Future technology predictions:
The 'flying car' will be airborne
2) We'll control devices via microchips implanted in our brains:
The 'flying car' will be airborne
The rebirth of the flying car? Liebhold, of the Institute for the Future, shoots this one down. "No. The air traffic control for something like that is incredible." It's a problem in every way — logistically we can't do it, cost-wise we can't do it, and technologically it's extremely unlikely. Oh well.
PopSci Predicts: The military might have its prototype “flying humvee” by 2020 (DARPA wants it by 2015), but the tech won’t trickle down to the rest of us for quite a while.
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.”
Google
3) Universal translation will be commonplace in mobile devices
This one's under intense development, both in practical forms like Google Translate and crazier ones from DARPA. Translation will probably happen in the cloud, consulting with massive bodies of language knowledge compiled by companies and governments.