Technology Timeline — Towards Life in 2020

Abstract

No-one knows precisely what life will be like in 2020, but it is always fun guessing. If we know the development rates of many different technologies, we can anticipate many of the things that will be possible and when they are likely to happen. Considering the interactions between the many technologies and society along the way, we can also foresee many potential consequences on business and social life. Developing such scenarios allows us to plan with a much better picture of how life might look, realising that many things will still turn out differently in spite of our best efforts.

It is in computer-based technology that we may see the greatest changes. By 2020, we will have synthetic intelligent life forms sharing our planet and they may even have legal rights. They will catch up with human intelligence before then in overall terms, though there will still be a few things left that only people can do. Most new knowledge will be developed by synthetic intelligence and we will have to accept that we just do not understand some of it, while accepting the resultant benefits. This will lead us into the care economy, where people gradually concentrate more on the human side of activity, as machines gradually take over both physical and mental work. A partnership between man and machine will make our work more productive and our play more enjoyable, augmenting the smallest spark of creativity with machine intelligence. Even entertainment will be within the machine domain, with today's crude computer game heroes and heroines evolving to a whole range of entertainers, even chat show hosts. It is even possible that some of our friends may be synthetic. Since many of our relationships will be net based, we will not even necessarily know which of our friends are synthetic.