It's likely that within 20 years we have the first generation of autonomous cars on the roads. Also consider the extraordinary development in narrow AI, like Siri and Cortana for example. And those are the things that are available on the market. Also remember IBM's Watson computer which defeated two Jeapoardy! champions. Cars in the future will be able to drive, learn your habits and daily routines, they will not only give you advice (something your smartphone has limited ability to do even today) but also make decisions on its own. And that's just the cars. Imagine what the home of tomorrow will be like. And the smartphone 20 years from now. They will not look like today, and they will be smarter than Watson.
Wow this blew up - definitely will mine this thread for ideas. Great stuff. For what it's worth - 1) We're definitely going with post-Watson level language recognition. 2) I'm not doing flying cars because I'm purposefully avoiding "Back to the Future" references (I love that movie but I'm purposefully building an "anti-BTTF") 3) The autonomous cars idea is good but I'm not using that for the same reason I'm not dealing with singularity - my future has stagnant or even retrograde movement on certain technologies because it's built on the premise that people are frightened of the loss of control that comes with progress. Self-driving cars are rare not because they aren't possible but because people refuse to use them, same with overly-real language recognition or any robotics that seem too human.
