2. Government and corporate surveillance of the individual will be so common place that it will seem weird that people in the past went through most of their lives unobserved.
3. Corruption in American government will be beyond rampant, and no one will even bother to complain about it anymore. It will be almost like Indian society where individuals have to pay bribes for any government contact, except the bribery will still only be available to corporations and individuals rich enough to operate as corporations.
4. Access to health care/health insurance (they amount to the same thing here) will be worse than it is now, and we will still crow that ours is the best healthcare system in the world.
5. The reported unemployment numbers will be at or above 20%.
6. Public schools will have deteriorated so badly that only the poorest of families will educate their kids there. That group will however be more than 50% of kids.
7. The car culture will have disappeared. Most of us will use public transportation, which will cost about what it costs now to operate a car.
By 2050 we are likely to have achieved at least one of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence or sped up computer uploaded brains. If the resulting superhuman intelligence makes it a priority to make itself even smarter, it's very difficult to predict what will happen since we'd be predicting the actions of the being that's much smarter than we are.
This is kind of like the futurist trump card--if it plays out, it will render predictions in many other fields (geopolitics, demographics, sociology and most kinds of technological advancement) null and void.
The US will have not have 50 states. Some states might secede, some states might split (e.g. Northern and Southern California), or some territories might be granted statehood (so their natural resources and cheap labor can be more readily extracted). Of course, some combination of the above could bring the state count full circle to 50, but I think that's unlikely.
2050 is only 39 years away... as far away as 1972.
While Puerto Rico may become a state (for reasons having nothing to do with "natural resources and cheap labour") I can't see anything else happening.
There's no strong demand for secession or splitting of states, quite apart from the major legal problems with either of those scenarios. And as for external territories Puerto Rico is the only sizeable one left. (What else? Guam?)
2. Government and corporate surveillance of the individual will be so common place that it will seem weird that people in the past went through most of their lives unobserved.
3. Corruption in American government will be beyond rampant, and no one will even bother to complain about it anymore. It will be almost like Indian society where individuals have to pay bribes for any government contact, except the bribery will still only be available to corporations and individuals rich enough to operate as corporations.
4. Access to health care/health insurance (they amount to the same thing here) will be worse than it is now, and we will still crow that ours is the best healthcare system in the world.
5. The reported unemployment numbers will be at or above 20%.
6. Public schools will have deteriorated so badly that only the poorest of families will educate their kids there. That group will however be more than 50% of kids.
7. The car culture will have disappeared. Most of us will use public transportation, which will cost about what it costs now to operate a car.
8. 2050 will be the Year of the Linux Desktop.