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I am cautiously optimistic.

I think that the majority of conflicts will blow over, global warming will eventually get under control, and stem cell research and gene therapy will find cures for many nasty diseases. I think poverty will be significantly reduced through programs such as microloans and development programs, and famine and drought will be essentially eliminated. International governments (like the EU, only larger) will form, with the strongest political power of any international body to date.

I don't think the world will be perfect; there will still be wars, and if we don't fight them on land with bullets we'll fight them in space with high-energy lasers. People will not be immortal; space exploration will expand, but not achieve anything much beyond the nearest clusters of stars. Maybe we'll find a few extraterrestrial bacteria, but nothing intelligent.

There probably won't be flying cars; we won't need them. We'll spend most of our times at home, surfing the Internet (or its 22nd-century descendant), and when we do go outside it will be to ride public transportation, developed to reduce emissions and stave off global warming. Robotics and cognitive science will have simultaneously developed until the point where artificial intelligence became possible, but then everyone realized that whatever an AI could do, people could do, and so they stopped caring.

Mental disorders will be treated with the same efficacy that physical ailments are today; medications will be tailor-made to individuals and never have side effects. Vehicles will be safer, computers will be ludicrously cheap, and everyone will work for a living, mostly in vaguely service- or art-based professions. Entertainment will be the quadrillion-dollar industry.

By this point, gays, transgender people, and all other human beings will have been given equal rights; other animals with lesser cognitive capacities will have gained in their own rights to the point where it is no longer legal to imprison or abuse an animal. Pets will be neutered by vasectomy rather than castration, leashes will be outlawed, and the world will be vegan (obtaining protein and vitamins from synthetic sources).

Learn more about this author, Patrick Julius.
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