her programmer 90% of the time. Today, AI-powered voice assistants (think Apple’s Siri and Google’s Alexa) are household names.

Originally, speech recognition technology was empowered by classification algorithms. Classification algorithms are simpler machine learning programs which apply labels to various inputs (think of the computer process that helps sort emails into “spam” and “not spam”). In speech recognition technology, classification algorithms worked to identify a distribution of possible phonemes (i.e. distinctive language sounds) across a given period.

Now, neural networks can be used in many applications of speech recognition technology, including “phoneme classification, isolated word recognition, audio-visual speech recognition, and speaker adaptation.” Neural networks, unlike simpler machine technologies, are better able to mimic the way that humans learn language.

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When children learn languages, they absorb a wide variety of sounds, intonations, and verbal cues. In traditional machine learning algorithms, humans must feed manually labeled datasets in the programs. Neural networks, in contrast, can absorb large amounts of unlabeled datasets and form connections on their own, mimicking the way the human brain initially learns speech and language.

Currently, speech recognition technology exists in the form of voice assistants, both in-home and on the road vis a vis the new in-car voice assistance technology. However, neural networks can stimulate the development of speech recognition technology in even more fields in the future. For example, many video game companies are working on speech recognition technology in game play. Adding voice effects would make gaming more accessible to people with visual impairments and other physical disabilities and would add another layer of interaction to the gaming experience. Additionally, speech recognition technology might expand beyond what today’s voice assistants are capable of in the office.

For example, Microsoft’s Cortana can currently handle basic office tasks like scheduling meetings or making travel plans. Future speech recognition technology might allow virtual assistants to generate financial reports or search through computer files for specific pieces of information, making the office assistants currently only available to senior company positions available to all.

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NEUTRAL NETWORKS AND COMPUTER VISION Computer vision is another area of AI that has taken off with the recent improvements in neural networks. Computer vision technology seeks to replicate the human process for identifying pictures and videos in machines. Much like with voice recognition technology, researchers began experimenting with computer vision in the 1950s. In the 1970s, computer vision as first used commercially to distinguish between handwritten and typed text. Today, computer vision has been behind technologies in everything from facial recognition software to self-driving cars.

Before neural networks were used in computer vision, a programmer wanting to perform facial recognition would have to manually create a database of images and annotate the distance between various facial features in each image. With neural network technology, to develop facial recognition software, a developer would simply have to train an existing algorithm with enough images without having to label or annotate the images ahead of time.

In the future, computer imaging algorithms are expected to discern even more data from individual images than they do now.

Self-driving cars currently use cameras and computer vision to identify objects so that they can move safely through the street; as computer vision technology improves, self-driving cars’ ability to operate safely will improve. It is also thought that image captioning technology will be combined with natural language generation (NLG) to read aloud captions for people with visual impairment disabilities. Computer vision might even ultimately be used to recognize a phone or computer user via camera and display targeted ads accordingly.

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SINGULARITY: AI’S FINAL FRONTIER Recent developments in AI have led to cars that drive themselves, facial recognition software, and virtual assistants which fit in a pocket. The future might produce robots that can feel their surroundings and software that can sort trends within the human genome. However, what if at some point AI technology becomes so powerful it eliminates the need for human brain power? Fifteen years ago, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted when computers might do just that. According to Kurzweil, singularity—the point in time where machine intelligence exceeds the capabilities of the human brain—can be achieved by 2045. Recent research, alongside the advent of neural networks and quantum computing, make it look like singularity might be achieved even sooner than that, perhaps even within the early 2020s. However, while researchers disagree about when exactly the advancement will arrive, they are certain singularity exists sometime in the near future.

And as for what singularity means for the future? AI experts are far from optimistic. The late Stephen Hawking predicted that with singularity will come the end of the human race. Ray Kurzweil believes that humans will ultimately be replaced by AI, or by a hybrid of humans and machines. Gideon Shmuel, the CEO of eyesight Technologies, argues that once machines can truly learn by themselves, they will be able to pass up human intelligence in a matter of hours (if not faster). Shmuel argues that it serves human interests to train AI to recognize specific circumstances and ascribe them with the correct meaning. However, risk comes into play with “the AI brain that is responsible for taking the sensory inputs and translating them into action.” Of course, the risk lies in how AI technology will respond to human life once it surpasses the human ability to respond to sensory inputs with action. Until then, computer scientists are left debating what these risks might entail.

The world has come a long way since Alan Turing predicted what would need to happen for machine intelligence to merely stand unquestioned. Recent advances in machine learning vis a vis neural networks have changed the way humans work, play, and problem-solve, and this technology will only improve in the next several years. In 2014, when a machine passed the Turing Test for the first time, humans joked about welcoming robot reign. With AI likely to surpass human intelligence sometime soon, humans will likely never see a day when they can bid artificial intelligence farewell.

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GUEST FEATURES

FUTURE-PROOFING THE WORLD WITH DIGITAL COMMONS

BY DANTE DISPARTE & DR. TOMICAH TILLEMANN

The COVID-19 pandemic did not break the global economy, but rather revealed which areas of the system were either broken or vulnerable in the first place. Prioritizing investments to address areas of digital infrastructure will not only shore up post-pandemic resilience, but it will also make it more lasting and equitable, thereby contributing to long term economic competitiveness.

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s the coronavirus pandemic exacts its horrible toll on the world claiming more than 1.5 million lives and infecting more than 70 million people, the human, economic, and political costs of this virus have spared few countries in the world. While it is too early in the crisis to call winners and losers, the countries and companies that have fared comparatively better had a number of key items in common.

Beginning with trusted leadership, the provision of high functioning health systems, trust in institutions, and strong technological infrastructure with near ubiquitous access all proved to be difference makers in mounting a credible COVID-19 response. Aside from the world’s dependence and debt of gratitude on the medical and scientific professionals donning lab coats in search for a COVID-19 cure, the other major difference maker in the pandemic has been access to, trust in, and the universal availability of digital commons. On this score, few countries, including the U.S., could successfully deliver even basic services at population scale without leveraging the internet or blurring the lines between public and private assets.

This much is borne by the unprecedented valuations of technology companies, who are showing the competitive market disequilibrium, where many countries may be running single cylinder economies. Apple is now a $2 trillion firm. Zoom, which offered its easy-to-use video conferencing platform at no costs to the U.S. schooling system, became more valuable than all of the U.S. airlines combined—all while surviving potential reputational and cybersecurity crises with uncharacteristically direct CEO-led ownership and accountability. The global economy, which is seeing Depression-like declines in many countries, looked like a singlecylinder engine, with only major technology companies doing well in the crisis. The lines between public and private infrastructure were blurred during the initial phase of the pandemic. Even recalcitrant private sector firms were coaxed to shift their supply chains to produce N95 masks, personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. Public powers traditionally wielded during 110 | THE WORLD IN 2050

times of war were used (or implied) to coax private sector balance sheets and supply chains to pivot towards public health needs.

The real failures in containing unmitigated COVID-19 contagion in the U.S., exacerbated by testing shortages and the lag in delivering results, was the lack of technological solutions to support contact tracing and other basic activities of daily life. Because of these informational gaps, public health officials are functionally flying blind on both the numerator and denominator of infected populations and hotspots around the world, but in particular the U.S., which has been the worst hit country during the pandemic.

So as cabin fever took over, along with the false choice of reopening the economy or mitigating the spread of COVID-19, early gains in flattening the curve have been erased.

Now, the U.S. faces the grim toll of a COVID-19 surge in the fall and winter, which is likely to be commingled with the common cold and seasonal flu, all in an election year where the prospects of remote or mail-in voting was the subject of a fierce political fight. Exhortations to put coins back into circulation and the undesirability of physical cash as a potential conveyor of disease (or because of scarcity) makes the best case for digital currencies, as much as politicized mail-in voting underscores the need for secure, national e-voting options. Similarly, the digital identity and authentication solutions that could scale trust and modernize enfranchisement were also clearly points of vulnerability in the crisis. This is especially true with the prospect of a post-COVID-19 health passport akin to Yellow Fever vaccine cards, which may be one of the likely approaches to provide assurance for reopening the global economy. These platforms are not about substitutions for traditional money, voting or other forms of civic engagement or providing public services. Rather they are forms of increasing optionality—the lack of which (in hindsight) has proven to be a source of great pre-pandemic vulnerability, for which we cannot buy insurance when the house is on fire.

In the tension between freedom of movement and freedom from the spread of COVID-19, the U.S. and many countries around the world have turned to centuries old pandemic remedies. From face masks, quarantines (derived from the Italian term quarantena, meaning 40 days) to makeshift hospital wards to cope with a surge in patients, institutional trust it would seem, was the other casualty in this crisis. From delivering government stimulus in the form of direct payments to the neediest people, to ensuring educational continuity at national scale, to the most sacrosanct of democratic activities, voting, the lack of trusted, privacy-preserving technological interfaces for the provision of basic citizen services is a major DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 111

point of vulnerability in building a resilient economy. The COVID-19 pandemic did not break the global economy, but rather revealed which areas of the system were either broken or vulnerable in the first place. Prioritizing investments to address the following areas of digital infrastructure will not only shore up post-pandemic resilience, but it will also make it more lasting and equitable, thereby contributing to long term economic competitiveness.

SOLVE 21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES WITH 21ST CENTURY TECHNOLOGY. Virtually every government mounting an effective response to the pandemic—South Korea, Estonia, Taiwan, and New Zealand—powers their institutions with world-class digital infrastructure. We need to learn from these examples. Citizens should have access to secure data wallets that provide individuals with ownership and control of their information and records. The right technology can streamline access to services, facilitate contact tracing, and allow for more rapid recovery from future disasters.

BUILD USING OPEN-SOURCE PRINCIPLES TO QUICKLY SCALE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE. During crises and even in normal times, time and resource-strapped governments need to accomplish a similar set of tasks to channel resources, information, and people efficiently and effectively to meet the needs of citizens and respond to unanticipated crises. High-quality digital platforms have proven to be critical crisis-response tools, and they can be scaled across borders at minimal additional cost using open-source development principles. A number of governments quickly replicated existing open-source solutions as a part of their COVID-19 response. Open-source development and adoption should become a part of every government’s digital playbook, both in times of crisis and in normal times as communities seek to upgrade the quality of their digital infrastructure.

ENSURE UNIVERSAL ACCESS TO BASIC DIGITAL SERVICES. It is almost impossible to participate fully in society without access to digital platforms. The pandemic has further exacerbated the inequalities that flow from disparities in connectivity. An expanded 21st century social safety net should include universal access to: 1) high-speed, low-cost internet; 2) a basic computer or tablet to get online, and 3) foundational digital government and financial services.

FOSTER OPTIONS TO REINFORCE RESILIENCE. Providing citizens with multiple paths to access vital services creates safeguards when things go wrong. From low-cost telemedicine as a fallback when in-person care is unavailable to digital and mail-in balloting to supplement in-person voting, the principle of optionality should apply to all essetial services and to business and governmental continuity.

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TRADING RESILIENCE FOR FRAGILITY. Prior to the pandemic, organizations in almost all sectors prioritized efficiency at any cost.

The pandemic exposed the weaknesses of systems optimized for airtight “just-in-time” delivery as supply chain failures caused cascading shortages for everything from test kits to meat. Policymakers must build redundancy to reduce risk. Institutions and firms should adopt digital procurement systems that rely on high-trust, real-time traceability to manage supply chain risk building stockpiles and surge capacity.

No one wins a pandemic, you merely contain it by pushing novel zoonotic diseases back to the natural shadows from whence they come. This comes in the form of containment, breaking the chain of transmission or successfully identifying a vaccine or other treatments, even in the prospect that future communicable diseases are not eradicated but become seasonal. There are, however, clear lessons that can be drawn from countries and companies on their crisis leadership, their embrace of digital transformation and the speed with which they adapted to entirely unprecedented social, political, market and economic conditions. These leaders had a number of things in common, chief among them was their ability to leverage technology not as a disruptive force, but as a source of business and operating continuity. Strong digital strategy is not enough to guarantee resilience, but it is necessary. ***** About the authors: Dante Alighieri Disparte is the Vice Chairman and Head of Policy and Communications at the Diem Association. He is also a member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Advisory Council and Founder and Chairman of Risk Cooperative.

He serves on the World Economic Forum’s Digital Currency Governance Consortium.

Dr. Tomicah Tillemann is the Executive Director of the Digital Impact and Governance Initiative (DIGI) at New America. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, DIGI is developing the next generation of technology platforms to transform the way governments deliver value for citizens.

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REIMAGINING INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION WITHOUT CATASTROPHE

BY DANE ERICKSON & TYL VAN TOORN

The international order is unlikely to undergo radical structural changes in the coming decades, but we can still infuse our current systems with transformational qualities.

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uring an era ruled by factious kingdoms and empires, the 30 Years War from 1618-1648 killed up to 12 million people across Europe, approximately 20% of the continent’s population at the time. In part to avoid similar carnage in the future, the Peace of Westphalia birthed the modern nation-state, sovereignty, and fixed boundaries for the countries involved in the fighting.

Three hundred years later, in the aftermath of two world wars resulting in over 90 million deaths, there was a need to create new multilateral structures and norms to prevent future catastrophes. Thus began efforts that eventually became the UN, EU, Bretton Woods, and a host of other institutions, resulting in arguably the most peaceful and prosperous time in human history. For example, the percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty ($2 a day or less, inflation adjusted) decreased from nearly 70% in 1945 to under 10% today.

Today we are at another crossroads. Technological innovation has provided the capacity to connect everyone to nearly all the information we possess in the world and, more importantly, to each other. However, we have also learned that it can divide us by enabling misinformation and disincentivizing the important practice of critical thinking. Despite there being more capital in the system than there are places to allocate it, we continue to invest only into the things that legal and financial systems consider de-risked and measurable by the most antiquated of measurement systems. And at a time when political and economic cooperation is receding, transnational threats are rising, from climate change to global health and artificial intelligence.

The fundamental question for the next thirty years is: Can we reimagine a new way of cooperating without a massive catastrophe to initiate this?

We are unlikely to rid ourselves of current institutions. Like the previous one, the coming decades will be increasingly multipolar and diffuse in power, which could make for disjointed and haphazard decision-making processes amidst growing complexity, disruption, and interdependency.

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Beyond COVID-19, our next crisis could be significantly more destructive, with no one person or one state to blame. This likely will not be a battle between right and wrong, good and evil. It may simply come down to being the victims of negative externalities in the complex systems we inhabit. What we need is sophisticated approaches that transcend isolationist cultures, systems of governance, and geography. To do this requires three incredibly important and sequenced ingredients.

SYSTEMIC LEADERSHIP. It is no surprise that leadership is required if we are to successfully address the increasingly complex species-level threats on the horizon, but there is a particular approach that will need to be practiced by many more individuals, organizations, communities, and nations.

Systemic leaders see themselves as a critical part of something bigger than themselves, paying close attention to the relationality between disparate nodes within a system and doing everything necessary to ensure the health of the whole and the people that inhabit it. Not only does this type of leadership embrace failure as a means of learning and growing, it heads fearlessly into the unknown, recognizing that while there are past patterns to observe, there are no reliable precedents. This type of leadership deftly separates risks that require mitigation while encouraging other types of risk that help us learn and innovate, overcoming the default to antiquated, “devil we know” ways of working.

For example, without systemic leaders embedded at all levels within international, national, and local communities, it will be impossible to even begin to tackle global intractable problems such as the climate crisis.

REQUISITE VARIETY. The second ingredient is what we refer to as Requisite Variety: the idea that for transformation of complex systems, we need a commiserate diversity of stakeholders—particularly traditionally underrepresented groups— intimately engaged in problem-solving, solution design, decision-making, and cognitive absorption processes.

Traditionally, one of the key strategies of risk mitigation is to make the decision-making circle as small as possible and to move the idea quietly through the maze of friction points that prevail in all institutional settings. Instead, this principle puts emphasis on involving a diversity of perspectives commensurate to the complexity of the challenge at hand. At first, that may appear daunting and inefficient. But evidence suggests DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 117

the outcome will be more durable and sophisticated; and when (not if!) a new co-created approach falters, stakeholders are prone to sharing the responsibility for making the next iteration stronger. Also, rapid advancements in technology have mitigated traditional constraints of time and resources, allowing this kind of engagement to be delivered with greater efficiency and efficacy.

TRUST. Finally, we come to Trust, a widely espoused but often underestimated condition for unlocking change. Trust is easily one of the most difficult terms to tether to a shared understanding. And yet it is the single most important ingredient to any complex, multi-interest shift. Most transformation is required because there is an inability to resolve the cause of a systemic failure. Either the cause is hidden in complexity or our way of thinking simply isn’t geared to absorb what is actually taking place. As we spend more time researching human behavior in the context of radical social, technological, and environmental changes, we are beginning to realize that there are many versions of the truth to any complex problem. And when one version of the truth overpowers others, we struggle to trust other stakeholders and we tend to lose trust in ourselves.

An argument could be made that this is the root cause for our inability to undertake the kind of transformation required in multilateral settings. Our distrust makes the cost of change unattractive and, therefore, unsponsored. What’s also important to note is that it takes more than money to begin building trust. Trust cannot be bought, it can only be earned. It cannot be forced, it can only be given.

Historically, as a species we have only successfully responded at the requisite scale when an immediate and existential crisis motivated our political willpower and altered our perspective.

From one point of view, our collective problem isn’t only the issues of climate change, isolationism, or lack of investment into sustainable development. There is also the fact that the institutions which reinforce the behaviors that underpin these conditions are impossible to change with the same thinking that got us into the problem to begin with.

Fundamentally, we can’t afford to fail the way we did in the 17th and 20th centuries. All of us—policymakers, international business leaders, and social impact executives—must work to transform the systems we navigate by embodying systemic leadership, requisite variety, and trust in our decisions and actions. ***** 118 | THE WORLD IN 2050

About the authors: Dane Erickson is Executive Director—United States at Watershed Partners. He has spent the past 20 years working around the world across sectors to enhance international development and cooperation.

Tyl van Toorn is the Co-Founder and CEO of Watershed Partners, a strategic advisory focused on multi-stakeholder alignment and systemic transformation. He has worked with and across public and private sectors in Europe, Asia, and North America.

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WHY 2020 WILL BE SEEN AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT YEARS IN THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION

BY DOMINIC REGESTER & OMAR ZAKI

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PARTNER EDITORIAL

t has been nearly nine months since the COVID-19 pandemic caused the shutdown of schools across the world resulting in over 1.5 billion learners out of school. Since then, schools have readjusted and adapted in various ways; some cities and localities have seen schools closed again. With recent encouraging news of successful vaccine trials and 2021 soon approaching, we take this moment to look back on the state of education in this tumultuous year with views from authors from the Education Disrupted, Education Reimagined e-book, while looking ahead to what the near future brings.

Throughout human history, humanity has been driven by the desire to learn, grow, improve, travel, move and innovate. And through all the efforts and struggles, it is fair to say we have learned more from failure than success, more from discomfort than comfort, and more from disruption than tranquility. As Deborah Kimathi, from Dignitas in Kenya reminds us, ‘’Disruption is rarely comfortable.’’ However, ‘’If we use the disruption wisely, it helps us rediscover vision and purpose, and refocus on what is most critical.’’

2020 as an accelerator of critical future trends in education.

From what we have seen this year in education, Deborah sees a number of trends that will emerge due to COVID-19. One of these trends is that, ‘’learning is only meaningful if a child’s most basic needs are taken care of, including their socio-emotional needs. Socio-emotional learning must take center stage in the recovery period.’’ The pandemic has forced us to prioritize well-being over economic growth, for ourselves and the planet. Since the industrial revolution our education system was built with the primary purpose of providing labour to maximize economic growth. This could be a turning point where we decide a new purpose of education. The second trend that Deborah sees is that, ‘’we can no longer fail to invest in leadership. Crisis, disruption, and recovery call for a strength of leadership to ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive.’’

School leaders were really put to the test this year. They had to juggle between government actions, public health concerns, and their students’ education in a time of public anger and mistrust of public officials.

The impact of COVID-19 the in the classrooms of 2020 will be long felt afterwards. Students have lost precious time between March and June, particularly close to examinations in many contexts. Many children whose education has been interrupted will not return to school. Those who have been able to stay DIPLOMATIC COURIER | 121

in education have had very different experiences of online and remote learning, which has had mixed results at best.

Lorenzo Benussi, Chief Innovation Officer of Fondazione Scuola in Italy, reminds us to take the middle approach, ‘’It is increasingly clear to teachers and to the general public that quality teaching and learning can happen both remotely and in person. In short, technology is an issue, not the issue.’’ Going forward, places of learning will need to be more agile and blended, the brick and mortar school created towards the end of the 19th century is changing. Furthermore, as Lorenzo puts it, with the increased importance of digital tools, “We are seeing a continuous increase in the digital competence of teachers, as well as an increase in their ability and willingness to collaborate and learn from one another.” Learning as a process rather than a place.

However, Xueqin Jiang, an education consultant based in China, is concerned about the imbalance left behind due to COVID-19. “My greatest fear is that 2020 will have created the conditions for public education not to be reimagined, but corrupted. COVID-19 tested how well schools had taught metalearning skills, and the best schools left everyone behind.’’

There are some important learning opportunities here for schools around the world.

Jiang reiterates the importance of sticking together, “Post2020, educators must fight for the soul of public education by teaching compassion, citizenship, and community.” While the more fortunate have ways out of crises, what about the rest of the population? It is essential that we remind young people that they will be shareholders in their respective communities and societies, and that they will have a stake in its success. But to ensure that success means fostering a sense of unity and helping one another. Even before COVID-19, there is a global crisis of national unity in many countries. Teaching civics, community, and citizenship will be key to remind the next generation that when each of us succeeds then the society as a whole does better.

This idea of togetherness is also a key theme and cause for cautious optimism for Dr. Robyn Whittaker from Kaleidoscope Lights in South Africa. For her the “overarching impression of 2020 has been that of a dramatic acceleration of collaboration (in particular with significant inter-continental links being facilitated), as well as a raised awareness of the eco-systemic nature of not only our education systems, but our societies, 122 | THE WORLD IN 2050

and the possibilities that may lie ahead if we fully embrace these…as Stanford economist Paul Romer once stated ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.’ My prayer for us all is that this is one crisis that we will not waste—but that as humanity we will rise to the challenge and find better, hope-filled, courageous ways to re-invent ourselves and our systems in service of each other and of our planet.”

That is a similar sentiment to what we heard from the Australian based educator Louka Parry, CEO of the Learning Future and a founding member of Karanga—the Global Alliance for Social Emotional Learning and Life Skills. “Some of the most effective responses to the education crisis in 2020 have had empathy, collaboration, compassion, and resilience development at their very heart. These are core social and emotional learning skills and behaviors and as we look to the future we need to ensure that more time is given to the development of these attributes than has been in the past.”

Covid as the test paper, climate change as the final exam.

As challenging as this year has been what if COVID-19 is only the test paper and climate change is the final exam? We could well be entering a period of protracted disruptions to ways of life all around the world. The responses to COVID-19 from educators around the world has shown that education innovation and change is possible at a pace and scale never previously seen. It is now more important than ever that we learn from this year, keep hold of the best of these innovations and take them to scale. Investing now is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do and will help us to come together at a global level to root out these long overdue issues in our education systems. COVID-19 has shown that amid disruption, tragedy and loss, new channels of innovation, creativity, and purpose can be found to allow us to rethink and rebuild better than before. ***** About the authors: Dominic Regester is Program Director at Salzburg Global Seminar and Executive Committee Member, Karanga.

Omar Zaki is a Senior Research Associate at the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE).

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TRANSPARENCY IS THE GATEWAY TO A BETTER FUTURE

BY DR. MOIRA GILCHRIST

SPONSORED EDITORIAL

C

oming from the pharmaceutical industry, I had never thought I’d join a tobacco company. But I was a smoker—so, when Philip Morris International (PMI) asked me to work on their new project creating smoke-free products back in the 2000s, I saw an opportunity to be part of a game changer for the hundreds of millions of men and women around the world who—like me—smoked combustible cigarettes.

Almost 20 years on, we’re fully and openly committed to a smoke-free future, undergoing a radical transformation rooted in science and guided by transparency.

In an increasingly polarized and divided world, where even science is far too often politicized, transparency remains one of our strongest tools to foster science-based dialogues, tackle misinformation, and help people make informed decisions. As a scientist, I’ve seen the wonderful possibilities of science. And as an eternal optimist, I passionately believe that if we put science front and center in business, policymaking, and everyday life, we can make huge progress toward solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

That’s why we’re encouraging politicians, regulators, public health groups, scientists, and key opinion leaders to consider science-backed alternatives to continued smoking as an additional tool to help address a global public health issue—in concert with existing anti-smoking measures aimed at preventing initiation, protecting minors, and encouraging cessation.

We’re aware of the skepticism when it comes to the tobacco industry. But I’m convinced that if we continue being transparent about our science—encouraging scrutiny even from the harshest of critics—science will prevail. Facts and evidence will ultimately become too difficult to ignore.

One thing is certain. We can’t create a smoke-free future on our own. Progress depends on our collective ability to objectively assess the facts and make science-based decisions that place the interests of adult smokers first. Robust science and data must be at the forefront of this conversation. ***** About the author: Dr. Moira Gilchrist is Vice President Strategic and Scientific Communications at Philip Morris International.

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ENORMOUS CHALLENGES LIE AHEAD From managing climate change to feeding nearly 10 billion people by the year 2050, coping with new security threats and navigating the future is tricky. How will major global forces such as global health crises, climate change, resource stress, technology, and economic power shifts change our future? World in 2050 is Diplomatic Courier’s think tank, which convenes multi-stakeholders in the private and public sectors through a series of global summits and forums, educational material, research papers and reports, and digital and print media. www.cocreate.world

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