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

By the 2030s, we will likely have invented decent brain-machine interfaces advanced enough for everyday use.

Whether these are used to control prosthetics, augment our memories or simply check Twitter without having to lift a finger, beaming information directly into our minds is something that most futurists believe is something of an inevitability. Some day, instead of downloading a Learn To Speak French audiobook, it might be possible to just download the French language directly into your cortex.

Perhaps we'll be able to download brain content in the same way we download music and films now. Imagine a world in which you can pay a premium for custom dreams or perhaps even digital "drugs" that can alter your state of mind.

This feels like a good leap towards creating artificial intelligence and it is tempting to imagine that we will have super-smart servant robots, but despite the fact that we have been predicting that for about 60 years so far, convincing AI has proved more difficult than we thought.

However, as we begin to directly tap into our brains with technology, our understanding of how electrical signals become thoughts, experiences and personality will necessarily improve, opening up new avenues for us to begin to recreating it in machines. 

So some day we could even be going the other way and, instead of implanting technology into our brains, we could be implanting our brains into technology.