janelane wrote:
In my "Engineering Design" class, we have to figure out what the world of 2020 will be like.
Brilliant. This is the sort of question we all should be asking. I'd like to see the final results. communication: No one will have a POTS line. You'll have a digital network connection in your house, maybe ip6, all voice traffic will be carried over that digital network, your cellphone will be like a sidekick, it might have thin parts that fold out to make the realestate bigger when you need it, it will use your home network when at home and other networks when not at home. It will be able to project content onto the wall. Long Distance will be included in the price of whatever you pay for network access. Its possible that the internet will submerge into a MMORPG style virtual reality environment, but it remains to be seen. There might be a standards war over that in 15 years. The media industry will be quite blurred with blogs and independent music/film. The copyright battles will be near their peak at that time. Movies, music, and news will come as often from proam indies then from "industry," but you'll turn to the same source for both kinds of information and it may be hard to tell them apart. You'll have internet radio in your car. Reputation systems will matter more then editors. Comptuer security problems will constantly plauge what we'd today call telecom and television infrastucture. South Korea will do for communciations technology what Japan did for manufacturing in the 80s. information availability: You'll search wikipedia instead of searching google. You'll pretty much have everything instantly available to a device that fits in your pocket. We're almost there today. A lot of the good information will be produced by proams. geographic location: What do you want? Your digital devices will know where they are. Your cellphone will easily map your location, show you where you want to go, and give you directions. You'll be able to leave virtual notes for people connected to physical locations, like a bulletin board connected to every bar. Often, the way to get news about major events will be to ask an internet service what pictures were submitted from a particular physical location at a particular time. Everyone will have devices in their cars which report their driving habits to their insurance company, in exchange for a cost break for most. Some orwellian use of this technology will go on, particularly with regard to minors.
government structure: This is a US centric response: I don't see many structural changes occuring in a 15 year timespan, other then the final nails in the coffin of the idea that the commerce clause restricts federal authority. Politics will increasingly be influenced by internet based open information sources like blogs and wikipedia. Voters will be more informed about particular issues. You will see more ballot referrenda items in US states, although I don't think that will reach in the federal level in a mere 15 years. California is a good place to start if you want to understand were US states will be in the nearterm. A large amount of new government mandated education programs in the workplace after SOX. The US healthcare system will likely be changed to deal with the uninsured in some unique way that doesn't match what other countries have done, or the US will be seen as a backwater in that regard. Pot may be decriminalized. NASA will have sent people to Mars. Around the year 2020 there will be a major social crisis that is more along the scale of WWII then 911 or Katrina. Life will suck alot and you'll feel like you need to do your duty to help whatever the cause is. language: English will continue to make progress as the, ehm, lingua franca, but progress in this area will be slow. Chineese will loose out because it is too complex. Some other languages will begin to seem quaint by their local inhabitants. National language efforts in Ireland, Isreal, and France, for example, will continue but will not succeed. outsourcing: Some South Korean, Indian and Chineese firms will do technology innovation and will outsource some labor to the US as Japaneese auto companies do today. Good jobs in the US will be less and less knowledge based and more and more service based, focusing on proximity to clients. Only the really brilliant in the US will do purely knowledge based work and will be location independent. Most location independent work will go to developing nations. There will be a growing wealth disparity in the US. Most of the young workforce in the US will be immigrant, naturalized citizens. The "born here" population of the US will be aging rapidly. RE: The Year 2020 | 
