The Future Is Here

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.

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.

It seems strange that when I read this article today it triggered a rant. Last night I lay awake thinking about technology and “progress” and how it has affected our jobs and lifestyles since the 50’s.

Is it better? The answer is no…it’s far worse.

Back in the 50’s men were the “breadwinners” and mom normally stayed home and raised the kids. Manners and morals were learned from both mom and dad and every male was expected to leave home after graduation from high school and start their paths into the world. Manners, morals, the work ethic, abiding the laws and rules of our country and institutions, and the goals of financial independence from the family along with a strong education from our public schools back then, made the generations up until the mid-60’s the greatest in American history.

My mind wandered back to the days when every town and city of any size had its own telephone company office, electric company office, utilities department, and a whole host of retail and department stores. In these stores worked local people. For instance: In a large department store you had local managers, their staff, clerks, sales people, inventory stockers and a whole host of other people from other local businesses providing logistical support along with services such as plumbing, carpentry etc. All of which had local people working for them and the chain of interaction between all local companies and the support of all of the people who worked for them.
Unemployment was not a problem. If you wanted work…there was work. It might not be what you like but the job was there.

All of this came to mind last night after I went through the misery of trying to terminate all of the utilities and auxiliary services to a house I own and sold yesterday. Note: I’ve not had the need to turn on nor terminate any local utilities in a very long time so what comes was a real “eye opener” to me and is the basis of this article. WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF THE LOCAL JOBS? Why is it impossible to simply walk into the utility office and have the service terminated? Where are they physically located? What happens if you don’t have a computer to correspond with them with? How can you possibly talk to someone who can’t speak understandable English? And (last but not least) how the hell do you even get to the correct department in the first place?

After this experience I got to thinking about the old days and how simple everything was and it dawned upon me the damage that technology has done to our society and local jobs and businesses. Going back to the local stores, the people who worked there and the “spoked wheel” of local interaction with all local companies and service companies, I suddenly realized that with each company that either “digitized”, centralized and moved their offices and service centers overseas KILLED local businesses along with the complete destruction of the “spoked wheel” of interaction and support among local people and businesses.

In the old days I could walk into the electric utility building, walk up to a counter and pay my bill or make changes to my services. It took about 5 minutes with no miserable experiences. Same with all of the other small offices and businesses it was necessary to visit to do business. Take the electric utility business for example: 1 manager, 1 secretary/bookkeeper, 1 general laborer, 1 clerk and the needed services performed by outside sources. That was 4 people who were employed at the electric service company used in the example. Of course larger cities had much larger figures. With the new-age technology in communications ALL OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE NO JOB. Worse yet, no personal service and support exists there any longer.

I lay there awake thinking about this and how we hear of Jobs, jobs, jobs, and how the government is going to bring them back. HOW? And what kind of jobs? Government? Minimum wage? “Make work” jobs? The fact is that the jobs have been digitized and sent overseas in both manufacturing and in general business activities.

Since the 60’s we have destroyed our own small towns, services on all levels, morality, the work ethic, and the jobs that used to support hard working families. Sure, technology has made many things easier for us but in many cases destroyed the fabric of our society. For example: Take TV for example. It used to be that in the old days everyone went to the movie theatre and everyone met and knew each other. It was a social bonding of each town and actually was the glue that held many in contact with their neighbors and friends. With the introduction of TV back then they stayed home and soon did not even know the neighbors down the street any longer.

Today it’s even worse for technology has totally decimated the social web we used to know. For example: cell phone users prefer to TEXT rather than speak on a telephone (a wondrous device that allows an individual to actually have TWO WAY vocal conversation with someone). Is something wrong here?
What this rant comes down to is that with each advancement of technology comes a decrease in both professionalism, personal service and attention, local jobs and the collapse of social interaction (real face to face).

Now, I’ve blown off steam and have to gird myself to try to call the electric company to terminate my services and hope I can speak to someone who has the mastery of the English language. I don’t think the bad experience I had yesterday will change today.

And there’s no reason your digital images will go away is if you save them as files.

You'd think that, but there are issues. Let's say that you have a novel that you wrote back in the day using MS-Word 1.0. You've done a really good job on keeping up with your files, and managed to successfully transfer from 5.25" floppies, to 2.5" discs, to CDs, and now to a micro-SD card the same size as your pinky fingernail. Now, it's 2016 and you'd like to re-read and perhaps modify the file. How do you do it? MS-Office won't read it. Fortunately, OpenOffice might, but you'll likely lose some formatting information.

Same thing will eventually go for various file formats. For pictures, JPEG is a lossy format so you've already lost some fidelity if you don't store your data in their raw format. I figure you'll see more and more cameras and other devices go to lossless compression. However, you'll have to be sure that the format is well documented, because if you want to read the file 50 years from now, even if you've faithfully transferred the file over time without losing the data due to file corruption, you're going to need a program to read it. My advise for images is to go with a lossless format, and every few years think about whether or not you need to convert it to something new. With luck you won't lose any data in the conversions, though it's pretty likely you will. For instance, will your conversions know about, or be able to handle EXIF information? One would hope so, but there are no guarantees.

The real shame with a lot of people's data is that they do a lousy job of keeping track of it, and backing it up. I can't tell you how many people that I know that have lost everything when their hard drive crashed. Hopefully they'll have some of that stuff stored in 'the cloud', but there are no guarantees for that either, unless you're paying for it. What happens to that cloud data when someone dies? Can you even get to it?

There are tons of issues surrounding access to data of all kinds that people aren't really thinking about.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.