Identity is central in human activities. Having a functioning psychological and social identity is essential for wellbeing. Threats to identity are serious threats and often evoke strong reactions. Yet we have multiple, changing identities.
Online identities will be growing rapidly in importance and will raise a plethora of issues. Linking multiple identities to a legal identity and across time and domains can cause problems, in the form of breaches of privacy, risks of identity theft, damage to reputations, and reprisals.
Virtual worlds – be they online games, social spaces or teleconferencing, will grow in reach and use. Users feel strongly about their online identities and want control over them despite weak legal protections.
The augmented world and exoselves: In the words of one author, the generation growing up now will “never be alone, never lost, never forget” – the constant connectivity holds together social networks regardless of location, location services makes everything findable, and life recording allows the storage of representations of a large part of life. The resulting extended memory is likely to have significant effects on personal identity.
Identity technology: Not only humans but objects are gaining persistent, traceable identities. RFID-tags and other methods will give many objects a much richer identity, allowing them to be identified not just as belonging to a category but also as individual objects, possibly without direct touch.
Automation and robotics will have broad but diffuse impacts on various aspects of identity, mainly by gradually changing the nature of work and impacting labour markets.
Medicine and personalized health are not only about health but also about the expression of social identities. Eating healthy and exercising – or not – are choices that people make not only because of health effects but also to maintain a certain social identity. Diagnostic medicine (and genomics) will expand the medicalization of self-conception.
Genomics raises many important identity-related issues. Some of the main issues include: (1) changes in self-conception as a result of knowledge about the personal genome and how it correlates with life outcomes; (2) general changes in conceptions of human nature and human identity as a result of better understanding genetic causation; (3) the possibility that genomics will reveal significant differences between ethnic groups – this could have important implications for ethnic identity;
(4) genetic privacy will become increasingly hard to safeguard, thanks to cheaper gene sequencing and methods such as PCR amplification that allow even a small sample (such as a skin flake or a hair follicle) to produce enough genetic information.
The medicalization of conception, embryo selection, and (over time) genetic modification will have important effects on individuals – most obviously on individuals who would not have come into existence were it not for these procedures, but also on parents whose reproductive lifespan is extended, and eventually on wider society.
Drug-use will continue to be a significant identity-related issue, and it may be joined by new concerns over novel pharmaceutical neuroagents.
A long lived, multigenerational society: Longer lifespans will lead to changes in how people regard their identity as aged people, as well as increased diversity in how age-related aspects of identity are managed and in cultural expectations.
New technologies may accentuate the vulnerability of certain groups: people who are outside identity systems, people who need certain forms of privacy, people unable to handle the growing complexity of identity, people who are victims of identity theft, and people with persistently ruined reputations. Developing methods for identity rehabilitation might be important in order to reduce the risk for vulnerable groups.

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