Commenting on “The Future” email

Coal & oil industries will not be affected. Where do you think electricity for electric cars comes from?  We will never build another nuclear-fueled electric plant in this country, people are irrationally scared of them.

Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day and then they use and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof?

It takes more electricity to manufacture photo-voltaic cells than the cells will produce in their lifetime.   Want proof of that statement?  Fine ANY photo-voltaic cell manufacture that is producing those cells with electricity they generate from their own product.

A baby of today will only see personal cars in museums.

The FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can handle.

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 went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?

What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 5-10 years and, most people don’t see it coming.

Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures on  film again? With today’s smart phones, who even has a camera these days?

Kodak thought that ‘digital imaging’ would never get cheap enough to replace film.  Ken Olsen, (Digital Equipment Company) once the richest man on planet earth, thought there was never going to be a market for personal computers.  Standard thought process “we got rich doing it this way, not going to change now.”

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 time, before it became way superior and became mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.

Forget the book, “Future Shock”, welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
Most software producers are going to self-destruct.  When common users begin to see what we see – have you ever tried to stop windows 10 updates?  Can you figure out how to turn off Google Chrome updates?  These traits are hackers dreams.  People will learn to be scared of most software producers.

UBER is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world!

Ask any taxi driver if they saw that coming.  After 9 years business, Uber is still losing money and can provide no data to show that it ever will.

Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.

Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw that coming.

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 USA, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of  IBM’s Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future, (what a thought!) only omniscient specialists will remain.

We might need more lawyers, not less because if a self driving car gets into a crash, who caused it?  Florida has 88,000 lawyers, do we really need more?

Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, its 4 times more accurate than human nurses.  An excellent motion picture about some possibilities from ‘instant’ DNA analysis is “Gattaca”

Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.

Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here.

In the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted.  You won’t want to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it you will only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car.

“self-driving cars” are terrorists dreams.   Steal car, change the software, deliver bombs.  Completely untraceable as to who did it. Drug smugglers and human smugglers also.   See the article in this month’s issue of “Popular Science” magazine.

This will change our cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into parks. That will never happen. real estate “developers” will find a way to change the parking lots into something we all hate much more.

1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6 million miles. That will save a million lives plus worldwide each year.  again, terrorists, smugglers, murderers, etc, will have a wonderful, highly effective tool to do more damage.

Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt.

Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak says “don’t expect a self driving car anytime soon.”

Traditional car companies will try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.

Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustions engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2019 models, using all electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out hybrid models.

Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi; are completely terrified of Tesla and so they should be. Look at all the companies offering all electric vehicles. That was unheard of, only a few years ago.

Electric cars? Tesla has never earned a single dollar profit.  Not one dollar.  And that is with $thousands subsidy per car from the taxpayers.

Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without accidents, the costs will become cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.

Real estate will change. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move farther away to live in a more beautiful or affordable neighborhood.

Electric cars will become mainstream about 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity.

Cities will have much cleaner air as well. (Can we start in Los Angeles, please?)

Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean.

Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact.

And it’s just getting ramped up.
Electricity will NOT become “incredibly cheap & clean”.   It takes more electricity to make a wind-driven turbine than the turbine will produce in its lifetime.  It takes more electricity to produce “solar power” than it will ever produce.  (Solar water heating, solar house heating, etc, are highly effective and should be promoted.)

Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply cannot continue – technology will take care of that strategy..
Traditional electric power providers are “fighting” (in my opinion, they are only trying to slow it down) solar & wind generated electricity for YOUR benefit.  99.9% of people have absolutely no concept how difficult it is to produce reliable electricity AND get it to your house. Suppose a whole county were to reach a point where 1/4 of peak electric demand were to be produced by ‘solar’ methods. e.g.  your town is using 1,000 megawatt to run air conditioners etc. but it’s rooftop solar systems are producing 1,500 megawatt.  So the ‘extra’ 500 megawatt can go to neighboring communities, thus burning less coal/oil/methane etc.  Sending that power elsewhere is a utility-design nightmare, requiring huge expenditures and building more ‘ugly’ substations etc, but it can be done. That just takes money, time, and real estate.

Sounds good !

Then a few clouds come over your community…   now, suddenly, within a few minutes, your town is no longer producing 1,500 megawatt, but that drops in half to 750 megawatt.   In the time of a few minutes, your town went from producing 500 MW more than it was using, to becoming a town that now needs 250 MW.

So in just a few minutes time, the electric utility has to go from ‘TAKING’ 500 MW from your town, to the situation now that it has to DELIVER 250 MW to your town.  This is impossible to handle with steam generated electricity. (All large plants, coal, gas, nuclear, generate steam to drive the generators.  It is the most efficient method.)

This is also an “easy” problem to cure.  The cures already exist.  The electric utility installs rapid startup generators every 1/4 mile, 1/2 mile, depending on your population density.   What is a rapid startup generator?   It is a turbine engine – yes, an jet-aircraft engine, coupled to a generator and placed in your neighbor’s yard, maybe YOUR yard.  Yes, I am sure you will be happy having a jet-aircraft engine fire up right by your house.

Health:
The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are companies who will build a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan,
your blood sample and you breath into it.  It then analyses 54 bio-markers that will identify nearly any Disease. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health purposes.

WELCOME TO TOMORROW – it actually arrived a few years ago.