Dear Rob

Thank you so much for your insightful, creative, well written and realistic article.

My husband and I are "baby boomers". On a daily basis we discuss, lament and question all of the issues and concepts that you have raised in your article. We are so greatful for being born at the time that we were born.

We only have one difference in opinion with you. It is happening now at a great pace - and we are sure by 2015 - not 2050!

Many thanks once again.

PS: We (my family) did not have television until I was 17 yerars. I did not have a telephone until I was 30 years - and I did not get my driver's licence and a car until then as well. My husband and I have a pre-paid mobile phone which we rarely use. We love living life without most of the techno stuff. I rarely use a microwave for cooking. We do not eat take-away. I cook everything and we love it - especially the flathead which we caught this evening! We watch our neices being encapsulated by technology. They cannot read, write, or express themselves without drawing on US influence. Very sad.

Though provoking article and first post.

I'm neither geek nor Luddite. From that standpoint I hope that people in 2050 (like my own young nieces, and me too if I'm still around then) will consider the larger (and equally, the more intimate and familial) meanings and consequences of taking up each shiny new technological "thing" as it comes along.

How far away is it anyway before education, news and bytes of culture become deliverable by ingestion or injection, to those who can afford it at least? Will the beneficiaries of such privilege by then lose sight of, and the ability or desire to access the gorgeous process of internal synthesis and external engagement with others, by which data becomes information becomes knowledge becomes understanding becomes wisdom? And everything is potentially bigger, wider and more nuanced in meanings than binary signals.

There is nothing so scary as the habitually uncritical audience. Thankfully the human condition does seem to both demand and produce annoying gnats to unceasingly poke at the ordinary, the imposed and the passively accepted majority-favoured......

Mental illness will be the bane of life as it increases due to more social disruption and impossible societal expectations. Suicide will increase in the young, hardly anyone will come from a traditional family, combined families from multiple partners will be more common and traditional marriage will be delayed further and become a curiosity of some groups. Most women will conceive in a fertility clinic because of advanced maternal age and more men will be infertile as is happening now. Depression will be even more common than now and psychiatrists will be in more demand as well as family therapists.
Obesity with all its attendant problems will increase, seat sizes in planes and stadia will widen and a good proportion of adults including women will have sleep apnoea, hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Life expectancy will start to fall, not rise.
Social isolation will increase as the article states and this will lead to a large segment of the population being middle aged single people with no dependants of course, with fragmented family ties and they will face a future of futility leading to death in a nursing home run by imported foreign workers from Asia as there will be an inadequate number of young Australians to work in such institutions.
As Maurice Chevalier said, "I glad I'm not young anymore."

Sorry, I missed out the inevitable pandemic of bird flu and other influenzal strains which may cause a significant blip in the stock market when a few hundred million die world wide. How about the inevitable catastrophe of a large earthquake and tsunami in Japan and California which is about to drop off into the Pacific any time. We underestimate these inevitable global events and how this will affect the health of the future Lucky Country. We can't assume our governments can control for all the maladies that have inflicted the globe since the late Devonian. Obesity becomes a bit of fuzz on the human radar screen by comparison.