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Just as we have seen many changes in the past century, people can expect many changes to occur in the next fifty to one hundred years. Come areas that have changed in the past will continue to change in the future. Such areas include the medical field and gender and racial issues. However, even areas that seem to have remained stagnant will also, finally, change. In the future, the area of medicine will see changes in how surgery is done; changes in racial issues will alter how interracial marriages are viewed; and education will become more personalized and technology based.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the medical field will continue to change as we move into the future; one significant change will be how surgeries are performed. At the moment, some doctors are using computers to perform surgery. The doctors are still mainly in control, but the computer is more accurate and safer than regular surgery performed by hand because it can make smaller incisions and is more detailed. The downfall is that the machine is huge and virtually takes up the entire room. Computerized surgery is much safer, but should something go wrong, it would be difficult for the doctors to come in and remove the equipment. It is difficult enough to maneuver in the same room as the giant computer with only one person. It could be very dangerous for the person undergoing the surgery should there be a sudden need for multiple doctors to remove the robot-like hands from the body. In the near future, however, the size will decrease, and the risk level will go down. The computer will also become smarter so that eventually, people will only be needed on the off chance that something did go wrong. It will also become a more common tool to have in hospitals. By looking at the history of computers, we can see this is a reoccurring pattern. Things start out big, stupid and do very little, and gradually shrink, become ‘smarter’, and their usefulness increases.
Another thing that will change is how interracial marriages are viewed. At the moment, people think twice about it because it seems strange and is not the cultural norm of today’s society. Some interracial marriages are currently less accepted than others, with white and black possibly being the least accepted. In the future, however, it will not be uncommon to see a black and white married couple. Already it is becoming more common, as more African American women marry white men. The reason for this is more and more African American women are becoming highly educated and succeeding in high level careers; however, they are having difficulty finding African American men who match them in this. One hundred years from now, people won’t consider it as strange, if at all, for interracial marriage to occur.
Perhaps one of the biggest transformations in the future will be in the education system. The current system was designed to produce factory workers. One can question whether it even succeeds in this, as only two thirds graduate. The education system will need to become more tailored to the student, also known as personalized learning. Teachers will teach students based on their preferred or dominant learning style, and students will be able to learn from anywhere, at any time. Online schools will be as common as site-based, if not more so as our technology continues to grow. Already, we are seeing more online education opportunities, not only in colleges, but in high schools and K-8 home schooling groups. The traditional school system is losing students to personalized learning programs. If they do not change their ways to become more tailored to the student, they will die out. Either way, the education system will be changed.
Many more changes will happen in the medical field, racial issues, and the education field beyond those mentioned here. In addition, changes will occur I many more areas in our society. As one change leads to another, especially in the area of technology, addition changes tend to happen exponentially. As such, the changes mentioned here are probably only modest ones and less revolutionary than those we will actually see to come.
