These 5 technologies will change the world by 2050

Since 1996, the number of people using the internet has climbed from about 40 million people to about 5 billion—or 60 percent of the world's population. There's internet access in the city slums of India, the rice terraces of Vietnam, and the favelas of Brazil.

That's a massive shift in 27 years—or my entire lifetime.

Venture capitalist Paul Graham recently asked on Twitter, "What do 36 million people use now that eventually 5 billion will?"

Here are my predictions for five technologies that could overtake the world by 2050, possibly changing the way we live just as profoundly as the internet did, and solving some of our most vexing problems, which almost always happens through creativity and innovation, not through regulation or government spending.