April 01 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Technology Year: 2015 Rating: 7
If you’re interested in how a specific future year may shape up,
the Future Scanner offers a
wealth of information to this end. A quick search through
2015 scans
revealed a plethora of information about the expected state of
cancer treatment, interfaces, artificial intelligence, robotics,
the environment and much more. 
Take a look at the following results for a quick snapshot of
2015:
Health of the General Population: Although it
has been predicted that 75% of Americans
will be overweight by then, what and how
we’re eating might be very different from today. Check out
these winning
designs from the competition “Dining in 2015” as well as the
potential for elegant designer
fruit that could hit grocery stores by 2015. And though the
future of fruit is exciting, the future of food prices may not be
so, according to this
prediction that cereal prices will rise by between 10% and 20% by
2015 due to supplies not matching future demands, according to the
International Food
Policy Research Institute.
The most exciting prediction regarding health in 2015 is the
likelihood that cancer may be well on its way to being cured.
According to this Future
Blogger post by futuretalk “Dr.
Andrew von Eschenbach, then director of the National Cancer
Institute outlined his goal to eliminate suffering and death from
cancer by 2015.”
Gadgets and Gizmos: Lots of exciting
technologies to look forward to in this year. Check out these awesome
laptop prototypes as well as Nokia’s
Nano-phone being developed with the 2015 goal in mind.
(cont.)
Technology: Not only can we expect exciting
things to carry in our laptop bags, IBM
Swiss scientists are also planning to create the first
artifical human brain by 2015 – these are the same scientists
planning to create a digital 3D replica of the brain.
Nanotechnology is already beginning to take off, but by 2015 this
industry has been predicted to be a $1 Trillion
Industry – anyone else thinking about stock market plays?
Robotics also promises to be a booming industry by then.
Marshall Brain
predicts that by 2015, robots will have ubiquitously taken over
tons of jobs currently done by humans, including airline pilots,
grocery store clerks, and waitresses. Another occupation robots
plan to take over is one with increasing more complex moral
implications: war. In fact, the US Department of Defense plans to
replace a third
of its armed vehicles and weaponry with robots by 2015.
Environmental Damage: If the U.N. is working to
save the world
from environmental destruction by 2015, something must be up. Green
trends are already evident as seen through their pervasiveness in
markets like the car industry, residential housing and a host of
alternative energy companies. One such energy company is Marine Current
Turbines, which is planning to power 400,000
homes per single sea turbine by 2015.
But what if such schemes don’t work and global warming continues
to cause climate change? No problem – the construction of
Polar Cities is set to begin in 2012 and some are expected to
be ready for occupation by 2015.
Business & Media: Due to the exponential
acceleration of
information, it has been predicted that if you consider the
YouTube vids, IPTV, high-def images,
cloud computing, and all that comes with emerging applications,
online video and rich media will total a ‘zettabyte’ by
2015.
And old media? Forget it. By 2015, it is argued that
participatory media (the next-gen Digg.coms, Daily Kos’, Newsvines,
etc.) will have destroyed the
press as we now know it, allow more people to get paid for
their informational contributions, produce unprecedented breadth of
content and cause a few heated media battles between entities like
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the New York Times.
Hope you enjoyed this 2015 snapshot, courtesy of our Future
Scanner and the following users who scanned in or wrote all the
content used in this post: wowshucks,
mariposa,
futuretalk,
Zora
Styrian, Andriod,
Venessa
Posavec, Fishka and
Marisa
Vitols.
And lastly, for the comment thread: What kind of specific
predictions do YOU have for
2015?
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