Every now and then someone will send us something worthwhile which we end up using. Barbara Sternig, who has been a recurring guest on, “The View From Over Here”, sent me the following article. I don’t know if it is the entire text or extracts therefrom. It is nevertheless, worth reading.

Into the future

By Udo Gollub at Messe Berlin, Germany

I just went to the Singularity University summit. Here are the key points I gathered.

Rise and Fall: In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they were bankrupt. 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? Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore’s law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became superior and mainstream in only a few short years. This will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, self-driving and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.

Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software and operating platforms will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years. Uber is just a software tool. They don’t own any cars, but they are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected. In the US, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice, (so far for more or less basic stuff), within seconds. With 90% accuracy, compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So if you are studying law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer generalist lawyers in the future; only specialists will be needed. ‘Watson’ already helps nurses diagnose cancer, four times more accurately than doctors. Facebook now has pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. By 2030, computers will have become ‘more intelligent’ than humans.

Cars: In 2018, the first self driving cars will be offered to the public. Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted. You don’t want to own a car anymore. You will call a car on your phone; it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive whilst driving. Our kids will never get a driver’s licence and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars for our future needs. We can transform former parking spaces into parks. At present,1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 100,000 kms. With autonomous driving, that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save a million lives each year.

Electric cars will become mainstream around and after 2020. Cities will be cleaner and much less noisy because all cars will run on electricity, which will become much cheaper. Most traditional car companies may become bankrupt by tacking the evolutionary approach and just building better cars; while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. I spoke to a lot of engineers from Volkswagen and Audi. They are terrified of Tesla.

Insurance companies will have massive trouble, because without accidents, the insurance will become 100 times cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear. Real estate values based on proximities to work-places, schools, etc. will change, because if you can work effectively from anywhere or be productive while you commute, people will move out of cities to live in more rural surroundings.

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.

Water for all: With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination now only needs 2k Wh per cubic meter. We don’t have scarce water in most places; we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if everyone can have as much clean water as they want, for virtually no cost.

Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year – a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and your breath. It then analyses 54 bio markers that will identify nearly any diseases. It will be cheap, so in a few years, everyone on this planet will have access to world class, low cost, medicine.

3D printing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from$18,000 to $400 within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies started printing 3D shoes. Spare airplane parts are already 3D-printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to need in the past. At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoe at home. In China, they have already 3D-printed a complete 6-story office building. By 2027, 10% of everything that’s being produced will be 3D-printed.

Business opportunities: If you think of a niche you want to enter, ask yourself: “in the future, do you think we will have that?” And if the answer is yes, then work on how you can make that happen sooner. If it doesn’t work via your phone, forget the idea. And any idea that was designed for success in the 20th century is probably doomed to fail in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear that there will be enough new jobs in such a short time.Agriculture: There will be a $100 agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their fields instead of working in them all day. Aeroponics will need much less water. The first veal produced in a petri dish is now available. It will be cheaper than cow-produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces are used for rearing cattle. Imagine if we don’t need that space anymore. There are several start-ups which will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labeled as “alternative protein source” (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects). Apps: There is already an app called “moodies” which can tell the mood you are in. By 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where we know whether the participants are telling the truth and when not!

Currencies: Many currencies will be abandoned. Bitcoin will become mainstream this year and might even become the future default reserve currency. Longevity: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span was 79 years, now it is 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more than a one-year increase per year. So we all might live for a long, long time, probably way beyond 100.

Education: The cheapest smartphones already sell at $10 in Africa and Asia. By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smartphone. That means everyone will have much the same access to world class education. Every child can use Khan Academy for everything he needs to learn at schools in First World countries. Further afield, the software has been launched in Indonesia and will be released it in Arabic, Swahili and Chinese this summer. The English app will be offered free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half a year.

That was Udo Gollub. Now it’s my turn.

Interesting? Yes. But it really is old stuff, especially if you are a sci-fi addict.  No one ever thought that years ago the sci-fi that was around when I was a kid would ever come to pass. Well, we’ve already gone way beyond.  In 1947 our Science teacher at PS 165 made an announcement that we will never be able to go faster than the speed of sound.  Being somewhat of a smart ass, even then, I explained to him how it could be possible to travel faster than the speed of sound. He thought I was some kind of genius.  Nothing of the sort.  I just applied some common sense.  Within the year Captain “Chuck” Yeager of the USAF broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. Today the experts say that we can never go faster than the speed of light.  If you have the time, I can explain to you how you can go faster than the speed of light.

Using Kodak as an example of how a company can go down the toilet is a good one. I can easily remember when the name of Kodak represented literally everything in the photographic arena, from simple to expensive cameras and lenses as well as film, printing papers and the chemicals to develop them and hundreds of other items of photographic equipment, aids and you name it.  The problem with Kodak is that they became complacent, overconfident and were blind to the changes and all the competition that were on the horizon.  Rather than embracing the R & D for those items that they once led the world in, they decided to rely solely on those items that represented immediate profits.  It was not too long thereafter that Nikon and Canon, two companies that were unheard of prior to the early fifties, began to surpass Kodak in the 35mm field.  At one time Kodak had the best 35mm camera system, the Kodak Ektra, but no changes or improvements were made after 1941.  The rest is history. The same goes for practically everything else that they were involved in.

Talking about a camera that uses 10,000 pixels, my new camera which I will soon be purchasing, has 50,000 mega-pixels (not pixels).  And it’s not made by Kodak.

Mention is made of our having a universal monetary system such as Bitcoin.  At some point in the future we will most likely have a universal monetary system.  It’s already in, “Star Trek”, so therefore it’s only a matter of time.  Right?  But Bitcoin?Any universal monetary system would have to be untainted regarding its usage to avoid any of the taxing and or regulatory agencies.  The question is whether or not the participating countries (maybe there will not be separate countries at that time), will voluntary give up their monetary system.  It is an ego thing, you know.

When pontificating on the future, the thing to keep in mind is that all of our combined knowledge throughout the world is finite.    Imagination on the other hand, is infinite. If you can imagine it, then sooner or later you will be able to make it happen.

An important item not mentioned in the above dissertation, is the separation of water (of which we have an endless supply, albeit salinated) into its basic elements of oxygen and hydrogen, provided it can be done economically, will give us an endless supply of energy and enough oxygen to compensate for the increasing amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Gollub talks about the 4th Industrial Revolution. What if the 1st Industrial Revolution started some 2,000 years before it actually did?  Around 2,000 years ago, a Greek inventor by the name of Hero who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, put together a small oddity which boiled water when sufficiently heated by fire which in turn converted the water into its gaseous form which in turn caused a rotator that was on top, to spin around. It was considered by those who witnessed what it could do as nothing more than a cute toy. If Hero or someone else had the foresight or imagination to take it to the the next logical step, it would have become the first steam engine and then the 1st Industrial Revolution would have started some 2,000 years before it actually did. If that happened, think of where we would be today.

It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention.  If that is true, then war is the mother of necessity. The changes and or advances in science and industry as of a direct or indirect result of WWII were, with the exception of the Renaissance, probably greater than everything else that preceded WWII.  With all of this insight or knowledge you should consider what would have happened to someone who lived perhaps 500 years ago and had this insight or knowledge and spoke of what he or she knew. Answer. That person would probably have been burnt at the stake, alive. So much for knowledge and insight.

Will there be less jobs for people to work at in the future?  Maybe.  Right now there are many who are looking for work and at the same time there are many jobs that are available, but those who are looking for work in many instances do not have the necessary education for those jobs that are available. This means that our hallowed institutions of learning will have to play catch-up with reality.

Considering everything mentioned so far, John Lennon was way ahead of his time when he wrote, “Imagine”.  At one time all that we had to worry about was some lunatic starting a nuclear war. Then it was about some errant comet with our name on it.  Now it’s about some lunatic starting a religious conflagration.  Should it ever come to pass that, “Imagine”, becomes the accepted International Anthem for the entire planet, then all we’ll have to worry about is that comet.

Are we living longer?  Hell, yes.  I’ll be 83 this month.  When I was a kid, there was no one around my age except for those who existed in an old age home. At the start of this century I declared that 120 was my goal to which everyone I know said I was completely nuts.  Why am I nuts?  The insurance companies have constructed their latest mortality tables on 120 being the maximum age and National Geographic devoted almost an entire issue on the subject. Improvements in mortality have been steadily on the rise and we presently have more people over age 100 than ever before.  With genetic engineering around the corner, whether the Church likes it or not, living to age 120 or greater is not only possible but probable.  For whatever his reasons, Gollub did not go here.

With everything said so far, the one point that Gollub has ignored, as has almost everyone else, are the problems of the so called third world and any group that considers themselves to be poor and or under privileged, which is the inevitable and unavoidable result of the lack of meaningful population control.  So what will happen to us and our planet if everyone lives to age 120 or greater?  We are now in the 21st century according to the calendars in use.  At the beginning of WWII the total world population was around two billion yet seventy five years later, even after all of the deaths attributable to WWII, the population still increased about three and one half times.  Unless the problem of runaway population growth is dealt with soon, in spite of and because of all of the predictions made herein, with or without global warming, it is not likely that our descendants will make it through the 22nd century let alone the 23rd or 24th and certainly not the 25th.