2020 predictions: flying cars, life on Mars, cut the alphabet, and robot cleaners

Is there life on Mars? An astronaut exploring Mars. Photo / Getty Images

Almost no one, bar a few forward-thinking epidemiologists, could have predicted the events of 2020. But if you take a look at some of the more long-range predictions for this year, things have gone even more off-piste than we could have imagined. For a long time, 2020 was used as a date so far off in the future, that anything might be possible. Emily Winstanley's been looking at what some prognosticators had promised for this year.

We'll travel in flying cars

Henry Ford himself made the call in 1940. "Mark my words – a combination aeroplane and motor car is coming. You may smile. But it will come." He had some experience, having already made a single-seat aircraft, which was dubbed the "Model T of the Air". But after a fatal crash of a prototype, the plan was abandoned.

Circa 1962: Cartoon family the Jetsons, comprised of George, Jane, Judy, Elroy, and Astro, flying in a space car in a space-age city. Not quite there. Photo / Getty Images

Depending on what you'd consider a "flying car", lots of different options have been trialled in 2020. Around the world, there are jetpacks, flying motorbikes and drone/plane hybrids. Locally there have even been secretive trials of a pilotless, electric air taxi called Cora. The Civil Aviation Authority's had to plan for the idea of flying cars, saying they've seen "significant growth" in the area" "The sky really is the limit when it comes to unmanned aircraft certification." The new flight category has opened a can of new acronyms for the CAA, which is one of the NAAs (National Aviation Authorities) that make up JARUS (the Joint Authorities for Rule-making on Unmanned Systems) looking into UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management).

Humans will be living on Mars

In a 1997 article, forward-thinking writers Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden wrote a faux-historical account of the feat. "It's an extraordinary event by any measure, coming a half-century after people first set foot on the moon. The four astronauts touch down and beam their images back to the 11 billion people sharing in the moment. The expedition is a joint effort supported by virtually all nations on the planet, the culmination of a decade and a half of intense focus on a common goal."

In reality, we're still a very long way off. At the moment, only unmanned spacecraft have landed on the red planet. The current mission, of Nasa's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, is due to land early next year. Ken Williford, Nasa's deputy project scientist for the expedition, says it might be the late 2030s or 2040s before we see any human missions to Mars - and even then, it would just be orbiting the planet before returning home.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk at Kennedy Airspace. Photo / Getty Images

"I wouldn't even venture a guess to when we might have a permanent or semi-permanent human presence there - and, in fact, there is good reason to believe we may never have such a thing. Mars is incredibly inhospitable, really to all life as we know it." Having said that, Williford's extremely excited about the idea of humans setting foot on Mars. "But the idea that, for instance, as the population grows or as we degrade the environment on Earth, we're going to have to move our civilisation to Mars one day, that it will be our new home, I don't buy that one bit. It's so profoundly challenging."

Elon Musk is typically more bullish about the progress of his Mars mission with SpaceX, saying he's "fairly confident" that humans will land on Mars in around six years' time. Indeed the first proper flight test of his Mars-bound spacecraft, "Starship", was on December 9. It crash-landed and exploded but Musk remains positive.

We'll cull C, X, and Q from the alphabet

In 1900, the Ladies' Home Journal approached engineer and curator of mechanical technology at the Smithsonian, John Elfreth Watkins jnr, for his 21st century predictions. One of them was "there will be no C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary." He went on to say that we'd be using "condensed words expressing condensed ideas". Dr Lynn Clark is a senior lecturer in linguistics at Canterbury University and says it might seem reasonable to predict that letters we don't use much, might disappear. But it's not practicalities that change a language, it's people. "You can come up with a new version of English, you can decide that you want to drop C, X and Q because they're not functional, but if the general population don't buy into that, then it just won't work."

Clark's reluctant to make her own predictions but does give one example of how language might change because of Covid. "If it turns out to be the case that the pandemic becomes worse and countries close their borders, then I could absolutely expect to see a situation where languages or dialects of English diverge and ended up being less and less similar to each other."

As for "condensed words expressing condensed ideas", Lynn gives the example of "lol" being used in spoken language. "But abbreviations and truncations and shortening words are absolutely not a new phenomenon. This has been around as long as there has been written language."

Other predictions by Watkins had mixed success, including "strawberries as large as apples", that rats and mice will have been exterminated and "photographs will be telegraphed from any distance".

We'll all live to 100 Ray Kurzweil, Google's former director of engineering, is also a famous futurist. Among other things, in 1990 he accurately predicted that chess-playing computers would be able to beat humans and that we'd own computers able to access information wirelessly via the internet by 2010.

He also claimed that by now human life expectancy would be over 100 years. Worldwide, we're miles off, with the WHO's 2016 figures showing the average life expectancy of the global population was 72. In Kurzweil's native United States, it was almost 79. Even in New Zealand, where we enjoy relatively high life expectancy, it's around 82. But for select groups, Kurzweil's prediction perhaps wasn't that far off.

Massey University Distinguished Professor Paul Spoonley says demographers expect life expectancy to keep inching towards 100, normally by around 1-2 years per decade. He says Pākehā girls born in higher socio-economic areas today can expect to live to 94 and half of them are the lucky ones who will get to 100. Those with the lowest life expectancy are Māori or Pacific Island boys born in lower socio-economic areas, which according to Spoonley "is an indictment of some of the inequalities we see in a country like New Zealand".

Robots will be cleaning our houses

In 1999, Kurzweil also predicted that by now, household robots would be "ubiquitous and reliable".

A robot cleaner doing household cleaning chores. Not quite there yet. Photo / Getty Images

While a Jetsons-style "Rosie" is still a way off, plenty of people do have one household chore ticked off by robots: vacuuming. But as far as anything else goes, University of Auckland Professor Bruce MacDonald says robots are just not capable enough or smart enough yet. "They don't have general common sense, sometimes people call it 'general AI', which is more than recognising faces and objects. People have been predicting AI would take over the world since the 50s or 60s but it's always lacked that broad intelligence of how to deal with certain situations. The cat, the dog, the kids ... even the vacuum-cleaning robots have a bit of a challenge with things on the floor." One of the most famous examples of robots for the home, Jibo, started with a bang. It was the poster child of Time Magazine's 2017 "best inventions" issue, the magazine saying: "Jibo seems downright human in a way that his predecessors do not, [it] could fundamentally reshape how we interact with machines." But a lot of what it was deigned to do - answer basic queries, relay messages, give the weather forecast - are now available with smart speakers like Alexa or Google Home. MacDonald says while it's not a direct comparison, smart speakers are one reason robots like Jibo can't get into the market.

While robot maids might not be on the horizon, something that can be found relatively commonly is robot pets. The Japanese-manufactured Paro is a robot baby harp seal, which can be found keeping residents company in rest homes.

Roxane Ducusin is the supervisor of Selwyn Village's Lavender Cottage, which is a dementia day programme. She says Paro is like having pet therapy but "it's more safe because it wouldn't run around, it wouldn't scratch or give an infection or allergies". She says the residents look at Paro like a cat or dog and because he responds to speechand touch with soft sounds or little movements, they don't recognise him as a robot. Ducusin says Paro is a star and everything is different when they have him out for the residents.
"It wouldn't replace human contact and it's unlikely to replace personal interaction, however, there's a place for technology like that in aged care.