What emerging Science and technology will be like in 20 years from now? I here we may have driverless cars, personal robots in the home, AI chat box that almost real like you can chat to it and make friends with it, computer video game graphics that you cannot tell if it is real or not that is how good the graphics is, There may be gene editing that becomes more mainstream and also 3D printed organs. Well wikipedia may disappear and Chat bot AI may have all the answers. We probably will go back to moon but going to mars still may be questionable. I hear there is lot of buzz news with anti aging but have not read up on it so cannot comment on it.
The way things are going people may as well just give themselves up fully to the Matrix and never really know what is real anymore. The fact is most people wont even know they have become virtual reality. Smart tech et al is not so slowly but surely erasing our intelligence , our instincts, our imagination our souls and filling the vacuum with bits and bytes. WE ARE DEVOLVING as fast as the tech is EVOLVING. Think about it it. Even peeps like me who try to lessen the involvement and impact of this modern tech prison we are building is pretty much forced to capitulate in some way or starve to death alone in the dark.
The military industrial complex prefers to keep secrets, and dole out the technology as slowly as possible, for maximum profit. By some estimates, we are now fifteen years into developing Star Trek technology, and the machines are already producing new technology that nobody comprehends. The current push is towards additive manufacturing, 3d printing, 2d reel to reel printing, and self-assembling systems. The war with China demands cheaper rockets, cheaper drones, cheaper everything on demand, while all of our technology is currently poised for the quantum revolution, requiring a theory of everything, that can account for academia's complete failure to produce one. Already, we have a new jet engine design that's more reliable and efficient, while doing mach 5 or better. All our jets are now outdated. All our power lines, phone lines, optical cables, etc. are all horribly outdated, and the real question is how outdated will they become before we have a theory of everything, that forces change.
The common folk have always been about a decade or two behind the latest tech developments ( at least in my lifetime) . We are being made redundant as quickly as we can be replaced by the tech that is already being designed and manufactured by tech. We are becoming unwanted and unneeded except for bodies to sell to or used to fight phoney wars ( which by the way take out more of us) They are quite successfully managing to get richer off the backs of more people with less real income - the abject poor are pretty much cannon fodder or left to rot. If you cant afford to buy anything they give you the money to put you in unrepayable debt. Slaves didnt get paid. Now slaves pay ( the working poor who cannot afford even a basic life without a line of credit to keep their heads above water) As long as you keep paying the piper you may be allowed to survive - absolutely useless and worthless if you cant keep treading water so you drown. I have a running joke that states that there are two ways they may help you stay alive. The first is having enough money to keep afloat and the other is owing enough that it is worth their while to save you as long as you keep paying.
Forget about twenty years behind, just the data nobody has really sorted through is now a mountain the size of the island of Hawaii. By the time the AI get through with it, all of humanity will be a century behind the AI, and most of us will still be stuck in the Dark Ages. Everybody is keeping their cards close to their chest, as WWIII breaks out, but even the French have created their own Psychic Quantum Research Institute. Reality as we know it is about to be redefined.
They just finding ways to replace you and have robots and automation do most of all the work well there is massive of unemployment.