Future Promise

By Bruce Firestone | Uncategorized

Sep 14

What does the future promise? Here are a few @profbruce fearless predictions:

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Start counting 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … Tell me when you’re done

  • What is the one thing we are sure is infinite? Cosmos? Money? Time? No, it’s ideas
  • The Internet is just a baby
  • It’s where electrification was at the end of its 2nd decade
  • It will eat EVERYTHING—tv, film, newspapers, banking, telecom, insurance, publishing, music, healthcare, government services, all services, all products, all innovation, every niche, every biz model
  • Jack Welch said that in all his years at GE, nothing, not jet engines, rockets, credit cards, CDs, DVDs, LEDs, calculators, sonar, bar codes,  ATMs, LCDs, video games, post-it notes, personal computers, cell phones, personal printers, laser printers, faxes, liposuction, MRIs, spreadsheets, walkman, windows, HDTV, Viagra, Segways, hybrids, YouTube, nothing compares to the advent of the Internet
  • Everything old is new again—look to the Encyclopedia Britannica circa 1930s for inspiration
  • DodoCase won Shopify’s first contest—they brought San Fran’s bookbinding traditions back to life
  • They fabricate American-made iPad and iPhone cases, laptop sleeves, wallets and folios  
  • They manufacture things locally and keep the art of bookbinding alive and well by adapting it to a world of e-readers and iPads
  • Each DODOcase cover has its own unique character and is handmade in San Francisco using techniques developed many years ago
  • Plus they wrap a modern (Internet-integrated) biz model around it
  • They mass customize their products by reversing out the design of each one to their customers as in BUILD YOUR OWN DODO
  • New industries are being born right now—e.g., 3-D printing
  • Need a new dress for prom or your company’s Xmas party?
  • Your personal 3-D printer will print one out for you in a couple of hours
  • Quantum computing will finally arrive
  • Infinite speed/bandwidth
  • Artificially intelligent agents will arrive… soon!
  • They’ll help you with your school work, your taxes, managing your social networks, research, writing, taking notes, answering your phone, screening your calls, paying your bills, babysitting your kids (when you have them), diagnosing illnesses, writing your shopping list, solving problems, reminding you of your appointments, writing emails, posting to social media, translating in real time as you speak or are spoken to in a language not your own…

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Pet3r, the first Quantum Entity

  • They’ll never dump you like your last boyfriend just did (or girlfriend)
  • The internal time clock of the Internet speeds up as AI beings do more work inside what Neal Stephenson called the Metaverse (Snow Crash, 1992)
  • Personal productivity soars
  • Privacy is a joke—you have none
  • Creatives will get wealthier
  • Income disparity becomes even more pronounced
  • SCOTUS will have to decide at what point these artificial entities acquire human rights
  • Leisure is the new infrastructure… entertainment components will be added to almost every new project
  • It will generate far more economic activity than simply building a new road or putting in additional municipal services
  • Drones will do more than kill people remotely… they will become household members; they’ll fetch pizza, do errands, deliver and carry things for you, even babysit your kids for you…
  • It will be even more of a self help planet so people who can curate and guide you through complex processes will be valuable https://www.eqjournal.org/?p=3289
  • Machine to machine Internet will be huge– your fridge will talk to your drone who will fly to the corner store and get you a liter of milk without being told by you to do that; it’s called the Internet of Things (IoT)–basically every object becomes smart and can be connected to the Internet/potential trillion dollar business
  • Self driving cars will change transportation industry and perhaps the way we see and use cars

  • World’s no 1 economy will be China

  • First people on Mars will be… Chinese
  • Arthur C Clark’s elevators to space will be built on the moon and Mars not Earth
  • Alzheimer’s will be a forgotten disease
  • Weather forecasts will still suck
  • Digitally recorded film/video/books/blogs/photos/images will vanish into the void as websites/apps evolve and disappear or are replaced
  • Entertainers/starchitects/elite artists/writers etc will make more money after they die
  • Homes will be smaller
  • You will design your own home/plant a seed and nanoscale engines will custom build it for you
  • The skin of every building will produce power
  • Homes convert to DC power (which runs RVs) from AC as more micro-grids develop and local power production goes up/potential 8% savings in switching to DC because power is generated in DC, transformed to AC for transmission (AC is much more efficient for wide area transmission) and re-converted to DC for use by most appliances with loss each time

  • Every wall will be a full-on, 2-way digital media wall

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Ellen Interacting with her Media Wall

  • Cities will be taller and denser
  • The US follows Canada’s model and bans gated communities as being too elitist and divisive
  • Neo-urbanists will win/NIMBY’ites will lose in the struggle to build better, more sustainable urban centres
  • Elon Musk’s Hyperloop will take people from NYC to LA in 45 minutes at an average speed of 4,000 mph
  • Goog turns into Skynet
  • Wearable computers will be everywhere
  • Farm-in-a-box replaces industrial farms
  • Humanity creates vast, connected zones where humans are forbidden to enter
  • Human population begins a long decline
  • Buildings turn transparent as the Internet is overlaid on RL (Real Life)
  • Mega cities will dominate innovation and creativity
  • Everyone will have at least five or six careers

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Nina—motocross racing/guitar-playing/rave attending/mediatronic programming/quantum data strategist/church-going/coffee house owning/half Hopi princess/rock n roll girl from Cal living in Texas w/ fluent French and some Swedish living in a time (2089) when all seems lost except hope (Quantum Entity | The Successors)

  • More and more people will develop and own PB4Ls (Personal Businesses for Life)
  • More people will become entrepreneurs and self-employed
  • The minimum wage will become a truly living wage as personal productivity increases even in service industries and retail
  • Workers become curators and teachers
  • Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs turn to more self-capitalization techniques looking to future customers and suppliers as well as strategic partners for resources to start new enterprises or introduce new products and services 
  • People will crave authenticity and locally grown food and locally developed products
  • Quality and brand will matter even more
  • Community—online and RL will matter more too
  • Strangely, people who are all about the money will have none and people who are all about building insanely great products and services as well as giving back to their communities will have it all
  • Organizations will develop biz models that have both a for-profit component (e.g., Tony Greco Lean and Fit) and NFP (Tony Greco Foundation to Fight Childhood Obesity)
  • Organizations will discover that what they’ve been doing in terms of customer service has made that term an oxymoron
  • Banks and lenders that use credit scores and scoring machines to make all their decisions will be replaced by human-scale lenders
  • Companies like credit card processor Square that enable individuals and SMEEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) to start processing payments in minutes instead of months and with fees that are a fraction of large banks will end bank dominance in many parts of the industry
  • Ditto pensions funds and insurance companies
  • People will search for more kindness and tolerate bullying, cronyism and dictatorship less
  • English will prove to be unstoppable
  • There will be more people in ESL (English as a Second Language) that any other single course
  • People will feel even more alienated from their governments than they already do
  • Relationships will become more critical in a self-help world
  • Customers service will become a profit centre instead of a cost centre
  • People will never retire
  • People will work effectively into their 80s and 90s
  • People will live into their 90s and 100s
  • Get ready for a 70 year career
  • Lifetime learning will be essential
  • It’s a growth industry
  • I retrained myself (took 8 courses and 8 exams in my 50s so I could get my real estate broker license)
  • Marks were 82 to 96 so I could prove to my 5 kids, you are never too old!
  • Exercise your brain like the rest of your body
  • Financial planning becomes more vital—another growth industry
  • Yoga, physiotherapy, holistic medicine—more growth ahead
  • It’s not autos, tech, communications, entertainment that are biggest, it’s the real estate biz that is world’s biggest industry
  • Other industries that are crucial?
  • Energy, agriculture, cloud computing, marijuana, software, food processing, event planning, wineries, clothing and fashion, video and film, television arts, construction, renovation, maintenance, trades, veterinarian, restaurants, engineering,design, coder, photography, genetics, specialty foods, food trucks, mentoring, life coaching…
  • Child rearing will be much more accepted and heavily promoted/supported by societies desperate for kids
  • Age of majority, voting age, drinking age, legal age, military service age and driving age will be 16 and society will stop treating teenagers as incompetent nincompoops and recognize as well as value the energy/passion/speed/sweat equity and luck they bring to EVERYTHING
  • High schools will become obsolete as more people home school their children and other alternatives are developed including distance learning, and specialized schools for the arts, tech arts, software arts, trades develop
  • People will rediscover arts and crafts as well as wrapping modern business models around old arts and crafts to create real businesses like the re-invention of bookbinding in San Francisco by dodocase.com https://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2171 and Field Notes https://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2012
  • Elders will be rediscovered to find that they have exceptional wisdom to share/pass on  and that there are better uses for them than shuffling them off to and stacking them in vertical warehouses to await death
  • There has never been a better time to start a business!
  • Make sure you are in an industry where all boats are rising!
  • The future will surprise us!

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Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Dunno. Dunno who? Dunno the future

Bruce M Firestone

@ profbruce

@ quantum_entity

Note: with input from Patrick Trahan,  

Generation Q, the short film

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrK4v786vsk]
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About the Author

Bruce is an entrepreneur/real estate broker/developer/coach/urban guru/keynote speaker/Sens founder/novelist/columnist/peerless husband/dad.

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