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1. The demise of the smartphone It is hard to imagine life without them. There are 7.4 billion smartphones in the world and the typical user checks them 144 times a day. And yet, 50 years ago we would have said the same of cigarettes. Everyone smoked in cinemas, on trains and, though it seems unimaginable now, on aeroplanes. Once it was clearly shown that smoking was very bad for your health, it went into steady decline. We are just starting to work out just how bad smartphones are for our mental health. There is a growing body of evidence to show they have a negative impact on cognitive ability, memory, attention and sleep, and create addiction and anxiety. That’s just for adults. The impact on teenagers is worse. There are already moves to put age restrictions on usage, and those may get tighter. Over the next decade, people will give up on the smartphone, taking down one of the biggest industries in the world – and with it the app economy. 2. The robo-economy takes off Despite all the hype, it will become painfully clear during the 2030s that the AI revolution was oversold. The chatbots don’t actually possess any intelligence and, apart from a few very limited tasks, can’t replace human work. Instead, it is robotics that will prove to be the next great wave of technological innovation. Domestic robots will be the biggest growth industry of the 2030s and 2040s, with smart machines performing dozens of small, dull tasks around the home, from mowing the lawn to cooking meals. People will be more than happy to pay for genuinely labour-saving devices, turning robots into a huge industry. 3. The Indonesian miracle Lots of attention will be devoted to the contest between China and India to become the largest country in the world measured by population, and the only serious rival to the US as the biggest economy. But it is Indonesia that will really be rising up the rankings. By 2050 it will have a population of 321 million and will still be growing strongly (China will be in steep demographic decline by then). Add in a 5% annual growth rate, the annual average rate for the last quarter century, and by the 2040s Indonesia will have established itself as one of the major global economies. The Jakarta stock market will be home to the fastest-growing new companies. 4. A global stock market emerges The competition between rival financial centres consumes a huge amount of attention. The decline of London, the rise of the US and the emergence of the Gulf bourses worries finance ministers, and companies have to decide where to list their shares. By 2050 a lot of that will seem irrelevant. Even in 2025 it seems surprising that we still have national stock markets. Technology means that we can trade any bond or equity anywhere in the world at any time of day. Over the next 25 years a single global stock market will emerge, hosted on the cloud, with settlement in a universally recognised crypto currency that is accepted everywhere. National stock markets will turn into a relic of interest only to a handful of financial historians. 5. A British revival When we look back from 2050, it will seem that today’s problems were surprisingly easy to fix. A bond-market collapse late in the 2020s as the country’s debts spiral out of control will prove traumatic and will be followed by a chaotic series of coalitions as the party system fragments. But by the middle of the 2030s, a technocratic government imposed by the IMF, and led by a surprisingly youthful-looking Tony Blair, will start to get the country back on track. Two big changes will make a huge difference. Allowing fracking will enable the country to become the Saudi Arabia of Europe. That will make a corporation tax at Irish levels affordable and trigger a huge wave of inward investment. And switching to a Dutch-German-style social-insurance system for healthcare to replace the NHS will transform the 12% of GDP spent on the medical system. With those two reforms in place, Britain will start to boom again, just as it did under Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s. This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.
