The Timeline: Making Chains

If there were to be a label to theme this thread, it would be somewhere between these quotes. 

 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, Hazards of Prophecy

 In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

Dwight Eisenhower

 Human beings are under the control of a strange force that bends them in absurd ways, forcing them to play a role in a bizarre game of deception.

Jacques Vallée, Messengers of Deception

 We are dealing with a multidimensional para-physical phenomenon which is largely indigenous to planet earth.

Brad Steiger, Canadian UFO Report

This is a work in progress and the OP will evolve. Feel free to take sections of information to expand upon them or create more links/correlations between the information. 

Much of the information was quoted from other sources. If you search the keywords you will find plenty of information. Also, all of the dates are give or take. They are all "circa". Hyperdimensional and interdimensional are interchangeable here. The idea is that most aliens are dimensional beings while the ones that are not are actually time-travelling to get here. They knew where we were because their development was somehow linked to this planetary system, or our own planet. 

Hopefully, this thread can become a succinct collection reflecting the overall picture regarding technology. Each instance below represents a moves in a game of strategy. 

In my opinion, there is a common thread -- oh, what a tangled web we weave. 

The long term strategy has been implemented over time and with a wide array of compartmentalized actions -- each unaware of their contributions to the overall agenda. Most of them aren't even aware of the cart they are collectively pushing. They are driven by good intentions yet they unwittingly help to bring about a future which isn't in their best interest -- making chains. 

There are forces operating below human's level of awareness. 

On the other hand, some of the people involved in this are willing pawns. 

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1918 - Aleister Crowley performs the Amalantrah Working in order to contact a hyper-dimensional intelligence. Creating a portal from his self-styled magick, Crowley claims that a hyper-dimensional being actually manifested. He drew a portrait of the being, and shared similarities to a grey ET. 

 The rumors that certain living people have advanced knowledge of psychic technology are untrue. Only disembodied spirits who have never incarnated on Earth can have this knowledge – it’s far too complex a set of astral memories to survive the incarnation process. Living Earth people do make use of this technology, but they are analogous to the users of a computer system, not to the technicians and system operators who actually run it. And the use of this equipment by the Theocrats and the living people who work for them is directly analogous to what computer hackers do on Earth: they have direct control of only a limited amount of soft-ware, but they use it to make unauthorized use of the whole system.

[...]

Since I made the breakthrough, I’ve noticed that much of the literature on operational magic resembles manuals for using computer systems. For example, those lists of “secret names” and “words of power” seem directly analogous to passwords for accessing computer files and commands for instructing the system to perform specific functions. I also see a resemblance between “magical languages” like Enochian and computer languages. The same holds true of numerological and literological systems. And many magical spells and incantations have a structural similarity to computer programs.

[...]

That’s exactly what they are. All those books that tell people how to work magic by controlling demons or other spiritual entities are quite literally manuals for using psychic technology. Our code name for the network of psychic machines left here by the Elohim has always been the “black” network,” which is the origin of the term “black magic.” It has nothing to with morality, but is strictly a technical term.

Kyle Griffith, War in Heaven

1946 - Babalon Working performed by L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons (one of the principle founders of JPL, now with NASA) in correspondence with Aleister Crowley.

Glory unto the Scarlet Woman, Babalon the Mother of Abominations, that rideth upon the Beast, for she hath spilt their blood in every corner of the earth and lo! she hath mingled it in the cup of her whoredom.

[...]

[S]he guardeth the Abyss. And in her is a perfect purity of that which is above, yet she is sent as the Redeemer to them that are below. For there is no other way into the Supernal mystery but through her and the Beast on which she rideth.

Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

1947 - Roswell UFO incident.

1953 - Humanoid aliens contact select world powers. They offer spiritual assistance and advise nuclear disarmament. The negotiations fail. 

 This alien group warned us against the aliens that were orbiting the Equator and offered to help us with our spiritual development. They demanded that we dismantle and destroy our nuclear weapons as the major condition. They refused to exchange technology citing that we were spiritually unable to handle the technology which we then possessed. They believed that we would use any new technology to destroy each other.

This race stated that:

• We were on a path of self destruction and we must stop killing each other
• Stop polluting the Earth
• Stop raping the Earth's natural resources
• Learn to live in harmony

These terms were met with extreme suspicion, especially the major condition of nuclear disarmament.

It was believed that meeting that condition would leave us helpless in the face of an obvious alien threat. We also had nothing in history to help with the decision. Nuclear disarmament was not considered to be within the best interest of the United States.

The overtures were rejected.

William Cooper

1954 - Hyper-dimensional or ET beings approach US government. President Eisenhower signs treaty with the aliens. They give the US advanced technology and offer assistance in technological development. 

The treaty stated that the aliens would not interfere in our affairs and we would not interfere in theirs. We would keep their presence on earth a secret. They would furnish us with advanced technology and would help us in our technological development.

They would not make any treaty with any other Earth nation.

They could abduct humans on a limited and periodic basis for the purpose of medical examination and monitoring of our development, with the stipulation that the humans would not be harmed, would be returned to their point of abduction, would have no memory of the event, and that the alien nation would furnish Majesty Twelve (MJ-12) with a list of all human contacts and abductees on a regularly scheduled basis.

William Cooper

 In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

Dwight Eisenhower

1955 - The aliens broke the treaty and did not adhere to the stipulations. They couldn't be trusted.

1958 - The creation of ARPA was authorized by President Eisenhower for the purpose of forming and executing research and development projects to expand the frontiers of technology and science, and able to reach far beyond immediate military requirements. ARPA is now known as DARPA.

1960 - Project ECHELON is conceived and formally established in 1971. It is an international SIGINT collaboration involving the NSA.

ECHELON, originally a code-name, is now used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement.

[...]

It has also been described as the only software system which controls the download and dissemination of the intercept of commercial satellite trunk communications.

[...]

ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses.

Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched. The processors in the network are known as the ECHELON Dictionaries. ECHELON connects all these computers and allows the individual stations to function as distributed elements an integrated system.

[...]

By the end of the 20th century, the system referred to as "ECHELON" had evolved beyond its military/diplomatic origins, to also become "a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications.

Wikipedia

1962 - Information Processing Techniques Office created by DARPA. The IPTO funded the research that led to the development of the ARPANET.

The Information Processing Techniques Office is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense whose [current] stated mission is:

[To] create a new generation of computational and information systems that possess capabilities far beyond those of current systems. These cognitive systems - systems that know what they're doing:

• will be able to reason, using substantial amounts of appropriately represented knowledge
• will learn from their experiences and improve their performance over time
• will be capable of explaining themselves and taking naturally expressed direction from humans
• will be aware of themselves and able to reflect on their own behavior
• will be able to respond robustly to surprises, in a very general way

Wikipedia

1969 - ARPANET deployed. The first connections were made with collaborators SRI and UCLA. SRI would also contribute to the later development of TCP/IP.

1970 - SRI separates from Stanford University and goes on to become SRI International in 1977.

1971 - SRI begins researching psychic abilities. Some of these endeavors are funded by the US government. Most notable among the projects is remote viewing. 

1975 - Jacques Vallée and his mentor, J. Allen Hynek, publish a book officially advocating the Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis (IDH). Vallée worked for SRI and he was also involved with the creation of the ARPANET.

In mainstream science, Vallée is notable for co-developing the first computerized mapping of Mars for NASA and for his work at SRI International on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet. Vallée is also an important figure in the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), first noted for a defense of the scientific legitimacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and later for promoting the interdimensional hypothesis.

The interdimensional hypothesis (IDH or IH), is an idea advanced by Ufologists such as Jacques Vallée that says unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and related events involve visitations from other "realities" or "dimensions" that coexist separately alongside our own. It is an alternative to the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).

[...]

Paranormal researcher Brad Steiger wrote that "we are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon that is largely indigenous to planet Earth".

[...]

One advantage of IDH proffered by Hilary Evans is its ability to explain the apparent ability of UFOs to appear and disappear from sight and radar; this is explained as the UFO entering and leaving our dimension ("materializing" and "dematerializing"). Moreover, Evans argues that if the other dimension is slightly more advanced than ours, or is our own future, this would explain the UFOs' tendency to represent near future technologies.

Wikipedia

1977 - Again SRI pursues the Sphinx searching for the Atlantean Hall of Records. This time with US government funding and the help of the ARE, an organization founded by Edgar Cayce. 

1977 - ELF mind control programs are exposed at SRI. 

 EM mind control machines were championed at Stanford University by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neuropsychology Research Laboratory: "I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior." Psychology Today feted Pribram as "The Magellan of Brain Science." He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at Stanford University studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection.

[...]

The "remote viewing" team at SRI was, in fact, engaged in projecting words and images directly to the cranium.

[...]

Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was the true object of study at SRI was exposed by the Washington Post in 1977.

The Constantine Report

1982 - US Department of Defense declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking.

The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late 1960s. After initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies.

The Internet protocol suite is the networking model and a set of communications protocols used for the Internet and similar networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP, because its most important protocols, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), were the first networking protocols defined in this standard. It is occasionally known as the DoD model, because the development of the networking model was funded by DARPA, an agency of the United States Department of Defense.

Wikipedia

1988 - The term internet is now used to describe the network of computers.

1989 - The World Wide Web is invented at CERN.

1993 - CERN gives the public domain access to the WWW software. The number of internet users in the world begins growing exponentially. As of 2013, there are 8 new internet users per second. By 2018, over half of the global population will be online. 

1998 - Google is created and goes on to become the largest internet company in the world. 

2002 - DARPA creates the Information Awareness Office.

The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA).

This was achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant. This information was then analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and "threats". Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.

Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded and merely run under different names, as revealed by Edward Snowden during the course of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures.

2003 - CALO was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program. The project ended in 2008.

CALO was an artificial intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive assistant. CALO is an acronym for "Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes".

Wikipedia

2005 - DARPA Grand Challenge. A competition for autonomous vehicles. Sebastion Thurn leads his team to victory and later went to Google to work on autonomous vehicles. 

2005 - DARPA begins funding the Heterogeneous Aerial Reconnaissance Team, or HART project. The technology is projected to be ready for deployment around 2015.

 The Heterogeneous Aerial Reconnaissance Team (HART) -- formerly known as the "Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team (HURT)"—program was an aerial surveillance project funded by the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

[...]

The unique features of the HART program are that it developed systems to "decouple soldiers from flight control"—that is, the UAVs automatically pilot themselves—taking care of flight control, collision prevention, and camera/sensor control automatically. When the drones notice suspicious activity, they notify the person with the HART control panel so that they can monitor the situation. Another feature of HART was to design handheld devices, to display surveillance video to small unit leaders in the field (as opposed to only being available to officers/agents in a control room). A third significant feature is that troops can request surveillance in an area, and a set of drones will automatically come over and take care of it themselves—all the soldiers have to do is ask for it, and then they can forget about it.

The UAVs can be commanded to automatically and intelligently perform a number of tasks, with very little direct control required.

[...]

According to Northrop Grumman—in addition to its military uses, HART also has numerous applications in homeland security (domestic surveillance) and border patrol.

Wikipedia

2006 - The project known as Sentient World Simulation (SWS) is made public. 

 It is called the “Sentient World Simulation.” The program’s aim, according to its creator, is to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.” In practical terms that equates to a computer simulation of the planet complete with billions of “nodes” representing every person on the earth.

The project is based out of Purdue University in Indiana at the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations Laboaratory. It is led by Alok Chaturvedi, who in addition to heading up the Purdue lab also makes the project commercially available via his private company, Simulex, Inc. which boasts an array of government clients, including the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, as well as private sector clients like Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin.

Chatruvedi’s ambition is to create reliable forecasts of future world events based on imagined scenarios. In order to do this, the simulations “gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.” Although not explicitly stated, the very type of data on digital communications and transactions now being gobbled up by the NSA, DHS and other government agencies make ideal data for creating reliable models of every individuals’ habits, preferences and behaviors that could be used to fine-tune these simulations and give more reliable results. Using this data, the SEAS Laboratory and its Sentient World Simulation offshoot are able to create detailed, operable real-time simulations of at least 62 nations.

James Corbett

2007 - The NSA folds their Disruptive Technology Office, formerly ARDA, into the newly created IARPA. This new activity is the DARPA of the US intelligence community. 

2007 - DARPA Urban Challenge for autonomous vehicles. 

The Urban Challenge required designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other robots on the course. This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles. Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection.

Wikipedia

2008 - The NSA unveils Aquaint, a program that was developed under ARDA (now IARPA). 

 With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

[...]

"The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering complex questions," said a former Aquaint researcher. "Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We are building HAL."

[...]

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.

James Bamford

2009 - The ideology of the Internet of Things begins to take hold in the mainstream. 

 Yet today's information technology is so dependent on data originated by people that our computers know more about ideas than things. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.

Kevin Ashton, RFID Journal

2010 - A story breaks revealing that Google and the NSA share information and resources. 

2010 - SRI International sells Siri to Apple Inc. The technology grew out of the DARPA-funded PAL program. 

 The fact is, a non-profit R&D powerhouse called SRI International conducted decades of research in artificial intelligence to build the foundations of Apple’s virtual digital assistant. The project was called CALO — Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes — and in 2007, SRI spun out a for-profit enterprise called Siri, Inc to bring CALO technology to consumer devices.

Wired Magazine

2011 - IBM unveils a neuro-synaptic chip. The new hardware was developed under a project funded by DARPA known as SyNAPSE.

 

Because these neurosynaptic chips are small and low-power with corelets enabling sensory perception, a whole new range of applications can be built.

IBM Research

2011 - HRL Labs unveils memristor-based, neuromorphic chip. This company is also working on the SyNAPSE initiative, and is funded by DARPA.

HRL Labs announced in December 2011 that they have built a memristor array integrated on top of a CMOS chip. This was the first ever functioning demonstration of such a memristor array.

[...]

The simultaneous memory storage and logic processing capability of memristors makes them very suitable for neuromorphic computing. The memory and logic units are one and the same, much like the neural circuits of the brain.

[...]

By using memristors, these cores could be reduced in size and energy consumption, thus making it more practical to build very large arrays of cores with sufficient numbers of neurons to match the human brain.

Artificial Brains

2011 - The existence of the Google[x] Lab is made public. Google is thought to be at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence and robotics. 

2012 - Google announces it's Web of Things initiative. 

The Web of Things is a vision inspired from the Internet of Things where everyday devices and objects, i.e. objects that contain an embedded device or computer, are connected by fully integrating them to the Web. Examples of smart devices and objects are wireless sensor networks, ambient devices, household appliances, RFID tagged objects, etc.

Unlike in the many systems that exist for the Internet of Things, the Web of Things is about re-using the Web standards to connect the quickly expanding eco-system of embedded devices built into everyday smart objects. Well-accepted and understood standards and blueprints are used to access the functionality of the smart objects.

Wikipedia

2012 - Google begins testing driver-less cars in Nevada. They expect to release their technology and have it available to the masses by 2018.

2012 - Regina Dugan steps down as director of DARPA to take an executive position at Google. 

2013 - Google partners with NASA to buy a 512-quibit quantum computer from D-Wave Systems. This computer will be involved in researching AI, among other things. 

Google bought one. So did Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest defense contractors. But we still can’t agree on what it is they bought.

[...]

Whatever you call it, the D-Wave is useful, helping to solve what are known as combinatorial optimization problems, which turn up in everything from genome sequence analysis and protein folding to risk analysis. In announcing its use of the D-Wave machine last month, Google said it would use the system to help advance machine learning — i.e. efforts to create computing systems that can learn in much the same way people do.

“We believe quantum computing may help solve some of the most challenging computer science problems, particularly in machine learning,” Hartmut Neven, a Google director of engineering, wrote in a blog post. “Machine learning is all about building better models of the world to make more accurate predictions.”

For what it’s worth, Google is matter-of-fact in calling the D-Wave a quantum computer. And it should come as no surprise that it just hired Sergio Boixo, one of the researchers behind the USC paper. The machine is housed at NASA’s Ames Research Center, not far from Google’s headquarters, in a place the company calls the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. At Google, the semantics aren’t nearly as important as the task at hand.

Cade Metz, Wired

2013 - Google acquires Boston Dynamics. This robotics company has many projects funded by DARPA and supplies the military with advanced robotic systems. 

 

2013 - DARPA Robotics Challenge. Many teams are supplied with a robot from Boston Dynamics. SCHAFT, another robotics company which Google acquired, wins the competition. An ATLAS robot, from Boston Dynamics, comes in second.

2013 - DARPA begins soliciting cortical processors for intelligent machines. 

2013 - The Utah Data Center is completed. It's facilities and functions are headed by the NSA. 

 The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store extremely large amounts of data, estimated to be on the order of exabytes or higher.

[...]

The data center is alleged to be able to process "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'."

Wikipedia

2013 - Over 60% of internet traffic is now non-human. 

This non-human traffic is search bots, scrapers, hacking tools, and other human impersonators, little pieces of code skittering across the web.

Alexis Madrigal

2014 - IBM, through the DARPA-funded SyNAPSE, begins fabrication of a multi-chip neural system to be tested in robots by 2016. 

2014 - DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

2014 - D-Wave Systems has the capability to produce a quantum computer with around 5,000 qubits. 

2015 - The FAA has enacted regulations allowing for drones to fly in US airspace. It's projected that at least 7,500 drones will be in the sky around this time. 

 The Federal Aviation Administration has a plan for allowing drones to fly everywhere in the country.

[...]

Drones are now severely limited. A hobbyist can fly a small aircraft several hundred feet off the ground.

[...]

The legislation called for drones to be fully integrated into the airspace by September 2015. Huerta insists that the FAA will meet the deadline.

Bart Jansen, USA Today

2015 - The HART system (a project funded by the IPTO of DARPA) is operational for the military and has the potential to be used by Homeland Security.

 

2015 - Knightscope unleashes the K5 droid for public and private security. 

 

Knightscope’s K5 is a 5-foot-tall, 300-pound robot that patrols areas like school campuses. It avoids objects while following a pre-programmed route. It sees in the dark using infrared sensors, determines the speed of moving objects and records audio for later retrieval. The robot can compare license plates to a list of approved or hot-listed plates.

The data collected from the robot’s sensors is processed alongside business, government and crowd-sourced social data sets to set a threat level for each potential irregularity. The public information serves to confirm a problem or provide an alternate explanation. If it deems a situation a serious problem, the robot notifies the authorities.

Cameron Scott

2015 - One third of US fighting strength will be composed of robots.

2015 - Moravec envisions crude machines that although frustrating at times, perform some household chores and assist seniors and children.

2015 - The number of devices connected to the internet approaches 15 billion. 

2015 - Virtual reality gaming systems take off. 

[...]

2016 - Internet traffic breaks through the zettabyte barrier. 

2016 - D-Wave Systems unveils a quantum computer with around 10,000 qubits. 

In addition to doubling the qubit count every 12 months, further improvements are planned, which include increasing the precision of the programmable elements, reducing the footprint of the entire system, reducing the energy consumption of the system, and the inclusion of parallel cores (i.e. multiple processors) within a single refrigeration unit.

D-Wave Systems

2016 - The DARPA funded SyNAPSE project (IBM, HRL Labs, and Hewlett Packard) comes to completion. 

[...]

2017 - The first exascale supercomputer is operational within the US intelligence community. 

[...]

2018 - The Multiprogram Computational Data Center at ORNL is completed and equipped with exascale potential. It is headed by the NSA. 

[...]

2017–2019 – Household robots begin getting better at performing desired functions.

2017-2019 - The era of neuromorphic and cognitive computing officially arrives.

[...]

2020 - Robots prepare meals, set tables, clean house, provide interface to communication and entertainment systems, strengthen security, and develop friendships with family members.

2020 - Implantable brain chips that let humans control electronic devices via brain waves becomes an option for everyday people.

2020 - A $1,000 computer now has the processing power of a human brain.

2020 - The number of devices connected to the internet approaches 40 billion.

2020 - The number of internet users approaches 5 billion.

2020 - The era of exascale super-computing begins. 

[...]

2020-2025 - Advanced nanotechnology becomes available to the mass market.

[...]

2021 - Caterpillar plans to have developed fully autonomous heavy robots around this time.

[...]

2020-2025 - Quantum computing makes huge breakthroughs.

2022 – Intelligent robots that sense their environment, make decisions, and learn are used in 30% of households and organizations. Their application potential and efficacy begins to spread into all areas of life.

2020-2025 - Humanoid robots begin being deployed for search and rescue missions for law enforcement (test-runs). Eventually, authorization is granted by the governments for robots to use "non-lethal" force against "terrorists". 

[...]

2023-2025 - The military begins deploying fully autonomous weapons systems, taking humans almost completely out of the loop. 

[...]

2025 – Full immersion virtual reality using a visual interface and trans-cranial EM stimulation to the brain becomes practical.

2025 - The rise of the machines prompts science to add a machinic phylum to the animal kingdom to account for artificial life. 

2025 - Self-driving cars approach full autonomy.

2025 – Robots are coming closer to matching human mental capabilities for performing in the real world. They can act as guides, escorts, check out groceries, and assume most home management duties.

2025 - Robots have taken over half of all U.S. jobs. 

[...]

2025–2030 - Robots surpass human intelligence and develop an independent volition, pursuing a collective agenda to suit their own survival interests.