In the past, one of the most significant limiting factors on business growth has been the cost of human labour, and technological development has focused on working around this limitation, eliminating manual jobs and creating jobs improving the technology.
However, as the world population grows and certain very important finite resources, such as fossil fuels, become severely depleted (especially fossil fuel reserves that can be extracted with less energy than the fossil fuel contains), these resources become a more important limiting factor than human time.
I therefore predict that in the future, far more work on technological development will go towards sustainability, and less will go towards minimising human labour. Employment will rise, while the price of anything which is not sustainably produced will rise in real terms relative to the cost of labour.
Due to the relatively higher costs of energy intensive transportation, I expect that there will be some degree of reversal of globalisation with respect to physical goods (but not other industries). Technology will probably play a role in allowing one family or small local community to do locally what currently takes a global network of large companies.
I think inequality will still be a real risk long term - if we ever reach the point where the food production system can be completely automated, and everyone had at least enough technology / capital to produce what they needed to survive and be healthy, poverty would be eliminated - but if only a few people owned all the capital, and squandered most of it on luxuries while others starved, that would be a significantly worse outcome.
In the past, one of the most significant limiting factors on business growth has been the cost of human labour, and technological development has focused on working around this limitation, eliminating manual jobs and creating jobs improving the technology.
However, as the world population grows and certain very important finite resources, such as fossil fuels, become severely depleted (especially fossil fuel reserves that can be extracted with less energy than the fossil fuel contains), these resources become a more important limiting factor than human time.
I therefore predict that in the future, far more work on technological development will go towards sustainability, and less will go towards minimising human labour. Employment will rise, while the price of anything which is not sustainably produced will rise in real terms relative to the cost of labour.
Due to the relatively higher costs of energy intensive transportation, I expect that there will be some degree of reversal of globalisation with respect to physical goods (but not other industries). Technology will probably play a role in allowing one family or small local community to do locally what currently takes a global network of large companies.
I think inequality will still be a real risk long term - if we ever reach the point where the food production system can be completely automated, and everyone had at least enough technology / capital to produce what they needed to survive and be healthy, poverty would be eliminated - but if only a few people owned all the capital, and squandered most of it on luxuries while others starved, that would be a significantly worse outcome.