Metatrends shaping the next decade
peterhdiamandis.medium.com
peterhdiamandis.medium.com
1. Resources especially water will become scarce in certain high population areas causing severe unrest and migration out of those regions.
2. Due to increased automation(spreading through all industries) income inequality will hit an all time high.
3. Due to climate change(fires/floods) and large insurance industry losses some areas will now be considered un-insurable.
4. Give the covid pandemic record amounts of money will be funneled to healthcare, expect some large scale diseases to be conquered, HIV, many forms of cancer.
5. Electric cars will be ubiquitous.
6. Large Media will suffer a near fatal collapse(changing consumer patterns ie cord cutting, distrust, polarization).
7. Military around the world will utilize more and more robots/AI in fights, most planes will be run by AI(no pilots), ground attacks will feature more robots also. Same with water, AI controlled submarines and boats.
8. Tech fatigue will set in with a significant part of the population with some people avoiding most forms of social media and smart devices.
9. A reverse of the people moving to big cities occurs, more people moving into smaller towns happens, this was triggered by covid but continues as more and more jobs are able to be done remotely.
10. Fusion reactors will become a reality with cheap power being achieved.
>9. A reverse of the people moving to big cities occurs, more people moving into smaller towns happens, this was triggered by covid but continues as more and more jobs are able to be done remotely.
These seem opposite, to me. I agree many jobs will eventually be automated. Especially manufacturing and other things small towns are known for. Can small cities survive with remote workers replacing the lost jobs?
You all are far more optimistic than I am it seems.
> And as the world’s poorest countries are also the world’s sunniest, the democratization of both new and traditional storage technologies will grant energy abundance to those already bathed in sunlight.
I would love to have that kind of optimism...
You pair the app to your NeuraLink brain interface, you black out for five hours, and some amount of money appears in your bank account. Sometimes $50, sometimes $5000.
I see so many people in tech discuss how interruptive COVID-19 has been on humanity, but they see it as a sort of temporary problem to get over, where once dealt with, they can then go back to thinking about AGI or some other lofty technological goal. In reality, COVID-19 should be seen more as a "taste" of things to come. I don't know why more action, or at least discourse, regarding climate collapse exists in tech communites about this subject. Is it because it isn't as interesting to think about, when compared to working on self-driving cars, VR, human longevity, etc?
Edit: I'm looking at you Lex Fridman and 90% of his guests.
It seems like the biggest impact a person has on the world is the way they treat people, especially people they don't agree with.
There seem to be three primary options regarding climate change:
1) change your lifestyle
2) make someone else change theirs
3) make better technology
Option two seems to be the default based on average home sizes, commercial flights, food waste from dining out, and iPhone sales.
Technology optimists choose option three.
The outliers choose option one.
"Assume someone else will develop better technology that will fix the problem."
That's not optimism, it's magical thinking.
A common fallacy of our time is to think that the observed fact that technologies have been developed with massive impact means that we can summon such advances at will in the areas we choose.
The people looking for tech solutions will try to think their way out of the problem. Need to reduce CO2? Ok, here is cheap solar and improved battery tech. Horizontal drilling and fracking to deliver cheap natural gas and drive coal out of the market. Modular nuclear and next gen geothermal. Electric cars and smart metering. It is interesting to be sitting in Europe where everyone talks about solutions but accomplish nothing, while tech advancements allowed the US to reduce CO2 emissions to levels last seen almost 30 years ago.
It seems to me that people looking for tech solutions are the only ones making progress on the problem of climate change, and doing so in a way that means they might be able to create substitutes that allow everyone else to continue in oblivious denial without noticing that their climate impact is reducing. I think there is a lot to criticize and object to in tech solutions to these problems, but assuming that any other group is actually going to solve the problem seems to deny reality.
The magical thinking is assuming we will find them on our desired timeline, or at all. Technologist (and I'm guilty here too) often like to thing of the technology steering but often it's policy work.
If that does occur, it certainly won't be driven by the emerging biotech factors he identifies and will instead be driven by expansion of healthcare in the developing world.
1. Continued increase in global abundance
2. Global gigabit connectivity will connect everyone and everything, everywhere, at ultra-low cost
3. The average human healthspan will increase by 10+ years
4. An age of capital abundance will see increasing access to capital everywhere
5. Augmented Reality and the Spatial Web will achieve ubiquitous deployment
6. Everything is smart, embedded with intelligence
7. AI will achieve human-level intelligence
8. AI-Human Collaboration will skyrocket across all professions
9. Most individuals adapt a -like “software shell” to improve their quality of life
10. Globally abundant, cheap renewable energy
11. The insurance industry transforms from “recovery after risk” to “prevention of risk
12. Autonomous vehicles and flying cars will redefine human travel (soon to be far faster and cheaper)
13. On-demand production and on-demand delivery will birth an “instant economy of things”
14. Ability to sense and know anything, anytime, anywhere
15. Disruption of advertising
16. Cellular agriculture moves from the lab into inner cities, providing high-quality protein that is cheaper and healthier
17. High-bandwidth Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) will come online for public use
18. High-resolution VR will transform both retail and real estate shopping
19. Increased focus on sustainability and the environment
20. CRISPR and gene therapies will minimize disease
To me - this one sounds most plausible.
Actually, we are already pretty much there. [0]
You might say these aren't 3D, but that's easy to add by following these instructions [1].
You might say there isn't true immersion, but that would be the next step, and already done in a music video. [2]
[0] - http://members.har.com/cwsites/dispVirtualtours.cfm?id=21
[1] - https://www.harconnect.com/2020/07/14/har-virtual-tools/
[2] - https://nofilmschool.com/music-video-lidar-point-clouds-unre...
The high end medical therapies are probably also going to be a thing.
The more funky computing-shell and AI predictions are a flop IMO.
The smart home is pretty dumb. Cameras, lights, roomba, lawnmower, watering. It's not smart. It's a cron job OR'd with voice recognition. It's an automated home - useful in its own right, but let's not hype it inappropriately.
> 19. Increased focus on sustainability and the environment
This is the most likely to me, although less in the sense of more action and more in the sense of more talk, e.g., political debates. I definitely don't think it will overpower other typical topics, but in the sense that it will probably be a perennial topic on the list I can see it happening.
As just one example, #20 is already being done for COVID: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/new-test-detects-cor...
And another disease: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2835-2
I could go on, but I think I've made my point.
Is COVID "minimised" yet? Quite the opposite. So it looks like the prediction of "disease can be minimised" is an absurd one.
Is COVID "minimised" yet? (1) Would Pfizer say so?
The research is bearing fruit, seeing that on the ground is a different matter.
This would certainly surprise me very much.
> Autonomous vehicles and flying cars will redefine human travel
https://www.facebook.com/theseinfeldfriarsclub/videos/flying...
Instant eye-roll from me.
Counterpoint: https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
is advertising currently "rupted" ? in a steady state of calm non-disruption? My guess is no.
Bear in mind that producing a vaccine to a new disease COVID-19 in 2 years would be simultaneously a) smashing existing records and b) far too slow to stop it being a catastrophe, then this prediction looks ridiculous.
- Dean Kamen’s "Slingshot," a technology which can transform polluted water, salt water or even raw sewage into incredibly high-quality drinking water for less than one cent a liter.
Units actually cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at first. They became somewhat cheaper, but never cost-effective. Coca-Cola bought about 150 of them so they could clean up local water for use in beverage dispensers.
- Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE which promises a low-cost, handheld medical device that allows anyone to diagnose themselves better than a board certified doctor.
That turned into a wearable vital signs monitor for people recovering from surgery.[3]
- Dickson Despommier’s "vertical farms"
Other than for very high value crops, this seems to be going nowhere.
[1] https://www.diamandis.com/
[2] https://www.diamandis.com/abundance
[3] https://wefunder.com/updates/114506-vitaliti-makes-a-differe...
I just have a passing interest in the AI space, but I feel like we've been hearing that this is "10 years away" for the last 20+ years.
Maybe I'm wrong, but with technologies like AI and self driving cars we tend to make a lot of progress and then hit long plateaus of minimal improvement. It feels like someone makes a breakthrough and then everyone rushes to solve all the formerly hard problems that are now easy to solve because of that breakthrough, but once those dry up, we run into a different "unsolvable" problem. The general public keeps assuming we will advance in a linear (or logarithmic) fashion during those times of growth and fails to account for the fact that there are large plateaus of minimal growth in between them.
I do think at some point we will achieve this, but 10 years feels like an incredibly optimistic timeline.
Also, as a side note, over the years I've found that anyone who describes themselves as a "futurist" tends to have a bit of optimism bias toward how quickly we will reach certain technological milestones, which makes me believe this timeline even less.
AI has perhaps, maybe passed human intelligence in 0.005% of applications.
It's 2020 and we still have steering wheels in cars.
If we replaced the word "AI" with "statistics" we'd be a lot closer to describing where we are.
I get the corporate cheerleading newoptimist TED talk breathless thing. And yes, some of these are reasonable extrapolations–at least, they would be, absent the entire apple cart being overturned by destabilizing forces which totally puncture the fragile globalist two-class equilibrium of the last decade or two.
But's it's breathtaking in its lack of engagement with the forces that make such an upsetting of the cart highly likely: • ever vaster reach and cost of the surveillance state • accelerating wealth accumulation in a smaller oligarchy • unprecedented efficacy of sentiment and behavioral control • disruptive climate change and side effects like pandemics
Just to name a few contemporary headlines.
I mean... really. I have lived through decades of misguided utopianism around the tech side. So has this guy.
Buck to be made and cottage industry aside, he should know better.
- Areas of coastal cities abandoned due to repeated flooding
- Areas of high fire danger abandoned in California and Australia.
- Mass die-off in India due to excessive population and lack of water.
- US, UK, and Israel classified as "failed democracies" due to autocratic leaders.
- Terrorists cause a worldwide epidemic.
- Apple announces IPhone 20. Nobody cares.
Scary. But how ? isn't the access to epidemiological viral knowledge and bio-manufacturing highly regulated?
It's much easier than making a custom IC.
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/11/crispr-pandemic-gene-ed...
And this is by Vivek Wadhwa, is he considered a serious analyst of such subjects ?
Edit: this is the opinion of an expert in bioweapons, about DIY bioweapons :
"“If you take risk as a factor of likelihood of impact, the most likely attacks will come from low-powered actors, but have a minimal impact and be based on traditional approaches, existing pathogens, and well characterized risks and threats,” Millett explains. DIY genome editors, for example, may be great in number but are likely unable to produce a biological agent capable of causing widespread harm."
https://futureoflife.org/2018/10/12/genome-editing-and-the-f...
It is getting easier, but hopefully not too easy.
Every second college and some high schools have these machines.
If that's the case, why did the bioweapons expert I cited, think that DIY bioweapons don't carry great risk ? What's the missing piece, the thing that when DIY guys or terrorists gets a hold over, we should start to really worry ?
Sounds like an online marketing hustler who makes more money from selling his strategy to others, than from actually using his strategy.
And indeed, the article ends with a call to action for you to sign up for his course to learn the "Abundance, Exponential, and Longevity Mindset".
It's like Tony Robin's adapted for lifestyle startup founders. That's a good idea, if you ask me. The author can probably live handsomely from his online course. And for him, it won't matter if these predictions are correct or not.
I...uh...just remembered somewhere I'm supposed to be...
I would just strike through this and type “cyber security job security will go through the roof” instead
In the US, health insurance plans will almost always have prevention measures. They give discounts for annual wellness screenings, they arrange transportation to checkups, they pay for cancer screening.
But health insurance is an oddity among insurance types. I don't use my fire insurance to pay for routine things. The fire insurance company can do pretty well playing the odds of disasters. But my health insurer also has to pay for the boring stuff like lifelong medications and annual checkups. So they need to drive down the risk of an emergency enough to still be profitable.
Also, the government really pushes prevention. Hard to say no to the entity with the biggest sticks and tastiest carrots.
The flying cars were supposed to happen 20 years ago. Even if the tech would be possible, their massive energy consumption and loud noise would severely limit them to a small elite being able to afford using them (like helicopters really).
We're not going to a world with cheap and abundant energy, quite the opposite actually.
The article reads like the dreams of the author, not something based on reality.
I understand insurance to largely already work like this: high premiums discourage risky behavior. For example, one might be dissuaded from building a home on a flood plain when one finds out what the flood insurance will cost.
But seriously, this list reads like an eerily accurate vision of the corporate hellscape that is to come. I can't tell if the author is genuinely naive to the effects of near-perfect surveillance and profiling in the hands of governments and megacorps, or if it's just dressed up in pleasantries because there's money to be made there.
How can it be so glorious for everyone when the focus is still on creating an ultra rich elite? Will energy be cheap if it is completely owned by the next Google? Or will it be just at a price point where two hard working people in one home can afford it? Current trends and this guy's intro have me worried a bit.
My 10 megatrends:
1. Energy is effectively free. Solar PV is already USD 13 per MW-h (Oil equivalent USD 22.1) and falling
2. China will fail. During 1919-1948 China was ruled be regional strongmen (aka Warlordism). The CCP will fail and return to Warlordism.
3. All the connected 'smart' devices will fail due to either a deliberate or accidental failure of the Internet. Many will never be reboot.
4. People get old. Most countries are ageing including China, Japan and most western countries.
5. Climate Change will cause water and food shortages.
6. Most countries taxes bases will be destroyed. Due to 'tax planning' by the rich and the inability of Governments to replace outdated taxes with modern ones. eg petrol tax on ICE cars with EVs
7. Politics will become even less relevant. Politics will continue to shrink with large donors the only voices heard.
8. Healthcare will become less equal, along with everything else.
9. Many nation states will fail including the America.
10. There will be a rise in extremism as displaced people fight for reduced resources.