The World Beyond Tomorrow

What will the world look like three decades from 2019? Today’s millennials will have reached retirement age. The mid-point of the 21st century will be a year away. With a pair of Nostradamus-augmented reality glasses firmly in place, what will the world look like in the following ten areas?

1.Health Care

2.Transportation

3.Food

4.Housing

5.Retail

6.Workplace

7.Government

8.Finances

9.Climate

10.Wars

It’s always interesting to look at the predictions of Nostradamus—and then let the pundits put their own spin on events. Nostradamus predicted a great war in 2018 between two or more countries that would change the world, plus a plethora of natural disasters. It isn’t until 2025 that he predicts a world filled with peace and serenity.1 In real time, 2018 featured many regional conflicts and more than its share of natural disasters. As this is being written, the great war predicted for 2018 has fortunately not yet materialized. Political historians might call the mid-term elections in the United States a great war between the Democrats and Republican parties.

Predictions of the future are both interesting and scary. The scary part can be attributed to jobs that fade into history. Consider the following predictions: 2

Auto repair shops will disappear. A gasoline engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are only repaired by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.

 Gas stations will disappear. Parking meters will be replaced by meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they’ve already started. You can find them at select Dunkin Donuts locations.

 Coal industries will disappear. Gasoline and oil companies will disappear. Drilling for oil will stop. So, say goodbye to OPEC!

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

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

 In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, its business model disappeared, and it went bankrupt. Who would have thought that would ever happen? What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next five to ten years and most people don’t see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that, three years later, you would never take pictures on film again? With today’s smart phones, who even has a camera these days except professional photographers? UBER is just a software tool—it doesn’t own any cars—and it is now the biggest taxi company in the world!

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

With artificial intelligence, computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. In the USA, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM’s Watson, you can get legal advice (only the basic stuff so far) 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!—and only omniscient specialists will remain. Watson already helps nurses diagnose cancer; it is 4 times more accurate than human nurses.

 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 will become common: in 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here. In the next two 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 it will drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it; you will only pay for the driven distance; and you will be able to be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver’s license and will never own a car. This will change our cities because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We will be able to transform former parking spaces into parks.

 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide, including those caused by distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles; with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in six million miles. That will save more than a million lives worldwide each year.

 Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. 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.

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

 Real estate will change. 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 by about 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity. Cities will have much cleaner air as well. 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.

In 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 will work with your phone and will takes your retina scan, your blood sample, and your breath into it. It will then analyze 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health purposes.

Many people have tried to predict the future and failed. Only some have succeeded. Part of this book will discuss predictability and end with some predictions on future health care cost challenges. However, the chapter begins with the disclaimer that predictions are often wrong. That said, here are some famous examples:

1.Harold Camping predicted the world would end in 2011. It didn’t, but he had predicted other fateful dates and the world did not end on those dates either. He calculated his dates from material in the Bible.

2.The Flat Earth believers have been around for a long time, going back to the early Greeks (notably, Pythagoras) for example. By the time of Galileo, the Catholic Church agreed that the world was round, but punished him when he said that the Earth went around the Sun, which was contrary to the Church’s belief.

3.Irving Fisher predicted in 1929 that “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Three days later the market crashed.

4.Technology has spawned more wrong predictions than anything else recently.

a.Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, said he saw no reason anyone would want a computer in a home.

b.Daryl Zanuck, a movie producer, said in 1946 that television would not last.

c.Clifford Stoll, an astronomer, predicted in 1995 that the Internet could not replace a newspaper or a classroom.

d.In 2007, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said the iPhone would never take an important part of the telephone market.

e.A Decca Records executive in 1962 said, “The Beatles have no future in show business.”

f.Time Magazine predicted in 1966 that online shopping would never become popular because “women like to get out of the house, like to handle the merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.”

5.In 1873, Sir John Eric Erichsen, a British doctor appointed Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, believed that the head, abdomen, and chest could not be operated on successfully.

Back to the present, which happens to be 2019. Excerpts from the previous article give a glimpse of the future from one writer’s perspective. Will the fossil fuel companies follow in the footsteps of Kodak and Sears and be relics to be viewed in the Museum of Science and Industry in...