The Cost of Living to Plummet in Next 20 Yrs

As Ray Kurzweil, who was important to starting the "singlarity" uni/hub has tried to hammer home: understanding exponential growth is so important to any of these forecasts. Pick your starting time generation for a product (solar for example). The amount of growth in the next generation will be double that. It will then double in half the time, and so forth. We are in the curve of the hockey stick for a lot of these.

(FYI - I used to work at the Office of Strategic Foresight of the Canadian Nation Science Foundation. Their mandate was to see how Canada spends it's science dollars looking 5, 10, 20 years into the future.)

Nice article. But the reason certain things will not reduce in price is because of regulations, in other words "How the system is set up".

E.g. even though there is an abundance of medical drugs, the costs are high for Americans because of the way regulations are set up. A generic of the same drug made in India would have a dirt cheap cost.

Large scale manufacturing of things had to be allowed. This means, no using of laws to prevent mass production of doctors, mass production of nurses, mass production of drugs, mass production of insurance companies, mass production of multiple units of housing, mass production of educational facilities.

It is competition that reduces prices, not just innovation.

So it’s perhaps true that AI will substantially decrease the cost of certain goods and services; how then does the author argue that most people will be using virtual headsets to go to work? Wouldn’t the vast majority of jobs that could be done virtually instead be done by an AI?

The Uber argument also doesn’t track for me. We are increasingly aware that cars and the infrastructure that goes towards supporting them is grossly inefficient. A massive waste of human lives and capital.

Transportation certainly has the potential to become much cheaper, but it certainly won’t come about through self-driving vehicles.

A much better article than I expected.

But I don't buy the argument on transportation. It hinges, essentially, on Uber. Well, Uber isn't going to drive the cost of transportation to zero. It's going to drive it to what the market can bear. (Yes, I know, Uber is likely to have competition. Still, Uber is going to have costs that will put a floor under the price of their service. I think that price will be significantly higher than the article does.