Gloomy Americans foresee a downhill slide to 2050

From the Associated Press:

Ask people to imagine American life in 2050, and you'll get some dreary visions.

Whether they foresee runaway technology or runaway government, rampant poverty or vanishing morality, a majority of Americans predict a future worse than today.

Whites are particularly gloomy: Only 1 in 6 expects better times over the next four decades. Also notably pessimistic are middle-age and older people, those who earn midlevel incomes and Protestants, a new national poll finds.

"I really worry about my grandchildren, I do," says 74-year-old Penny Trusty of Rockville, Md., a retired software designer and grandmother of five. "I worry about the lowering of morals and the corruption and the confusion that's just raining down on them."

Even groups with comparatively sunny outlooks - racial and ethnic minorities, the young and the nonreligious - are much more likely to say things will be the same or get worse than to predict a brighter future.

"Changes will come, and some of them are scary," says Kelly Miller, 22, a freshly minted University of Minnesota sports management grad.

She looks forward to some wonderful things, like 3D printers creating organs for transplant patients.

But Miller envisions Americans in 2050 blindly relying on robots and technology for everything from cooking dinner to managing their money.

"It's taking away our free choice and human thought," she says. "And there's potential for government to control and regulate what this artificial intelligence thinks."

Overall, 54 percent of those surveyed expect American life to go downhill, while 23 percent think it will improve, according to a December survey from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research....
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Link: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_THE_MORE_THINGS_CHANGE?