The Futurist

The Imminent Revolution in Lighting, and Why it is More Important Than You Think

There are many technological revolutions of varying impact that we will see in the next decade, in fields ranging from entertainment to automobiles to longevity to nanotech to telebusiness.  One of the largest revolutions, however, with the potential to improve fuel costs, electricity bills, greenhouse gas emissions, dependence on foreign oil, workplace productivity, and consumer confidence will happen where you least expect it - in the humble light fixtures of your home and workplace. 

There are two technologies that have existed for decades, but are reaching cost and quality levels that can displace traditional incandescent lightbulbs.  Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) and Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are both reaching prices of under $2.50 each per unit. CFLs and LEDs not only consume only about 20% of the electricity of a traditional bulb, but can last up to 8 times as long, saving the time and hastle of 8 bulb purchases and replacements. 

Of the 2 billion bulbs sold in the US each year, CFLs have jumped from just 1% of the total in 2000 to about 5% in 2005, or 100 million units.  To accelerate adoption, Wal-Mart, often a critical catalyst for technology adoption, will start a major education and marketing campaign to sell another 100 million CFLs in the next 12 months. 

Let's run some numbers to illuminate the magnitude of this.

The 110 million US households have an average of 20 incandescent bulbs in operation, each lasting a year on average (hence the 2 billion bulbs sold a year).  If all 2.2 billion household bulbs are replaced with CFLs, the estimated 8-year average life of a CFL will ensure that replacement sales are only one-eighth of incandescent bulbs, or 250 million CFLs a year.  Since a 60 Watt/hour incandescent can be replaced with a CFL that consumes only 15 Watt/hours of electricity, we can calculate :

If the typical household's 20 bulbs average 60 watts (.06 kWh) each and are used for an average of 4 hours a day each, and electricity costs 10 cents per kilowatt/hour, the household spends (20 x .06 x 4 x 365 x $.1) = $175.2 a year.  CFLs would save 75%, or $131.4 in electricity costs for such a household each year.  Since the electricity consumption curve is not linear and demand is somewhat inelastic, this benefits lower-income households greatly. 

At the macro scale, if each of the 2.2 billion bulbs in operation in 110 million households is aggregated, they consume (110m x $175.2) = $19.3 billion in electricity a year.  CFLs would save 75% or $14.5 billion for consumers per year. 

But wait, it gets better.

In an age of fears about oil imports and atmospheric pollution, people are very wary of the amount of gasoline they consume, but usually have no idea how much oil and coal go into producing the electricity they use.  A single 60 Watt bulb used 4 hours a day for a year requires the burning of about 70 pounds of coal.  2.2 billion incandescent bulbs would require 77 million tons of coal per year, and CFLs could reduce 58 million tons out of that, or 6% of total US coal consumption.  The emissions savings alone would be the equivalent of reducing US automobile driving by 15%, or about 25 million cars. 

LEDs offer similar benefits in energy savings, and while they are not going to benefit from a push by Wal-Mart, are still a neccesary presence as a rival technology to CFLs, each mutually forcing the other to keep up the rate of innovation.  One of these two, if not both, will sweep across the world in the next 24 months. 

Beyond the lighting revolution in the home, there is also one in the offering for the office, where tubelights, rather than bulbs, are currently used.  This brings us to the third technology of this discussion.

A company called Sunlight Direct has a brilliant product that distributes sunlight indoors, no matter how far from a location is from a window.  The solar lighting system consists of a roof-mounted 40-inch light-collecting disc that moves to follow the sun during the course of a day, and plastic fiber-optic cables that distribute the light throughout the interior of the building.  After the costs of the initial installation, this will not only save businesses the cost of artificial lighting during the day, but will greatly increase the quality of life of employees who can be freed from their tubelit torture.  Large retailers stand to save over 20 cents per square foot per year in electricity through the use of this system.  Wal-Mart, for example, has about 3000 stores averaging 150,000 square feet each.  This amounts to (3000 x 150,000 x $.2) = $90 million in electricity potentially saved per year. 

The product will be commercially available by 2007, with the possibility of a residential version by 2009.  Of course, some geographies stand to benefit more than others, as we can see from this handy map of US solar energy intensity (from Wikipedia).  But taking the marketing even further, we can note that some fast-emerging economies with acute energy shortages also have abundant sunlight, much greater than even in the Southwestern US.  A product like Sunlight Direct's is very compelling in India, VietNam, Thailand, and Taiwan, where electricity costs are often much higher than in the US, but near-continuous tropical sunlight is the norm. 

All three of these new technologies, and their descendants, will combine into a gale of creative destruction that will shake up a part of daily life that has been essentially unchanged for several decades.  Unlike many other such disruptive technologies, the displacement and digestion process will be almost painless and nearly seamless.  We all will be the richer for it. 

Update (5/29/07) : A CNet article has more details on various lighting technologies.

Virtual Touch Brings VR Closer

Scientists have created a touch interface that, while smooth, can provide the user with a simulated sensation of a variety of surfaces, including that of a sharp blade or needle (from MIT Technology Review).

By controlling the direction in which pressure is applied to the skin when a user's finger is run across the smooth surface, the brain can be tricked into feeling a variety of pointed or textured objects where there are none.  Essentially, this is the touch equivalent of an optical illusion. 

While this technology is still in the earliest stages of laboratory testing, within 15 years, it will be commercially viable.  By then, it will find many uses in medicine, defense, education, entertainment, and the arts.  Examples of practical applications include training medical students in surgical techniques, or creating robots with hands that can perfectly duplicate human characteristics. 

This will be one of the critical components of creating compelling and immersive virtual reality environments, and the progress of this technology between now and 2020 will enable prediction of the specific details and capabilities of virtual reality systems for consumers.  A fully immersive VR environment available to the average household has already been predicted here, and now one more key component appears to be well on track. 

Update : More from Businessweek

Terrorism, Oil, Globalization, and the Impact of Computing

Three things have happened in the last few years, which are now converging with a fourth inexorable trend to make major changes in consumer behaviour, mostly for the better. 

1) September 11, 2001 showed the world the destruction that a small number of terrorists could cause by hijacking unsuspecting passenger planes.  The subsequent increase in security almost did not stop 10 other UK to US flights from being exploded above the Atlantic by British-born terrorists disguising liquid bomb ingredients in soft-drink containers.  The terrorists will continue to get more and more creative, and will eventually destroy an airliner in an act of terror.  This fear now hangs over all passengers.  At the same time, security at airports is increasing pre-flight periods to up to 3 hours in duration.  Multiply this by the millions of business passengers per year, and the loss of billions of dollars of productivity is apparent. 

2) Oil at $70/barrel is making air travel more expensive for cost-conscious businesses.  I happen to believe that $70/barrel is the optimal price for oil for the US, where the economic drag is not enough to cause a recession, but the price is high enough for innovation in alternative energy technologies to accelerate.  Nonetheless, economic creative destruction always has casualties that have to make way for new businesses, and airlines might bear a large share of that burden. 

3) At the same time, globalization has increased the volume and variety of business conducted between the US and Asia, as well as between other nations.  More jobs involve international interaction, and frequent overseas travel.  This demand directly clashes with the forced realities of items 1) and 2), creating a market demand for something to ease this conflicting pressure, which leads us to...

4) The Impact of Computing, which estimates that the increasing power and number of computing devices effectively leads to a combined gross impact that increases by approximately 78% a year.  One manifestation of the Impact is the development of technologies like Webex, high-definition video conferencing over flat-panel displays, Skype, Google Earth, Wikimapia, etc.  These are not only tools to empower individuals with capabilities that did not even exist a few years ago, but these capabilities are almost free.  Furthermore, they exhibit noticeable improvements every year, rapidly increasing their popularity.

While the life blood of business is the firm handshake, face-to-face meeting, and slick presentation, the quadruple inflection point above might just permanently elevate the bar that determines which meetings warrant the risks, costs, and hassle of business travel when there are technologies that can enable many of the same interactions.  While these technologies are only poor substitutes now, improved display quality, bandwidth, and software capabilities will greatly increase their utility.

The same can even apply to tourism.  Google Earth and WikiMapia are very limited substitutes for traveling in person to a vacation locale.  However, as these technologies continue to layer more detail onto the simulated Earth, combined with millions of attached photos, movies, and blogs inserted by readers into associated locations, a whole new dimension of tourism emerges. 

Imagine if you have a desire to scale Mount Everest, or travel across the Sahara on a camel.  You probably don't have the time, money, or risk tolerance to go and do something this exciting, but you can go to Google Earth or WikiMapia, and click on the numerous videos and blogs by people who actually have done these things.  Choose whichever content suits you, from whichever blogger does the best job. 

See through the eyes of someone kayaking along the coast of British Columbia, walking the length of the Great Wall of China, or spending a summer in Paris as an artist.  The possibilities are endless once blogs, video, and Google Earth/WikiMapia merge.  Will it be the same as being there yourself?  No.  Will it open up possibilities to people who could never manage to be there themselves, or behave in certain capacities if there?  Absolutely.

Related :

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

100 Mbps Broadband for $40/month by 2010

Broadband Speeds of 50 Mbps for $40/month by 2010

In 1999, maybe 50 million US households had dial-up Internet access at 56 kbps speeds.  In 2006, there are 50 million Broadband subscribers, with 3-10 mbps speeds.  This is roughly a 100X improvement in 7 years, causing a massive increase in the utility of the Internet over this period.  The question is, can we get an additional 10X to 30X improvement in the next 4 years, to bring us the next generation of Internet functionality?  Let's examine some new technological deployments in home Internet access.

Verizon's high-speed broadband service, known as FIOS, is currently available to about 3 million homes across the US, with downstream speeds of 5 Mbps available for $39.95/month and higher speeds available for greater prices.  How many people subscribe to this service out of the 3 million who have the option is not publicly disclosed.

However, Verizon will be upgrading to a more advanced fiber-to-the-home standard that will increase downstream speeds by 4X and upstream speeds by 8X.  Verizon predicts that this upgrade will permit it to offer broadband service at 50 or even 100 Mbps to homes on its FIOS network.  Furthermore, the number of homes with access to FIOS service will rise from the current 3 million to 6 million by the end of 2006. 

Verizon's competitors will, of course, offer similar speeds and prices shortly thereafter.

The reason this is significant is that if falls precisely within the concept of the Impact of Computing.  The speed of the Internet service increases by 4X to 8X, while the number of homes with access to it increases by 2X, for an effective 8X to 16X increase in Impact, and the associated effects on society.  High-definition video streaming, video blogging, video wikis, and advanced gaming will all emerge as rapidly adopted new applications as a result. 

We often hear about how Japan and South Korea already have 100 Mbps broadband service while the US languishes at 3-10 Mbps with little apparent progress.  True, but Africa has vast natural resources and Taiwan, Israel, and Switzerland do not.  Which countries make better use of the advantages available to them?  In the same way, South Korea and Japan may have a lot of avid online gamers, but have not made use of their amazing high-speed infrastructure to create businesses in the last 2 years like Google Adwords, Zillow, MySpace, Wikipedia, etc.  The US has spawned these powerful consumer technologies even with low broadband speeds, due to our innovation and fertile entrepreneurial climate that exceeds even that of advanced nations like Japan and South Korea.  Just imagine the innovations that will emerge with the greatly enhanced bandwidth that will soon be available to US innovators. 

Give the top 80 million American households and small businesses access to 50 Mbps Internet connections for $40/month by 2010, and they will produce trillions of dollars of new wealth, guaranteed.

Related :

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

The Impact of Computing

Why Do The Biggest Technological Changes Take Almost Everyone By Surprise?

The End of Rabbit Ears, a Billion More Broadband Users

Ultrasound Tourniquet May Greatly Reduce Troop Deaths

There was a time when America could wage wars and sustain 50,000 or more casualties without severe domestic opposition.  Not any more, as even 2000 hostile deaths in Iraq has caused many Americans to be demoralized from the seemingly immense body count.  Our technological and economic progress has caused our society to rightly place a premium on human life, but in order to preserve our society, we still need to wage brutal wars.  Thus, market forces demand innovations that reduce US troop deaths even further. 

Accordingly, the Pentagon has provided $51 million for research towards the development of an ultrasound tourniquet that can stop the loss of blood from major wounds in as little as 30 seconds, and thus reduce troop deaths from guerilla/terrorist tactics (like those in Iraq) by over 50% by 2011 (Article : MIT Technology Review). 

When the tourniquet is wrapped around a wounded limb or torso, it emits ultrasound beams that detect ruptured blood vessels and induce rapid clotting to seal them.  This buys the wounded soldier enough time to be carried to an equipped medical facility, where previously he would often have died of blood loss before reaching the facility.  Once at the emergeny room, his chances of survival continue to be higher than before from targetted sealing of severed arteries and veins.  Thus, the damage from all but the most severe wounds can be greatly reduced.

The implications of this are immense.  In Iraq, the majority of US troop deaths are from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), where shrapnel often inflicts fatal wounds.  Additionally, for each troop killed, eight are wounded.  This device could reduce such deaths by half or more, and even help the wounded return to action in a much shorter time.  At the same time, none of our opponents would have such a technology, further widening the power gap between an elite US force and a terrorist cell.  Eventually, this could become a medical device available in hospitals for civilian use, reducing the deaths from automobile accidents and gunshot wounds significantly, provided an ambulance arrives in time. 

Such a tourniquet will not be available to the US military in an easily usable form for another 5 years, but when it is, US military effectiveness in the War on Terror will be increased dramatically, as will the willingness of the US public to engage in continued military activity.  When our troops become harder to kill from mere IEDs and gunshot wounds, non-uniformed terrorists and insurgents will be blunted even further.

Nanotechnology to Create Plentiful Clean Water by 2015

An article from the MIT Technology Review describes a development by researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that could bring clean drinking water to 2 billion people who currently don't have access to this necessity. 

By using carbon nanotubes, membranes were created with pores so fine that only the width of seven water molecules could pass through.  This removes many impurities, including salt molecules.  These filters may reduce the cost of desalinification by up to 75%, and could come to market in the next decade.  The real secret is the price of carbon nanotubes, which is expected to decline by half every 18 months.  In 10 years, the price of nanotubes will be merely 1/100th of what it is today.  This filter could become inexpensive enough for even small villages to operate their own desalinification facilities.  This, in turn, could greatly reduce poverty, increase life expectancy, and foster economic growth. 

Water is a critical component of economic growth on every level, even more so than oil.  Numerous wars have been fought over water in the Middle East and North Africa, and this innovation could be yet another contributor towards the reduction of warfare through economic prosperity. 

Needless to say, a massive reduction in the cost of creating highly purified water also benefits the top of the economic pyramid.  Industries that use large amounts of purified water and could benefit from cost reductions are semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, food processing, etc.

Related : The Nanotech Report 2006 - Key Findings

The Nanotech Report 2006 - Key Findings

The 2006 edition of the Nanotech Report from Lux Research was published recently.  This is something I make a point to read every year, even if only a brief summary is available for free. 

Some of the key findings that are noteworthy :

1) Nanotechnology R&D reached $9.6 billion in 2005, up 10% from 2004.  This is unremarkable when one considers that the world economy grew 7-8% in nominal terms in 2005, but upon closer examination of the subsets of R&D, corporate R&D and venture capital grew 18% in 2005 to hit $5 billion.  This means that many technologies are finally graduating from basic research laboratories and are being turned into products, and that investment in nanotechnology is now possible.  This also confirms my estimation that the inflection point of commercial nanotechnology was in 2005. 

2) Nanotechnology was incorporated in $30 billion of manufactured goods in 2005 (mostly escaping notice).  This is projected to reach $2.6 trillion of manufactured goods by 2014, or a 64% annual growth rate.  Products like inexpensive solar roof shingles, lighter yet stronger cars yielding 60 mpg, stain and crease resistant clothes, and thin high-definition displays will be common. 

But a deeper concept worth internalizing is how an extension of the Impact of Computing will manifest itself.  If the quality of nanotechnology per dollar increases at the same 58% annual rate as Moore's Law (a modest assumption), combining this qualitative improvement rate with a dollar growth of 64% a year yields an effective Impact of Nanotechnology of (1.58)*(1.64) = 160% per year.  As the base gets larger, this will become very visible.

3) Nanotech-enabled products on the market today command a price premium of 11% over traditional equivalents, even if the nanotechnology is not directly noticed. 

The next great technology boom is upon us, and it is beginning now. 

Next-Generation Graphics - A Good Intro

IGN has a good article on what level of sophistication can be expected in video game graphics in the next couple of years.  While their optimism about the period between now and 2008 is cautious, this reaffirms the technological trends and is consistent with my prediction that the descendants of modern video games will become the most popular form of home entertainment by 2012, mostly at the expense of television. 

As always, viewing the pictoral history of video games gives an idea of the rate of progress that one can expect in the next decade. 

Virtual Worlds - BusinessWeek Catches On

The cover story of BusinessWeek this week is devoted to virtual game worlds and the real economic opportunities that some entrepreneurs are finding in them. 

I spoke of exactly this less than a month earlier, on April 1, about how video games would evolve into an all-encompassing next generation of entertainment to displace television, and also become a huge ecosystem for entrepreneurship.  It seems that we are on the cusp of this vision becoming reality (by 2012, as per my prediction). 

Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico

What would be the best way to measure, and predict, technological progress?  One good observation has been The Impact of Computing, but why has computing occurred now, rather than a few decades earlier or later?  Why is nanotechnology being talked about now, rather than much earlier or later?

Engineering has two dimensions of progress - the ability to engineer and manufacture designs at exponentially smaller scales, and the ability to engineer projects of exponentially larger complexity.  In other words, progress occurs as we design in increasingly intricate detail, while simultaneously scaling this intricacy to larger sizes, and can mass produce these designs. 

For thousands of years, the grandest projects involved huge bricks of stone (the Pyramids, medieval castles).  The most intricate carvings by hand were on the scale of millimeters, but scaled only to the size of hand-carried artifacts.  Eventually, devices such as wristwatches were invented, that had moving parts on a millimeter scale.

At the same time, engineering on a molecular level first started with the creation of simple compounds like Hydrochloric Acid, and over time graduated to complex chemicals, organic molecules, and advanced compounds used in industry and pharmaceuticals.  We are currently able to engineer molecules that have tens of thousands of atoms within them, and this capability continues to get more advanced. 

The chart below is a rough plot of the exponentially shrinking detail of designs which we can mass-produce (the pink line), and the increasingly larger atom-by-atom constructs that we can create (the green line).  Integrated circuits became possible as the pink line got low enough in the 1970s and 80s, and life-saving new pharmaceuticals have emerged as the green line got to where it was in the 1990s and today.  The two converge right about now, which is not some magical inflection point, but rather the true context in which to view the birth of nanotechnology. 

As we move through the next decade, molecular engineering will be capable of producing compounds tens of times more complex than today, creating amazing new drugs, materials, and biotechnologies.  Increasingly finer design and manufacturing capabilities will allow computer chips to accomodate 10 billion transistors in less than one square inch, and for billions of these to be produced.  Nanotechnology will be the domain of all this and more, and while the beginnings may appear too small to notice to the untrained observer, the dual engineering trends of the past century and earlier converge to the conception of this era now.

Further into the future, molecule-sized intelligent robots will be able to gather and assemble into solid objects almost instantly, and move inside our body to monitor our health and fight pathogens without our noticing.  Such nanobots will change our perception of physical form as we know it.  Even later, picotechnology, or engineering on the scale of trillionths of a meter - that of subatomic particles - will be the frontier of mainstream consumer technology, in ways we cannot begin to imagine today.  This may coincide with a Technological Singularity around the middle of the 21st century. 

For now, though, we can sit back and watch the faint trickle of nanotechnology headlines, products, and wealth thicken and grow into a stream, then a river, and finally a massive ocean that deeply submerges our world in its influence. 

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment - Part III

Here is a follow up to the two-part article, the Next Big Thing in Entertainment, where a prediction is made that the video game industry will give rise to something much larger, that transforms many dimensions of entertainment entirely.

I feel one additional detail worth discussing is the performance of stocks that may do well from this phenomenon.  A 5-year chart of four game development companies, Electronic Arts (ERTS), Activision (ATVI), Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO), and THQ Inc. (THQI), plus retailer Gamestop (GME) provides an interesting picture. 

   

All 5 companies appear to have greatly outperformed the S&P500 over the last 5 years, despite this being a poor period for technology stocks.  Past performance is no indication of future returns, and it is difficult to predict with competitors will prevail over others, but a basket of stocks in this sector will be very interesting to watch for the next 6 years. 

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment - Part II

Continuing from Part I, where a case is made that the successor to video games, virtual reality, will draw half of all time currently spent on television viewership by 2012. 

The film industry, on the other hand, has far less of a captive audience than television, and thus evolved to be much closer to a meritocracy.  Independent films with low budgets can occasionally do as well as major studio productions, and substantial entrepreneurship is conducted towards such goals. 

This is also a business model that continually absorbs new technology, and even has a category of films generated entirely through computer animation.  A business such as Pixar could not have existed in the early 1990s, but from Toy Story (1995) onwards, Pixar has produced seven consecutive hits, and continues to generate visible increases in graphical sophistication with each film.  At the same time, the tools that were once accessible only to Pixar-sized budgets are now starting to become available to small indie filmmakers. 

Even while the factors in Part I will draw viewers away from mediocre films, video game development software itself can be modified and dubbed to make short films.  Off-the-shelf software is already being used for this purpose, in an artform known as machinima.  While most machinima films today appear amateurish and choppy, in just a few short years the technology will enable the creation of Toy Story calibre indie films. 

By democratizing filmmaking, machina may effectively do to the film industry what blogs did to the mainstream media.  In other words, a full-length feature film created by just 3 developers, at a cost of under $30,000, could be quickly distributed over the Internet and gain popularity in direct proportion to its merit.  Essentially, almost anyone with the patience, skill, and creativity can aspire to become a filmmaker, with very little financing required at all.  This too, just like the blogosphere before it, will become a viable form of entrepreneurship, and create a new category of self-accomplished celebrities. 

At the same time, machinima will find a complementary role to play among the big filmmakers as well, just as blogs are used for a similar purpose by news organizations today.  Peter Jackson or Steven Spielberg could use machinima technology to slash special-effects costs from millions to mere thousands of dollars.  Furthermore, since top films have corresponding games developed alongside them, machinima fits nicely in between as an opportunity for the fan community to create 'open source' scenes or side stories of the film.  This helps the promotion and branding of the original film, and thus would be encouraged by the producer and studio. 

Thousands of people will partake in the creation of machinima films by 2010, and by 2012 one of these films will be in the top 10 of all films created that year, in terms of the number of Google search links it generates.  These machinima films will have the same effect on the film industry that the blogosphere has had on the mainstream media. 

There you have it, the two big changes that will fundamentally overturn entertainment as we know it, while making it substantially more fun and participatory, in just 6 short years. 

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment - Part I

Previously, I had written about why the biggest technological changes take almost everyone by surprise.  Not many people recognize the exponential, accelerating nature of technological change, and fewer still have the vision to foresee how two seemingly unrelated trends could converge to create massive new industries and reconstruct popular culture.

Today, we will attempt to make just such a prediction.

Computer graphics and video games have improved in realism in direct accordance with Moore's Law.  Check out the images of video game progression to absorb the magnitude of this trend.  One can appreciate this further by merely comparing Pixar's Toy Story (1995) to their latest film, Cars (2006).  But to merely project this one trend to predict that video games will have graphics that look as good as the real thing is an unimaginative plateau.  Instead, let's take it further and predict :

Video Gaming (which will no longer be called this) will become a form of entertainment so widely and deeply enjoyed that it will reduce the time spent on watching network television to half of what it is today, by 2012.

Impossible, you say?  How can this massive change happen in just 6 years?  First, think of it in terms of 'Virtual Reality' (VR), rather than 'games'.  Then, consider that :

1) Flat hi-def television sets that can bring out the full beauty of advanced graphics will become much cheaper and thinner, so hundreds of millions of people will have wall-mounted sets of 50 inches or greater for under $1000 by 2012.

2) The handheld controllers that adults find inconvenient will be replaced by speech and motion recognition technology.  The user experience will involve speaking to characters in the game, and sports simulations will involve playing baseball or tennis by physically moving one's hand.  Eventually, entire bodysuits and goggles will be available for a fully immersive experience. 

3) Creative talent is already migrating out the television industry and into video games, as is evident by the increase in story quality in games and the decline in the quality of television programs.  This trend will continue, and result in games available for every genre of film.  Network television has already been reduced to depending on a large proportion of low-budget 'reality shows' to sustain their cost-burdened business models. 

4) Adult-themed entertainment has driven the market demand and development of many technologies, like the television, VCR, DVD player, and Internet.  Gaming has been a notable exception, because the graphics have not been realistic enough to attract this audience, except for a few unusual games.  However, as realism increases through points 1) and 2), this vast new market opens up, which in turn pushes development.  For the first time, there are entire conferences devoted to this application of VR technology.  The catalyst that other technologies received is yet to stimulate gaming.

5) Older people are averse to games, as they did not have this form of entertainment when they were young.  However, people born after 1970 have grown up with games, and thus still occasionally play them as adults.  As the pre-game generation is replaced by those familiar with games, more VR tailored for older people will develop.  While this demographic shift will not make a huge change by 2012, it is irreversibly pushing the market in this direction every year. 

6) Online multiplayer role-playing games are highly addictive, but already involve people buying and selling game items for real money, to the tune of a $1.1 billion per year market.  Highly skilled players already earn thousands of dollars per year this way, and with more participants joining through more advanced VR experiences described above, this will attract a sizable group of people who are able to earn a full-time living through these VR worlds.  This will become a viable form of entrepreneurship, just like eBay and Google Ads support entrepreneurial ecosystems today.

There you have it, a convergence of multiple trends bringing a massive shift in how people spend their entertainment time by 2012, with television only watched for sports, documentaries, talk shows, and a few top programs. 

The progress in gaming also affects the film industry, but in a very different way.  The film industry will actually become greatly enhanced and democratized over the same period.  For this, stay tuned for Part II tomorrow. 

Finding Earth-like Planets Will Soon be Possible

First, the Earth (whether flat or spherical) was considered to be the center of the universe.  Then, the Sun was considered to be center of the universe.  Eventually, mankind came to realize that the Sun is just one of 200 to 400 billion stars within the Milky Way galaxy, which itself is just one among hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe, and there may even be other universes.

Astronomers have long believed that many stars would have planets around them, including some Earth-like planets.  Carl Sagan wrote and spoke extensively about this in the 1970s and 80s, but we did not have the technology to detect such planets at the time, so the discussions remained theoretical.  There were no datapoints by which to estimate what percentage of stars had what number of planets, of which what fraction were Earth-like. 

The first confirmed extrasolar planet was discovered in 1995.  Since then, continually improving technology has yielded discovery of more than one per month, for a grand total of about 176 to date.  So far, most known extrasolar planets have been Jupiter-sized or larger, with the detection of Earth-sized planets beyond our current technology. 

But the Impact of Computing is finding its way here as well, and new instruments will continue to deliver an exponentially growing ability to detect smaller and more distant planets.  Mere projection of the rate of discovery since 1995 predicts that thousands of planets, some of them Earth-sized, will be discovered by 2015.  To comfortably expect this, we just need to examine whether advances in astronomical observation are keeping up with this trend.  Let's take a detailed look at the chart below from a Jet Propulsion Laboratory publication, which has a lot of information.

The bottom horizontal axis is the distance from the star, and the top horizontal axis is the orbital period (the top and bottom can contradict each other for stars of different mass, but let's put that aside for now).  The right vertical axis is the mass as a multiple of the Earth's mass.  The left vertical axis is the same thing, merely in Jupiter masses (318 times that of the Earth). 

Current detection capability represents the area above the purple and first two blue lines, and the blue, red, and yellow dots represent known extrasolar planets.  Planets less massive than Saturn have been detected only when they are very close to their stars.  The green band represents the zone on the chart where an Earth-like planet, with similar mass and distance from its star as our Earth, would reside.  Such a planet would be a candidate for life. 

The Kepler Space Observatory will launch in mid-2008, and by 2010-11 will be able to detect planets in the green zone around stars as far as 1000 light years away.  It is set to examine 100,000 different stars, so it would be very surprising if the KSO didn't find dozens of planets in the green-zone. 

After 2015, instruments up to 1000 times more advanced than those today, such as the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope and others, will enable us to conduct more detailed observations of the hundreds of green-zone planets that will be identified by then.  We will begin to get an idea of their color (and thus the presence of oceans) and atmospheric composition.  From there, we will have a distinct list of candidate planets that could support Earth-like life. 

This will be a fun one to watch over the next decade.  Wait for the first headline of 'Earth-like planet discovered' in 2010 or 2011.

These Are the Best of Times

When we read stories or watch films set in a historical context, it is seductive to romanticize about being an Egyptian Pharoah, an English Knight, an Arab Sultan, or an 18th century French Aristocrat.  But how desirable were their daily lives compared to ours today?

First, refer back to the articles on Historical Life Expectancy, and Exponential and Accelerating Economic Growth.  Both show that the improvements in human life over the 20th century dwarf the improvements made in all of human history before then. 

But surely the people at the very top of society, at any time in history, had enviable lives, did they not?  To put this perspective, we need not go back any further than a century. 

Consider John D. Rockefeller, a name nearly synonymous with wealth.  At one point he had a net worth as high as 1/65th of US GDP at that time, a figure that would be the equivalent of $190 Billion today - four times what Bill Gates currently has.  He owned land, employed people, and had political clout that would seem extraordinary at any time in history.  But, having died in 1937 at the age of 98, Rockefeller never had photographs of his childhood, never watched a color film, never flew in a jet engine airplane, and never saw a photograph of the Earth taken from space.  If Rockefeller wished to travel from New York to Chicago, it took him and his entourage more than a day.  If his servant cut him during a morning shave (or even if he did it himself), a cloth bandage was the only kind available. His underwear did not have elastic, and since no cohort of servants could have realistically alleviated that problem for him, he probably spent every day accustomed to irritating hassles that would be unacceptable to even the poorest Americans today.  He couldn’t have even obtained a tube of mint-gel toothpaste or a can of chilled Coca-Cola from a soda machine. 

The same applied to Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and JP Morgan. While they had immense political, purchasing, and hiring power, the diversity of what they could do was limited by our standards, and we might actually have found some portions of their lifestyles to be inconvenient and monotonous.  They, in turn, had electricity, phonographs, railroads, and slow automobiles that may have made them think that the world of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington was deprived, and so on. 

Even as the ability to purchase land and hire the services of others has become increasingly expensive with time (but still at a rate consistent with GDP growth), the cost and diversity of goods available to the average person continues to improve remarkably, and, of course, this trend will continue to accelerate. 

While it took electricity, automobiles, and air travel decades to evolve from invention to commoditization in the United States, the process of diffusion is now shortening to years.  One merely needs to internalize The Impact of Computing to grasp this surging pace.  Needless to say, if we can chuckle at the limitations of John D. Rockefeller’s world a century later, by 2030 we may be able to poke fun at out own world of 2006 to the same extent.  A world where there were no hypersonic passenger aircraft, no intelligent robots, no self-driving cars, no virtual reality entertainment, and no easy cure for cancer may seem brutal and boring by then.

Thus, the advance and democratization of technology transcends perceptions about wealth and poverty over the course of time, and it is debatable whether it was better to be a super-wealthy American in 1920, a moderately wealthy American in 1960, or an average American in 2006.  Which would you choose? 

Are You Prepared to Live to 100? - Part II

Refer back to Part I here, where we discuss that despite the many stunning advances in medicine, there is still something within us that doubts that our present lives could be extended to 100 years.

The exponentially progressing advances in genomic and proteomic science will cure many genetic predispositions that an individual may have to certain diseases, again, with medical knowledge currently doubling every 8 years.  Programmable nanobots that can keep us healthy from inside, by detecting cancerous cells or biochemical changes very early, are also a near-certainty by the 2020s.  Furthermore, if just half of the world's 8 million millionaires were each willing to pay $500,000 to add 20 healthy, active years to their lives, the market opportunity would be (4 million X $500,000) = $2 trillion.  The technological trend and market incentive is definitely in place for revolutions in this field. 

But that is still not quite enough to assure that the internal mechanisms that make cells expire by a certain time, or the continuous damage done by cosmic rays perpetually going through our bodies, can be fully negated. 

Ray Kurzweil, in his essay "The Law of Accelerating Returns", seems confident that additions to human lifespan will grow exponentially.  While I agree with most of his conclusions in other areas, over here, I am not convinced that this growth is accelerating at the moment.  I feel that the new advances will be increasingly more complex, and only the most high-informed and disciplined individuals will be able to capitalize on the technologies available to them to extend their lifespan.  This will benefit a few people, but not enough to lift the broader average by much. 

However, where I do agree with Kurzweil and other Futurists is the concept of a Technological Singularity and Post-Human existence.  The advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology will become so advanced that humans will be able to reverse-engineer their brains re-engineer their entire bodies down to the molecular level.  In fact, you could effectively transfer your 'software' (your mind) into upgraded hardware.  This is not as crazy as it sounds, as even today, many devices are used within or near the body in order to prolong or augment human life, and many of these are fully part of The Impact of Computing; so both their sophistication and number could rise rapidly. 

This potentially will afford immortality to the human mind for those fortunate enough to be around in 2050 or so.  Of course, as the years progress, we will have a better idea of how realistic this possibility actually is.

So that is my conclusion.  Average human life expectancy will make moderate but unspectacular gains for the next 50 years, with only those who maintain healthy lifestyles and are deeply aware of the technologies available to them living past the age of 100.  This will be true until the Technological Singularity, where humans *may* be able to separate their minds from their bodies, and reside in different, artificially engineered bodies.  This is a vast subject which I will describe in more detail in future posts.  For some reading, go here. 

Also read about The Longevity Dividend.

Are You Prepared to Live to 100? - Part I

There is a lot of speculation about whether new medical science will allow not just newborn babies to live until 100, but even people who are up to 40 years old today.  But how much of it is realistic?

At first glance, human life expectancy appears to have risen greatly from ancient times :

Neolithic Era : 22

Roman Era : 28

Medieval Europe : 33

England, 1800 : 38

USA, 1900 : 48

USA, 2005 : 78

But upon further examination, the low life expectancies in earlier times (and poorer countries today) are weighed down by a high infant mortality rate.  If we take a comparison only of people who have reached adulthood, life expectancy may have risen from 45 to 80 in the last 2000 years.  This does not appear to be as impressive of a gain rate.

But, if you index life expectancy against Per Capita GDP, then the slow progress appears differently.  Life expectancy began to make rapid progress as wealth rose and funded more research and better healthcare, and since Economic Growth is Accelerating, an argument can be made that if lifespans jumped from 50 to 80 in the 20th century, they might jump to 100 by the 2020s.

But that still seems to be too much to expect.

We hear that if cancer and cardiovascular disease were cured, average lifespans in America would rise into the 90s.  We acknowledge that medical knowledge is doubling every 8 years or so.  We see in the news that a gene that switches off aging has been found in mice.  We even know that the market demand for such biotechnology would be so great - most people would gladly pay half of their net worth to get 20 more healthy, active years of life - that it will attract the best and brightest minds. 

Yet something within us is doubtful.....

(stay tuned tomorrow for Part II)

Advances in Automobile Technology : Safety

Earlier articles have discussed the murmur of activity building up in the field of energy technology, and how the sum total of many different fields of innovation will add up to big cumulative advancements.  I even go so far as to predict that there will be average-priced family sedans in 2015 that deliver 60 MPG even with 240 hp engines.  But that is not the only field of exciting advances that the automobile will see over the same period. 

Today, about 42,000 Americans die each year in road accidents.  Most of these are young people, including thousands of children.  On top of the tragic loss of life, this is very costly to the economy.  From police, ambulance, emergency room, insurance, legal, and funeral resources to the productivity lost, each casualty may cost an average of $2 million.  This totals to $84 billion in cost to the US economy each year.  However, one detail has gone nearly unnoticed about this grim statistic : the number has not risen in over a decade, despite population and automobile growth. 

Here is a table with details on the last 10 years of traffic fatalities.  The deaths per mile traveled, and in proportion to the population, has been dropping by 1-2% per year.  Recent additions, such as side airbags and stronger body frames, have been percolating through the system. 

The rate of fatality reduction will begin to slightly accelerate with a raft of new innovations about to make their way into cars.  Nanotechnology is bringing new materials science to car parts, with strong carbon fiber components weighing a fraction of their steel predecessors.  With lighter vehicle weights and stronger bumpers fewer accidents will be fatal, with continual improvement through each successive advance in nanomanterials. 

As guaranteed by The Impact of Computing, more electronic intelligence will percolate into cars in the form of revolutonary safety systems.  Night Vision, Lane Departure Warnings, and Collision Avoiding Cruise Control are already available in luxury cars, and will rapidly improve while becoming standard, inexpensive features in all cars.  The Impact of Computing necessitates that even if such systems cost $5000 today, a system 5 times better may cost under $100 in ten years. 

The nanomaterials and electronic systems may at first generate false complacence and carelessness among drivers, who assume that the safety systems can negotiate any situation.  Once this belief dissipates, we will see accelerating declines in annual traffic deaths each year.  This will spare the lives of thousands of children who might not have otherwise had a chance to become adults.  Economically, this will translate into lower auto, medical, and life insurance premiums, fewer traffic jams, and less wastage of police resources. 

Prediction : By 2020, average US traffic deaths will have dropped to only 25,000 per year, despite the greater US population by then.  This is against 43,000 in 2004 and 42,000 in 1995. 

Futuristic Construction Materials

Here is a fun slideshow in BusinessWeek today, in the upper-left corner of the article.  Materials such as translucent concrete that lets 10% of natural daylight through the walls, and a composite wood that actually conducts electricity are now a reality. 

While these materials are expensive, their costs are dropping rapidly, as the advanced molecular science behind them is, after all, an information technology.  The translucent concrete cost will, over many years, converge with that of ordinary concrete.  Plus, the money saved from consuming less electricity on indoor lighting, and thus fewer maintenence people needed to replace indoor tubelights, would also enter the cost equation.

An inflection point may occur with a major new skyscraper in Asia choosing to use some of these materials in some superluxury hotel on the upper floors, or someone like Donald Trump or Steve Wynn adding this as a feature to a new, highly publicized building.  The massive exposure will bring more competition, accelerating improvements and driving down prices.

This will be a very fun one to watch over the next several years. 

Keywords : Futuristic materials, Donald Trump new building, transparent concrete.

The Coming Jump in Energy Technology - More Updates

I have two prior posts on what I believe is a new climate ripe for major advances in energy technology.  Refer to :

Why $70/barrel oil is good for America.

The Coming Jump in Energy Technology Advancement

My prediction is that the burden of high energy prices and reliance on unsavory regimes that we currently face will have some serious scares in the next few years, but will abate and no longer be a major crisis by 2015, due to rapid advances in many new areas of technology. 

I claim that there will be no single technology that saves us, but rather many fields of innovation that slay the monster with a thousand small cuts.

Some more examples of promising advances :

A new method of converting previously unusable husks and stalks to ethanol.   

A business renting out biodiesel cars in Los Angeles sets up shop.

A battery breakthrough.

GE has created a machine that cuts the cost of producing hydrogen fuel by more than half. 

Solar energy costs are dropping quickly.  The reason this is happening now instead of at any time over the last 30 years is because solar cells are made of the same materials that computational chips are made of, and thus inevitably converge into The Impact of Computing. 

A startup attempting to make a 330 MPG hybrid.  Another attempting to reach 250 MPG.  While this may be unrealistic, if they make even moderate progress, their IP would be sold and used elsewhere.

None of these will singlehandedly change the world.  However, each bit of innovation makes the economics of the whole ecosystem a tiny bit better, which cumulatively adds up to a lot.

I have no hesitations in predicting that the average-priced 2015 model family sedan, with a 240 hp engine, will deliver 60 MPG.  On top of this, the fuel itself may have a large ethanol component, and will contain much less gasoline per gallon than today. 

Keywords : Ethanol, oil price, energy innovation, solar power, wind power, energy technology, tar sands, oil shale, hybrid car, hydrogen car

The Impact of Computing : 78% More Each Year

This article was updated on April 20, 2009, linked here. 

Anyone who follows technology is familar with Moore's Law and its many variations, and has come to expect the price of computing power to halve every 18 months.  But many people don't see the true long-term impact of this beyond the need to upgrade their computer every three or four years.  To not internalize this more deeply is to miss investment opportunities, grossly mispredict the future, and be utterly unprepared for massive, sweeping changes to human society.

Today, we will introduce another layer to the concept of Moore's Law-type exponential improvement.  Consider that on top of the 18-month doubling times of both computational power and storage capacity (an annual improvement rate of 59%), both of these industries have grown by an average of approximately 15% a year for the last fifty years.  Individual years have ranged between +30% and -12%, but let's say these industries have grown large enough that their growth rate slows down to an average of 12% a year for the next couple of decades.

So, we can crudely conclude that a dollar gets 59% more power each year, and 12% more dollars are absorbed by such exponentially growing technology each year.  If we combine the two growth rates to estimate the rate of technology diffusion simultaneously with exponential improvement, we get (1.59)(1.12) = 1.78. 

The Impact of Computing grows at a screaming rate of 78% a year.

Sure, this is a very imperfect method of measuring technology diffusion, but many visible examples of this surging wave present themselves.  Consider the most popular television shows of the 1970s, such as The Brady Bunch or The Jeffersons, where the characters had virtually all the household furnishings and electrical appliances that are common today, except for anything with computational capacity.  Yet, economic growth has averaged 3.5% a year since that time, nearly doubling the standard of living in the United States since 1970.  It is obvious what has changed during this period, to induce the economic gains. 

In the 1970s, there was virtually no household product with a semiconductor component.  Even digital calculators were not affordable to the average household until very late in the decade. 

In the 1980s, many people bought basic game consoles like the Atari 2600, had digital calculators, and purchased their first VCR, but only a fraction of the VCR's internals, maybe 20%, comprised of exponentially deflating semiconductors, so VCR prices did not drop that much per year.

In the early 1990s, many people began to have home PCs.  For the first time, a major, essential home device was pegged to the curve of 18-month halvings in cost per unit of power.

In the late 1990s, the PC was joined by the Internet connection and the DVD player, bringing the number of household devices on the Moore's Law-type curve to three. 

Today, many homes also have a wireless router, a cellular phone, an iPod, a flat-panel TV, a digital camera, and a couple more PCs.  In 2006, a typical home may have as many as 8 or 9 devices which are expected to have descendants that are twice as powerful for the same price, in just the next 12 to 24 months. 

To summarize, the number of devices in an average home that are on this curve, by decade :

1960s and earlier : 0

1970s : 0

1980s : 1-2

1990s : 3-4

2000s : 6-12

If this doesn't persuade people of the exponentially accelerating penetration of information technology, then nothing can.

One extraordinary product provides a useful example, the iPod :

First Generation iPod, released October 2001, 5 GB capacity for $399

Fifth Generation iPod, released October 2005, 60 GB capacity for $399, or 12X more capacity in four years, for the same price. 

Total iPods sold in 2002 : 381,000

Total iPods sold in 2005 : 22,497,000, or 59 times more than 2002.

12X the capacity, yet 59X the units, so (12 x 59) = 708 times the impact in just three years.  The rate of iPod sales growth will moderate, of course, but another product will simply take up the baton, and have a similar growth in impact. 

Now, we have a trend to project into the near future.  It is a safe prediction that by 2015, the average home will contain 25-30 such computationally advanced devices, including sophisiticated safety and navigation systems in cars, multiple thin HDTVs greater than 60 inches wide diagonally, networked storage that can house over 1000 HD movies in a tiny volume, virtual-reality ready goggles and gloves for advanced gaming, microchips and sensors embedded into several articles of clothing, and a few robots to perform simple household chores. 

Not only does Moore's Law ensure that these devices are over 100 times more advanced than their predecessors today, but there are many more of them in number.  This is the true vision of the Impact of Computing, and the shocking, accelerating pace at which our world is being reshaped. 

I will expand on this topic greatly in the near future.  In the meantime, some food for thought :

Visualizing Moore's Law is easy when viewing the history of video games.

The Law of Accelerating Returns is the most important thing a person could read.

How semiconductors are becoming a larger share of the total economy.

Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating, primarily due to information technology becoming all-encompassing. 

Elevators into Space - Yes, Really.

Most popular science fiction is still not all that ambitious in what it expects the audience to accept.  The basics, such as assumptions that space will be explored by large spaceships, and that faster-than-light travel will be achieved before human near-immortality, are given.  Yet, neither is a probable outcome within current trends of technological progress, and thus represent an unwillingness to challenge many basic assumptions about our technology and existence. 

Reality can be far more exotic than the science fiction of earlier generations, because not only are the wrong trends extrapolated in science fiction, but linear, rather than exponential, thinking is applied. 

People are working to build a functioning space elevator by 2018 - just 12 years from now.  It would consist of a carbon nanotube ribbon that extends into space to carry 100 tons up at a time, to a height of at least 65 miles or higher.  NASA has a long-term goal of extending an elevator all the way up to 62,000 miles in height, or one-fourth of the distance to the Moon. 

Beyond absurd, you say?

Material strength, at least, is not going to be a problem.  Carbon Nanotubes can form superstrong materials that can be strong enough and light enough to handle this.  Nanotubes were priced at $230,000 per pound in 2000, but the price is dropping exponentially, and even a 65-mile ribbon would not be tremendously expensive by 2018.

My opinion on whether this goal is possible?  It is difficult, and 2018 might be a decade too soon, even if it does succeed.  But a voyage to the Moon would have appeared difficult to Thomas Jefferson, and the accelerating rate of progress continues to shorten the interval between major innovations.  They already advanced from 300m to 1600m in just a few months.  What if they got to, say, 10 miles by 2016?  Would people take notice?

This will be a fun one to watch over the next few years.  Stay tuned for updates.

Exponential, Accelerating Growth in Transportation Speed

In the modern world, few people truly understand that the world is progressing at an exponential and accelerating rate.  This is the most critical and fundamental aspect of making any attempt to understand and predict the future.  Without a deep appreciation for this, no predictions of the intermediate and distant future are credible.

Read Ray Kurzweil's essay on this topic for an introduction.

Among the many examples of accelerating progress, one of the easiest to historically track and grasp is the rate of advancement in transportation technology.  Consider the chart below :

For thousands of years, humans could move at no more than the pace of a horse.  Then, the knee of the curve occurred, with the invention of the steam engine locomotive in the early 19th century, enabling sustained speeds of 60 mph or more.  After that came the automobile, airplane, and supersonic jet.  By 1957, humans had launched an unmanned vehicle into space, achieving escape velocity of 25,000 mph.  In 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched on an interplanetary mission, reaching peak speeds of 55,000 mph.  However, in the 29 years since, we have not launched a vehicle that has exceeded this speed. 

Given these datapoints, what trajectory of progress can we extrapolate for the future?  Will we ever reach the speed of light, and if so, under what circumstances?

Depending on how you project the trendline, the speed of light may be reached by Earth-derived life-forms anywhere between 2075 and 2500.  How would this be possible?

Certainly, achieving the speed of light would be extremely difficult, just like a journey to the Moon might have appeared extremely difficult to the Wright brothers.  However, after the 1000-fold increase in maximum speed achieved during the 20th century, a mere repeat of the same magnitude of improvement would get us there.

But what of various limits on the human body, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the amount of energy needed to propel a vehicle at this speed, or a host of other unforseen problems that could arise if we get closer to light-speed transportation?  Well, why assume that the trip will be made by humans in their current form at all?

Many top futurists believe that the accelerating rate of change will become human-surpassing by the mid-21st century, in an event known as the Singularity.  Among other things, this predicts a merger between biology and technology, to the extent that a human's 'software' can be downloaded and backed up outside of his 'hardware'. 

Such a human mind could be stored in a tiny computer that would not require air or water, and might be smaller than a grain of sand.  This would remove many of the perceived limitations on light-speed travel, and may in fact be precisely the path we are on. 

I will explain this in much more detail in the near future.  In the meantime, read more about why this is possible.

The End of Rabbit Ears, a Billion more Broadband users

On Feb 17, 2009, television signals will no longer be broadcast through the airwaves.  A rabbit-ear antenna will not bring television to a set, and to say 'on the air' will be obsolete.

So why do we care about this?

While this will not affect the majority of households that are already subscribing to cable television, this will usher in a substantial wave of technological innovation.  The freed up band of the electromagnetic spectrum has certain scientific properties that can be exploited to transmit new generations of wireless broadband. 

Imagine getting a 100 Mbps signal on your cell phone, fast enough to download streaming high-definition video.  Your cellphone service would include this broadband, and you could even link the phone as an adapter to your home network, and receive this broadband into your network.  This would allow you to consolidate your broadband and cellphone service into one subscription, saving money.

More importantly, the innovations that arise through this will induce leapfrogging to broadband in the developing world. 

The scalability of wireless broadband will result in Internet access spreading to previously disenfranchised markets.  In India, the wired infrastructure is so poor that 99.9% of the population does not have broadband Internet access today, and 90% of households do not have landline telephones.  But cellphone penetration has already overtaken landlines, at 80 million subscribers and growing rapidly. 

Cellphones become the natural vehicle of leapfrogging to broadband deliverence to areas where landline telephones and wired broadband have no chance of reaching in the near future.  This diffusion will be shockingly rapid. 

Prediction : By 2013, Asia and Latin America will jointly have 900 million people exclusively subscribing to wireless broadband services through cellphone-like devices, enjoying speeds of 5 Mbps or more.  80% of these people have no Internet access, not even dial-up, today. 

The Coming Jump in Energy Technology Advancement

Some people say ethanol is the answer.  Others say solar.  Still others say wind, while yet others say that more sophisticated technology in the car itself and big light-emitting-diodes in the home can reduce oil consumption to the point that it doesn't matter.

Will any one of them revolutionize the world in ten years?  Probably not. 

The point is, there is not just one thing being worked on to kill the monster of US oil dependency, but many.  The monster will be killed by a thousand cuts. 

An article on Winds of Change about the 8 possible alternative energy technologies. 

An article in Fortune about ethanol. 

Many people are pessimistic, after the lack of progress over the last 30+ years.  However, the amount of energy-related murmurs in the blogosphere is trending higher, and the number of public and private energy initiatives, including venture capital going to energy, is much higher than even a couple of years ago. 

There is a more than fair chance that the cocktail of accelerating, exponential innovation, market forces, and renewed political interest in energy innovation is building a head of steam.  I have commented recently on why $70 oil is good for America. 

I'm convinced that the world of 2015 will have had substantial jumps in energy technology from where we are today, not the least of which will be the typical 2015-model middle-class family sedan offering 60 mpg despite having a 240 hp engine. 

It is always darkest before the dawn..

Why $70/barrel Oil is Good for America

After President Bush's SOTU address last night, his Energy Initiative may not be what gets the mainstream excited.  After all, every President since Nixon has announced a desire to free America from dependence on foreign oil, and while there have been tiny steps of progress towards this, it has taken so long that few will believe that it will be any different this time.

However, I will come out and say that the next 10 years will, in fact, be different.  Here's why.

When oil spiked in 1973 after the Yom Kippur War to a price that would be the equivalent of $90/barrel today, this caused a world-wide recession, including a very deep recession in the US.  Most of the US economy was still dependent on manufacturing, with information technology being a miniscule sector.

However, at $67/barrel today, we are only seeing a slight economic slowdown, and even if prices were to rise to $90/barrel today, we still would not dip into recession through that alone, as the US economy has evolved to the extent of being only about one-third as intrinsically bound to oil consumption as 32 years ago.

The US economy produces 2.5 times as much economic output per barrel of oil, as in 1973.

We are already evolving towards making our vulnerability to oil prices an asymptotically dwindling problem.  This is accelerating as advances in information technology accelerate.  This is why world economic growth is accelerating at ever-increasing speeds.

High oil prices today are not triggering one solution to the problem, but many.  At a sustained $70/barrel, numerous alternatives, like ethanol, Canadian tar sands, Colorado oil shale, solar power, etc. become much closer to cost-competitiveness.  They were not options in 1973. 

In addition, this market force has caused the stagnant innovation we have seen in automobile technology during the era of cheap gasoline to awake from its slumber.  The real story behind all the buzz behind hybird vehicles is that the cost delta between a hybrid and traditional vehicle is now under 15% of the vehicle's price, and dropping.  In about 10 years, the term 'hybrid' will not exist at all, as that technology will merely be a standard feature in all cars. 

Credit goes to President Bush for increasing funding for basic research in energy technology.  While this will not deliver benefits during his remaining time in office, it will bring us large dividends by 2015.

Prediction : Despite several scares in the next 2-4 years, by 2015, oil prices will not worry people nearly as much anymore, whatever the price of oil at the time.  A much smaller portion of the US economy will be tied to oil prices.  This new reality will be visible in many places, such as the typical 2015-model family car yielding 60 MPG (highway) despite having a 240 hp engine. 

Gas at $4/gallon is not so bad, if you only need 5 gallons a week. 

Turn that frown upside down. :)

The Technological Progression of Video Games

As several streams of technological progress, such as semiconductors, storage, and Internet bandwidth continue to grow exponentially, doubling every 12 to 24 months, one subset of this exponential progress that offers a compelling visual narrative is the evolution of video games.

Video games evolve in graphical sophistication as a direct consequence of Moore's Law.  A doubling in the number of graphical polygons per square inch every 18 months would translate to an improvement of 100X after 10 years, 10,000X after 20 years, and 1,000,000X after 30 years, both in resolution and in number of possible colors.

Sometimes, pictures are worth thousands of words :

1976 :

1986 :

1996 :

2006 :

Now, extrapolating this trajectory of exponential progress, what will games bring us in 2010?  or 2016?

I actually predict that video games will become so realistic and immersive that they will displace other forms of entertainment, such as television.  Details on this to follow.

The future will be fun...

Related : The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

Why do the biggest technological changes take almost everyone by surprise?

The Internet was born as early as 1969, but no later than 1983, depending on what you consider to be the event most analogous to a 'birth'.  However, only a tiny fraction of the world's people were aware of the Internet even in the early 1990s.  Then, by 1994-95, the graphical browser from Netscape seemingly emerged from nowhere, opening up a wonderland that appeared to have the sum total of human knowledge instantly available to anyone with a computer. 

This 'World Wide Web' was predicted by almost no one in the late 1980s and was absent from the vast majority of science fiction work depicting the late 1990s onwards, just five years before it happened (with the notable exception of Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Intelligent Machines").  So many supposed 'great thinkers' missed it.  How?

Because, while they could easily extrapolate exponential trends such as Moore's Law and the dropping cost of telephone calls/data transfer, almost no one thought about the bigger vision - combining the two. 

1)  By the late 1980s, personal computers were starting to make their way to the mass market.  That most of the population might have bought their first PC by 1995 was an easy prediction.

2)  Long-distance telephone rates were dropping through the full 20-year period from 1970 to 1990.  That this would continue until costs would be virtually zero was an easy prediction. Plus, people already had modems and where exchanging data between computers in the 1980s.  

But combining the two, for the grand vision of hundreds of millions of PCs collectively accessing and contributing to the growing World Wide Web of information, was the missing layer of analysis that almost every great thinker missed.

Notice how the number of internet hosts was already growing exponentially in the early 1990s, but the apparent 'knee of the curve' occurred after 1996.

So, the next question becomes : How do we make additional predictions by noticing multiple, steady exponential trends, and knowing which ones will combine into something explosive, at what time?

That is, of course, the $64 trillion question.  I will venture a few, however, in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned..........

Related : Mili, Micro, Nano, Pico

Related : The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

Scientific Breakthrough will help Speed up Flu Drug Development

As important as terrorism is, Al-Qaeda has still managed to kill no more than 10,000 people worldwide in the past five years.  An outbreak of bird flu, however, could kill tens of millions.  The Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918 killed 50 million people, or nearly 3% of the world's population at the time.  If a pandemic of similar severity were to engulf the world today, it would spread much more quickly in this age of international air travel, and could wipe out most of the population of developing countries in the world, as well as cause an economic calamity more severe than the Great Depression. 

However, scientists have now discovered how the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus replicates inside cells.  While the virus will continue to mutate and attempt to outpace our efforts to develop effective drugs quickly, what is noteworthy is how far our technology has advanced.  As recently as 1995, it would have taken several years to map the genome of a flu virus and dig out this information.  Now, the same can be achieved in a matter of months, due to computers being 100 times more powerful than they were in 1996, and the productivity of this exponential improvement in computational power now diffusing pervasively throughout our scientific research infrastructure.

In the future, new pathogens will be decoded in even shorter times, hopefully at a rate faster than they can mutate.