2024: The year that the future arrives

There are movies I enjoyed in childhood that strongly date themselves, presenting visions of a possible future on dates that are now in the past. The ultimate example is Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey', depicting the arrival of commercial passenger space flight and sentient machines 21 years ago. Other examples include the wonderfully realised dystopian vision of Ridley Scott's'Blade Runner' (set in Los Angeles in November 2019), the flying DeLorean and'Mr. Fusion' generator of'Back to the Future: Part II' (taking us "forward" to the Hill Valley of 2015) and the war with the machines in'The Terminator' and'Terminator 2: Judgement Day' (where Skynet was brought online and triggered a nuclear war in 1997). The technologies shown in these sci-fi touchstones might not have been realised by the advertised dates, but we're getting very close – and a number of developments suggest that 2024 might be the year that reality catches up with these sci-fi futures.