[Mr. Douglas]

Humans need not apply: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

[babble-on]

Mebbe yes, mebbe no

[CodeToad]

Because of the economic manipulations, many thing seems abnormal. Trump will probably get busy correcting those manipulations.

[Mr. Douglas]

When predicting the future, we almost never get it right (Except for Back to the Future part 2, which was ridiculously accurate), but this list sums up a lot of my feelings. It’s one of the reasons I moved to my farm in south central, rural KY from Seattle.

But some of these things will change even faster than the article predicts. I think we really are on the cusp of ensuring perfect health and immortality - cheaply. It’s why I think the Lord’s return is imminent. Well, it’s one of the reasons.

[piasa]

How many people will be qualified and be able to find work in a world where all industry is 3d printing to pay for the cartridges for their 3d printers or will everyone simply 3d print the money they need to buy 3d printed stuff from 3d printing retailers’ 3d printed robots working from 3d printed office cubes since no one will own their own 3d printers any more than they would own their own computers and cars and will be paying monthly fees for everything instead?
Seems like everything is now a monthly charge so we can never “pay off” what we buy.

[Buckeye McFrog]

Solar energy production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but only now is having a big impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. The price for solar will drop so much that almost all coal mining companies will be out of business by 2025.

I call B.S. on that one. Solar panels are going to have to make massive leaps in efficiency before they come anywhere close to producing the yield of burning coal or oil.

[bigbob]

Udo, who looks to be about 23, attended a conference and is now a futurist. His real gig is language learning:
https://www.sprachenlernen24.de/

The words of the prophet are written on subway walls and tenement halls....and in blogs of course.

[dfwgator]

It’s all about distribution channels and who controls them.

[PeterPrinciple]

time for a little history lesson:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/riots/luddites.html

http://campus.murraystate.edu/academic/faculty/kBinfield/luddites/LudditeHistory.htm

http://historymesh.com/event/luddite-riots/?story=textiles

[Garth Tater]

A young man walks into a job interview with a smartphone in his hand. After an in depth interview his smartphone was offered the job. Working for anyone but yourself will soon be obsolete.

[RayChuang88]

I think the next energy revolution will be a new type of nuclear power called the molten salt reactor, which uses commonly-found thorium-232 dissolved in molten fluoride salts as liquid fuel--e.g., there's no such thing as a "meltdown" since the fuel is already in liquid form. MSR's have numerous advantages over today's uranium-fueled pressurized vessel reactors, and can be scaled up and down in size from 50 MW to as high as 1,000 MW.

I expect by 2060 AD a large fraction of the world's electrical energy needs be provided by MSR's, not solar or wind power.

[PeterPrinciple]

Notice the tone of the article. What’s different? What is in the article that you haven’t seen in a long time?

Lots of criticism here and maybe right so. Of course no one accurately predicts the future, we older folks know that. It is the unintended consequence that are hard to predict.

[buckalfa]

Sigh. I cannot figure out if I was born 50 years too soon, or 50 years to late when I read articles like this one. In the end, what will be will be because of God’s will.

[RegulatorCountry]

The author is relentlessly positive about all this disruption, as well as the uses to which all this looming technological advance will be put. Human nature being what it is, there will be quite a few nasty surprises. Prepare yourselves, fasten your seatbelt and return your tray tables to the full, upright and locked position. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Me, personally, I’m all for autonomy and some technology holds great promise for increasing personal autonomy. I don’t hate solar power, I see great possibilities, even to the point of not resenting subsidization to the extent that many FReepers do.

Of course I hate the cronyism that’s always present whenever Uncle Sugar is showering anything with money. That’s always been there. It was there with the construction of the interstate highway system, the millionaires that were made with the location of key interchanges in former agricultural areas alone would be astounding, if we were ever allowed to know the extent of the insider corruption.

[spintreebob]

‘Watson’ four times more accurately than doctors.

average life span increases by 3 months per year.

It's on the internet so it must be true... or fake news.

IBM Watson Health anlyzed my shop's data and came up with extremely erroneous conclusion due to errors an 8th grader would not make. It used a numerator as the denominator.

And other reports are that longevity in the US went down, not up, in the past couple years. Maybe fake predictions are the new Kodak camera.

[central_va]

Waiting for the invention of an artificial womb. Just think of the social implications of that one.

[aquila48]

About 100 years ago over 80% of the people worked on farms, today less than 4%. Jobs were created in fields and industries that no one imagined.

Today’s “visionaries” more often than not see only the obvious and are as clueless about all the eventualities as their peers 100 years ago.

[imardmd1]

From the systems approach, how is this going to deal with human whimsy and sinfulness, that which is the tendency to do that which is wrong and hurtful, just out of sheer obstinacy? From observation, I would say that tendency is increasing, not decreasing, and affects all of human life about us. And what about behavior? Are we heading toward a Stallone-type Judge Dredd? Eh?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

After reading through this list I would say half are nonsense and the other half are wishful thinking.

[sparklite2]

What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years – and most people don’t see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again?

---

Not only did I believe it, I was saying it by 1990. Although I spent my career in the industry, it took no special knowledge to see where digital cameras were going to lead us. You can bet Kodak knew it too, as they attempted to buy up or put out of business foreign-owned finishers in the US, ie, Fuji and Konisharoku {Konica).

Couldn’t have happened to a better bunch of predatory monopolists.