In the recent UK launch issue of Wired, a panel of experts and ‘professional futurists’ (how the hell do you get to be one of those ;)) gave their predictions for developments up to 2050.  The predictions made for the years up to and including 2020 are listed below… 

• 2010 – Citywide free WiFi – ( I like the word ‘free’)
• 2013 – Rapid bioassays using biosensitive computer chips (I think this means less animal testing – good news for rabbits 😉 )
• 2014  – Care robots – (not your iRobot style ones but pragmatic machines to make life easier for those with physical difficulties)
  • Life browsing – (personal data management)
• 2015 – Intelligent advertising posters (Minority Report style)
• 2017 – Window power – (energy efficient buildings adding power back to the grid)
  • Intelligent packaging
• 2018 – Teledildonics – (oooh missus! –  remote control sexual stimulation)
  • Active contact lenses -(like the Terminator head-up display)
  • Meal replacement patches – (taking nicotine patches a stage further)
  • Non touch computer interfaces – (wave your arms around like in Minority Report)
  • Nanotech drugs
  • Everything online – (the intelligent grid arrives)
  • Office Video walls – (like Quantum of Solace)
• 2019 – Folk-art revival – (cause anybody can do anything online)
  • Electro sex – (these people are obsessed!!! – but probably right, as sex has driven most mainstream consumer tech developments in recent decades)
• 2020 – Death of Web 2.0 – (a real dig at amateur journalism and the blogging generation)
  • A machine passes the Turing test – (artificial intelligence arrives and we’re all doomed if the autonomous US battlefield robots haven’t wiped us out already ;))
  • Space currency floated – (what are they smoking???)
  • Universal cloud computing – (if they can all stop arguing and ever agree on standards)
  • Genetic prophecy at birth – (survival of the fittest and a new super-race is born)
  • Humans visit Mars – (and find they didn’t learn any more than all the robots they’d been sending there for 30 years already)

Beyond 2020 some notable inclusions are…

• 2021 – First global warming conflict – floods in Bangladesh lead to mass emigration and drought in South East Asia will cause battles for water
• 2024 – Microbial diesel provides most of our fuel – (oooh cheap fuel again – all energy problems solved)
• 2032 – Cancer no longer a problem – (that’s a relief then)
• 2035 – China goes global and dominates the world economy and its worldview starts to change culture – (I’ll stock up on woks then)
• 2045 – Super intelligence – machines will build other machines – (and we’ll all be moving to The Matrix)
• 2048 – Space elevator – (I thought they were already building this? ;))

Notable exceptions…

• No mention of nuclear fusion
• No mention of quantum computing

Bit surprising given that those two really do have the potential to change the world – but as long as we get ‘Electro Sex’ at least we’ll all die happy!!!