Ten Year Futures

People can't really see it yet, partially due to a unwillingness to see the darker side of humanity, but a real cyber security expert is worth more than a cruise missile.

Planes, self-driving cars, swarms of aerial and underwater drones, fraud, propaganda, auto-targeting laser systems, surveillance, power generation and distribution, command and control interruption, machine learning + cyber warfare.

Who needs nuclear weapons when you have a zero day on a hundred million self-driving cars and you can get them to the nearest gas station or chemical plant going 300km/h?

But they'll have legal pot to keep them quiet and passive.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/the-par...

Viewing habits are shifting but so is public opinion on Ads. The future of Ads on these internet TV sites is going to be the same as it was for traditional TV albeit a bit more targeted. Instead of TV networks controlling the viewing data in the future internet TV services will control it.

so the potential of a startup to take advantage of that data is going to be minimal since it will be guarded like gold.

Having said that, it's strange that this guy doesn't mention cryptocurrency anywhere in his post.

He spends a lot of time discussing technologies that aren't quite there yet, and leaves out the one area that is (likely) right at the point of adoption.

The reason why I bring this up, as being important in 10 years or less. Is that it will be available for around $1m.

AI will negate the need to go through rigorous astronaut training. Maybe there will be some, but not as thorough.

Graphene and other exotic metals will allow for lighter craft and reusability.

High performance electric engines will allow for less fuel payloads to get into high altitude, whilst allowing for the metallic hydrogen to literally blast out into space. Metallic hydrogen is 7x more powerful than liquid hydrogen.

I think once average joe is able to get into space. We could finally see an abundance of rare earth materials. Could be like the old west, where a co-op of you and your buddies go out, wrangle an asteroid and mine. Come back with a trillion dollars worth of metals.

Of course, a glut of anything will bring prices down. But hopefully by then manufacturing is ubiquitous also.

Maybe it's the optimist in me, but there are certain historical events that could take our society from where it is now, scarcity based, to an abundant one.

Interesting times ahead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)

no parking lots? If we have AI driven cars than billions of people who can't drive can suddenly use a car. Your 5yr old kid wants to visit grandma? The just ask the car to take them there. Grandma who's too old to drive wants to go somewhere? She jumps in an AI car. All that public transportation in Tokyo, HK, Singapore, NYC, London, Paris, Berlin? Maybe all that disappears. Maybe many people stay close to home because they don't have a car and public transportation is no fun (10 minute walk to station, 2-3 transfers, possibly a crowded train standing with sweating people, 10 minute walk from station to final dest) but if there are ubiquitous AI cars then I can go door to door at any time. Those two 10 minute walks disappear, the standing with sweaty people disappears. Now I start traveling far more often. Even better I don't have to concentrate on driving I can use that time.

In other words, AI cars might 10x car usage

But also living in the city is going to get a lot easier because of robotic transportation. It won't be necessary to haul anything home from a store, for example. A lot of cabs could just have one or two seats and no trunk.

We'll see tiny vehicles delivering dinner, handling dry cleaning. And parking woes disappear.

But the biggest change will be in how easy it will be to move from one place to another. Yes, robots will be able to move all your stuff cheaply. But they also might just procure comparable stuff in your new city instead. And most of your stuff you don't use all the time, so maybe it's in long term remote/cheap storage until you do. Maybe its okay if those table leafs are at your house for Thanksgiving dinner.

Maybe you move every month or live in one place during the week and another on the weekends.

Student loans are driven by massive inefficiencies that various companies will exploit. The end will be apparent in 10 years.

I think that there's still ENORMOUS potential for mobile apps and mobile-driven services. There's huge opportunity for new services e.g. Uber. I think just about every large web/desktop property faces a significant threat from a mobile app e.g. craigslist, match.com (they luckily own tinder), flickr (wait, already gone to Instragam), AIM/Yahoo Messenger (gone thanks to Whatsapp), etc...

uhhh, wasn't I reading pieces about how the internet was really shaking up TV about 5 years ago?

(1) Software is well on the way to an old, slowly changing, mostly routine, boring, low margin, slow growth business and industry.

(2) That the general purpose computing hard/software and 100 Mbps Internet data rates are all so cheap will in places undercut large, expensive approaches to computing projects. E.g., people will do projects, but Sand Hill Road need not be more involved than they are now in, say, a new pizza shop in Peoria, not more involved than they were in the romantic matchmaking Web site Plenty of Fish.

(3) A huge problem for computing causing (1) is that there just are not enough good, new ideas for high value IT startups. For a joke, but a simple explanation, the days of a hot social, mobile, local sharing app are gone.

(4) For Evans's dreams about machine learning (ML), he is not very well informed and is not seeing very clearly, but in principle, if strain to extend the meaning of ML, he is correct about the potential. But in practice that future will come slowly, very slowly.

Why so slowly? In fact, e.g., looking at, say, scikit, that's basically some applied math, and nearly all the math there is now old enough to have long, gray whiskers, literally. That applied math and much more in optimization, simulation, experimental design and analysis of variance, stochastic processes, on and on, i.e., the math sciences, optimization, operations research, statistics, except for a few niches (e.g., optimization in operating oil refineries, the fast Fourier transform for oil prospecting, partial differential equations for modeling oil reservoirs, air line crew scheduling, maybe airline plane scheduling, statistics in biomedical research and development) hasn't caught on at all well generally in business; so there is only tiny reason to believe it will become "The next big thing" now.

For that math, it's not so easy to get good at it: (A) The pure math departments don't want to teach it. (B) Very few other departments have enough grounding in the math prerequisites to teach the material very well. (C) Except for a few niches, business has long made its position crystal clear -- such applied math and a dime won't cover a 10 cent cup of coffee. (D) It has long been the case and still is that about the only paying customer that takes such applied math seriously is the US DoD for purposes of US national security.

Run a good applied math project down Sand Hill Road, for a big problem, with running prototype software, and will hear laughs, silence, or "don't call us; we'll call you". I have to doubt if there is a single information technology (biotechnology can be different) VC firm on Sand Hill Road able to direct technical due diligence for an applied math project.

There can't be "The next big thing" without a few hundred times more well qualified startup founder, worker bee, applied mathematicians to do the work.