
In what areas are the massive fortunes of the future going to be made? - Apane
Let&#x27;s discuss...
======
pg
Always hard to predict, but one area where I'm sure there's lots of room is
starting startups in industries that didn't previously have them. To use one
example of many, LendUp.

~~~
zt
The cliche phrase "software is eating the world" doesn't quite do the future
justice. "Startups in industries that didn't previously have them" does it
much better: that's agriculture (Sourcerly), payments (WePay, Stripe,
Balanced, Slidepay, Square), lending (LendUp, Lending Club), startup investing
(Anglelist, WeFunder), banking (Palintir, Standard Treasury), insurance
(Oscar) fashion (La Tote, Crowdery), and more. So many industries can still be
improved with the startup ethos of disruption, growth, efficiency, data, etc.

~~~
kohanz
I assume by "startups", you mean Silicon Valley-style tech startups? If we're
taking Eric Ries' definition of startup, then agriculture might be the first
industry to ever have startups and thousands of years ago, at that.

~~~
opminion
[http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html)

------
DanI-S
As a co-founder of Tiny Farms[1], we're betting on the growing need for
alternative sources of protein. Humanity's current protein supply is
inefficient, unsustainable and won't scale to feed the future world.

Our particular domain is edible insects; we wrote this article about why
entrepreneurs should get involved:

[http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-
dr...](http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-drop-
everything-start-growing-bugs/)

[1] [http://www.tiny-farms.com](http://www.tiny-farms.com)

~~~
stcredzero
What is the best climate for raising crickets in the US? Or does it matter
that much?

~~~
krapp
Come to Texas, follow the grackles, bring a broom. you can get crickets by the
truckload.

~~~
DanI-S
A huge amount of insects eaten worldwide are collected just like this. We
wouldn't recommend it, though; they are likely to be contaminated with
pesticides, fertilizers and other environmental pollutants.

------
lutusp
Let's extrapolate from present trends. More robotics and automation means
people will work fewer hours but still have disposable income. Medical
advances mean people will live longer, healthier lives.

Conclusion? There's going to be a lot of energetic, healthy people with time
on their hands -- even more than at present. So there will be many future
opportunities in the areas of entertainment, computer games and travel.

Also, on the medical front, because psychiatry and psychology are in the midst
of a historic meltdown, in the future society will increasingly look to
neuroscience for guidance about the issues that psychiatrists and
psychologists are mishandling right now. My favorite example showing what the
possibilities may be, is the story of a severely depressed woman who didn't
respond to the available anti-depression drugs and was finally
institutionalized, her life essentially over.

But a new procedure has come out of brain research (not mind research) called
deep brain stimulation, that shows great promise for addressing depression's
cause, rather than its symptoms (the present treatment approach).

In this specific case, after electrodes were put in place, the neurosurgeon
threw a switch that began stimulation of a location of present neurological
research called "area 25" that seems to play a role in depression. The woman's
depression lifted instantly -- _instantly_ \-- something that no other
treatment had been able to accomplish.

This is still very experimental, and the procedure is still too risky for
everyday use, but if it matures and is made safe, it will revolutionize the
treatment of depression. It will also accelerate the present trend away from
psychiatry and psychology toward neuroscience.

Reference:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
tspike
I disagree about people working fewer hours. Work that used to be performed by
humans has already been automated to a large degree.

Rather than a uniform reduction in hours, the result appears to be a swelling
class of unemployed and increasing hours worked by those who are employed.

Those who have time do not have money and vice versa.

~~~
31reasons
You are absolutely right. 40 hours/week is the standard that was set more than
100 years ago and is long due for an update. As long as there are groups of
people competing against each other to get the bigger part of the pie, it will
continue this way until there is a big movement similar to the following:

From wiki:

"The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the
short-time movement, had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain,
where industrial production in large factories transformed working life. The
use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16
hours for six days a week"

We now need a 4-hour day movement. :)

------
rollo_tommasi
Brain technology. Eventually 'wireheading' is going to stop being science
fiction and start being science fact. The people who commercialize that
technology first are going to swim in oceans of money.

------
colmvp
Since developed countries are experiencing population aging, I would guess if
someone could help women prolong their window of having healthy births.

I say this because if you look at the last ten years, the rate of births in
the age ranges of < 18, 18-35 have been decreasing while the age of women
getting pregnant in the 35+ range has been increasing.

The birth rate of the United States is only as high as is now largely because
of the immigrant population.

As more women in developed countries choose to have careers and go through
higher education, the median age of pregnancies will continue to rise.

------
oracuk
Agriculture.

An aging industry, small margins for the older economic structure of
small/medium holdings, little existing use of new technologies at scale.

As the industry demographic shifts and as 'new' technologies such as drones,
robotics, remote sensing, pervasive wireless data, vat-grown meat and mixed
land/marine farming are adopted there will be a lot of money to be made
feeding the world.

~~~
PaulHoule
In some sense you're right, but you shouldn't underestimate either the
innovation that is going on or the intelligence of farmers.

There's a word for a stupid or wasteful farmer, and that word is "broke". You
can't make it in agriculture unless you can make it against fierce global
competition.

Ten years ago there was a lot of apocalyptic talk about the opposition of
organic vs. GMO crops but the truth is that organic and GMO crops have both
thrived. GMO crops are getting better, yet organic methods are advancing too
and are being cherry-picked by conventional farmers when they are competitive.
Robotic tractors are a reality today.

------
coldcode
Most people won't see it when it first appears. Eventually you'll notice it
when it's too late.

~~~
yashodhan
Perhaps the most astute observation in here. Lost count the number of times
I've missed the 'the next big thing' when it was right in my face. Each time I
tell myself that I'll pay more attention next time. But we all know the
definition of crazy.

------
niels_olson
Read Asimov. It's all there. It comes down to space travel.

Presumably, the ultimate propulsion will be nuclear-boiled water ejected out
of a nozzle as steam. I suppose you could do something similar with other low
molecular weight (stable bonds), low atomic weight (plentiful in post-stellar
debris) fluids, but water's on a sweet spot in terms of caloric density.
Hydrocarbons would probably be good, so I suppose you could mine the
atmospheres of the gas giants for those. Interstellar travel will involve
strapping a reactor to a large iceberg lassoed from the Ort belt and
accelerating for one half of the trip, then decelerating for the other half.

Space travel will require space mining (uranium, water, gold, titanium,
lithium, etc)

Think of all the things involved: mining equipment, (robots) depots,
transport, refueling stations, distribution. SpaceX has already shown vast
industries are going to be largely robotic. But people will go to the same
places as the mining, because something will always go wrong with something,
and those will be the well-developed trade routes.

Those people will have all the same issues they have here. Governance,
gambling, hepatitis, surgery. But there will be new issues as well. There will
likely be founder effect: segments of humanity will venture off to planets
many light years away. It will take decades to get there. How do you maintain
the concept of "humanity" if they land on a planet with slightly more gravity,
slightly colder, slightly less oxygen, so everyone becomes what we would
consider a furry dwarf with an IQ of 170?

Synthetic genomics will be big in all sorts of ways, some related to the
founder effects of space travel.

We will not travel faster than the speed of light and hibernation is a
fiction. Our bodies just aren't made for that. I think this is a thing people
haven't started really planning for very well. Interstellar travel is going to
involve very large vessels.

but once we do Mars and the asteroid belt, there's not much left in this
system.

~~~
a3voices
Alternatively, people might give up on space travel if simulated worlds become
too enticing.

~~~
wildermuthn
That has already happened, if the absence of a moon base is any indication.

------
samelawrence
Small fortunes:

Marijuana, online privacy, personal defense weapons, batteries, patent law.

Big fortunes:

Ocean mining, fuel and energy, long-distance wireless communications,
medicines, education.

------
bcoates
If the rapid obsolescence cycle of chip fabs end (ie, Moore's law ends and
process nodes stop getting smaller so there's no reason to change processes),
it will kick off a golden age of ASICs and a Cambrian explosion of chip
diversity and software design tool progress.

You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to
use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose
parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of
the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be.

Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with
pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.

~~~
jrn
I think this as well, but i'm also keeping my eye on graphene transistors. And
then there is the quantum computer stuff which is beyond my ken.

------
deftnerd
Package delivery using drones. A DPS (Drone Parcel Service) base truck could
roll into a neighborhood and a swarm of drones would fly out with packages
under a certain weight and deliver them, while the base truck delivers any
packages too heavy. The drones keep informed of where the truck is so they can
return (even when the truck is in motion) to recharge until the next
neighborhood.

With county budgets being stressed and more areas considering converting paved
roads to gravel roads, any kind of delivery system that can avoid roads will
be a benefit.

------
gavingmiller
Oil & Gas

I'm with a startup called PetroFeed and we're looking to tap into the huge
potential in the industry[1]. Most startups in the O&G industry are concerned
with building better drilling technologies, or finding new resource pockets;
leaving lots of room for companies like ours. ;)

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_companies_by_revenue)

~~~
pyoung
I hope not. I would much prefer a future that relies more heavily on a
sustainable form of energy.

------
JayNeely
3d printing. I saw someone saying that 3d printers are the beginnings of
replicators from Star Trek, and that really struck home for me. I think we'll
see a lot of physical goods get redesigned to be made via single-material
extrusion, and 3d printers will get smarter about how to manipulate that
single material (some kind of plastic) to achieve a variety of qualities
(texture, strength, color, etc.).

------
LarryMade2
Drones - Drone first responders for accidents, for emergency coverage remote
telepresence assistance as well as news recording. Drones replacing
photographers, meter maids, small package delivery and distribution especially
stuff that bike and car couriers are doing now. Crop dusting (already
happening), site inspections. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the marriage of
flying drone and telepresence rolling robots where the drone lands out in your
driveway folds up and rolls in the front door.

Everyone connected and addressed via internet. Eventually everyone personally
will have an internet "address" that would combine voice, email etc. when you
fill out forms and apply for credit, etc that will be part of your personal
identification as well as the primary way to contact you.

Self driving long-haul delivery trucks, probably be accepted quicker than
personal cars. Still will be manned initially to handle problems and to
dissuade looters, or drive in hard to navigate areas.

------
bfitz
3D Printing (a nearly infinite number of knock-on effects). Legal drugs
(prohibition is once again losing its sway). Care for people who are 80+ years
old. Autonomous vehicles.

Space travel - I'd love to predict fortunes in it, but it's still a wildcard
and a dream.

------
dome82
Healthcare: Cancer treatments and cancer drugs for fixing cancer and improving
the patient's life. Sometimes, Chemio can be devastating.

Self-treatments on demand: someday, you wont need to go in a doctor office for
diagnoses, medical check-ups and treatments.

------
pjdorrell
Online educational videos.

99.99% of online educational videos suck. For example, watching the video is
so painful that all I can think about is "how do I get out of here?".
(Possibly I am spoiled from watching too many popular vlogs on YouTube.)

The other 0.01% of online educational videos that don't suck prove that it is
possible to make such videos. The best examples I can find are RailsCasts and
"Math Antics" (the first is for grownups, the second is aimed more at
children, but I would watch something like Math Antics that had more advanced
content).

------
aaron695
Anything that is currently controlled or regulated by governments will get
decentralised to the net by private enterprise.

Education, Medicine, Law, Jobs, Banking, Sins (Most already there),
Importation (3d printers).

My guess.

------
vincie
Military, mass behavioural control & surveillance technology.

------
meerita
If I have to choose 4 things came to my mind:

Health, Space, Robotics and Food imho.

Health, to produce better treatments agaisnt sickness, cure for cancer and
other applications like regenerative i guess will be the ones who will coin a
lot of dollars, specially from labs.

Space and robotics to produce better transportation, manufacturing and other
hardware potential advancements.

Food. The food industry will work for sure o new sintetic food, to mass
produce as well to produce safe transgenic meat.

------
josephpmay
-Food (agriculture, livestock, protein from insects, lab grown meat, etc.)

-Transportation (if you can find a way to decrease fuel costs)

-Disruptive medicine (traditional drug companies will be making less and less money, but companies that develop cheaper cures to common world-wide ailments will be extremely successful)

Basically, things that are necessities for living. Media/entertainment will
become an increasingly zero-sum game.

------
Neslit
There is an increasing interest in life extension, so I think we'll also see
wide demand for an interim solution to the whole death thing. E.g. brain
plastination, cryonics, sufficiently detailed brain scans... whoever makes one
of these scalable and effective at preserving a person (information-
theoretically) will rake in like $O(10^9).

~~~
stcredzero
Big O notation with a constant amount? If so, that's the same as O(1) or is
that another notation I'm not familiar with?

~~~
Neslit
Ah sorry... I was just being sloppy, what I wrote doesn't make sense. What I
meant was "order of magnitude", but I'm not sure how to write that; Big Theta
says two functions grow within a constant factor of each other, which is
vaguely similar to the notion of order of magnitude. Maybe it should have been
"$~10^9$" or just "$10^9$".

(By the way, my reasoning was 10^4 for current cryonics prices, times 10^7 or
10^8 people, times 10^-2 or 10^-3 assuming a fee of 1% to 0.1%.)

------
sharemywin
Marketplaces will become more and more common. Because
Customer/Company/Employee is much more cumbersome (legally, administrativaly)
than Customer/Maketplace(with reviews)/Independant Contractors. Robotic
automation will take more jobs because they continue to do more and more
cheaper.

------
stretchwithme
I think robotics. We'll eventually see robotic transportation, construction,
supply chains, agriculture, and cooking.

Much the home will be automated, includes search and storage and cleaning. It
will get smaller, lose the need for a garage, and be easier to lease out,
reconfigure, move, replicate.

------
patfla
Energy is probably the largest industry in the world - our civilization runs
on abundant energy.

The world energy industry needs to be very substantially reworked otherwise
there's a high chance that many (most) of us (or subsequent generations) will
die.

There are massive fossil incumbents who will be displaced.

I'd say energy.

------
Toenex
Personal decision support. I simply don't have time to search for the cheapest
energy supplier/insurance provider/credit card/mortgage each month but I'm
sure I could be saving money. The people who can demonstrably do so on my
behalf have my interest.

~~~
sharemywin
I think the biggest issue there is trust. Who do I trust with all my financial
information?

~~~
Toenex
Absolutely, trust is a massive part of this. Many people have accountants so
trust can be be given. Perhaps accounting institutes would be in a good place
to do something like this. I'm probably going to be giving the organisation a
limited Power of Attorney so they will need some serious credentials. Don't
forget that your financial information will have real value which you may be
willing to trade for the benefit of better deals i.e. they don't charge actual
money for the service but get access to your spending pattern.

Lots of issues but the point I was making was simply that a) I want the best
deal possible b) I'm lazy. I reckon I'm not alone either.

------
ccbrandenburg
I would say one of them could be in making the utility (electricity, gas,
water) more user friendly. Transparency hardly exists and there are seldom
interactions between companies and subscribers. Focusing on user experience in
this area could be an opportunity...

~~~
saryant
So long as the power doesn't go out and the price is reasonable, why do I care
if my utility company has a nice website?

~~~
msandford
For many people utility bills are a large expenditure, not an insignificant
one. A company that can make it easier for folks to budget, plan, predict, etc
could potentially reap rewards as they can take on lower income or risky
utility customers who historically have high default rates and lower the
default rate through proactive management. Furthermore a regular person might
appreciate a utility company that bends over backwards to ensure there are no
surprises on the monthly utility bill.

The roughly 17 million people who are unbanked are the target market:
[http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-
economy/2013/09/wh...](http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-
economy/2013/09/why-poor-choose-go-without-bank-accounts/6783/)

That doesn't just go for electric power but other things as well like mobile
phones, cable TV, internet, etc. I'm not optimistic that the Congress will get
their shit together in the near future and force last-mile monopolies to
provide access again like the FCC required for a while. But if they do, look
out!

------
return0
Artificial Wombs

Artificial/in vitro food

~~~
deftnerd
I always thought that the anti-abortion crowd was missing out on an angle that
could be taken advantage by science-types. The whole "no abortion for X weeks"
is based on the age that it's plausible that a fetus can live outside of the
womb.

If the anti-abortion folk are so serious about their beliefs, they should fund
a massive research project to create artificial wombs that very early babies
can be placed into to finish their development.

If anyone wants to work on the tech, that's the benefactors you should go
after!

~~~
return0
There are considerable efforts

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus)

But i wasn't thinking of the abortion crowd, just a more safe way to grow
people.

------
skadamat
Space / asteroid mining

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR0kzklRE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR0kzklRE)

"Space is where the first trillionaires will be made"

~~~
worldsayshi
Wouldn't it make more sense to dig deeper into the crust first? When it comes
to minerals mine-able from an asteroid.

~~~
geuis
We have already been doing that. This is potentially a long discussion, but
basically there are a few factors.

Heat. It gets really hot the deeper you go. There are a lot of mines already
where it's very difficult for humans to exist for very long.

Also, availability. There's a lot of stuff in the earth. But after 4 billion
years gravity happened. All elements have different densities. Turns out a lot
of the metals that are really, really useful also turn out to be pretty dense.
Think uranium and platinum as examples. Most of these elements have sank into
the deep mantle and the core over time. The bits we find left over aren't even
a taste of how much is collectively in the earth but can't get to. On a side
note, it's been theorized that the massive amounts of uranium that sank to the
core has been powering the earth for billions of years. Basically, the earth
is a giant fission reactor.

The third point is that there's a lot more stuff up there than down here. If
you had to pick a direction to mine, in the long term it's going to be easier
and more profitable to mine the stuff in space than to dig deeper into the
ground.

~~~
kbutler
TIL "heat from radioactive decay contributes about half of Earth’s total heat
flux."

[http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/abs/ngeo1205.html](http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/abs/ngeo1205.html)

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/nuclear-
fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/)

------
woofyman
Security fences Armoured cars Autonomous armed guard killer robots

------
t0
I sometimes look here for ideas:
[http://www.futuretimeline.net/](http://www.futuretimeline.net/)

------
Choronzon
Healthcare Managing the automated transition of ageing populations with
increasingly more automation and less budget per patient.

------
mcot2
Electric vehicles & associated infrastructure. Very high speed transportation
air and ground transportation.

------
wildermuthn
Civilian-use drones and virtual reality culminating in the functional
equivalents of androids and holodecks.

------
lrichardson
driverless cars.

I think google is years ahead of everyone else here, and it will be a product
that will be high price, high margin. And the market is huge.

I really don't see how google could walk away from that one without gobs of
cash in their pockets.

~~~
sharemywin
It's not legal. The technology is being introduced slowly by the current
manufactures as well. Assisted parking. Enhanced cruise control. automatic
braking. If they can manage to get it legalized quickly Google has a chance to
disrupt the market. But the car companies are introducing products to market
that people are buying.

------
gbog
In China obviously. It is already the case.

------
ArekDymalski
Predictive analytics that works.

~~~
jacques_chester
I hate to burst your bubble:
[http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-12-06.pdf](http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-12-06.pdf)

------
spre
nano technology, alternative energy, space travel R&D

------
ghostdiver
food production, healthcare

------
nickthemagicman
Medicine

------
n00b101
software

------
jng
A.I.

------
InclinedPlane
Computing and telecom are obvious. By 2050 it's fairly likely that a majority
of the entire population of the Earth will own a computer (e.g. smartphone,
tablet, or pc/laptop), which is pretty profound if you think about it.

Fulfillment will be a place for fortunes to be made, as it always has been.
Amazon has been executing exceedingly well in this area but it's not as though
everyone else has been sitting on their ass. Over the next decades the sort of
smart, high-tech, low latency fulfillment that we've come to associate with
Amazon will be the worldwide standard anywhere and everywhere. Also look for
infrastructural improvements along those lines. It used to be that people had
visions of pneumatic tubes running everywhere. But consider some variations on
that theme, a fully automated delivery system that could route standard sized
containers across cities, continents, or maybe even the world. Maybe
autonomous vehicles could play into that, but it seems as though building
custom infrastructure would also provide a substantial RoI. Imagine how
different the world would be if every housing structure had a 1m^3 "mail box"
that you could receive packages in or send packages from which would
immediately deliver them anywhere in the system 24/7 without human
intervention. Economics changes a lot, consumerism changes a lot, industry
changes a lot, and so on.

Fully automated manufacturing and configurable manufacturing. These may not
replace all manufacturing but they seem likely to me to become a "big deal",
and people will make a lot of money off them. Imagine if you could go to a web
page upload a bunch of plans (3D models, wiring diagrams, etc.) and place an
order for a factory to manufacture something you've designed. This is more
than just the home manufacturing (3D printing et al) revolution, it's
something on an entirely different scale. Imagine how this sort of thing would
affect the cost of production of material goods. Imagine how it would affect
the iteration speed as well. And think about how it would affect the mass
production society we've grown accustomed to. What happens when a designer can
produce a batch of a few hundred or a few thousand custom designed smartphones
or what-have-you? Instead of everyone buying from a small pool of mass
produced goods does the market change to focus more on boutique versions of
such things? Do people start buying things that are more customized in
functionality? What happens when you create factories that can effectively
replicate themselves?

Education is slated to change dramatically over the next decades. Much of the
world today lives in areas where formal education is not the norm. As those
areas become developed there are education opportunities other than the
traditional ones, especially when you consider the widespread abundance of
computing devices in the future (see above). There is a huge market for
learning software, on a multi-billion dollar per year scale, but a hell of a
lot of work will have to go into creating all of that software to make it
effective and practical.

Space will be big business too but that can be a bit hard to predict. Through
the 21st century the cost of launching things into space will drop by at least
a factor of 10 if not a factor of 100 or more. That will cause an exponential
increase in the amount of stuff and people we put in orbit which will create
substantial off-Earth economic activity which will gain momentum due to
positive feedback effects. By 2100 I'd expect millions of people to be living
off-Earth and trillions of dollars in revenue to be involved in off-Earth
commerce and industry. This starts to get really interesting when you consider
what sort of potential advantages building things in space might have.
Obviously it makes it easier to test spacecraft, of course, since you have
access to the environment they'll operate in right there. But there are also
some other interesting aspects. Vacuum is abundant and easy to get at. As is
zero-g or nearly any level of g-forces you desire. A lot of manufacturing
processes would be very different if vacuum conditions were cheap and easy to
get at.

------
nofortunateson
Broadly speaking, biology.

------
Kudzu_Bob
Sexbots.

------
MarkTanamil
data mining

