Even if the AI boom didn't exactly take off in 2020 (transformers were developed in 2017, GPT-2 and AI Dungeon came out in 2019, and ChatGPT only dropped in 2022), the global shifts that year due to the pandemic (and ensuing mistrust in institutions, supply chains, and the offline world) means that 2020 will appear just as often as 2022 or 2023 in terms of discussions of the launch of the current world order. Furthermore, enough important developments did occur in 2020 (first paying Waymo robotaxi customers, GPT-3, and the first delivery of a humanoid work robot – Digit – to Ford) that it makes it as good a milestone as any.
Some other years that come to mind as being recognizable from their digits alone:
1066 (in England). A succession crisis erupts with the death of the prior childless king. His successor is able to fend off a Viking claimant before ultimately falling in battle to the Normans, launching the development of the English language and the Celtic-Danish-Dutch-French fusion culture that would lead to the world's first global superpower and the world's first lasting industrial revolution.
1492: The last Muslim ruler surrenders in Iberia, and the process of Christianizing or expelling its religious minorities begins. An Italian by way of Portugal and then Spain conman, who shaved hundreds of km off the earth's diameter to secure funding for the journey, lands in the Caribbean, launching the first sustained contact between the Old and New Worlds and granting Europe an unprecedented advantage against the other world civilizations. To this day, Europeans and their descendants control a disproportionate share of world GDP, wealth, and resources.
1776 (in the USA): The American War of Independence evolves into a full-fledged separatist conflict with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Those who drafted it, the "Framers" or "Founding Fathers", are revered by American patriots and nationalists to this day, and were also respected by the French Revolutionaries. The USA remains one of the world's two leading superpowers, and the French Republic (after about a century of turbulence) is still an important regional power.
1945: The fall of the Third Reich and later the surrender of Imperial Japan end WWII, history's deadliest war. With the Axis defeated, the Soviet Union now becomes the largest non-US power, and the decolonization process in the Old World and Caribbean begins shortly thereafter. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while tragic, launch the Atomic Age that sees huge peacetime leaps in energy production and scientific knowledge. ENIAC, the first full-fledged computer, enters service in the last weeks of the year.
2020 (conjectural): The COVID-19 pandemic, while first reported by credible sources on December 31, 2019 (I'm not making it up; it actually was announced on the last day of the decade, meaning I wonder if we somehow pissed off the Gregorian calendar), spirals into the greatest global crisis since WWII, breaking a trend of improving global wellbeing that had been ongoing since at least the early 1990s if not since '45. The pandemic and its immediate fallout raise new questions about global trade and tourism as well as the fragility of supply chains, and the shutdown of much of the offline world results in an explosion of new digital technologies. Remote work is normalized, and to this day it is among the most popular (and among the cheapest, if you don't own office space) perks that employees and employers negotiate. Investment plows into crypto (with mixed results), NFTs (disastrous), and then generative AI (mixed results) and robotics (too soon to tell, but at the very least mission-critical drone warfare isn't going back to 2010s levels). If AI ends up developing as an intelligent "species" of sorts, 2020 or so may well be seen as its equivalent of a 1066 or 1776, a cultural birth year even if it didn't ascend to global relevance until years or even decades later.
In future history, the year "2020" may well earn its place as one of those instantly recognizable dates like 1492, as more or less the birth of an explicitly science-fiction influenced world.
byu/TF-Fanfic-Resident inFuturology
2 Comments
I think what you meant to say was that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue
All the other dates you mentioned were course-of-civilization altering battles that fundamentally reshaped the global power structure.
2020 was a mid-tier outbreak of disease plus a few tech-bro-ish events.
No one remembers any of the dates of the Spanish Influenza, and it killed far more people both absolutely and as a share of global population.
If anything, the date that will be remembered is 2022, as that was when the Long Peace after WWII was formally broken as a great power invaded a developed neighbor in the “civilized world”.