An Author's look into the future: Economic models are changing. We must deal with it.

I just went to the Singularity University summit. Here are the key points I gathered.

Rise and Fall: In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they were bankrupt. What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years – and most people don’t see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again?

Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore’s law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became superior and mainstream in only a few short years. This will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, self-driving and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.

Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software and operating platforms will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

Uber is just a software tool. They don’t own any cars, but they are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.

Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected. In the US, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice, (so far for more or less basic stuff), within seconds. With 90% accuracy, compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So if you are studying law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer generalist lawyers in the future; only specialists will be needed.

‘Watson’ already helps nurses diagnose cancer, four times more accurately than doctors. Facebook now has pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. By 2030, computers will have become ‘more intelligent’ than humans.

Cars: In 2018 the first self driving cars will be offered to the public. Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted. You don’t want to own a car anymore. You will call a car on your phone; it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive whilst driving. Our kids will never get a driver’s licence and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars for our future needs. We can transform former parking spaces into parks. At present,1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 100,000 kms. With autonomous driving, that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save a million lives each year.

Electric cars will become mainstream around and after 2020. Cities will be cleaner and much less noisy because all cars will run on electricity, which will become much cheaper.

Most traditional car companies may become bankrupt by tacking the evolutionary approach and just building better cars; while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. I spoke to a lot of engineers from Volkswagen and Audi. They are terrified of Tesla. Insurance companies will have massive trouble, because without accidents, the insurance will become 100 times cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.

Real estate values based on proximities to work-places, schools, etc. will change, because if you can work effectively from anywhere or be productive while you commute, people will move out of cities to live in a more rural surroundings.

Solar energy production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but only now is having a big impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. The price for solar will drop so much that almost all coal mining companies will be out of business by 2025.

Water for all: With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination now only needs 2kWh per cubic meter. We don’t have scarce water in most places; we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if everyone can have as much clean water as they want, for virtually no cost.

Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year - a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and your breath. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any diseases. It will be cheap, so in a few years, everyone on this planet will have access to world class, low cost, medicine.

3D printing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from 18,000$ to 400$ within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies started printing 3D shoes. Spare airplane parts are already 3D-printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to need in the past.

At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoe at home. In China, they have already 3D-printed a complete 6-storey office building. By 2027, 10% of everything that’s being produced will be 3D-printed.

Business opportunities: If you think of a niche you want to enter, ask yourself: “in the future, do you think we will have that?” And if the answer is yes, then work on how you can make that happen sooner. If it doesn’t work via your phone, forget the idea. And any idea that was designed for success in the 20th century is probably doomed to fail in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear that there will be enough new jobs in such a short time.

Agriculture: There will be a 100$ agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their fields instead of working in them all day. Aeroponics will need much less water. The first veal produced in a petri dish is now available. It will be cheaper than cow- produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces are used for rearing cattle. Imagine if we don’t need that space anymore. There are several start-ups which will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labelled as “alternative protein source” (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).

Apps: There is already an app called “moodies” which can tell the mood you are in. By 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where we know whether the participants are telling the truth and when not!

Currencies: Many currencies will be abandoned. Bitcoin will become mainstream this year and might even become the future default reserve currency.

Longevity: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span was 79 years, now it is 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more than a one-year increase per year. So we all might live for a long, long time, probably way beyond 100.

Education: The cheapest smartphones already sell at 10$ in Africa and Asia. By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smartphone. That means everyone will have much the same access to world class education. Every child can use Khan Academy for everything he needs to learn at schools in First World countries. Further afield, the software has been launched in Indonesia and will be released it in Arabic, Swahili and Chinese this summer.

The English app will be offered free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half a year.

Socialism is one solution, just give stuff to everyone whether they work or not, but it fosters terrible qualities in human beings. Even when the economic value of working is meaningless, the moral value of HAVING to work is enormous.

I agree. I remember as a kid in the 1960’s, I imagined a world where nobody had to work because of robotics. And in that utopia, everyone would get a living wage, but they could work to afford nicer things, travel, etc.

I realized just a couple of years ago that we actually live in that utopia. It’s really a dystopia. Those “living wage” people are called welfare recipients. Their neighborhoods are quite dangerous. They are in no way happy people.

The author is relentlessly positive about all this disruption, as well as the uses to which all this looming technological advance will be put. Human nature being what it is, there will be quite a few nasty surprises. Prepare yourselves, fasten your seatbelt and return your tray tables to the full, upright and locked position. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Me, personally, I’m all for autonomy and some technology holds great promise for increasing personal autonomy. I don’t hate solar power, I see great possibilities, even to the point of not resenting subsidization to the extent that many FReepers do.

Of course I hate the cronyism that’s always present whenever Uncle Sugar is showering anything with money. That’s always been there. It was there with the construction of the interstate highway system, the millionaires that were made with the location of key interchanges in former agricultural areas alone would be astounding, if we were ever allowed to know the extent of the insider corruption.

‘Watson’ four times more accurately than doctors.

average life span increases by 3 months per year.

It's on the internet so it must be true... or fake news.

IBM Watson Health anlyzed my shop's data and came up with extremely erroneous conclusion due to errors an 8th grader would not make. It used a numerator as the denominator.

And other reports are that longevity in the US went down, not up, in the past couple years. Maybe fake predictions are the new Kodak camera.

I see the solar energy, 3D printing, AI, and materials handling technology all creating a situation in which most jobs are unnecessary or voluntary in another 2-3 decades.

Once the technology that produces the petri dish veal ‘marries’ the 3D printing technology, you will essentially have the replicator from Star Trek. So long to starvation, as long as stuff (anything really) carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen is around to feed into the machine.

Want something made? Even if it is a house, download the software, make the parts for it, and ‘rent’ some robot time to put your house together.

That software can’t be free and neither can the design be free, otherwise there is no motivation to create it. Want a cool house? We’re looking at an explosion in design options and variety, an explosion in novel materials and construction methods. Cheap it cannot be, though. Look at the supply chain required to make that cool house possible. They’re not slaves.

“How many people will be qualified and be able to find work ... all industry is 3d printing ... 3d printers ... 3d print the money ... 3d printed ... 3d printing ... 3d printed robots ... 3d printed office cubes ... own 3d printers... monthly fees for everything instead?...”

Great series of circularities.

Digital-pioneer optimists are morons. Optimistic, ignorant, overbearing morons: just because a few trends have been hopeful, for a few years, we dare not assume that all conditions will improve, indefinitely, without exception. Trend is not destiny.

3D printing cannot replace more traditional methods of manufacture and construction in all cases. For example: it’s not going to make firearms.

Firearms require tempered steel: springs and hardened parts (hammers, triggers, sears, pins etc) simply cannot be made the way 3D printers build up material in increments, to create an object.

And final assembly cannot be accomplished by tossing all the parts into a box for a robot to slap together. Fitting is always required: some need more, some need less. Handwork and a trained eye, seasoned by good judgment and experience, are essential. Human skill.

About 100 years ago over 80% of the people worked on farms, today less than 4%. Jobs were created in fields and industries that no one imagined.

Today’s “visionaries” more often than not see only the obvious and are as clueless about all the eventualities as their peers 100 years ago.

” I think virtually all jobs available on the planet will go away.”

Where ? Majority of traditional jobs (where people actually produce something using their hands) have already gone away. Now majority of employees either sell something or teach other people or help them in any other way. Even those that still work in manufacturing, more often plan the production, estimate trends or control/fix the machines than walk around with hammers in their hands. It’s not a look into the future. It has already largely happened.

We should write a book together because that’s exactly right.

People now don’t even bother moving from regions where there are no jobs and no hope of jobs, because just enough money comes in from the state to keep them warmish and well-fed, and they can obtain drugs and other vices in sufficient quantities to make life bearable on a surface level.

But it’s desperately depressing on a moral level, which they do feel, and they want someone to blame. But whom?

What does an AI care for profit?

You are still assuming that there will be people involved in the supply chain or even the code writing on the software.

I’m not. Automation from beginning to end... That is where the author of the article sees things going and I agree with him. Once that genie is let out of the bottle, it will happen no matter how much the large corporations, governments, and change resistant may not want it to.

Some forms of work will survive — entertainment, sports, journalism, story-telling, boutique farming, law enforcement, travel and hospitality, and other things that a robot can’t do (that list will get smaller and smaller as time goes on) or that humans will want to do (write, paint, act, play, travel, work with the soil, craft their own ____). The motive for doing those things will be different though — a “want to” model instead of a “have to” model.

Good grief you’re sounding like a communist utopian, lol. People are going to work their butts off creating beautiful things to give away? No, they’re not. If there is no reward the creation will not be offered to the public, not even at the end of a gun. What the public gets by force is by it’s very nature inferior.

I think one of the implications is something some millennials have already figured out is cottage crafts. Brew pubs, cheese dairies, bakeries whose goods I see hawked at farmer’s markets.

Robot goods will be dirt cheap and hand crafted goods will become the items with cache.

I am minded of various descriptions from various fantasy fiction about the skilled craftsmanship of elven cultures whose long lives led to superior mastery of various arts.

The problem is that large numbers of humans may choose to live like orcs rather than elves when presented with the opportunity.

I do agree with some of what you are saying but also disagree in some ways.

When computers were first invented, everyone was talking about computers translating languages. Turns out it was a tougher nut to crack than they thought. Meanwhile, we used LED’s as that little indicator on our stereos way back in the 70’s. Then they discovered how to alter the chemical compound to make multiple colors and finally, white. And now the “white” can be tuned to any color temperature you want. and they are revolutionizing lighting as much as the invention of the incandescent bulb.

And back in the early 70’s, a remote controlled TV was a costly option. It was getting better and better, but then one day the electronic tuner was invented and with it the infrared LED remote. Now you can get remote controlled LED candles.

Yep, candles are virtually obsolete now.

And I compare the old mechanical tv remote control to the modern 3D printer. Give it a decade or two.

What technology does, often is not improve the current way of doing something, but attack it from a completely different angle, suddenly making the once impossible into a very simple and cheaply done thing.

Think Digital Photography. And we are nowhere near done exploiting that little gem of a technology. Many of us are STILL thinking of it from a “film” paradigm.

I think that in some ways the author is overly optimistic and in others not nearly optimistic enough.

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