My 2020 vision may not be 20/20, but I'm guessing that 10 years from now ...

Several weeks ago I offered an end-of-decade list of expert predictions of all the changes in store for us ("Ten years from now ..."). The surprise ending was that the predictions were all actually from late 1999 and early 2000, and the point was that the future tends to make fools of those who presume to predict it.

Updated with click-survey results from approximately 160 readers...did they agree with my view of life in 2020? Where they disagreed, I highlighted the prediction in red

--A young Republican president, the successor to two-term President Barack Obama, will be running for re-election against a group of Democrats that includes a top female candidate and a self-financing mega-millionaire. (

62% of readers disagree

)

--Entertainment industry observers will agree: The top star of the decade was Taylor Swift. (

82% of readers disagree

)

-- Lisa Madigan will be in her sixth year as governor of Illinois, where the long-term pension debt will have grown to $200 billion from $95 billion in 2009. (62% of readers disagree)

--Security at theaters, stadiums, shopping malls and train stations will resemble security at airports in 2009 as America responds to terrorist attacks from ineradicable Islamic extremists. (57% of readers disagree)

--The proliferation of video and the ubiquity of volunteer exhibitionists will have nearly destroyed the pornography industry. (61% of readers disagree)

--Technology will have enabled the now budding, preposterously narcissistic practice of "lifecasting" -- nearly nonstop streaming of video of one's own everyday doings -- to have flowered into a full-blown media craze. Like reality TV before it, the genre will have created a stable of superstars. (58% of readers disagree)

--Steve Bartman will no longer be a pitiable recluse, as Cub fans will have forgiven and forgotten on the very day the Cubs clinched a berth in their first World Series since 1945. (63% of readers disagree)

--More than 20 states will have legalized gay marriage, more than 40 will have OK'd same-sex civil unions and decent people will be faintly embarrassed that we used to drum homosexuals out of the military. (66% of readers agree)-- DVDs will be as old school as videocassettes were in 2010. Blockbuster Video, Netflix and other stand-alone DVD rental outfits will be out of business, replaced by online, on-demand movies and TV programs. (86% of readers agree)--Electric cars will be the emerging vehicle of choice for city driving, having been led into the mainstream by the Chevy Volt. (59% of readers agree)--Division I college football will have a playoff system. (62% of readers agree)--The concept of the "land line" telephone will be obsolete. Mobile phones will be seamlessly integrated into home-phone systems. (72% of readers agree)--At least one Web-only, full-service media enterprise will rise in Chicago to compete as an equal with legacy print and broadcast outlets for advertising dollars, talent, audience and influence. (67% of readers agree)--Dreamers will still be talking about how great it will be if we could just build high-speed rail systems between major Midwestern cities. (80% of readers agree)--The mayor of Chicago will be the successor to the successor of Mayor Richard M. Daley. (58% of readers agree)--Jan. 1, 2020, will mark the 7,596th day since Illinois last executed a prisoner. (66% of readers agree)--Except in rare, advanced cases, a cancer diagnosis will no longer be a death sentence. Medicine will have made great leaps in battling Alzheimer's and autism, but not in battling heart disease, which will remain our biggest killer. (55% of readers agree)--Major League Baseball will be using instant replay to adjudicate disputed fair/foul, catch/no-catch and swing/check calls. (58% of readers agree)--Outdoor smoking will be banned in most places as the political strength of the dwindling number of nicotine addicts dwindles. (65% of readers agree)--Virtual reality video games for the home will make the Nintendo Wii look like Pong. Sports simulation games will feel almost eerily real. (84% of readers agree)-- Sarah Palin will be featured in end-of-decade "whatever happened to ...?" stories. (68% of readers agree)--The Internet will be deemed so basic and essential that the percentage of homes with access will be similar to today's percentage of homes connected to the power grid. (94% of readers agree)--Fresh water will be the source of more international friction than oil. Congress will be riven by efforts to expand health care coverage beyond that which was provided in the now massively popular insurance reform legislation of 2010. (66% of readers agree, though due to space limits in the online poll template the question did not include the part about health care reform)

--Chicago will have a Children's Museum in Grant Park (60% of readers agree)

--The Spire skyscraper will be off the drawing board. (58% of readers agree)

--Thanks to extremely sophisticated voice recognition programs, we'll have very little need for smart-phone keypads and will talk our way through many e-mail and messaging tasks. (65% of readers agree)

--E-readers, tablet computers, netbooks, game consoles and laptops will have converged into theft-proof, unified portable devices that will store large, self-updating multimedia libraries. (71% of readers agree)

--These devices will sync seamlessly with remote backup storage units as well as combination phone/music player/video camera/GPS devices with at least 10 times the storage and computing power of the slickest such gadgets today. (81% of readers agree)

--Newspapers will not have Web sites. Web sites will have newspapers (as well as robust video and audio channels). Every major media personality will generate content on all platforms. (65% of readers agree)



--The distinction between books and other printed matter will be vastly diminished in the wake of a painful digital overhaul of the publishing industry's 19th century business model. (64% of readers agree)





--Tens of millions of Americans will be using a social networking site far more flexible and useful and far less annoying than Facebook today. It may or may not be a vastly improved version of Facebook itself, but having a page on it will be as useful and nearly as common as having a phone. (80% of readers agree)



--Great strides in nonlethal firearm technology will be pointing the way toward resolution of the handgun debate. (79% of readers disagree)

--But the abortion and immigration debates will remain as poisonously polarized as ever. (85% of readers agree)

--Cheap, tiny video recorders and tracking devices along with even cheaper data storage will have radically diminished our meager expectations of privacy. But day in and day out, we and the things we own will be much safer than now. (77% of readers agree)



-- -- --



Change of Subject readers also weighed in with a raft of predictions, a number of which struck me as quite plausible:





Michael S. Messinger: Telecommuting will finally be the standard for more than 50 percent of the workplace. Instead of higher salaries, bonuses and vacations, companies will negotiate how much work-from-home capability is built into your employment package. (62% of readers disagree)



Jim Jones: The possession of marijuana will be decriminalized in the majority of states. (54% of readers agree)

Jim Jones: A large part of McCormick Place will be converted into a casino complex, with the Arie Crown Theater used to attract big-name entertainers, just like in Vegas. (50% of readers agree)

Wendy Clark: The United States Postal Service will cease to exist. What, if any, snail mail is left by then will be taken care of by private companies. (58% of readers disagree)



James Reyes: People will eat more healthy food as chefs find ways to make it taste better than unhealthy food. (mistakenly not included in the poll)



Allen Tipper: Cable TV will move to a completely Internet-based, on-demand style of programming. (73% of readers agree)





Jens Zorn (my dad): With adaptive public transportation, passengers will submit requests to go from one specific location to another. The APT center will aggregate requests, optimize the paths for suitable vehicles (buses, vans or sedans) and reply with pickup times. (85% of readers disagree)



David Brann: There will still be people who wrongly believe that decades end with years ending in 9 and that centuries end with years ending in 99. (86% of readers agree)

JB: Brett Favre will be retired from pro football (86% of readers agree)

-- -- --

One last prediction from me: Seven-day-a-week newspapers will be history by 2020, but print journalism will have defied predictions of its death. You will be able to read a column mocking the vanity and fatuity of most of the above predictions in an ink-on-paper version of the Chicago Tribune in January 2020. (81% of readers agree)

Indeed, I plan to write that column myself.