Smart Future

August 12: Do you know that there’s a possibility you may live forever? And that you will have computers that are 1,000 times more intelligent than Albert Einstein, generally known as the smartest scientist ever! That all these miracles may happen in 15 years or more?

These are the predictions of Ian Pearson, a top British futurologist. A futurologist is a person who tells what life will be in the future. He is a kind of professional day-dreamer.

But he doesn’t gaze at crystal balls to say what lies ahead. Instead, he studies scientific trends in the world.

And based upon his studies, Pearson predicts that in the next 20 or 30 years, the world will change much faster than ever before, and all because the pace of technology change will be simply breath-taking.

So much so that computers will acquire humans traits, or personalities, as well as the ability to understand words and their meanings when you speak to them. So developed will tomorrow’s computer be, that you can sit face to face with it, and have a chat just as you would with a friend.

In fact you don’t even have to speak to it. Just like a friend, the computer will also have the ability to understand your thoughts.

So, will computers take over the world? Probably not, for people, too, will acquire superhuman abilities. They may never die, for example. “Unless my daughter (who is five), is unfortunate enough to die early from accident or disease, she has a good chance of not dying at all,” says Pearson in a Reuters agency report in ‘The Asian Age’.

Genetics will make this possible, says Pearson. Genetics is that branch of science, which studies the make-up of the human body. Recently there have been so many reports about how scientists have been able to discover the code of the human genome, or the blueprint of a human being that determines so many aspects of heredity.

In 50 years says Pearson, this knowledge will enable technology to undo damage caused by age and disease, keeping people eternally young. Not only that, if people suddenly became extinct, it should be possible for an advanced civilisation in the future to recreate them — with the help of the genetic “blue-print”, of course.

Pearson is employed as a futurologist with a large British telecommunication company. He is actually a trained physicist. But Pearson loves dreaming. His best ideas come to him when he is in the middle of the night in bed. Even as a kid, he dreamed a lot. But now, he gets paid to dream. Of course, these are no idle dreams that he has.

451 words | 4 minutes
Readability: Grade 7 (12-13 year old children)
Based on Flesch–Kincaid readability scores

Filed under: world news
Tags: #diseases, #british, #computers, #technology

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