How will future technology be?

• All new screens will be ultra-thin OLEDs

Courtesy of Popular Science

Display tech moves incredibly fast. There will certainly still be some “antique” LCD monitor screens hanging around in 2020, but as far as new stock is concerned, it’s easy to see the entire industry shifting to paper-thin OLEDsurfaces, many with touch capability.

“So surfaces will become computational," Liebhold says. "walls, mirrors, windows. I think that's legitimate.”

• We'll control devices via microchips implanted in our brains

Courtesy of Popular Science

The human brain remains biology’s great, unconquered wilderness, and while the idea of meshing the raw power of the human mind with electronic stimulus and responsiveness has long existed in both science fiction and — to some degree — in reality, we likely won’t be controlling our devices with a thought in 2020 as Intel has predicted. While it’s currently possible to implant a chip in the brain and even get one to respond to or stimulate gross neural activity, we simply don’t understand the brain’s nuance well enough to create the kind of interface that would let you channel surf by simply thinking about it.

“Neural communications are both chemical and electrical,” Liebhold says. “And we have no idea about how that works, particularly in the semantics of neural communication. So yeah, somebody might be able to put electronics inside somebody’s cranium, but I personally believe it’s only going to be nominally useful for very, very narrow therapeutic applications.”

• Cars will drive themselves

Courtesy of Popular Science

It's long been a dream of, well, just about everyone, from Google and DARPA to automakers themselves: utter safety and ease of transport thanks to self-driving cars. There's movement being made, but the first hurdle to clear is a big one: Getting all these heterogeneous cars to speak to one another. We don't yet have the wireless infrastructure, globally speaking, to link all our cars with all our traffic tech.

• China will connect Beijing to London via high-speed rail

Courtesy of Popular Science

China’s plan:Link the East and West with a high-speed rail line. Not linking the Eastern with the Western parts of China — they're talking about linking the Eastern world with the Western world.

How to deal with the inevitable headaches of a 17-country train? Offer to pick up the tab. China would pay for and build the infrastructure in exchange for the rights to natural resources such as minerals, timber and oil from the nations that would benefit from being linked in to the trans-Asian/European corridor.