Get ready for the first complete synthetic human brain, moon mining, and much more. Maybe robotic moon
bases, chips implanted in our brains, self-driving cars and high-speed rail linking London to Beijing. According to a
dazzling number of technology predictions that single outthe year 2020, it’s going to be to be one heck of a year.
Here, we take a look at some of the wonders it has in store. 2020, of course, is just a convenient target date for
roughly-10-years-off predictions. “It’s not any more particularly interesting, in my opinion, than 2019 or 2021,”
says Mike Liebhold, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for the Future, and an all-around technology expert with a
resume that includes stints with Intel, Apple, and even Netscape.
Liebhold now helps clients take a long view of their
businesses so they can make better decisions in the short
term. He and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future
don’t help clients read tea leaves but they do help them
read what he calls the signals — those things you can see
in the world today that allow you to make reasonable
forecasts about what the future holds.
In other words, the year 2020 (and 2019, and 2021) is
Liebhold’s business. And he forecasts a pretty interesting
world a decade from now. So what will the world look like
in 2020? With Liebhold riding shotgun, we took a quick
spin through 2020 to see what the future might hold.
Cars will drive themselves
It’s long been a dream of, well, just about everyone,
from Google and DARPA to automakers themselves: utter
safety and ease of transport thanks to self-driving cars.
There’s movement being made, but the first hurdle to
clear is a big one: Getting all these heterogenous cars
to speak to one another. We don’t yet have the wireless
infrastructure, globally speaking, to link all our cars with
all our traffic tech.
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.”
