> 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).
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.
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)
Potable water is an approximate proxy of energy costs. Find a scenario where energy costs increase 10-100x, and water will closely follow (not exactly, because when potable water costs in the US rise above a certain level, then people will change their habits, like not use potable-grade for watering their lawns, and not having lawns in the first place). Due to ongoing transition of developing nations into developed nations, and the tendency so far of the latter to decrease birth rates due to populations that embrace development trends responding to economic incentives, there is likely a cap on energy costs well below 100x.
In that case I will have to move somewhere where I can dig a well, buy a reverse osmosis filter and fix it all to solar panels (which are getting super cheap).
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.
A pesimistic view - the inequality will be rampant, well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML and a huge surplus of developers will be fighting for scraps, requiring 1-2 side-jobs to pay their expenses. 25% of jobs will be gone due to self-driving cars boom, causing another round of consolidation among car manufacturers as people stop buying cars. Most of 1st world will resemble Brazil, gated communities of lucky ones and shanty towns for the rest. There will be a significant population decline in the 1st world due to widespread cheap availability of sexbots, with universities researching "baby factories" to keep humanity going. Eugenics will be alive and well and culture completely shifts to survival of the fittest, with hunger games becoming main sports TV broadcast. Global warming causes massive ocean die off, prompts massive emigration out of the area between two tropics, disrupting economies world-wide. Fossil fuels will be largely depleted, people would lose the knowledge how to extract them from great depths as the productive generation passes away. Most people will be selfish narcissists with no regards to each other, living their artificial life on social media and in advanced VR. Cryptocurrencies cause governments to lose any effect on economy, advanced cryptology prevents effective capital control, allowing largest players to completely dominate.
>well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML
The first thing I started to code in was Delphi 3, which I think was one of the first IDEs to have code-completion, which speeds up development quite a lot. It still required you to manually handle memory.
Today we have much more powerful computers, much more power languages, far more powerful IDEs, tools like code testing, code review and commonly use version control systems - and a shortage of programmers, with their salaries just going up.
I am not saying that AI won't ever make devs obsolete, just that it will be one of the last fields to be made obsolete, as we are likely to integrate it into our tooling (perhaps in the future, rather than write code you review and fix AI generated code).
Sexbots will definitely be a thing, but I still think they will be a niche, because the real sexy times will happen with AR (it is both far more deniable than sex-bots and, according to reviews I have read, way better than internet porn).
As for fertility, that has been in decline in the US for years, and the rest of the west. The average European rate is only a tad above 1.5, so in the future net-import of brains (zombie-mode) will be required, but the world is also full of smart people who wants very much to go to the west.
The main problem will be reaching political consensus. Given that the US have a problem of reaching much, if any, consensus this may be the biggest hurdle.
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.
It sounds far fetched and maybe it is, but one thing to consider is that AI, robotics, and automation have compounding impact. Each generation makes developing the new generation faster. We've already seen more advancement in 5 years than the past 20, at least in terms of mainstream adoption.
Vertical farming has been a perennial favorite of "futurists" much like flying cars. Unlike flying cars, the technology itself is fully proven and has been for a long time. The reason why it isn't common is due to economic factors, not so much technology.
Urban land is a very expensive speculative commodity and under-used, because there's little penalty for doing nothing with it, thus causing sprawl.
Simultaneously, we subsidize transportation, so we encourage sprawl in lots of senses... including in an agricultural sense. The wear and tear on highways is almost entirely from trucking, but we all pay equally for it.
Cultured meat, however, is something that I am very hopeful about. I'd be thrilled if we achieved it by 2030, but that seems overly optimistic. I'd love to be proven wrong, however... the sooner the better.
How can anyone in a city justify vertical farming when there is already very little housing available for lower income folks? Vertical farming doesn't make any sense to me in the real world where an efficient cargo delivery infrastructure exists.
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?
Indeed, this is from the world economic forum, yet some of these predictions are more likely from 2130 more than 2030.
And nothing about social change, economic power shifts, etc - The pampered American calling in to see how the minions in China have done the day's work.
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.
> 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.
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?!?
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.
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.
A year or two ago I worked on a project with the idea that ads are going to slowly phase out on at least video - instead the influence will be from product placement and the purchase process (which was the part I was working on) would be incredibly easy to do with minimal and voluntary interruption of viewing. I still think that's the way things are going to go.
Do you really think AI would do worse job than many board members? Probably the simplest AI in the form of math.random() would consistently put some decisions to shame...
"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.
"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%..."
Plus the current advertising merry-go-round is funded indirectly from large amounts of VC money. Once that goes away, "everything is free because advertising" may not be true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
We also had a global Great Recession. That’s about a decade of backward progression. The real factor here is whether we’ll see another recession of similar magnitude. If we do, then we’ll be lucky to see equally similar changes.
As for probability, it feels like the market needs a correction as does society. Trump/Brexit are a reaction to many things.
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).