Michio Kaku
Dr. Michio Kaku was the featured speaker at the Opening Keynote of Scaling New Heights delivering his own special blend of humor with some hard science aimed at everything from the earliest of human existence to the first modern (steam) revolution, the electric age, the current computer age, and futures based on molecular physics based technologies, and even further into the future: Atomic-level physics powers.
Dr. Kaku believes that humans will soon be experiencing "living in cyberspace" with virtual and augmented realities where we connect visually via goggles to the internet to give us "virtual mobility" across the world. This technology will augment humans' lives in the areas of commerce, science, engineering, entertainment, art and design. It will make both creative activities as well as fabrication functions virtual that are then assembled into reality by robotic technologies (building things) or 3D printers generating them from the applicable resource materials.
Another vision (one might wonder if the noted Physicist was in fact using them himself) of the Kaku's future is 'smart contacts' in which the world of the Internet and beyond will sit on our eyes as contact lenses. These vision enhancements will provide a wealth of information applicable to everyday life like confirming who we are speaking to (for those of us who are forgetful of 'names'), as well as background information relative to the person, topic or subject we're engaged in. "Where do I order my pair?"
Self-driving vehicles will become the norm, not the unusual... and riders will interact with their vehicles in exactly the same way that they currently speak to fellow passengers. The future technology will also significantly enhance around the world transportation featuring the return of supersonic air travel. The supersonic transports of the future will travel higher and faster than any prior or present SST, and enable air trips from New York to China or Japan in less than four hours... the amount of time it typically takes to travel from New York to Los Angeles. Cross-country supersonic travel will also be possible because new technologies will essentially eliminate the 'sonic boom' that has traditionally marked the change from sub-sonic to super-sonic speeds by an aircraft.
But human transport won't change with just a new generation of SST, but will also include economical 'space travel' made possible by the use of reusable commercial rockets. Ordinary individuals will have the opportunity to travel and explore outer space, the moon and perhaps even Mars in much the same way we currently head to a national park or to geographic landmarks to explore the beauty and uniqueness of our planet.
Power will soon become abundant and clean via use of 'fusion reactors' that convert Helium into Hydrogen in the same process that occurs in the center of our Sun. "Break even" has already been accomplished by a fusion reactor in California in which the amount of energy produced equaled or slightly exceeded the amount of energy expended to produce fusion. Dr. Kaku predicts that France will likely be home to the first energy producing fusion reactor and its success will lead the way to resolving problems of 'global warming' by helping to eliminate the use of pollution producing power plants of today.
Unfortunately, the "Bad Guys" are also learning these modernized technologies for nefarious purposes. Artificial intelligence is being used to mimic both auditory patterns and visual images of individuals in order to produce false messaging that can be used for multiple illegal purposes. You might receive a call from your boss, actually an AI Bot emulating your boss. and you are told to transfer funds, or write a check. Currently hackers are doing this via email and SMS messaging but in the future it will be vocal and visual communications created by AI that deceives tens-of-thousands of unsuspecting individuals.
But AI computer applications are not perfect, in fact they are frequently subject to 'hallucinations' and create fictional data in order to accomplish a required task. For example, court legal arguments have already been bolstered by fictional case law that one AI computer simply created in support of the argument it had 'briefed' in a legal filing.
AI is not the final future of computing... Quantum Computers will be the elimination of 'digital technology' and will compute based, not on bits of data, but on q-bits (quantum-bits) running on atomic rather than silicon chips. But this technology is extremely complex, with the actual cooling plants required to keep the computer super-cooled much larger than the the computer itself. But these computers are already in development and have demonstrated new records in computing speed and complexity over existing digital technology.
And this is just a few of Dr. Kaku's vision for the future. For more details, and pleasurable reading on these topics, check out the Professor's books: Physical of the Future, The Future of the Mind, The God Equation, Physics of the Impossible and Quantum Supremacy at a book store (or on Amazon) near you.