The year 2020 is now less than a year away. It sounds like science fiction. But is it? Here are four examples to remind you that we are already living in the future:
Everyone is running around with a supercomputer that offers instant access to all of the world's knowledge and the ability to instantly connect with hundreds of millions of people by video chat. If you own one of these devices, you can't get lost anymore because they know exactly where you are located on the globe and feature a detailed map of the whole world. You can restrict access to these devices by inbuilt iris scanners, fingerprint scanners, and facial recognition.
Computers can instantly generate news articles, poems, photo realistic faces, speech, and music. They can beat everyone at various games, including Go, translate text and audio from one language into the other (soon using your own voice) and understand voice commands to an extent that's reminiscent of the board computer depicted in Star Trek TNG. And this isn't even called artificial intelligence; it's just machine learning.
Virtual reality is now fun and affordable.
Animals such as livestock and pets are now regularly cloned. For example, South Korean police are going to deploy cloned sniffing dogs that offer savings of 65 percent.