HOW WE PREDICTED THE FUTURE IN 2002
Technology has progressed at an amazing rate but predicting where it will go next can prove difficult
WE would all like a crystal ball to see the future. Back in 2002 a researcher took a crack at what he thought would happen. Needless to say, things didn’t quite pan out as expected.
In 2002 Shakira topped the charts, everyone was watching Big Brother and Spider-Man was in cinemas.
In those days people still held out hopes of seeing flying DeLoreans and hoverboards by 2015, as predicted by Back to the Future Part II. A leading UK researcher published a major paper through firm BTexact Technologies compiling a lifeline of technology breakthroughs which could be expected to occur within our lifetimes. The timeline, published in the Bulletin in March 2002, shows remarkable accuracy in some areas, with the rest appearing highly ambitious with 15 years of hindsight. The paper painted a utopian vision of a future full of robots and highlyadaptive technology. “Imagine coming home to a clean house and kept garden, courtesy of your personal fleet of robots,” the Bulletin reported at the time.
“As you walk through the front door an electronic puppy playfully pulls at your pants.
“Your house will have detected what mood you are in and set the lighting accordingly, while if the weather is fine you might flick a switch and your patio tiles will simulate a beach.”
Its list of predictions make for amusing reading:
2003: Devices are registered in homes and won’t work if stolen. 2005: Computers that write most of their
own software, the frequent use of multiple “net” identities causes personality disorders, widespread use of virtual reality for education and recreation, voice controls of many household gadgets and clothes which collect and store solar power.
2006: The first organism brought back from extinction while emotionally responsive toys and robots will be available.
2010: The use o of human tissue to grow rep replacement organs, outsource outsourced vegetable plots, the world’s highest earning celebrity is synthetic, your house will have separate volume control for different people in the same room, foetal gender selection becomes the norm and there would be household access by facial recognition.
2012: DNA computers will exist.
2015: Virtual reality escape becomes a major social problem, while computers and robots become superior to humans. Desktop computers become as fast as human brains.
2020: 3D home printers exist.
Of this list, it’s easy to pick what has, and hasn’t come true.
Most notably the prediction of 3D printers in homes was beaten by nearly a decade, with such devices now easily available for purchase.
Researcher Ian Nelid predicted artificial intelligence would become a major force by 2010.
In possibly his most unusual tip, Nelid suggested the world’s first artificial intelligence student would graduate from Year 12 in 2011, gain a bachelors degree by 2013, a masters degree by 2014, a PhD by 2016 and the Nobel prize in 2018.
The future is what we make of it but the age of robots is still some decades away at least.