
Predictions for what life will be like in 2030 - rbanffy
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/tech-life-predictions-for-2030/?utm_content=buffer35e2f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
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rwmj
_> Your shower uses very little water or soap. It recycles your grey water and
puts the excess heat back into your home’s integrated operating system._

Who is going to pay to upgrade the huge number of existing bathrooms in homes?
We are still using a bathroom barely changed since the 1960s (about the only
functional change is the replacement of the open-vented boiler system with a
combi so we now get hot water on demand).

~~~
rsynnott
In general, this sort of thing happens when building standards require that it
be used in new homes. For instance, many European countries now require that
new homes achieve an ‘A’ rating on the relevant energy efficiency scale.
Retrofitting old homes to achieve that tends to be impractically expensive,
though.

This just sounds like the next step after the mechanical heat recovery systems
that many new homes now have.

~~~
rwmj
To put it in numbers, the UK has 25 million homes, and currently builds around
200,000 new homes per year (and has never built more than 350,000 homes per
year even during the huge building boom after the war). So even at the
greatest rate of house building it would take 71 years to replace the whole
stock.

So my bet is that any technology which replaces fundamental parts of the
current home without a simple and cheap upgrade path is not likely to happen.
(See also: carbon-neutral homes, "smart" homes, clever housebuilding systems,
etc etc etc)

~~~
rsynnott
It will happen, if required (or even just incentivised) by building regs. Just
slowly, over a period of decades.

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throwaway2016a
These are all very mundane predictions. I have a more interesting one (I
think)...

We will be living in a post-work and post scarcity economy and we will need to
decide as a culture how to handle that.

Automation, robotics, and AI will replace all jobs that aren't creative tasks.
And things where scarcity breads economic disparity such as food[1],
energy[2], and water[3] will no longer be scarce due to advances in
technology. And advances in medicine will make us live longer, increasing the
average age.

How do we as a society deal with that?

[1] vertical farming, bioengineering, artificial meats

[2] renewables

[3] harvesting and recycling

~~~
varjag
> We will be living in a post-work and post scarcity economy

In 12 years? No way.

~~~
contingencies
I estimate there are 100 million people or more in China alone who work in
sales and sourcing departments on manual supply chain processes that could
easily be replaced with a single decent piece of open source software and a
manager who can be assed typing in some figures or buying a smart factory
upgrade to do it for him.

That's very much tending towards post-work, for a significant chunk - 1/14th -
of China, which is now I believe the world's largest economy. And that's the
white collar scenario!

And yet, by removing overheads and allocating resources to produce goods and
services less wastefully for everyone, it will produce a net positive for the
environment, despite the social upheaval.

Then there's other areas at high risk from automation including
transportation, QA/QC, law enforcement, financial and legal services, retail,
manufacturing, construction, etc.

I personally have no problem believing that at least 1/3 of society in
developing or developed economies will see their lives change significantly
through automation in the next 12 years.

~~~
varjag
Structural unemployment isn't quite 'post-work'.

~~~
marcosdumay
Structural unemployment is a first symptom of 'post-work'.

Of it and a lot of other things, but it's something one should expect to see.

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forkandwait
2030 is only 12 years from now. so we should assume it will be about as
different as 2006; which was about the same as today except for smart phones
everywhere. Yawn.

Maybe a better game would be -- what single technology will become ubiquitous
in 2030 that is at the first adopter stage today?

~~~
arbie
Smart glasses/contacts will bring about ubiquitous AR.

~~~
mortenjorck
Smart glasses, _maybe,_ if there's an iPhone-level breakthrough in optical
tech.

What will likely be ubiquitous is simply a seamless, always-on, phone-based AR
experience. Lock screens will become a relic of the 2010s as phones move to
becoming AR-first devices, with apps joining SMS and phone calling as
secondary use cases.

Glasses will be on the market and in use, but they'll probably be too bulky
for ubiquity in the next decade. Smart contacts will be the long-term goal,
but that tech will be missing a lot of prerequisites for some time.

~~~
Balgair
> Smart glasses, maybe, if there's an iPhone-level breakthrough in optical
> tech.

Highly unlikely, unless we somehow get to treating each photon quantumly.

Engineering wise, the hard part about 'smart contacts' is the power/data
transmission problem. You'd need a wire hooked up to each one, maybe routed
from the back of the eyeball. Might as well just use opto-genetics and modify
the optic nerve outright.

Physics-wise, the focal length of the lenses matters a lot. Just putting a
flex-screen on contacts would lead to VERY blurry images, especially as the
cornea changes shape to adjust focal lengths. You'd have no ability to discern
display changes as your data is essentially ON the front aperture. Maybe you
could do DIC (Differential Interference Contrast) or SIM (Structured
Illumination Microscopy) kinda stuff and get really good resolution for things
up close to your eye, but that would be a lot of effort to just maybe be able
to count the hairs on an ant. Also, you have to be at least a focal length
away to just do that, like the diameter of your eye.

Glasses are much better suited for this, as they have sufficient distance away
from the eye. But still, you'd have to focus on the glasses in order to read
anything. Sure, you could track each eye in real time and adjust the
'blurriness' of the glasses input to match the focal length changes of the
cornea, but the processing there would be really crazy, any lag would likely
cause nausea as the vestibular organs go haywire. Imagine being on a boat in
very rough/random seas.

Likely, just using opto-genetics to hack the optic nerve would be easier.
Getting those proteins to behave well is an entirely different task and there
really is no path forward at this time for individual optical nerve
stimulation in a nerve bundle of transfected tissue.

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ejlangev
This article (in addition to being somewhat dystopian) is also fairly dumb
even for something trying to predict future technologies which is a very low
bar.

Not sure who they think is going to replace all the world's showers with ultra
efficient ones or all the worlds houses with smart ones and integrate the two
together.

> You will be more connected than ever before, though advertisers will find
> clever ways to influence your behaviour, based on the same biometric
> technology that monitors your health.

Read: There will be nothing private left in your life and people without your
best interests in mind will use technology to control your behavior and
biology. What could go wrong?!?

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imgabe
> Ads – a necessary evil

I'm going to go out on a limb and say we'll see fewer ads instead of more. As
advertising becomes increasingly intrusive and manipulative I think people are
going to have to wake up and start actually paying for services if we want
them to be of any value to the actual users instead of the advertisers. As it
stands right now, services like Facebook etc. are borderline hostile to
advancing the user's interests since it is not the user who is paying.

~~~
temp-dude-87844
Ads are going to tumble, because the targeted online advertising industry is
largely bullshit [1] -- a house of cards built on collective delusion and
sustained on perverse incentives and borrowed time.

Brand advertising will be as prevalent as ever, and with every online
storefront (e.g. Walmart, Newegg, Amazon) devolving into a 'marketplace' with
random sellers, the value of brands as a reliable quality signal will climb
higher than before. Submarine influencing will thrive and be indistinguishable
from organic content; if discovered it won't be perceived as advertising but
rather lobbying or conflict of interest.

Recurring subscriptions will be the dominant business model for content
exchange. Vertical integration of content production, distribution, and
delivery will predominate in areas like entertainment and news. Until this
transition is complete, aggregators will offer meta-subscriptions to some
curated subset of wider offerings.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271348)

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mac01021
360 of the 800 people surveyed believe we'll see the first AI system to be a
member of a corporate board of directors within the next 8 years?

~~~
zardo
Regardless of whether there is an AI capable of making some meaningful
contribution, I'm sure it will be done by someone for the PR exposure.

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voltooid
"Someone has to pay for all of this change, and it is still going to be us in
the form of targeted advertising"

Honestly I would hate this to be part of the future. I don't believe ads work
now. Users get used to ignoring them by being over-exposed or using ad
blockers. When we already know that they make for a terrible experience for
users now, couldn't we start dreaming of different ways to do this.

~~~
greggarious
>I don't believe ads work now. Users get used to ignoring them by being over-
exposed or using ad blockers.

This is supported by data - each new tech shows rapidly declining
effectiveness shortly after it's development:

[http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf](http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf)

 _" when the first banner advertisement emerged online in 1994, it reported a
(now) staggering clickthrough rate of 78%. By 2011, the average Facebook
advertisement clickthrough rate sat dramatically lower at 0.05%..."_

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bergie
> When it’s time to leave, an on-demand transport system has three cars
> waiting for you, your spouse and your kids

This sounds incredibly wasteful. I doubt car sharing (self driving Uber) will
be workable if the fleet has to be sized to 2-3X number of households.

Instead, wouldn't it be more reasonable to assume a mix of real public
transportation and increased amount of telecommuting?

~~~
miohtama
Current private car fleet is 95% parked - one could have 20 cars waiting for
you today with full utilization

~~~
npsimons
Even though parent was referencing number of cars, having "enough" cars has
never been the issue - the problem is traffic congestion and other
externalized costs inherent to having a car per person.

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supermdguy
Some of these seem a little far fetched, but many could be real. I don't think
we'll be having "A hot breakfast tailored to your specific nutritional needs
(based on chemical analysis from your trips to the “smart toilet”)" anytime
soon.

Light field displays are going to be so cool!

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mikestew
_Change may arrive as a gentle breeze or as a violent, category 5 typhoon_

I’ve tried to think of any change that wasn’t a “gentle breeze” that would
justify some of these ridiculous predictions. Even smartphones had a lead up
with PDAs coming prior. But in thirteen years I’m going to rip out all the
plumbing in my house, replace the appliances with something more expensive and
less reliable, and sell my current vehicles without replacing them. I’m also
going to let devices shoot things onto my retina, because in thirteen years
device manufacturers will be driven solely by device safety and security, and
not saving four cents on a component or software dev costs.

I see none of these things happening in thirteen years. As others have pointed
out, it’ll be a lot like today, except for $POSSIBLY_ONE_THING.

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kurthr
The article fails to mention the automatic translation available and retired
to talk to your teams in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and San Diego. Cultural
translation will be your job.

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autokad
"5\. The age of implantables: As our world changes, scientists believe that
humans’ brains will continue to get bigger"

its my understanding that the human brain has been shrinking, especially since
agriculture

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tyen_
Forget 2030, let's think bigger: 2070.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yFhR1fKWG0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yFhR1fKWG0)

~~~
RepressedEmu
The Syfy show Incorporated seems more like the direction we are currently
heading: climate refugees living in "Red Zones" while megacorp employees live
in the "Green Zones".

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dreamdu5t
Mine: Digital democracy.

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saiya-jin
As any predictions in the past, this one is expecting too much change too
soon, and most in wrong directions. Look back 13 years (12 to be more precise)
- how much had our lives changed compared to 2005-2006? Screens got a bit
bigger, computers a bit faster (not really, thanx to all the clutter), mobile
got better.

Daily lives are exactly the same for most of us, and most changes are not due
to technological advances, but simple changes in our lives due to aging,
changing employers, having kids, changing priorities etc.

For example I will do all I can to have a simple, disconnected household.
Nobody is going to change billions of simply working toilets to these stupid
fecal-izers. Definitely not in increasingly rental society, where KISS
approach prevails, and for good reasons.

~~~
ameister14
People now routinely order all their gifts and appliances online; small things
as well as large purchases are made online. Television is consumed less and
less and in an effort to maintain viewership the 24 hour news cycle has become
the norm. In many countries, person to person market exchanges are now carried
out through the internet and phones, enabling more, and more flexible,
businesses.

Taxis have been supplemented and are being replaced by car services you summon
with a tap from your phone. The music industry has been completely re-made.
There are a large variety of new types of jobs including digital marketing,
design and programming positions that didn't previously exist.

Millions of people have some kind of robot servant, either a vacuum cleaner
like Roomba or a concierge type like Alexa.

