Scientific predictions for 2020

Arthur C. Clarke

It is well known that future forecasts are all the more risky the further in time they go. Readers of my blog know that I love keeping scientific forecasts to use in the future, so as to check them when the corresponding dates arrive. Sometimes I have waited for half a century to perform these checks, which in general prove that the forecasts tend to be unsuccessful, generally due to too much optimism, although sometimes they are correct. In this previous post, I checked some of the predictions made by such distinguished popularizers as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

The three predictions I’m going to check today were made for the year 2020, with less time to go: 25 years in the first, just 10 years or a little above in the other two. Let’s look at them:

Jules Verne’s scientific predictions for 2889

Jules Verne

In a science fiction story published in English in the United States in 1889, entitled In the Twenty-Ninth Century and subtitled One Day of an American Journalist in 2889, Jules Verne made several scientific predictions that, according to him, would take almost a millennium to be put into practice. Let us look at a few of the most interesting:

•         The average lifetime of the human population will have increased from 37 in 1889, to 68 in 2889. According to the UN, the average longevity in the world exceeded 68 years in the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, almost nine centuries before Verne’s forecast. Here, as elsewhere, he underestimated.

•         The land and sea voyages of the nineteenth century will have been replaced in the XXIX by air travel, or intercontinental underwater pneumatic tubes. At present, little more than a century after Verne’s story, although air travel has achieved great primacy, land and sea travel continue to exist, and for distances less than a thousand kilometers make a successful competition to air travel. Intercontinental pneumatic tubes, on the other hand, are still science fiction, although there some recent steps in this direction.

What happened to the predictions for 2017?

Drone

At the end of every year, many predictions are made about the following year. This applies especially to politics and the technological field. In this blog we are not interested in politics, so we’ll talk a little about technological predictions. What happened to those that were made for 2017 near the end of 2016? Have they been fulfilled?

This question is difficult to answer satisfactorily (with a yes or no), for those who make predictions usually do them on purpose in an ambiguous way, so the next year they’ll be able to say that they were right. For instance:

Predicting the scientific future

Man likes making predictions about the future. Scientists are human beings, therefore they make predictions about the progress to be expected in various fields of research during the coming years, decades and even centuries. These predictions are widely publicized by the media.

Are scientific predictions more likely to be satisfied than other predictions of the future? We might think so, since science is the most rational branch of human knowledge. What should we do to confirm or disconfirm this surmise? We should apply the scientific method to the predictions, i.e. wait until the scheduled time has come and check whether the predictions were fulfilled or not. Such studies are not usually done. Everyone is prepared to predict or to listen to predictions, but few bother to check if those anticipations actually came to happen.

There are a few egregious cases that many people remember. In 1956, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, where the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, predicted that in less than ten years we would have computer programs capable of beating the world chess champion, or seamlessly translating between any two human languages. The total failure of this prediction is obvious: the first target came true 41 years later rather than 10, while the second has not been achieved after almost 60 years. As a result of this failure, research in artificial intelligence stopped for more than a decade and was not revived until expert systems reawakened interest in the discipline.

Why science can’t explain everything

The difficulty of explaining everything is not due to our mental weakness, but to the very structure of the universe. In recent centuries we have discovered that the fabric of the cosmos can be considered on several different levels. While the next level has not been discovered, what happens in the previous one cannot be explained, it can just be described. Consequently, for the last known level we can never have explanations, we can only have descriptions.

Let's look at a little history:

1. Eighteenth-century chemists discovered many new substances. Not knowing what they were, all they could do was describe them in catalogs of properties, but they had no explanation of those properties.

Are we about to become immortal?

Arthur C. Clarke

In 1965 Arthur C. Clarke published a short story, titled Dial F for Frankenstein, later published in the collection The wind from the sun: stories of the space age. In that story Clarke proposed the following scenario:

When all global telephone systems are connected via geostationary satellites, the number of components of the global system will exceed those in the human brain. As such a system will have access to the information in all the computers connected to the network, we’ll have a very complex system with an extremely high amount of information. If conscience arises automatically from such a system, the computer network, connected by telephone, should be conscious and, being far superior to any human brain, will take control of the Earth.