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World in 2025 1. Introduction What will the world be like ten years from now? It is impossible to say for sure what the future will be, but we do know two important things about it. First, we know that a lot will change between now and 2025. And second, we know that those changes will matter a great deal. They will affect the lives today’s children will lead when they are young adults. They will influence the jobs they do, the way they live and the things they care about. So it is worth looking ahead so we can be prepared. What trends can you see today that will affect our lives in ten years’ time? How might you influence what the world is like in 2025?
Facts about this news story • This is an unusual “news” story, because it is about tomorrow’s news, not today’s. So it relies less on hard facts than on spotting “trends” – things that may affect how the world changes in the coming years. • Some signs of change that we are just starting to see today will be much more important ten years from now. We can make some guesses about the trends that will matter most in the future. • Technology, for example, is bound to change a lot. Already, companies like Google are experimenting with driverless cars. Another company, Amazon, is testing small planes without pilots to deliver its packages – these planes are called drones. Other firms are designing robots to help around the home. • Scientific discoveries could also make a difference to the way people live – including how long they live. Scientists might find ways of curing more types of cancer or treating diseases that affect people’s minds and bodies in old age. • That would be particularly helpful because people are living longer and longer. In ten years’ time there will be significantly more older people than there are today. Some will want to carry on working for longer rather than retiring. Others will need carers to look after them. • Caring for the elderly may be one type of job that will be more common in ten years’ time. Other sorts of job will grow thanks to new technologies. Think of the people who now work as app developers or drone operators, jobs that didn’t exist just a few years ago. But robots will probably replace people in some tasks. The world of work could look very different in 2025. • What happens outside our country is sure to have a big influence on life in Britain. China and India both have more than a billion people and are becoming more and more important in the world: selling things to us, buying things from us, using more energy and consuming more food. To understand the world in 2025, we need to look closely at how Asia is changing. • We need to pay attention to Africa too. One sad recent trend has been the rise in the number of people risking their lives in overcrowded boats to get to Europe from troubled parts of Africa. The number of these people, who we call migrants, could keep growing if more people fear for their futures in their home countries and are prepared to take big risks in the hope of a better life in Europe. Big movements of people are not easy to handle. • Towards the end of 2015 the leaders of countries around the world will meet in Paris to try to agree on ways to control global warming. Will they be able to agree on serious moves to protect the planet? If they can’t, worries about climate change may be even greater in 2025 than they are today. • Another of today’s growing worries is about the rise of inequality in many countries around the world: anger has increased over the growing difference between rich and poor. This is leading to a search for ways of narrowing the gap. A big question for 2025 is whether by then the people questioning the difference between rich and poor people will have started to have an impact, or whether inequality will have become an even bigger concern.
Background context • To get a sense of how different the world might be in ten years’ time, it helps to look at how much has changed in the past ten years. Take technology. In 2005, Facebook was only one year old, YouTube had only just been born and Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp (let alone games like “Angry Birds” and “Candy Crush”) didn’t yet exist. • Or think of mobile phones. Now there are as many mobile-phone subscriptions as there are people on the planet, and the use of smartphones is spreading very fast. Back in 2005, especially in poor countries, relatively few people had mobile phones –and the iPhone wouldn’t exist for another two years. • Ten years ago the world looked very different in other ways, too. The “global economic crisis” hadn’t yet happened. This crisis made many people all around the world much poorer. When it did come, in 2007-08, the future for people’s jobs and their confidence in the future suddenly got much worse. Ten years ago, few people would have imagined how hard their lives were about to become. • All that makes some people think that it is pointless to try to predict the future. So many things can affect it that it is impossible say what will happen in the years ahead. Yet people have always felt the need to make predictions, to plan ahead, even if the methods of doing this have sometimes been strange. • For example, some fortune-tellers use crystal balls to peer into the future. Others say they can see the future in the stars, in cards, in the pattern of coffee grains, or in the lines on the palm of a hand. Fortune-tellers in ancient Rome tried to guess the future by examining the livers of sacrificed sheep. • In modern times there is still a lot of guesswork involved in predictions. However the best guesses are based on what has happened or is starting to happen, and deciding where this might lead. This is how people predict which team will win the league or which politician will win an election. • One common prediction is that technology, especially computers, will change the sorts of jobs people do in the years to come. Researchers at Oxford University have estimated that 47% (in other words, nearly half) of all the usual types of jobs people do now will be at risk of being automated. This means that machines take over the jobs that humans were doing. • That does not mean there will be no jobs. New types of job will appear. For example, many people are now finding work as “data analysts” who are people who look at lots of numbers and turn them into something everyone can understand. This is useful thanks to the massive increase in the amount of information the world is producing (something that is often called “big data”). • Some people are optimistic about the future. Bill and Melinda Gates, an American couple who are leaders in providing help for the world’s poor, recently set out their “big bet” for the next 15 years. They predict that the lives of people in poor countries will improve faster than at any other time in history. • Specifically, they expect that child deaths will go down and more diseases will be wiped out. They think Africa will be able to feed itself, and that technology (especially mobile phones) will help the poor transform their lives. • Others are gloomy about the future. They think things will only get worse, because of climate change, damage to the environment, growing inequality, the spread of diseases like Ebola or the acts of terrorists. • For better or worse, one of the ways the world will change in the years ahead is the number of people who live in it. It is easier to see the size of this change by looking over a longer period than just the next ten years. Over the next 35 years, the world’s total population is likely to grow by more than 2 billion people, to reach 9.6 billion. • The number of people in Europe won’t change much between now and 2050; if anything it will probably shrink a bit. But the population of Africa is expected to double, adding more than 1 billion people.
Videos This video shows what some children in Gaza hope their future will be like. Unicef asked them to use drawings to express themselves, four months after the fighting there ended. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_n2m9JHM2s#t=30 This is an amazing video about what a day in the future could be – some of the details are in French but don’t let that put you off! https://youtu.be/d78BNm_49J0
2. Concepts Trend / Forecast / Optimism / Pessimism
3. Starter Questions • Based on what’s happening in the news at the moment, what do you think the world could be like in 2025? • What current events in the news will have the biggest impact on the future? • What do you think the biggest changes will be between now and 2025? • Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the world in 2025? • What would you like the world to be like in 2025? • What can people do today to influence the way the world will be in 2025?
4. Standpoints • It’s impossible to predict the future so we shouldn’t even try • It’s important to predict the future so that we can be prepared for it • Technology will make lots of today’s jobs disappear and make the future harder • Technology will create a lot of new types of jobs and make the future better • We can’t really influence the future, we just have to adapt to it • We can affect the world in 2025 if we take smart decisions now.
5. Voices Melinda and Bill Gates’ Big Bet; an optimistic view for the future Melinda and Bill Gates believe that the spread of technology, such as mobile phones, will lead to much more equality across the whole world because people in developing countries will be able to use online banking to save some of their money. That will mean they can pull themselves out of poverty and Mrs and Mr Gates also believe that this will increase how much people do for charity as more people in the world will have been in bad situations. https://youtu.be/7DmpncBDibA
Paul Ehrlich – a pessimistic view for the future Paul Ehrlich is a futurist; someone who studies the future as his job. He believes that there are too many of us on the planet, with people living longer and babies still being born. He thinks the planet won’t be able to cope with us because we are not changing how we deal with the planet but the number of us is growing and growing. He thinks that because of this, global warming will get much worse and there will be entire areas of the planet that we can’t live on because they will be too hot. https://youtu.be/CbLN75TVVRM
6. Fact checking • What do you friends think 2025 will be like? Can you find any trends that might mean they are right? • Over all of the issues you have learned, what do you think the strongest trend will be in the future, i.e. what do you think will most affect the future from what you’ve learned? • Where could you spot the trends that mean you can make a forecast? • If someone makes a forecast, how do you know if they are right or not? • What are the most common standpoints about the future?
