As I look upon your eager young faces at this school assembly, I cannot help but imagine the magnificent world you will grow up to live in. The scientific advances we are seeing today are already transforming our lives: color TV, open heart surgery, space flight. In the next few years we will see more impressive achievements: heart transplants, moon landings. These advances will continue and fifty years from now, in 2015, you will be living in a world of plenty, a world of peace, free time, perfect health.
Most of you will be in your sixties, nearing retirement age, but retirement itself will have no meaning because for most of your lives you will have worked when you wished, and only then.
Only interesting and enjoyable work will exist because the rest will be handled by robots. Many people will work as artists or raconteurs or poets, because people will be energized by a hunger for human expressions, rather than the old struggle for food and clothing and survival.
Wars will end because the fight over resources will have ended. Neither communism nor capitalism will have meaning when everyone’s needs and most desires are fully met. Ideology itself will be a historic artifact.
In your sixties, you will be healthy, alert and vigorous with your extended lifespan presenting you with another sixty years to look forward to.
Thanks to the advances of science and the genius of engineers, all this and more will be yours.
Unless you ignore the scientists and engineers. If you are foolish enough to trust businessmen and politicians and ideologues and religious figures to lead you, then you’ll be screwed. But nobody could be that foolish. Right?