1 Geopolitics: 'Rivals will take greater risks against the US'

No balance of power lasts forever. Just a century ago, London was the centre
of the world. Britain bestrode the world like a colossus and only those with
strong nerves (or weak judgment) dared challenge the Pax Britannica.

That, of course, is all history, but the Pax Americana that has taken shape
since 1989 is just as vulnerable to historical change. In the 1910s, the rising
power and wealth of Germany and America splintered the Pax Britannica; in
the 2010s, east Asia will do the same to the Pax Americana.

The 21st century will see technological change on an astonishing scale. It

may even transform what it means to be human. But in the short term the
next 20 years the world will still be dominated by the doings of nationstates and the central issue will be the rise of the east.

By 2030, the world will be more complicated, divided between a broad

American sphere of influence in Europe, the Middle East and south Asia, and
a Chinese sphere in east Asia and Africa. Even within its own sphere, the US
will face new challenges from former peripheries. The large, educated
populations of Poland, Turkey, Brazil and their neighbours will come into their
own and Russia will continue its revival.

Nevertheless, America will probably remain the world's major power. The
critics who wrote off the US during the depression of the 1930s and the
stagflation of the 1970s lived to see it bounce back to defeat the Nazis in the
1940s and the Soviets in the 1980s. America's financial problems will surely
deepen through the 2010s, but the 2020s could bring another Roosevelt or
Reagan.

A hundred years ago, as Britain's dominance eroded, rivals, particularly

Germany, were emboldened to take ever-greater risks. The same will happen
as American power erodes in the 2010s-20s. In 1999, for instance, Russia
would never have dared attack a neighbour such as Georgia but in 2009 it
took just such a chance.

The danger of such an adventure sparking a great power war in the 2010s is
probably low; in the 2020s, it will be much greater.

The most serious threats will arise in the vortex of instability that stretches
from Africa to central Asia. Most of the world's poorest people live here;
climate change is wreaking its worst damage here; nuclear weapons are
proliferating fastest here; and even in 2030, the great powers will still seek
much of their energy here.

Here, the risk of Sino-American conflict will be greatest and here the balance
of power will be decided.

Ian Morris, professor of history at Stanford University and the author of Why
the West Rules For Now (Profile Books)

2 The UK economy: 'The popular revolt against bankers will become

impossible to resist'
A view of the Strata building across the city at dusk
A view across the City at dusk. Photograph: James Brittain
It will be a second financial crisis in the 2010s probably sooner than later
that will prove to be the remaking of Britain. Confronted by a second trillionpound bank bailout in less than 10 years, it will be impossible for the City and
wider banking system to resist reform. The popular revolt against bankers,
their current business model in which neglect of the real economy is
embedded and the scale of their bonuses all to be underwritten by bailouts
from taxpayers will become irresistible. The consequent rebalancing of the
British economy, already underway, will intensify. Britain, in thrall to finance
since 1945, will break free spearheading a second Industrial Revolution.

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In 2035, there is thus a good prospect that Britain will be the most populous
(our birth rate will be one the highest in Europe), dynamic and richest
European country, the key state in a reconfigured EU. Our leading universities

will become powerhouses of innovation, world centres in exploiting the

approaching avalanche of scientific and technological breakthroughs. A
reformed financial system will allow British entrepreneurs to get the
committed financial backing they need, becoming the capitalist leaders in
Europe. And, after a century of trying, Britain will at last build itself a system
for developing apprentices and technicians that is no longer the Cinderella of
the education system.

It will not be plain sailing. Massive political turbulence in China and its conflict
with the US will define part of the next 25 years and there will be a period
when the world trading and financial system retreats from openness.

How far beggar-my-neighbour competitive devaluations and protection will

develop is hard to predict, but protectionist trends are there for all to see.
Commodity prices will go much higher and there will be shortages of key
minerals, energy, water and some basic foodstuffs.

The paradox is that this will be good news for Britain. It will force the state to
re-engage with the economy and to build a matrix of institutions that will
support innovation and investment, rather as it did between 1931 and 1950.
New Labour began this process tremulously in its last year in office; the
coalition government is following through. These will be lean years for the
traditional Conservative right, but whether it will be a liberal One Nation Tory
party, ongoing coalition governments or the Labour party that will be the
political beneficiary is not yet sure.

The key point is that those 20 years in the middle of the 20th century
witnessed great industrial creativity and an unsung economic renaissance
until the country fell progressively under the stultifying grip of the City of
London. My guess is that the same, against a similarly turbulent global
background, is about to happen again. My caveat is if the City remains
strong, in which case economic decline and social division will escalate.

Will Hutton, executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation and an Observer

columnist

3 Global development: 'A vaccine will rid the world of Aids'

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Within 25 years, the world will achieve many major successes in tackling the
diseases of the poor.

Certainly, we will be polio-free and probably will have been for more than a
decade. The fight to eradicate polio represents one of the greatest
achievements in global health to date. It has mobilised millions of volunteers,
staged mass immunisation campaigns and helped to strengthen the health
systems of low-income countries. Today, we have eliminated 99% of the polio
in the world and eradication is well within reach.

Vaccines that prevent diseases such as measles and rotavirus, currently

available in rich countries, will also become affordable and readily available in
developing countries. Since it was founded 10 years ago, the Gavi Alliance, a
global partnership that funds expanded immunisation in poor countries, has
helped prevent more than 5 million deaths. It is easy to imagine that in 25
years this work will have been expanded to save millions more lives by
making life-saving vaccines available all over the world.

I also expect to see major strides in new areas. A rapid point-of-care

diagnostic test coupled with a faster-acting treatment regimen will so
fundamentally change the way we treat tuberculosis that we can begin
planning an elimination campaign.

We will eradicate malaria, I believe, to the point where there are no human
cases reported globally in 2035. We will also have effective means for
preventing Aids infection, including a vaccine. With the encouraging results of
the RV144 Aids vaccine trial in Thailand, we now know that an Aids vaccine is
possible. We must build on these and promising results on other means of
preventing HIV infection to help rid the world of the threat of Aids.

Tachi Yamada, president of the global health programme at the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation

4 Energy: 'Returning to a world that relies on muscle power is not an option'

Providing sufficient food, water and energy to allow everyone to lead decent
lives is an enormous challenge. Energy is a means, not an end, but a
necessary means. With 6.7 billion people on the planet, more than 50% living
in large conurbations, and these numbers expected to rise to more than 9
billion and 80% later in the century, returning to a world that relies on human
and animal muscle power is not an option.

The challenge is to provide sufficient energy while reducing reliance on fossil

fuels, which today supply 80% of our energy (in decreasing order of
importance, the rest comes from burning biomass and waste, hydro, nuclear
and, finally, other renewables, which together contribute less than 1%).
Reducing use of fossil fuels is necessary both to avoid serious climate change
and in anticipation of a time when scarcity makes them prohibitively
expensive.

It will be extremely difficult. An International Energy Agency scenario that

assumes the implementation of all agreed national policies and announced
commitments to save energy and reduce the use of fossil fuels projects a
35% increase in energy consumption in the next 25 years, with fossil fuels up
24%. This is almost entirely due to consumption in developing countries
where living standards are, happily, rising and the population is increasing
rapidly.

This scenario, which assumes major increases in nuclear, hydro and wind
power, evidently does not go far enough and will break down if, as many
expect, oil production (which is assumed to increase 15%) peaks in much less
than 25 years. We need to go much further in reducing demand, through
better design and changes in lifestyles, increasing efficiency and improving
and deploying all viable alternative energy sources. It won't be cheap. And in
the post-fossil-fuel era it won't be sufficient without major contributions from
solar energy (necessitating cost reductions and improved energy storage and
transmission) and/or nuclear fission (meaning fast breeder and/or thorium
reactors when uranium eventually becomes scarce) and/or fusion (which is
enormously attractive in principle but won't become a reliable source of
energy until at least the middle of the century).

Disappointingly, with the present rate of investment in developing and

deploying new energy sources, the world will still be powered mainly by fossil
fuels in 25 years and will not be prepared to do without them.

Chris Llewellyn Smith is a former director general of Cern and chair of Iter,
the world fusion project, he works on energy issues at Oxford University

5 Advertising: 'All sorts of things will just be sold in plain packages'

Shinjuku districk of Tokyo
Advertising in Tokyo. Photograph: Mike Long / Alamy/Alamy
If I'd been writing this five years ago, it would have been all about
technology: the internet, the fragmentation of media, mobile phones, social
tools allowing consumers to regain power at the expense of corporations, all
that sort of stuff. And all these things are important and will change how
advertising works.

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But it's becoming clear that what'll really change advertising will be how we
relate to it and what we're prepared to let it do. After all, when you look at
advertising from the past the basic techniques haven't changed; what seems
startlingly alien are the attitudes it was acceptable to portray and the
products you were allowed to advertise.

In 25 years, I bet there'll be many products we'll be allowed to buy but not
see advertised the things the government will decide we shouldn't be
consuming because of their impact on healthcare costs or the environment
but that they can't muster the political will to ban outright. So, we'll end up
with all sorts of products in plain packaging with the product name in a
generic typeface as the government is currently discussing for cigarettes.

But it won't stop there. We'll also be nudged into renegotiating the
relationship between society and advertising, because over the next few
years we're going to be interrupted by advertising like never before. Video

screens are getting so cheap and disposable that they'll be plastered

everywhere we go. And they'll have enough intelligence and connectivity that
they'll see our faces, do a quick search on Facebook to find out who we are
and direct a message at us based on our purchasing history.

At least, that'll be the idea. It probably won't work very well and when it does
work it'll probably drive us mad. Marketing geniuses are working on this stuff
right now, but not all of them recognise that being allowed to do this kind of
thing depends on societal consent push the intrusion too far and people will
push back.

Society once did a deal accepting advertising because it seemed occasionally

useful and interesting and because it paid for lots of journalism and
entertainment. It's not necessarily going to pay for those things for much
longer so we might start questioning whether we want to live in a Blade
Runner world brought to us by Cillit Bang.

Russell Davies, head of planning at the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather
and a columnist for the magazines Campaign and Wired

6 Neuroscience: 'We'll be able to plug information streams directly into the

cortex'
By 2030, we are likely to have developed no-frills brain-machine interfaces,
allowing the paralysed to dance in their thought-controlled exoskeleton suits.
I sincerely hope we will not still be interfacing with computers via keyboards,
one forlorn letter at a time.

I'd like to imagine we'll have robots to do our bidding. But I predicted that 20
years ago, when I was a sanguine boy leaving Star Wars, and the smartest
robot we have now is the Roomba vacuum cleaner. So I won't be surprised if
I'm wrong in another 25 years. Artificial intelligence has proved itself an
unexpectedly difficult problem.

Maybe we will understand what's happening when we immerse our heads

into the colourful night blender of dreams. We will have cracked the secret of

human memory by realising that it was never about storing things, but about
the relationships between things.

Will we have reached the singularity the point at which computers surpass
human intelligence and perhaps give us our comeuppance? We'll probably be
able to plug information streams directly into the cortex for those who want it
badly enough to risk the surgery. There will be smart drugs to enhance
learning and memory and a flourishing black market among ambitious
students to obtain them.

Having lain to rest the nature-nurture dichotomy at that point, we will have a
molecular understanding of the way in which cultural narratives work their
way into brain tissue and of individual susceptibility to those stories.

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Then there's the mystery of consciousness. Will we finally have a framework

that allows us to translate the mechanical pieces and parts into private,
subjective experience? As it stands now, we don't even know what such a
framework could look like ("carry the two here and that equals the experience
of tasting cinnamon").

That line of research will lead us to confront the question of whether we can
reproduce consciousness by replicating the exact structure of the brain say,
with zeros and ones, or beer cans and tennis balls. If this theory of
materialism turns out to be correct, then we will be well on our way to
downloading our brains into computers, allowing us to live forever in The
Matrix.

But if materialism is incorrect, that would be equally interesting: perhaps

brains are more like radios that receive an as-yet-undiscovered force. The one
thing we can be sure of is this: no matter how wacky the predictions we make
today, they will look tame in the strange light of the future.

David Eagleman, neuroscientist and writer

7 Physics: 'Within a decade, we'll know what dark matter is'

The next 25 years will see fundamental advances in our understanding of the
underlying structure of matter and of the universe. At the moment, we have
successful descriptions of both, but we have open questions. For example,
why do particles of matter have mass and what is the dark matter that
provides most of the matter in the universe?

I am optimistic that the answer to the mass question will be found within a
few years, whether or not it is the mythical Higgs boson, and believe that the
answer to the dark matter question will be found within a decade.

Key roles in answering these questions will be made by experiments at Cern's

Large Hadron Collider, which started operations in earnest last year and is
expected to run for most of the next 20 years; others will be played by
astrophysical searches for dark matter and cosmological observations such as
those from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.

Many theoretical proposals for answering these questions invoke new

principles in physics, such as the existence of additional dimensions of space
or a "supersymmetry" between the constituents of matter and the forces
between them, and we will discover whether these ideas are useful for
physics. Both these ideas play roles in string theory, the best guess we have
for a complete theory of all the fundamental forces including gravity.

Will string theory be pinned down within 20 years? My crystal ball is cloudy
on this point, but I am sure that we physicists will have an exciting time
trying to find out.

John Ellis, theoretical physicist at Cern and King's College London

8 Food: 'Russia will become a global food superpower'

20 predictions
A woman works on the production line of a poultry processing factory in
Stary Oskol, central Russia. Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
When experts talk about the coming food security crisis, the date they fixate
upon is 2030. By then, our numbers will be nudging 9 billion and we will need
to be producing 50% more food than we are now.

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By the middle of that decade, therefore, we will either all be starving, and
fighting wars over resources, or our global food supply will have changed
radically. The bitter reality is that it will probably be a mixture of both.

Developed countries such as the UK are likely, for the most part, to have
attempted to pull up the drawbridge, increasing national production and
reducing our reliance on imports.

In response to increasing prices, some of us may well have reduced our

consumption of meat, the raising of which is a notoriously inefficient use of
grain. This will probably create a food underclass, surviving on a carb- and
fat-heavy diet, while those with money scarf the protein.

The developing world, meanwhile, will work to bridge the food gap by
embracing the promise of biotechnology which the middle classes in the
developed world will have assumed that they had the luxury to reject.

In truth, any of the imported grain that we do consume will come from
genetically modified crops. As climate change lays waste to the productive
fields of southern Europe and north Africa, more water-efficient strains of
corn, wheat and barley will be pressed into service; likewise, to the north,
Russia will become a global food superpower as the same climate change
opens up the once frozen and massive Siberian prairie to food production.

The consensus now is that the planet does have the wherewithal to feed that
huge number of people. It's just that some people in the west may find the
methods used to do so unappetising.

Jay Rayner, TV presenter and the Observer's food critic

9 Nanotechnology: 'Privacy will be a quaint obsession'

Twenty years ago, Don Eigler, a scientist working for IBM in California, wrote
out the logo of his employer in letters made of individual atoms. This feat was
a graphic symbol of the potential of the new field of nanotechnology, which
promises to rebuild matter atom by atom, molecule by molecule, and to give
us unprecedented power over the material world.

Some, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, predict that nanotechnology will lead to
a revolution, allowing us to make any kind of product for virtually nothing; to
have computers so powerful that they will surpass human intelligence; and to
lead to a new kind of medicine on a sub-cellular level that will allow us to
abolish ageing and death.

I don't think that Kurzweil's "technological singularity" a dream of scientific

transcendence that echoes older visions of religious apocalypse will
happen. Some stubborn physics stands between us and "the rapture of the
nerds". But nanotechnology will lead to some genuinely transformative
applications.

New ways of making solar cells very cheaply on a very large scale offer us
the best hope we have for providing low-carbon energy on a big enough scale
to satisfy the needs of a growing world population aspiring to the prosperity
we're used to in the developed world.

We'll learn more about intervening in our biology at the sub-cellular level and
this nano-medicine will give us new hope of overcoming really difficult and
intractable diseases, such as Alzheimer's, that will increasingly afflict our
population as it ages.

The information technology that drives your mobile phone or laptop is already
operating at the nanoscale. Another 25 years of development will lead us to a
new world of cheap and ubiquitous computing, in which privacy will be a
quaint obsession of our grandparents.

Nanotechnology is a different type of science, respecting none of the

conventional boundaries between disciplines and unashamedly focused on
applications rather than fundamental understanding.

Given the huge resources being directed towards nanotechnology in China

and its neighbours, this may also be the first major technology of the modern
era that is predominantly developed outside the US and Europe.

Richard Jones, pro-vice-chancellor for research and innovation at the

University of Sheffield

10 Gaming: 'We'll play games to solve problems'

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In the last decade, in the US and Europe but particularly in south-east Asia,
we have witnessed a flight into virtual worlds, with people playing games
such as Second Life. But over the course of the next 25 years, that flight will
be successfully reversed, not because we're going to spend less time playing
games, but because games and virtual worlds are going to become more
closely connected to reality.

There will be games where the action is influenced by what happens in

reality; and there will be games that use sensors so that we can play them
out in the real world a game in which your avatar is your dog, which wears a
game collar that measures how fast it's running and whether or not it's
wagging its tail, for example, where you play with your dog to advance the
narrative, as opposed to playing with a virtual character. I can imagine more
physical activity games, too, and these might be used to harness energy

peripherals like a dance pad that actually captures energy from your dancing
on top of it.

Then there will be problem-solving games: there are already a lot of games in
which scientists try to teach gamers real science how to build proteins to
cure cancer, for example. One surprising trend in gaming is that gamers
today prefer, on average, three to one to play co-operative games rather
than competitive games. Now, this is really interesting; if you think about the
history of games, there really weren't co-operative games until this latest
generation of video games. In every game you can think of card games,
chess, sport everybody plays to win. But now we'll see increasing
collaboration, people playing games together to solve problems while they're
enjoying themselves.

There are also studies on how games work on our minds and our cognitive
capabilities, and a lot of science suggests you can use games to treat
depression, anxiety and attention-deficit disorder. Making games that are
both fun and serve a social purpose isn't easy a lot of innovation will be
required but gaming will become increasingly integrated into society.

Jane McGonigal, director of games research & development at the Institute

for the Future in California and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make
Us Happy and How They Can Help Us Change the World (Penguin)

11 Web/internet: 'Quantum computing is the future'

The open web created by idealist geeks, hippies and academics, who
believed in the free and generative flow of knowledge, is being overrun by a
web that is safer, more controlled and commercial, created by problemsolving pragmatists.

Henry Ford worked out how to make money by making products people
wanted to own and buy for themselves. Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are
working out how to make money from allowing people to share, on their
terms.

Facebook and Apple are spawning cloud capitalism, in which consumers allow
companies to manage information, media, ideas, money, software, tools and
preferences on their behalf, holding everything in vast, floating clouds of
shared data. We will be invited to trade invasions into our privacy
companies knowing ever more about our lives for a more personalised
service. We will be able to share, but on their terms.

Julian Assange and the movement that has been ignited by WikiLeaks is the
most radical version of the alternative: a free, egalitarian, open and public
web. The fate of this movement will be a sign of things to come. If it can
command broad support, then the open web has a chance to remain a
mainstream force. If, however, it becomes little more than a guerrilla
campaign, then the open web could be pushed to the margins, along with
national public radio.

By 2035, the web, as a single space largely made up of webpages accessed

on computers, will be long gone.

As the web goes mobile, those who pay more will get faster access. We will
be sharing videos, simulations, experiences and environments, on a
multiplicity of devices to which we'll pay as much attention as a light switch.

Yet, many of the big changes of the next 25 years will come from unknowns
working in their bedrooms and garages. And by 2035 we will be talking about
the coming of quantum computing, which will take us beyond the world of
binary, digital computing, on and off, black and white, 0s and 1s.

The small town of Waterloo, Ontario, which is home to the Perimeter Institute,
funded by the founder of BlackBerry, currently houses the largest collection
of theoretical physicists in the world.

The bedrooms of Waterloo are where the next web may well be made.

Charles Leadbeater, author and social entrepreneur

12 Fashion: 'Technology creates smarter clothes'

Gareth Pugh show
A model on the catwalk during the Gareth Pugh show at London Fashion
Week in 2008. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
Fashion is such an important part of the way in which we communicate our
identity to others, and for a very long time it's meant dress: the textile
garments on our body. But in the coming decades, I think there'll be much
more emphasis on other manifestations of fashion and different ways of
communicating with each other, different ways of creating a sense of
belonging and of making us feel great about ourselves.

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We're already designing our identities online manipulating imagery to tell a

story about ourselves. Instead of meeting in the street or in a bar and having
a conversation and looking at what each other is wearing, we're
communicating in some depth through these new channels. With clothing, I
think it's possible that we'll see a polarisation between items that are very
practical and those that are very much about display and maybe these are
not things that you own but that you borrow or share.

Technology is already being used to create clothing that fits better and is
smarter; it is able to transmit a degree of information back to you. This is
partly driven by customer demand and the desire to know where clothing
comes from so we'll see tags on garments that tell you where every part of
it was made, and some of this, I suspect, will be legislation-driven, too, for
similar reasons, particularly as resources become scarcer and it becomes
increasingly important to recognise water and carbon footprints.

However, it's not simply an issue of functionality. Fashion's gone through a

big cycle in the last 25 years from being something that was treasured and
cherished to being something that felt disposable, because of a drop in
prices. In fact, we've completely changed our relationship towards clothes
and there's a real feeling among designers who I work with that they're trying
to work back into their designs an element of emotional content.

I think there's definitely a place for technology in creating a dialogue with you
through your clothes.

Dilys Williams, designer and the director for sustainable fashion at the London
College of Fashion

13 Nature: 'We'll redefine the wild'

We all want to live in a world where species such as tigers, the great whales,
orchids and coral reefs can persist and thrive and I am sure that the
commitment that people have to maintaining the spectacle and diversity of
life will continue. Over the past 50 years or so, there has been growing
support for nature conservation. When we understand the causes of species
losses, good conservation actions can and do reverse the trends.

But it is going to become much harder. The human population has roughly
doubled since the 1960s and will increase by another third by 2030. Demands
for food, water and energy will increase, inevitably in competition with other
species. People already use up to 40% of the world's primary production
(energy) and this must increase, with important consequences for nature.

In the UK, some familiar species will become scarcer as our rare habitats
(mires, bogs and moorlands) are lost. We will be seeing the effects from
gradual warming that will allow more continental species to live here, and in
our towns and cities we'll probably have more species that have become
adapted to living alongside people.

We can conserve species when we really try, so I'm confident that the
charismatic mega fauna and flora will mostly still persist in 2035, but they will
be increasingly restricted to highly managed and protected areas. The
survivors will be those that cope well with people and those we care about
enough to save. Increasingly, we won't be living as a part of nature but
alongside it, and we'll have redefined what we mean by the wild and
wilderness.

Crucially, we are still rapidly losing overall biodiversity, including soil microorganisms, plankton in the oceans, pollinators and the remaining tropical and
temperate forests. These underpin productive soils, clean water, climate
regulation and disease-resistance. We take these vital services from
biodiversity and ecosystems for granted, treat them recklessly and don't
include them in any kind of national accounting.

Georgina Mace, professor of conservation science and director of the Natural

Environment Research Council's Centre for Population Biology, Imperial
College London

14 Architecture: What constitutes a 'city' will change

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In 2035, most of humanity will live in favelas. This will not be entirely
wonderful, as many people will live in very poor housing, but it will have its
good side. It will mean that cities will consist of series of small units
organised, at best, by the people who know what is best for themselves and,
at worst, by local crime bosses.

Cities will be too big and complex for any single power to understand and
manage them. They already are, in fact. The word "city" will lose some of its
meaning: it will make less and less sense to describe agglomerations of tens
of millions of people as if they were one place, with one identity. If current
dreams of urban agriculture come true, the distinction between town and
country will blur. Attempts at control won't be abandoned, however, meaning
that strange bubbles of luxury will appear, like shopping malls and office
parks. To be optimistic, the human genius for inventing social structures will
mean that new forms of settlement we can't quite imagine will begin to
emerge.

All this assumes that environmental catastrophe doesn't drive us into caves.
Nor does it describe what will happen in Britain, with a roughly stable
population and a planning policy dedicated to preserving the status quo as
much as possible. Britain in 25 years' time may look much as it does now,
which is not hugely different from 25 years ago. Rowan Moore, Observer

architecture correspondent

15 Sport: 'Broadcasts will use holograms'

Globalisation in sport will continue: it's a trend we've seen by the choice of
Rio for the 2016 Olympics and Qatar for the 2022 World Cup. This will mean
changes to traditional sporting calendars in recognition of the demands of
climate and time zones across the planet.

Sport will have to respond to new technologies, the speed at which we

process information and apparent reductions in attention span. Shorter
formats, such as Twenty20 cricket and rugby sevens, could aid the
development of traditional sports in new territories.

The demands of TV will grow, as will technology's role in umpiring and

consuming sport. Electronics companies are already planning broadcasts
using live holograms. I don't think we'll see an acceptance of performanceenhancing drugs: the trend has been towards zero tolerance and long may it
remain so.

Mike Lee, chairman of Vero Communications and ex-director of

communications for London's 2012 Olympic bid

16 Transport: 'There will be more automated cars'

It's not difficult to predict how our transport infrastructure will look in 25
years' time it can take decades to construct a high-speed rail line or a
motorway, so we know now what's in store. But there will be radical changes
in how we think about transport. The technology of information and
communication networks is changing rapidly and internet and mobile
developments are helping make our journeys more seamless. Queues at St
Pancras station or Heathrow airport when the infrastructure can't cope for
whatever reason should become a thing of the past, but these challenges,
while they might appear trivial, are significant because it's not easy to
organise large-scale information systems.

The instinct to travel is innate within us, but we will have to do it in a more
carbon-efficient way. It's hard to be precise, but I think we'll be cycling and
walking more; in crowded urban areas we may see travelators which we see
in airports already and more scooters. There will be more automated cars,
like the ones Google has recently been testing. These driverless cars will be
safer, but when accidents do happen, they may be on the scale of airline
disasters. Personal jetpacks will, I think, remain a niche choice.

Frank Kelly, professor of the mathematics of systems at Cambridge

University, and former chief scientific adviser to the DfT

17 Health: 'We'll feel less healthy'

overweight woman
An overweight woman in Maryland, USA. Photograph: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty
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Health systems are generally quite conservative. That's why the more radical
forecasts of the recent past haven't quite materialised. Contrary to past
predictions, we don't carry smart cards packed with health data; most
treatments aren't genetically tailored; and health tourism to Bangalore
remains low. But for all that, health is set to undergo a slow but steady
revolution. Life expectancy is rising about three months each year, but we'll
feel less healthy, partly because we'll be more aware of the many things that
are, or could be, going wrong, and partly because more of us will be living
with a long-term condition.

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We'll spend more on health but also want stronger action to influence health.
The US Congressional Budget Office forecasts that US health spending will
rise from 17% of the economy today to 25% in 2025 and 49% in 2082. Their
forecasts may be designed to shock but they contain an important grain of
truth. Spending on health and jobs in health is bound to grow.

Some of that spending will go on the problems of prosperity obesity, alcohol

consumption and injuries from extreme sports. Currently fashionable ideas of

"nudge" will have turned out to be far too weak to change behaviours.
Instead, we'll be more in the realms of "shove" and "push", with cities trying
to reshape whole environments to encourage people to walk and cycle.

By 2030, mental health may at last be treated on a par with physical health.
Medicine may have found smart drugs for some conditions but the biggest
impact may be achieved from lower-tech actions, such as meditation in
schools or brain gyms for pensioners.

Healthcare will look more like education. Your GP will prescribe you a short
course on managing your diabetes or heart condition, and when you get
home there'll be an e-tutor to help you and a vast array of information about
your condition.

Almost every serious observer of health systems believes that the great
general hospitals are already anachronistic, but because hospitals are where
so much of the power lies, and so much of the public attachment, it would be
a brave forecaster who suggested their imminent demise.

Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of the Young Foundation

18 Religion: 'Secularists will flatter to deceive'

Over the next two and a half decades, it is quite possible that those Brits who
follow a religion will continue both to fall in number and also become more
orthodox or fundamentalist. Similarly, organised religions will increasingly
work together to counter what they see as greater threats to their interests
creeping agnosticism and secularity.

Another 10 years of failure by the Anglican church to face down the Africanled traditionalists over women bishops and gay clerics could open the
question of disestablishment of the Church of England. The country's
politicians, including an increasingly gay-friendly Tory party, may find it
difficult to see how state institutions can continue to be associated with an
image of sexism and homophobia.

I predict an increase in debate around the tension between a secular agenda

which says it is merely seeking to remove religious privilege, end
discrimination and separate church and state, and organised orthodox
religion which counterclaims that this would amount to driving religious
voices from the public square.

Despite two of the three party leaders being professed atheists, the secular
tendency in this country still flatters to deceive. There is, at present, no
organised, non-religious, rationalist movement. In contrast, the forces of
organised religion are better resourced, more organised and more politically
influential than ever before.

Dr Evan Harris, author of a secularist manifesto

19 Theatre: 'Cuts could force a new political fringe'

The theatre will weather the recent cuts. Some companies will close and the
repertoire of others will be safe and cautious; the art form will emerge robust
in a decade or so. The cuts may force more young people outside the existing
structures back to an unsubsidised fringe and this may breed different types
of work that will challenge the subsidised sector.

Student marches will become more frequent and this mobilisation may breed
a more politicised generation of theatre artists. We will see old forms from the
1960s re-emerge (like agit prop) and new forms will be generated to
communicate ideology and politics.

More women will emerge as directors, writers and producers. This change is
already visible at the flagship subsidised house, the National Theatre, where
the repertoire for bigger theatres like the Lyttelton already includes directors
like Marianne Elliott and Josie Rourke, and soon the Cottesloe will start to
embrace the younger generation Polly Findlay and Lyndsey Turner.

Katie Mitchell, theatre director

20 Storytelling: 'Eventually there'll be a Twitter classic'

Are you reading fewer books? I am and reading books is sort of my job. It's
just that with the multifarious delights of the internet, spending 20 hours in
the company of one writer and one story needs motivation. It's worth doing,
of course; like exercise, its benefits are many and its pleasures great. And yet
everyone I know is doing it less. And I can't see that that trend will reverse.

That's the bad news. Twenty-five years from now, we'll be reading fewer
books for pleasure. But authors shouldn't fret too much; e-readers will make it
easier to impulse-buy books at 4am even if we never read past the first 100
pages.

And stories aren't becoming less popular they're everywhere, from adverts
to webcomics to fictional tweets we're only beginning to explore the
exciting possibilities of web-native literature, stories that really exploit the
fractal, hypertextual way we use the internet.

My guess is that, in 2035, stories will be ubiquitous. There'll be a tube-based

soap opera to tune your iPod to during your commute, a tale (incorporating
on-sale brands) to enjoy via augmented reality in the supermarket. Your
employer will bribe you with stories to focus on your job.

Most won't be great, but then most of everything isn't great and eventually
there'll be a Twitter-based classic
source: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jan/02/25-predictions-25years