The main element I would critique is in the culture. Culture in 2015 will feel old and dated by 2030 - our memes, our artisan craft breweries and hip indie games. Something else will overtake them. Culture has the soft power to change people's perception of reality even as the substance of that reality remains more stagnant. And culture isn't directly associated to a new tech so much as it is the proliferation of that tech.
For example: "Drone" today equates to big war machines dropping bombs. "Drone" tomorrow could mean the kid across the street with a new toy and the ensuing shenanigans inflicted on stodgy 50-year-olds who think you're going to blow everything up.
Or you know, more destruction and loss of life for unfortunate countries, constant policing for developed countries, a huge blow to the people's ability to protest and do demonstrations, etc...
The biggest change will be that more people in the 3rd world will enjoy better living standards, and that's a huge achievement on its own. We don't need flying cars for that.
I think there have been much more drastic (positive) changes during the 19th century for the western world than during the 20th century.
Sure, one can work as a web designer now, and they couldn't before. But they'd still have some other job anyway in the past. Same with smartphones. We wouldn't have selfies, and casual surfing on a restaurant and constant BS calls while on the move. Other than that, not much would change.
Whereas things like women rights or seggregation or cars or toilets or flights or electricity etc have much more changed how we live in a much more profound way.
There is a big achievement in the 20th century, which is that the time-barrier has been slashed for spreading information, and that spreading information has become cheap. IMHO this is the biggest thing since the invention of writing (== communication over large distances) and the invention of printing (== cheap mass reproduction of information, but you still had to physically transport it around the world). The internet goes hand in hand with cheap personal communication devices, I give you that. It's a shame that it is mostly used for shopping and looking at cat images ;)
Sounds like someone has spent too much time in the tech industry in San Fransisco and perhaps should broaden their perspective a bit. Maybe go back to Ohio and look at the meth labs and bulldogs and then think about the future. Also, 30% of the world (at least) probably barely works now. This includes to some extent people who are nominally employed.
"It suddenly occurs to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up."
[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the-worl...
From living in and helping facilitate this "campus environment" for the past year: it's kind of nice. I can't say how well it works yet long-term, but I very much appreciate being in a community where I know who my neighbors are, what they're up to, where I actually care about how they're doing. More than just the benefit of being surrounded by like-minded, intellectual/creative people, there's this shroud of anonymity that living in a city comes with. It's refreshingly pleasant to live and work in a community where the shroud is lifted.
Campus' recent shutdown was a step backwards. I don't know if the author is right; the biggest open question to me is financial sustainability (IE, are enough people willing to pay a premium for communal living to fuel growth & innovation)?
> Taking into account CO2 emissions prior to 2014, the remaining emissions quota (from 2015 onwards) associated with a 66% probability of keeping warming below +2°C is estimated to be 1,200 (900–1,600) GtCO2. This +2°C quota will be exhausted in about 30 (22-40) ‘equivalent emission-years’ at the 2014 emission level (40.3 GtCO2 yr^-1). Owing to inter-annual and decadal variability, the actual year when +2°C will be reached is uncertain. The remaining quota associated with a 50% probability of committing to 2 °C of warming is estimated to be 1,500 (1,100–1,900) GtCO2 (Table 1), corresponding to 37 (27–47) equivalent emission-years at the 2014 emission level.
So, within the 40 year timeframe mentioned in the link, and assuming (optimistically) that we've reduced global CO2 emissions to 2014 levels (recall: global emissions have been growing by 2.5% each year for the past decade.), we'll have hit a 50% chance of having locked in > +2°C of warming.
[1] -- Friedlingstein et al - nature geoscience, 2014 -- pdf version http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Friedlingstein...
Anyway, I'm not a climate scientist and there are a number of people who claim that 1000 GtCO2 lead to 2 degree warming, so your 1500 GtCO2 seem only a little optimistic. However, just reducing CO2 production is not enough. We have to completely stop, because CO2 takes basically forever to sequester from the atmosphere, and every degree of warming we cause increases the likelihood that we leave the "safe" linear-relationship territory.
For a vr world where you can live someone's life that's not crap we will have to have hit the singularity, which conflicts with a lot of the other ideas.
> Gestures that previously were arcane are now the way to invoke computer programs
This is a strange one. Why would you gesture for a check and not just push a button to just pay it. Is it a themed restaurant?
> China, India, and the United States are the three world powers.
Not sure why these three are picked. China I get.
>A good segment (30%) of the world barely works.
There's no reason the think the rest of the world will support them. Besides which currently most people can live this in the first world. Rural property is cheap and so is simple food. But most of the population wants more than just food and a house. Like high end medical care and GoT.
> More and more infrastructure follows a pay-per-use model.
People don't like making a stack of small losses. We prefer to pay big then use the products at our leisure. I can't see this changing.
There's some interesting thoughts here's. Misses the mark in bits as well though. Burning man that never ends, not sure what to think about that. But I can see it happening.
I don't see how self-driving car services could be "almost free". Self-driving cars cost money to manufacture. Like all mechanical equipment, they have finite lifetimes, so their purchase cost needs to be paid back over that lifetime. They need to be maintained, e.g., tires and shocks don't last forever, and metal corrodes over time (especially in environments where roads are salted for de-icing). Someone will need to clean the interiors every day (or more often), since people tend to leave messes (sometimes really disgusting ones).
The power for them isn't free. Even if they're solar powered, solar panels have to be manufactured, installed and maintained (e.g., cleaned off periodically to maintain maximum efficiency), and they need to be replaced after their finite lifetimes expire. Rechargeable batteries need to be replaced after a certain number of recharge cycles.
Roads, bridges and tunnels cost as much to maintain for self-driving cars as for conventional cars. There will still be tolls and taxes. As gas and diesel vehicles die off, the revenue from the taxes on their fuel will need to be replaced by other taxes, such as per-mile taxes on electric vehicles.
I doesn't seem that merely showing ads to passengers could pay for all these capital, labor and tax expenses. And if the cars are owned by a for-profit company such as Uber, there has to be enough income for the company to have a profit after paying their operating costs and taxes.
In the future, running an ultra-efficient electric car we can imagine the fuel price could be lower and the range before replacement even higher.
Is eleven cents a mile "almost free"? It's certainly a lot cheaper than the vast majority of public transport trips I've taken in recent years. Could it be ad-supported? Well, maybe. How much would advertisers be willing to pay to captively monopolise the attention of someone whose individual tastes and spending habits were already well profiled? Quite possibly more than eleven cents a mile (a few cents a minute in traffic).
(Personally I'm more than willing to outbid the advertisers in order to get peace and quiet.)
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/636684338352951297
One thing he forgot - what about shared transport - say sharing with 3 people could offer ride time relatively close to a car. That gets us to 4.5 cents/mile. That comes about to $50 a month/american-person(avg 13.5K miles/year) , less for a kid, surely less for people in dense cities(say $25) .
EDIT:and if you're willing to ride an on demand bus/minibus , maybe it could go to 1/2-1/3 of that , so maybe your monthly transport demands could be met by less than $10.
I'm pretty skeptical of this one, but I am curious to see how that plays out. I suspect there are some inherent, systemic rigidities that develop in large companies, that will prevent this from coming (entirely) to pass. If so, small companies / startups will continue to emerge with some technological innovation (or business model innovation) or other and "disrupt" existing models.
That said, an interesting related question would be "will be actually reach 'the end of technology' at some point?" That is, will we reach a point where we have mastered all of the technologies that can exist, given the constraints of the laws of physics? I mean, if we assume a fundamentally unchanging universe (unchanging in terms of the fundamental laws) then human / technological progress has to stop at some point, no? The question is, how far from that point are we?
In general ,technologies are building blocks of newer technologies.Maybe we'll run out of problems first ?
I.e. radicalize, want to blow up the world, ready to take arms for $150/month?
Another role model for those people is 1st world ghettos. We're not doing it better than that yet. "The cost of subsistence has been driven down significantly", that's nice if you actually have some independent source of income. Otherwise you're a slave of someone who has it.
"Solar panels are everywhere" - making electricity out of rain, darkness and misery anyone? Not every country in the world has enough sunshine (however, most do)
Not a world of explaination why India is superpower. Not a word about Europe.
Greece is also already home to far-right and far-left political forces seeing mainstream acceptance.
Also, being a part of united Europe, they can find work in other european countries. Thus the most energetic people leave and get busy.
With, I don't know, space travel, teleportation, telepathy, nanoassembly, digital democracy, aliens?
I don't see how this will be changing in the future.
In Portland maybe. In most of the developed world most of the 30% that doesn't work hasn't decided to "check out of the rat race" but just can't find anything decent (or, in some countries, anything at all).
Maybe 40 years seems like a lot of time in some fields (electronics, software, human life-span), but not so much in some major areas (culture, some hard sciences, societies, economy).
Yes, the rate of technological advances are sometimes exponential. But in some fields, they are clearly slowing down, and stabilizing. And even when technology can alter our daily lives, introducing new elements to our lives, most changes are introduced as a convenience, or a way to enhance our productivity, but our daily life remains almost the same, in the big scope.
Sometimes, a REAL revolutionary element emerges, like the Internet. Computers enhanced the way companies did their work, but the Internet introduced changes much more intensive, enabling new markets, new products, new channels of communication, and above all, changing how we learn, distributing knowledge, and empowering the people to express and divulge their thoughts and opinions.
But in the end, the core of our lives remains the same. If we compare the daily life of a middle class man living in 1935 (80 years to the past, not just 40), to the daily life of a middle class man living in 2015, we would find, generally speaking, that they are really similar. The general structure remains the same. Sure, we enjoy lots of new gadgets, and maybe work 1 or 2 hours less... some of us.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Our grandchildren”, would work around “three hours a day”..
"Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"
Of course, for the vast part of the society that didn't happen. And that won't happen in the next 80 years...
You'll see... One could argue that our standard of living is better than what kings enjoyed 200 years ago. Better infrastructure, better services, better medicine, less physical work, etc. But that standard of living has a cost. Of course, we live in a society, and we pay that cost between all. And as a society, as we get more specialized and qualified jobs (comparatively better jobs), we "earn more". But we have a lot more things to pay for. More services, more products, more everything. And then comes inflation. In the end, this is the key: Cost of living adjusts as we move forward in time, as we introduce new elements in our lives.
If someone is not rich, and would want to stop working, he could try to live like a Mennonite, while spending his savings, but that's not what most people want.
So, in order to get better lives and adjust to our new standards, we either work more ours or we try hard to be more productive, more competitive, increase your social network, get more educated to get better jobs, increase our sales, etc. And as we do that, we live more stressed lives.
Real change in our lives comes when major social change arrives. And revolutionary social changes, often comes from complex origins, not easily attributable to a single technological change.
In my previous example, I proposed comparing a man's life in 1935 and 2015. Now, compare an average woman's life in the same years. During WW2, women became part of the labor force. When men came back, women had to go back to their roles as housewives. But didn't last long. Women proved capable of doing "real" work (getting paid), and they claimed their rights to be included. To have a life outside their homes.
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> Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit.
Cheaper, probably, but not almost-free. Unless it's a public utility and it's owned and subsidized by a state, then it's going to be profit-based, and given the level of investment needed, it can't be almost-free.
>Magic is real.
As someone else posted, that kind of uses feels awkward.
>A good segment (30%) of the world barely works
As I wrote before, this may happen but not because "people have chosen to check out of the rat race." But because automation and the increasing concentration of wealth is leaving lots of people out of the market.
>Many people live throughout their life in campus environments similar to college campuses of the early 21st century.
Communities and cities growing around major companies is nothing new. On the contrary, that was far more common in the early 20th century. And it wasn't really a nice environment. What the future will see, is the expansion and proliferation of gated communities. And eventually, private cities. Nordelta, in Argentina, is an example of that. With 5 schools, medical center, 20 restaurants, shopping center, hotels, golf, sports fields, parks, offices, etc. And of course, high density != friends.
>Hyper-personalized healthcare.
For the ones who can pay it. This is one of the areas where the difference between high-end and low-end services will increase enormously. If you are rich, custom-made organs and genetic treatments, tailored just for you, will be available. If not... you'll have something a little better than now, but not that much better.
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So, in general, what I care the most about the future are the big social changes, and those are not necessarily the technological ones. Those are my predictions:
- Middle East will still be a mess. Governments coming and going. Factions fighting for power, etc.
- As the clash of civilization escalates, people will take refuge in their own value systems. Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia will increase A LOT. More and more.
- Religion will recover lost ground in the west and the far east. We saw this happen in the Middle East, when secular governments fell (some puppets, some dictatorships and monarchies) and theocratic and radicalized movements expanded their influence. I'm seeing this happening in some parts of Europe and Latin America.
- A new wave of New-Age like movements will make appearance, promoting healthier spiritual lives.
- The gap between the rich and the poor will increase.
- As China's economy and influence expands, and it's workforce is paid better, new opportunities rise in cheaper-labor countries, and many companies will move their production centers. This poses a threat to the Chinese Government.
- US and China economies are very entangled. So, direct confrontation benefits no-one. A new economic cold war, under the table, will be fought. Something like the current Cyberwar.
- Eventually, the world will see the first WMD attack (radiological, bio or chemical).
- We'll see the rise of a new kind of fascism or pseudo-Nazism. This is one of the things that scares me the most.
- As we get used to mass surveillance, our expectancy of privacy will go to the floor. And the sad part is that we'll get used to it. And we may even convince ourselves that this is for the better.
- Proxy wars between China, Russia and USA will be fought in Asia and Africa.
- The quest for ever-cheaper labor will lead to Africa.
- A large scale cyberwar will be executed.
- But eventually, money (and not war nor peace) will find the way.
While I try to be realistic, I seem to have a pessimistic view of what's to come.
