The Carnival of Creative Destruction

Words like 'disruption' and 'destruction' usually have negative meanings, and one may strain to find any good ways in which to use the terms.  But today, the accelerating rate of change ensures that more technologies alter more aspects of life at an ever-quickening rate.  A little-understood dimension of this is the concept of Joseph Schumpeter's 'Creative Destruction', where the process of technological change topples existing norms and replaces them with new ones, often quite rapidly. 

Technological diffusion was in a lull in 2008, as I pointed out at the time.  But now, in 2010, I am happy to report that the recess has passed, and that the accelerating rate of change is rising back to the long-term exponential trendline (although it may not be fully back at the trendline until 2013, when people who have not been paying attention will be wondering why they were taken by surprise).  The Impact of Computing continues to progress, infusing itself into a wider and wider swath of our lives, and speeding up the rate of change in complacently stagnant industries that never thought technology could affect them.  Silicon Valley continues to be 'ground zero' for creative destruction, and complacent industries thousands of miles away could be toppled by someone working from their bedroom in Silicon Valley. 

Just a few of the examples of creative destruction that is presently in process have been covered by prior articles here at The Futurist.  These, along with others, are :

1) Video Conferencing is poised to disrupt not just airline and hotel industry revenues (which stand to lose tens of billions of dollars per year of business travel revenue), but the real-estate, medical, and aeronautical industries as well.  Corporations will see substantial productivity gains from successful adoption of videoconferencing as a substitute for 50% or more of their travel expenses.  Major mergers and acquisitions have happened in this sector in the last few months, and imminent price reductions will open the floodgates of diffusion.  Skype provides a form of video telephony that is free of cost.  This is described in detail in my August 2008 article on the subject, as well as in my earlier October 2006 introductory article. 

2) Surface Computing, which I wrote about in July of 2008, has begun to emerge in a myriad of forms, from the handheld Apple iPad to the upcoming consumer version of the table-sized Microsoft Surface.  This not only transforms human-computer interaction for the first time in decades, but the Apple 'Apps' ecosystem alters the utility of the Internet as well.  All sizes between the blackboard and the iPad will soon be available, and by 2015, personal computing, and the Internet, will be quite different than they are today, with surfaces of varying sizes abundant in many homes. 

3) The complete and total transformation of video games into the dominant form of home entertainment will be visible by 2012 through a combination of technologies such as realistic graphics, motion-responsive controllers, 3-D televisions, voice recognition, etc.  The biggest casualty of this disruption will be television programming, which will struggle to retain viewers.  Beyond this, the way in which humans process sensations of pleasure, excitement, and entertainment will irrevocably change.  Thus, the way humans relate to each other will also change.  I have written about this in April 2006, with a follow-up in July 2009. 

4) The book-publishing industry has been stubbornly resistant to technology, as evidenced by their insistence as late as 2003 that manuscript queries be submitted by postal mail, and that a self-addressed stamped envelope be enclosed in which a reply can be sent.  A completed manuscript would take a full 12 months to be printed and distributed, and the editors didn't even find this to be odd.  Fortunately, two simultaneous disruptions are toppling this obsolete and unproductive industry from both ends.  Print-on-demand services that greatly shorten the self-publishing process and entry-cost, such as iUniverse and Blurb, are now flexible and easy, while finished books can further avoid the paper-binding process altogether and be available to millions in e-book format for the Kindle and other e-readers.  Books that cost, say, $15 to print, bind, and distribute now cost almost zero, enabling the author and reader to effectively split the money saved.  When e-readers are eventually available for only $100, bookstores that sell paper books will be relegated to surviving mostly on gifts, coffee table books, and cafe revenues.  This is a disruption that is happening quickly due to it being so overdue in the first place, resulting in a speedy 'catchup'.  I wrote about this in more detail in December of 2009.

5) The automobile is undergoing multiple major transformations at once.  Strong, light nanomaterials are entering the bodies of cars to increase fuel efficiency, engines are migrating to hybrid and electrical forms, sub-$5000 cars in India and China will lead to innovations that percolate up to lower the cost of traditional Western models, and the computational power engineered into the average car today leads to major feature jumps relative to models from just 5 years ago.  The $25,000 car of 2020 will be superior to the $50,000 car of 2005 in every measurable way. 

By 2016, consumer behavior will change to a mode where people consider it normal to 'upgrade' their perfectly functioning 6-year-old cars to get a newer model with better electronic features.  This may seem odd, but people did not tend to replace fully functional television sets before they failed until the 2003 thin-TV disruption.  The Impact of Computing pulls ever-more products into a rapid trajectory of improvement. 

By 2018, self-driving cars will be readily available to the average US consumer, and will constitute a significant fraction of cars on the highway.  This will revise existing assumptions about highway speeds and acceptable commute distances, and will further impede the real estate prices of expensive areas. 

6) The Mobile Internet revolution, which I wrote about in October of 2009, is already transforming the way consumers in developed markets access the Internet.  The bigger disruption is the entry of 1 billion new Internet users from emerging economies.  While many of these people have relatively little education compared to Western Internet users, as the West shrinks as a fraction of total Internet mindshare, many Western cultural quirks that are seen as normal might be seen for the minority positions that they are.  Thomas Friedman's concept of the world being 'flat' has not even begun to fully manifest. 

7) The energy sector is in the midst of multiple disruptions, which will introduce competition between sectors that were previously unrelated.  Electrical vehicles displace oil consumption with electricity, even while the electricity itself starts to be generated through nuclear, solar, and wind.  The electrical economy will be further transformed by revolutions in lighting and batteries.  Cellulostic ethanol will arrive in 2012, and further replace billions of gallons of gasoline.  I wrote in October 2007 why I want oil to surpass $120/barrel and stay there (it subsequently was above that level for a mere 6-week period in 2008).  This leads to why I claim that 'Peak Oil', far from being fatal for civilization, will actually be a topic few people even mention in 2020.  The creative destruction in energy will extend to the geopolitical landscape, where we will see many petrotyrannies much weaker in 2020 than they are today. 

8) Despite the efforts of Democrats to create a system unfavorable to advancement in healthcare and biotechnology, innovation continues on several fronts (partly due to Asian nations compensating for US shortfalls).  One disruption is robotic surgery, where incisions can be narrow instead of the customary practice of making incisions large enough for the surgeon's hands, which in turn often necessitates sawing open the sternum, pelvis, etc.  Intuitive Surgical is a company that already has a market cap of $14 Billion. 

The biggest disruption, however, is that the globalization of technology is enabling medical tourism.  In the US, about twice as much is spent on healthcare per person as in other OECD countries.  If manufacturing and software work can be offshored, so can many aspects of healthcare, which is much more expensive than manufacturing or software engineering ever became in the US.  This will correct inflated salaries in the healthcare sector, return the savings to consumers, and force innovations and systemic improvements in all OECD countries. 

9) By all accounts, the cost of genome sequencing has plunged faster than any other technology, ever (it is less clear how this was accomplished, and whether the next 4 years will see a comparable drop).  I tend to be skeptical about such eye-popping numbers, because if something became so much cheaper so quickly, yet it still didn't sweep over the world, then maybe it was not so valuable after all. 

But it is also possible that while the raw data is now available cheaply, there is not yet enough of a community that instructs people why they should get their genome sequenced, and how to use their data.  The Economist has a special report on the implications of inexpensive genome sequencing. 

10) Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly inundated with the trivialities of young people, or of older people who never matured, who think they have an audience far larger than it is.  However, these mediums have been used to horizontally organize interest groups and movements for political change that know no distance barriers or boundaries. 

Blogs have shattered the hold that traditional media had on the release of information and opinions, and the revenues of newspapers, magazines, and network television have tumbled.  The Tea Party movement in the US was started by a very small number of people, but has surged with a momentum that has reshaped the American landscape in just one year, and, irony of ironies, the Tea Party is spreading to overtaxed Britain.  The next Iranian revolution will not only use Twitter and YouTube, but will have millions of collaborators outside of Iran, operating out of their own homes. 

11) The financial services industry is overdue for disruption, and this was the cover story of Wired Magazine for March 2010, and was a structure established in an era when computing power needed to process transactions was expensive.  Today, several startups are seeking to change the way money is transacted to eliminate this cut that incumbent companies take.  Major financial services companies will see shrinkages in revenue, and will have to innovate and create new value-added services, or accept a diminishment. 

Aside from this effectively being a sizable 'tax cut' for the economy, this is particularly valuable as a complement to mobile Internet penetration in poorer regions, as the capacity to conduct web micro-transactions without fees will be an essential element of human development.  The highly successful concept of micro-finance will be augmented when transaction fees that consumed a high percentage of these sub-$10 transactions are minimized. 

12) 3-D Printing will soon be accessible to small businesses and households.  This transforms everything from commodity consumer goods to the construction of buildings.  An individual could download a design and print it at home, rather than be restricted to only those products that can be mass produced.  It is quite possible that by 2025, construction of basic structures takes less than one-tenth the time that it does today, which, of course, will deflate the value of all existing buildings in the world at that time. 

So we see there are at least 12 ways in which our daily lives will shift considerably in just the next few years.  The typical process of creative destruction results in X wealth being destroyed, and 2X wealth being created instead, but by different people.  For each of the 12 disruptions listed, 'X' might be as much a $1 Trillion.  As a result, the US economy might be mired in a long-term situation where vanishing industries force many laid off workers to start in new industries at the entry level, for half of their previous compensation, even as new fortunes created by the new industries cause net wealth increases.  The US could see a continuation of high unemployment combined with high productivity gains and corporate earnings growth for several years to come.  Big paydays for entrepreneurs will make the headlines frequently, right alongside stories of people who have to accept permanent 50% pay reductions.  This would be the 'new normal'. 

Income diversification is the golden rule of the early 21st century.  Those that fail to create and maintain multiple streams of income are imperiling themselves.  The hottest career one can embark on, which will never be obsolete, is that of the serial entrepreneur. 

 

Comments

[Xamuel]

I, for one, welcome all this creative destruction. What are your thoughts on the education bubble?

[The Futurist]

Xamuel,

Excellent question. I wrote about this in April 2007. I wanted to add that in, but 12 was a better number than 13 :)

Education is even more of a bubble than healthcare or real-estate. Many websites offer 1:1 interactive education.

Massive disintermediation would seem natural. The reason this is delayed is due to accreditation issues. Companies like 2Tor.com are attempting to address this, by garnering real accreditation for low-cost, online degrees.

In general, more and more learning of importance will be done outside of school, for little or no cost.

Note that public school teachers are not just overpaid relative to hours/months worked per year, but the *number* of them at the trough is inflated too. The construct of 'class size' does not seem to cause detriment at top Business Schools, where class sizes of 65 are the norm, and $45,000/yr tuition is charged.

[David Gobel]

Thanks very much for your article! Another creative destruction of which you are no doubt aware: AI piloted aircraft which moots the pilot and lowers the barrier leading to game/joystick flying by folks who can merely drive a car. The Predator is *not* part of this group as it requires a constant comm connection, and an actual pilot on the ground. Instead, systems such as GlobalHawk and Skyraider from Proxy Aviation will allow low(ish) cost aircraft to take off, fly/navigate/adjust to conditions/land in VFR and IFR conditions, and even react to a goat wandering onto the landing strip at the last second during landing.

This should/will create a vast and very much needed new industry (JOBS!!) to complete the Railroad -> Car, centralized/scheduled -> private/unscheduled/distributed transportation paradigm shift in/from commercial airlines -> private/zipcar-ed air traffic.

this can increase radius and coverage area of travel per unit time by an order or more of magnitude, redefine "suburbs" and is deflationary for real estate.

[Bernard Denis]

So much to say, first on the last comment, how can you compare an adult paying $45 000 for a class that he will definitely listen to very carefully, with all the learned methods of concentration and focus one acquires through years of practice; to a class of kids forced to go to a place where they do not know what is expected of them...

On another subject, I understand that 12 was better then 13, but much is missing, the world will be changed in much of the ways you mention, but there are many more implications. Borders which are so completely useless have to be eliminated, wealth redistribution is to be addressed by the people for the people if we want an enduring prosperity and a new world creation.

The transition will be a destruction of many standards, but it will need world adherence, which is years away, because fanaticism and religion still thrive here on earth.

Human statistical governance is on the rise, who will use it is to be defined. As of today large corporations and governments are studying it, but with emergence of larger networks of individuals, "JUNTO" being a good start, we may find a good use to it. But we will need to spread the word outside of english speaking 60K plus middle class users. Learn languages or start using real time translators.

Keep up the good work, every futurist will discover some mistakes he made with time.

[Thucydides]

Good to see you back. Congrats on the success of The Misandry Bubble.

[Zyndryl]

The Futurist,

In the 'Can Buildings be "Printed"? article, you say this at the end:

For me to be convinced, I would have to see:

1. Articles on this device in mainstream publications like The Economist, BusinessWeek, MIT Technology Review, or Popular Mechanics.
2. The ability to at least print simple constructs like concrete perimeter walls or sidewalks at a rate and cost several times superior to current methods. Only then can more complex structures be on the horizon.

I will revisit this technology if either of these two conditions is solidly met.

Well, technically you are 'revisiting' the technology by mentioning it in this article. Have your opinions on this technology been upgraded or are the same as written in the original article?

[Zyndryl]

And, Futurist, I noticed that you didn't mention nanotech in this. Any particular reason?

[The Futurist]

Zyndryl,

For printing of buildings, I said 'quite possible by 2025', which still does not indicate solid progress. But I have not upgraded an opinion on it since then.

I did not mean to convey that I would 'never mention it unless XYZ makes it more probable'.

Nanotech : It isn't really a disruption of a sector in the shorter scale being addressed here, but I do mention 'nanomaterials in cars'.

[Zyndryl]

Sorry, what I meant by 'nanotech' was molecular manufacturing, medical nanobots, etc.

Thanks.

[Daniel Hasbo]

Hmm. I'd like you to comment on the possible superpower the European Union.
Also surveillance and the coming of the maybe future NWO.

[The Futurist]

Daniel Hasbro,

Your question was answered on May 8 over here.

The EU will never be a superpower, because the EU is not a country.

[Zyndryl]

The EU will be a superpower. The Insolvency Superpower.

We will end up being the number two Insolvency Superpower at the rate we keep going, too.

[Daniel Hasbo]

Well the EU does not need to be a country. See 20 years ago EU was very small. 20 years later we got a parliament, common foreign policy, the EURO. An army is in the process(eurocorps,eu battlegroups,SAFE) and the lisbon treaty allows such an army to come to life. In 20 years after maybe 2 treaties i think you'll see a much closer EU with a common defence and such.

[Big Jay]

Great post. As always. I originally found this site from a link on one of Marshall Brain's blogs, but it has become a favorite.

Its interesting to me how the impact of computing is finally making its way into the financiers territory. They've been trying to stave off deflationary pressures for hundreds of years through regulation and limits to competition.

[me.yahoo.com/a/BaMfxVQ.qY6RSpb0J3ON5l6AWmqp]

I have posted of the Kondratieff economic downturn at this site for years. Now we have the beginning.

America will suffer a currency crisis probably after the 2012 elections by the end of 2013. The Dollar crisis will be worldwide because of its 'reserve currency' status.

Creative Destructionism as a concept was developed by a follower of Kondratieff who believed that Capitalism would reassert itself and thrive following a 'winter'.

Computers did not exist then. Now the world is flooded with Trillions of dollars worth of DERIVATIVES that are muliples of the world's GDP. The Dollar crisis will result in failed counterparties and the failure of the world of Derivatives that are mostly interest rate gambles and to a lesser degree CDS gambling on defaulting debt instruments.

[jeffolie]

Creative Destructionism requires freedoms and a somewhat fair marketplace. When thieves steal your intellectual property and/or propietary industrial processes, then investing in research and development declines in value to the point of almost not making it worth doing.

Today, China and India plus others rarely protect 'creative destructionism' by ignoring and in some cases sponsoring the stealing of new developments. China and India often protect their markets by requiring foreigners to 'partner' with locals thus forcing the foreigners to effectively give away half of their plants and/or companies.

America does not effectively require 'fair' trading and/or industrial practices. China and India are allowed to 'create' industries that sell to the EU and America without the same labor or environmental safeguards. The 'Destructionism' of American and EU since the 1970s has resulted from the 'Creationism' of wage and environmental arbitrage promoting pollution and bad working conditions by multinational corporations and corrupt governments.

Creative Destruction is not happening as a good result as practiced today.

[Basil Ransom]

Perhaps it's my optimism, but we may see some creative destruction in the food sector. Corn is highly subsidized while there are high tariffs on sugar, skewing our consumption of corn-based products like high-fructose corn syrup up and cane sugar down. Sugar-based ethanol, based on the Brazilian model, may be competitive if tariffs are lifted. Also, nutritionists are slowly coming around to the reality that fats, particularly saturated fats, are not the problem, but overly processed foods are, such as refined carbohydrates and cured meats.

Education is a potential bubble, but until standardized tests pose a viable alternative of certification of ability, the education bureaucracy will remain strong.

GK, I could not post a comment on the misandry essay, so I'm writing it below:

Great essay, a terrific summation of contemporary relations between the sexes.

As for the Venusian Arts, they doe little to puncture the misandry bubble. As long as game is just a petty bag of tricks to get women into bed, it will do nothing but perpetuate the current state of affairs. For game to have a positive impact, it must endow men with a great sense of dignity and self-respect.

Men must take up the tool of women and shame unacceptable behavior. On the micro-scale, women behave badly because men tolerate it. The best way to make a woman question herself is to surround her with a chorus of critics. Men must realize that white-knighting will not get them laid. But none of this is happening, and nor is game helping.

FWIW, Roissy, Roosh et al are nobodies on the PUA circuit. Search the popular forums (which I don't patronize), and among thousands of posts, they are rarely mentioned. Aspiring pickup artists are not contemplative rakes like Roissy, just socially unadept guys trying to get laid.

IMO, legalizing prostitution has a better chance of improving the situation than game does.

[The Futurist]

Basil Ransom,

Could not post? Did you scroll to the 2nd, 3rd, etc. page of comments? Comments are now on the 5th page.

For game to have a positive impact, it must endow men with a great sense of dignity and self-respect.

I think it does that, but this is not covered in a lot of the mainstream material. Too much is focussed on twenty-something pickup.

[Basil Ransom]

Speaking of video games, cloud computing may end the use of consoles and powerful PCs to play video games. Computations are done server-side, and the graphics are piped in to a modest computer. There may be no Playstation 4 or Xbox 720, no more upgrading your PC's video card or processor. The PC requirements are a computer running XP, Seven, or Vista, or an Intel-based OS X machine. Perhaps no more consoles, smaller number of and role for publishers, game store sales decline or disappear, less piracy. The same could happen with movies for the same reasons. We'll know a lot more in just a couple weeks on the potential of this technology. The necessity of high bandwidth connections are the only obstacle.

The company OnLive is deploying this technology tomorrow for PC, and for console games in the months ahead.

[Geoman]

Good article - I can't think of much left out, although I would like to see you discuss resources, specifically the availability of raw materials in this bright new future.

I remember science fiction novels by..who was that? Niven? Where in the future everyone was on the dole, since machines and higher productivity had destroyed most of the jobs. If only six men run the entire car factory, who buys the cars?

On a side note...I thought the misandry bubble post was interesting as well, but we were well past time time to move the conversation over to other topics. There has been desperately repetitive and persistently dull comments posted there for the last few weeks. I'd almost given up on you...

[The Futurist]

Geoman,

Of raw materials, most will not be a shortage problem. Coal and gas are already too abundant to ever use up, and the 'peak oil' topic has been discussed in the past as too alarmist. New alternatives + efficiency improvements move that problem down-list.

There has been desperately repetitive and persistently dull comments posted there for the last few weeks. I'd almost given up on you...

Well, I have to beat up all the weirdos, even if they are all the same (and their tactics already pre-empted in the article).

Given up? The Misandry Bubble got more traffic than *any* other article here, and is still about half of the incoming traffic despite not being on the top anymore. I think it has made a small difference in the national dialog, on what will be the most serious issue of the coming decade.

[jeffolie]

Creative Destructionism will look a lot like plain Destructionism during the 'winter'.

I predict the big picture to include a Dollar crisis after the 2012 elections, most likely by the end of 2013 that will result in the end of the financial world as we know it. Politically, I predict the US Constitution will survive as the basis of American politics. Socially, all manor of bad behavior may happen in America for a short period of as much as months.

I have posted that this coming intermediate period is similar to 1937 when government declined and general economics declined. American Austerity NOW and EuroTrash Austerity NOW are just starting.

Near term I continue to predict an economic decline immediately ahead after consumer spending turns down which should happen no later than the end of July. I predict that there are many parts that will lead to 'the feeling of hopelessness that will be common by the end of October'. I predict among the many parts that will exist to include: declining stock prices, declining incomes, declining metals prices, declining polls for incumbent federal politicans, declining crime, declining Gulf coast life/lifestyles, decline 10 year Treasury yields, declining Euro prices, declining state & local government payrolls, declining housing prices & rents, declining commodities including gasoline prices.

My views evolved from reading Kondratieff in the 1960s while in college.

I agree with the following from Wikipedia:

............."Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history.[1] In the extreme, the concept hypothetically assumes the form of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, which has been written about in various forms since antiquity and was described in the 19th century by Heinrich Heine[2] and Friedrich Nietzsche.[3]

..............."While it is often remarked that "History repeats itself," in cycles of less than cosmological duration this cannot be strictly true. That was appreciated by Mark Twain, who has been quoted as saying: "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme."[4][5]

..............."The contemplation of historic recurrences tends to induce a peculiar sense of "convergence" or "resonance," or perhaps déjà vu.[6] This sense is best conveyed by examples, three of which follow. Each juxtaposes paired events, widely separated in time and geography, which might not have been set side by side before the advent of the Annales School and of more recent historiographies such as "Big History," "World History" and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.

----------------------------------------------------------

To the extent that Elliot Wave Principle and other theories apply, the world does not repeat exactly. For example, computers did not exist back then and now the dominant financial instruments worldwide are Derivatives that are multiples of America's GDP even in 'nominal' values.

As to Kondratieff, he viewed the world as a struggle of mainly capitalism against socialism/communism. That no longer predominates in my view because Globalism with wage arbitrage predominates the financial world while religions predominate the political cultures without the imminent threat of billions engaged in armed World Wide conflict. Kondratieff's views (few actually read his translated works) were often rewritten wrongly by subsequent economists that made names for themselves.

[Zyndryl]

The Constitution will survive? Define 'survive'.

If it gets 'reinterpreted' beyond recognition but still there (sort of like the Queen of Britain), I wouldn't call that 'surviving'.

[jeffolie]

Politics and economics are 2 sides of the same coin. Simplistically put, bad politics results in economic failure. Economic failure promotes the rise of bad politics.

Creative Destructionism was an optimistic political/economic view that the ineffective and inefficient would die off during the 'winters', depressions and allow better, more technologically advanced industries to replace the stagnant, old, politically supported industries.

American politics include creative destructionism as bankruptcy. The genesis of the bankruptcy power is the Bankruptcy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution provides that Congress shall have the power "to establish . . . uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States." U.S. Const. art. 1, section 8.

American politics and the constitution are 'reinterpreted' by the courts and legislative actions.

American politics/policies change from one era to the next. Americans were reluctant to enter WWI and WWII. Sometimes America wants no part in foriegn dealings/wars while sometimes America has been extremely envolved in foriegn dealings/wars such as since WWII. Ron Paul speaks for isolationism now and may be the next president and/or present the face of the next era of isolationism. The 'politics of the backlash', TeaBagger movement is focused on America's borders, immigration, racial demographics as an inwardly minded, collapsing empire seeking to cut expenses and budgets. Even Obama has again restated his promise to start withdrawls in Afghanistan in July 2011.

The West has surrendered and is slowly just started to withdraw its projection of force. The West will stop empire building in the coming years. The West has no longer the will to spread Democracy and merely fades away from the ethical and moral high ground. Championing religious and political freedoms is no longer popular in the age of 'the American Family gone viral' where a child rarely reachs 18 years old with their biological father as their mother's husband.

[Zyndryl]

"The genesis of the bankruptcy power is the Bankruptcy Clause of the U.S. Constitution."

That wasn't to promote bankruptcy, but to suppress it. That was because at the time of governance under the Articles of Confederation, states would pass their own bankruptcy acts that would deliberately allow people to screw over creditors out of state. It was a severe problem at that time and so it was federalized because of it.

"American politics and the constitution are 'reinterpreted' by the courts and legislative actions."

Which means the Constitution will not survive. That 'living document' nonsense is for those who want to get around the stringent amendment requirements. That is all. It is unconstitutional but intellectually tolerated. Tolerated unconstitutional activities = dead Constitution, period.

"It's dead, Jim!"

[WebFroze]

Since I am a aeronautical engg. I feel little bad to see that my industry is also affected by Video conferencing. Anyway we have to accept. You have mentioned many sectors but what about the education sector?

[The Futurist]

I feel little bad to see that my industry is also affected by Video conferencing.

Webfroze,

Go to the telepresence link, and see how it may induce an aeronautical leap. Passenger planes have not gotten faster in the last 40 years, but this may be the push that is needed for airlines to make hypersonic flight cost-effective (i.e. they will have to do it in order to survive).

[jeffolie]

The Futurist are you watching Tesla? Shares of electric car maker Tesla soar in IPO debut after offering raises more than expected. Tesla shares are trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol "TSLA."

The company also has a high-profile CEO. Musk was a co-founder of Internet payment service PayPal and currently runs rocket manufacturer Space Exploration Technologies.

Tesla is a bet on the future of the electric car industry, which isn't currently a big draw for U.S. consumers. The IPO also comes at a time when volatile broader markets have dampened investors' taste for risk, particularly for companies with a history of losses or high debt levels.

The company hasn't had a profitable quarter since it was founded in 2003. It has sold only 1,000 of its high-end Roadster sports cars.

Investors are hoping that a planned lower-priced car will have a broader appeal.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Tesla-Motors-shares-surge-in-apf-4181475241.html?x=0

[The Futurist]

jeffolie my friend,

Things have come a long way.

I recall you used to say there is no way Tesla's cars could be effective for the market (Dec 2006) :
http://www.singularity2050.com/2006/12/the_tesla_roads.html#comments

..and that Tesla is a scam and fraud (Sept 2007):
http://www.singularity2050.com/2007/09/businessweek-sl.html?cid=83063671#comment-6a00d83452455969e200e54edf887b8833

Tesla was one of my 'Nine Tantalizing Startups' from Feb 2008.

[jeffolie]

Tesla may become effective for the market but as to selling electric cars Tesla is not yet effective. Tesla remains mostly hype and myth because it does not have a sound, profitable business model. Tesla sells very expensive cars and very few of them.

Today you can put your money where your mouth is by buying Tesla stock at $25. Like most IPOs TSLA would have been nearly impossible to buy at its initial offering price of $17. I bet TSLA will be trading lower a year from now and TSLA will probably not be priced at $5 in inflation adjusted dollar ten years from now.

[Zyndryl]

Tesla might wind up being the Pets.com of the electric car 'early phases' industry. You never know.

[jeffolie]

While I am long term optimistic, I am not optimistic for car buying over the next year. Tesla will be fighting a difficult economy and competition from the soon to be sold Nissan Leaf. There will be a market for mass produced electric cars someday but I am unwilling to predict when except that it probably will not do TSLA much good as I do not like the company.

[The Futurist]

Tesla has had problems with missing deadlines. Their $50,000 car was initially meant for 2010 launch, but now is 2012.

I personally would not buy the stock.

But that is very different from calling it a 'scam' and 'fraud' as jeffolie did a couple of years ago.

[Zyndryl]

I don't think of Tesla as a scam. Just a lost cause that will help the industry niche it is pioneering in.

BTW, Jeffolie was right about the 'Obamavilles' forming. It was Jeffolie who predicted that, correct?

Huge tent city takes root

Homeless camps cover 50 acres, from Waipio Point, around Middle Loch to Pearl City

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/20100627_Huge_tent_city_takes_root.html

Jeffolie also predicted that widespread bulldozing of homes by the FHA/Fannie/Freddie behemoths would occur. I've been reading about articles where that very 'solution' is now seriously being considered.

[The Futurist]

Jeffolie was right about the 'Obamavilles' forming. It was Jeffolie who predicted that, correct?

Yes he did. Before Nov. 2008 in fact.

[Anapaest]

The Futurist,

I apologise if this could have been posted in a more relevant post but I could't find one.

What are your views on the recent Google/Verizon movements towards the supposed 'net neutrality' which is an obvious way to stamp competition and effectively create 2 internets. If you catch my drift, i'm sure you have vast networking experience.

This creative path that we walk can be blocked my corporations to make that extra dime. The advancement of technology surely depends on peoples ability to innovate. The internet is a breeding ground for innovation and if it is censored/changed/damaged in anyway then it will veer us off course.

The FCC will have to fight this to the death and I fear that if this goes ahead then a major catalyst for change will have been destroyed. For the very reason the internet is great, innovation, is the reason it is at risk. This smells a bit like the Windows monopoly in the 90's to me. Except the stakes are much higher here.

Thoughts?

Anapaest

[The Futurist]

Annapaest,

I'm not too worred about that. The Internet itself is branching out from websites to apps, and the 1990s Window monopoly weakened in dominance relatively quickly.

[David Collard]

"While many of these people have relatively little education compared to Western Internet users, as the West shrinks as a fraction of total Internet mindshare, many Western cultural quirks that are seen as normal (such as institutionalized misandry sustained by an ever-expanding state) might be seen for the aberrations that they are."

Good point. This kind of blogger may be a case of what you describe:

http://muslimpatriarch.blogspot.com/

[Orlando]

Which media do you refer for economics / high finance?

[Bowers & Wilkins P5]

The advancement in the technology has really been a boon and a bane in many ways over the time and many new things evolved and some got washed away from this advancement.

The common men has to cope up with it and find some other means to get revenue if the previous one has been affected due to the technology advancement and it is happening thus from years.

Shared some interesting thoughts in the post and enjoyed it while reading. Thanks and awaiting to read more.

[M. Simon]

The advance of sequencing: the problem may be one of scale.

Look at it from this point of view: suppose I can make gasoline today for 1 cent a gallon. Yes it will disrupt the market (at once on the news) but the initial disruption will be temporary until I can scale up from 1cc an hour to billions of tons a year. That will take time - but the demand is already established.

For sequencing the demand was very small at the high prices but because of the problems of deployment a drastic drop will not affect the market significantly for a while. The same happened with microcomputers. How many microcomputers were sold in 1975? Probably less than 10,000. Things didn't start to take off until IBM unified (mostly) the market around '82. Once the deployment was significant it accelerated.

Or think Internet. The computers were there. Phone lines were there. And I was a late adopter in Dec. '75 when there were already 20 million users on line. Things didn't really take off until broadband became common. Streaming movies (or even YouTube clips) over phone lines was either for the hard core or the desperate (I gotta see that clip).

Price is not the only determination of speed of deployment. And really. Things don't get moving until hackers start experimenting. Which has only happened in the last year or so.

[M. Simon]

This is a heads up:

The Democrat's 2012 Victory Plan

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/09/the_democrats_2012_victory_plan.html

[Paul Gordon]

Disruption and destruction are such negative words. But thanks for providing this article. We can use this positively for technological terms.

[Geoman]

This is worth a 10 year look back:

1) Video Conferencing: This is the year it broke through. It has been gaining this last decade, but I think the days of in person training and large meetings is over. Despite an early lead Skype failed badly, and now it is MS teams and Zoom.

2) Surface Computing: more or less correct. What we see is it slowly becoming ubiquitous, just a thing we never consider.

3) The complete and total transformation of video games into the dominant form of home entertainment: hard to say - it has certainly become a massive form of entertainment, but TV and movies have persisted. My observation is TV, movies, and video games have become more integrated, with one feeding another. A successful movie will spawn a Tv show, or a video game, and a video game will inspire a movie.

4) The book-publishing industry: Still alive, but dying slowly. POD has arisen, but not taken over as yet. Kindle has not destroyed books for one simple reason - the publishers insist on full price for a kindle book, even though their costs are next to zero to publish.

5) The automobile is undergoing multiple major transformations at once: This is ongoing. I saw a RAV 4 Prime hybrid for sale - 94 MPGe. And of course the surge in electrics. "The $25,000 car of 2020 will be superior to the $50,000 car of 2005 in every measurable way." Likely true. I happened to just buy a $25k Hyundai for my daughter this last year - lovely car for very little money.

"By 2016, consumer behavior will change to a mode where people consider it normal to 'upgrade' their perfectly functioning 6-year-old cars to get a newer model with better electronic features." Too true. Even cars from 2016 pale in comparison with 2020 cars. the new cars have so much more connectivity.

"By 2018, self-driving cars will be readily available to the average US consumer, and will constitute a significant fraction of cars on the highway." Hasn't happened yet. But by 2025? Seems likely. It will be very soon. Tesla is selling cars with a self driving package.

6) The Mobile Internet revolution: yep.

7) The energy sector: "Electrical vehicles displace oil consumption with electricity" - yes. "The electrical economy will be further transformed by revolutions in lighting and batteries" happening now. Did anyone guess we'd be using less electricity in 2020 than we did in 2010? "Cellulostic ethanol will arrive in 2012" Unfortunately it bombed out. In retrospect, as EVs become more popular, demand for gasoline (and prices) will shrink. And fracking changed the whole ball game.

"This leads to why I claim that 'Peak Oil', far from being fatal for civilization, will actually be a topic few people even mention in 2020." Well that sure was the case. But we hit peak demand before we hit peak oil.

"The creative destruction in energy will extend to the geopolitical landscape, where we will see many petrotyrannies much weaker in 2020 than they are today." exactly. And I haven't shed a tear.

8) healthcare and biotechnology: nothing much changed there.

9) "By all accounts, the cost of genome sequencing has plunged faster than any other technology": It's cheap enough I did genetic testing on my dog (he's a lab/husky/Great Dane/Australian shepherd mix). I had my own genes sequenced as part of a routine doctor's visit (they were concerned I might have Rheumatoid arthritis. Genes say nope).

10) "Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. are mostly inundated with the trivialities of young people, or of older people who never matured, who think they have an audience far larger than it is. However, these mediums have been used to horizontally organize interest groups and movements for political change that know no distance barriers or boundaries." Yes. And it has not been a good thing, in total.

11) "The financial services industry is overdue for disruption" I think this has happened.

12) "3-D Printing will soon be accessible to small businesses and households." This is slowly growing as a business - I think there are elements of "Very cool, but what's it for?" A lot like the laser - an invention with seemingly infinite potential that no one (at first) could seem to think of what to do with. But it is slowly changing our world.

I'd say you are doing very well with your predictions - Most right, a few wrong, and a few that seem right, but have been delayed perhaps another 5 years. Well Done!

[Kartik Gada]

Thanks, Geoman, for checking back.

70-90% accuracy is pretty much the highest among Futurists. There are almost none who even still make predictions. Another dimension of accuracy here is that there is no major technological revolution missed (which is just as important as the 'bottom up' list of what disruptions we will see).

Also note that in the elapsed 10 years, the ATOM percentage of the world economy has risen from 1.6-1.7%, to 3% now. Rising to 6% will take the same, or less time (i.e. 2029-30).