So, we are just over a week into 2020. What type of technology did you think we'd have by now?

Google Glasses kind of contacts.
Controlled, not by voice, but by thought/electric brain pulses (or whatever the medical term for that is).

@rebbel That would be insanely awesome but jeez imagine the possible repercussions of that!!! I am a person that LOVES technology but then you gotta think, these companies have been caught taking peoples information and selling it.

Imagine getting that kind of technology, thinking about a product, and then getting ads without even googling it or buying it! That would be scary.

Orgasmatrons…relax, don’t do it, when you wanna cum!

Customizable pizza and schooling. By the slice/topics.

A reverse v-chip. To get rid of all the g rated musicals.

Augmented reality. Apple has that in the works right now so it should come soon. That’s going to be a game changer like the personal computer was.

Definately the food processor from Star Trek, and the robot maid from The Jetsons. And jetpacks, why are we still consuming fossil fuels?

Flying cars & underwater cars. They almost had the underwater car perfected back when I was a child.

Robot butler/maid. Oh would I love to have one!

In the seventies I predicted in a writing assignment outdoor air purifiers, but we got smog regulations instead.

Solar powered everything.

Holographic messaging.

Then too, we have several advances I did not see coming.

@Patty_Melt What advances?

I thought we would have more going on in space. If not a Martian colony, at least a moon base and more space stations. Also flying cars. That said, I’m glad we don’t have them. I can’t imagine the destruction and mayhem if people were texting and crashing into people’s roofs. I certainly have less faith in humanity.

@gorillapaws

I wonder if you would get in more trouble for driving(flying??) a flying car while drunk vs driving a regular car while drunk.

When I was a kid, computers were government only, and took up an entire room. What’s more, they frequently messed up!

Some predicted we would one day have video phones, but laptops were still a zit faced kid’s dream. He wasn’t yet collaborating in his garage.

I wished asomebody would invent a cross between phones and walkie talkies, but smartphones were even better than Star Trek communicators.

I thought we’d have service robots, but never expected to see one on Jeopardy.

I never thought it would be okay to stir hot soup with a plastic spoon.

When I was a kid, laser beams were for weapons, and precision cutting, not dance clubs.

Some technology we expected never happened because someone jumped past to something better.

In 1969, my economics professor declared in class that we would be paying over $100/mon to watch TV, that we’d be looking at each other when we talked on the phone, and that everybody on the same street would have a different area code for their phone number. I scoffed at the idea at the time. Still, here we are 50 years later & the over the air TV is so unappealing that we’re paying way too much to get any news or entertainment, we are looking at each other when we speak on our phones, and most of my friends have different area codes. NOT what I was expecting…yet something I was interested in seeing how it would end up being.

What I have learned over the year is that human has a tendency to overestimate how future technology would evolve. There are fictions that depict the 21st century as some ultra-modern world with mind-blowing technology. Well we have really nice technology right now, but we haven’t reached the point of traveling in time, or making clones of ourselves. But I can see that we are sort of living in a computer-controlled world. Not the kind of intelligent robots that fictions say, but computers are an integral part of our society. The dream of doing everything just by sitting at home is kind of fulfilled.

We don’t really overestimate, we just get it wrong. Star trek devices like the talking computer, and communicator exceeded expectations in just 40 years yet we have nothing approaching real space travel yet.