The World of 2050: What’s Actually Possible

Take the perspective of someone in 2050 and get a sense of how much better things could get in the next 25 years if we ignore the doomers and make the most of AI.

Image generated with ChatGPT by OpenAI, prompted by Peter Leyden.

The AI doomers have been particularly active these last several months, ramping up their descriptions of all the bad things that are going to happen any moment and all the disasters that will emerge for sure in the next decade. I have been mostly heads down on deadline writing a book that tells the opposite story, focusing on the many positive things that are now possible through the next 25 years.

The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050 will lay out what I call a “new grand narrative” of how America could harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive an era of great progress and make a much better world. The book won’t be available until early next year, so I thought I would use this month’s essay on Substack and Big Think to quickly touch on some of the many positive things that are now within reach thanks to the recent arrival of AI, clean energy technologies, and bioengineering. Along the way I will link to previous essays that I have written in this series that go deeper on various topics.

I’m writing the following essay from the perspective of an American in the year 2050. She is looking back and briefly outlining some of the changes that occurred between roughly 2025 and 2035, and then listing many of the marvels of the world that surrounds her at the mid-point of the century.

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The first decade: 2025 to 2035

I was born in 2000, making me a member of Gen Z. In 2025, I was a young adult just starting my career, and I’m now middle-aged at 50. The last 25 years have brought a crazy amount of change, but the final results turned out to be far better than what most people seemed to be predicting when this all started. The first decade was the most difficult, but also the most surprising.

The transition to an economy empowered by AI was unusually fast because, unlike past general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet, we didn’t have to spend decades building the infrastructure for it. AI was more like the crowning achievement of the digital revolution — its infrastructure had been built over the previous 40 years.

The economic disruption was significant. Its impact was initially felt most by educated knowledge workers who had remained insulated from previous traumatic economic transitions, like the loss of manufacturing from the Rust Belt. This transitional strain was felt by the upper middle class, and particularly their children, and so economic concerns around AI quickly became central to politics. This was good because we needed to act early and in comprehensive ways.

A sizable faction of people wanted to stop the AI transition and became increasingly anti-AI, if not outright anti-tech. They came from both the left and right sides of the political spectrum, and much of their fear was based on inaccuracies — or encouraged by self-interested bad actors. This slowed progress but was probably unavoidable. The bulk of Americans recognized that AI was going to be central to life in the 21st century, so resistance gave way to adoption.

Adoption accelerated as many benefits of AI became readily apparent. Workers using AI were demonstrably more productive, and as adoption spread through the economy, the overall productivity rate rose to historic levels. Over the decade, rising productivity pushed up economic growth, challenging previously assumed limits to how fast developed economies could grow.

The booming economy empowered by AI got an added boost as clean energy technologies scaled up. These two technologies were synergistic, feeding off each other and contributing to what amounted to long-term wealth creation and rising prosperity.

A strong economy and a growth mentality prompted the majority of businesses to make the most of the more versatile human workforce rather than choose to temporarily cut costs with mass layoffs. We learned yet again that a human job is just a way to solve a problem or chase a new opportunity — until we run out of problems or opportunities, humans made redundant by technology will be reallocated to the next problem or opportunity.

A huge wave of AI-first startups applied the capabilities developed by Big Tech to myriad niche sectors of the economy and society. This unlocked new entrepreneurial energy and led to new opportunities that many did not expect. It also absorbed many of the young workers who had feared that legacy companies would not make junior hires.

The business world was not alone in adopting AI to reinvent the models of the past. The education, healthcare, and nonprofit sectors began their own reinvention process, with early adopters applying best practices from the business and startup worlds to their own work.

A new political coalition formed a national supermajority that brought more transformational change through the decade. A core set of ideas, coming from both the left-of-center abundance movement and the right-of-center progress movement, emerged and attracted a wide range of people.

The federal government, along with state governments, improved dramatically by essentially starting over and using AI to deliver services in a much more effective and efficient way. This boosted public confidence in what governments could accomplish with taxpayer money and encouraged more public investment.

A public reckoning with the billionaire class forced them to contribute a much more equitable portion of their vast wealth to the common coffers and accept much stricter limits on how they could use their wealth to influence politics.

Global politics calmed down after the chaotic Trump years, and the beating of the drums for a new Cold War with China faded. A contrite America mostly focused on its own reinvention while considering how to more fully reengage with the world in the following decade.

Europe stepped into the geopolitical void, becoming a more equal partner to the hegemon of America. This was good for Europe, spurring more internal innovation and risk-taking, and for the world, too.

After reassessing the so-called backlash against globalization, the developing world opted to continue building off the achievements of the globalization era. China played a big role in helping underdeveloped regions integrate into the global economy.

Scientific breakthroughs driven by AI became frequent occurrences in a wide range of fields, and researchers increasingly saw it as indispensable to future progress. The breakthroughs in medicine and health alone built widespread public support for pushing its boundaries farther.

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By 2050, a much better world

By 2050, the AI-empowered American economy is fully mature and humming. Over the past 25 years of almost ceaseless innovation, global productivity rates soared higher than the ones experienced in the aftermath of World War II. GDP growth rates are higher as well — though not as high as the most bullish tech-optimists had projected. As in the postwar era, the tremendous new wealth generated was broadly shared, thanks to a rebalancing between profits and wages and an expansion of equity ownership to a broader set of stakeholders in companies, particularly Big Tech ones.

This new economy solved many of the structural problems that had seemed insurmountable in the early 21st century. Highly productive human workers and robots helped sustain an economy capable of supporting programs like Social Security in an increasingly aging society. The structural deficits of the federal government disappeared, and much of the nation’s debt was retired. Despite those fiscal burdens, the average worker was still able to work less, sometimes as few as 20 hours a week, resulting in a more balanced life.

The Americans may have cracked the new AI model, with an assist on the robot front from the Chinese, but the European democracies eagerly adopted and modified it to be more socially harmonious. Nearly every economy in the developed world — particularly East Asia — was quick to embrace the new AI model because they all faced similar structural challenges, most notably too few workers for the number of old people. The bots, not more tots, ended up saving the day.

By 2050, the new AI model for education is highly honed as well. The new norm is for every student to have a personal AI tutor that stays with them through every educational stage (and, usually, the rest of their life). Once the rare, expensive experience of having a human tutor was made cheap and abundant through AI, educational outcomes improved for everyone, but particularly for kids growing up in underprivileged families and neighborhoods. The model quickly scaled globally across the developing world.

Healthcare went through a double-barreled transformation in those same years. AI was able to give every patient the attention of a concierge doctor at a fraction of the cost. Relentless breakthroughs in genetics and all things related to biology have pushed us toward more personalized medicine. The average American’s healthcare experience in 2050 is almost completely different from what it was in 2025.

By 2050, as crazy as it would have sounded in 2025, we’re close to being able to prevent, manage, or cure all diseases. AI has turned drug discovery from a slow process of trial and error into precision engineering. This is already leading to longer lifespans, as well as more vigorous lives for older people.

By 2050, housing in the West is affordable again due to reasons that were surprising, though obvious in hindsight. The arrival of versatile robots made the construction industry much more productive, causing building costs to plummet. Shared autonomous vehicles played the biggest role in driving home prices down, though — because people began abandoning individual car ownership, cities were able to turn land previously devoted to parking into housing. When the housing supply increased, costs came down.

By 2050, the world has turned the corner on global warming, meaning the situation is no longer getting worse. That does not mean we have solved climate change, but compared to 25 years ago, we have made dramatic progress. We have broken the back of the transition to electricity as the world’s primary energy system, and the vast majority of that electricity is now clean. China deserves most of the thanks for helping the world scale these technologies.

By 2050, the Pax Americana is over, and though the chaotic Trump transition was difficult, the world is better off than it was when one hegemon was the global policeman keeping the peace for all. In 2025, America spent more on its military than the next six countries combined and nearly three times as much as the second biggest spender, China. By 2050, America has reduced its military spending by 33%, dismantling a significant chunk of its global footprint, to go to a more “first among equals” role. That reconfiguration is healthier for all.

By 2050, China has made it through the relatively dangerous reign of Xi Jinping, now long dead. Younger generations of increasingly affluent Chinese have forced the Communist Party to loosen control and allow more personal and political freedoms. China also successfully navigated a dramatic population decline by becoming one of the most technologically sophisticated societies on the planet.

By 2050, Africa has become the world’s main source of young migrants — countries with shrinking populations welcome them into the many parts of their economies still reliant on human labor. Africa became the last region of the planet to finally get beyond extreme poverty.

By 2050, usable fusion energy is a reality, and though it’s still relatively expensive, we know tech tends to get cheaper and more abundant over time. The timing of this development is fortuitous because we also know that the energy-intensive desalination of seawater is going to be critical to stabilizing parts of the world now trapped in severe droughts.

By 2050, synthetic biology is starting to replace many of the industrial materials that defined the 20th century, including plastics. Synthetic meats make up the bulk of the world’s fast food protein, and the lives of animals still used for meat production are much better than they were 25 years ago. The heyday of this syn-bio front, though, will be the second half of the century.

New layers of planetary governance have emerged over the last 25 years and are making a difference in how things get done on this planet of nearly 10 billion people. But these new means to coordinate planetary activities, often involving AI, have not gotten much public attention. They are mostly technocratic solutions for now.

By 2050, the world has changed in many ways, big and small, but most people in America and the West still see themselves working within the boxes of capitalism, liberal democracies, and nation-states. A growing number of people are challenging that framework, though, and starting to think through how the world might evolve beyond them by more fully leveraging AI in the second half of the 21st century.