Malta Vision 2050: A tall order?

The government launched the Malta Vision 2050, a plan that will shape the country’s future over the next 25 years. The goal is to improve the quality of life for everyone, focusing on important areas like digital innovation, infrastructure, education, healthcare, sustainability and jobs.

It won't be easy. Let’s start from the basics.

Will the consequent rebalancing of our economy, already underway, intensify, and will a much-needed new economic model be in place? Will the government of the day manage to re-engage with the economy and build a matrix of institutions that will support innovation and investment?

Will providing sufficient food, water and energy to allow everyone to lead decent lives be an enormous challenge 25 years from now?

After years of trying, will Malta at last build itself a system for developing apprentices and technicians that is no longer the Cinderella of the education system?

Today, it’s all talk 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.

Will we likely be making use of no-frills brain-machine interfaces, allowing the paralysed to dance in their thought-controlled exoskeleton suits, and not still be interfacing with computers via keyboards, one forlorn letter at a time, as we currently do?

I'd like to imagine we'll have robots to do our bidding, but, then again, I won't be surprised if I'm wrong in another 25 years. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll still be around by then, but the fact remains that artificial intelligence is proving itself an unexpectedly difficult problem.

Is anyone out there ready to 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?

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.

In the coming 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 it can't muster the political will to ban outright. So, will we end up with all sorts of products in plain packaging with the product name in a generic typeface, as the government had done for cigarettes?

In all probability, by 2050, we will have reached the one million population figure. Will our towns and villages, therefore, consist of a series of small units organised, at best, by the people who know what is best for themselves and, at worst, by local construction oligarchs? Will the remaining little distinction between urban areas and open countryside fade into nothing, or will some human genius steal the limelight for inventing social structures leading to new forms of settlement we can't quite imagine will begin to emerge?

I guess it's not difficult to predict how our transport infrastructure will look in 25 years. There will have to be radical changes in how we think about transport. The technology of information and communication networks is changing rapidly, and internet and mobile developments should help make our journeys more seamless, but they are not.

Will traffic congestion on most of our roads at all times of the day when the infrastructure can't cope for whatever reason become a thing of the past? The instinct to travel is innate within us, but we will have to do it sustainably. It's hard to be precise, but I think we'll be cycling and walking more; in crowded urban areas, we may see more escooters. Perhaps by then, we will be seeing the advent of automated cars, like the ones Tesla has recently been testing. Personal jetpacks will, I think, remain a niche choice.

Will health undergo a slow but steady revolution? Will we 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? Will we spend more on health with a good amount of it going on the problems of prosperity – obesity, alcohol consumption and designer drugs? Or perhaps a new technology will let us edit human DNA, enabling the altering of people’s DNA to carve diseases like cancer out of the equation. Will healthcare look more like education, with an e-tutor to help you and a vast array of information about your condition, rendering hospitals unnecessary?

Will rising sea levels make some of our popular beaches disappear? The rate of increase is accelerating. How will the government of the day ensure that homes, livelihoods, and, ultimately, lives are not threatened by rising sea levels?

A utopian milestone might be that only a minority of the population will still experience linear/sequential life cycles (i.e., study, job, family, retirement). The others will finally live a long-desired quality of life.

The future is exciting and daunting at the same time. Malta Vision 2050 remains blurred.