Scott Underwood column: 2020 wasn’t what it was cracked up to be – The Herald Bulletin

After we got past Y2K, 2020 towered like a beacon of light, attracting the moths of prognostication. Twenty years before, the 20/20 promise of perfect vision was simply too enticing to ignore.

Some projected spectacular advances in technology, breakthroughs in health care and sweeping changes in the world order.

Few foresaw that a spiky microscopic ball would completely dominate the landscape in 2020, wreaking death, depression and recession.

Before we give 2020 one last kick in the pants, lets look back at what the past year was supposed to bring.

In 1997, futurists Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden predicted that Americans would be voting electronically from home long before 2020 rolled around.

While the novel coronavirus prompted many states to expand mail-in voting, can you imagine the controversy that electronic home voting would have caused in the 2020 election? The lawsuits would still be flying.

Schwartz and Leyden took another flyer when they predicted that China was on the path to democracy.

The Chinese people, of course, still suffer under the yoke of authoritarian rule, and the government still draws scrutiny for human rights violations, particularly against the Uighurs, minority Muslims whove been subjected to reeducation camps.

While the idea that the Chinese intentionally unleashed the coronavirus on the rest of the world has been thoroughly discredited, theres no doubt that the Chinese government is more than capable of harming people at home and abroad.

In 2005, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and computer scientist, wrote that by the 2020s, nanobots would be used inside the human body to feed cells and remove waste. Kurzweil projected that these nanobots would render eating and drinking obsolete.

Yuck. That sounds like an even worse 2020 than the one we got.

Kurzweil also thought that print books would be dead by 2020, greatly exaggerating the demise of an industry.

Last year, 650 million printed books sold in the United States, according to statistica.com.

Schwartz and Leyden predicted that almost every new car sold would be a hybrid in 2020 and that most would use hydrogen power.

They were a little bit off. Hybrids, plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars account for just 4% of the light vehicle market today in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Few cars sold in the country use hydrogen power.

The Space Studies Board of the National Research Council predicted in 1996 that NASA would coordinate possible human exploratory missions to the moon and Mars within the next quarter century, explicitly projecting that humans would land on Mars by 2018.

While weve sent eight unmanned missions to Mars, men walking on the red planet are limited to fictional accounts.

And this one seems fitting to end.

Dave Evans, a futurist for Cisco Visual Networking, predicted that there would be no more need for predictions from futurists.

By 2020, predicting the future will be commonplace for the average person, he said in 2012. We are amassing unprecedented amounts of data New image and video analysis algorithms and tools will unlock this rich source of data, creating unprecedented insight. Cloud-based tools will allow anyone to mine this data and perform what-if analysis, even using it to predict the future.

Well, we certainly all could have used that technological crystal ball going into 2020. If wed known what was coming, we would have been highly motivated to build a time machine and leap a year ahead.

Continue reading here:
Scott Underwood column: 2020 wasn't what it was cracked up to be - The Herald Bulletin