50 brilliant mind forecast

Brilliant mind forecast

Michael Gazzaniga
Does our species have a moral compass? Do we mostly get along because we enjoy common reactions to similar challenges? Can we truly understand how we understand others, their intentions, desires and beliefs? Understanding these issues is what is coming down the pike.

Robert May
The significant breakthrough we really need is better understanding of human institutions, particularly of the impediments to collective, cooperative activity in which all individuals pay small costs to reap large group benefits. Darwin recognised the evolution of cooperative behaviour as one of the most important unsolved problems of his day

Helen Heber Katz
Advances in heart regeneration are around the corner, digits will be regrown within five to ten years, and limb regeneration will occur a few years later. Central nervous system repair will occur first with the retina and optic nerve and later with the spinal cord. Within 50 years whole-body replacement will be routine.

Stephen Wolfram
I expect the children of 50 years from now will learn cellular automata before they learn algebra.

Timothy Gowers
However, one of the great gaps in our knowledge is that nobody knows how to show that searching for solutions really is harder than checking that the solutions are correct. This is the P = NP problem.
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Therefore, if we found a solution to the P = NP problem it would profoundly affect our understanding of mathematics, and would rank alongside the famous undecidability results of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

Igor Aleksander
The notion that information has a physical basis, like the wind, is itself less than 50 years old. Those involved in the rapid development of computation now have the power to understand the brain-machine in a way that was not possible through classical sciences. They are beginning to formalise the many elements of what we call consciousness.

Michael Benton
Well, until we have a near-complete tree of life, it is hard to understand large-scale patterns such as rates of evolution, mass extinctions and diversifications. It would be nice to know for sure whether the diversifications of flowering plants and of social insects are linked, whether the demise of the dinosaurs really opened the world to mammals, when and how life moved onto land, whether the Cambrian explosion was a real event, and when and how the major increases in biological complexity were achieved. We might even find out what lies at the very root of the tree.

Frank Wilczek
The sun rains about 10,000 times as much energy onto Earth as we now use. We'll learn how to capture at least a thousandth of that energy, thus vastly increasing the world's wealth.

Geoffrey Miller
Thus, science will kill religion - not by reason challenging faith, but by offering a more practical, universal and rewarding moral framework for human interaction.

Elizabeth Loftus
I've spent three decades learning how to alter people's memories. I've even gone so far as planting entirely false memories into the minds of ordinary people - memories such as being lost in a shopping mall, cutting your hand on broken glass or even witnessing demonic possession as a child, all planted through the power of suggestion.
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In 2048, a descendant of George Orwell will write 2084, a book about a totalitarian society in need of control. When we have mastered the false memory recipes, we will need to worry about who controls them. What brakes should be imposed on police, lawyers, advertisers? More than ever, we'll need to constantly keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.

Terry Sejnowski
To understand how the brain creates consciousness we must first understand unconscious processing, which does most of the heavy lifting for us. I suspect that when we start to make progress with this the problem of consciousness will, like the Cheshire cat, disappear, leaving only a smile in the air.