Cool Thing Of The Day: The Future Of Technology To 2050

With technology changing ever faster every day, just keeping on top of the present state of the art is hard enough. Given the techno-social revolutions of the past few years, imagine the hubris involved in trying to project decades into the future.

Never a shy set of writers, Fast Company magazine takes on the task and maps out the future in a handy chart.

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The downloadable pdf maps out their vision of various technological, economic, social and risk predictions through 2050. Everything gets pretty fuzzy (and pretty sci-fi, like cosmetic brain surgery, shopbots, and "virtual communities start physical communities") once you get out past 2015, but that's what futurists do for a living, I guess.

(Side note: I wonder what the state of futurism will be like in 2050?)