Our Changing World

Evolving Future

The 38 predictions below were sent to this blog by email but the source is unknown. While some are over dramatic and exaggerated, they are generally true. Only the timing is unknown. The world is in for huge change in all ways, not just those listed below.

For Example, Omitted Are, How:

• CRISPER, the gene editing tool, will all but eliminate hereditary and common health problems such as cancer, heart disease, obesity
• New low cost learning methods will educate the third world, helping stabilise population growth
• Low cost electricity, water purification and non sewerage human waste disposal will allow low income countries leap frog old technologies
• Changes and alternatives to traditional farming will dramatically increase food production and quality
• Controversially, technology will produce abundance, not shortages
• Watch this space

“38  Interesting Predictions (There are 38!)

Electric Vehicles

• Electric cars will become mainstream by about 2030… Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run ONLY on electricity…
• Auto repair shops will disappear..
• A gas/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts… An electrical motor has 20… Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers… It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor…
• Faulty electric motors are NOT repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with ROBOTS…
• Your electric motor malfunction light goes on … so you drive up to what looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee… Then your car comes out on the other side with a new electric motor or component…
• Gas stations will go away…
• Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity… Companies will install electrical recharging stations … in fact, they’ve already started in the developed world…
• Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start building new plants that build ONLY electric cars..
• A baby of today will only see “personal cars” in museums. The FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can even handle…

Energy

• The “Coal Industries” will go away… Gasoline/oil companies will go away… Drilling for oil will stop… So say goodbye to OPEC… The Middle East is in trouble…
• Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use… It will be sold back to “The Grid”… The Grid will store and dispense it, to the industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof??

Digital Photos

• 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 went bankrupt… Who would have thought of that ever happening, especially as they invented the digital camera?
• What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in the next 5–10 years … and most people don’t even see it coming…
• Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures on film again? With today’s smartphones, who even has a camera these days??
• Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975… The first ones only had 10,000 pixels but followed Moore’s law… As with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment in the beginning … before it became superior and mainstream in only a few short years…

Artificial Intelligence

• It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence (AI), health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs…
• Forget the book, “Future Shock,” welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution…
• Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries … (in the next 5 to 10 years…
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): 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 USA, young lawyers already don’t get jobs (because of IBM’s WATSON) … you can get legal advice within a few seconds so for the basic stuff … with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans.. So, if you’re studying law, STOP IMMEDIATELY… There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future, what a thought and only omniscient specialists will remain…
• WATSON already helps nurses diagnosing cancer … it’s 4 times more accurate and many times faster than human nurses…
• Facebook now has a ‘face recognition’ software that can recognize faces better than humans… In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans…

New Company Structures

• UBER is just a software tool (they don’t own any cars), and are now the biggest taxi company in the world… (Ask any taxi driver if they saw that coming…
• AIR-BnB is now the biggest hotel company in the world .. (they don’t own any properties)… Ask Hilton Hotels or the Marriott if they saw that coming…

Autonomous Cars

• Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars were already here… In the next few years, the entire auto industry will start to be disrupted… You won’t want to own a car any more as 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 will pay only for the ‘driven distance’ and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver’s licence and they will never own a car..
• This will change our cities because we will need 90% to 95% fewer cars… We can transform former parking spaces into green city parks…
• About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents (worldwide). That includes distracted or drunk drivers… We currently have one accident every 60,000 miles driven… However with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in about 6 million miles… That will save a million plus lives, worldwide each year…
• Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt… They will 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…
• Look at what Volvo is doing right now … no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2020 models… They are using all-electric or hybrid only (with the intent of phasing out hybrid models in the not too distant future)…
• Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla… Look at all the companies offering all-electric vehicles… That was unheard of, only a few years ago…
• Insurance companies will have massive trouble too … because, without accidents, the costs of insurance will become cheaper… Their car insurance business model will disappear…

Energy

• Cities will have much cleaner air…
• Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean, eventually free..
• Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years … but you can now see the burgeoning impact … and it’s just starting to get ramped up…
• Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid … to prevent competition from home solar installations … but that simply cannot continue… Technology will take care of that strategy in the not too distant future…

Health

• The Tricorder X price will be announced this year… There are companies who will build a medical device called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, a sample of your blood, then you breathe into it… It then analyzes 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease.. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health…

Where We Live

• Real estate will change… Because if you can work while you commute, or you can work from your home … people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful and affordable properties.

WELCOME TO TOMORROW — To think, I used to complain about my parents and grandparents being “out of it.””