10 Most Important Things That Will Happen In The Next 20 Years

Whenever anybody has tried to predict the future, robots always come into it sooner or later.

With robots as an everyday occurrence in many industrial settings, it is becoming ever more likely that they will also invade our homes.

It's tempting to envision the domestic help robots of the 50s futurists, with humanoid bots rolling around our homes, cooking the dinner and letting the dog out, but the reality is probably going to be a bit more subtle.

Rather than just putting robots inside our houses, the next 20 years will probably see our houses themselves becoming more robotic. Smart homes will have technology woven throughout them, allowing us to connect, control and interface with our dwellings. The Internet of Things is already embedding technology in pretty much all of our belongings, and being able to connect everything to everything else and control it all from your phone is a trend that is set to continue.

Actual in-house robots are less likely to have four limbs and a face, in favour of a more device-based vision of the future. We are only just beginning to let go of our dreams of an all-purpose butler-bot, and are instead developing specialised devices to help us around the house. The internet's favourite Brave Little Hoover, the Roomba, is just the beginning of our relationship with automated home-help