5 Ridiculous 2020 Predictions | Random Thursday

I'm Joe Scott and this is 20/20 hello and welcome to the first video from the 2020s on the answers of Joe channel thanks for joining me congratulations on surviving this long you know a lot of people make predictions about the future I do it a lot on this channel and I'm always curious how well those predictions are gonna hold up like how crazy are they gonna look someday because when you look back at predictions from the past they're kind of crazy predictions from the past are fun because they really say a lot more about the time period in which they were made than about the future itself you know all we can really do is look at what's going on around us right now look at trends from the past and and make plans for you know how that might continue so it's really more of a reflection of the technologies that are prevalent at the day the trends that are going on at the time and just the general value system of the world when that prediction was made so 2020 being a pretty big year I thought it might be kind of fun to see what kind of predictions people made in the past about what the world would look like in the year 2020 and here are five doozies for you prediction number one everything will be made of steel this prediction was actually made by Thomas Edison in 1911 in an interview that he did with the Miami metropolis in which he said this the house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel that sounds comfortable so I can't imagine living in a house is just like a steel house but again you got to kind of have to look at what was going on in the world at the time the Art Deco movement was big at the time which involved a lot of steel structures you can look at the Chrysler Building that went up a little bit after this bit was in the planning stages at that time plus steel was actually pretty new as a building material at the time the Bessemer process was created in the late 18-hundreds and that actually made steel something that could be produced in high volume for the first time before that it was only used in smaller items like weaponry so this set off a wave of construction using steel and bridges and buildings and skyscrapers and stuff like that and this is what was going on in Edison's world as he you know became an adult and started becoming an inventor and a businessman and made a name for himself in that world this was what was going on around him steel was cheap it was strong and it was being used more and more all the time so it's not illogical for him to think that it was going to continue into the future now ironically steel has been coming up a lot more in this channel specifically around things like the cyber truck and around the starship with SpaceX this 301 stainless steel that apparently has a lot of properties that make it very valuable on those use cases so it's kind of an interesting thought you know maybe we're kind of rediscovering the greatness of steel in a way that Edison once did you know hundred years ago prediction number two Apes will work in factories and as chauffeurs okay here's what blows my mind about this prediction it was made in 1994 Seinfeld was on when this prediction was made and it came from a pretty respected source the RAND Corporation so the RAND Corporation was set up after World War two it was kind of this place where they were gonna assemble some of the brightest minds and futurists in America to kind of help us get ahead on technologies to keep us ahead of the rest of the world and they have a pretty great track record the Space Station Global Positioning satellites the Internet modern computing as we know it all this stuff was thought up at the RAND Corporation years before it ever actually happened but I guess when you're in the business of predicting the future you're gonna come up with some stinkers so yes somehow in 1994 in their yearly report that they put out they predicted that by the year 2020 we would be breeding super intelligent animals that would be capable of working in our factories and driving us around it actually suggested that well-trained apes driving cars would actually reduce the number of auto accidents I don't know why Apes would be better at driving than we are and they even suggested that every household might have a live-in ape that's there to do the housework as a housekeeper so ape slavery I guess you won't Planet of the Apes because that's how you get Planet of the Apes this was in 1994 like how did that seriously how did they think this in 1994 so again you got a look at what was one of the big things that was going on in 1994 the Human Genome Project was going on in 1994 we've gotten so used to having done by now we forget what a big deal the human genome project was it was started in 1990 and it was completed in 2003 it was the first time that we had ever mapped the entire human genome this had never been done before and a lot of people were predicting that we would have this immense power and capability to do all kinds of crazy things once we finally crack the human genome we'd be able to edit it and do all kinds of stuff the movie Gattaca is a great example of how people were thinking at the time about the human genome the human genome and gene editing and what we can do with it so they had a lot of crazy ideas but I mean let's let's be honest there's some cool stuff that we can do anybody now it's very commonplace you can just spit in a cup and get all kinds of interesting DNA results to find out about your history your ancestors and also about your own personal health sometimes you get life-saving stuff out of that plus genetic editing is improving with CRISPR cast 9 just in the last year there were some breakthroughs in that that makes it even more accurate and more powerful so you know maybe no smart apes but potential cures for cancer I'll take it prediction number 3 nobody will drink tea or coffee this one came from a person you've heard of many times before Nikola Tesla you know Nikola Tesla genius electricity guy so - Tesla knows something about the tea and coffee industry that we just don't know about did he predict that it would be some kind of alternative that would take its place then we'd all be more interested in by this time actually he just thought we'd be a lot healthier today he said in an article that he wrote in 1937 that in a hundred years or so quote coffee tea and tobacco will no longer be in vogue he talked about how he personally issues all stimulants and that he just believed that in the future people would be you know simply no longer be fashionable to poison your system with harmful ingredients I'm kind of reading what he said here now it should also be noted that in the very next sentence he praised alcohol calling it quote the elixir of life he also in the same article spoke really highly of eugenics so we just call him eccentric I mean this is the same guy who once fell in love with a pigeon so but really the crux of his argument was that we would be consuming healthier food at this point which he was wrong about that not only are we making horrible food choices and what we eat in general the number of diabetes cases are going up obesity is going up yeah he was wrong frankly I think wally was closer in their prediction of the future but another thing that's a little bit concerning isn't just that we're making poor food choices it's that the food itself like natural raw food that's coming out of the ground is less nutrient dense than it used to be because of soil erosion this is actually why a lot of dietitians recommend taking supplements now more than ever it's not just a fad and it's not just a money thing is that we actually the food that we are consuming has less nutrients in it than it used to prediction number four will have the power of telepathy so yeah a lot like the one about the apes earlier this one also came from fairly recently six years ago actually this was made by Michael Jo Farrell who heads up the mobile Institute he's kind of an expert in technology innovations and trends and stuff like that and in 2014 he released a book called shift 2020 and in that book he talked about nanotechnology specifically as something that's going to change the way we are communicating with each other he wrote in the pending nano mobility era I predict telepathy and teleportation will become possible by the year 2020 with both commonplace by 2040 crazy but depending on your definition of telepathy maybe right see when I hear telepathy I think the ability to communicate with somebody else using only your thoughts and I think that's what he was talking about too but if you consider telepathy to be just transmitting information say to a computer we aren't kind of there we have prosthetic limbs that can be fully controlled with just our thoughts and now there's full-body exoskeletons that give disabled people the ability to walk for the first time and pretty soon those could be completely controlled by thoughts now again these aren't really communicating thoughts so much as brain signals through the motor cortex and a brain implant but still and of course we can't leave out neural link who just announced their project in the last year and how this is gonna actually move brain implants forward they actually want to make getting a brain implant as simple as getting a lease surgery so I'm not quite there yet but the wheels are definitely in motion unlike some of the others on this list I think this one is actually gonna be less and less outrageous over time and prediction number five everybody will be rich let's hope this one comes true as well in 1966 Time magazine had an article called the futurists and in it they predicted this that machines will be producing so much that everyone in the US will in effect be independently wealthy they predicted that the average non-working family could make thirty thousand to forty thousand dollars a year just free so that's a 1966 dollars adjusted for inflation that would be closer to 300 thousand dollars a year yeah that hasn't happened but their central point that we would be getting paid because machines would be doing all the work well it's it's not too far off the mark as I've talked about in this channel robotics and automation have already started taking over jobs from people and it's gonna be even more accelerated into the future the difference is no one's getting paid for it I talked about this in previous episodes that this is a problem that we're running into that's only gonna be getting bigger over time especially as autonomous cars get going the entire transportation sector is gonna change you know we are about to encounter a technological disruption that's going to affect the economy and it's going to put a whole lot of people out of work this is why Andrew yang and many others are starting to talk about a universal basic income something I also I've talked about previously on this channel now ubi of course is not meant to make us all rich it's meant to serve as sort of a safety net so that for those people who do kind of fall between the cracks and this economic disruption they won't just completely be left out in the cold there's a lot of details to hammer out lots of opinions on the subject but this basic problem that they Illustrated in 1966 is starting to become a reality whether or not we'll come to the same solution that they came to I guess always had to say so as I said before predictions of the future are really more of a reflection of what's going on at the time that that prediction was made you know what trends are happening what breakthroughs what everybody's talking about so why don't we play with this a little bit and I'm gonna throw it to you you guys make a prediction to what you think the world's gonna look like 100 years from now and 2120 and you know in a hundred years maybe we can go take a look at it and have good laugh from the vets that are keeping our brains alive assuming you can laugh as a brain-in-a-vat maybe it's a glug we can glurg over it and hey before you go I just want to let you guys know I'm gonna be at fully charged live in Austin on February 1st and 2nd the whole hour Ludacris future crew is going to be there Tim and Ben many other great youtubers that talk about electric cars and whatnot is going to be a great time there's gonna be some cars there that you're never gonna get to see anywhere else the Rivi and trucks gonna be there all kinds of fun stuff I'll be speaking we'll be doing a live OLF podcast while we're there so anyway if you're remotely interested check it out I'll put a link down the description below description I can say their description so thanks for watching hope you enjoyed that and I wish you guys the best 20 20 you could possibly have there's there's a lot of stuff going on that's just really fun and exciting I'm gonna be covering it all here and can't wait to see what the future holds so good luck to all of us in 2020 see you next time

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 368,623

Keywords: answers with joe, thomas edison, 2020 predictions, rand corporation, steel, gene editing, human genome project, neuralink, telepathy, brain implants

Id: LrgijOYzD4c

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2020