A survey commissioned by British telecoms group BT, asked children between the ages of 5 and 11 what they thought the future would look like 10 and 50 years from now.<\/p>\n
According to the responses, children of today envisage a future with great technical leaps – but also with some deep environmental and ecological concerns.<\/p>\n
The survey revealed that nearly half (44%) of the responding children believe that within the next decade, most people will have self-driving cars, robots to do chores at home (42%) and wearable tech will exist that will be able to detect when wearers are unwell and what’s wrong (37%).<\/p>\n
Looking further ahead, to the year 2072, imaginations get a bit wilder, the group noted.<\/p>\n
Gazing fifty years into the future, more than a third of children envisage people will be living on other planets (34%),\u00a0 there to be a cure for all diseases and illnesses (29%) and there won\u2019t be any more rubbish because everything will be recycled (35%).<\/p>\n
Other fanciful predictions include things like robot teachers (32%) and being able to fly to school on jetpacks (30%).<\/p>\n
More negative expectations, though, revolve around topics that have dominated the public mind space in recent years, with children being most concerned about a future\u00a0pandemic (60%), more animals becoming extinct (50%) and climate change (48%).<\/p>\n
Some of the specific predictions – both good and bad – for the next 50 years include:<\/p>\n
Predictions of robot servants and living in space are not unique to the children surveyed by BT, and have been a fixation of futurists of the late 19th and 20th centuries – though many back then expected these things to be a reality by the 2000s.<\/p>\n
In 1982, Random House New York published the\u00a0Kids\u2019 Whole Future Catalog by Paula Taylor<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a book looking \u201cfar\u201d into the future (2000 and beyond).<\/p>\n While many of these futurist predictions will likely remain in the realm of science fiction<\/a>, there are some ideas that are startlingly accurate and have even become a reality in many ways.<\/a><\/p>\n This is what the future of tech looked like for people 35 years ago<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n