How Our Lives Will Change In The Next Two Decades

Thanks, Jan, for sending me this interesting article on how our lives will change in the next 20 years.  The ideas in this blog come from points made by Udo Gollub.  Here are some of the changes he thinks will take place.

1.  Artificial intelligence:  computers will become exponentially better at understanding the world.  This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.
2.  Because of IBM Watson, you can find out answers to basic legal questions in seconds.  Law will be specialized, and there will be 90% less lawyers in the future.
3.  Autonomous cars:  In 2018 the first self-driving cars will hit the road.  Around 2020, the complete auto industry will start to be disrupted.  You probably won't need to own a car anymore.  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, and will only pay for the driven distance.  Our grandkids may never get a driver's license or own a car.
4.  Parking lots will become parks, and driving accidents and deaths will be dramatically reduced.
5.  Real estate will change.  Because you can work while you commute, people will move further away from work to live in a better neighborhood.
6.  Agriculture:  There will be an agricultural robot in the future.  Farmers in third world countries can then become managers of their field instead of working in the field all day.
7.Bitcoin may become the default reserve currency of the world!
8.  The cheapest smart phones are already at $10 in Africa and Asia.  By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smart phone.  That means that everyone will have access to world class education.
9.  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 if there will be enough new jobs in such a short time.
10.  3D printing.  The price of the cheapest 3D printer has already been dramatically reduced, and all major shoe companies have already started printing 3D shoes.  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.

12.  Medical:  Your smart phone will be ale to scan your retina, take a blood sample and have you breathe into it.  It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease.  It will be cheap so in a few years everyone on the planet will have access to world class medical analysis, nearly for free.  Good bye, medical establishment.  For more info on this fascinating possibility, read Eric Toppel.

Will all of these predictions come to pass?  Probably not, but most of them will.  We need to get ready for huge changes in medical and technological ways.  The most important problem I see is what we are going to do with all the people that will be put out of work by these advancements.  That's for the really smart people working at think tanks to figure out.