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.

Well I saw this article posted as a reply on another thread a few days back and I thought it was worthy enough of an article to start a new thread with. So using Google, I found the original source which was some publication in India that I know nothing about. I know that India is where many of us get our tech support these days. They also have good cuisine. I like their spicy fish with curry with rice beer that looks like watered down milk but packs quite the punch. Those Indians sure have an exotic way of eating.

But I digress. I came here tonight to talk about technology and how the whole world is about to be disrupted. We are going to have 3-D printers making our shoes on demand and when we want to go someplace, we will be able to mix ourselves a strong cocktail and have some driverless car come pick us up and whisk us away. I'm going to need a strong cocktail or two before I put myself into a driverless car! But they say it is coming and less than 10 years away.

One of the companies I used to work for was Kodak and I remember very well when their business model evaporated pretty much overnight. Back in the 1970s, they invented this clunky thing called the digital camera and everybody laughed and Kodak put it on the shelf to collect dust. They could pay people to invent such "useless things" because they were literally printing money with their core film business. Everybody was taking pictures on film cameras and Kodak pretty much cornered the market on film. They also made a pretty good camera. They were perfectly verticalized! And if you bought a non-Kodak camera, chances were, you stuck Kodak film into it. Then you had to take the film to a place like CVS to get it developed. You'd seal the film into an envelope, write your name and address and would have to come back in like 5 days to get your developed pictures. Half the time, the pictures were crap. Sometimes you accidentally took pictures of your feet while adjusting something on the camera. But you had to pay for those pictures anyway. What a racket! And Kodak made money hand over fist.

You know the rest of the story. Other companies started selling digital cameras. They became cheaper and and had more and more memory. But still, they took mostly crappy pictures. Film cameras were so much more superior! But Moore's Law! Starting in the late 1990s, the cameras started really getting better and cheaper. But Kodak still laughed. Then BANG! We all woke up one morning and nobody was buying film cameras anymore or even film. I mean it was literally overnight. The entire camera industry as we knew it went the way of the vinyl LP record. Only a niche group of nerds and professional photographers were interested.

In my current job, I am involved somewhat with 3-D printers. My company sells and supports several models of them. Right now they are clunky and rather amateur, much like those first consumer digital cameras of the late 1990s. But I see the potential and each year's model is more than twice as good as the model before it. Before too long, we will have these in our homes. If we drop our comb under the sink and are too lazy to get down on our hands and knees to get it, then we can just hit a button and print a new one. If I misplace my spark plug wrench, why I can just download the appropriate file and print it out in my garage. The possibilities are endless. And as for high-end 3-D printers, the sky is the limit.

A lot of other technologies mentioned in this article have that same disruptive potential. I've been using Uber lately. It's so easy. I just tell the app where I want to go and five or ten minutes later, a Uber car is pulling up. The GPS in my phone already knows where I am and the driver coming to get me gets driving instructions based on my GPS location. The fee is already calculated and tipping is discouraged so it's a total hassle-free cashless transaction. I have not tried out Airbnb yet but as I travel a lot, that sounds intriguing. It just might beat staying at the Marriott Courtyard by some shopping mall in Scranton, PA.

I'm not sure if Bitcoin is going to become our main currency but other than that, most of what I read in this article seems plausible.

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