Nightline Interview with Steve Jobs (1981) [video]

People are going to "drone in to the office", they'll send one to look around new houses or office space before bothering to turn up themselves, they're going to be on holiday but connect to their drones at home to check that their house and cats are okay, they'll rent drones far away and just _explore_ stuff.

And eventually there will be undesirable things, schools will cut costs by sending drones on field trips instead of kids. Ubiquitous eavesdropping will arise. If the hardware and connectivity becomes hard to trace, trolls aren't going to just dox you, they're going to film and break into your house. The gated communities of the future will be Faraday cages.

No idea of a timeline for this stuff, and would certainly like to believe some of it isn't inevitable.

- The taxing of robotic / AI systems, to offset the losses in tax revenue from human labor. Regardless of whether I agree with it, it's guaranteed to happen. It'll dramatically reshape taxation.

- CRISPR (gene editing broadly). There won't be a major pharma/biotech company on earth that isn't working with it, within 10-15 years. We'll be able to cure dozens of major and minor diseases in a few decades using it. The public mostly has no idea what's coming nor how fast. The mainstream media has only just begun to cover it from time to time. There will hardly be a person in the developed world that doesn't utilize gene editing for something in their lifetime, within a generation (whether for improvement or therapy). This century we'll permanently strip dozens of diseases & serious medical problems from the human genome, it'll be akin to what vaccines have accomplished. CRISPR will also solve the antibiotic resistance problem (the first headlines on that have finally begun to show up, in a few years it'll be widely agreed with).

- Gene software. There will be a $100+ billion company created in the genetics space around software. AI + personal gene technology is interesting 15-20 years out. Persistent micro regulation of the genome through editing + AI guide. Instead of responding with gene altering treatment after disease has well set in, we'll quickly move to the next logical level which will be frequent early course correction & disruption. It'll make the most sense to have AI doing this for us on a productivity / cost effective level. Improvement (not therapy due to disease) will also obviously be a major segment. It'll take a while (50-70 years?), but eventually our bodies will be treated more like genetic software platforms; we'll likely deploy into ourselves some kind of human genome operating system, that will have updates & patches as improvements come along.

- Bio-reactors, growing organs, etc. Vast progress has been made here and it's moving very fast. 20-30 years out we'll have the ability to grow most organs for routine implant. Today it's a very, very (barely existent) small niche segment vs the traditional transplant market. This is interesting as well in line with CRISPR:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603857/crispr-may-speed-p...

- The scale of the worlds that will be built in VR and the demands that will place on all computing resources. It's not something that is being widely considered right now, even on HN you'll routinely run into high skepticism about the scale of what's coming. Whatever scale you think it'll be at in 20 years, multiply that by 100x, you'll probably still be undershooting.

Before then I think we'll also all but have solved cancer through immunotherapy and gene editing, but it will probably still be out of reach for most people who won't be able to afford the drugs (especially in countries without a single-payer or nationalized healthcare system).

Solar and wind power will produce at least 70% of the world's electricity needs in 20 years. Probably close to 95% of the new cars sold in the market will be EVs by then. There may still be 20-30% ICE cars on the road by then, depending how aggressive governments decide to be about it.

I think we'll have solved both fusion power (but not yet deployed at scale) and have quite powerful quantum computers in 20 years. I don't know where "AI" will be in 20 years, but our current notions of AI will probably be rather quaint.

AI takes over the world?

The decline of the middle class and a new developed world of low wage working slaves straight out of Dickens / Hugo?

so idea of smartphone was pretty safe bet, touchscreen was risky choice

You could make a good case for the internet turning into something more like AOL or cable tv. Net neutrality going away, search engines preferring to show their own content, DRM going into browsers, various monopolies forming up, etc. At the very least, what's usable on the internet might be different depending on your path in. You'll have the iPhone internet, the Comcast internet, and so forth.

Not a great development, but there's probably money to be made in there somewhere.

I've never tried VR or AR, but I'm confident that in 50 years we will spend most of our waking hours having an image projected onto our retina from a pair of glasses or contact lenses.

People now spend an hour or more each day commuting to work because face-to-face communication is so much more efficient than via the internet. But that advantage will slowly erode as VR/AR improves. Eventually most people will work remotely, and this will have huge consequences: People will no longer need to live in an expensive city; companies will be able to hire workers without regard to international borders.

Quick ones -

1. Revolution in civil engineering - virtually viewing the final bridge before even laying one brick

2. Medical - performing any surgery to learn before even touching a patient

3. Theatre - previewing your setup and practice like it is live

4. Speakers - practicing your speech before thousands of people (of course, virtual)

"Man is the creator of change in this world. As such, he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them."

I think it served as part of Apple's internal mission statement in the 80s or something.