
Predictions for the World in 2030 - olalonde
http://www.ilookforwardto.com/2010/11/10-predictions-for-2030-that-may-sound-outrageous-today-but-will-not-in-the-future1-by-2030-learning-a-language-will-no-lo.html#more
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city41
2030 is less than 20 years away. Can we look back on 1990 and really feel like
an equivalent amount of innovation happened? I feel like these predictions are
too optimistic. Not to mention just because we have the technology to do
something doesn't mean it's practical, desirable, profitable or many other
things that are required for something to become reality.

~~~
endtime
In 1991 (20 years ago), DOS 5.0 was released.

In 2005 (14 years later), autonomous robotics cars successfully navigated a
course in the desert. Two years later, they did the same in a city, with no
traffic violations.

In 2007 (16 years later), for a few hundred bucks you could carry several
orders of magnitude more computing power in your pocket, with remote access to
the sum of all human knowledge.

Today, we have affordable 3D printing and are on the cusp of quantum
computing. Cryogenic preservation is offered at feasible prices by multiple
companies. Political revolutions happen with live commentary which is beamed
through space into my pocket. Several new nanotech-based products are released
to market every week. If you don't stop and look around, it's easy to miss the
fact that we live in the freaking future.

That said, I'm not sure I buy that space tourism will be that big in 20 years,
nor that poverty rates will be so low. But the rest don't seem outrageous at
all.

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protomyth
Didn't we have a long thread on #4 (By 2030, the best food will be grown in
skyscrapers) and had a pretty big majority conclude it was bull?

~~~
olalonde
Yep, I think this is what you're referring to:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1701724> &
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024252>

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m0th87
I have a prediction: 20 years from now we'll look back at articles like these
and think "wow those were stupid predictions," in the same way that we look
back at those Popular Mechanics articles from decades past that foresaw pill
food and robot maids.

~~~
j_baker
To be fair, I bet a list of predictions from 1990 wouldn't have been too far
off the mark. I would imagine they probably would have said something like:

1\. The Internet will grow.

2\. Computers will become more common.

3\. Computers will become smaller.

Of course I'm sure there would have been a ton of dumb predictions as well,
but I think it's easier to predict 20 years in the future than 50 years in the
future.

------
nostromo
I believe the most impactful event that is likely to happen in our lifetime
isn't listed here. It's the peak of human population and even possible
decline. (Even if it doesn't happen world wide in your lifetime, it will very
likely happen in the country you live in, and already has in Japan, much of
Europe and Russia.)

Urbanization and rising out of poverty drastically reduces population growth,
often times below the replacement rate. It will be interesting to see what
happens if/when for the first time in human history, the number of people on
the planet goes down.

~~~
jacobolus
> _first time in human history_

The black death in the 14th century made the number of people on the planet go
down quite dramatically, as did the plague of Justinian in the 6th–7th.

If you’re willing to look at geographic regions smaller than the whole world,
populations have been quite frequently ravaged by disease and invasion.

------
russell
One good rule of thumb is that a transforming technology was in existence
15-20 years before it became revolutionary. Applying that to this list:

1\. Machine translation already exists and is getting better. Will it be
ubiquitous? Unlikely. Only tourists and those interacting with them will
normally carry them.

2\. No way. We cant even see the way to go. Cure a disease and another pops up
to take its place. By 2030 we may know enough to start.

3\. Another no. If people have the freedom to make bad choices, there will
always be extreme poverty. Will the police do daily roundups to force people
into shelter, into mental helth facilities? Singapore maybe.

4\. No, except for a few exceptions, like pot. It's economics. Who is going to
grow wheat in Manhattan?

5\. Of course. Google already has the prototypes.

6\. Yes, but somewhere along the line technology will enable the trend to
reverse,

7\. I dont think so, even if the technology. We wont see flying cars because
of cost and liability issues and the publicity of even infrequent crashes.
Airliners will still have pilots because of public confidence. It's possible
that cargo planes will perhaps have ground based pilots/monitors. In the
military, of course.

8\. No way. The economics arent there, except for a few hundred rich people
per year. The experimental technology doesnt exist today.

9\. Yes for low budget films and a lot of TV. Blockbusters will use actors,
because stars sell films. We still have theater, opera, and concerts an films
will still have actors.

10\. Probably so.

11\. If large numbers means several of your friends, even hackers, the answer
is no. I dont think having a robot, can compare to having a real girl tell you
she loves you. And I dont think a real girl will put up with the competition.

------
philwelch
_5\. By 2030, driverless cars will be commonplace._

I think peak oil, the rising cost of energy, and increasing urbanization might
actually increase the usage of mass transit compared to any type of car. What
cars remain, however, very much may be driverless.

 _9\. By 2030, most film actors will be out of work due to competition from
cheap computer animated actors._

 _11\. By 2030, a large number of people will have robot lovers._

I'm sure robot lovers and CGI actors will exist, but I can't see them entirely
displacing their human counterparts. Those are two places where most people
will want an actual flesh and blood human, even if the alternative is
indistinguishable.

------
thomasknowles
I can't see self driving cars being commonplace in 19 years time. People tend
to like control.

~~~
gst
Those things change fast.

I remember when in the 90s most people preferred POP3 (for mail transfer),
because for privacy reasons they didn't want their provider to have access to
their mails. And quite a large number of people used encryption, even if they
weren't technically inclined.

Today almost no one cares about privacy anymore. Expectations have completly
changed within a century. Today it's, e.g., common for most people to store
all of their chat logs on Google's server, without regularly deleting them. Or
another example: Today we have much more advanced surveillance systems used
against the general population than the techniques used in the DDR. For most
people back in the DDR those surveillance systems where not acceptable. Today
most people accept them if it helps the government "to find terrorists and
criminals".

If privacy expectations can change within a century, why shouldn't the
expectations on one's car change?

~~~
joeyo

      > And quite a large number of people used encryption, even
      > if they weren't technically inclined.
    

I agree with your broader point that expectations and perceptions can change
fast, but I don't ever remember a time when "quite a large number" of people
used email encryption. Perhaps a larger group of users then than now had a
_desire_ for email encryption.

------
shawnee_
_3\. By 2030, only 2% of the world's population will live in extreme poverty.

The eradication of extreme poverty will happen in our lifetime. In 1990, 42%
of the world’s population lived on less than $1.25 (constant 2000 dollars,
PPP). In 2005, that number had fallen to 25%. The UN estimates that by 2020,
only 10% of world citizens will live in absolute poverty. My bold estimate is
that by 2030, only one in 50 will._

Would be awesome, but it won't happen if the world population keeps increasing
at the rate it is increasing. We've already surpassed 7 billion people, which
wasn't originally projected to happen for at least a couple more years.

~~~
Vivtek
The rate is already falling, isn't it?

~~~
derleth
Precisely, and the Malthusians are just torn up to absolute _tears_ over it.

------
cletus
My thoughts:

1\. IMHO learning a second language will largely be no longer necessary
because English will increasingly be the lingua franca. That being said, on
the fly translation will clearly continue to get better.

2\. 150 year life expectancy? This one I don't buy. Medicine here has to be
differentiated in two areas: curing and preventing the causes of "premature"
death (eg disease) that stop us reaching a "natural" age when we die. That
lone won't get us to 150 years. We're probably not far off that limit now. To
get to 150 we need to extend the age to which humans can live, which is
getting into some fairly serious genetics. I can see such technology coming
about but IMHO will be the province of the wealthy for some time and will
probably take longer than expected (again IMHO).

3\. I disagree with this. Despite all the efforts to stop poverty, even in
developed nations, there is a segment of the population who remain poor. It
might be controversial but a certain segment (IMHO) are poor and remain poor
because they make poor choices.

Also, the definition of "poor" constantly changes. Poverty in the developing
world is lack of access to basic health care, food and clean drinking water.
In the developed world, poverty seems to mean your iPhone is two generations
old.

And yes I realize there is true poverty in the developed world. There are
people who are homeless but the scope of "poverty" in such discussions extends
way beyond those when we're discussing social policy.

4\. Possible. Food production will need to change.

5\. Agreed. I think future generations will look back on this age of manually
driven cars as being somewhat barbaric, especially considering the number of
people who die on the roads.

6\. I also agree that the world's will become increasingly urbanized and you
will see "mega-cities" as a result. There are efficiency advantages in
concentrating populations in such cities.

7\. I was just having a conversation with a colleague at work on Friday about
flying cars. My position was (and is) that personal flying vehicles won't
happen before driverless cars. Humans won't simply be able to reliably fly
such vehicles. Also, the energy costs I believe will possibly scupper such
plans so we need to find a far cheaper source of energy for this to happen,
especially considering we've probably passed peak oil production.

8\. This too is dependent on finding a new, cheaper energy source. Without
that space travel will (IMHO) still be too expensive.

9\. I think this will be partially true but human labour is extraordinarily
cheap and will be incredibly hard to completely displace. It's the same reason
we still have humans doing incredibly menial work even when such work could be
done by robots, that are comparatively much more expensive.

10\. Probably true.

Predicting the future is hard. 1900 to 2000 had a _massive_ amount of change,
unparalleled in human history. Think about it: we went from the birth of the
automobile to handheld computers, putting a man on the Moon, the global
Internet and cheap, almost ubiquitous air travel. How much of that could've
been predicted?

What's more, how much of that is on the back of cheap non-renewable energy
that is ultimately unsustainable? Not just energy, but other resources like
metals. The rate at which the world population is growing and using resources
is unsustainable so something has to change: whether it be new energy sources
are found or the population problem corrects itself.

I seriously urge you to watch:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>

if you haven't already.

If you think of sci-fi as a predictor of the future (which it has been in many
ways), we've vastly exceeded predictions in some fields (eg computers) and
vastly underperformed in others (eg space travel). I heard Jerry Pournelle
talking abot this with the predictions from the Mote in God's Eye. The
handheld computers exist now, being smartphones, less than 40 years after the
book was published. But in space travel terms, we're, if anything, _behind_
what we were in the 20th century.

To me the predictable aspects of the future are:

1\. Urbanization;

2\. Ubiquity of computing and networking;

3\. Genetic engineering.

Other things depend on the big question mark that is cheap and abundant
energy. We may not find anything, in which case the future will be bleak. If
we find something however the world will change beyond recognition.

~~~
Symmetry
2\. Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these
treatments? Its quite likely that some number of people won't have access, but
most new medical technologies are available to most people because the largest
cost of any new medical technology is its development. For some disease that
everyone suffers from I wouldn't expect the treatment to end up costing more
than, say, your typical run of chemotherapy. Something expensive, but that
should be covered by most health insurance.

3\. He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction,
and while I agree that completely eliminating poverty might be impossible
getting it down to 1 in 50 seems doable.

EDIT: Edited for clarity.

~~~
derleth
> Why do you think that only the wealthy will have access to these treatments?

To begin with, the companies providing them will have to reach break-even and,
in a field like biotech with huge up-front costs, that means making a lot of
money from the first clients. Rich people have a lot of money.

> Something expensive, but that should be covered by most health insurance.

Then we're talking about different things. How often does health insurance pay
for treatments that are still somewhat unproven in the real world?

> He gave an objective definition of "poor" he was using in his prediction

Right, and everyone seems to ignore the fact that, as measured on an objective
scale, how a culture defines 'poverty' creeps up that absolute wealth scale as
the culture's wealth grows. For example, at one time kings and rich
industrialists could die of appendicitis; now, only the most desperately poor
are so deprived of healthcare that having an inflamed appendix is a death
sentence.

------
gst
By 2030 we have long passed peak oil, renewable will not be able to provide
sufficient amounts of energy, nuclear power will not be used in many countries
because of irrational fears, and we will destroy the climate by using coal to
produce energy.

Economically China will have surpassed the US and Europe and will therefore
also have a higher standard of living than US/Europe (but still a lower
standard than today's standard in US/Europe).

~~~
j_baker
By 2030, China will be a humanitarian disaster area. They're doing ok now
simply because they have such a massive workforce, but their notorious one
child per family policy is rapidly reducing the working age population.

~~~
cpeterso
Most developed nations have population growth less than the replacement rate.
They will have fewer workers supporting more retirees, who happen to be living
longer and wanting more expensive medical care.

After a few generations of "one child per family" (by law or by choice), most
kids won't have siblings or aunts or uncles!

------
herval
I don't buy any of that. Unless, of course, the number of people playing
WhateverVille games stops rising so fast, in which case some of those things
might actually be possible :-)

IOW: By 2030, we'll have single Farmvilles producing more food than the entire
world today, and CityVilles bigger than New York, sucking up most people's
times faster than any other diversion in history of mankind

------
ytkliu
In 2030, Diablo III will finally be released.

~~~
j_baker
The real question will be if Duke Nukem Forever will be released.

------
Symmetry
I wonder what it says that out of that entire list of predictions I find the
ones about industry in space the least credible - the very ones which people
in 1950 might have predicted for 2010.

------
bergie
In 2030, we still need to code exceptions for IE6 (I hope not)

~~~
iron_ball
If businesses haven't upgraded after 12 years, why would another 18 make any
difference?

I'm beginning to think that IE6 is the new COBOL -- something that's locked
into irrevocably locked into business practices. I'm working on a B2B site
that is less than 10% IE6 in its day to day traffic, but when a major
marketing event brought a flood of potential investors and customers, IE6's
share spiked to 25%.

Our only hope is that companies will at least install an additional browser,
and train their employees that IE6 should be used only for the legacy apps.

