WHAT WILL HAPPEN AFTER 2020 ?

1) Japan will build a robotic moon base

JAXA

There’s no technological reason why Japan shouldn't

be able to move forward with its ambitious plan

to build a robotic lunar outpost by 2020 — built by

robots, for robots. In fact, there’s really no nation

better for the job in terms of technological

prowess.The Institute for the Future’s Mike Liebhold says, “There are private launch

vehicles that are probably capable of doing that, and I think the robotics by that point

are going to be quite robust.”

2) China will connect Beijing to London via high-speed

rail

Courtesy of Popular Science

China’s plan:Link the East and West with a high-

speed rail line. Not linking the Eastern with the

Western parts of China — they're talking about

linking the Eastern world with the Western world.

How to deal with the inevitable headaches of a 17-

country train? Offer to pick up the tab. China would pay for and build the infrastructure

in exchange for the rights to natural resources such as minerals, timber and oil from the

nations that would benefit from being linked in to the trans-Asian/European corridor.

3) Cars will drive themselves

Courtesy of Popular Science

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.

4) The 'flying car' will be airborne

Courtesy of Popular Science

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.

5) We'll control devices via microchips implanted

in our brains

Courtesy of Popular Science

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.”

6) A $1,000 computer will have the processing

power of the human brain

Zephyris via Wikimedia

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.

7) Robots to act

As Korea’s infrastructure is turned into a vast information network, it’s easy to envision Samsung smartphones serving as the citizen’s interface to this new informational environment. Transportation, medicine, power, education —

everything integrated into a single pool of knowledge, available to everyone via increasingly intelligent pocket-sized devices. Indeed, Samsung researchers are currently discussing the creation of AI software for turning smart phones into smart agents that communicate both reactively and proactively: telling the user what she needs to know when she needs to know it, and even carrying out communications for the user when she’s not available to do it herself.Robots will be in every home, they’ll

need to know how to interact with humans emotionally as well as physically.