The Future Has a Flag
Superintelligence, undersea cities, and a 2049 vision you weren't expecting
Grüezi!
Somewhere in the world, a consortium of scientists, tech executives, and strategic planners has produced a detailed forecast of what life will look like in twenty-five years.
The document runs to dozens of pages. It has top institutional backing. And it describes a future radically different from the one you might be expecting.
Here’s what they’re planning for.
1. An Intelligence Explosion
By 2050, the report says, artificial general intelligence will have crossed the “singularity” to become artificial superintelligence (ASI) – so powerful that “comprehensively surpasses human wisdom.”
The language in their manifesto is pretty striking:
“When the light of wisdom is born in machines, the evolution of human social thinking will break through the constraints of limited lifespan and limited brain energy consumption.”
ASI will achieve “recursive self-improvement” and gain “continuously evolving capabilities,” fundamentally reshaping “wisdom cognition and how the world operates.” Intelligence can be “rapidly and continuously replicated,” which will “greatly accelerate the process of scientific creation.”
The human brain, cities, and decision-making systems will become “interconnected as an intelligent community” capable of cross-domain learning and autonomous evolution. ASI will “instantly integrate expert-level cognition from hundreds of domains” and generate “optimal solutions for complex decisions within a second.”
Personal AI assistants will evolve into “digital personalities” matching users’ thinking patterns and value preferences. Businesses will partner humans and AI agents. City management will predict traffic, energy demand, and “social emotions” seven days ahead.
Scientific discovery will become networked and AI-mediated – global researchers’ inspirations “interweaving in a collective consciousness cloud,” with AGI able to “extract breakthrough theoretical achievements from chaotic information.”
At home, ASI will automatically customise your diet and exercise based on health data, adjust your environment in real-time according to your emotional state, and match your children with personalised intelligent tutoring. Your house will become a therapeutic environment that reads and responds to your mood.
2. The Scale
The quantitative projections are difficult to grasp, so here’s what they mean in practice.
Trillions of intelligent agents globally – not millions, trillions. That’s hundreds of AI agents for every human being on Earth. That will require computing power demand to grow 100,000 times from 2025 levels, making the entire computational infrastructure humanity has built to date becomes a rounding error.
Storage demand growing 500 times means every data centre currently operating would need to be replicated five hundred times over.
The energy requirement? Global storage capacity exceeding 5 terawatts. For context, the entire United States currently has about 1.2 terawatts of total electrical generating capacity. The vision assumes we’ll need four Americas’ worth of energy storage alone.
General-purpose robots? Priced at hundreds of dollars, ‘as ubiquitous as mobile phones’. The smartphone in your pocket costs what a computer room cost in 1970. The robot folding your laundry in 2050 will cost what a dishwasher costs today.
The report presents ten technological visions:
Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) opening a new human-machine symbiosis;
General-purpose robots triggering a ‘productivity revolution’;
Flying cars releasing new urban spatial value;
A ‘mirror world’ where virtual and real coexist;
Universal quantum computing making processing power ‘as accessible as water and electricity’;
Internet of Intelligent Agents eliminating space-time constraints;
Room-temperature superconductivity;
Commercial fusion power;
Molecular medicine fused with AI;
‘Multi-domain cohabitation’ where humanity moves seamlessly between land, space, and deep sea.
That last one deserves particular attention. Western futurism fixates on missions to Mars. This vision gives equal weight to cities under the sea.
It’s one of the details that reveals how different this document is from Silicon Valley’s ideas of where humanity is headed.
3. What’s Missing
But what’s not in this brave new world?
No discussion of AI alignment problems or existential risk. No scenario planning for technology failure, misuse, or unintended consequences.
Autonomous weapons and military applications are off the table. The social consequences of mass automation-driven unemployment are for the political system to grapple with.
Nor is there any acknowledgement of the geopolitical competition that might derail these high-speed trajectories.
The vision assumes that technology is unambiguously beneficial, coordination problems evaporate, and the only question is ‘how fast’ rather than ‘whether’ or ‘at what cost.’
The ethical framework focuses on technology failing to serve humanity – not technology actively threatening it.
The core concern is ensuring ‘no one is left behind’ as exponential growth becomes normal, not ensuring that ASI doesn’t pursue goals misaligned with human welfare.
4. ‘First Knock on the Door of the Future’
As you probably figured out, this isn’t a Silicon Valley manifesto or a transhumanist thought experiment.
On 6 December 2025, China released its first systematic national forecast of technological development: Tech Foresight and Future Visions 2050 (科技预见与未来愿景2050).
The report emerged from the Tengchong Scientists Forum, and an expert consortium that included some of China’s top corporate research shops, includine Huawei, Tencent, China Mobile, and more.
Yang Yuliang, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and former president of Fudan University, calls it “the first knock on the door of the future” – China’s contribution to global technology forecasting on its own terms.
He positions the work as picking up the legacy of the Southwest Associated University (西南联大) – a wartime institution where China’s scientific elite taught in exile during the Japanese occupation.
The message: ‘Previously we could only see similar reports from foreign sources.’
China is no longer reacting to Western visions of the future. It’s articulating its own.
5. Why This Matters
Re-reading the vision above with this context generates more questions.
The ‘collective consciousness cloud’ where global researchers’ inspirations interweave? It assumes coordination problems between competing national scientific establishments won’t exist – striking given current US-China tech decoupling.
The confident timelines for fusion power, room-temperature superconductors, and commercial ASI? They also assume no major disruptions from export controls, chip restrictions, or geopolitical conflict.
The undersea expansion emphasis? It lines up with China’s actual strategic investments – deep-sea research stations in the South China Sea, floating platforms, underwater data centres, networks of autonomous submersibles. This is military-strategic thinking embedded in civilian forecasting.
The complete absence of AI safety concerns?
If China’s AI development proceeds without internalising Western alignment research, this creates exactly the race dynamics that safety advocates warn about.
But in China, the state sees itself as resolving the safety problem.
6. The Ethical Framework
The report concludes with ‘three forward-looking reflections’:
Embrace the intelligent society;
Human-centric “tech for good”;
Open cooperation.
The second principle – kējì xiàngshàn (科技向善, “tech for good”) – reveals the ethical framework. Technology should serve humanity. The possibility that superintelligent systems might not play the specific roles allotted to them isn’t entertained.
The letter accompanying the report poses five ‘fundamental questions’:
What is humanity’s unique value when machines can think, create, and even make decisions?
When data is as ubiquitous as air, how do we protect privacy, security, and dignity?
When exponential growth becomes normal, how do we ensure ‘no one is left behind’?
When the five foundational technologies converge, how do we achieve a ‘singularity breakthrough’ for all human technology?
When energy becomes the key constraint, how do we enable green development whilst protecting the Earth?
These are real questions. But what’s missing is any question about whether ASI will answer them the way humans hope.
7. The Question for Today
If you found this vision exciting – and a lot of it is – you may share more assumptions with Chinese techno-optimism than you’d expected.
If you found it naïve or dystopian, ask yourself: is that because the vision is wrong, or because much discussion has framed AI development through an alignment-anxiety lens?
Whatever your view, two radically different frameworks for thinking about the next quarter-century now exist – backed by institutional resources, strategic planning, and genuine conviction. And they’re not converging.
This report is less prediction than declaration of intent. It articulates a specifically Chinese vision of technological civilisation: optimistic about AI; expansionist toward sea and space; confident about coordination, quiet about risk.
And that confidence is also appealing beyond China.
Is there a European vision of the future right now? Only one focused on impending conflict.
Is there an American vision? Only ones articulated by individual tech billionaires. There is no national project. Or at least there are no ballrooms in space.
Whether this particular Chinese vision proves accurate matters less than whether the country’s institutions act as though it’s true.
For everyone else, the question is whether engaging with it requires adopting its assumptions wholesale – or whether competing frameworks can coexist.
The report’s silence on that is an answer in itself.
A note on dates: the report actually targets 2049, not 2050. The difference is the point. 2050 is a round number – the default horizon for climate targets, demographic projections, long-range forecasts. It belongs to everyone.
2049 belongs to China. It marks the centenary of the People’s Republic. The vision isn’t just about technology; it’s about what kind of country China intends to be when it celebrates a hundred years of Communist Party rule.
The future has a flag.
Thanks for reading and have a very merry Christmas!
Best
Adrian
Here’s the report >>> https://www.fxbaogao.com/detail/5183728