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Join today<\/a><\/p>\n \n Already a member? Never predict anything, especially the future,\u201d the film producer Sam Goldwyn famously said as a joke, but with wisdom behind it.<\/p>\n Future gazing has, for thousands of years, been based on informed imagination, a spot of intuition, and a lack of data. Even professional future prediction<\/a> for business usually involves a large measure of inspired guesswork. <\/p>\n Along with almost everything else in the world, all that changed dramatically three years ago with the emergence of generative AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n AI is now used for serious, heavyweight data-driven future prediction, and in this market, one of the leading companies in the world serving corporations and governments is an 11-person British startup, Cassi, co-founded by Dr Keith Dear, a former military intelligence officer, and consistently beating Anthropic<\/a>, Google<\/a>, Elon Musk\u2019s xAI<\/a>, Meta and others<\/a> in industry-wide AI rankings. <\/p>\n Cassi uses a constantly evolving cast of three top-level AI models working together, in concert with a mathematical secret sauce so good that wealthy companies are paying six-figure annual fees for its futurology services. <\/p>\n So what, we asked Cassi this week, are six significant things that might amaze us 2026 people if we could fast-forward to 40 years from now, when The Independent is 80<\/a>?<\/p>\n Overall, Cassi\u2019s super-brain concludes that the next 40 years could bring transformative, positive changes in geopolitics, demographics, climate, and technology, as well as AI.<\/p>\n After asking Cassi about the likely surprises coming by 2066, I also did a spot of manual, non-AI crystal ball gazing.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been writing about serious future prediction (as opposed to psychic options) for 30 years. My book A Brief History of Tomorrow came out at the beginning of 2000 and examined thousands of years of attempts to predict the future \u2013 ending with a few informed guesses of my own. <\/p>\n I got a few more or less on target \u2013 the rise of Islamism and the probability of an unprecedentedly extreme terrorist incident; the isolating effect of the internet on people and the need to re-learn how to socialise and have conversations; the revived interest in old-fashioned analogue technologies, from vinyl to cassettes to film cameras.<\/p>\n Cassi\u2019s predictions for 2066, with a calculated probability for each<\/p>\n The planet will be wearing shades. Some form of sunshade will protect Earth by reducing the amount of solar energy absorbed at a climatically significant scale.<\/p>\n Likelihood: 20 per cent<\/p>\n The Benjamin Button effect. A major health regulator will approve a therapy explicitly targeting biological ageing. But such advances in \u201cgeroscience\u201d are more likely to happen in Japan or China<\/a>, where there will be higher regulatory flexibility.<\/p>\n Likelihood: 21 per cent<\/p>\n The age of shape-shifting furniture \u2013 substantial, human-scale things that switch automatically between at least two distinct functions \u201cthrough distributed material deformation or internal reconfiguration\u201d. Cassi explains this doesn\u2019t mean ordinary hinged sofa beds, reclining chairs and adjustable desks, but that in 40 years, material science and programmable structures could progress from laboratory experiments to real products. They may not quite be in IKEA yet, though. \u201cAchieving a 10 per cent regular household penetration rate in the UK requires transition from niche luxury products to mass consumer adoption.\u201d<\/p>\n Likelihood: 14 per cent<\/p>\n
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Tesla may have given a look into a possible future just this week \u2013 but Margolis thinks owning a car in the city will be kaput in 40 years time (Tesla)<\/p>\n![\"Seeing](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/iStock-2269157484.jpg\")
Seeing red: technology could make light work of many aspects of the ageing process (Getty)<\/p>\n
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Jonathan says that robots will be great delivery people \u2013 but don\u2019t trust them with your brew (Getty)<\/p>\n