(Read an introduction to this feature here)
2017 Energy-efficient buildings
Norman Foster reflects that "architectural tastes will probably be driven by the global ambition to develop a sustainable way of living," although these new buildings will still have to be "a great place to be". The problem is that glass and concrete structures are not that energy-efficient.
Richard Silberglitt imagines new buildings using "third-generation solar collectors, such as the Grätzel cell, the solar cell developed by Michael Grätzel which is based on a nanoparticle of titanium dioxide and a dye that's a solar absorber." These would essentially be flexible solar panels that come in rolls like wallpaper. Fitting them, however, is expensive.
Will Alsop is convinced that eventually governments will intervene to encourage green design, while Jim Cramer sees most buildings as being energy-neutral in ten to 15 years' time.
2018 Everything online
Internet-protocol (IP) addresses, the numbers that identify computers on a network, are running out. But its replacement, IPv6, will create such a vast amount of new ones, Vint Cerf tells us, that a very large number of devices can be part of the interactive environment.
"I'm anticipating that several hundreds of millions of devices will be online. A lot will be very small things - sensors, for example, for local ambient information such as temperature, humidity and possibly the detection of biohazards. Or they might be used to monitor and control building conditions or security devices."
Chris Bishop sees this as leading to the fully automated home in ten to 20 years - and we are already on the way. "Some estimates show a typical modern house has around 100 fully programmable computers and this looks set to increase."
2018 The meal-replacement patch
Lisa Bodell says these may be in use by 2018. However, Patrick Dixon says that the concept is "junk" and Richard Yada worries about its impact on romance. "Can you imagine taking a young lady out on a date and going, 'Oh, hey, slap on a patch and we'll talk for four hours.'?" he says.
2019 Electro-sex
Since the orgasmatron in Woody Allen's Sleeper stimulated us with the idea of electronically generated orgasms, the possibilities for integrating sex and technology have multiplied.
Richard Kadrey predicts the fun starting within 12 years. "There might be some really interesting side effects, like people simply burning out sectors of their brain, as with cocaine use where you don't have any serotonin left."
Other substitutes for traditional relief include an orgasm pill, which Kadrey warns could lead to "the breakdown of culture". But, he adds, "it would also affect warfare in interesting ways - it's probably hard to Electro-sex have a war when everyone's sitting around jacking off."
Violet Blue says that only the "prudish mores" of pharmaceuticals are holding back such a drug. "It'll arrive in a version for men a lot faster than it will for women," she says. "We'll get it in three to five years."
But for the true-to-life experience, you really need a robotic sex doll. James Bellini assures us we should "give it another 15 years" for that, and Tamar Kasriel can see the logic of using one instead of a prostitute. And when will we see the first politician embroiled in a robot sex orgy scandal? Kadrey reckons around the year 2035, Blue a more forward-thinking 2015.
2020 Artificial intelligence
If someone cannot tell if they are in conversation with a human or a computer, artificial intelligence has been achieved - this is the Turing test.
Peter Bishop believes meeting Turing's criteria lies in teachable neural networks, "thousands and thousands of very small processors, each with a connection to a set of others". However, Chris Bishop disagrees. He says that the first-generation machines were based on rules created by humans and the second used statistical approaches such as neural networks. "Now we are seeing a third generation that combines aspects of both."
Practicalities aside, Gordon Bell says that while we will have a machine that passes the Turing test by 2020, he does not believe in the "singularity" - the point at which machines improve themselves through artificial super-intelligence. Vint Cerf agrees it will be difficult. "Our understanding of language and our ability to reason and think is in part a product of our ability to interact with the world around us and experience the world through our senses. Even if computers had the same experience, I don't think they would be able to develop the same sort of connections we can make."
However, Eric Horvitz disagrees. "I think that's selling short the possibilities. If what we experience is indeed computation, there is nothing about it that we could not replicate."
Horvitz reckons machine consciousness is not unlikely in the long term, but in any case, he believes the Turing test is a red herring that doesn't really measure intelligence. And Chris Bishop makes the point that we would logically never know if a machine was conscious, as the mind is always private.
2020 Humans visit Mars "For a trip to Mars," says Carl Walz, a long-serving Nasa astronaut, "you're looking at 500 to 900 days in space - it's bad for your bones and you're exposed to huge amounts of space radiation. And you have to bring along your water and your oxygen."
However, he is optimistic that in the 2040s we might see a successful mission. "We've just now delivered a water-regeneration system to the International Space Station."
Richard Bower sees the main problem as one of funding. "If there was the money available, it would be feasible. With enough effort you could build a station there where people could live. And if there was oil on Mars, the game would change completely." So what is the time-scale? "It all depends on the discovery of Martian oil in, maybe, 2020," he says. "If that were to happen, I think maybe ten years after that - like, 2030 - you'll be seeing manned bases on Mars."
2020 Affordable genetic prophecy at birth
Your child is born, the umbilical cord is cut and a swab is taken from the inside of the baby's cheek so that your new arrival can be gentoyped. This would reveal their genetic vulnerabilities, putting into action a chain of prophylaxis and treatment that will ensure them, so the argument goes, a longer, healthier life.
Up to now, this kind of testing was out of reach to all but the very rich or very connected. But Linda Avey says the price of whole-genome sequencing has decreased significantly over the past five years, with at least two companies saying they will be able to sequence a person's genome for less than £3,500 in 2009.
"We expect that this price will continue to drop, making some form of genetic analysis accessible to large numbers of people within the next decade," she says. Tamar Kasriel likens sequencing to a "Damocletian threat", but Josh Calder disagrees. "The list of things we can partially prevent or prepare for is going to grow long enough that we're going to want to do it." The offshoot could be genes specific medicine, which Marian Salzman believes "will be the name of the game" by 2020. "If you know your child is at risk of diabetes, you can modify their diet and medication from day one to reduce the chances of it ever manifesting."
2021 First conflict based on global warming
Climate change will create new military flashpoints. With a rise of the sea level around Bangladesh, says Peter Schwartz, "you will suddenly find 100 million refugees headed towards India". This dwarfs the biggest refugee migration seen so far: four million people displaced from Afghanistan since the conflicts of the 1980s.
Meanwhile, as the Mekong river dries up, China will dam it, even though 60 million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia depend on its waters for their livelihood.
This could happen soon, as conditions for both will emerge "in the next ten to 15 years", says Schwartz.
2021 Remote controlled surgery
Richard Watson says remote controlled surgery will be commonplace "in ten to 15 years" and Lisa Bodell reckons that, by 2016 or 2017, "it's a definite". But Patrick Dixon disagrees.
"There's a fundamental physical problem. Things go wrong in surgery and when they do you have to change gear fast."
The technology would be particularly useful for space surgery but the distances are even more troublesome. Timothy Broderick tells us: "We did an experiment for Nasa, the US military and the Canadian Space Agency, that looked at operating a robot remotely with lunar latency. The lag time for a surgeon operating from the Earth to the Moon was about two seconds."
However, "the more you have the system do, the easier it is to operate the robot's capabilities remotely." This is especially important "if we're talking about being on Mars and there's a communication lag of up to 45 minutes".
While full surgical automation is dangerous, in warzones its risks may be less than the risk of death. Broderick has been working with the US Department of Defense's on a new "Trauma Pod" for the battlefield. The goal is "to have no one in the operating room except for the injured soldier, so you have a robotic suite where a surgeon remotely operates on him and the nurses and local surgeon are all replaced by robots."
Nor is that as far fetched as it sounds. "Aspects of this could be in use within ten years," he says.
2021 Male birth control
Richard Anderson says pharmaceutical male birth control could involve "steroid administrations to suppress the reproductive axis".
Yet hopes for a simple male pill may be, well, premature. "The trouble is that, for men, you need to do it much more thoroughly than you do for women. For women, you just need to suppress things so they don't ovulate, whereas for men you've got to get rid of all those sperm that the male testes are making, all day, every day."
Nick Bostrom, however, is less pessimistic. He thinks a male birth-control pill or injection "wouldn't be too hard to develop" and Marian Salzman sees a product of this kind as "inevitable".
Certainly, Anderson tells us, there would be plenty of demand for it.
2024 AIDS Vaccine A vaccine against HIV has so far proved elusive. "It is about the trickiest virus of all to try to develop a vaccine for," says Richard Barker.
"It mutates very rapidly, so to have something that hits all forms of the virus is that much more difficult. I think all researchers working in this field know it's about the hardest target they've ever seen. But nobody has said, 'Let's give up,' because it is almost impossible to treat your way out of the Aids epidemic."
A vaccine could be with us soon, despite these difficulties. "Because of clinical development time," says Barker, "my guess is that we're ten years away."
Marian Salzman thinks it will be "before 2020." But Patrick Dixon is not so optimistic. He reckons that, by 2025, "we'll have the first Aids vaccine that looks like giving some protection against HIV infection but not complete. I don't think we'll see an effective Aids vaccine before 2035."
2024 Microbial diesel provides most of our fuel
Our cars may eventually run on fuel from genetically engineered bacteria that create diesel. Peter Schwartz says "bacteria have been modified so that they produce diesel fuel" and expects that "by 2050 most of our fuel will be made biologically".
In fact we already have synthetic fuels, as Karl Littau points out. "Sasol has several plants running coal to liquid fuel and natural gas to liquid fuel conversion."
Jon Ballesteros works for California company LS9, which aims to use microbes to produce what it calls "UltraClean" diesel on a commercial scale by 2012.
This would mean a "greater than 75 per cent reduction in the carbon footprint" of diesel production and, he says, will be "able to compete with $45-a-barrel oil".
Eventually LS9 says it will make gasoline but diesel is more pressing as "the economy runs on diesel and everything we have here in the States is touched by diesel in some way."
As to microbes providing most of our fuel, Richard Yada says "closer to five than ten years would be probably a good time frame."
2026 Vertical city farms
Imagine what Richard Watson describes as a "high-rise block of flats, but instead of people, you put agriculture in there." Well, Dickson Despommier is already working on it. He says the first such structure will possibly be "five storeys tall and an eighth of a city block in footprint", will overcome the lack of soil in desert countries and step in when crops fail due to floods and droughts.
Finnish expert, Elina Hiltunen adds that these farms-in-buildings would improve self-sufficiency, but Richard Yada worries that the infrastructure costs for maintaining them would outweigh the benefits. However, he still sees them springing up in cities "in 20 years if we can work out the economics".
2029 Lab-grown meat in fast-food restaurants
Test-tube burgers could provide your future fast-food fix. But what exactly will lab-meat be? Lisa Bodell thinks we could be cloning animals for this by 2020, although she sees "political and psychological hurdles".
Others envisage lab-meat as more like a lump of cultivated cells.
This is why Tamar Kasriel is sceptical about its mainstream acceptance. "It'll be all one type of tissue," she says, "whereas natural meat is actually lots of different bits."
Sara Risch agrees: "There's fat, nutrients and it's a very complex biological system." However, she still thinks lab-meat would be widely accepted "If you delivered on the eating experience."
Lab-meat could be developed within 15 years, she says, but "in terms of its being on a fast-food menu, I think it's further out than that. And you'd have to create factories to be able to do it... Maybe in 30 years."
The idea of lab-meat is supported by Peta, an organisation that campaigns against cruelty to animals. But will vegetarians abandon their tofu? That none of our panel were willing to predict.
2029 Intelligent advertising posters
In 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote: "Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement." Well, times have changed - the buzzword is now "addressability" - or personalised advertising. Intelligent advertising posters "Advertising created mythology around mass-produced goods," says Douglas Rushkoff, "and people are no longer so interested in consuming those mythologies."
This is where new media comes in. According to Martin Sorrell, "online will occupy a third of the market in five- to ten years - that's search-and display, mobile and viral."
And all this will of be targeted, of course - something sites such as Google already do but which will become a common capability of television advertising "imminently - though not immediately", says Sorrell.
So will we see Minority Report-style personalised video posters?
Peter Schwartz, who worked as a consultant on the film, predicts they will be with us "easily within ten to 15 years". Stefan Bardega thinks the posters will recognise us via our mobile phones - which we then use to buy the product - and within three to five years.
2033 Live to over 100 with ease
James Bellini thinks that, "in Europe and the UK, the first man or woman to live to 125 is probably already born."
Ian Pearson, predicts healthcare will extend life, as "smart drugs deliver treatment to an exact site and target a few specific cells." And in 2025, he says, we will be consuming "clusters of specific proteins which are essentially nanotech robots".
Richard Silberglitt suggests nanoshells for beating cancer (a technique proposed by Rice University, Houston), which find their way into a tumour and are then irradiated with a laser, where they heat up and explode, destroying the cells. Peter Schwartz imagines that in 40 years, we will see antiageing pills and a boom in regenerative medicine, where we grow replacement organs.
2036 Freeze out death with cryogenics
Liquid nitrogen has been hailed as the chilly elixir of the immortalist but, contrary to popular belief, Walt Disney was not dipped in a barrel of it after his death in 1966, so the 21st century will not herald his revival. However, Ben Best, chief executive of the Cryonics Institute, says we may yet find ourselves thawed out into a brave new world.
"It's a last-in, first-out process," he tells us. "People who would be reanimated would be those frozen about 30 years from now, when it may be possible to cryopreserve someone reversibly." That's not to say we would never be able to reanimate older preservations - the first of the 91 he oversees dates from 1977.
The process isn't yet perfect. Buddy Ratner of the University of Washington tells us, "The freezing has to be fast. The outside freezes quickly, but deep within the core of a person, freezing will be slow. You need rapid freezing to prevent ice crystals from forming that will burst cells. It's hard to say how they'd speed up that process without the core going mushy." Combined with the use of potentially toxic antifreeze proteins to keep cells intact, he considers reanimation "improbable".
If not cryonic reanimation, cryonic suspension (remember Han Solo in the carbonite block?) might be more likely. "I think there's work with hydrogen sulphide gas showing that you can put living creatures into a kind of suspended animation."
Charlie Stross agrees. "They're actually developing that for getting injured people to medical centres from remote areas... but I think those who have already been cryonically suspended are out of luck."
2038 Meet ET
Extraterrestrial microbes are the best bet, but what about sentient life? Faith Popcorn says within "three decades", others are more cautious. "Even if you take three billion years for intelligent life to evolve somewhere else," says Charlie Stross, "that gives you about four billion for intelligent life to spread within our galaxy. The suggestion is that if there is intelligent life, we would be able to see their impact on the cosmos." His conclusion? "We're probably alone - or alone within the observable bits of the cosmos."
Judith Jaafar of the British UFO Research Association acknowledges that Drake's equation - which attempts to estimate the possibility of life on other planets - was meant to be a bit of fun. But she adds: "If his calculations were accurate and there were suns and planets that supported intelligent life, would they be able to alert us to their presence over such vast distances, never mind travel here?"
Richard Bower is sceptical but thinks we have more chance of receiving signals from another planet.
2045 Super-intelligence
Super-intelligence is the game-changer. Nick Bostrom says it could "quickly develop all other technologies that we might develop, because it would be a better inventor by definition. That way, all other technologies would happen very quickly." Christopher Bishop is more sanguine: "As for a fully intelligent machine, which can equal or surpass humans in all aspects of intelligence, I think this is very unlikely to be achieved by 2049." Either way, let's hope it decides it makes sense to keep us alive...
HOW WE DID IN 1996
Spot On Movies-on-demand -
Wired said 1997: The first service of this kind was launched in the UK in 1999 by Kingston Communications, only two years after wired 's prediction.
Universal picture phones-
Wired said 2003: Phones tended to have cameras as standard in Europe by this point - although picture messaging and video calls never took off.
The chief reason for this was sociological: many phone calls involve lies - you can't pretend you're in the office if your spouse can see your mates doing shots.
Off The Mark Effective hair-loss prevention -
Wired said 2006: Genetically engineering your DNA was meant to help you hang on to your locks. Sadly, hairline technology didn't move forward.
Computer defeats human chess master-
Wired said 2005: In fact, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov almost eight years before, in 1997.
Almost E-cash gets real:
Wired said 1998: It's not quite what they imagined (banks issuing "digital money") but PayPal has changed the lives of wannabe entrepreneurs.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
