Class Predictions
The Class of ’22 Shares Insights on How Technology Will Affect Us by 2032
As one of the outputs of the course, students were asked to reflect on one emerging technology and to predict how that tech might impact the world in a decade. The result was captured in an NFT, “The Class of ’22 Shares Insights on How Technology Will Affect Us by 2032.”
Students were asked to choose an issue in emerging tech that mattered to them and to consider: How will this technology have a significant impact on society in the next decade? Do you think that impact will be positive or negative? Or both? What evidence caused you to reach this conclusion? Why does this issue matter? What steps might be taken to mitigate risk or enhance benefits offered by the tech/issue you’ve chosen?
The NFT is organized into broad categories based on topics that speculate on the future of emerging tech on democracy, the economy, the future of work, health care, biology, ecology, and social interactions, and humanity as we know it. In the spirit of the class, we used an AI application, WOMBO Dream to generate artwork for each section based on written prompts.
Individual submissions to the collective Class NFT were organized on this site into the following broad and sometimes overlapping categories:
- AI, AR & Humanity
- Attention Economy & Exponential Tech
- Climate Change
- Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
- Gene Editing
- Metaverse
- NFTs
- Web3 & Decentralized Systems, Government & Economy
Journalism As an Industry Will Be Greatly Disrupted But Storytelling Will Grow To Be More Important Than Ever
Large companies may struggle to adapt quickly exponential technologies in journalism but nimble journalists will thrive.
NFTs Are Why Your Mom Will Be On Chain
NFTs are here. How impactful they will be for our society?
In 2032, AI Will Have Mastered Natural Language Understanding and as a Result Made a Significant Stride Towards Artificial General Intelligence
An AI system that has the language learning and comprehension capabilities of humans will be ready within the next 10 years.
Hollywood’s Next Frontier: NFTs as a Platform for Character & Intellectual Property Development
By 2032, at least 75% of all film & TV revenues will come from intellectual property (IP) that originated as part of an NFT collection.
Is Twitter the Mint of The Future? What Musk’s Bid on The Social Media Platform Reveals about the Serious Business of Hype
If money is the blood of the global economy, hype is the blood of the internet.
The Metaverse Helps To Realize Meritocracy, While Destroying Dating Prospects
Today, youth are born into a society that lives in at least two realities. That of the physical world and that of the numerous digital worlds you can occupy.
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We Will Need To Leverage New Decentralized Ways of Organising To Overcome the Existential Risk Challenges from New Technologies and the Climate Crisis
The main challenge we are facing is not the climate crisis, but the climate governance crisis.
When Rubber Meets the Road: AV as a Harbinger of AI
Over the next decade, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will introduce most of the world to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the very first time.
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DAOs Will End the Era of Traditional Governments
This latest generation of the web has introduced blockchain, a distributed immutable ledger, and smart contracts, public, auditable code run on a distributed global computer.
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By 2032, Fanfiction Will Become a Billion-Dollar Market
NFTs have the potential to change this adverse dynamic between original authors (and publishing houses) and their fans, and allow both original authors and fanfiction writers to receive benefit for their work.
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By 2032, as Many as 17M Jobs in the US Alone Will Be Displaced by Universal Language Processing Models Like GPT-3
Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-3 (GPT-3) is a pioneering universal natural language model developed by OpenAI. I
The Benefits Of Augmented Reality (AR) in Intraoperative Management of Cerebral Pathologies
One of the technologies that is revolutionizing the world of neurosurgery is the use of augmented reality (AR) in pre-operatory planning and surgery.
Solving Climate Change: Aligning Incentives and Approaching Global Unison
We face a real and present danger in human-accelerated climate change.
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Synthetic Biology Will Solve the Climate-Change Problem by Enabling Carbon Capture And Sequestration through Natural Means
Over the last 10 years, synthetic biology has undergone a technological revolution to allow rapid, precise, automated, and high-throughput engineering of biological cells for targeted purposes.
Are We Are Running Out of Time, Or Will Time Be the Only Thing Left?
Technology is providing an opportunity to develop a “new world” of education, culture, and adult gaming, in which people will now have time to participate and be active in.
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The Metaverse Will Disrupt Your Workplace and Take Your Employees with It
The promise of this metaverse will be to create a digital experience that is comparable to physical experience.
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Long-term Hope for Organ Recipients
The methods of producing and procuring replacement organs will undergo dramatic change in the next decade.
Cherry-Picking Genes Will Create A Caste System
Genetic engineering has been around for a long time, however, so far it has been an extremely expensive, inaccurate and unscalable process.
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Human Germline Editing: A Potential Source of Inequality
It is critical to consider the extent to which technological developments can impact economic and social disparities around the world.
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CRISPR: Survival of the Richest?
Gene editing is the process by which the existing DNA sequence of a species is altered by editing the current sequence of DNA or removing parts of the DNA sequence, an approach closer to natural random genetic mutations that can occur in nature over time.
By 2032, Women Will Own Less Than 10% of All Crypto, Which Significantly Exacerbate The Gender Wealth Gap
Unless conscious efforts are made to address the investment gap which already exists in crypto, women will be left out and this absence will not only perpetuate but actually exacerbate the gender wealth gap.
Web3 is a Giant Bubble Just like the Dotcom Bubble
While there are real use cases for deploying blockchain technology and for reforming the current internet system, these investments have more to do with speculation than anything else.
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DAOs for Scientific Development, from Literature To Fund-Raising
The world of scientific discovery and development is very much stuck in the past, with very little transparency in a field that would require information sharing to build knowledge on top of existing knowledge.
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Blockchain-Integrated Voting Will Improve Democratic Outcomes Worldwide
Confidence and satisfaction in democracies is waning worldwide according to a report published by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy.
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In An Age of Exponential Technology, the World Needs Wisdom
AI, synthetic biology, and autonomous weapons have decentralized global destructive capacities.
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Governments of Developing Countries Will Utilize AI & Blockchain To Curb Corruption & Build Sustainable Economic Models
The famous Yuval Harari in an article written in 2018, made a point that humans will “feel” irrelevant in the future as they may have a hard time understanding the technologies that will surround them.
Web3: Today’s Techno-Capitalist Feudalism Magnified
Web3 touts a decentralized future for the internet, with users as owners, where power is transferred back to the community and away from the current guard. But just because we could potentially do this, doesn’t mean it will happen.
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The Convergence Between Developed & Developing Economies Will Be Accelerated by Blockchain Technology
One of the theories for why some countries continue to be economically prosperous while others remain poor is the World systems theory.