
Ten Year Futures - kawera
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/4/24/ten-year-futures
======
3pt14159
Swords and shields.

People can't really see it yet, partially due to a unwillingness to see the
darker side of humanity, but a real cyber security expert is worth more than a
cruise missile.

Planes, self-driving cars, swarms of aerial and underwater drones, fraud,
propaganda, auto-targeting laser systems, surveillance, power generation and
distribution, command and control interruption, machine learning + cyber
warfare.

Who needs nuclear weapons when you have a zero day on a hundred million self-
driving cars and you can get them to the nearest gas station or chemical plant
going 300km/h?

~~~
Nition
I wish the present was a little less obsessed with having everything Internet-
connected. I don't want an Internet connection on my self-driving car, or at
least have an air gap between the user functions and the car's driving
computer. But that won't happen because the company will be more worried about
being able to push updates than about security.

To be fair I guess even with a non-connected car that I have to update via
USB, I could still download a malicious update. But at least we won't all get
the malicious update pushed at once.

~~~
desdiv
All I see is praise for Tesla on HN. I rarely see sentiments like "Tesla makes
great cars, but I just wish their ECU and other critical systems wasn't
internet connected" or "I refuse to buy any Tesla products until they remove
the constant user tracking".

People vote with their wallets, and if the technology-savvy and privacy-
conscious HN crowd is voting this way then...

~~~
Pica_soO
.. nothing changes. We are too small of a group, even as influencers to change
that.

However, if someday a zeroday is used to duke it out, a very angry, very
unreasonable, not interested PR-Bla and Excuses crowd is going to assemble
outside someones office tower. The someone will call the police, but the
police will be busy, with the mess someones ECU peeping has made. The privat
guards will do what private guards always do, if they see no good outcome for
themselves and step aside. The escape helicopter pilot will have lost loved
ones in the mess and take off. Someone is going to get shoved out the airlock,
for all the other someones to see. That will have a interesting learning
effect. Thus ended the lesson.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
In a community with so many members that pride themselves on contrarian views,
why is this view on autonomous vehicles and more broadly, incredibly powerful
AI that is just around the corner so broadly accepted?

~~~
nostrademons
A number of us live in Silicon Valley or work daily with AI. These aren't
science fiction technologies for us: they're, real, tangible cars that you see
daily on the roads, or software libraries that you can download and use
yourself. I can understand why they'd seem like fantasy if you live in some
far-off place, but when you're stuck behind a self-driving car going 25 mph on
El Camino, there's pretty concrete evidence that self-driving cars are here.

I do think that AI and particularly deep learning are overhyped. It _is_ a big
deal, but it's not as big a deal as many people make it out to be. It's much
like the Internet in 1998; it _works_ , you can use it now, and you know that
it's going to drastically increase the reach of computing power, but people
are talking like that's all going to happen in 1-2 years when really it'll be
2-3 decades.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
I guess my concern isn't that these are "science fiction technologies" but
that they're rather simple. AI has a history of over-promising and under-
delivering and even if a few "self-driving" cars have made it on the road, how
long until people begin trying to use them in scenarios they're not really
ready for? All of that progress can disappear overnight if there are a few bad
accidents.

I guess when I look around, I don't see a comparison between AI now and the
Internet then, I see a comparison between AI now and AI then (70's).

~~~
nostrademons
AI has this effect where whenever an approach starts working, it ceases to be
AI:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

It's worth remembering that many of the actual technologies developed in 1970s
AI - A*, beam search, pattern matching, constraint solving, rules engines -
are now basic CS algorithms that most programmers are just expected to know,
and they have continued applicability to a wide variety of domains. We just
don't call them "AI" anymore, because the technology has been commoditized
enough that they are "business rules", or "single-player games", or "layout
engines", or other examples of the actual problem domain that's solved.

Ditto 1990s AI - fuzzy logic, SVMs, Bayesian networks, collaborative
filtering, perceptrons. It just got good enough that it became the standard
way you solve a certain class of problems with computers, and now it's called
"fraud detection", "Zestimates (tm)", "recommendation engines", "stream
ranking", and so on.

Deep learning is the same. The hype cycle will eventually bust, because all
hype cycles eventually bust. But in the meantime, it has opened up whole
classes of problems in computer vision, speech recognition, recommendation,
machine translation, and several other domains that were not amenable to
computerized treatment before.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
I guess that's sort of my point though isn't it? A _, SVMs, etc. aren 't
really called AI because they're not. Because AI carries a connotation and
once you understand A_ it's obvious that it's not really AI. Won't the same be
true of today's neural networks? Granted they've been given a name which
should add some longevity but when a layperson thinks "AI" they think a robot
which acts like a human, they think AGI. If someone had an AI algorithm which
could start to demonstrate more AGI leanings I bet the AI effect wouldn't
apply.

~~~
nojvek
When cars came out they killed quite a number of people in accidents and
mechanical failures. They were just so much better than horses we kept on
improving them.

That's how I see AI. People will surely get injures and even die in Accidents.
We are a humanist society where human life is valued above everything else, so
I'm very optimistic that AI will get better and give their humans more divine
powers and longer life over time.

------
guimarin
Or of course, things could take an altogether different turn. I remember when
GPS was introduced in 96 for civilians and no one could have predicted Uber at
that time, though all the pieces were there. BE does a great job of
synthesizing possible directions from what's available to him in albeit a
really good position at a16z. However, there are many people out there quietly
building technology that changes the game completely. Making affordable
graphene is one such unknown at this point.

~~~
icebraining
On the other hand, in 2001 (eight years before Uber):

 _Basically WebTaxi works well with people having wireless web access from
PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Imagine a scenario where you are sitting
in a restaurant and you need a Taxi service. You go to the WebTaxi website and
request a Taxi to your home. WebTaxi comes back and tells you exactly how much
it will cost you. It can even tell you how long you will have to wait for the
taxi. You continue to chat while you wait for the taxi to show up. As soon as
the taxi arrives, your PDA informs you that the taxi is waiting for you!_

[https://web.archive.org/web/20010127103500/http://www.eventh...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010127103500/http://www.eventhelix.com:80/ThoughtProjects/WebTaxi/WebTaxiIntroduction.htm)

~~~
guimarin
good argument that all internet businesses were invented in the late 90s
bubble. nearly all were too early.

------
Animats
53% of US jobs look automatable within 20 years.[1] There will be a much
larger underclass in a decade.

But they'll have legal pot to keep them quiet and passive.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-
par...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-parts-of-
america-most-susceptible-to-automation/525168/?single_page=true)

~~~
maverick_iceman
Or they'll do better jobs. At one point, 70% of US workforce was engaged in
agriculture, now it is 1%. The 69% didn't become an unemployed underclass.

~~~
jnicholasp
> Or they'll do better jobs. [...] The 69% didn't become an unemployed
> underclass.

No, they moved into factory, mining, retail, and other jobs that were
commensurate with their abilities. The automation shift is not the same,
because it will take over _all_ the unskilled/low-skilled jobs, and there will
be nowhere in the economy for the displaced people to move into.

It is not really conceivable that all these people are capable of taking on
jobs which require complex thinking, judgment, creativity, or other higher
skills. IQ is a real thing, and although it does not reflect on someone's
human value, it does very definitely place limits on what functions a
significant portion of the population can perform. And in the long run, we
will all be in that displaced portion. Best that we find ways to create human
security and meaning, now, for a coming world in which we have no necessary
economic role to play.

~~~
pharrlax
>The automation shift is not the same, because it will take over all the
unskilled/low-skilled jobs, and there will be nowhere in the economy for the
displaced people to move into. It is not really conceivable that all these
people are capable of taking on jobs which require complex thinking, judgment,
creativity, or other higher skills.

There are plenty of "low-skill" jobs that nonetheless require human labor in
some form because of the ability of humans -- even less intellectual humans --
to think creatively and contort themselves both mentally and physically.

Imagine a robot that does everything a school janitor can do. That simply
won't exist in the near future. Sure, maybe the janitor won't have to mop
large floors anymore. But there's plenty of other work to be done around a
school nearly always to continue to justify their employment.

~~~
jnicholasp
I suppose it depends on what you think of as "near future", but I - and I have
no special insight, for the record, just speaking as an outside observer -
would put around 75% probability of a robot that can wholly replace a janitor
existing in 15 years, and 95% in 20.

In terms of time needed to politically and socially prepare for that
situation, 20 years feels really near term to me. I don't really expect our
existing political structures and processes are capable of dealing with the
challenge adequately in time. It's one of my top three fears for the <30 year
future. And unfortunately the other two (global displacements from climate
change, and bio-/nuclear-terrorism by desperate or angry people/groups) are
synergistic with it. If it weren't for my normalcy bias, I'd be kind of
terrified.

~~~
Animats
More likely, instead of 10 janitors, you'll have one janitor and a dozen robot
cleaning machines.

~~~
jnicholasp
> More likely, instead of 10 janitors, you'll have one janitor and a dozen
> robot cleaning machines.

For how long, though? Is there any reason to think that will be anything
besides a transitional stage before the robots entirely phase out the human?

~~~
jacobush
Hoooomans are cheap and trainable - they will get directed by the AI to serve
the robots' needs. See "MANNA"
[http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

------
palakchokshi
I think he missed the point about TV ad budget not moving to the likes of
Netflix or Amazon. The reason it hasn't moved is not because the audience is
limited but because the companies in question don't want to pollute their
viewers' experience with Ads. Compare that to YouTube which is free and does
have Ads.

Viewing habits are shifting but so is public opinion on Ads. The future of Ads
on these internet TV sites is going to be the same as it was for traditional
TV albeit a bit more targeted. Instead of TV networks controlling the viewing
data in the future internet TV services will control it.

so the potential of a startup to take advantage of that data is going to be
minimal since it will be guarded like gold.

~~~
graycat
Some Web sites will have enough data to do some unique and especially
effective ad targeting, due to data and targeting math, for their own users.

------
charlesism
I realize mentioning Bitcoin in a tech forum feels gauche in 2017...

Having said that, it's strange that this guy doesn't mention cryptocurrency
anywhere in his post.

He spends a lot of time discussing technologies that aren't quite there yet,
and leaves out the one area that is (likely) right at the point of adoption.

~~~
cponeill
I was thinking the same thing while reading through this essay. I know the
firm he works for (A16Z) is investing in the cryptocurrency area and even just
did a podcast[0] on it.

[0] [http://a16z.com/2017/04/03/cryptocurrencies-protocols-
appcoi...](http://a16z.com/2017/04/03/cryptocurrencies-protocols-appcoins/)

~~~
charlesism
Regardless of his opinion, he probably should have added a one-liner as to why
it he didn't think it relevant. Otherwise he leaves the reader wondering did
he forget? or not think it will have impact? or feel it's outside the scope of
what he''s discussing? Regardless, it was an interesting read.

------
no1youknowz
I think the rise of machine learning, graphene, high performance electric
engines and metallic hydrogen will finally allow a reusable vehicle to go into
space, something like the Skylon [1].

The reason why I bring this up, as being important in 10 years or less. Is
that it will be available for around $1m.

AI will negate the need to go through rigorous astronaut training. Maybe there
will be some, but not as thorough.

Graphene and other exotic metals will allow for lighter craft and reusability.

High performance electric engines will allow for less fuel payloads to get
into high altitude, whilst allowing for the metallic hydrogen to literally
blast out into space. Metallic hydrogen is 7x more powerful than liquid
hydrogen.

I think once average joe is able to get into space. We could finally see an
abundance of rare earth materials. Could be like the old west, where a co-op
of you and your buddies go out, wrangle an asteroid and mine. Come back with a
trillion dollars worth of metals.

Of course, a glut of anything will bring prices down. But hopefully by then
manufacturing is ubiquitous also.

Maybe it's the optimist in me, but there are certain historical events that
could take our society from where it is now, scarcity based, to an abundant
one.

Interesting times ahead.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_\(spacecraft\))

~~~
bigger_cheese
Graphene is interesting I was working on synthesizing it for my undergrad
thesis in Materials Engineering in 2010 (back then we were looking at using it
in Li-Ion batteries).

Personally I feel we are still more than 10 years away from mass applications.
I'm happy to be proven wrong though.

Thinking from a Materials POV in the next 10 years I think 3D printing
(additive manufacturing) is an area where large advances will occur. New
applications for 3D printed materials and wider adoption of 3d printing.

------
greggman
I don't think we know where AI driven cars will lead.

no parking lots? If we have AI driven cars than billions of people who can't
drive can suddenly use a car. Your 5yr old kid wants to visit grandma? The
just ask the car to take them there. Grandma who's too old to drive wants to
go somewhere? She jumps in an AI car. All that public transportation in Tokyo,
HK, Singapore, NYC, London, Paris, Berlin? Maybe all that disappears. Maybe
many people stay close to home because they don't have a car and public
transportation is no fun (10 minute walk to station, 2-3 transfers, possibly a
crowded train standing with sweating people, 10 minute walk from station to
final dest) but if there are ubiquitous AI cars then I can go door to door at
any time. Those two 10 minute walks disappear, the standing with sweaty people
disappears. Now I start traveling far more often. Even better I don't have to
concentrate on driving I can use that time.

In other words, AI cars might 10x car usage

~~~
dx034
Public transport will continue to exist because it'd too expensive to build
enough roads. London without Bus & Tube? You could walk faster than using a
self driving car (recent tube strikes confirm that).

It would hurt medium distance flights and trains though. Boston-NYC would
probably be more attractive in a self driving car than flying.

~~~
greggman
AI cars are supposed to solve traffic. That assumes all cars are AI cars but
that's certainly one possible future (30-50yrs out). I'm sure someone thought
horses would still be a thing when cars were introduced. I think it will go
the same with AI cars. People will find the convenience too hard to resist and
and some point I suspect human drivers will be relegated to race tracks and
country roads

------
stretchwithme
Excellent questions regarding autonomous vehicles. Instead of a city center
being two hours away at rush hour, it could be a half hour trip.

But also living in the city is going to get a lot easier because of robotic
transportation. It won't be necessary to haul anything home from a store, for
example. A lot of cabs could just have one or two seats and no trunk.

We'll see tiny vehicles delivering dinner, handling dry cleaning. And parking
woes disappear.

But the biggest change will be in how easy it will be to move from one place
to another. Yes, robots will be able to move all your stuff cheaply. But they
also might just procure comparable stuff in your new city instead. And most of
your stuff you don't use all the time, so maybe it's in long term remote/cheap
storage until you do. Maybe its okay if those table leafs are at your house
for Thanksgiving dinner.

Maybe you move every month or live in one place during the week and another on
the weekends.

~~~
roymurdock
This sounds good in theory because it correlates with trends in the IT
industry. Centralized compute/storage/app delivery on an IaaS but in the real
world, with our actual physical stuff instead of data. In practice I'd wager
that this lifestyle of moving constantly and having robots move your stuff
around for you would be prohibitively expensive. Also, who wants to
containerize their life? How could this ever be sustainable for someone with
kids.

I think we should be less focused on autonomous driving, and more focused on
reforming our tax code, infrastructure spend (too little), and healthcare
spend (too much).

~~~
stretchwithme
I know a guy that travels constantly and has no permanent address. And there
are a few families that spend years on the road because they want to teach
their kids that life is an adventure.

They haven't found it prohibitively expensive or unsustainable. It's worth it
to them. Making that lifestyle cheaper and easier will expand the number of
people for whom that is true.

Automation, as it has always done, will make our infrastructure cheaper and
more robust. It will slash the cost of healthcare and dramatically increase
the amount of resources we have available and our quality of life.

So, no, I don't think we should focus more on nibbling around the edges of
what is possible. Those things can all be fixed, but that takes political will
and convincing the majority of people. And most of them are stuck in the
analogies of the past.

------
wtvanhest
Higher ed should see the most impressive shift of all in the next 10 years.
Right now, it seems like everyone realizes there is a problem, but nobody can
see the future.

Student loans are driven by massive inefficiencies that various companies will
exploit. The end will be apparent in 10 years.

~~~
kayoone
For the US thats true, as a german who can basically study for free at any of
the "elite" Universities in the country (same for scandinavia, netherlands
etc) the whole higher ed concept in the US seems borderline scam to me anyway.

~~~
fwn
...not implying that you meant otherwise, but:

The German "elite" label does not mean anything at all. It's basically a
government program to allocate (a small amount of) additional funds decorated
with a fancy term.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Universities_Excellence...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Universities_Excellence_Initiative)

~~~
kayoone
Well yes, but all of them are among the most highly regarded Universities in
the country, while there are others without the label that are equally good. I
just wanted to emphasise that the quality you can get for "free" is really
good.

------
Nition
Not the main point of the article, but pretty interesting to see that Google's
ad revenue is now apparently about equal to advertising revenue from all print
media in the world combined.

------
metastart
"mobile is maturing and its growth is slowing"...yes, somewhat on the hardware
side. There are still annual sales of maybe 1 billion smartphones a year...so
that's a pretty big market.

I think that there's still ENORMOUS potential for mobile apps and mobile-
driven services. There's huge opportunity for new services e.g. Uber. I think
just about every large web/desktop property faces a significant threat from a
mobile app e.g. craigslist, match.com (they luckily own tinder), flickr (wait,
already gone to Instragam), AIM/Yahoo Messenger (gone thanks to Whatsapp),
etc...

~~~
Animats
The top 10 apps are now all from Facebook or Google. The average user now
loads zero apps per month. Apps are dead.[1]

[1] [https://www.recode.net/2016/9/16/12933780/average-app-
downlo...](https://www.recode.net/2016/9/16/12933780/average-app-downloads-
per-month-comscore)

~~~
microddin
in addition, the users who don't have smartphones yet don't have very
attractive demographics, and attention is saturated:
[https://key2.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/570bbc5f-526e-482f-90ac...](https://key2.bluematrix.com/docs/pdf/570bbc5f-526e-482f-90ac-c6ff2fd9fb29.pdf)

~~~
Animats
From that article: "U.S. users spend about 12 hours a day consuming media,
which seems a relatively hard limit (up only 4% in the past five years)."

12 hours? Wow. TV maxed out at about 5 hours a day.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> TV, which so far has not really been touched by the internet,

uhhh, wasn't I reading pieces about how the internet was really shaking up TV
about 5 years ago?

~~~
mbesto
His point is that TV ad dollars haven't shrunk (look at the graph)

------
graycat
My view is:

(1) Software is well on the way to an old, slowly changing, mostly routine,
boring, low margin, slow growth business and industry.

(2) That the general purpose computing hard/software and 100 Mbps Internet
data rates are all so cheap will in places undercut large, expensive
approaches to computing projects. E.g., people will do projects, but Sand Hill
Road need not be more involved than they are now in, say, a new pizza shop in
Peoria, not more involved than they were in the romantic matchmaking Web site
Plenty of Fish.

(3) A huge problem for computing causing (1) is that there just are not enough
good, new ideas for high value IT startups. For a joke, but a simple
explanation, the days of a hot social, mobile, local sharing app are gone.

(4) For Evans's dreams about machine learning (ML), he is not very well
informed and is not seeing very clearly, but in principle, if strain to extend
the meaning of ML, he is correct about the potential. But in practice that
future will come slowly, very slowly.

Why so slowly? In fact, e.g., looking at, say, scikit, that's basically some
applied math, and nearly all the math there is now old enough to have long,
gray whiskers, literally. That applied math and much more in optimization,
simulation, experimental design and analysis of variance, stochastic
processes, on and on, i.e., the _math sciences_ , optimization, operations
research, statistics, except for a few niches (e.g., optimization in operating
oil refineries, the fast Fourier transform for oil prospecting, partial
differential equations for modeling oil reservoirs, air line crew scheduling,
maybe airline plane scheduling, statistics in biomedical research and
development) hasn't caught on at all well generally in business; so there is
only tiny reason to believe it will become "The next big thing" now.

For that math, it's not so easy to get good at it: (A) The pure math
departments don't want to teach it. (B) Very few other departments have enough
grounding in the math prerequisites to teach the material very well. (C)
Except for a few niches, business has long made its position crystal clear --
such applied math and a dime won't cover a 10 cent cup of coffee. (D) It has
long been the case and still is that about the only paying customer that takes
such applied math seriously is the US DoD for purposes of US national
security.

Run a good applied math project down Sand Hill Road, for a big problem, with
running prototype software, and will hear laughs, silence, or "don't call us;
we'll call you". I have to doubt if there is a single information technology
(biotechnology can be different) VC firm on Sand Hill Road able to direct
technical due diligence for an applied math project.

There can't be "The next big thing" without a few hundred times more well
qualified startup founder, worker bee, applied mathematicians to do the work.

