Posted on 04/15/2017 7:53:10 AM PDT by Enchante
Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years. Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties. This disruption will create large growth opportunities as well as dangerous pitfalls. Be prepared for both....
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...It is a fast moving world and getting faster. There will be both opportunities and pitfalls along the way. The next generation of business leadership needs to be able to navigate these progressive changes and disruptive events faster and more effectively than at any time in the past. We note again that these are all extrapolations of exponential technology trends made by the Singularity University of California. Nothing here is definitive and everything is in a state of change. The purpose of a think tank is to motivate and stimulate thinking. We hope this paper helps accomplish that goal. Welcome to the Exponential Age.
(Excerpt) Read more at equitas-capital.com ...
Fascinating to watch the evolution of technology over the past 50 years. And it is indeed exponential.
However, I wonder how much a human being can handle and manage. It seems like too much and too fast sometimes.
Also, it scares me how much we depend on technology. Technology that is very vulnerable in many ways.
Technology is INHERENTLY DEMOCRATIZING. We wouldn’t have modern western industrial democracy or a bourgeoisie middle class without the industrial part. Our own Revolutionary war occurred precisely because England’s colonial empire discouraged manufacturing industry anywhere in the Empire other than the home country. England wanted nothing more than to rip us off for our raw materials, which remains the chief characteristic of modern day globalist financier empire building in the form of DEBT IMPERIALISM wherein a 3rd World nation’s natural resources are, in fact, the collateral for loans from the World Bank or the IMF. Technology is a death threat to feudalist war lordism which typifies predatory capitalism and monopolist cartels. Technology requires an educated work force, a work force that is literate and informed and which will fight against tyranny rather than succomb to “1984” slogans and newspeak.
imho limited government requires unlimited natural resources. To access those resources —the price of energy and water has to keep falling.
Leftists are making energy very expensive.
Energy is the lifeblood of our modern industrial age. Without it, or restrict its use, a lot of people will suffer.
However, I wonder how much a human being can handle and manage. It seems like too much and too fast sometimes.
Yes. I think the ability of humans to assimilate technology is the limiting factor.
Agree.
Trump has vowed to make the USA energy dominant.
It remains to be seen as to whether he understands that in order to be energy dominant —the USA has to be the lowest priced energy producer in every category—and has to put R&D chips on 4th generation nuclear power as well as fusion power—that promise to collapse the cost of energy to small fractions of today’s costs.
“Leftists are making energy very expensive.
Energy is the lifeblood of our modern industrial age. Without it, or restrict its use, a lot of people will suffer.”
As planned ... the more people suffer, the more they tend to turn to idealistic and simplistic solutions offered by those-who-make their-own-reality (leftists).
“Technology is a death threat to feudalist war lordism which typifies predatory capitalism and monopolist cartels.”
Seems rather like predatory capitalism and monopolist cartels are adapting to, and finding ways to use this glorious technology for thier own ends. They are exploiting the hell out of it to gain or retain power and control, and the masses are the pawns, as always. There’s no shiny new peace and love world on the horizon. Sadly, the ugly realities perpetrated by highly adaptive predators, ‘warlords’ and government hacks are in the news every day.
Maybe it needs to be explained to him and the rest of Americans.
About fusion — this is our future and the technology seems to be suffering right now. I don’t have hope that fusion generated power will be available anytime soon — decades, never?, 50 years if we are lucky.
Good or bad, Microsoft changed our lives dramatically and all for the better. Leftist and people who hate MS argue that MS didn't and don't need the billions of dollars that it “stole” from its competitors. I suggest that if MS had not been as aggressive, we would not have the consumer technology that we have today. Actually, commoditizing technology has helped the military, too and science, everything.
There is a balance of course.
I don’t know when fusion will come through.
Its important however to keep plugging away at it even if progress is slow—because the results are so profound.
4th generation nuclear reactors however will come onstream much more quickly. The first ones were actually done back in the 1960’s. they had working models working properly that were abandoned because of politics. the next working models will come out in the early 2020’s. the beta’s will produce electricity for .03@ kilowatt. subsequent models will quickly take prices down to to .01@ kilowatt. this is what causes the next big industrial revolution.
A Carbon tax is just a tactic - creation of suffering is the point.
Amazon is hiring vets and the family members of vets to work from their homes, where ever that might be.
We are hearing from local artists and makers of good stuff that they are getting questions and feelers from Amazon and Walmart re selling their products/creations on line.
Some excellent chefs are being contacted by Blue Apron and Amazon to set up meals for one or two or ? to be delivered for preparation by Prime users/customers.
Large HMOs/Clinics are looking at using retired RN’s to be their on call Nurses from home with access to patient medical records to help guide the patients to appropriate care with on call doctors available for instant consulting.
We know patients, who have taken pictures of rashes and wounds to be treated or during treatment to aid the doctors treating these patients.
The biggest service industry today seems to be the Comcast, Direct TV, AT&T and Verizon installers and problem solvers working from their trucks at customers’s homes. Watch for independents to work across the board paid by end customers or the biggies to do the jobs.
One of our younger relatives, who is a whiz with on board auto computers and the automobiles themselves, will be starting his own business with his sons/daughters. They will be going to customers’s homes or offices to handle and solve the problems with computers in vehicles. He feels that business will keep him and his offsprings working for decades.
We have another younger relative, who does the computer checkup on used cars and recommends what needs to be done to be certified and called pre-owned, (we laugh when we see that term instead of used).
The really good Construction Project Managers, those with real degrees in that skill and decades of positive work will be able to do most of that job on line in their home, their own fixed location office or a shared office building and even a mobile office. They will be able to pick and choose their clients to avoid the shady operators.
We know a couple of young pilots, who have Uber types of jet and prop planes for charter. They have done very well even during the Obama years. They are so busy after Trump won the election, they will be expanding. Their clients avoid the mass abuse of TSA, mobs of angry fliers and the Unfriendly Skies of United besides saving hours at a major airport. Even if they use a major airport, they don’t use the United/SW terminals.
It's also the other way around, the two are mutually reinforcing. Scarcity is created by government, most obviously by price controls but also by regulations that protect monopolies and entrenched interests.
Solar will easily surpass nuclear. It is already a lot cheaper. The storage problem is being solved in at least two ways, embedded capacitors and panels that generate fuel from water. The panels in the labs are 3x more efficient than current commercial panels. The US invented it and will continue to invent more.
That said, I would like to see more R&D for nuclear as well.
If they can manage to free students of all ages from the horrible, failing government education system, it will all be worth it. I look forward to the day when people don’t have to be locked in classrooms marching lockstep with kids the same age for 16+ years. Most schools, including private schools, are still doing things the way they were done 100 years ago. At some point, education has to change to become more about the individual student and not about warehousing kids so both parents can work.
Also, how does technology change humans? Heads down looking at a phone. No conversation or interaction. No need to learn anything. I see smart people using the phone calculator to calculate 65-35.
Take a look at Amazon and Facebook and Google. They are monopolies. The Facebook and Google technology might be replaceable, but moving the customer base won't be. Amazon has enough physical plant, that it'd be hard to replicate. The only easy path for Google and Facebook replacement is if they commit business suicide.
The automobile was democratizing. The personal computer and personal blogs could be. But in general computer technology is driving centralization, not democratization.
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