Life in 2050

1. Life in 2050

2. By mid-century there will likely be 9 billion people on the planet, consuming ever more resources and leading ever more technologically complex lives. What will our cities be like? How will we eat? Will global warming trigger catastrophic changes, or will we be able to engineer our way out of the climate crisis?

3. Demographic changes will certainly be dramatic. Rockefeller University mathematical biologist Joel Cohen says it's likely that by 2050 the majority of the people in the world will live in urban areas, and will have a significantly higher average age than people today. In the U.S., cities theorist Richard Florida thinks urbanization trends will reinvent the education system, making our economy less real estate driven and erasing the divisions between home and work.

4. And rapidly advancing technology will continue ever more rapidly. • But what will all this new technology mean? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the director of the Information & Innovation Policy Research Center at the National University of Singapore, hopes that advances in technology will make us more empowered, motivated and active, rather than mindless consumers of information and entertainment. And NYU interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky worries that technological threats could endanger much of the openness that we now enjoy online.

5. In the financial world, things will be very different indeed, according to MIT professor Simon Johnson, who thinks many of the financial products being sold today, like over-the-counter derivatives, will be illegal—judged, accurately, by regulators to not be in the best interests of consumers.

6. We will live longer and remain healthier. Jay Parkinson, the co-founder of Hello Health, says the health care industry has a "huge opportunity" to change the way it communicates with patients by conceiving of individual health in relation to happiness.