- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
London (CNN Business) - You're late for work because you forgot to put the alarm clock embedded in your forearm. Quickly getting out of bed, you give your relatives, located thousands of kilometers away, a quick virtual hug, and you get into the car, ordering your mono driver to accelerate. It's a stressful day, of course, but at least your vacation on the Moon is only a few days away.
It may not sound like a typical morning, but people thought it could have been that way.
The story is full of predictions and projections. Many of these are given with supreme confidence, before they conveniently fade into insignificance as they move away from the goal.
But as we move towards the third decade of the twentieth century, it is time to ask: where do we think we would be in 2020?
The pace of technological advances has been rapid, and some defining trends of the last decade were predicted with remarkable precision many years ago.
However, we did not do everything right. According to several experts, scientists and futurists, we would have already landed on Pluto and the robots should already be washing clothes. Oh, and we would all be living up to 150 years.
CNN has tracked the archives to find out what it could have been, and met some of those people who thought they had planned the last decade.
The robot revolution was delayed
The possibility of robots coming for our jobs has been a permanent concern of all post-war generations, and by 2020 we were destined to be virtually redundant in many areas.
"Futurists and technology experts say that robots and artificial intelligence of various types will become an accepted part of daily life by 2020 and will take over almost completely physical work," said Elon University in 2006.
British futurologist Ian Pearson went even further. "Consciousness is just another sense, indeed, and that is what we are trying to design on a computer," he told the UK Observer newspaper in 2005. "My conclusion is that it is possible to make a conscious computer with superhuman intelligence levels. before 2020 ”.
"I would definitely have emotions," he added. "If I'm on a plane, I want the computer to be more terrified of crashing than me, so it does everything possible to stay airborne."
Toyota developed a robot that plays the violin in 2007.
Already in 2020, our planes are not yet more emotional than us.
"It hasn't progressed as fast as I thought," Pearson tells CNN this month. "Artificial intelligence was developing very quickly at the beginning of the century, so we had predictions that by 2015 we would have conscious machines that would be smarter than people."
“There was a great recession and that delayed things a bit,” reflects Pearson. "I would estimate that AI has probably progressed 35 or 40% slower than we expected."
But although Pearson admits that there have been fewer redundancies forced by robots than he had anticipated, he notes that computerized colleagues have infiltrated some workplaces. "You can enter some car factories and you will not see anyone," he says.
The robots are still coming. MIT Technology Review has attempted to track all reports on the effect of automation on the workforce. There are many of them, and they suggest anything from a moderate displacement of jobs to a total automation of the workforce, with varying degrees of alarm.
Pearson also took a risk in 2009 by predicting that we would already be using "active skin", "printed" electronics in our bodies to control our health. He added that the device could also locate “nerve signals and record them, and maybe re-inject them at a later date, so that we can effectively record and reproduce a feeling like hugging your partner while you're away.”
READ : 20 things to expect in 2020
Pearson tells CNN now that such a product would not have required technology difficult to create. "We could see how to do it almost 20 years ago, but it hasn't happened, because there aren't enough engineers or companies that have decided to examine those areas," he says.
The futurist says that about 85% of his predictions come true; He promotes text messaging and social media mastery among his best predictions.
"Just by looking at things like Yahoo !, which was really the beginning of social networks, you could see that this new World Wide Web was making it easier for people to talk with other people around the world about topics of interest to them," he says. .
There are some trends of the decade that Pearson did not see coming. He points to the growing public concern about climate change as something that took him by surprise.
But Pearson is not afraid to release predictions again. By 2030, "everyone seems to think we will be driving cars without a driver," he says. "I am not convinced that it will be like that."
A cheaper and more feasible address, he says, is that we will all travel in generic fiberglass pods, being dragged by automatic highways.
“You can turn an entire city in just a few weeks into a smart city, with very, very cheap transportation, within it,” says Pearson. "You will get fantastic benefits for people, cities and the environment."
We still like food, but our tastes are changing
Humans are still here, and we still haven't given up our lunch breaks.
Prominent futurist Ray Kurzweil has regularly predicted that food consumption will be reduced by 2020. "Billions of small nanobots in the digestive tract and bloodstream could intelligently extract the precise nutrients we need," he wrote in his book of 2004 “Fantastic trip: Live long enough to live forever”. Kurzweil projected that these nutrient-laden bots could "send the rest of the food we eat on their way to elimination."
Small robots did not replace meals, but some much more speculative predictions about what we eat well could be fulfilled.
Predictions of a vegetarian revolution in the 21st century began since 1910.
A 1913 edition of the New York Times contained a long-term estimate by the president of the now disappeared American Meat Packers Association, in an article entitled "Threatening us with vegetarianism." Looking "deep into a bleak future," the newspaper signaled its warning that Americans would give up meat and start living on "rice and vegetables" in the 21st century.
The article described the perspective as a "scary destination," which could only be avoided "by educating the American farmer about the need to raise more cattle."
But a century later, vegetarianism and veganism are booming in popularity. Many scientists also warn that we should immediately eat less meat and change the way we manage the land to stop the climate crisis.
READ : Four (really important) reasons to be vegan
Apart from our diets, in 2000 Kurzweil also predicted that computers would be "largely invisible" and "embedded everywhere: on walls, tables, chairs, desks, clothes, jewelry and bodies," by 2020.
He was one of the group of futurists who predicted that smart glasses or contact lenses would replace our phones. Google tried, but failed to resonate with the public.
Google Glass did not hit when it was launched in the middle of this decade.
What other changes could have been in the store for our daily lives, if experts had proved right?
Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, writing in Wired in 1997, predicted that electronic voting in home elections would be a reality now.
In 2000, Eric Haseltine wrote in Discover magazine that written signatures would be "considered picturesque" by 2020, replaced by biometric identifications, including irises, fingerprints and voice recognition systems. Smartphones now use all three types of this technology.
Joseph D'Agnese predicted in the same magazine that we could not board a plane or access our homes without lasers that measure our irises. And Marvin Minsky, founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, estimated that people would turn to the black market for genetic manipulation, extending their lives and even "developing features in their brain" illegally.
We're not on vacation on the moon, yet
They say the past is a foreign country. Well, if that is true, then the future is another planet. With hotels in it.
Space vacations have been a prediction for decades. "Look back at what people talked about in the 60s or 70s: space tourism has been a vision for a long time," says Laura Forczyk, founder of the Astralytical space consulting firm. "Return to the Stanley Kubrick movie, where Pan Am took tourists to various destinations," he adds, referring to the blockbuster "2001: A Space Odyssey."
In 2009, it finally seemed that we were on the cusp of a breakthrough, with a number of companies and individuals who expressed their desire to make the space tourism decade of the years 2010.
"By 2020 you will have seen private citizens circumnavigate the Moon," Eric Anderson of Space Adventures told the Space.com website in 2009. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk went further. "I'm going to take a chance and say that by 2020 there will be serious plans to bring people to Mars," said the same site.
"From 2001 to 2009, people saw it become a reality," Forczyk told CNN. "They thought it was just around the corner."
But space tourism proved to be so close, but so far away. Seven people paid to go to space during the first decade of the 21st century, but orbital tourist flights stopped in 2009.
The delays mean that hundreds of people who signed up for space travel have been waiting. “Back then it was always 'next year, next year',” says adventure journalist Jim Clash, who bought a $ 200,000 ticket on a Virgin Galactic flight in 2010. “I thought that by 2020 we would be running this as a regular operation
"I'm supposed to be passenger number 610, which is well below the list," he adds. But he is not disappointed by the delay. "It takes a while, and I'm willing to wait," Clash tells CNN. "Space is difficult and you want to do it right before you start taking people."
However, the 2010 decade was not a lost decade for commercial space travel.
LOOK : Space X launches new rocket into space
The last 10 years have seen several companies move towards takeoff, and SpaceX revealed in 2018 that Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa will be his first space tourist, with a trip around the Moon reserved for 2023. Beyond that, Musk still has Fixed sight on Mars.
"Now we have private companies that build their own vehicles to transport paying customers," says Forczyk. "That has been the difference between the last decade and the previous decades."
You would need a thick wallet to see Earth from space by 2030, of course. But the long-standing vision of hotels on the Moon may not be a completely distant proposal, he adds.
"Humans are witty ... absolutely, that will eventually happen," says Forczyk, with some confidence. “Whether it happens in our lives, I can't tell you. But as long as that dream lasts, people will continue to work on it. ”
Some predictions were not even close
The more you step back, the more extravagant the predictions for 2020 will be.
In 1964, the RAND Corporation made a long-term forecast report, asking 82 experts in various fields to prepare a series of predictions for our times.
If they had been right, we would already be communicating with aliens and traveling in time. Our lives would extend for half a century and Mars would be old news. We would have landed there in the mid-1980s, and Venus and the moons of Jupiter would have been conquered in the early twentieth century. We would have even flown to Pluto, which, at the time, was still a planet before being degraded in 2006.
"Primitive forms of artificial life will have been generated in the laboratory," the report continues. "A universal language will have developed ... (and) on the Moon, mining and manufacturing of propellant materials will be in progress."
However, one of the most surprising claims in the RAND report was that by 2020 we would have raised animals, including apes, to carry out daily household chores.
The predictions, the study said, reflected "explicit, reasoned and self-aware opinions" that "should reduce the chance of surprise and provide a stronger basis for long-term decision-making."
The claims were certainly taken seriously. Three years later, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg commented on his findings in a speech before the National Women's Democratic Club in Washington, DC.
Drawing of the future in 1958.
"During the 21st century, houses that don't have a robot in the broom closet could have a live monkey to do the cleaning and gardening," he said. "In addition, the use of well-trained apes as family chauffeurs could decrease the number of car accidents."
Next year it will not look much like what we thought, but the rapid growth of the Internet and various technologies means that the scientists of the 1960s would not recognize it either.
That, in turn, has generated new concerns that even many futurists did not see coming, and the future is equally murky.
So, while we set our sights on the 2030s, remember to take any prediction carefully. Assuming nanobots don't do it first.
2020