Ask HN: What will the economy be like 100 years from now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What will the economy be like 100 years from now?

14 pointsbyoung210 comments

Considering how technology has come in the last 100 or so years (electric light bulb, telephone, and radio to computers, smartphones, and the internet), it's quite possible that in the next 100 years we will have computers with AI advanced enough to be capable of handling natural language conversations and carrying out complex tasks. Combined with advanced robotics, I can see entire industries being replaced with automation. We wouldn't need people to drive trucks, taxis, buses, trains, or planes. We wouldn't need checkers at grocery stores (assuming they don't get automatically delivered and charged). We wouldn't need thousands of agents at faraway call centers, or workers at factories stamping out products by the thousands. Maybe teachers will be replaced by interactive simulations, and surgeons replaced by intelligent robots. Aside from truly creative professions, there would seem to be very few jobs left for people to do.

What would our economy look like in that world?

It is instructive to look 100-200 years back to see what people thought that. A lot of things were pretty spot-on (Jules Vernes description of the fax machine, which he actually named facsimile; Tesla's prediction of the mobile phone).

A theme that was commonly wrong was the belief that there would be a big engine in every home, with appliances using its motion/torque for stuff (instead, they became miniature and moved into devices). In the 50s, the same wrong belief was held with respect to computers (you'd have a few big ones, and you'd use their power when needed).

And if you asked someone in 1900's New York or London, what's going to be the century's biggest challenge, the answer would be an unequivocal "Getting rid of all the horse shit"

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/robotics-software/economic... - The economics of the Singularity. The piece is obviously heavily critiqued, and quite speculative in places. However, much like Kurzweil uses historical trends to paint the picture of technical growth, Robin Hanson has used historical economic and technology trends to predict future economic cycles. I think its an interesting point of view.

Thanks for sharing that link. I think he and I have a very similar view of the future!

In my opinion, the next 100 years are going to be the outcome of inventions in the areas of energy generation and storage. Systems currently perceived as futuristic such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal will all become primitive in comparison. The results of expansions and discoveries will spill over into all aspects of our lives - however it will not start until someone picks up Fermi's work.

Just what the IC did for the last 1/2 of this century, and the spillover effect is from Apple to Groupon to FB, someone will figure a way to generate, move and store energy that will impact our transportation, how food is grown/produced, how we work and travel, how we share and present information, and the overall quality of life in the most underdeveloped parts of the world.

Wars will become more lethal and fierce, but will become narrower and be more targeted. If Steve Jobs were well, and Apple would have fired him again, I can see someone like him leading the charge.

The above is all speculative, of course, but this is what I think the next 100 will look like.

.. and just not needing so much energy anymore. i'm sure there will be a great disbelieve in how much energy this generation wasted for (pov of a 100year in the futurist) almost no reason. the energy used of a daily commute probably powers several blocks by then.

The upper class will get smaller and richer, as they now control the robots, the middle class will disappear into grinding poverty, as they're now competing for jobs against robots.

Until the robot uprising, that is.

Not techno-optimist, sorry :)

I think that it might look something like William Gibson's sci-fi books. Well off clusters around corporations, not countries. Outlying economic niches. A lot of reality in people's desires to get good/unusual job skills.

I have always hoped that the world society would evolve into a meritocracy, but where people at the bottom would receive enough support to prevent excess violence. However, we are probably going to get a plutocracy with extreme differences between classes and absolute control of government, news media, etc. by a very small elite class.

I bet it would take >100 years for most people to feel comfortable being operated on by a robot.

It's already common-place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System

Surgical robots are still controlled by a human behind the scene but the human doesn't need to be physically present.

Statistically, auto-pilot is a lot safer than a real pilot, so I don't see why a parallel cannot be drawn to surgery.

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