There is only a year left to be patient: according to an Italian magazine in 1968, this is how the world should have looked in 2022.
“Two by twenty” is not the best year in world history. It will be remembered as you like, but not as a year of accomplishments, discoveries or achievements (if only not some "bottom"). Although, due to its "roundness", many futurists and forecasters used it as a kind of milestone, the year of the emergence of some breakthrough technologies or inventions. Let's remember which predictions did not come true in the Year of the Pandemic.
Let's start, I'm clear red, with the
Life expectancy over 100 years
Formally, this milestone was predicted not for 2020, but for the previous year, but when did the releases come out on time? In 1999, Kurzweil predicted that the development of wearable electronics would equip a person with gadgets that would be able to diagnose acute and chronic diseases, as well as actively help maintain and restore health. And due to this, the average life expectancy will exceed a century. Well, our pedometers and heart rate monitors in 2020 are clearly not the ones that will lead to mass longevity. According to the UN forecast , the average life expectancy in the world by 2050 will reach 77 years.
Retired at 70
According to the English editor Hamish McRae , retirement at 70 should have become the norm in 2020. The closest to this (from countries where there is a pension system in general) are a number of European countries where men retire at 67. And many in the next couple of years are planning to delay this milestone to 69-70 years.
Computers are everywhere, and wirelessly
According to Kurzweil, in 2020 the world should have entered literally stuffed with computers built into walls, furniture, clothes, jewelry and even our bodies. And no monitors for you - the image had to be projected directly onto the retina. Keyboards and cables had to become an anachronism.
Well, it's fifty-fifty here. On the one hand, we have learned to make all kinds of embedded electronics. The rest of the prediction did not come true: there is no talk of total filling yet, with projection onto the retina is also a bit tight, and keyboards and cables are more alive than all living things.
Hydrogen car industry
Schwartz and Leiden - both Peters - promised us that by 2020, hydrogen-fueled cars that can drive for months without refueling will win. And that almost all new cars will be produced with hybrid engines with main operating mode on hydrogen. As you can see, so far things are not going very well in this direction, battery-powered cars have advanced much further.
Mars again
The same authors predicted that just in 2020 the first people would land on Mars, even reported the size of the landing - four people. And the expedition was to be the fruit of the efforts of almost all countries in the world. The last sentence is especially interesting: one can very vividly imagine the contribution to the flight to Mars of countries such as Ethiopia, Burkina Faso or Papua New Guinea. Okay, without them. Here's some fun fun: come up with a business case for participating in a Mars project, say, for 80% of the world's countries, sorted by GDP.
And the moon, of course
In 2009, Eric Anderson of Space Adventures promised regular passenger services to the moon in 2020. Not Mars, of course, dreams are on a lower level, but the moon buses on Baikonur are still far away.
Robots, and even emotional ones
In 2006, Elon University was noted for the prediction that in 14 years our lives will be filled with all kinds of robots that will practically free people from physical work . And the British futurist Ian Pearson believed that there would already be computers with emotions and awareness of their existence. When Pearson was called to account in early 2020, he dodged, saying that AI is being developed 35-40% slower than expected.
Monkey servant
In 1994, the RAND Corporation (one of the main visionary and analytical organizations in the United States, serving the military, NASA and God knows who else) suggested that by 2020 it would be possible to breed "intelligent animals, such as monkeys", on which will dump physical labor. It's amazing, and this is not a frostbitten fantasy, but RAND, and even in 1994.
The solar system and time travel
However, the idea of intelligent monkeys is just a model of sanity compared to the predictions given in the same RAND in the blessed sixties: 82 experts (!) Were nazioned that by 2020 mankind should have already conquered not only Mars, but also Venus with Jupiter and Pluto. We also had to create primitive life forms and invent a long coma that would play the role of time travel. And a universal language would also dominate the planet.
Personnel as a human brain
And finally, one more prophecy of Raymond Kurzweil: "By 2010, supercomputers will equal the computing power of the human brain, and by 2020, personal computers."
Did anything come true?
Almost all the predictions that, to one degree or another, can be considered come true today, were formulated not specifically about 2020, but in the style of “in the first decades of the 21st century”, or “by the 2020s”, or “in the coming years, relatively dates of prediction ".
A few exceptions include, say, Jeff Bezos's 1999 prediction (and it did not come true to the same extent):
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What else? Well, for example, in the anime Akira, created in 1988, it was said that the Summer Olympics would be held in Tokyo in 2020. And they didn't lie, it really should have passed, only it was postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.
Do you know about any predictions that came true about 2020?