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Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology (medium.com)
Chris Dixon, an American internet entrepreneur and investor in a range of tech and media companies including Kickstarter and Foursquare has written an essay on Medium highlighting some of the reasons why we should be excited about the future of technology. The reasons he has listed are as follows: 1. Self-Driving Cars: Self-driving cars exist today that are safer than human-driven cars in most driving conditions. Over the next 3-5 years they'll get even safer, and will begin to go mainstream.
2. Clean Energy: Attempts to fight climate change by reducing the demand for energy haven't worked. Fortunately, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs have been working hard on the supply side to make clean energy convenient and cost-effective.
3. Virtual and Augmented Reality: Computer processors only recently became fast enough to power comfortable and convincing virtual and augmented reality experiences. Companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to make VR and AR more immersive, comfortable, and affordable.
4. Drones and Flying Cars: GPS started out as a military technology but is now used to hail taxis, get mapping directions, and hunt Pokemon. Likewise, drones started out as a military technology, but are increasingly being used for a wide range of consumer and commercial applications.
5. Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence has made rapid advances in the last decade, due to new algorithms and massive increases in data collection and computing power.
6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone: By 2020, 80% of adults on earth will have an internet-connected smartphone. An iPhone 6 has about 2 billion transistors, roughly 625 times more transistors than a 1995 Intel Pentium computer. Today's smartphones are what used to be considered supercomputers.
7. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: Protocols are the plumbing of the internet. Most of the protocols we use today were developed decades ago by academia and government. Since then, protocol development mostly stopped as energy shifted to developing proprietary systems like social networks and messaging apps. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies are changing this by providing a new business model for internet protocols. This year alone, hundreds of millions of dollars were raised for a broad range of innovative blockchain-based protocols.
8. High-Quality Online Education: While college tuition skyrockets, anyone with a smartphone can study almost any topic online, accessing educational content that is mostly free and increasingly high-quality.
9. Better Food through Science: Earth is running out of farmable land and fresh water. This is partly because our food production systems are incredibly inefficient. It takes an astounding 1799 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. Fortunately, a variety of new technologies are being developed to improve our food system.
10. Computerized Medicine: Until recently, computers have only been at the periphery of medicine, used primarily for research and record keeping. Today, the combination of computer science and medicine is leading to a variety of breakthroughs.
11. A New Space Age: Since the beginning of the space age in the 1950s, the vast majority of space funding has come from governments. But that funding has been in decline: for example, NASA's budget dropped from about 4.5% of the federal budget in the 1960s to about 0.5% of the federal budget today.
2. Clean Energy: Attempts to fight climate change by reducing the demand for energy haven't worked. Fortunately, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs have been working hard on the supply side to make clean energy convenient and cost-effective.
3. Virtual and Augmented Reality: Computer processors only recently became fast enough to power comfortable and convincing virtual and augmented reality experiences. Companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to make VR and AR more immersive, comfortable, and affordable.
4. Drones and Flying Cars: GPS started out as a military technology but is now used to hail taxis, get mapping directions, and hunt Pokemon. Likewise, drones started out as a military technology, but are increasingly being used for a wide range of consumer and commercial applications.
5. Artificial Intelligence: Artificial intelligence has made rapid advances in the last decade, due to new algorithms and massive increases in data collection and computing power.
6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone: By 2020, 80% of adults on earth will have an internet-connected smartphone. An iPhone 6 has about 2 billion transistors, roughly 625 times more transistors than a 1995 Intel Pentium computer. Today's smartphones are what used to be considered supercomputers.
7. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: Protocols are the plumbing of the internet. Most of the protocols we use today were developed decades ago by academia and government. Since then, protocol development mostly stopped as energy shifted to developing proprietary systems like social networks and messaging apps. Cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies are changing this by providing a new business model for internet protocols. This year alone, hundreds of millions of dollars were raised for a broad range of innovative blockchain-based protocols.
8. High-Quality Online Education: While college tuition skyrockets, anyone with a smartphone can study almost any topic online, accessing educational content that is mostly free and increasingly high-quality.
9. Better Food through Science: Earth is running out of farmable land and fresh water. This is partly because our food production systems are incredibly inefficient. It takes an astounding 1799 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. Fortunately, a variety of new technologies are being developed to improve our food system.
10. Computerized Medicine: Until recently, computers have only been at the periphery of medicine, used primarily for research and record keeping. Today, the combination of computer science and medicine is leading to a variety of breakthroughs.
11. A New Space Age: Since the beginning of the space age in the 1950s, the vast majority of space funding has come from governments. But that funding has been in decline: for example, NASA's budget dropped from about 4.5% of the federal budget in the 1960s to about 0.5% of the federal budget today.
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Under the driving forces of businesses who want to profit from the near-continual violation of my privacy, technology has become more and more of an unwelcome intrusion into my life.
9) refers to the amount of fresh water that has to be processed to make a pound of beef, not the amount the beef has in it. If you only count water that's destroyed... well, none of it is. After you eat the beef you piss or shit out the tissue water and even turn much of the other stuff into carbon dioxide and water. But we still have to spend the energy reprocessing all that water to raise the cow and process it's carcass.
I agree that many of the technologies just make dystopia easier to do as well though. Drones? Everyone will be watching everything. AI? That's what will be doing the watching and reporting to it's masters for signs of dissent. Pocket supercomputers? A window into the soul of every user that nicely complements the airborne drone tracking their movements.
And yes, computerized medicine (and other forms of labour) don't help unless you make the fruits of those labours widely available - and not just to those with jobs, because eliminating jobs is the whole point of them.
Public libraries are a vastly under-utilized resource. When I was a kid, I loved spending time there, looking for exciting books to read. One of my best finds was a book on nuclear fission and fusion by Glenn Seaborg. I pored over that book, checking it out time after time after time.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Well... ok. Let's look at the black-lining of this happy puffy cloud.
1. Self-Driving Cars: Truckers and cabbies are all going to lose their job. It'll be a big wave of unemployment for a sector of the populace that was already wasn't doing well. A lot of disenfranchised people with not much to lose is a worry.
2. Clean Energy: (this ones harder... ok, got it). It's a step towards these clean-energy eco-nuts outlawing coal. You'll have to.... (No that doesn't make any sense... AH) The more people that switch to distributed power generation, the less support the power grid will have. It benefits from economy of scale, but chip away at that and have half the populous stop paying, and you have problems for a public utility. The first to go with be mandates for rural electrification. Farmers will be cut off. Without the power lines being subsidized, communication lines won't be able to piggyback. (It's a stretch, but it's something)
3. Virtual and Augmented Reality: You know how kids these days barely look up from their phones? Get ready to have blind-deaf (sadly not mute) meatbags ignoring you with twice the power. Kids wandering into streets chasing their pokemon. If they can overlay their own better reality, they'll disconnect from your reality. Oh, and this.
4. Drones and Flying Cars: With a camera on there, now it's feasible and cost effective to operate a panopticon where the FBI or anyone else with $200 are always watching.
Flying cars are one of those classic tropes for letdowns. In reality, it's just more expensive to operate a plane. I know a pilot with a shitty commute and there's an airstrip RIGHT next to work, but he still drives simply because he can't justify the cost of a plane. Automate the pilot license requirement, and rich people probably will fly everywhere. Let's hope the budget for road maintenance is still approved.
5. Artificial Intelligence: Remember those truckers? Get ready for whole swaths of office workers to go away. It's not like everyone from HR will get laid off. But none of them will touch paychecks and there will just be two to handle sensitivity training. Generalist doctors, the sort that diagnose you when something is wrong, could probably be replaced by Watson right now. The only barrier is who do you sue when it screws up.
6. Pocket Supercomputers for Everyone: Uhh... something something, company leash you can't run away from, tracking you everywhere, the crushing disappointment that we gave everyone super-computers with the grand sum of human knowledge at their finger tips and the ability to instantly communicate with anyone anywhere (and have the language translated for you) and they only use it to look at pictures of cats.
7. Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: Yay, a secret money to buy cocaine online with! And as for business-minded uses of blockchain technology... I'm still not sure how that's any different than running a co-opt.
8. High-Quality Online Education: It's been there for a couple decades and people are still pretty stupid and uneducated.
9. Better Food through Science: (This one is also hard) ...I got nothing. Maybe something about soil degradation?
10. Computerized Medicine: Robo surgeons are going to get hacked and then they're going to hack you.
11. A New Space Age: (I could probably find something negative about this, but I really like space. SPAAAAAAAACE!)
Ok, I ran out of steam at the end. Too much pessimism is as bad as too much optimism.
I hate to break it to folks, there is no such thing coming.
The industrial use and production of energy is a messy business, both environmentally and financially. This will not change.
Consider the recent advent of two major "clean" energy alternatives, solar and wind. They are FAR from "clean" environmentally no matter how you slice them. Photovoltaic solar is really a horrible thing for the environment. Manufacturing and scrapping of solar cells is a messy thing and creating and operating those "let's build a huge array of mirrors to focus the sunlight to make something really hot thing is even worse as it takes huge swaths of land, has a serious issue with local wildlife and is *really* expensive. Wind isn't all that much better. It takes large areas of land, puts substantial structures on it and has a detrimental affect on the local environment too (killing birds, bats, bugs and such).
About the only real hope here is fusion, but we are a LONG way from even being able to field an operating industrial level facility so there is no way we can judge the environmental impact of such a thing. I can tell you that right now, they are pretty messy, with superconducting magnets and emitting radiation.
"Clean" energy is like "Free" food. It doesn't really exist.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101