| Continuing my review of the predictions from the 2010 thread with those I consider to be Hit and Miss (a bit right, a bit wrong): Hit and Miss: 2010 Prediction: Ebooks defeat paper books. All high street bookstores go bust.
—JulianMorrison 2021 Review: High street book sellers had a very hard decade, but people are still buying plenty of paper books online. 2010 Prediction: Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.
—JulianMorrison 2021 Review: Driverless cars have appeared, but the software is not yet reliable enough for them to be operated without human oversight under typical conditions. Small trials of fully driverless cars are underway in some places. 2010 Prediction: BPA and pthalates are finally banned from the food and personal grooming categories.
—ericb 2021 Review: Some legislation was passed and BPA use did decline markedly for some applications, but this seems to have been mostly due to commercial decisions rather than a direct result of regulation. 2010 Prediction: The technology that will eventually 'cure' cancer is invented--essentially a find and kill tool for a genetic signature. Signature creation is built for more and more cancers and becomes more dynamic with added logic over time.
—ericb 2021 Review: Progress has been made in this regard across a number of promising technologies, particularly immunotherapy, and there is some hope that the MRNA technology used for some of the coronavirus vaccines might revolutionise cancer treatment, but this remains to be seen. 2010 Prediction: By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.
—artagnon 2021 Review: Internet Explorer's usage share is insignificant and Chrome's is estimated to be over 60%, but Firefox's is only a few percent. 2010 Prediction: Quantum computing will start to surge around the third quarter of the decade. It won't be a general tool and it won't be used for cracking crypto - it will be doing things like data mining, bioinformatics, and solving variations on the travelling salesman problem.
—JulianMorrison 2021 Review: There has been substantial investment in quantum computing in recent years and quantum supremacy was demonstrated in 2019, so the prediction of a 'surge' around the third quarter of the decade was arguably right, but quantum computing still hasn't quite yet become a practical tool. 2010 Prediction: In 2020, AMD's 3rd generation holodeck isn't quite like Star Trek, but the future video games and videoconferencing/telepresence systems make today's tech look like something out of the stone age.
—kf 2021 Review: Telepresence has not advanced much and videoconferencing has only improved incrementally, despite many millions of people being forced to use it for the first time during the coronavirus pandemic. Virtual Reality headsets are impressing people however, and ILM's StageCraft technology looks set to change the visual effects industry after being used successfully by Disney in the production of its Star Wars spinoff series, The Mandalorian. Raytracing and other technologies are also pushing video games increasingly towards photorealism. 2010 Prediction: The media as we know it now will fade away from people’s lives like the Oldsmobile and the Pontiac. Perfectly viable businesses, self-destructed, not important enough to qualify for taxpayer bailouts just gone from the scene like the horse and buggy. They had a good run but now it’s over.
—Scott_MacGregor And... 2010 Prediction: Death of traditional news industry.
—Slashed 2021 Review: Social media has become the primary news source for many, and print media has continued to suffer serious declines in circulation and influence, but major national newspapers around the world have largely managed to survive by improving their online offerings, and they remain mainstream sources of journalism. Television audiences have also declined further, but the major networks are still around and influential, and, like the newspapers, have adapted by shifting their attention to the internet audience. 2010 Prediction: WIFI will be free for everyone in all major metropolitan areas and it will be 100% taxpayer supported.
—Scott_MacGregor 2021 Review: Taxpayer-supported WiFi is not provided freely to everyone in all major metropolitan areas, but it is widely available free of charge from commercial establishments, and city governments do subsidise it in some places. 2010 Prediction: The first real AI is created, but isn't taken seriously until it comes up with a revolutionary way of promoting soap powder, which advertising executives describe as "blindingly obvious" in hindsight. However, its success is tragically short-lived, as advertising is mmediately redefined as not requiring genuine intelligence. The search for real AI continues....
—10ren 2021 Review: This has a ring of GPT-3 to it. 2010 Prediction: Some gene-therapy will be more commonplace.
—brfox 2021 Review: Gene therapies are beginning to bear fruit, but they remain relatively rare. 2010 Prediction: Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments.
—IsaacL 2021 Review: Chrome OS's usage share is estimated to be around 4% at the moment, though the major commercial developers are clearly trying to move more towards making their operating systems reliant on web access. 2010 Prediction: Augmented reality becomes a major entertainment system. You wear something like an EyeTap device and 3D content is projected into your field of view. The device also contains a accelerometers (same as the Wii controllers) to monitor head pose. Highly compelling 3D content, including games, business charts, street directions, ads, and even "adult content" can be interacted with at any location using the headset, which is wirelessly linked to something like a mobile phone or laptop.
—motters 2021 Review: Augmented Reality has definitely developed substantially, and it achieved widespread public attention around 2016 when the Pokemon Go game became popular. Aside from some early adopters of headsets, however, it's still mostly confined to the screens of handheld devices and vehicle interiors. The prediction got the use of accelerometers etc. right. There are many practical uses of AR now of the kind the prediction envisaged, but adoption is uneven and a lot of applications are still regarded as gimmicks. Many people in the developed world are now carrying around devices with them all day that have quite sophisticated AR abilities, but at the moment it's still a peripheral feature for most. 2010 Prediction: Augmented reality could also be used for political purposes. I imagine that as part of an election promotion campaign a photo-realistic avatar of the candidate sits opposite to you in your living room and says "look Bob, it's like this...". The avatar has access to your data and can completely customize the political message to your individual circumstances. This ultra personalized campaigning could be highly effective.
—motters 2021 Review: Personalised AR avatars might not have become a feature of political campaigns, but personalised targeting of political advertising over social media, and the use of data harvested from internet users to monitor and improve its effectiveness, certainly has; that aspect of the prediction was very prescient. 2010 Prediction: growth of a chinese middle class with a voice and some balls and independence
—slvrspoon 2021 Review: The Chinese middle class has continued to grow, and they have a voice on social media, reacting to various issues and cultural trends. Their independence, however, is heavily controlled for now. The Chinese government seems to use social media to monitor and influence public sentiment, and there is strict censorship of politically sensitive speech, which seems to have increased in recent years. |