Technology prediction for the 2020s

And I'll just say I am dubious on his prediction that those would be enough to get us to a post-scarcity world. Certain people today already live a post-scarcity lifestyle and they have shown an aversion to sharing that with the rest of us. I don't know why we should expect the benefits of this increased productivity would be shared rather than hoarded.

On the crypto front it looks like there has been some progress, my $100 of tether now costs $150 worth of eth to send, whereas it only cost $30 to send during the last bull run.

Some computational revolutions will happen (or are already happening). See photo, translation, speech recognition.

We will not have cheap abundant energy. On the contrary we'll enter a phase where will have to deal with heavy fallout of many early and current wind and solar farms needing upgrades and replacement.

Now that's an unusual list.

- Longevity research. At some point it should be possible to re-engineer the human genome to produce longer lived people. Retrofitting to old models, though, is less likely to work. Also, what this really means is creating new species. Look at all the trouble we have with race. Wait until we have multiple humanoid species that can't interbreed.

- AR. We're probably going to get AR at an affordable price this decade. The Facebook version will be like "Hyperreality", the Google version will be Glassholes 2.0, and the Amazon version will be Marshall Brain's "Manna". But "at last, the Pokemon will be free to roam the real world!" And maybe someone will figure out how to draw black.

- VR. The year of VR was 2019. We can do it, it just sucks. Except for Beat Saber. Somewhere between 5% to 15% of the population gets nauseated, which is far worse than high-end roller coasters. You can look, point, and shoot, but more than that is hard.

- Psychedelic medicine. Probably not all that helpful. More of an excuse for recreational drugs, like "medical marijuana" was.

- Cryptocurrency driving major societal change. Nah. It's zero-sum. It's not creating any wealth. Great for money laundering, not so useful for anything else.

What are we going to get in the 2020s?

- Electric vehicles everywhere. That's pretty clear.

- Self-driving cars. It's been a long haul, but Google doubles the mean time between disconnects every 18 months by incremental improvement. Getting there, slowly.

- Much faster and more effective vaccine development. Vaccines were kind of a backwater for years, but now they're getting attention. Influenza and HIV might be knocked out this decade. Maybe even make a dent in cancer.

- China 2025. Go read the 14th Five Year Plan, 2021-2025. If you think it's unrealistic, read the 13th Five Year Plan and check off the items completed.

- Energy will be less of a problem as solar, wind, and batteries are deployed. We have the technology, now it's just deployment. The next big problems are in water and metals.

Helmets incorporating glasses with head-up displays, Beats headphones with a personal Siri meets Samantha so your IoT fridge and shoelaces can speak with you, and ubiquitous masks, all wrapped in an ultra thin, lightweight helmet.

An extreme example is inter stellar travel.

I can't use Twitter without an account + the information density on this one isn't much high. Just a guy speculating about something they can't know.