The Economist's predictions for 2050

[wjfox]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17465251

[HAL9000]

Megachange: The world in 2050

[BrandNewGuy]

In 34 pages, there were just two mentions of "resources" (one in relation to water-scarcity conflicts and the other concerned with education), two of "energy" (only one in the main body of the report) and one mention of "oil" (concerning oil-rich countries inability to generate significant numbers of jobs)...

It seems to me that this is a wilful blindness towards the greatest challenges facing the world which are to do with energy and resource depletion. Blithely (or blindly) to assume infinite substitutability of stuff that will allow us to grow and grow is to ignore the hard physical finite limits to resources that are vital to an advanced industrial world. The rest of it - nano-bots curing cancer etc - is all hot air if these challenges aren't faced.