Every year, we pick 10 recent technological breakthroughs that we predict will have a big impact in the years to come. We’ve been doing it for nearly two decades, and we’ve been pretty good at predicting big trends like data mining, natural-language processing, and microfluidics, but not so great at specific products.
Let’s look back at our 2010 list: mobile phones with hologram-style 3D displays? Microbes that turn carbon dioxide from the air directly into diesel fuel? Electronic implants that dissolve in your body when their job is done? “Social TV” that lets you talk about shows with your friends online while you watch? (Yeah, we have that—it’s called Twitter.)
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At least in 2009 we profiled Siri—before it was even launched, mark you, let alone acquired by Apple. Shame we bought into the company’s hype that it was going to be not merely a voice-activated search engine but a “do engine” that can book you a restaurant or a flight.
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Then again, if we really could predict which new inventions would take off, we wouldn’t tell you about them; we’d start a fund. Venture capitalists, who do this all day long, still get it wrong nine times out of 10. But as any decent futurist will tell you, the point of futurism isn’t to guess the future; it’s to challenge your assumptions about the present so the future doesn’t catch you off guard.
So this year, since it’s 2020 and we like round numbers as much as anyone, we decided to supplement our annual list with a closer look at the art and science of prediction, and to collect some other people’s predictions for 2030—if only so we can have a laugh a decade hence at how wrong they were.
This last topic is close to my heart; I first wrote about it more than 20 years ago, when nobody had yet built a working quantum computer. Last fall Google announced the first demonstration of “quantum supremacy,” a quantum computer doing something a classical one can’t feasibly pull off. Some people are still skeptical they’ll ever amount to much, but I predict we will be using them to solve real problems by 2030. Check back on me then.