The Future Is Here

Matters India ^ | May 18, 2016 | mattersindia.com

[SamAdams76]

Well I saw this article posted as a reply on another thread a few days back and I thought it was worthy enough of an article to start a new thread with. So using Google, I found the original source which was some publication in India that I know nothing about. I know that India is where many of us get our tech support these days. They also have good cuisine. I like their spicy fish with curry with rice beer that looks like watered down milk but packs quite the punch. Those Indians sure have an exotic way of eating.

But I digress. I came here tonight to talk about technology and how the whole world is about to be disrupted. We are going to have 3-D printers making our shoes on demand and when we want to go someplace, we will be able to mix ourselves a strong cocktail and have some driverless car come pick us up and whisk us away. I'm going to need a strong cocktail or two before I put myself into a driverless car! But they say it is coming and less than 10 years away.

One of the companies I used to work for was Kodak and I remember very well when their business model evaporated pretty much overnight. Back in the 1970s, they invented this clunky thing called the digital camera and everybody laughed and Kodak put it on the shelf to collect dust. They could pay people to invent such "useless things" because they were literally printing money with their core film business. Everybody was taking pictures on film cameras and Kodak pretty much cornered the market on film. They also made a pretty good camera. They were perfectly verticalized! And if you bought a non-Kodak camera, chances were, you stuck Kodak film into it. Then you had to take the film to a place like CVS to get it developed. You'd seal the film into an envelope, write your name and address and would have to come back in like 5 days to get your developed pictures. Half the time, the pictures were crap. Sometimes you accidentally took pictures of your feet while adjusting something on the camera. But you had to pay for those pictures anyway. What a racket! And Kodak made money hand over fist.

You know the rest of the story. Other companies started selling digital cameras. They became cheaper and and had more and more memory. But still, they took mostly crappy pictures. Film cameras were so much more superior! But Moore's Law! Starting in the late 1990s, the cameras started really getting better and cheaper. But Kodak still laughed. Then BANG! We all woke up one morning and nobody was buying film cameras anymore or even film. I mean it was literally overnight. The entire camera industry as we knew it went the way of the vinyl LP record. Only a niche group of nerds and professional photographers were interested.

In my current job, I am involved somewhat with 3-D printers. My company sells and supports several models of them. Right now they are clunky and rather amateur, much like those first consumer digital cameras of the late 1990s. But I see the potential and each year's model is more than twice as good as the model before it. Before too long, we will have these in our homes. If we drop our comb under the sink and are too lazy to get down on our hands and knees to get it, then we can just hit a button and print a new one. If I misplace my spark plug wrench, why I can just download the appropriate file and print it out in my garage. The possibilities are endless. And as for high-end 3-D printers, the sky is the limit.

A lot of other technologies mentioned in this article have that same disruptive potential. I've been using Uber lately. It's so easy. I just tell the app where I want to go and five or ten minutes later, a Uber car is pulling up. The GPS in my phone already knows where I am and the driver coming to get me gets driving instructions based on my GPS location. The fee is already calculated and tipping is discouraged so it's a total hassle-free cashless transaction. I have not tried out Airbnb yet but as I travel a lot, that sounds intriguing. It just might beat staying at the Marriott Courtyard by some shopping mall in Scranton, PA.

I'm not sure if Bitcoin is going to become our main currency but other than that, most of what I read in this article seems plausible.

[PGR88]

There will be companies who will build a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) which .... will identify nearly any disease. It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medicine, nearly for free.

I am certain the US Government will find a way to make it frighteningly expensive.

[Secret Agent Man]

No offense, this article is just full of sh1t predictions.

[Huck]

I used AirBnB for the first time last year for a vacation rental. Worked out great. Staying at another AirBnB lodging this year. Have never used Uber though, and don’t have a smartphone.

[LongWayHome]

80% of all jobs are not going away in 10-20 years.

[SkyPilot]

So if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90 percent less lawyers in the future

Not to pick on lawyers, but many of our troubles come from the "legal profession." Equal Protection Under the Law (that is written on the walls of the Supreme Court) is a joke.

"Civil Rights" for protected groups, and now sexual perverts have these "rights."

Lawyers have destroyed marriage, and fathers.

Someone tell me I am wrong.

[Vision Thing]

The only problem with these what-a-wonderful-world-it-will-be articles is they never address humanity’s self destructiveness. Nothing but God can ‘evolve’ us from that.

Want proof?

Homobama voters still exist in the multiple millions.

[SamAdams76]

Maybe so. But if I posted a thread here back in 1998 predicting some of the technologies we use today, I would get the same reaction.

[disndat]

Boy! Won’t it be great when “I Know What You Are Thinking” is a reality?

[Yollopoliuhqui]

Technology is INHERENTLY democratizing. ALL top town hierarchical power structures are about to vaporize. Upgrade or die.

[freespirit2012]

They seem like pretty good predictions to me, which ones do you think are wrong?

[Yollopoliuhqui]

>>No offense, this article is just full of sh1t predictions.

Didn’t predict that conservatives would get their butts kicked by a clot of dope smoking hippies did you. In the meantime guess who controls academia, the media, entertainment, hackers, govt bureaucracies, news, youth culture, etc. Those shit predictions are going to leave you waving in the rear view, son.

[SamAdams76]

Won’t it be great when “I Know What You Are Thinking” is a reality?

You should meet my wife. She's already invented that.

[Maceman]

Work: 70-80 percent of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be enough new jobs in such a short time.

If 70-80 percent of jobs disappear, then the number of people who can afford to buy all this stuff -- especially robots -- will be drastically reduced. The AI applications that will replace humans will not be paid, and will not have money to buy stuff.

I'm not sure what happens in that environment, but to my simple human brain, it appears to that the economic disruption would certainly disrupt the timeline suggested in this article.

[Lazamataz]

I am so screwed.

[2banana]

And then stuxnex v4.3 hit. And then the cheap EMP devices went on the market

[Lazamataz]

We are so screwed.

[Lazamataz]

The AntiChrist will come as an Artificial Intelligent computer.

[Lazamataz]

Satan walks among us.

[Lazamataz]

God will return and destroy all the AI machines.