Dispatch From the Future: The Must-Have Gadgets and Gear of 2053

What will personal technology look like in 2053? Now that we have three decades of gear coverage under our belts, we cast our eyes 30 years into the future to answer that very question. We consulted with industry analysts, researchers, product designers, and computing experts. The tools of tomorrow will be shaped not only by advances in the tech that powers them—batteries, materials, processors, artificial intelligence—but by the future they inhabit.

Television

ILLUSTRATION: RICARDO REY

Picture this: Screens everywhere. Screens in your palm, screens in your autonomous vehicle, screens embedded in the street sign that used to help you know where to turn, back when humans were still driving cars. This is television in the year 2053. To call it television, though, is quaint. Display hardware will be astonishing—thinner, brighter, able to roll up like a magazine—and so unbelievably cheap to produce that the sets will be free. Well, free of cost but not of commitment. Anyone who signs up for Jeff Bezos’ ad-supported BlueOriginals TV service, which scooped up Elon Musk’s Starlink to broadcast its AI programming globally, will qualify for a free TV. Subscribers to the streaming service from DisneyCharter-­Shopify-WarnerBros.-Discovery+, which acquired TikTok’s US assets after the ban, gets a free set. Buyers of the $640 Apple Vision Pro XX headset get a free Apple TV display bundled in.

There will be so many screens that nesting partners will become polyscreenerous, each of them soaking up audiovisual feeds from two or more personal screens simultaneously, comprising what designer and author Erika Hall calls “our own idiosyncratic combination of device and content.”

A small child who suffered permanent hearing loss after seeing Oppenheimer on Imax in 2023 will have gone on to develop groundbreaking captioning technology for transparent screens—we’ll want it because the sound will still suck. “The only hardware issue that needs to get fixed: AUDIO!” says Tony Fadell, famed product designer and inventor of the iPod. “Smaller, thinner screens run counter to first-­principle audio physics. Solve that, Samsung!” Samsung, doing its best to make Tony happy, will announce a new four-­dimensional spatial audio soundbar at CES 2053, but it will only come bundled with a 4D TV. —Lauren Goode

Phone

ILLUSTRATION: GIOVANNI MEDALLA

When you look at the phone you have now, you might think we’re 99 percent done. Nothing more to see here. Not so fast: According to Counterpoint Research exec Neil Shah, a 2053 smartphone won’t be a phone at all. It’ll be embedded in a headset or our ears or even our brain. “It will have generative and cognitive AI capabilities,” Shah says, “which will learn our habits and anticipate what we need to do next, seamlessly connecting to ambient devices at the office or on the road and make switching between them a breeze.”

A pocketable virtual assistant empowered by artificial intelligence to foretell our wants, streaming a playlist tailored to our mood as we step into the robotaxi it hailed for us, will make our phones the personalized everything machines we’ve always imagined they would be. It also means we’ll be physically interacting with our mobile devices far less. We’ll go from gazing at our handsets all day to rarely ever needing to tap, swipe, or issue a voice command. In the instances when a screen is necessary, we won’t rely solely on slabs of glass but also funkier designs, like a rolled-up display that transforms into a palm-size touchscreen.

Manufacturing will need to transform to meet the demands of a world defined by gaping inequality, scarce resources, and an overabundance of waste. Fairphone cofounder Miquel Ballester is looking to build fully traceable cradle-to-grave supply chains in which every human involved earns a living wage. A pipe dream? We hope not. He’s also excited about the potential of soluble printed circuit boards that can be dissolved in water “so that every component can be easily separated and recycled.” Cool, though we do wonder what that will do to the device’s IPX rating. —Sophie Charara

Health and Fitness Tracking

ILLUSTRATION: GIOVANNI MEDALLA

When it comes to staying fit in the future, Ozempic-style drugs will do the bulk of the heavy lifting by keeping us slim. Getting swole will still require actual work, though. Infinite digital twins of your favorite Peloton instructor will lead simultaneous training sessions around the globe, with workouts tailored to your specific goals and needs. Location-aware ultra-­wideband chips, each an order of magnitude more powerful than the ones currently helping your iPhone sniff out nearby AirTags, will police your form by precisely tracking the movements of the tiny sensors embedded in your sweat-wicking workout clothes.

Smartwatches will still be popular (and fashionable), but instead of just counting reps, they’ll keep close tabs on a wider array of health conditions. New sensors that more accurately monitor blood pressure, glucose levels, and heart rate will feed data into an on-­device AI analysis engine that correlates any irregularities with the historical and real-time health data of family members.

Jennifer Radin, an epidemiologist who has conducted research for Scripps and the Centers for Disease Control, says the data that today’s devices collect lacks detail. In a 2053 world full of cheap and ubiquitous wearables, these devices will not only tell us when we’re getting sick, but data from millions of those wearables will be used to create granular health models of every community, predicting the spread of viruses and allergens and tracking trends on a societal scale. “I hope this empowers the individual to both better understand their own health as well as outbreaks that may be occurring in their community or environmental impacts that are constantly changing,” Radin says.

Alerts will buzz all of your screens and devices whenever your virtual medic discerns it’s time for you to mask up, book a telehealth visit, or request a vax-by-drone appointment. If the news is more serious, we just hope the AI has a good bedside manner. —Boone Ashworth

Disaster Survival

ILLUSTRATION: RICARDO REY

The landscape of 2053 looks like the landscape of today, just more beat up. Forests blackened by fire, rivers muddied by runoff, skies obscured by smoke, and oceans whipped to a frothing violence by a rapidly warming biosphere. Given this grim fate, the technology we use to mitigate the impacts of our own planetary abuse and neglect will surely improve. Wearable air-quality monitors will alert us to the presence of particulate ash, carbon monoxide, mold spores, and pathogens like Covid-51. Our mobile devices will be able to scan food we’re about to eat for traces of microplastics and other potential toxins. Air-filtration masks will be thinner, more breathable, and, thanks to advances in antimicrobial polyester, infinitely reusable.

Robin Murphy, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University and cofounder of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, envisions a future in which even the worst environmental catastrophes are rendered less devastating by technology. Key to this, she says, are autonomous robots. Firefighting drones will track blazes around the clock and drop fire retardant in zones where it’s unsafe to send humans. Armies of wee robots will snake through rubble to search for trapped survivors. Floating bots will navigate the smaller rivers that today’s equipment can’t accurately study, collecting data for the AI-enhanced flood prediction models that can let the most vulnerable residents know when it’s time to evacuate. “I foresee a world in which there’s a disaster, but it’s not an emergency,” Murphy says.

These technologies won’t supplant hands-on rescue work; they’ll supple­ment the efforts of first responders. Humans will still have to make the call about who gets help first and where to concentrate resources like food and water. The machines can take that over by 2083. —Boone Ashworth

Headphones

ILLUSTRATION: GIOVANNI MEDALLA

Over-ear headphones will have plummeted in popularity by 2053. Advances in materials and manufacturing will lead to smaller, lighter, more comfortable designs, and—more importantly—headphones that fit your ears perfectly. It’s already possible to buy earphones with tips shaped to match your outer ear canal, but 30 years from now, extraordinarily accurate and rapid mapping of your pinna and ear canal means you’ll be able to get headphones 3D-printed or molded to fit you and you alone. They’ll be so discreet and comfortable, you’ll forget you’re wearing them.

Advances in battery technology will be felt in headphones as surely as they will be in cars and other devices. Battery life will be increased by harvesting the energy of your movements and body heat. Improvements in wireless tech will enable stable and reliable transmission of enormously complex, information-rich data—way more than just audio, though the audio they pump out will exhibit a level of sonic fidelity and realism that makes the best of today’s headphones sound like someone playing a comb and paper next to your ear.

More than just aural escape pods, the in-ear headphone of 2053 will take on many of the tasks currently handled by our phones, acting as a portal, an assistant, and a platform for running apps. Making calls, instantly translating multilingual conversations, controlling the smart home—none of this will need a screen, just a tap or voice command. Headphones will have the computational power to act as a personal operating system, blurring the lines between audio accessory and mobile communicator. If considered purely as equipment, the headphones of the future will be as essential as clothing or shelter. —Simon Lucas

Car

ILLUSTRATION: RICARDO REY

Why are flying cars always held up as the future of automotive technology? We’ve had them since the 1940s—they’re called helicopters. In the modern world, electric vehicles have caused the biggest upheaval for the car industry since its inception, but the next three decades will feel less radical. Better batteries? Sure. Self-driving? Likely. Augmented reality windscreens? WayRay and others are developing them now. Declining car ownership? Certainly.

For Andy Palmer, CEO of the EV charging company Pod Point and ­former COO of Nissan, batteries will be the next big, boring advance. “They’ll be more energy-dense, meaning longer ranges,” he says. “We’ll see changes to the way batteries are charged—wireless potentially, and faster.” As far as more environmentally friendly fuels, Palmer says hydrogen is one to watch, assuming storage and production challenges can be overcome. And experts agree that the next decades will finally bring Level 5 autonomous driving—autos without steering wheels will be the norm.

Car ownership is a present-day status symbol. Mobility as a service (MaaS) will upend that, especially in cities. “On-demand motoring will become common­place, especially if cars can be summoned remotely,” Palmer says. “But in rural areas we won’t see a great deal of change.” Soumen Mandal, senior automotive analyst at Counterpoint, thinks pay-per-use subscriptions, ride-sharing, and ride-hailing will dominate while micromobility soars and new car sales stagnate. Of course, your robotaxi will hard-sell you add-ons: in-cabin video streaming, upgraded AR info, advanced safety features, and even custom scents.

The biggest shift will be societal. Three astonishing stats have not changed in two decades: Average daily journeys are under 30 miles; average car occupancy is 1.4 humans, making a typical five-seater far too big; and the average car spends 95 percent of its time parked. Translation: Today’s car makes no objective sense, and drastic change is inevitable. Yes, that does mean flying cars are coming. We just really hope those don’t have human drivers either. —Jeremy White

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