Posted on 06/08/2016 6:21:13 PM PDT by SamAdams76
In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85 percent of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went 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 way superior and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age.
Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.
Artificial Intelligence: 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 percent accuracy compared with 70 percent accuracy when done by humans.
So if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90 percent less lawyers in the future, only specialists will remain. Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 times more accurate than human nurses. Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.
Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self driving cars will appear for 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 with 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 can be productive while driving. Our kids will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95 percent less cars for that. We can transform former parking space into parks. 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 100,000 km, with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save a million lives each year.
Most car companies might become bankrupt. Traditional car companies try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. I spoke to a lot of engineers from Volkswagen and Audi; they are completely terrified of Tesla.
Insurance companies will have massive trouble because without accidents, the insurance will become 100x cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.
Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in a more beautiful neighborhood.
Electric cars will become mainstream until 2020. Cities will be less noisy because all cars will run on electricity. Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean: Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can only now see the impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. The price for solar will drop so much that all coal companies will be out of business by 2025.
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 anyone can have as much clean water as he wants, for nearly no cost.
Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There will be companies who will build a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and you breath into it. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medicine, nearly for free.
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 3D printing 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 have 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 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 go in, ask yourself: “in the future, do you think we will have that?” and if the answer is yes, how can you make that happen sooner? If it doesn’t work with your phone, forget the idea. And any idea designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st century.
Work: 70-80 percent of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be enough new jobs in such a short time.
Agriculture: There will be a US$100 agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their field instead of working all day in their fields. Aeroponics will need much less water. The first Petri dish produced veal is now available and will be cheaper than cow produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30 percent of all agricultural surfaces is used for cows. Imagine if we don’t need that space anymore. There are several startups who will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labeled as “alternative protein source” (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).
There is an app called “moodies” which can already tell in which mood you are. Until 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where it’s being displayed when they are telling the truth and when not.
Bitcoin will become mainstream this year and might even become the default reserve currency.
Longevity: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span used to be 79 years, now it’s 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more that one year increase per year. So we all might live for a long long time, probably way more than 100.
Education: The cheapest smart phones are already at $10 in Africa and Asia. By 2020, 70 percent of all humans will own a smart phone. That means, everyone has the same access to world class education. Every child can use Khan academy for everything a child learns at school in First World countries.
We have already released our software in Indonesia and will release it in Arabic, Swahili and Chinese this summer, because I see an enormous potential. We will give the English app for free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half a year.
Kodak always thought of a camera as a separate device. People had to think, "I am going out, should I take my camera with me?" But then people started carrying around smartphones, and the phones had cameras included with them. The quality wasn't quite as good, but it was "good enough," and so people suddenly stopped choosing to carry along their separate camera, because what they were already carrying was good enough. Kodak was completely locked out of the phone market, and never saw that coming.
I agree that we are going through a period of tremendous transformation. There will be a lot of wonderful things that will come about, but a lot of pain for individuals to adjust. The great depression was like that too. It was prolonged because the transformation from a horse based society to a car based society was occurring at the time, throwing people out of work, with little skills for the new economy. This is why I am strongly against the large immigration that we are allowing right now. It would be easier to digest rapid technological growth if we were not also absorbing lots of immigrants, which typically have performed the work we are now getting rid of.
Just thinkin’ of Paul Simon’s song Boy in the Bubble, which was skeptical of progress’s ability to make us finally happy. In particular, the ironic closing lines of the chorus: These are the days of miracle and wonder, so don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry.
Kodak’s judgement of consumer tastes was tragically myopic.
They didn’t get into the 35mm film business until very late, and never made a consumer 35mm negative-to-print film that was as good as Fuji’s.
Interesting bit of trivia ...
Originally, 35mm ‘cameras’ were used as light meters by the Hollywood movie industry, using movie film stock, hence the sprocket holes.
Rather than plunge into the 35mm camera market, where companies like Nikon were firmly entrenched, Kodak felt the consumer needed simplification, not f-stops and knobs to fiddle with. So that came up with the disc camera/film.
The film technology for the disc produced a picture so grainy, it was like viewing the scene through a lens smeared with cream of wheat. As to processing the disc negative, a Kodak VP was on hand to watch the first demonstration as the equipment took an undeveloped disc and flicked it out in the room, fatally exposing it and gaining the processor the nickname of ‘disc launcher.’
Eventually, Kodak adopted T-grain technology for the disc and the 110 film camera, which made possible grain-acceptable pictures all the way up to 5x7!
Venturing into digital photography, well, more like sticking in a tippy-toe, Kodak invested its future (and thereby forced the photofinishing industry to buy a bunch more equipment) in the IX-240, named APS for consumers, and deemed Another Piece of Shit by users. The camera produced some digital encoding, but still relied on film to take a picture and could make a decent 8x10! Progress!
Even when not dealing with the amateur market, Kodak was arthritis-ridden. Their R&D performance was so sluggardly that by the time new professional equipment reached the shipping dock, it was obsolete and outmoded.
Kodak was a product of its quasi-monopoly in the US: lazy, obese, and complacent.
How about the prediction that energy will magically get cheaperm
Well, there will always be demand for sex...
“Loser pays” would do wonders here, suppressing the need for more lawyers, as frivolous litigation mitigates.
“I am seriously quite convinced the Antichrist comes as AI.”
I am not, but I believe that God has a plan, and that plan includes the technology that is being invented and used.
We live in interesting times, my FRiend.
One of the things I find unlikely in the article is cheap solar power. Be nice, but what we really need is a cheap efficient battery. Possible, but has proved quite difficult.
7 billion will die.
....so you are saying I *will* be employed.
Prediction: The Powers That Be see how poorly extermination worked the last century. This time, look for a sudden drop off in fertility.
Zika seems like a test run.
Wow, in the early 1900s they perfected heavier than air flying machines and it all went to hell in the transportation industries after that!
Seriously, I see your point. I retired as an Army Aviator in 2005, and since then I’ve seen how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have steadily crept into jobs previously performed by human pilots. From aerial reconnaissance, to armed reconnaissance, to full attack platforms and soon for cargo delivery and not too far from that for robot troop deployment if not human troop transport as well.
And now as a travel and tourism executive, we are seeing how the share economy is disrupting ground transportation (Uber, Lyft, etc.) and lodging (AirBnB, VRBO, etc.), and more recently, concierge services (livingua).
My point here, I guess, is that humans adapt well to new tech, and that it will come to a point that as a species we will come full circle and live simpler lives again while machines do most of our chores. That could be good, since people are not having as much children as they used to and labor will be scarce, as it is already in most advanced economies. We will have more time for creativity instead of trudging through mind-numbing work. Like a new renaissance, when Medici-sponsored geniuses didn’t have to worry about making a living and could concentrate in their God-given talents.
Kodak had marvelous inventions in the lab that could have easily saved them, but their management was still living in the 19th Century.
I remember visiting their Rochester lab sometime in the 90’s at the height of their big copier business when they were actually beating Xerox because the Kodak machines were WAY more reliable.
We went to look at some OCR software they were developing to sell, but as I remember almost everybody had OCR just about done at the time, so no big whoop.
But we DID see a big 4-color copier that was revolutionary. This was at the time when smaller, Ethernet-attached printers were just starting to come out. So I was REALLY excited about what they had and suggested that if they just tacked on a rasterization engine and an Ethernet interface, they would have a world-beater of a product WAY ahead of the competition, even though they were just working on a high-speed, high-capacity model.
Well, our excitement was squelched faster than the Pointy-Head Boss could whip out a firehose when we were told management wouldn’t allow that because the only market they could possibly imagine for the color copier was CEO’s of the Fortune 500 companies might want one for their own offices so their secretaries could prepare color hand-outs for them for big meetings, like board meetings, etc., and the marketplace wouldn’t be much bigger than that for color copiers/printers.
I shook my head and absolutely knew right then and there on the spot that Kodak was going to go bankrupt, and it was just a matter of time.
True story.
“... then government control becomes quite unnecessary.”
We will still need government to protect us from other people, and other governments.
Human nature will still present threats, so computers will be used to monitor and profile, and analyze each of us - completely.
But who will watch the watchers?
muslims inbreeding, abortion and faggotry will do the rest.
There is a nanotechnology battery that basically is a large-scale capacitor. Seconds to charge, retains charge indefinately, you can discharge the nanocells as power is needed.
Kodak was killed by digital cameras,not smartphones. Compact digital cameras,in particular, a huge segment of the camera market, has been killed by smartphones.
Rochester is a ghost town now.
At it’s height, Kodak employed 170,000 people. Now there are maybe 6,000 people, mostly security guards to make sure nobody runs off with the remaining equipment.
Oh no silly. They are going to change that for the likes of us. It will be demanned for sex...
I use Uber all the time. It’s great and cheaper and higher quality than a cab.
I also use Turo - a sort of AirBNB for rental cars. I have a very small car, so need to rent a big one from time to time, so I get one from a private person via Turo.com.
My smartphone has replaced:
- My camera
- My maglight
- My GPS
- My guitar tuner
- My metronome
- My landline phone
- My phone book
- My note pad
- My mp3 player
- My Calculator
I also use it to check currency rates, weather, make calls, send text messages, skype messages, FB messages, Viber and read PDF books when I’m waiting for something.
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