As we are in a longer lockdown here in York County it can be extremely frustrating for everyone involved. You might need a bit of a break, so if you are looking for a moment away from the world look no further than the Nicely Done Sites blog. In today’s world of rampant media speculation, conspiracy theories and prediction sometimes we need to be reminded that predictions are not always accurate. Today we will look over some technological predictions about 2020 that have not come to be.
Animal Employees
In 1994 the global think tank RAND Corporation believed that by 2020 humanity would be able to breed intelligent animals who would be capable of handling chores for us, most notably apes. They would handle manual labor or could even handle chauffeur duties they believed.
Of course we know this has not come to pass though it has not been entirely off the mark. While we have not bred intelligent animals, artificial intelligence has started to handle some of these tasks, from farming to flipping burgers.
Deliveries
In 1959 the Navy attempted to revolutionize mail delivery. A nuclear warhead was removed from a missile and replaced with a payload of 3,000 letters addressed to political figures of the time. It was fired from a submarine toward a Naval Air Station and the mail was delivered successfully. This prompted the Postmaster General of the time to declare that by now mail would be delivered by rockets. That obviously has not come true but we are seeing different methods of delivery using drones or AI. So, there’s that.
Flying Cars
Flying cars have long been a dream of sci-fi writers and quite frankly everyone and it has been for sometime. In the 1950s Popular Mechanics was pretty sure that by now every single American family would have their own personal helicopter. Not only that but it would burn any fuel from stove oil to kerosene to aviation gasoline.
The Home Of The Future
Arthur C. Clarke is most known for writing the short story that was the basis for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey but he had quite the visitation for the future. It was more than just HAL 2000. Clarke believed that the home of the future would not be tied to terra firma. Move over flying cars, Clarke believed that the house of the 21st century would be able to fly.
How would these homes be cleaned? In a 1950 Popular Mechanics article New York Times editor Waldemar Kaempffert believed that the furniture of the 21st century would be made of a waterproof plastic or synthetic fiber that could be cleaned using your everyday garden hose. A drain in the middle of the room would remove the water from the room when completed and drying will be done by unleashing a blast of hot air. Would that be better than the prediction of a nuclear powered vacuum cleaner espoused by the former president of Lewyt Vacuum CleanerCompany Alex Lewyt? We don’t know but that is one company that no longer exists.
As for what we wear in the home, in 1939 British Vogue product designer Gilbert Rhode speculated that buttons, pockets, collars, and ties would be a thing of the past. He also believed men would stop shaving (that has sort of happened in 2020). At the same time our hats would have radios in them to keep us constantly connected. He’s sort of right, we are constantly connected since most people spend all day with their smartphones and while wearable tech does exist in hat form it is not something that is common at all.
Using Your Computer
We have used a qwerty keyboard for so long we are used to it. That might not be for long if one prediction from over a century ago had his way. John Watkins Jr, the then-curator of mechanical technology at the Smithsonian Institute believed that by the 21st century the letters C,X, and Q would be removed from the alphabet. He believed that these letters were unnecessary and we would be spelling mostly by sound. He may have gotten one prediction right though, we would communicate with condensed words expressing condensed ideas. Could he have described the emoji? Either way our keyboards still have C,X and Q on it.
The technology used by us in 2020 would also be suitable for electronic voting. Perhaps this is the most likely of this group to actually be right as electronic voting is being discussed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A 1997 Wired article believed that it would be common by now.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil also had a strange prediction about modern computers. Computers would become essentially invisible and keyboards and mice would be nonexistent by 2019. He was somewhat right, as most everything contains an embedded chip these days helping to create all of this smart tech that we know and love. Keyboards and mice are also not as necessary anymore but they can still be found. By the way, how does one get the job title of futurist?
Transportation
How cool would it be to be able to transport yourself instantaneously to another location? In a more recent prediction author Michael O’Farrell predicted in 2014 that by 2020 we would be able to transport ourselves instantaneously. On top of that some people would have telepathy and both of these would be common with everyone by 2040.
A bit further back in 1957 Popular Mechanics predicted that most every road and street in the United States would not be asphalt or concrete but instead would be a pneumatic tube. You would only need a vehicle to get from your home to the nearest tube. This of course worked well in Futurama but that was not only a cartoon but was set in the year 3000 and not reality in 2020.
Interplanetary Travel
When a human sets foot on Mars is a big question and the United States may be involved in a space race now with China for that very goal. It didn’t need to be that way. In 1997 Wired Magazine believed that this would be the year that humanity set foot on the Red Planet. It might take another decade or more. Considering all of the technological innovations that came out of the space race in the 1960s, it is exciting to think what could have been now in 2020.
Of course it is more than just Mars. After landing humans on the Moon most people believed that it was only a matter of time until the average person could not only visit the Moon but also vacation there. Space tourism is a visionary concept but outside of taking a few people to the edge of space it is not a reality yet, much less taking your vacation on the lunar surface.
The RAND Corporation also weighed in back in the 1980s believing that by now we would have landed humans on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and humans would have flown to Pluto. Not only that but a universal language would have been developed and humans would be mining the Moon (probably with the intelligent apes they predicted would exist). Of course a manmade object has visited Pluto with New Horizons but humans have yet to get past the Moon.
Medical Technology
Medical technology has been improving a lot, even in the past decade. How good did people think it would be? Futurist Ray Kurzweil believed as recently as 1999 that by now, our medical technology would be so good that the average lifespan of a human would be over 100 years. Yeah, missed that one.
This of course does not even touch predictions made in movies and on television. It proves that this rosey colored vision of the future will be harder to reach than we think.