The 5 Most Fantastic Technical Advances Coming in Our Future of Abundance
Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think
1) 3D Printing: Get ready to geek out because, yes, a rudimentary replicator exists. 3D printers can create everything from lampshades to prosthetic limbs out of steel, titanium, glass, and plastic among other materials. Inventor Behrokh Khoshnevis has even come up with a 3-D printer that uses concrete to build low-income housing for the third world. Granted, this isn’t as powerful or efficient as a Star Trek replicator, but when the technology improves enough to be mass produced and becomes cheap enough for most people to afford, it will be amazing. Picture it now: you’re shopping on Amazon and you see a TV you like. You then walk over to your 3D printer, hit a button, and thirty minutes later, you’re kicking back and watching House reruns. Granted, it won’t make a pork chop or materialize what you want out of thin air like a replicator, but it would represent an amazing leap forward.
2) Algae: Ethanol is the biofuel of choice in the United States and it should be considered an inefficient, over-priced failure that has driven up food costs and is being kept alive mainly because of politics. Algae, on the other hand, is an extraordinary biofuel on the horizon that’s so great that even Barack Obama’s endorsement won’t ruin it. That’s why Exxon, Shell, Boeing, Procter and Gamble, and Chevron are experimenting with algae. It can produce thirty times more energy than conventional biofuel and because it can be grown efficiently we could make enough of it to fuel all of America’s 250 million cars in an area about 17% the size of Nevada. Imagine being able to tell Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and the rest of the world’s spoiled oil brats that they can take a permanent hike because we’ve replaced them with pond scum.
3) Nearly cost-free medial diagnostics: One of the biggest societal problems we have in the Western world is the exploding cost of medical care and with our aging populations things seem likely to get worse before they get better. What kind of resources would be freed up if that trend could be dramatically reversed? Imagine being able to get X-rays for a dollar. How about a specially designed bra that does a mammogram? What about a cheap optical chip, smaller than a credit card, that can do a complete blood work-up and detect everything from AIDS to diabetes in 15 minutes? These technologies are all in the works and they would revolutionize medicine, not just by providing tools many people don’t have access to in the Third World, but by dramatically cutting costs and increasing efficiency in the First World. The less money we spend on medicine, the more money we have left for everything else!
4) Vertical farming: On a growing planet, there’s only so much room for crops. Worse yet, in some parts of the world, even if you have the land, there just isn’t enough water to make ‘em grow. This is where vertical farming comes in. You have a minimal amount of land to grow food? No problem. You can go up instead of out. Don’t have a lot of water? No problem. You can use a nutrient-rich mist that cuts water usage 70% from traditional agriculture. Better yet, it can also reduce shipping costs by allowing food production to be localized, which is no small matter because in some cases up to 70% of transportation costs come from shipping. But how effective would it be? Well, one 30-story building with a one-block footprint would grow enough produce to feed 50,000 people. That may seem like a surprisingly large amount, but keep in mind that the buildings are impervious to weather so crops can grow year round. Furthermore, vertical farming doesn’t require any great technological leaps to implement. The U.S. military has already done it successfully. The future of farming is here and it’s cheap, tasty, and efficient!
5) Robots: Who wouldn’t want a robot like Rosie from The Jetsons or C-3PO? We’re not talking about a Roomba here; we’re talking about a robot capable of walking the dog, washing dishes, and taking care of you when you’re sick. In just five years we may have robots on the market that can actually do basic work around the house and even respond to facial expressions. In twenty years, we should have robots that are capable of having nuanced, intelligent conversations. This may seem to be beyond belief, but it’s possible because of the dramatic reduction in cost of three dimensional range fingers driven by Xbox Kinect and the vast yearly increases in computing power. How much more could you accomplish if you had a robot helper around the house who could do all of the housework, chores, repairs, cooking, and other mundane daily tasks you don’t want to do?
And check out John Hawkins’ article from last week comparing the optimistic vision of the future with a darker possibility: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think VS X-Events: The Collapse of Everything
Robots will be having intelligent conversations in twenty years because computers are getting faster? I heard that twenty years ago.
It’s not a question of CPU speed. It’s many other questions combined: understanding how language works, writing the necessary software, figuring out how the robot will learn new words. Believe me, this is not trivial.
My tests: Put a child in front of the robot and ask whether it’s a boy or a girl. Then, put a dog in front of the robot and ask what it is, plus what color it is.
Good luck with that!
Ummm… jaafar, I think you should take a more careful look at the current state of robotic vision systems and facial recognition software.
Facial recognition software still can’t distinguish between male and female children–without clothing cues or lack of clothing over the genitals it’s often difficult for people to distinguish–and “vision” is not just a technical problem, in people any more than in robots. I’m reminded of a report of robot playmates for children–people were operating the robot, it wasn’t operating on a program, was in essence a puppet. Isaac Asimov has a lot to answer for.
The strange thing was the in his story, the difficult part was speech – and that was licked decades ago. And the robots were full of relays and such. The whole thing was the brain, and that was a black box.
Some kind of facial recognition works. My digital camera has a “Dog Mode” and a “Cat Mode”. When I select that mode, the camera takes a picture when it recognizes a dog or a cat. I works way better than I would have expected.
In my world, 100% of transportation costs come from shipping.
No packing or warehousing?
I’m not sure I want to have an Xbox equipped with “range fingers”. If your Xbox fingers your range, it also fingers the range of everyone else who ever played with it!
/kidding
I noticed “range fingers” too. I’m guessing he meant to say “range finders”. Here’s hoping the author will make the appropriate changes so we can read what he MEANT to write instead of the present gibberish.
Hey John, just wondering if algae is more efficient then hemp as a biofuel? Are these oil companies also growing algae in countries where hemp is legal?
Of course a single-celled plant that can be grown in a tank can be produced more efficiently than a plant whose cells differentiate functions! Hemp makes a good rope, but the plants that have good rope qualities don’t have good drug qualities, because of the distribution of energy to producing fiber or flower. Sorry for the lecture, I have a low tolerance for silliness this morning.
How about long-term investment opportunities? Right now there are at least two 3-D printer companies that are real operations beyond the reach of pump’n'dump Wall St shills: DDD, SSYS. Early days, but not by much.
What about vertical farming?
The issue I have with vertical vegetable farms is one of sunlight. Green plants (which needs photosynthesis) which grow in shade do not grow fast. As far as animal farming goes, Denmark already runs multi-story pig farms.
On the issue of algae, there is an environmental/ecological issue. And there is the question of contamination of algae farms with other organisms. Overall, plants are about 3% efficient converting sunlight into organic matter. Photovoltaic cells currently are about 10 to 15% efficient. Besides, one still have to put in a lot of energy and effort to make a product to which one sets on fire with a match.
Along with 3-D printer, I am looking forward to the programmable Universal Chemical Synthesizer, allowing anyone to make their favorite drug (99.9% of which are organic compounds).
Yeah, I have the same trouble with vertical farming. The farm casts a shadow that deprives plants behind it of light.
I think (without any basis whatsoever) that with vertical farm you grow shady plants in sunny areas. That is, a leafy plant (like lettuce or kale), which ordinary grow in more northerly climes, is grown on on a wall in a sunny southern area and subsists happily on half of the local sunlight.
The shadow cast by the vertical farm falls on things that do not need sunlight at all: warehouses, factories, parking lots.
You are correct in that the visual for the vertical farm is somewhat misleading. Basically, the concept is like a green roof, only it’s the south wall of the structure.
Isn’t the cost of drugs mainly licensing?
We live in the midst of a cargo cult. Technology and modernity are the Gods which will soon bring bounteous convenience and prosperity.
There is nothing inherently wrong with technological innovation, science-driven progress, but to worship it is something else.
Think I’m over-reacting?
Recall the video of the silly girl who got all excited and squeally because Obama was going to pay her rent and gas and all that good stuff out of his stash.
Fast forward 3 1/2 years where thousands up and down the eastern seaboard are being scammed of the SS numbers and bank routing numbers with promises of Obama paid electrical bills and mortgages. Some peoples children…
My point regarding the video of the girl actually had nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with the girl’s childish excitement over something which wasn’t there. My fault. I should have pointed that out.
We get that way. In the Eighties and Nineties, it was called technolust.
I wish I’d kept a copy of the electronics trade journal from the Eighties which listed the Magnificent Technological Advances of the previous quarter-century which had died fast and quiet. Tunnel diodes was one. OMG, at one time, ALL semiconductors of the future were going to be based on that junction’s science. It was very much like that girl in the video. Lemmings.
The point isn’t the technologies or sciences. It’s the emotions.
The most obvious drawback of 3D printing is weapon proliferation.
A 3D constructor which can “replicate” a plasma TV from a commercially-available, downloadable software “blueprint” can also create anything from a simple grenade, to a more complex time bomb, to a projectile-firing handgun or even a 400-watt+ output pulsed laser; it’s just a question of having the correct software and making sure the right amounts of the right materials are loaded in the supply bins.
And of course making sure the constructor “stage” is big enough, although modular weapons, etc., could be constructed “One Piece At A Time”, as Johnny Cash used to say.
While a fairly libertarian culture might not have much of a problem with this (anyone wanting an M-16A2 would probably just be considered a reasonably prudent individual), more “European”-style cultures, such as those favored by our modern intellectuals, would probably have screaming fits at the prospect.
And no, I do not believe any sort of security software to prevent it, or bans on the software needed to program it, will work. Even before the internet, the necessary “recipes” for almost anything could be found if you looked hard enough. And security software rarely survives its first run-in with a determined hack.
I suspect that once this is realized by our oh-so-smart ones, the usual suspects (environmentalists, etc.) will rally round to quash it. They are really amazingly predictable, when confronted by any technological advance which bodes ill for their hegemonic pretensions.
clear ether
eon
“I suspect that once this is realized by our oh-so-smart ones, the usual suspects (environmentalists, etc.) will rally round to quash it. They are really amazingly predictable, when confronted by any technological advance which bodes ill for their hegemonic pretensions.”
Of course, that is no guarantee that they will be successful in quashing 3D printers. I would expect a black market to develop very quickly, as it does for all forbidden/illegal things that are actually useful or pleasurable.
It can’t form complex machines. Guns and explosives have chemicals, moving parts. It doesn’t work that way, but it can form solid metal shapes, knives and stabbing weapons.
(OK, that was the T-1000, but the principle is the same.)
Yes, guns have moving parts. Which such a system could replicate, in metal sinterings, either one bit at a time, or (with more sophisticated software) in batches using the stage like a checkerboard; a sear here, a disconnector there, etc.
BTW, metal sinterings have been used by the firearms industry for working parts for decades. The internal workings of most Ruger self-loading pistols other than the barrel are metal sinter structures. Polymer components, like the frame and much of the trigger assembly, magazines, etc., of the Glocks, are even easier; they are, after all, plastics.
Propellants are nitro compounds; given the right raw materials (hydrocarbons come to mind) not only powder, but monolithic-grain propellant “cylinders” could be artificed, ready for loading into a cartridge case. (For an existing commercial example, Google “Pyrodex”.) In fact, such propellants are also a type of plastic, and could be made with about the same ease as polymer components. For that matter, high explosives are in the same chemical family, too.
Cartridge cases don’t have to be “brass”; given the right tensile strength, zinc, aluminum, or even plastics (again) will do. If percussion ignition is too much of a hurdle (maybe a shortage of lead picrate?), electrical ignition wouldn’t be a problem for a system capable of making that TV set.
The Germans used electrical ignition in 20mm and 30mm aircraft cannon in World war Two. Smith & Wesson used it in an experimental 9mm submachine gun firing caseless ammunition (monolithic-grain propellant, again) in the 1960s. Talk about a “mature” technology, electric ignition is older than I am.
As for bullets, going back to the Germans, the Wehrmacht issued a special armor-piercing round for 9mm SMGs in 1944. A steel-cored bullet with a sintered-zinc jacket to reduce bore wear. The cartridge case was enameled black, so people wouldn’t put it in a pistol by mistake; its breech pressures were in what is now called the “+P++” range, just short of a factory pressure-test round, or “blue pill”. Safe enough in an MP-40, with its open-bolt advanced primer ignition system (aka “slamfire when the bolt rams forward under the pressure of the recoil spring”), but probably too much even for the strong lockup of the P.08 (aka the Luger).
Guns are a lot simpler than most people think, if you take them a bit at a time. And if all else fails, well, there’s always that laser.
cheers
eon
Robots that can perform mundane tasks around the house canalso perform any manufacturing task, cheaply, 24/7 and error free. Those robots can perform all retail tasks and most or all service tasks. Paridoxically, most of the population will be unemployable, living on the bare minimum that is possible in abject squalor. Oh yes, let’s go there. faster please.
So said the buggy whip and carriage manufacturers at the turn of the 19th century.
Yet somehow how us foolish an nonadaptapble homo sapiens keep right on muddling along.
The world is filled with enough real things to frighten us. We don’t need hyperbole about things like this and the climate (thank Al Gore) to worry about.
Besides, we are all going to die from just a “teaspoon of super aids” “Butters” dad said so.
Personally, I think GPS Dots are closer to being a cultural disruptor than any of these technologies. Putting GPS in my wallet, keys, children’s backpacks, cars, my wide-roaming cat, laptop, iPad and pretty much anything else you can imagine – that will change our daily lives.
This micro-GPS sounds more like “The Future Is Worse Than You Feared”.
I think the 3-D printers/prototypers are getting down into the consumer range. They’ve been around since the 1980s, but have gotten much better and less expensive. And to use with it, you can get 3-D laser scanners (likewise around since the 1980s, just as plasma displays and computers with 64-bit words that we’re just getting back to in consumer-affordable forms). There’s even an app for iPhones that can do a crude version of 3-D scan. Together, you can use them to copy in plastic that famous statue at the museum; copy, decipher and renew that hard-to-read grave-stone of great-great-great-grandma. Just think what you can do with your “Christmas village” or train lay-out by scanning buildings and other objects and printing them out in precisely scaled-down versions.
ObummerDoesn’tCare, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Socialist Insecurity Abomination must go down in infamy.
A friend of a friend had an inadvertent encounter with a vertical farm a few years back. He was living in a high-rise apartment building and noticed water drops from his ceiling one morning. He assumed the people in the apartment above his had left a tap running and reported it to the property manager in the building. When the property manager entered the apartment, he was astonished to find that the tenants had planted a rice paddy in their living room! Apparently, they were farmers from southeast Asia and had decided to re-create their traditional agriculture in a modern apartment….
A good place to concentrate research effort would be self-driving vehicles. In the scifi future it is usually illegal to drive a car inside a city using manual control. You enter your destination and your car takes you there on its own. If implemented nationwide, collisions would be avoided and many lives would be saved. But instead we are happy to get our 3-D printers.
No, no no no…You are all forgetting that all new technologies are first used by the military and adult industry. Before anything else, we’ll have terminator and sex robots. Cherri 2000, Gigolo Joe and all that.
The picture for the future in medicine looks good except the current and certainly the future impact of the government approval process will slow down the implementation of the new technologies. Symbolically, think of 5 gallon pails of information coming to an emptying station (the government approval process, FDA, etc) and each of them having to go through a large funnel connected to a large drinking straw. Compound that bottleneck with the fact that a new 5 gallon pail of information comes into the line every minute. The government cannot and will not be able to keep up with all the new information, techniques, etc. They are not now. There are amazing techniques available now for analysis but they cannot be used because they are considered “experimental” by the FDA, hence they cannot be used on Medicare or Medicaid patients. A specific example: there exists a test that costs $ 150 that analyzes some forms of nerve damage. It takes 5 minutes and does not require opening up the patient. The “approved” and therefore, reimbursed procedure costs $ 1500 and requires an incision to perform it and it takes 2 hours not counting recovery. And with Obama care this scenario only gets worse. Medicare and Medicaid are now 40% of the industry. Imagine how things will slow down when they are more as they are destined to be.
Which is why I always ask – how much will it cost if I pay for it myself? (I live in a country with mostly socialized medicine.) People and doctors need to learn to rhink this way.
Even for expensive things – I do not understand people who say, “my parent died because the insurance company / government refused payment”. Did all of the children mortgage their homes, did they beg door-to-door, take out loans? Too many people have the mentality that if someone doesn’t take care of it for us, it can’t be done.
All these pie in the sky predictions ignore the ‘Elephant in the room’ and that Elephant is Government who will , as soon as they become a viable option, TAX everything in to oblivion so any savings projected now are just a MYTH.
They will NOT. They’ll regulate it into nonexistence.
TAXATION will be part and parcel of the REGULATIONS
Vertical farm? Really? You’re going to build a skyscraper, with the attendant cost p/sq ft, to grow rice or wheat?
That is going to be some incredible rice there. At $50/lb it better taste like rice grains polished between a supermodel’s thighs.