
What You'll Need to Know in 2020 That You Don't Know Now (2000) - behnamoh
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/what-youll-need-to-know-in-2020-that-you-dont-know-now
======
aripickar
I think it's interesting how one prediction that they made was that
1,000,000,000 would be starving. However, the massive reduction in extreme
poverty[1] that the world has made, especially since 2000, is amazing and
under-covered. That's one prediction that I am glad they got wrong.

[1][https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-
poverty](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)

~~~
hedora
> _Globally, there are 821.6 million people that are considered undernourished
> or starving._

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/269924/countries-most-
af...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/269924/countries-most-affected-by-
hunger-in-the-world-according-to-world-hunger-index/)

Sorry to be a killjoy.

~~~
aripickar
Undernourished != starving, and 821.6 million != 1 billion. While there is
plenty of work to do left, theres a lot of progress that has been made so far
and its important to recognize that.

~~~
Lammy
Feel free to mentally substitute “has access to anything less than enough
food” and round up slightly, but I don’t see much of a difference.

~~~
ccvannorman
"round up slightly" by >100 _million_ humans?

You don't see a difference?

The point being made is that human civilization is making leaps and bounds
globally because that number _isn 't_ a billion, and most importantly it has a
strong, predictable trajectory _downwards_ , towards _zero_.

"I don't see a difference" is like saying "we were going 80 mph towards the
wall, and we braked, but now we're going 50, and I don't see much difference,
it's practically 80 if you just round up." Are you not interested in the fact
that we're continuing to brake?

~~~
samoa42
thing is, you won't see much of a difference if you hit a wall with 80 or 50
(mph/kmph)

~~~
ldb
Figure 3.3 in [1] suggests that a belted driver has a 40% chance of survival
in a full frontal crash at 50 mph. At 80 mph the survival changes are close to
zero.

[1]
[https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...](https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_fatal_injury_pedestrians_and_car_occupants_richards.pdf)

------
dilippkumar
The author of this article wrote this in a Jan 2020 blog [0]:

> Am I a genius prognosticator and futurist? Hardly. I was just a reporter who
> interviewed a bunch of really smart people. As I recall, when the editors of
> the magazine hired me to write the story, they already had the title in mind
> but weren’t 100 percent sure that it would bear fruit. My editor and I drew
> up a list of scientists the magazine had worked with or had interviewed in
> the recent past, and set me free to contact as many as I could and ask them
> how they saw the future shaping up.

> At the time I thought some of the predictions were off the wall. The one
> about cleaning up our digital reputations, for example, seemed nutty to me.
> ...

[0] [https://www.josephdagnese.com/blog/2020/1/20/that-time-i-
pre...](https://www.josephdagnese.com/blog/2020/1/20/that-time-i-predicted-
the-future-and-cnn-noticed)

------
mikestew
_Even in 2020 you will always need to know if the facts you 've dredged up are
accurate and truthful._

You've always needed to do this. The internet just drives that point home
_hard_. Because when I was growing up 50 years ago, I just assumed that all
the good things said about Christopher Columbus (to pick an easy example) must
have been true because they wouldn't print it in a book if it weren't, right?

Years later, thanks to that same lie-spewing internet Discovery Magazine warns
me about, I find out that Columbus guy was a real prick. That, and an idiot
who thought he was the first to cook up this "round Earth" theory (only to be
beaten by 2000 years by, eh, the Greeks was it?), and got it massively wrong
at that.

The article overall, though, is surprisingly even-handed, lacking in
ridiculous hyperbole so rife in such articles, and amazingly spot on.

~~~
jasonpeacock
Exactly - those 50-book encyclopedia sets your parent owned had a surprising
number of factual errors, and still required cross-checking to verify their
facts.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encycl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Errors_in_the_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_that_have_been_corrected_in_Wikipedia)

~~~
onlydeadheroes

      Even today the english wikipedia has articles that are full of lies, like for example the Gamergate article.

------
jere
I found all of that remarkably prescient except for this:

>To reach that age you'll need to know enough to make more complicated medical
choices: Do I want to jettison a limb and wait five years to regrow another?
Shall I allow a phalanx of nanobots to scrape the plaque out of my arteries or
opt to replace the vessels altogether?

Why do we always seem to wildly overestimate progress in medicine?

~~~
WalterBright
> Why do we always seem to wildly overestimate progress in medicine?

Because we dismiss the role the FDA regulations have in greatly retarding
innovation.

~~~
elil17
If it was the FDA's fault, you'd see scientists regrowing limbs and testing
nano-bots in rats. The FDA actually has a great system of emergency and
compassionate use authorizations that allow early testing of experimental
drugs and devices. These systems came into place because of a long history of
medical disasters: see thalidomide, Elixir sulfanilamide, and so many more.

~~~
zozbot234
> If it was the FDA's fault, you'd see scientists regrowing limbs and testing
> nano-bots in rats.

Can't do that either, the IRB says it's not allowed under research ethics
unless the rats have given informed consent.

~~~
elil17
Unfortunately, now that we have a “smart” printer, we need the printers
consent before we can print the informed consent papers

------
gshdg
The technical predictions are hit and miss (as such things tend to be), but
this bit is prescient:

> On the one hand, your workload will multiply as you bat away each glitch
> resulting from the increased number of gadgets in your life. On the other,
> you will be forced to take on moral questions no human has ever faced. When
> will you find time to do that? How will you contemplate when everything is
> speeding up and time for reflection is practically nonexistent?

------
titzer
> By 2020 you'll need to know how to clean up that electronic trail day in and
> day out. "Say you were searching for information on hats," theorizes Jaron
> Lanier, computer scientist, musical composer, and virtual reality pioneer,
> "and you saw a link about hats, but when you got to it, it was actually a
> weird pornography site about hat fetishes. Then it turns out there's a
> record that you visited this site, and now you're getting bombarded with
> offers from people with hat fetishes. Furthermore, your friends are being
> contacted in case they have hat fetishes. All of a sudden you're the hat
> fetish person in your social circle, and you have to go in and undo it."

Well, this happened, but it's simultaneously more pervasive and more silent
than we would have suspected. The ad networks know _everything_ about your
online behavior, not just hat fetishes.

~~~
smabie
I mean do they? Isn't it just as simple as installing Ghostery? Anyone who
cares already doesn't see ads and already isn't being tracked. If you don't
spend a minute of your time installing a free extension in order to protect
your privacy, than the logical conclusion is that you don't really care (which
is fine, you do you).

~~~
titzer
Ad tracking is a lot more pervasive of a problem than can be solved by a
browser extension.

------
flowerlad
Anyone want to make predictions for 2040?

Here's a start:

Self-driving cars will be the norm. Humans will not be allowed to drive.

Extreme weather will make many parts of the planet unlivable.

Manufacturing will return to America, where robots will do the manufacturing.

Universal Basic Income will become a thing.

Humans will work fewer hours, fewer humans will work, and fewer workers will
work from work.

Wealth and power will be concentrated among fewer people.

There will be no retail industry.

Sports will be the only reason to leave the house.

~~~
geowwy
On the world stage:

• America will still be a strong player, but not completely dominant anymore.

• China will successfully assert itself in East Asia, OR force Japan, Taiwan,
Phillipines, Vietnam, etc into a strong anti-China alliance.

• India and Europe will act more and more independently of the US.

• Turkey will seek to assert itself in former Ottoman territories, possibly
leading to a period of peace in the Middle East if successful.

Technologically:

• Nothing groundbreaking in computer hardware.

• Still no self driving cars or compelling voice interfaces.

• Electric cars gain ground, but other forms of electric transportation become
wildly popular.

• Having a driving license will become less common. Driving may become
something left to the professionals, with more stringent tests and
requirements.

• Meat alternatives become mainstream. People start to look down upon eating
real meat.

Socially/economically:

• Continued urbanisation of the population.

• Continued slowing the the birth rate.

• Dwelling places keep getting smaller.

• Long term monogamous relationships become more uncommon.

• Wage stagnation

• Retail shopping almost dies out

• Entertainment is mostly online

Politically:

• Prison abolition movement will become stronger.

• Primitivist movement will get much bigger. They will seek to return to the
country and a more independent, primitive way of life. When laws and social
circumstances don't allow this they will turn to terrorism.

~~~
elil17
> Prison abolition movement will become stronger.

I really want this to happen. In the past decade, we saw the first mass
pardons of people in the U.S. imprisoned for drug charges. This would have
been unimaginable during the height of the "War on Drugs." This gives me hope
that the imprisonment rate will continue to decline.

~~~
Kiro
Unless crimes are actually going down I don't see how lower imprisonment rate
is good. Just sounds like criminals getting away with it to me.

~~~
franze
So basically: imprison more people -> cost goes up -> crime does not go down
-> imprison more people -> cost goes up -> crime does not go down -> imprison
more people ->....

Does not sound too clever in my book.

Maybe time to try something else?

~~~
Kiro
What are the alternatives? For me, punishing criminals is more important than
rehabilitating them.

~~~
elil17
Why is punishing people more important than preventing recidivism?

~~~
Kiro
I want criminals to be punished for their crimes. That's justice for me. Can't
explain why I feel that way but I do.

~~~
solstice
I (and I suspect victims of crime) sympathise with this POV. However, I'd
encourage you to also think about it from a larger perspective, like a
government: what would be the most advantageous path for a society to take in
dealing with crime? If you take such a larger perspective you'll see that
individual justice is only one of several important factors. I don't have time
to explain further. But one analogy could that nobody likes to pay taxes
themselves, but many accept that taxes in general (if well-spent) can be a net
positive for a society/country.

~~~
elil17
Exactly. It’s hard to feel emotionally that prison abolition is right in the
face of an individual case. You want justice! But if you look at the system as
a whole you have to conclude that, on average, justice isn’t really being
served. The tax burden is unjust to the tax payer. Poor conditions and long
sentences are unjust to incarcerated people. Strange sentencing rules and
prosecutory practices (people can get more time for petty theft than rape) are
unjust to people who want justice.

------
apropostate
Kind of eerie how much of that was spot-on. Except for the medicine bits, all
of those things came true.

------
chaos_a
>By the year 2020, for example, you will need to know how to talk to your
house. Today your home contains dozens of appliances, each working
independently. >The lights will flicker on, the air conditioner will have
kicked in, the refrigerator will clamor to enumerate all the meals you can
assemble with the groceries cached inside.

It's amusing that this is sort of true, however every voice assistant I've
ever used kinda suck. The most they really can do is tell the weather and set
reminders. Add in the fact that a smart fridge might not use the same AI
platform as a smart speaker and that dream is shattered.

------
hedora
> _" Say you were searching for information on hats," theorizes Jaron Lanier,
> computer scientist, musical composer, and virtual reality pioneer, "and you
> saw a link about hats, but when you got to it, it was actually a weird
> pornography site about hat fetishes. Then it turns out there's a record that
> you visited this site, and now you're getting bombarded with offers from
> people with hat fetishes. Furthermore, your friends are being contacted in
> case they have hat fetishes. All of a sudden you're the hat fetish person in
> your social circle, and you have to go in and undo it."_

This is charmingly naive. He thought you could undo targeting and social
networking snafus!

If only we could replace all the Internet propagandists and seo content
shovelers with hat fetish people.

That would be objectively better, right? I don’t even really like hats, but
I’d be OK with it.

~~~
dang
That's a bit unfair to Jaron. He didn't make a hole-in-one but he hit the
green in one stroke (I'm sure there's a golf name for that, but know nothing
about golf metaphors). What he said was pretty astonishing for 2000. Google
didn't even introduce ads until...checking...oh! three weeks later, and the
privacy concerns that he's depicting have basically become the water in which
we all swim.

------
CM30
Well, some of this list was surprisingly prescient, like the stuff about
online tracking and home assistants. The points about online misinformation
and fact checking were pretty ominous too, though the internet of the early
00s had the exact same problems.

The medical predictions however were way off (it'll probably be a while until
nanotechnology as mentioned in the article becomes that ubiquous or limbs can
be regrown), and the self driving car ones sounded like something people would
write today in their list of future predictions.

And for the moral quandries? Well, it seems the human response to those has
been what it always has; ignore everything that's happening outside their
tribe/local area/country. That's probably never going to change, since any
creature that lives its life constantly thinking about everyone else's moral
struggles is going to be living its life on the constant verge of a mental
breakdown.

------
_bxg1
Remarkably accurate aside from the healthcare stuff

------
mikekchar
You'll need to know how to build a website that loads its ads before the
reader has finished skimming the article.

------
travbrack
It would have been so hard to predict Twitter.

------
DyslexicAtheist
_> Tomorrow's Kaczynskis will be able to concoct harmful viruses and insinuate
them into the food supply, or perhaps release pathogens in public places.
You'll need to be ready for them. _

TK was heavily in the news back then so it's no surprise they predicted more
people like him may be causing mayhem at a far bigger scale. I don't think
this kind of terror is likely though since people rather commit suicide before
going down TK's path.

They mentioned TK but didn't go into what drove him to criminal insanity:
environmental destruction due to systems thinking (TK got heavily influenced
by Jacques Ellul's "La Technique" and references him throughout his writings).

Difference from 2000 I see today which I wouldn't have imagined in my worst
nightmare is environmental destruction. The places where I went diving in the
90ies: like Great Barrier Reef, Gulf of Thailand, Indonesia's "ring of fire",
that were full of life back then, they are now underwater wastelands. The
primal forests / jungle I trekked in North Sumatra are nearly burnt down and
forests of Borneo under threat from total destruction thanks to the new
capitol they want to buid there. Apes such as Orang-Utans (Malaysian for
"forest-man") nearly extinct. The beaches where I hung out in my early 20ies
are now full of plastic and need to be cleared daily otherwise tourism there
wouldn't be possible at all.

I'm not TK but I do wish humanity wouldn't be "making leaps and bounds
globally" because we destroy our own home and therefore ourselves for no
reason other than pure greed.

When the human race makes leaps and bounds it also leaps further towards its
own demise. And I wonder if this is unique to humans or if other species given
enough time would also race towards their own destruction in such fashion. And
if capable of language would they describe their leaping as progress or would
they be smarter and see it for what it is?

We need to think of ways to reduce our population back down to size for the
planet to recover and in correct proportion to our surrounding. Because
thinking that we can just use smarter-Tech or geo-engineering will destroy us.
The only way to get there is less of us. I already had kids so it's too late
for me. But I hope I won't be a grandparent, and I hope other people also stop
reproducing. I also cheer for this virus to wipe out as many as it can, even
it means I or my loved ones die. Not because I'm a lunatic but because it's
the only fair way (without a human deciding who is removed from the gene-
pool). I also hope people will voluntarily opt not to have children but I
think that's just a fantasy and example of dangerous systems thinking (who
would enforce such insanity?).

[https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah](https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah)

------
ripvanwinkle
amazingly prescient

