2020 has not turned out how anyone has predicted. There was a president almost impeached, Kobe Bryant's death, and the pandemic came along. All in all, it wasn't a good year but definitely one to remember. I was wondering what people thought would happen in 2020 so I wrote this blog.
1. Self-driving cars
We will be “permanent backseat driver,” the Guardian predicted in 2015. Later, in 2016 Business Insider said “10 million self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020." Followed by General Motors, Google’s Waymo, Toyota, and Honda's announcement that they’d be making self-driving cars by 2020. Elon Musk thought that Tesla would prefect it by 2018. 2020 is here but where are the cars?
Sadly No: While we don't have self-driving cars yet, we do have cars that can control steering speed, and self-parking even if the driver is not driving. The next thing they are trying to do is make vehicles fully autonomous but require driver attention. These cars aren't available yet but they are being tested.
2. Personal Companions
In 1999, Bill Gates predicted that there would be devices that "will check your email or notifications, and present the information that you need. When you go to the store, you can tell it what recipes you want to prepare, and it will generate a list of ingredients that you need to pick up. It will inform all the devices that you use of your purchases and schedule, allowing them to automatically adjust to what you're doing."
True mostly: Wait a second doesn't that sound a lot like your Alexa's and google homes. These devices still need a lot of improvements but they are very close to a personal companion.
3. Humans will set foot on Mars
A report in 1996 by the Space Studies Board of the National Research Council said NASA would launch "possible human exploratory missions to the moon and Mars within the next quarter-century." This predicted that humans would land on Mars by 2020.
Not true yet: While no human has set foot on Mars, we have sent lots of robots to Mars to explore if humans could possibly live there. We have good signs and probably will set foot on Mars soon.
4. Heart disease/ Depression would be the world's top Disease
In 1996, the Harvard School of Public Health and the World Health Organization predicted that by 2020, the world's top two causes of the global burden of disease – a measurement of the number of healthy life years lost because of sickness, disability or early death – would be heart disease and clinical depression.
True: Just as Harvard predicted the world's number one disease is heart disease. 7.25 million people are dying because of this disease.
5. Your every move will be tracked
Kurzweil predicted that privacy would be a social issue and that "each individual’s practically every move (will be) stored in a database somewhere."
I think that it's true: Your smartphone follows you. Your web browser traces your digital trail (everything you looked up). Right now, Almost most of the populations worldwide live under 24/7 high-tech surveillance. Most U.S. adults say they do not think it is possible to go through daily life without having some data posted about them online for the world to see.
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