What do you think an average childhood will look like in 2040?
Not sci-fi — just the everyday stuff:
– How kids will learn at school
– How they’ll communicate with friends
– How much of their lives will be tracked by algorithms
– What kinds of toys or tech might be totally normal
The building blocks for a lot of this are already here today. I’d love to hear what this community thinks will change the most over the next 15 years.
EDIT:
This post has gotten a lot more engagement than I expected — thank you all for the thoughtful comments. I’m actually working on a Childhood of 2040 series where I try to break down some of these ideas in more detail.
If you’re curious, here’s the 8-minute video I just put together on the topic: https://youtu.be/k-yLuzX4ouI?si=QC0_01wFgiN9ct-l
I’d love feedback on what you think is realistic or overreaching.
Kids growing up in 2040
byu/RevolutionaryBag1383 inFuturology
33 Comments
Largely the same as today. Most of the difference will be more renewable energy and green spaces, and perhaps a few robots now and again. That’s literally it.
2040 is only 14 1/4 years away. Look at 14 1/4 years ago (mid 2011) and look at what’s changed. Our smartphones are better, there are more solar panels on houses and more electric cars… and that’s literally about it. Don’t expect much.
I’ve speculated it will be even more disconnected than it already is. My kids are growing up in a very different fashion than I did and one cannot argue it’s going to keep changing. Augmented reality might be more prevalent as will AI. Not sure it’s for the better but here we go.
AI will be very, very prominent in the classroom. Other than that, people will live longer, and be better educated.
I’m currently trying to ask myself these questions, as I’m at the age limit of deciding to have children, and I can never really convince myself that I’d like my child to be in this reality. Social media and smartphones scare me a lot; community division and polarization don’t seem to be improving. I don’t know. I suppose many things will improve because they must; there’s no other option. But there are others that are devolving, on a social level, and it doesn’t seem like they’ll improve.
Brother, we may not get through the end of this year.
Lots of restricted drivers licenses in car dependent communities. Getting kids through driver’s education is getting to be a Herculean feat in the upper and middle classes, and they’ll gladly give up the effort of an operator’s license for a heavily restricted permit to operate fully autonomous vehicles when it’s a written only test, and a nominal fee. Rural and lower class children will continue getting unrestricted licenses out of necessity, much like they’ll still learn how to operate a tractor or manual transmission today. There will likely be a stigma against human drivers by the 40’s, painting human drivers as unsafe and likely unclean, perpetuated by influencers, and echoed by teens never lifting their eyes from their phones on the road. This will likely lead to a labor gap where the majority of trades requiring operators will see their workforce median age creep upwards in edge cases where autonomous vehicles aren’t appropriate, with the majority of operators around 2050 having been born in the 20th century with a small trickle of lower class 21st century replacement labor filling ever fewer human required vehicle operator roles.
Public school will probably not be a physical institution
there’s a few graphene companies that could take off soon. if that gets implemented into products you could see tera hertz processing, wearable tech potentially powered by body heat, etc etc. terahertz is 1000x faster than current ghz processors. could have real time ai
An even more oppressive world. Most of it destroyed due to selfish rich pricks.
I think kids will spend less time learning in school and more time engaged in other activities. Like 2 hours of school and maybe 3 hours of specialized activities of their choice. And an hour of socializing.
In Germany:
– schools will have clean toilets
– “Religion” will only be taught once a week, not four hours
– unified school programme for the whole country, no more federally unique lessons
– school buses will reliably transport pupils between home and school
…. oh wait, I read this as 3040.
:/
Alot of varying views on here. Some people think that things wont change much and things are pure hype. I think the algorithm and smart things tech will change things at the micro level drastically
https://youtu.be/k-yLuzX4ouI?si=QCO_01wFgiN9ct-l
Maybe not so much how kids will learn and more what they learn. Unless trends change, I think there will be a further polarization of society across the globe whereas digital learning tools will continued to be improved, adapted and controlled to teach kids whatever their society wants them to learn, including the good, the bad and the ugly.
Also, and as an increasing phenomenon, the gap between “the haves”, generally categorized as private education and “the have nots”, generally categorized as public education will increase. Society will be further segregated. I suppose it depends on who you are and where you live to determine if this is good or not.
It’s wildly optimistic modern society will make it to 2040. +2C sustained would lead to an estimated 2 billion deaths, and we are easily on track to hit +3C sustained and higher given the amount of warming in the pipeline.
Read ‘Ministry for the Future’ for a sneak peek.
Kids ordering food online and water gunning the delivery man and ruining his day with 1 star rating
Less faith in large institutions. Less faith in the public. Next to negative privacy; they’ll be documented from the day they’re born till the day they die.
School will still be school. But thanks to AR, they’ll probably have lessons to follow when they can’t readily attend. Probably a bunch of wearable devices, certain ones possibly outlawed (via state, province, country) until one is 18 or even 21.
Probably stricter career paths. All the fluff has been cut out, your major is that, and everything you take is curtailed to aim at that.
Smaller social circles. Current social media has shown them years later what the downsides are. Ergo, expect community to be tighter, and quieter, with less personal things exchanged.
Personally I think most kids will be living in a famine-ridden hellscape caused by a combination of climate-change and wealth-disparity driven fuckwittery.
But then a fair proportion of kids are living this now.
By 2040, the average childhood might look like a mashup of a wellness retreat, a tech startup, and a digital reality show, with a side of nostalgia for analog crayons.
The biggest shift? Digital identity will start early. A kid’s online presence might be built before they’re old enough to read, and parents will need a crash course in raising both a child and their digital twin.
All that said… they’ll probably still find cardboard boxes more fun than the $600 AR headset. Some things never change.
I hope real life community makes a comeback somehow. We are too digital now. But I have a feeling that we’re going to become even more disconnected.
Gene therapy and selection seems to be improving. I could see kids having designer traits a la GATTACA by that time.
At least in the Us, I feel public education is heading down the crapper. It you are rich enough you can afford a good school. Then there are the home schooled of whom 95% will be unemployable. The rest will suffer with public ed, under-funded schools, and low quality and low paid teachers.
A terrible dystopia.
We will be fully immersed by AI driven job loss and mass unemployment by that time. So kid will grow up in a time of elevated crime and civil unrest
Let’s get past the war with China and AGI happening in 2027. If humanity survives that then we can look ahead.
By 2024 most kids will be wearing glasses and have hunchback backs due to the amount of time the spend looking down at their phones.
Tbh. I wouldnt be surprised if basically everything is “from home” by 2040.
Buildings are expensive, transportation is expensive, its far more profitable to just not bother.
Kids growing up in 2040 (in what is today still known as the USA) will have experienced something profoundly different in their childhood than anyone alive today. First of all, the US will either be organised very differently, likely no longer formally or practically “United”. In other words it will be multiple countries. If that is not the case, and it is still federally constituted, then it will be closer to what Russia is today than anyone can fathom. Autocratic (and quite possibly theocratic – cf Margaret Atwood). Please know that I hope very much to be wrong on this but I very much see this as the current direction of travel unless something(s) profoundly change.
Imagine thinking about having kids in this shithole
I was basically raised by TV which isn’t an algorithm but it is almost as bad.
I suppose it depends where you look. I’m raising kids at the moment who play on streets on their bikes with other kids from the estate. We spend a lot of time in nature. We bake and go to the library. We have family around and they’ve got friends and hobbies. Not too much different from my childhood. We don’t allow them iPads or tablets and cartoons are limited and AR reality will not be welcome either. And most of my friends and other school parents are like minded.
However there are places where kids live online unsupervised. And that’s a parenting issue. And parenting issues have always existed. So in 14 years you will get those neglected kids who have high tech low human contact but most kids will still play outside with others, like our own childhoods.
2040 is close enough to assume a lot of things will be similar
but it really depends on which country you asking about
if we mainly focus on developed western countries, my guess is that 14 years might be enough for personal AI tech to develop, to a point where most people have a good personal AI bot in their future smartphone that runs 24/7 basically and does background work as well (to differ it from current AI assistants)
it wont be AGI and not super “smart” but it will work good enough for casual daily issues and will have much better memory and reasoning, to a point the AI will “learn” your habits (to a basic degree, its not going to be skynet level AI anytime soon)
cars? more electric cars but not much else, batteries might get better
i dont have high hopes for fusion tech (if we figure fusion out, it will be revolutionary for humanity)
school? mostly the same, probably the AI i mentioned above will be somewhat integrated in class to help the teachers when using the class PC and such, still somewhat limited)
Lots of digital toys. Everything will be on screens. Possible hologram tech.
The children will starve to death after dad dies from heatstroke and the family can no longer afford to repair the house from flood damage
In reality, the same. I live in a slightly smaller than average Russian city and in 22 years not much changed. New asphalt here, cut trees there, new benches over there.
What changed most is information we’re fed. It’s all round negative, all bad and all dark. Government only bans stuff and limits our access to the Web to its fullest, as well as trying to collect any data by enforcing government-sponsored apps. School programs are twisted to put more propaganda and it pushes back actually useful subjects, which had not enough hours in the first place.
There are even less doctors and teachers now, so its more difficult for peers to learn and for people to get (free) medical help due to crowds of old people clogging clinics daily starting at opening hours
Tiktok and child-oriented brainrot also spread like fire, can’t imagine it get even worse in fifteen years but oh well
Overall, I’m afraid nothing really good is coming