It is exam time in the year 2020 and pupils are feeling tense. Suddenly gentle music starts to play, the corridors filled with a soft blue light and a soft breeze blows through the classrooms. In another part of the school, a geography teacher creates a jungle in his classroom, complete with steam, heat and smells. Elsewhere, a history teacher recreates the freezing conditions of the siege of Leningrad (列宁格勒保卫战).

“Intelligent” school buildings, which respond to pupils’ moods, are just one of the predictions made in a report by Futurelab, the Bristol education centre.

They predict that in 13 years’ time, pupils will have 24-hour access to a new kind of wireless—incorporating the Internet, television and telephone —through tiny devices in the fabric of their clothes. Pupils will be able to look back at lessons at any time via special glasses, which will record their whole lives, creating a reliable “virtual memory”. Hands-free virtual reality computer games will change, too, by picking up brain activity through a tiny cap worn by the player. Virtual environments, such as those already found in the online game Second Life, will allow pupils to have lessons with teachers in other schools or overseas.

Security in schools will change, too. Advanced biometric (生物计量的) full-body scanning system, embedded (镶嵌) in doorways, could allow pupils and staff access to different rooms without the need for keys, passwords or retinal (视网膜的) scans. And the system would refuse access to criminals and excluded pupils.

Keri Racer, the research director at Future-lab, said technology would become so embedded in clothes, everyday objects and schools that it would become harder to see where the child ends and the technology begins.

There is mounting evidence that the smartphone era is fading. Phone sales have been in gentle decline since 2016, as slower technological improvement has led to people upgrading less often.

The current big idea is virtual-reality (VR) headsets, promoted in part by pandemic lockdowns. More promising are glasses for experiencing augmented reality (AR), in which computer graphics are overlaid on the real world. Most of America’s big tech firms-among them Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft-as well as Asian giants like ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese owner) and Sony, are developing or selling VR or AR headsets. What has so far been a niche (有利可图的) market is about to become very crowded.

What does seem to be under way, however, is a gradual movement by consumers towards a series of new wearable devices. These include voice-activated smart headphones, which can make calls, read messages and more, and smart watches, which handle scheduling, navigation and fitness. Many health-tech gadgets measure everything from blood sugar to sleep patterns. In some countries unit sales of these “wearables” are already close to sales of smart phones.

People are not about to ditch their phones, any more than they threw out their laptops a decade ago. But as they interact more often with earphones or, soon glasses, more of them will come to use their phone as a kind of back office, primarily there to provide processing muscle for other gadgets. As chips get even smaller, phones may not be needed even for that.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more subtle, we can expect them to be used more often in the world of human medicine and healthcare. AI is designed to imitate the human brain in decision making and learning, so with the computing power to learn tasks in days or even hours, it is possible to create medical AIs that rapidly outperform doctors in certain tasks.

Most of the AI systems working in medicine employ smart algorithms ( 算 法 ), with the machine and   deep learning techniques, and are supported by speech recognition and computer or machine vision to make their decisions. It will be some time before researchers can develop artificial general intelligence systems capable of abstracting knowledge and developing their own experiences to share with other AIs. But firms like Microsoft, Google, Apple,

IBM and Facebook are preparing themselves up to deliver the most advanced AI personalized healthcare possible for patients around the world.

Data plays a hugely important role in helping AI systems learn about human medicine. AI systems are trained on large data sets gathered from real-life cases. Providing amounts of detailed patient information is a decisive factor for their success.

One of the most important areas for influencing global health is in the field of epidemiology ( 流行病学).

Predicting disease outbreaks can save millions of lives by having resources ready should the worst happen. Another field where medical AIs are making rapid advances is in diagnostics. Doctors base a lot of decisions on information from X-ray, CT and MRI images. Speeding up diagnoses from patient scans can rapidly improve patient care and outcomes.

Cardiologist (心脏病医生) Rima Arnaout developed an AI that beat human experts at correctly interpreting echocardiograms by 92 percent to 79 percent. She said that despite the result there is no hope of AI replacing human doctors any time soon. "As cardiologists, we read the images and then go see the patient," she said. "So we’re both reading images and practicing medicine. I don't think that the second piece will be taken over so quickly."