7 Top Futurists Make Some Pretty Surprising Predictions About What The Next Decade Will Bring

[Humanist_Activist]

55. Since people are jumping on the futurist bandwagon, here are my predictions, based on when

changes are wrought, and start to become not rare.

Technological:

Autonomous road vehicles:

I will predict that probably within the next 5 years or so, long haul trucking will no longer involve humans directly, the first autonomously designed big rigs(no steering wheels, nor human controls) will be built and, at the very least, tested for long distance cargo hauling.

In that same time period, urban areas will seeing more autonomous electric cars on the road, the first generation or two with backup manual controls, but soon enough, those will be done away with, and by generation 3 or so, no controls available for human driving. On top of this, by this time, or perhaps generation 4 or so, say within 10 years, these urban vehicles will NOT be available for purchase, but rather are run by large fleet companies/public sector, as auto-taxi services. Same transition may occur for public bus and light rail services.

What holds for road vehicles may also hold for aircraft, boats, and trains. Having autonomous systems will remove human fallibility from the equation. The speed of adoption of this technology will be greatly affected by the power play between various Unions, Insurance companies, Customer advocacy groups, and Public Transportation lobbyists. The upside of such technology is a radical reduction in the amount of injuries and deaths attributed to vehicle accidents, most of which are caused by human error. The downside is that displacement of workers will be rather extreme, from truckers to bus drivers, the domino effect may lead to unemployment for millions of workers. We will need to have systems in place to deal with this.

Other Autonomous systems:

Now this one is tricky, because its so diverse, but basically, within the next 5-10 years, you can kiss a lot of customer service jobs goodbye. We are already seeing this with self checkouts in our stores, but next the technology will move to coffee shops, fast food, restaurants, hotels etc. This isn't so much reliant on the adoption of any new technology, but rather the wider adoption of current technology. It will adapt to where you just need an app on your smartphone to pre-order food and make a reservation at your favorite restaurant, and have it hot, ready and waiting for you when you arrive.

At the same time, more factory and warehouse jobs will be displaced by more machines, in this case general purpose robots and autonomous vehicles. This is already happening in a lot of places, and its different from the last wave of automation that displaced workers, those machines were big, heavy, expensive, and good at one or two tasks. Today's machines can be tooled to be more general purpose, or be really good at doing 5 or more things, repeatedly, with less errors, than humans. This means more jobs displaced.

And don't think, if you have a cushy office job that it is safe too. If you collate reports, organize files, deal with spreadsheets, etc. Well, the sophistication of AI agents and bots is catching up to human ability to organize, and can do it much faster and cheaper than any human.

Even in the medical field, the first or second opinion for your diagnoses may be IBM's Watson, or another, similar computer, which is, right now, tooled and programmed to combine and organize all known medical knowledge to allow it to make more accurate diagnoses of disease than any doctor can do.

Upside of this implementation of technology, a more convenient world, cheaper access to goods and services, more flexibility for individual needs and schedules. Downsides are, up to perhaps half of currently employed people would be laid off. It would be gradual of course.

Distributed Manufacturing:

A lot of people call this 3-D printing, and I think far too many think this will be the next big thing, and it will be, for hobbyists and small/specialty manufacturers. Even if you get the printers down to 50 bucks and available at every Wal-Mart, a lot of people simply won't bother if they can buy the item they can build for 10 cents worth a plastic for a dollar at the dollar store.

Instead, what we will see is more personalized and specialized items will drop drastically in price, and you may be able to pick them up locally, at wholesale, more or less, from the manufacturer themselves. CAD and other design models will be commodities to be bought and sold online, they already are, actually. Prototyping with physical objects is much easier to do now, and will expand. This type of manufacturing will lead to interesting aesthetics, things that simply couldn't be built using traditional manufacturing methods.

Energy:

I think, combined with distributed manufacturing, the drastic reduction in the cost of goods and automation, we will see a huge reduction in the needs for fossil fuels in the future. Solar cells, wind power, wave power, etc. will increasingly displace traditional fossil fuel sources for electricity generation, while electric cars(soon driverless) will displace gasoline cars as well. Basically, current trends will continue, barring catastrophe or stupid policy decisions. Another point, combine this with increased urbanization, and the points I made above, and you should see a rather large decrease in overall pollution by people in general. Again, barring stupid public policy decisions.

Food:

I would say, further out, we will see, as current trends continue, more human migration from rural to urban environments, and also increasing crop yields. However, top soil depletion and population pressure will increase the necessity of trying for low impact agriculture. Including types of hydroponics and aeroponics. However, I'll be honest and say this is highly speculative, and if we first fine a way to preserve or restore topsoil, that should take priority. But I could see, in the next 10-20 years, vertical farms moving beyond the experimental stage they are in today, and becoming somewhat practical. In addition, biotech may help improve yields in lower quality soil, etc. Lab grown meat may end up being factory grown meat, without the need for raising animals in the first place. May lead to an initial mass slaughter of such animals, but allowing many to roam wild, similar to horses.

Environment:

Now, please bear in mind, on this one, I'm talking technology, not necessarily public policy. So here goes, the increased automation mentioned above, combined with food and energy technology should, hopefully, reverse the current Mass Extinction event we are going through. The reason is simple, much of the environmental damage we have wrought on this planet is related to two things, pollution and destroying habitats. The largest sources of pollution in both cases is agriculture and manufacturing. With automation, we will reduce waste, with increased urbanization, we may be able to allow some land to lay fallow, to grow wild again. If we can increase agricultural yields without using more of the surface of the Earth to do so, that's perfect. But the ultimate goal would be to reduce the amount of land we need. This could allow us to expand carbon sinks, forests, to mitigate the effects of global climate change.

Communications:

This one, I don't see current trends slowing down anytime soon, so more ubiquitous, wearable and portable internet ready devices, expansion of internet accessibility in the so called third world. Penetration within the next decade of probably an addition 30% or more. It may become universal as wireless technology expands, as close to 100% coverage as possible.

Space, the Final Frontier:

Timelines here, 20-50 years, on the optimistic side. Much of this is speculative, but most of the restrictions right now are in implementation and economics, not necessarily technological. Right now, we have a few private space companies that are contracted with NASA and others to provide some specific services, such as delivering cargo to the ISS. We should expect this to expand in the future. However, it will be expanded independents of much government spending. We will see, first, space tourism for the super rich, that will, in turn, help fund research and implementation of methods for acquiring resources that are not in Earth gravity well, mostly asteroids. This will lead to a huge crash in the metals and violates market on Earth. Nickle, Iron, Gold, Silver, rare Earth metals, etc. will drop radically in price, a single, moderately sized asteroid(up to 1km or so in size) may contain enough of these and other elements than humans have mined from the Earth in all of human history.

Political:

This one is really tricky, because the biggest issues facing us are global, yet our governments are so varied. You have countries like the U.S. and Australia burying their heads in the sand when it comes to Global Climate Change, and others, especially in Europe and developing economies, who are trying to avoid increasing their carbon footprint as much as possible.

Honestly, I think the technology will lead over policy, companies, and consumers, want lower carbon emissions, so despite many conservative government efforts, less carbon dependent advances will be developed and implemented, just slower with less government funding.

We will face a political crisis that will be global, huge labor surplus brought about by technology. Its really up in the air how we will handle that, personally I would advocate for type of universal basic income, otherwise we have huge segments of the population who are unemployable and starving, that's how revolutions start.