Many of us dreamed of having a superpower when we were children. I always wanted to fly. Perhaps you fancied having superhuman strength. If that was your specific wish, then your dream is now partly achievable. The RoboGlove has been refined from a robot that works on board the International Space Station. Known as Robonaut, or R2 for short, it takes on tasks that are dangerous for humans.

From this ongoing development project we now have a robotic glove that can be worn by anyone who manipulates objects with their hands. The technology, developed jointly by NASA and General Motors, doubles the strength of the wearer’s grip while minimising tendon and muscular damage.

In The Next Generation, I have outlined many other technologies that will enhance our everyday existence and clearly improve our human abilities. Here are some that our children will be using in the future. Many are already in early application.

Personal life
• Translation devices will help them to communicate with people of different cultures, saving the countless hours needed to learn a new language.
• An AI medical monitor will program their wearable devices to encourage optimum nutrition and exercise.
• Their Intelligent Assistant will organise everyday tasks such as meal preparation, clothing choice and payment of bills.
• Machine writing software will complete any writing tasks, including that difficult letter to a friend to apologise for their behaviour at last night’s party.
• The traffic accident rate is projected to drop by 90 per cent once most vehicles are autonomous, making life on the road much safer.

The workplace
• Typing will be very 20th century. Voice recognition software, iris movement sensors and gesture-based technology will revolutionise the recording of information. Will handwriting be necessary? Only if you enjoy calligraphy.
• In education, software will accurately mark a student’s assignment and offer suggestions for further improvement in the next assignment.
• The wearing of exoskeletons will allow anyone to lift heavy objects even in tight spaces.
• 3D visualisation glasses will be used in low safety environments to detect hidden dangers, for example on rock faces or around corners.
• Wearable technology will monitor a person’s mental and physical responses while performing a task, and provide warnings and time signals to improve performance.

One scenario often proposed by science fiction writers is a future in which AI entities become a superior species, at least intellectually. The more likely scenario is that our children will continue to take advantage of the technology, whether or not it can calculate faster than they can. Already cars drive us faster than we can run, and machines can lift much heavier loads than we can. Our children will not necessarily need to match future technologies intellectually. They just need to use them to improve their own circumstances.

If our children do decide to boost their brain power, they will have several options. A brain chip called a neuro-prosthetic may be implanted in people who are suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes or concussion. This may eventually lead to brain chips that boost intelligence and memory capacity in healthy people. Bio-hacking involves engineering the body and mind to dramatically improve functionality. Futurist Ray Kurzweil talks of nanobots made from DNA strands that can be injected into the brain to connect the conscious brain to the internet.

With Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology, we already control many devices with our thinking. Amputees can move a complex robot arm, a quadriplegic can operate a wheelchair, a writer can control the typing, a drone can be piloted — all by a controller’s mind alone. BCI devices allow humans to send limited decoded messages to each other through the power of thought. The mobile phone is probably the quintessential contemporary technological device, and its refinements over the next decade are likely to reflect these neuro-advances. The headwear iPhone 18 may enable us to transmit thought messages to others. Welcome to the future possibilities of mental telepathy.

Does this sound too far-fetched? Perhaps it is. However, the challenge with thinking about the world ahead for our children is that we are anchored to our present thinking patterns and understandings. If we were able to go back to visit the 1870s, and tried to explain to people then what was happening today, it would be incomprehensible to them. Imagine describing social media to someone who still uses the telegraph. However, consider what might occur if we were visited by time travellers from 2120 who described their future world to us.

Their version of social media might be a form of global brain or collective consciousness, in which millions co-create intuitively to initiate changes in world affairs. We would struggle to grasp what was being outlined to us, yet for those visitors from the future, this personal telepathy and the global brain may be taken for granted.

Will our children become super-human in the world up ahead? Some of the pending augmentation technologies are already in advanced stages of development. Whether they choose to use it is another matter, given some of the complexities involved. However, the future will become increasingly complex, and a convergence of mega-issues will require a depth of thinking and awareness far beyond pre–21st century efforts. Perhaps they will need to be super-human.