With the decade winding down it's time for us to set our sights on the next one. The 2020s promises to be anything but dull. From the automation revolution and increasingly dangerous AI to geohacking the planet and radical advances in biotechnology, here are the most futuristic developments to expect in the next 10 years. Making predictions is easy; it's getting them right that's tough. That said, some tangible trends are emerging that should allow us to make some informed guesses about what the future will hold over the next 10 years. Of great concern, of course, is the pending automation revolution and the associated onset of technological unemployment.

By the end of this decade, a milestone is reached in artificial intelligence, with computers now routinely passing the Turing Test.** This test is conducted by a human judge who is made to engage in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. Participants are placed in isolated locations. For several decades, information technology had seen exponential growth – leading to vast improvements in computer processing power, memory, bandwidth, voice recognition, image recognition, deep learning and other software algorithms. By the end of the 2020s, it has reached the stage where an independent judge is literally unable to tell which is the real human and which is not.* Answers to certain "obscure" questions posed by the judge may appear childlike from the AI – but they are humanlike nonetheless.*

Last November Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of twin babies whose germline he claimed to have altered to reduce their susceptibility to contracting HIV. The news of embryo editing and gene-edited babies prompted immediate condemnation both within and beyond the scientific community. An ABC News headline asked: "Genetically edited babies--scientific advancement or playing God?" The answer may be "both." He's application of gene-editing technology to human embryos flouted norms of scientific transparency and oversight, but even less controversial scientific developments sometimes provoke the reaction that humans are overstepping their appropriate sphere of influence.

Of the many great things promised by Crispr gene editing technology, the ability to eliminate disease by modifying organisms might just top the list. But doing that requires perfecting something called a gene drive. Think of gene drives as a means of supercharging evolution to, say, give an entire population of mosquitoes a gene that kills the Zika virus. The trouble is, organisms develop resistance to gene drives, much like they eventually outwit pesticides and antibiotics. Researchers dedicate no small amount of time and thought to creating gene drives that can outsmart evolution because the potential payoffs are so great.

With CRISPR-based gene drive, however, anyone with the right training could conceivably alter whole ecosystems unless their creation is actively countered and overwritten. In the worst-case scenario, an unopposed "global" gene drive system could spread through every population of the target species in the world, potentially affecting countless people without their consent. While most genetic changes would have no ecological effects whatsoever, we can't know for sure without testing them in small areas (i.e., without a global gene drive), and individuals acting on their own won't have run such tests. Imagine if someone in, say, New Zealand--even a would-be do-gooder--released a "global" gene drive designed to suppress or remove an invasive rat population by spreading infertility. Even if it worked well, possibly saving many endangered species, the construct wouldn't stay in that area.

Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deep-blue eyes made him look like a sandy-haired raccoon. Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the "sculpting evolution" group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world. If the residents of Nantucket agree, Esvelt intends to use those tools to rewrite the DNA of white-footed mice to make them immune to the bacteria that cause Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. He and his team would breed the mice in the laboratory and then, as an initial experiment, release them on an uninhabited island. If the number of infected ticks begins to plummet, he would seek permission to repeat the process on Nantucket and on nearby Martha's Vineyard. More than a quarter of Nantucket's residents have been infected with Lyme, which has become one of the most rapidly spreading diseases in the United States. The illness is often accompanied by a red bull's-eye rash, along with fever and chills. When the disease is caught early enough, it can be cured in most cases with a single course of antibiotics. For many people, though, pain and neurological symptoms can persist for years. In communities throughout the Northeast, the fear of ticks has changed the nature of summer itself--few parents these days would permit a child to run barefoot through the grass or wander blithely into the woods. "What if we could wave our hands and make this problem go away?" Esvelt asked the two dozen officials and members of the public who had assembled at the island's police station for his presentation. He explained that white-footed mice are the principal reservoir of Lyme disease, which they pass, through ticks, to humans.