elfs | Is it The Future yet? (Reply)

So, it's December, 2007. I have the 2001 British Telecomm white paper "The Technology Timeline" here, and let's see if their futurists got anything right at all. Here's the 2007 list:

Artificial Inteligence & Artificial Life
- Domestic appliances with personality and talking head interface
- Systems to understand text and drawings (e.g. patent information)
- People have some virtual friends but don't know which ones
- AI students
Business & education
- Lifestyle brands dominate
- Network based learning causes polarisation in classes - streaming is essential
- Global classes used for multicultural immersion
Environment & countryside
- Virtual farming co-operatives
Home & office
- Emotional objects, switches etc around home
Life & leisure in a cyberspace world
- People reduce tax liability by being partially paid in information products
- On line voting in UK
Materials & electronic devices
- Material with refractive index variable by 0.1 in electric or magnetic field
- Self organising adaptive integrated circuits
Processing, memory and storage
- Optical neuro-computers
- Quantum computer
Robotics
- Totally automated factories
Security, law, war
- Data mining use in trials
- First net war between cyber-communities
- Remote override capability on planes
Shopping & money
- Paper and coins largely replaced by electronic cash
- Shops start being paid by manufacturers as try-on outlets
- Electronic cash from internet migrates onto high street
- Next generation space telescope launch
Transport & travel
- All new cars fitted with positioning systems as standard
- Portable translation device for simple conversation
- Kaleidoscopic clothes using materials with embedded pigment micro-capsules

I might have virtual friends, but I don't know of any AI students yet. Global classes is a joke, there aren't widespread "emotion sensitive" houses, and both quantum computing and neurocomputing are still gleams in the eyes of researchers. Data mining in law cases has happened, not all cars have positioning black boxes, and portable translation boxes are still a few years out.