10 predictions for the world of January 1, 2020
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
2) Android and Iphone will take a larger marketshare, but RIM will come back with a much revamped blackberry, and microsoft will re-do their windows mobile and this time they might even get it right.
3) facebook will die and will be replaced by the next fad
4) 3D displays are a lot harder than it seems, those that you can buy right now are all seriously inferior to people used to Hi-Def and 3D doesn't offer that much more of a user experience unless the user is completely free to go around the display.
5) is probably spot on
6) I don't think so, but what will happen is that people will be a lot more careful. 1987 to 2009 took 22 years, I think the next economic crash is a little further out, but eventually it will happen. All that it takes for that is to wait long enough, eventually people forget the previous one.
7) is pretty US centric, if you want a fixed health care system tomorrow move to Europe, Cuba or Colombia.
8) There is no drug war, that's just a figment of some peoples imaginations.
9) The energy solutions will immediately be offset by an increase in consumption by the developing world, I figure the energy-almost-crisis will be here for at least another 50 years. The only thing that will solve the energy crisis is cheap, pollution free fusion power. That will take a while.
10) The internet will force transparency on to politicians at a level that they are not used to and might actually bring something good, but the evolution of politics in America starts with making it a real democracy first, until then the two party system will rule. The day there is a 'coalition' government in the USA will be the day that there is a real possibility of change, instead of just 'lipservice' change.
Facebook reminds me a lot more of Prodigy (where I met many good online friends who became in-real-life friends who are now my Facebook friends) than of Google. Yes, I think Facebook will be pervasive for a while, and then fizzle out.
I look at FaceBook as more like the mall. It's a place to hang out. (And just like the mall, they try to sell you something ;-)). There will always be a need for some sort of mall. But if this particular mall starts getting evil, or ugly, or filled with undesirable people, then you can just call up your friends and visit some other mall. Or hang out at the gas station, or rec center, or bowling alley.
Google has literally become mission critical for millions of people doing their everyday job from doctors to scientists. Someone should make a little program to track how many google searches you do on a daily basis, that would be a really interesting bit of knowledge.
If you have photos on facebook but not backed up elsewhere (on your own storage devices) then you're setting yourself up for a fall.
Interactions with people can happen in many ways outside of facebook, after all it's not like they invented inter-human communications.
But sifting through the web without a search engine would be a bit tedious. On the other hand it would stop the spammers cold and people would have to spend some more time linking to places. Who knows what a web without search engines would have looked like, possibly better than the one we have today. But we can hardly go back there.
Your social graph is a self-updating address book. That's the hard to replicate feature of it. Maybe it's taken for granted now, but I grew up in a time when your email address was probably tied to your school or employer, people moved around a lot for school or work, and mobile phones were still seen as a yuppie toy. Your social graph back then was a fragile thing that needed constant maintenance, repairing broken links, etc. If you were busy it was easy not to even notice it had fallen into disrepair. Our parents generation, or their parents, tended to stay local. Gen X/Y, slackers, whatever we were called, had transportation tech before we had communication tech to match.
Facebook solved that problem for 30-somethings so well that today's 20-somethings aren't even aware that it was ever an issue.
"If you have photos on facebook but not backed up elsewhere"
You've missed the point. I have all my own photos backed up (in a way that is guaranteed to last). I don't have every photo of me taken by other people and even if I did - I don't have all the photos that make up a coherent set of that party or that trip - and even if I did, I couldn't browse those photos and click to an up-to-date contact page for that person.
Don't underestimate how deeply FB has embedded itself in people's real lives.
A couple of things:
There are many photos of myself (and friends) that I enjoy and would love to have around, but weren't taken by myself. At parties, friends take pictures and upload them. I can enjoy them through Facebook, but I wouldn't think to download a backup 'just in case'. It's just too much of a hassle. With my own photos, I have a local copy by default, since the device I took the picture with has the original image.
Even if I had a local copy of all my pictures (including pictures by friends), Facebook's tagging feature is pretty neat, and I don't exactly have that functionality with a local copy. I use Picasa and I love the facial recognition features, but it took a lot of training, and a lot of personal intervention to get my library recognized. Facebook has the power of the masses working to tag me and all of my friends.
I think that Facebook will remain relevant as long as there is no suitable substitute for those features.
There is no drug war, that's just a figment of some peoples imaginations.
I've been on the edge (on various sides) of what looks to me like a very long, slow and destructive engagement between the populace / drugs gangs / the authorities.
So Im wondering how your comment is pitched? Im certain there are quite a few people in SA countries who would argue there certainly is a drugs war :)
On the other hand I suspect your talking in a domestic sense (in which case I mostly agree). Just interested where your coming from with that?
The energy solutions will immediately be offset by an increase in consumption by the developing world, I figure the energy-almost-crisis will be here for at least another 50 years. The only thing that will solve the energy crisis is cheap, pollution free fusion power. That will take a while.
This I think you nailed spot on. But I think there is definitely a market here for someone to really work on sustainable energy - and to make it less of a niche / hippy thing. Perhaps a startup opportunity or 2. The am would be simple: to stretch that "50 years" out as long as possible till a proper solution (Fusion, I guess) is stabilized.
To call something a war means that there is an enemy of sort. The war on Cancer, the war on Terror, the war on Drugs etc.
War evokes a whole pile of emotions in people and that's the reason why that word gets a lot of use (or better put abuse) outside of its proper usage.
War is an act of violence between two nation states when diplomacy fails to resolve a conflict. A last resort, after which a state of normality (or sanity) normally resumes, this we call 'peace'.
Since you can't really make peace with Cancer, drugs or terror you can't be at war with them either. Who will negotiate the surrender, what will the terms be.
But war is such a convenient short word that politicians simply can't resist the temptation to use it, after all, if there is a war we want to be on the good side (and never mind looking too closely at what the good side is, almost by definition we are a on the good side).
So to call the war on drugs a war is disingenuous (sp?), it puts people mentally on the wrong foot and then uses their emotional response as a way to suppress their critical thinking faculties.
If they stood still long enough they'd realize that cancer cells have never declared war on us, and we can declare war back all we want it's not going to make a difference. Cancer doesn't care about us, it's just a malfunctioning of a mechanism that is built in to our cells. Normally it serves us well, when it malfunctions it turns against us. So we'd like it to go away, but because it is systemic and because the longer you live the more frequently you play the lottery of cell division the bigger the chance you'll lose. So to win the war on cancer you'd have to turn back the clock on our longer life spans.
The war on terror is similar. You can't create a world in which there are so many black vs white, with-us-or-against-us polarizing elements without having some percentage of the world population turn to radical methods of making their displeasure known. And given a world wide media that loves nothing better than carnage on a large scale these people have a great platform. The gorier the merrier as far as they're concerned, anything to drive up those ratings.
Then, the subject at hand, the war on drugs. There are people that would rather close their eyes to the reality around them, for a short while feel better than their lot in life gives them reason to, a way to escape reality. Some do this by playing games online, a world in which they can be more than in reality. Some do it by exiting this world altogether. Some get up and start changing the world around them until it suits them better and get a kick out of that. And some choose drugs. Sometimes 'softer' drugs like cannabis or piles of chocolate, sometimes harder drugs like alcohol, heroin, cocaine or whatever floats their boat.
It's systemic as well. In a world where there are so many people driven to the fringe of society, where the only way to make a killing is to do something illegal because you don't stand much chance of doing it the honest way plenty of people will take the chance to become a cog in the machine that supplies the escapists with their method of escape.
That's a societal problem, not something you're going to solve with a war. It will take time, tolerance, education and real involvement on all levels of society.
You're not going to win that by either bombing some fields, raiding some labs or by killing or busting a few people.
The only thing that will do is drive the price up because the drugs will become more scarce.
EDIT: though I will point out your definition of war is somewhat a false argument. Because your referring very specifically to it as a "state of being" - either we are at war or at peace. Which isn't always the case. In a very real sense governments are in conflict with "other parties" over the legality of drugs, their importation and production.
So in an absolutely literal sense there is a drugs war :)
The simile with Cancer is also incorrect as well as Cancer is a non-concious entity compared to, say, a band of drugs traffickers.
Though I do whole heartedly agree it is a much overused word.
[I suspect the original poster is referring, to give him the benefit of the doubt, to the actual "battles" with the drug cartels. That is something no amount of legalisation will stop, at least initially; so his is, it is true, a naive view]
Similarly "war on terror". No-one thinks it's a war against an abstract emotion...
Everybody uses their own emotional background to give it the meaning that suits them best.
That's the whole point of using slogans, we all identify with them in our own personal way.
I believe that Facebook in its current form will not exist. People will become more concerned about privacy. Facebook will be replaced unless they manage to change in time. Perhaps personal websites that can be more easily connected to others will replace the need of a central hub?
I think that it's just a matter of time before a major incident forces people to think about privacy. We will see an advanced search engine that can find out more about you than you want to, and/or some sort of 3rd party service that sells information to advertisers. That will certainly cause a lot of panic. I am almost sure that this will happen soon (within 2-5 years)
This is more of a 2012 prediction than it is a 2020 prediction. Mobile technology is evolving so quickly, and there are so many potential competitors (not just Google, Apple, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia), that there is no way to know what systems will power 2020's mobile devices.
That said, I think this is like the early PC market -- many platforms, but most (Commodore, Atari, etc) won't survive because they lack purpose. RIM, Nokia etc will switch to Android or disappear.
Android has momentum -- it's good and getting better and bigger faster than the others. It will be the Dos/Windows of the mobile world (except more open).
I've given up on the belief that anything will succeed merely on the notion of being open.
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Not true. I cite Sun's OpenOffice effort as one example. Cast your mind back further and there was Caldera Network Desktop backed by Novell (who were a powerful corporation back then). Even today there's Umbuntu. So we can clearly see that many people have tried to make Linux successful on the desktop, and all have failed.
Linux didn't have the name of a company like Google associated with it, a name many of us trust (or at least know). Linux didn't succeed because there was no PR,no marketing and it was hard to set up. Android will not have to be setup.
Also there is the case of compatibilities. Although linux was developed by 1991 but it didn't enter the mainstream market then.Android, on the other hand,is not entering a market which is already dominated by some other incompatible format. So standards can be built and dealt with.
2. Even if it does happen, that doesn't mean everybody would be forced to use it. If you don't want to put your data on Dropbox you don't have to.
3. From a technical perspective, isn't it premature to conclude that hosting all our data means the end of privacy? For example, I can host all my data on my own server and connect all my devices to it without compromising my privacy. I am sure smart people are working on other solutions. (I think the end of privacy will pretty much happen anyway, but I'm not sure that cloud computing will be the culprit.)
Agreed on that one.
Moving everything into the cloud will just speed things up for the culprits ;)
I think you're underestimating the security of Google's servers and overestimating the security of your own computer.
IANAL but I have experience in this rough area. That is pure scare mongering and I don't think there is even the remotest possibility they would get away with it. If they even tried Google would wrap them in counter-defence so fast it would be funny.
Also, for the record, your search history may be criminally suggestive but it is not something they could use to actually prosecute you (this is something I do know about). They still need a subpeona on your personal machine :)
Fishing is expensive; forces tend not to do it too much (despite what the politico's want to suggest otherwise). :)
This is somewhat a non-argument because subpeona's are easy to serve against you now. THe argument that they might be easier to serve on a company with no emotional attachment to you is countered by the fact that they have a much much bigger legal pocket and a desire to keep a "good" image to the public (by refusing banal subpoena's).
As to:
> and no black hat on the planet can break into my wallet without being in immediate physical proximity to me.
Maybe not. But any old pickpocket on the street can. Indeed there are more people that can steal your wallet than can break into Google's servers :)
Of course, this would raise the storage cost because the service provider can't use deduplication on all the user's data. The storage provider also would be unable to use data mining on the data. Thus, it probably could only be offered as a payed service.
Anyway, the first major cloud dataloss will put an end to that one. And that's only a matter of time.
I am willing to bet you on this. Big datalosses will happen, and people will for the most part continue doing what they did before, because they don't know better, because it's less of a hassle, or because the cat's already out of the bag. Look at the long list of data losses and privacy breaches that have happened in recent years:
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm#2005
These haven't significantly changed the way your average person protects their data. People continue to put their data at risk in ways that boggle my mind, but we hackers have to be careful not to assume the average consumer shares our tech savvy and concerns for privacy.
As for the question of data loss: sure, a cloud provider might lose your data, but then again you might spill coffee on your laptop and do the same. (Again, "you" meaning the average consumer.)
But the other comments are spot on too, it's all in the air, but Facebook's and Google's recent attitude of you shared so you're damned has left me gravely worried about our future.
A year ago tablets were pretty much a dead end. If the decade had ended in 2008 no one would have predicted tablets making a comeback (probably, though the Crunchpad might have caused speculation). Now the Apple rumours mean it is high on our prediction lists, right?
I think if were going to do this we should go for Jan 1, 2050... (and my only prediction there that I will make off hand is that Man will have commercialised space travel properly and reached the Moon again - if not beginning to settle / talk about settling there.)
I would argue that Howard Dean's 2004 candidacy was an earlier hint of this.
I actually think the internet's effect on politics is overstated. Ron Paul won the internet in 2008, but got single digit percentages of the vote.
When an independent wins the Presidency on the strength of his or her Internet campaign, then that'll be news.
The winner will be the green nuke, Thorium. Once people understand that it has all the advantages of our current uranium based plants with few of the negatives public opinion will shift.
His predictions on AI also seem reasonable.
interesting assumption that might be worth expanding
Our lives may change significantly for better or for worse, but civilization isn't going anywhere.
whether we can overcome deeply fundamental crisis our western civilization faces remains to be seen, but looking back at 2000-2009 i am not convinced.