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In 2030, artificial intelligence may be as smart as your biological friends. “I think that in three to five years you will see a computer system that will be able to autonomously learn how to understand,” IBM Watson lead developer David Ferrucci says in 2018’s Do You Trust This Computer. “Not unlike the way the human mind works
Read more: CNet 2020s visions: We’ll get flying cars just before becoming software-based people
Ectogenesis??
Zoltan Istvan, author and current Republican candidate challenging President Trump for the 2020 GOP nomination, says an emerging related technology called in vitro gametogenesis could soon shift how we approach infertility and having children. The process basically allows for sperm or eggs to be created from an individual’s stem cells. “It could change how women approach their lives, since they will no longer be on a time table … They’ll be able to have children at any age,” he tells me. “This tech can also be used for men, and individuals may not even need partners anymore to have children
Read more: CNet 2020s visions: We’ll get flying cars just before becoming software-based people
It gets worse before it gets better?
Advances in artificial intelligence will open up new opportunities for mass surveillance and mass manufactured emotional manipulation,” Interchain Foundation President and Tendermint CEO Jae Kwon tells me. “It will get worse before it gets better
Read more: CNet 2020s visions: We’ll get flying cars just before becoming software-based people
Finally.... the flying car?
Vivek Wadhwa, author of the 2017 book The Driver in the Driverless Car, expects that along the way, several other major advances will be in common use by 2030, including the ever-delayed flying car, medical tricorders, bionic exoskeletons and unlimited clean energy. “Some technologies will take longer to reach the masses than others, but they will be at hand,” he tells me. “The 2020s will be when the incredible promises of technology finally happen.”
But engineer, inventor and former BT “futurologist” Ian Pearson sees our self-driving destiny playing out differently. “I think there’s going to be a shock in the 2020s on that one,” he says. Pearson envisions bans on personal cars in city centers in favor of electric “pods” (sometimes called personal rapid transit) that would be inexpensive and basic — perhaps akin to big, covered golf carts — running on designated roadways and controlled from riders’ phones.
