A Timeline of the Future

The Night Watchman writes: "Ian Pearson, a British futurist, has produced a sort of timeline of the future, which provides a simultaneously hopeful and bleak look into the coming decades. Mr. Pearson has evidently had a fairly high success rate; a timeline he produced in 1991 was about 85% accurate. An article on Yahoo news has a summary." Reader ricst lists some of Pearson's predictions: "People have some virtual friends, but don't know which ones (2007), leisure activities for intelligent software entities released (2015), electronic lifeform given basic rights (2020)." Brought to you by a division of British Telecom, but no date is set for when they win their hyperlink patent suit.

Comments

Re:Suggestion

[HanzoSan]

Barely literate? Alot of them know English.
Education? Internet.

Standard of living? Biotechnology = free food.

Its not so much culture as ability, when Chinas only jobs left are scientific, they will be forced to do science because China is communist.
Education is free, thats the one benifit of the internet.

Oh geez a racist

[HanzoSan]

What are you some kinda racist?

Whats their skin color have to do with any of this?

Ok their culture thats debateable, but the Chinese and Indian cultures are far less violent than ours, they also have a more scientific culture than us, our culture is a more physical labor based culture.

Poor doesnt mean Dumb.
Age has nothing to do with success, you seem to forget China was ahead for a long time in the past, and at one Time africa (more specifically Egypt) was ahead. No one stays on top forever, instead of competiting people should join forces and work together.