2035: The "American Dream" For $250 A Month?
Could we be nearing the end of global poverty? Is it possible that we see, over the next 15 years, the ability to provide everyone with basic levels of sustenance along with some "extras" for minimal money?
No, this is not a topic about universal basic income or governments paying for all that is needed?
This is about technology and the tremendous impact it is going to have on daily life.
Over the past week, I have been posting videos about how different things will be in the middle of the next decade. We are about to embark on a technological explosion that is going to radically alter the basics areas of society. Through the advancement of materials science, IoT, 3D printing, and AI, industries all over the world will be upended. This is going to have quicker than people can image.
We got a glimpse of this over the last 30 years. Until people step back, they do not realize the drastic changes that took place in areas such as computation, communications, music, video, and consumer electronics. Even space, which did not see many breakthroughs over the first 20 years, has realized enormous gains in the last decade.
The tentacles of this same process are expanding.
There are a number of fields were, due to technological advancement, costs will plummet. Other areas, due to the expected progress of digitization and AI, will see changes that provide the same effects.
For example, the area of transportation is getting a lot of attention. Transportation-as-a-Service (TaaS) will be here in a few years. While the likes of Elon Musk get a lot of press, the real breakthrough is happening in the area of trucking. We are seeing a number of companies already utilizing long haul, autonomous trucks to move cargo.
https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Volvo-Vera.jpg?w=1200&strip=all
Thus, we see the potential for a drastic reduction in the cost of moving from point A to point B, regardless of whether it is a cargo or a human. Obviously, in the Western countries, transportation, i.e. a car, is one of the largest household expenses. According to Tony Seba, we could see the cost per mile, when all is factored in, drop by 90% by 2030.
Other technologies such as climate controlled farming, precision fermentation, and meats grown from stem cells hold the promise of dropping the cost of food by an even greater percentage. A household that now spends hundreds a month on food could see this be only a few dollars by the middle of the 2030s.
The materials sciences is where most of the interesting action is taking place. We are starting to be able to not only understand, but manipulate the "unseen" world around us. For years, we knew about DNA, electrons, qubits, and photons. Now, we are able to start constructing at the sub-atomic level.
There are many stories about self-healing concrete being brought to market. Over the next few years, this will likely be implemented into our construction process. Naturally, if we can create concrete that heals, the jump to self creating concrete is not far away.
In other words, we are moving towards an era where construction is made up of living organisms that form to a pattern that is coded in. This is the entire premise behind 4D printing.
This is a much different topic of conversation than we hear from our leaders today. In my mind, this shows how disconnected politicians and CEOs are from what is taking place.
Consider what was being discussed around the turn of the century. The big fear was Y2K and the Internet bubble. Greenspan was thinking about "irrational exuberance" while the U.S. government was about to start a two decade run of war mongering.
Nobody was discussing how the world of music production, distribution, and sales were going to be completely upended. Yet, with the introduction of Napster, record companies everywhere started to collapse. The same was true for video. Netflix was a start up and few saw that it was going to take out Blockbuster, Movie Gallery, and anyone else who was renting video content.
Of course, AT&T was still garnering billions in long distance phone service. The idea of cutting the cord was unheard of in the cable industry. In fact, they were still growing their customer bases. At the same time, Kodak was hanging on due to their misstep with the digital camera. The belief was that the Japanese companies like Canon and Ricoh were going to dominate for decades. Few were able to foresee the smartphone.
Today, we are seeing a repeat. There are many who are completely unaware of what is taking place. It is easy to be a naysayer believing that autonomous vehicles will never come into being. The challenge with that is that they are already here. The only thing left to do is to scale the technology to be able to handle all driving conditions. We can see the same with food production. Climate controlled, localized farming is in operation. At this point, they are few and far between. However, over the next decade, that will change.
Only recently did people wake up to the fact that renewable energy is gaining a larger share of the energy produced. This was a trend that was stared decades ago.
We can even point to the fact that cryptocurrency is still being bashed. There was a report that the growth of Bitcoin transactions in a number of African nations grew by over 100%. It does not take too many triple digits gains over a few years before that growth is noticed.
What started out small tends to explode. That is the nature of exponential growth. Today, we are seeing the seeds in many areas of life.
Give it another 15 years, and we will not believe how "outdated" we were in 2020.
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