[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.

[disndat]

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

[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

[ClearCase_guy]

If jobs are disappearing ...
If machines will do a lot of our work ...
If we will have "stuff" without actually contributing a whole lot of labor ...

... then government control becomes quite unnecessary.

People worry about the word "anarchy" -- but the real idea is a return to LIMITED government. They won't need to "take care of you" because we will live in a post-scarcity world. That's a world in which the jobs went away, but the "stuff" still gets produced.

Whether or not this is desirable is beside the point. It's coming.

[outofsalt]

Prostitution, politics and Plastics!

[r_barton]

Here come the robots. Yikes!

Atlas, The Next Generation
https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY

Introducing Spot
https://youtu.be/M8YjvHYbZ9w

Introducing WildCat
https://youtu.be/wE3fmFTtP9g

Beginnings of Skynet: The Best Robots in the World Meets in DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals 2015
https://youtu.be/qh1dNSu9ZSE

Korea Humanoid Robot - Hubo - DRC Final Winner
https://youtu.be/BGOUSvaQcBs

[BeauBo]

Thanks for the interesting article.

General purpose robots are coming too. Like a smart phone, you will be able to get a software app, and make it do a whole different task. Hell, just tell it what you want, and it will get its own software.

Fix the water heater, walk the dog, perform some light surgery, pull the weeds, cook dinner, get me a beer, and kill anything that comes into the yard tonight...

Next decade, they will proliferate everywhere, by the 2030’s they will be much smarter than us, and networked together. Government won’t be able to resist demanding monitoring and control capability.

Very good for sure, but some very bad is also probable (because people will still be trying to use the new tech unethically).

[MNDude]

One only needs to watch Back to The Future 2 to realize what a disappointment the future is.

[Vince Ferrer]

Disruptive market shifts often don't happen within markets, they come from beyond the market, at least as far as how the market participants see the market. Kodak wasn't killed by another film company, or another camera company. They were destroyed by a phone.

Kodak always thought of a camera as a separate device. People had to think, "I am going out, should I take my camera with me?" But then people started carrying around smartphones, and the phones had cameras included with them. The quality wasn't quite as good, but it was "good enough," and so people suddenly stopped choosing to carry along their separate camera, because what they were already carrying was good enough. Kodak was completely locked out of the phone market, and never saw that coming.

I agree that we are going through a period of tremendous transformation. There will be a lot of wonderful things that will come about, but a lot of pain for individuals to adjust. The great depression was like that too. It was prolonged because the transformation from a horse based society to a car based society was occurring at the time, throwing people out of work, with little skills for the new economy. This is why I am strongly against the large immigration that we are allowing right now. It would be easier to digest rapid technological growth if we were not also absorbing lots of immigrants, which typically have performed the work we are now getting rid of.

[sparklite2]

Kodak’s judgement of consumer tastes was tragically myopic.
They didn’t get into the 35mm film business until very late, and never made a consumer 35mm negative-to-print film that was as good as Fuji’s.

Interesting bit of trivia ...
Originally, 35mm ‘cameras’ were used as light meters by the Hollywood movie industry, using movie film stock, hence the sprocket holes.

Rather than plunge into the 35mm camera market, where companies like Nikon were firmly entrenched, Kodak felt the consumer needed simplification, not f-stops and knobs to fiddle with. So that came up with the disc camera/film.
The film technology for the disc produced a picture so grainy, it was like viewing the scene through a lens smeared with cream of wheat. As to processing the disc negative, a Kodak VP was on hand to watch the first demonstration as the equipment took an undeveloped disc and flicked it out in the room, fatally exposing it and gaining the processor the nickname of ‘disc launcher.’

Eventually, Kodak adopted T-grain technology for the disc and the 110 film camera, which made possible grain-acceptable pictures all the way up to 5x7!

Venturing into digital photography, well, more like sticking in a tippy-toe, Kodak invested its future (and thereby forced the photofinishing industry to buy a bunch more equipment) in the IX-240, named APS for consumers, and deemed Another Piece of Shit by users. The camera produced some digital encoding, but still relied on film to take a picture and could make a decent 8x10! Progress!

Even when not dealing with the amateur market, Kodak was arthritis-ridden. Their R&D performance was so sluggardly that by the time new professional equipment reached the shipping dock, it was obsolete and outmoded.

Kodak was a product of its quasi-monopoly in the US: lazy, obese, and complacent.

[Sirius Lee]

Nobody has figured out what to do with a growing surplus population - courtesy of the exponential AI revolution. Well, except for the globalist ghouls who ginned up Agenda 21.

7 billion will die.

[cll]

Wow, in the early 1900s they perfected heavier than air flying machines and it all went to hell in the transportation industries after that!

Seriously, I see your point. I retired as an Army Aviator in 2005, and since then I’ve seen how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have steadily crept into jobs previously performed by human pilots. From aerial reconnaissance, to armed reconnaissance, to full attack platforms and soon for cargo delivery and not too far from that for robot troop deployment if not human troop transport as well.

And now as a travel and tourism executive, we are seeing how the share economy is disrupting ground transportation (Uber, Lyft, etc.) and lodging (AirBnB, VRBO, etc.), and more recently, concierge services (livingua).

My point here, I guess, is that humans adapt well to new tech, and that it will come to a point that as a species we will come full circle and live simpler lives again while machines do most of our chores. That could be good, since people are not having as much children as they used to and labor will be scarce, as it is already in most advanced economies. We will have more time for creativity instead of trudging through mind-numbing work. Like a new renaissance, when Medici-sponsored geniuses didn’t have to worry about making a living and could concentrate in their God-given talents.

[catnipman]

Kodak had marvelous inventions in the lab that could have easily saved them, but their management was still living in the 19th Century.

I remember visiting their Rochester lab sometime in the 90’s at the height of their big copier business when they were actually beating Xerox because the Kodak machines were WAY more reliable.

We went to look at some OCR software they were developing to sell, but as I remember almost everybody had OCR just about done at the time, so no big whoop.

But we DID see a big 4-color copier that was revolutionary. This was at the time when smaller, Ethernet-attached printers were just starting to come out. So I was REALLY excited about what they had and suggested that if they just tacked on a rasterization engine and an Ethernet interface, they would have a world-beater of a product WAY ahead of the competition, even though they were just working on a high-speed, high-capacity model.

Well, our excitement was squelched faster than the Pointy-Head Boss could whip out a firehose when we were told management wouldn’t allow that because the only market they could possibly imagine for the color copier was CEO’s of the Fortune 500 companies might want one for their own offices so their secretaries could prepare color hand-outs for them for big meetings, like board meetings, etc., and the marketplace wouldn’t be much bigger than that for color copiers/printers.

I shook my head and absolutely knew right then and there on the spot that Kodak was going to go bankrupt, and it was just a matter of time.

True story.