This essay describes what I believe education, communication, careers, and home/leisure life will look like in 2041

1. Running head: THE INFOCENTRIC WORLD OF 2041 1
The Infocentric World of 2041
Colin G. Haines
Western Oregon University
March 18, 2018

2. THE INFOCENTRIC WORLD OF 2041 2
The Infocentric World of 2041
Based on the technological progress the world has seen over the past twenty-five years,
one could assume that the next twenty-five years could bring about an equal or even greater
amount of change. Education, communication, careers, and home/leisure life will surely have
been impacted by technological progress. Instantaneous information retrieval will be the thread
that holds all of these areas and several others together. While the aforementioned areas will
have experienced change, society will still be left wanting for change in the years to follow; we
will have come a long way but we will still have quite a ways to go.
Home and leisure life in 2041 will look generally the same, but the level of intuitive
interaction with our devices will have greatly increased. One must imagine the future of the
smart home being far more intelligent and instinctive than the simplistic web of Internet of
Things (IoT) devices that are being utilized in 2018. The number of IoT devices would have
shot up dramatically by 2041, from about ten billion in 2018 (Regalado, 2014) to at least twenty
times that in 2041. The future smart home will be able to provide a person with just-in-time
information that it knows would be useful based on learning the patterns of an individual or
group of individuals and anticipating their needs based information it knows about future
events. A smart home in 2041 would ask its resident if they would like a quick and easy
breakfast of toast and coffee tomorrow because it sees that he or she has an early morning
meeting. The resident could tell it yes and it would inform the resident that it shall notify the
toaster and coffee maker that they need to have the breakfast prepared by 5:30. The downside to
this is that with everything in the smart home connected and being tracked through the Internet,
the invasiveness of advertisements will hit critical mass. Going on the previous example,
imagine the smart home informing its resident that he of she is down to three slices of bread and

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informing them that Dave's Killer Bread is having a sale and that they should give it verbal
authorization to take advantage of this incredible deal while supplies still last.
Generally speaking, a person’s leisure time at home will not have changed all that much
from 2018. Televisions will have grown larger, crisper, and flatter and people continue to watch.
The shift to on demand viewing is almost complete by 2041, with live events such as sports
being the only form of broadcast television that people still watch. There will be early
experiments with streaming television style content directly into a person’s cortical modem but
people will not seem to care for that experience. Another leisure activity that people are unlikely
to fancy will be virtual reality. Although some futurists like Leo Marini continue to champion
virtual reality as the next big thing, its wide spread use will never come to fruition. Marini (as
cited in Franklin, 2017) sees gaming as a fertile ground for virtual reality, but serious gamers
have not flocked to virtual reality in the past and they will continue to shun it in the future. As it
turns out, people like the sense of detachment that video games provided and, more importantly,
the only gamers serious enough to invest in virtual reality will refuse to do so because the
physical movements needed to complete in-game tasks are not as rapid or as intuitive as they are
with keyboard and mouse.
Unsurprisingly, a preponderance of people will still own and operate automobiles in
2041, although the percentage of vehicle owners will have dropped significantly as will the
number of miles they will accrue behind the wheel. Manufacturers will have moved entirely
towards electric cars and they will have some self-driving abilities but they will not be too
radically different than the vehicles from the early part of the twenty-first century. Many people
who live in the city will simply own cars so they can partake in leisure activities away from the
confines of the city, since daily driving will no longer be the norm. Public transportation has

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become the standard, since both under and above ground monorails will make getting to work a
breeze. City dwellers find riding the monorail a breeze, never having to wait more than ten
minutes for a comfortable train ride to work. The need not worry about payments because the
train fees are part of their taxes and the bio data scan on their way through the train’s door will
show that they need not pay; only people who are not city tax payers will need to pay a fee to
ride the train. Park and ride stations on the outskirts of the city will be the transportation of
choice for suburbanites and country folks.
Over half of American children will be educated in private schools in 2041, since they
will prove more progressive and forward thinking than their public counterparts. In 2041, the
government will be speaking about attempting an overhaul of public education to try to keep up
with the new technologies that students are using in the 40s. The public will be entirely
unconvinced by these talks since they have been hearing them since the latter part of the
twentieth century. Similar to what was occurring in the 2010s, when schools encouraged a use
of technology paradigm that was barely sufficient for 90s students, so to will they attempt to use
a tech paradigm from the 2020s in 2041. Tin Tan Wee, as cited the 2012 Pew Report on the
Future of the Internet, believes that the government urge to shift the educational view of
technology will be a slow burn, and based on the way it is being handled at present, it would be
hard to disagree. The one great change that public schools will have implemented by 2041 is
vocational education. Following a ninth grade year of general education, students will have the
opportunity to take an aptitude test that would admit them into a vocational school to finish out
their high school years. These students will receive training in things along the lines of
mechanics, coding, data analytics, or robotics that will enable them to pursue an entry level job
as a skilled worker immediately out of high school. These students have a leg up in the

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workforce, but unfortunately only around ten percent of students will be able to get into
vocational schools. There will be a public outcry to expand these schools to accommodate more
students over the years but the state and federal budget deficits will prevente any movement on
the issue.
In contrast to the general stagnation of public school, private schools will have continued
to keep up with the latest trends in technology and pedagogy. Teachers in private schools will be
given a great deal of freedom to implement new and innovative methods and technologies into
their classrooms. Two of the principle practices that helped private schools stay ahead of the
curve were digital collaboration and embracing social software. Teachers have long lamented
the restrictive nature of textbooks, yet those same textbooks have helped to guide and provide
structure to their curriculum. Software like DynamicBooks (Rich, 2010) has helped teachers
within a school to collaborate on altering textbooks to better suit their educational goals. Using
this software and its successors, private school teaching departments are able to successfully
align their content with that of their custom digital textbooks. In addition to using software that
aided their own efforts, private schools also made a conscious effort to incorporate technologies
and platforms that were native to their student body. While public schools continued to ban
personal electronics and implement firewalls that blocked social media sites, private schools
decided to use these devices and platforms as a means of content delivery that could help
facilitate a flipped learning model. Several social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram
will come and go, with tweaks and improvements to every iteration, but social media will
continue to persist in some form and educators who can keep up with the trends will continue to
find new ways to deliver content through the new platforms.

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Public and private schools will tend to differ in the types of careers for which they
prepare their student body and changes in the future job market will likely have and impact of
the preparatory efforts of both. The American job market will surely have shifted by 2041 since
the United States will still be adjusting to no longer being a world economic leader. Brazil,
Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) are expected to be world economic leaders in
the near future (Zakaria, 2008), leaving the traditional Western powers in their wake. There are
three sectors, however, in which the United States will still be a world leader: healthcare,
biotechnology, and military technology. These three sectors are likely to be some of the largest
growth sectors in the coming years and should continue to be in 2041, so schools will be focused
on preparing students for careers in these sectors. Healthcare will continue to be a growth
industry and will require specialized postsecondary education; colleges offering technical
degrees in healthcare related fields will continue to proliferate. Military technology will
continue as a growth industry whether we wage another war or not. Agencies like the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will continue to seek out the best minds to work
on future technology. As of 2012, biotechnology exceeded two percent of our national GDP and
is continuing to grow (Philips, 2017). The current trend towards STEM education will persist in
order to keep up with the growth in this industry. STEM education will also help to provide the
engineers that will be crucial in the world of 2041. American infrastructure is already inadequate
in many locations and will need engineers to execute nearly a complete overhaul if it is to keep
up with the skyward growth and technocentrism of the mid twenty-first century.
As much as the job market may have changed by 2041, it cannot hold a torch to the
amount of change that will be seen in the realm of communication. The breakthroughs in
communication will focus little on how humans communicate with each other but more on how

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humans communicate with the world around them and vice versa. The largest breakthrough in
communication will be the cortical modem, which is currently being developed at DARPA
(Pauli, 2015). The cortical modem will allow messages in the form of text, images, or sound to
be put directly into the receiver’s brain, which could enable an almost telepathic form of
communication. In the early stages of the cortical modem, it will be used for everything from
instant messaging, to video streaming, to gaming. After a while, however, people will find the
open stream to be far too invasive and will tone back the usage to make it more of a device that
can instantaneously look up information at the users command. The cortical modem will also
make augmented reality seamless, allowing the world around us to be overlaid with just-in-time
information without the use of cumbersome screens, glasses, or contact lenses. After the initial
use of the cortical modem as a communication device falls out of favor, people will migrate back
toward wearable technology. Wearables comprised of computerized fabric (McDonald, 2017)
will replace the FitBit type wearables of today. These “smart clothes” will track all kinds of
biometric data throughout the day and many health insurance companies will even reduce their
rates if a person will wear the smart clothes and keep their biometrics within a certain threshold.
These biometrics will also give physicians good data with which to support their diagnoses.
The changes the world will have witnessed by 2041 will be astounding but all will not be
right and just in the world. Education, communication, careers, and home/leisure life will have
changed in a number of ways but will have remained the same in equally as many ways.
Instantaneous information and remaining hyper-connected will be the order of the day. Both
education and vocation will be striving to move forward with technology while still carrying the
albatross of long entrenched tradition.

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References
Anderson, J., & Rainie, L. (2012, February 28). Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their
hyperconnected lives. Retrieved March 05, 2018, from
http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/02/29/millennials-will-benefit-and-suffer-due-to-their-
hyperconnected-lives/
Franklin, D. (Ed.). (2017). Megatech: technology in 2050. New York, NY: The Economist
Books.
McDonald, G. (2017, July 14). Computerized Fabric Could Transform Any Piece of Clothing
Into a Fitness Tracker. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from
https://www.livescience.com/59799-computerized-fabric-turns-clothing-into-fitness-
tracker.html
Pauli, D. (2015, February 17). DARPA's 'Cortical Modem' will plug straight into your brain.
Retrieved March 08, 2018, from
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/darpas_google_glass_will_plug_straight_into_
your_brain/
Phillips, T. (2017, October 06). Ranking the Top Biotech Countries. Retrieved February 21,
2018, from https://www.thebalance.com/ranking-the-top-biotech-countries-3973287
Regalado, A. (2014, May 20). Prepare for the Internet of Things. Retrieved March 10, 2018,
from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/527356/business-adapts-to-a-new-style-of-
computer/
Rich, M. (2010, February 22). Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally. Retrieved
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/business/media/22textbook.html

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Zakaria, F. (2011). The post-American world. London: Penguin Books.