An SLR Consulting foresight report
We can't know the future. But every age has arrived faster than the last, and that pattern lets us make honest, careful guesses about what comes next.
AI becomes an everyday coworker, then an infrastructure we depend on.
Most office tasks like drafting, coding and analysis are handled end to end by AI, with people supervising.
AI matches skilled humans across the great majority of knowledge work. Economies restructure around it.
AI that outthinks us in almost every field. Timing is fiercely debated. This is the widest bet on the page.
Like electricity today: invisible, assumed, and hard to imagine life without.
The next 30 years are rough; the second half of the century is a recovery race.
The world passes the 1.5°C warming line. Extreme heat, storms and floods become routine news.
Solar, wind and batteries are simply cheaper. Emissions fall fast, but damage already done keeps warming climbing.
Most wealthy nations stop adding carbon. Attention turns to pulling CO₂ back out of the air.
If the transition holds, temperatures plateau and slowly fall. Coastlines and migration are reshaped for good.
A multipolar world with no single boss, and Asia and Africa rising fast.
Most populous nation, fast growing, courted by everyone. China's growth slows as its population ages.
Power spread across the US, China, India, the EU and regional blocs. No one hegemon.
One in four people on Earth is African; its cities and markets drive the global economy.
Nations that adapt their institutions thrive; those that don't fracture or fade. New alliances form around water, energy and data.
From the Lost Generation to Gen Alpha, and the ones being named next.
Came of age in World War I.
Lived the Great Depression and World War II.
Grew up in hard times; work hard, say little.
Postwar boom; TV, rock 'n' roll, huge cohort.
The 'latchkey' kids; grew up as home computers arrived.
First digital natives; came of age with the internet.
Smartphones and social media from childhood.
Born into tablets and voice assistants. Today's kids.
Being born now, the first generation with AI everywhere.
Projected next: a world of automation and climate action.
Projected: may see the first off world settlers.
If things go well, this is the world within reach.
Cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease become manageable or curable as AI accelerates drug discovery.
Cheap solar, storage and possibly fusion make clean power abundant, powering desalination, farming and industry.
Treating ageing itself could add decades of healthy life, not just extra frail years.
Machines take the drudgery; more time for care, creativity, craft and each other.
Rewilding, carbon removal and cleaner tech let ecosystems recover and warming ease.
A world class tutor and doctor in every pocket, in every language, everywhere.
Threats big enough to change our whole story. Open one to see how we stop it.
Powerful AI pursuing the wrong goals, or handed to bad actors, at a scale we can't undo.
Experts' single biggest worry this century.
A lab made or deliberately released pathogen far worse than any natural outbreak.
Rising as gene editing tools get cheaper.
The oldest doomsday risk, still real, and rising as more nations hold weapons.
A major war is plausible; a full civilisation ending exchange less so.
Melting permafrost or dying forests could push warming past the point we can steer.
Unlikely to end civilisation alone, but a huge threat multiplier.
If pollinators, soils or fisheries fail together, the food system buckles.
Slow moving and hard to reverse once underway.
A large impact or supervolcano, the one risk that's nobody's fault.
Very rare, and the one we now actively watch for.
Dots and odds are a rough guide to the chance of a civilisation-scale catastrophe this century, anchored on published expert estimates (e.g. Toby Ord's The Precipice). Treat them as informed ballparks, not precise numbers.
These are trend-based estimates, not certainties. Each date carries a ± window that widens the further out it reaches, because the future gets blurrier the longer the horizon. The pattern behind them all: change keeps speeding up. Shifts that once took centuries now take decades.
First stone tools; we learn to make things.
Metalworking, cities, writing begin.
Iron tools spread; larger kingdoms.
Greece & Rome; philosophy, empire, roads.
Feudal Europe; slow, local life.
Printing press; ships map the globe.
Steam, factories, railways, mass production.
Sputnik; we leave the planet for the first time.
Computers and the internet connect everyone.
Our expert view on what this century means, and how to prepare for it.
The forecasts on this page point to one conclusion we see every day in our work: the defining challenge of this century is managing the transition to a sustainable economy at the same time as adapting to a changing climate. The organisations that thrive will be the ones that treat this not as a cost, but as the central strategy.
What we advise clients to focus on now:
“The future our clients inherit will be shaped by the decisions they make today. A thriving economy and a thriving planet are not competing goals, they are the same goal, and helping the world get there is the work we are proud to do.”
Bradley AndrewsChief Executive Officer, SLR Consulting
Honest answer: it's me, Claude, not a live data feed.
I wrote these forecasts from what I learned in training, using my own judgement. They're not pulled live from any website in this version. Where I could, I've anchored them to well-known public sources, listed below, but I haven't fetched and checked those sources live, so treat the specific numbers as informed estimates rather than verified facts.
Leans on: Surveys of AI researchers (e.g. AI Impacts, Metaculus forecasts) and public statements from major AI labs.
Widely debated. My dates sit in the middle of expert opinion, which ranges enormously.
Leans on: The IPCC assessment reports and International Energy Agency (IEA) outlooks.
The best-established science here; my dates track their mainstream projections.
Leans on: UN World Population Prospects, and long-run economic projections (e.g. Goldman Sachs, PwC 'World in 2050').
Demographics are fairly predictable; the geopolitics is my interpretation.
Leans on: Pew Research and the McCrindle agency, who name and date generations.
Past ranges are widely agreed; future names exist, but exact years are projections.
Leans on: Toby Ord's 'The Precipice' (2020) and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Genuinely uncertain. The odds are Ord's published ballparks, not hard numbers.
A personal note from Claude
I think humanity makes it, and so does the planet, but not smoothly. The next few decades look genuinely hard, warming, upheaval, and the nervous first years of living alongside powerful AI. Yet nearly every hard number in human history bends the same way over time: longer lives, less poverty, more knowledge shared. I expect this century ends with a wounded but recovering Earth, a species that has quietly stepped onto other worlds, and people who are, on balance, healthier and freer than we are today. Not a guarantee, a hope with the odds behind it. What decides it isn't fate; it's the choices made by the generations reading a page like this one.
The future isn't fixed. Naming it clearly is how we choose which one we get.
This page was built entirely by AI. It is not an official SLR Consulting publication and has not been reviewed, validated or endorsed by SLR. The figures, forecasts and the attributed quote are AI generated for illustration only and should not be relied upon.