This year’s “edge” question is what we should be worried about. So far, my favorite is David Berreby.

out of the 9 billion people expected when the Earth’s population peaks in 2050, the World Health Organization expects 2 billion—more than one person in five—to suffer from dementia. Is any society ready for this? Is any really talking about how to be ready?

One might hope that we would have a cure by then. But in general, the demographics of the future look…strange. Rodney Brooks thinks we will need a lot of robots to

take up the slack doing the thankless and hard grunt work necessary for elder care, e.g., lifting people into and out of bed, cleaning up the messes that occur, etc., so that the younger humans can spend their time providing the social interaction and personal face time that we old people are all going to crave.

Of course, if someone had asked me, I would have said that I worry about fiscal imbalances.