The writer Bill Douglass is well-versed in making compelling forecasts – in 2000 he won a $20,000 (\u00a314,800) global futurist writing contest entitled “The World in 2050”.<\/p>\n
While he still agrees one of his original predictions – pilotless planes – will come true by 2050, he believes we will first see more advances in driverless cars, making traffic congestion “largely a thing of the past”.<\/p>\n
“Cars will drive so much closer to each other than they can now,” he told the BBC. “And if one has to break, they all break.<\/p>\n
“On private toll roads for autonomous vehicles, there’s no reason traffic can’t go up to 100 miles an hour or so – you’ll see mortality from traffic accidents plummet.”<\/p>\n
Away from Earth, the space race will equally continue at speed, journalist and co-host of the Space Boffins podcast Sue Nelson told the BBC.<\/p>\n
She says in 25 years, it is likely there will be a liveable base on the Moon; and some industries could be almost entirely based in space.<\/p>\n
For example, she believes we may see pharmaceutical companies making the next generation of medicines in microgravity, i.e. on board an orbiting spacecraft.<\/p>\n
This is because, she says, crystals grown this way rather than on Earth, are “often larger and better quality”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The writer Bill Douglass is well-versed in making compelling forecasts – in 2000 he won a $20,000 (\u00a314,800)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-349136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}