Facts about 2020
12 years 2020 will be an awesome year
An expert's look on synthetic human brains, lunar mining and many more
Prepare for the first full synthetic human brain, lunar mining and much more. Perhaps robotic moon bases, chips implanted in our brains, autonomous cars and high-speed trains that connect London with Beijing. According to a dazzling number of technological predictions that point to the year 2020, it will be an incredible year. Here, we take a look at some of the wonders it has in the store.
Prepare for the first full synthetic human brain, lunar mining and much more. Perhaps robotic moon bases, chips implanted in our brains, autonomous cars and high-speed trains that connect London with Beijing. According to a dazzling number of technological predictions that point to the year 2020, it will be an incredible year. Here, we take a look at some of the wonders it has in the store.
Liebhold now helps customers have a long-term view of their businesses so they can make better decisions in the short term. He and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future do not help clients read the tea leaves, but they do help them read what he calls the signs: those things you can see today in the world that allow you to make reasonable forecasts about The future holds.
In other words, the year 2020 (and 2019 and 2021) is a matter of Liebhold. And he forecasts a very interesting world within a decade. So what will the world be like in 2020? With the Liebhold driving shotgun, we took a quick turn until 2020 to see what the future holds.
Japan will build a robotic moon base
There is no technological reason why Japan cannot move forward with its ambitious plan to build a robotic lunar outpost by 2020, built by robots, for robots. In fact, there really isn't a better nation for work in terms of technological skill.
Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future says: "There are private launch vehicles that are likely to be able to do that, and I believe that robotics will be quite robust at that time."
PopSci predicts: Technologically possible, but economics will be the deciding factor.
China will connect Beijing to London via high-speed rail
China plan. They do not link the east with the western parts of China, they are talking about linking the eastern world with the western world.
How to deal with the inevitable headaches of a train from 17 countries? Offer to pick up the tab. China would pay and build the infrastructure in exchange for the rights to natural resources, such as minerals, wood and oil from the nations to which it is linked to the trans-Asian / European corridor. the rights to natural resources such as minerals, wood and oil of the nations that want
The cars will drive alone
For a long time it has been a dream for everyone, from Google and DARPA to the automakers themselves: total safety and ease of transport thanks to driverless cars. Movements are being made, but the first obstacle to clearing is great: getting all these heterogeneous cars to talk to each other. We still don't have the wireless infrastructure, worldwide, to link all our cars with all our traffic technology.
PopSci Predictions: Certainly feasible, but not by 2020.
For a long time it has been a dream for everyone, from Google and DARPA to the automakers themselves: total safety and ease of transport thanks to driverless cars. Movements are being made, but the first obstacle to clearing is great: getting all these heterogeneous cars to talk to each other. We still don't have the wireless infrastructure, worldwide, to link all our cars with all our traffic technology.
PopSci Predictions: Certainly feasible, but not by 2020.
Biofuels will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels
The U.S. military has pledged to get half its energy from renewable resources by 2020, and the Navy whole-heartedly believes it can turn to 50 percent biofuels by then. It makes political sense not to rely on volatile regions for energy, and this push could mean both cleaner vehicle fleets and a major bump in the competitiveness of biofuels in the market.
PopSci Predicts: Feasible.
The 'flying car' will be airborne
The rebirth of the flying car? Liebhold, of the Institute for the Future, shoots this one down. "No. The air traffic control for something like that is incredible." It's a problem in every way — logistically we can't do it, cost-wise we can't do it, and technologically it's extremely unlikely. Oh well.
PopSci Predicts: The military might have its prototype “flying humvee” by 2020 (DARPA wants it by 2015), but the tech won’t trickle down to the rest of us for quite a while.
We'll control devices via microchips implanted in our brains
The human brain remains biology’s great, unconquered wilderness, and while the idea of meshing the raw power of the human mind with electronic stimulus and responsiveness has long existed in both science fiction and — to some degree — in reality, we likely won’t be controlling our devices with a thought in 2020 as Intel has predicted. While it’s currently possible to implant a chip in the brain and even get one to respond to or stimulate gross neural activity, we simply don’t understand the brain’s nuance well enough to create the kind of interface that would let you channel surf by simply thinking about it.
“Neural communications are both chemical and electrical,” Liebhold says. “And we have no idea about how that works, particularly in the semantics of neural communication. So yeah, somebody might be able to put electronics inside somebody’s cranium, but I personally believe it’s only going to be nominally useful for very, very narrow therapeutic applications.”
PopSci Predicts: We might have chips in the brain by 2020, but they won’t be doing much.
All new screens will be ultra-thin OLEDs
Display tech moves incredibly fast. There will certainly still be some “antique” LCD monitor screens hanging around in 2020, but as far as new stock is concerned, it’s easy to see the entire industry shifting to paper-thin OLED surfaces, many with touch capability.
“So surfaces will become computational," Liebhold says. "walls, mirrors, windows. I think that's legitimate.”
PopSci Predicts: “Give that one a high probability,” Liebhold says. Done.
extra
terrestrial body
mining. That last part seems less likely: we have not
yet discovered what long-term space travel would do to the human body, and even robotic missions are probably several decades away.
A $1,000 computer will have the processing power of the human brain
Cisco’s chief futurist made this prediction a couple of years ago, and it seems reasonable in some ways. Not intelligence, really, but purely the "ability, the number of cycles," as Liebhold puts it, is on track given Moore's Law.
PopSci Predicts: Likely.
Universal translation will be commonplace in mobile devices
This one's under intense development, both in practical forms like Google Translate and crazier ones from DARPA. Translation will probably happen in the cloud, consulting with massive bodies of language knowledge compiled by companies and governments.
PopSci Predicts: Probable, but with varying degrees of accuracy depending on the language.
Finally we will see decent AR glasses
Augmented reality is very visible in smartphone applications, but we want more: we want rich, customizable, relevant and easily accessible AR superimposed directly on whatever we are looking at. That depends on the glasses and the GPS, which should be accurate enough to keep up with the real world by 2020, but also on the space web, with geolocation data.
We will create a synthetic brain that works like the real deal
Once we have a computer with the processing power of a brain, can we build a brain from scratch? The researchers of the Blue Brain Project in Switzerland think so. But there is an argument that as we build a brain, we will learn more and more about it, increasing the difficulty rate as we go.
PopSci Predictions: we will get there. Someday.
Augmented reality is very visible in smartphone applications, but we want more: we want rich, customizable, relevant and easily accessible AR superimposed directly on whatever we are looking at. That depends on the glasses and the GPS, which should be accurate enough to keep up with the real world by 2020, but also on the space web, with geolocation data.
We will create a synthetic brain that works like the real deal
Once we have a computer with the processing power of a brain, can we build a brain from scratch? The researchers of the Blue Brain Project in Switzerland think so. But there is an argument that as we build a brain, we will learn more and more about it, increasing the difficulty rate as we go.
PopSci Predictions: we will get there. Someday.