Johns Hopkins University (“America’s First Research University”), my alma mater, was founded in 1876. In the current issue of Johns Hopkins Magzine and number of professors imagine the world in 2076: Ben Whitford, What Happens Next?
Getting old:
When Disneyland unveiled its House of the Future attraction in the 1950s, visitors lined up to wander through the MIT-designed plastic shell and gawp at wonders—including a microwave and a wall-mounted TV—designed with young families in mind. Back then, just 8% of Americans were 65 or older, but today this group makes up nearly 20% of the population; by 2076, the proportion is expected to climb to over 27%. To manage that transition, we’ll need a new approach to domestic environments, says Najim Dehak, director of engineering in JHU’s Geriatrics Engineering hub. “Older adults have different needs and different wants,” he explains. “We need to design future houses that can let older adults live safer, longer, and healthier lives.”
On the Bayview campus, Dehak’s team is building a new generation of “houses of the future”: model apartments packed with sensors and AI tools to help older residents. Fifty years from now, Dehak predicts, people will stay independent far longer, using self-driving cars to run errands or meet friends. Arriving home, they won’t fiddle with keys; their homes will recognize them, log their safe return, and automatically open the door. Inside, sensors—from motion detectors to cameras scanning the contents of the fridge—will monitor each resident’s wellbeing, ensuring they eat well, stay hydrated, and keep active. If we aren’t taking care of ourselves, voice-operated artificial intelligence assistants—Dehak’s specialty— will encourage us to grab a snack, call a loved one, or pop on virtual reality goggles for immersive group activities.
Space exploration:
Each new probe builds on insights from previous missions, but the intervening period is determined by planetary alignment. Missions to Saturn, for instance, can be sent only about every 30 years, so by 2076 researchers will likely be digesting data from a hypothetical “Son of Dragonfly” mission in the mid-2060s and deciding what to focus on next. One thing’s for sure: Titan won’t have given up all its secrets by then. Researchers will still be exploring what its complex chemistry and weather reveal about the origins of life on Earth or the likelihood of finding life elsewhere.
“Those are the kinds of questions we’re aiming toward making progress on,” Hörst says.
In coming decades, other flagship probes could include the Europa Clipper, arriving at the Jovian moon in 2030; a mission to Uranus, arriving around mid-century; and the Enceladus Orbilander, which could reach the Saturnian moon in the 2050s. Many of Hörst’s biggest questions— such as whether there’s life in Europa’s buried oceans or what Venus’ surface is really like—will almost certainly take longer to answer, requiring major breakthroughs in robotics and materials science. “I personally would be surprised if we accessed Europa’s ocean or sent a rover to the surface of Venus by 2076,” she says.
Further afield, the study of exoplanets will yield new insights: While thousands of planets have been discovered, there’s an enormous amount still to learn.
Solar panels:
Today, virtually all solar panels are made from silicon, which is cheap, durable, abundant—and only capable, even in theory, of absorbing one third of the energy in any given sunbeam. In practice, most current photovoltaic panels convert barely one-quarter of incoming solar energy into electricity, limiting their usefulness and driving up the cost of clean energy.
By 2076, that could change dramatically, says Susanna Thon, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Using nanomanufacturing, layered semiconductors, and other innovative techniques—some of which Thon is testing in her lab—it will soon be possible to harvest energy from a wider range of high- and lowenergy photons, potentially tripling the efficiency of panels. “We have a bunch of strategies, so it’s a technical challenge now,” Thon says.
Beyond AI
If Joshua T. Vogelstein—a polymath whose research spans biomedical engineering, computer science, mathematics, and neuroscience— had a time machine, he’d head to 2076 and ask family and friends their take on artificial intelligence.
“I’ll know we’ve made real progress when the general population—people who aren’t involved in creating AI—are no longer afraid of it,” he says.
Right now, Vogelstein says, we’re in an unsettling place: AI is evolving fast, but we don’t know where it’s heading. Some expect progress to snowball, leading to the “singularity”—a turning point in which machine intelligence leaves humans in the dust. Others believe computers will never achieve humanlike intelligence. “And there’s good support for both claims,” Vogelstein says.
Demystifying AI will require a fuller understanding of intelligence itself, Vogelstein argues. [...] we’ll need to fuse interdisciplinary research spanning neuroscience, human and animal cognition, and neural networks into something akin to the Standard Model used by physicists. “I’d like to think that by 2076 there will be a unified set of theories to explain intelligence writ large,” Vogelstein says.
Notice, however, there's no mention of superintelligence, much less world-wide dominance by our robot overlords.
Quantum weirdness:
Quantum mechanics has been around for a century but continues to challenge researchers, says physics professor Peter Armitage. The field’s core insight—that at the tiniest microscopic levels, the universe is choppy and pixelated, rather than smooth and continuous—quickly leads to mindbending conclusions, with quantum objects teleporting around, influencing one another instantaneously across vast distances, or existing simultaneously as both waves and particles.
The core equations governing quantum mechanics are now well-understood, but new technologies and theoretical advances mean the field’s practical implications are still being explored. “I don’t see any indication we’re at the bottom of this well,” Armitage says. “We’re so busy that it’s like drinking from the fire hose.”
Microrobots investigating your body:
In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, scientists shrink to microscopic size to explore the body and treat a patient’s blood clot. We won’t achieve that in the next half-century—but the next best thing, says biomolecular engineer David Gracias, would be intelligent micro-robots that could be swallowed like a pill, allowing them to examine and treat patients from within. “We can send probes into space but don’t have a system to navigate our own body. That’s the big challenge that motivates me,” he says.
Gracias has already developed starfish-like contraptions, each the size of a grain of sand, that pinch onto the intestinal lining to deliver medications more slowly and precisely. Next, Gracias hopes to develop swallowable robots that can take photos or video before selectively performing a biopsy on tissue, enabling noninvasive colonoscopies and ureteroscopies.
Sensation revealed:
When you reach out and feel something—rough or smooth, wet or dry, hard or soft—you’re touching on a mystery that still baffles researchers, says Jeremy D. Brown, associate professor in mechanical engineering. “We still don’t fully understand how haptic sensing really works,” Brown says. “Over the next 50 years, I suspect, scientists will get better at understanding how the touch system orchestrates disparate stimuli to form a percept of the physical world.” That would unlock new ways for humans to interact with machinery and digital tools. [...]
Better haptic technologies could also upgrade medical tools, allowing surgeons using laparoscopic robots to feel what’s happening deep inside the body and maneuver robots as dexterously as their own hands. “Having access to that sensory information naturally changes how you physically interact with tissue in a surgical environment,” Brown says.
There’s more at the link.
