Summary: Tomorrow will be nothing like today. It may look and feel a lot like today – you’ll get up, have breakfast, exercise, go off to work, etc. But tomorrow will be nothing like today.
Original author and publication date: Shelly Palmer – January 20, 2020
Futurizonte Editor’s Note: Tomorrow you will (very probably) still be you. But it will be you in a new future. (We still don’t understand that).
From the article:
Tomorrow there will be 600,000 new smartphone activations, 540,000 new computers sold, hundreds of thousands of new cloud computing credentials issued, hundreds more petabytes of data traveling through the Internet, thousands more miles driven by autonomous vehicles, millions of new words interpreted by Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems, billions of new patterns learned by machines, and billions of new lines of code created. Tomorrow will be nothing like today.
With that in mind, it might be fun to think about how some of things that will make tomorrow different might impact how you spend your day. So let’s play a game about the future called, “What Do You Believe?”
First we will list a set of assumptions. Then we will craft a set of thought experiments to help visualize the future we assume and put some timing around it. Then we will ask two simple questions: (1) Do you believe in the future you’ve envisioned? (2) How will you spend your day in the future you’ve envisioned?
What Do You Believe?
To help you get started, here are a few things I believe. You may (and should) have a different set of theses, but feel free to adopt any of the following:
- The big will get bigger, the small will survive, and the middle will perish.
- Consumers of every economic stratum will demand “on demand.”
- Access is becoming as valuable as ownership – streaming media instead of buying a download, ride-sharing instead of buying a car, etc. You will pay for it with cash, data, or a combination of both.
- Anything you can talk to will understand and talk back – Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), NLU, and related technologies coupled with Augmented Reality and machine learning will have a radically disruptive impact on the way we live our lives.
- As a result of ride-sharing, the auto industry will contract by 20 percent.
- Traffic will increase because ride-sharing service cars will always be in motion.
- AI will start taking white-collar jobs more quickly than experts predict. If just 20 percent of white-collar jobs evaporate, the economic impact will be profound.
- New technology will not replace all of the jobs that new technology displaces.
- Commoditized products that are hard to pronounce or spell (or speak) or hard to search will quickly become unprofitable.
- The convergence of on demand, machine learning, and autonomy will change the world.
- Data is more powerful in the presence of other data.
- Anything that can be connected will be connected.
- Anything that can be hacked will be hacked.
- Distribution channel disruption is accelerating.
- Due to the increasing world population, we cannot train enough doctors, dentists, and other health care professionals.
- Fresh water is a scarce resource, and natural supplies will diminish quickly over the next 30 years.
- “Big Food” may go the way of “Big Tobacco” as health care costs rise.
- The tools used to access the free and open Internet have enabled users to filter out anything that makes them uncomfortable and have exacerbated the negative effects of confirmation bias.
- The entire education system is too expensive and is not producing qualified candidates for newly created jobs.
- Climate change will cause sea levels to rise over the next 50 years.
