1 . Life will probably be very different in 2050. First of all, it seems that TV channels will have vanished by 2050. Instead, people will choose a programme from a “menu” and a computer will send the programme directly to the television. By 2050, music, films, programmes, newspapers and books will come to us in the similar way.

In many places, agriculture is developing quickly and people are growing fruit and vegetables for export. This uses a lot of water. Therefore, there could be serious shortages of water. Some scientist predict that water could be the cause of wars if we don’t act now.

In the future, cars will run on new, clean fuels (燃料) and they will go very fast. Cars will have computers to control the speed and there won’t be any accidents. Today, many cars have computers that tell drivers exactly where they are. By 2050, the computer will control the car and drive it to your destination. Also, by 2050, space planes will fly people from Los Angeles to Tokyo in just two hours.

Some big companies now prefer to use robots that do not ask for pay rises or go on strike, and work 24 hours a day. They are also easy to control. And they never argue with people. They can be easily used in a variety of places — factories, schools, offices, hospitals, shops and homes.

Scientists will have discovered how to control genes (基因). Scientists have already produced clones (克隆) of animals. By 2050, scientists will be able to produce clones of people and decide how they look and how they behave. Scientists will be able to do these things, but should they?

2 . The home of the future won’t be completely different and we will be living in houses and flats just as we do today. But people will want to shape their homes to match their dreams. No two homes will be the same. People will be able to buy “house kits” containing a basic house structure, with movable walls, doors and windows. They will put together the different parts to create the home they want.

Many jobs that we do today will disappear, others will still exist but will change and new jobs will be created. Skilled workers such as builders, gardeners and electricians won’t disappear because machines can’t replace them. Teachers will still exist because students need human contact. But they will be using modern technology in class more and students will be working more at home. The medical technology revolution and space travel will create new jobs which we can only imagine today.

Space holidays will develop in the future, but these holidays won’t be for everyone because they won’t be cheap. Short space trips will develop first;then space hotels will orbit the earth where it will be possible to have a longer vacation. By the end of the next century, there will have been holiday centres on the moon with leisure facilities (休闲设施) for families.

Paper won’t exist in the future. Instead, there will be e­paper which people will be able to use over and over again. This will develop in order to save natural resources. E­newspapers and e­magazines will replace traditional newspapers and magazines and we will download information and news articles from the Internet every day onto our reusable paper.

The laws of physics tell us that the Earth is going to disappear some time in the future. This isn’t going to happen tomorrow but scientists predict that it will happen in five billion years when our sun explodes. We will have to explore the universe and find another home. At some point in the distant future, either we stay on the Earth and die with it, or we leave and move to another planet. There won’t be any other choice.

4 . The future home is something that people have talked about for decades. Because the future home idea inspires our imagination, scientists and engineers have been working hard to develop different systems to make houses “smarter”.

The video camera at the entrance recognize visitors using facial recognition. The facial recognition software of the future home will not only recognize friends, but strangers as well. And the software in the future home will run the strangers faces against a database of criminals.

The future home will also have smart application appliances (家电) as well. There will be a vast networking system connecting them. Ovens, microwaves and refrigerators will be controlled automatically, so remote cooking will be a possibility and meals are prepared for your arrival.

There will also be a green systems in place such as saving and reusing washing water and bathwater. Plants and people may receive pure or mineralized (含矿的) drinking water.

If you think this future home idea is pie in the sky or science fiction, then think again. Most of the systems described here are either in development or already out in the market. Future homes may not be standard yet for the middle class but this is not as far ahead as many people would think.

8 . With the development of science and technology, our daily life is becoming more varied and more convenient. At the same time, life in the late 21st century will be different from that nowadays, because many changes will take place then, but what will the changes be?

    1     There will be more and more people in the world and most of them will live longer than today.

Computers will be much smaller and more useful, and there will be at least one in every home.     2    

People will work fewer hours than they do now. They will have more free time for sports, watching TV and traveling. Traveling will be much cheaper and easier.     3    

    4     More land will be used to build new towns and houses. Then there will be less room for cows and sheep, so meat will be more expensive. Maybe no one will eat it every day. Instead they eat more vegetables and fruit. Maybe people will be healthier thanks to that.

Work in the future will be different, too.     5     Because of this, many people will not have enough work to do. This will be a problem.

9 . Given how valuable intelligence and automation are, we will continue to improve our technology if we are at all able to. At a certain point, we will build machines that are smarter than we are. Once we have machines that are smarter than we are, they will begin to improve themselves. The concern is really that we will build machines that are much more competent than we are. And the slightest divergence (分歧) between their goals and our own could destroy us.

Just think about how we relate to ants. We don’t hate them. We don’t go out of our way to harm them. In fact, sometimes we take pains not to harm them. We step over them on the sidewalk. But whenever their presence seriously conflicts with one of our goals, we will kill them without hesitation. The concern is that we will one day build machines that, whether they’re conscious or not, could treat us with similar disregard.

The bare fact is that we will continue to improve our intelligent machines. We have problems that we desperately need to solve. So we will do this, if we can. The train is already out of the station, and there’s no brake to pull. If we build machines that are more intelligent than we are, they will very likely develop in ways that we can’t imagine, and transcend us in ways that we can’t imagine.

So imagine we hit upon a design of super intelligent AI that has no safety concerns. This machine would be the perfect labor-saving device. It can design the machine that can build the machine which can do any physical work, powered by sunlight, more or less for the cost of raw materials. So we’re talking bout the end of human labour. We’re also talking about the end of most intellectual work. So what would apes like ourselves do in these circumstances?

But the moment we admit that information processing is the source of intelligence, we have to admit that we are in the process of building some sort of god. Now would be a good time to make sure it’s a god we can live with.

10 . Forecasting the technological future is difficult. Back in the 1980s, the thought of carrying around a small, portable phone seemed to belong in the world of science fiction. Then in the 1990s, imagining a phone that would allow you to surf the Internet something that didn’t even exist until 1990 was unheard-of. Today, smartphones can surf the Web, run applications and play games,and those with a near field communication (NFC) chip can act as a way to make purchases. And they can still make phone calls, too.

So what will phones look like in 2050? Based upon phone customer behavior, I imagine the future phones will rely more on combiningour physical lives with our digital lives. They probably won’t be similar to the ones we’re reusing now. They’ll be built into other devices and products. Imagine a pair of glasses that can display a digital overlay on top of your physical surroundings.

I don’t think video chat is taking off despite services like Skype and FaceTime. Rather, the trend seems to be toward asynchronous (非同步的) communication. That means the two or more people in a conversation complete a discussion over time.

We might even see the phone part of phones disappear. Recent phone customer behavior suggests that texting is a more popular way to communicate than telephone calls. Future phones will need a way to display messages but don’t necessarily include voice communication.

Since we’re talking about 2050 here, there’s even the possibility that research into brain-computer interfaces (脑机接口) will have reached a point in which we won’t need a physical screen or microphone at all. Electronics could be built into clothing. You’d link the devices to an interface connected to your brain and post messages just through thought. I’d be a form of telepathy (心灵感应).

But what do you think? Will we be wearing devices that let us communicate easily? Or will we be carrying around the iPhone 47 and answering texts between games of Angry Birds? Let us know your predictions.