You are about to arrive in the year 2020 — a historic year where we have finally trained animals to do the hard work, like the gorilla that flies the family helicopter. The only thing we worry about is that, what with self-cleaning houses and all, the animals will be unemployed.
Oh wait, none of that is true. But smart folks predicted it would be, because the year 2020 just seemed so futuristic.
Take off your jet packs, citizens of 2020, there is some bad news for all ordinary time travelers. Contrary to what some bigwigs predicted, we won’t teleport ourselves at will nor will we read people’s minds. Most of us, anyway.
And, we aren’t colonizing Mars.
Still, this is a time of change. In just the last 60 years, we’ve gone to the moon, started living cyber-lives on social media, and mainly stopped getting paychecks on paper. Today, we don’t need to have mail delivered via rocket, as predicted by the Postmaster General in the 1960s. We have email, so junk travels in the blink of an eye.
Thanks to social media, we know the letters C, X and Q are still in the alphabet, contrary to what John E. Watkins, Jr. predicted in 1900. But, also thanks to social media, we now know few people know the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re.”
In the next 100 years, technologies like 3D printing, biotechnology, robotics, digital currency, and wearables all look poised to change everything. But who knows? In 2200, someone will probably be chuckling about people who thought we could print out a robot at our desk. Or not.
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