WELCOME TO TOMORROW

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Byter Peter B sent me the email below which sets out predictions and assessments for the future. Unlike Nostradamus and crystal ball gazers, these predictions are projections of current trends, technology, IT and the continuing development of same.

If it seems fantastic, remember that the Wright Brothers made the world’s first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft in 1903. Only sixty three years later astronauts walked on the moon and returned safely home.

Invention, developments, progress happen exponentially.

There's food for thought in what follows . . . 

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Peter’s item, thanks Peter . . .

Welcome to Tomorrow..........digest this

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This is extremely interesting.

If you think the virus is going to make changes read this!

Guess we'll have to come back in-person to see if this forecast comes true. All of the following will likely become reality in the next 10-20 years. Many of us won’t see the changes, but our kids and grandkids probably will. A major concern is what will happen to the disused batteroes and solar panels? There will be millions of them!

1- Basic auto repair shops will disappear. Read on to know why.

2- A gas/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has only 20 parts. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.

3- Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with robots

4- Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, and so you drive up to what looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor!

5- Gas pumps will go away.

6- Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they’ve already started in the developed world.

7- Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start building new plants that build only electric cars.

8-Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling for oil will stop. Say goodbye to OPEC! The middle east is in trouble.

9- Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use, and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispenses it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof?

10- A baby of today will see personal cars only in museums. The FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can handle.

11- In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?

12- What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in the next 5-10 years ... and most of us don't see it coming.

13- Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you'd NEVER take pictures on film again? With today’s smart phones, who even has a camera these days?

14- Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore's law – that technological capacity will DOUBLE every year. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a time, before it became 'way superior' and became mainstream in only a few short years.

15- It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence (AI), health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.

16- Forget the book, “Future Shock”; welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.

17- Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

18- UBER is just a software tool; it doesn't own any cars, and is now the biggest taxi company in the world! Ask any taxi drivers if they saw that coming.

19- Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw that coming.

20- Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected.

21- In the USA, young lawyers already don't get jobs Because of computers, you can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy – compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future, (what a thought!). Only omniscient specialists will remain.

22- Computer programs already help nurses diagnosing cancer, and the programs are 4 times more accurate than human nurses.

23- Facebook now has pattern recognition software that can recognise faces better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans...COMPUTERS CAN BE UNPLUGGED... OR SHOT!!!!!

24- Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here. In the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted. You won’t WANT to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone; it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.

25- You will not need to park it. You will pay only for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will never get a driver's license and will never own a car.

26- This will change our cities because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can transform former parking lots into green parks.

27- About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles. With autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6 million miles. That will save more than a million lives worldwide each year.

28- Some traditional car companies will doubtless go bankrupt. They will try the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.

29- Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting this year – with the 2019 models using all-electric or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out the hybrid models.

30- Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla – and they should be. Look at all the companies offering all-electric vehicles. That was unheard of only a few years ago.

31- Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without accidents, the costs will become cheaper. Their auto insurance business model will disappear.

32- Real estate will change. If you can work from home (or from literally anywhere), people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful affordable locations.

33- Electric cars will become mainstream about 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity.

34- Cities will have much cleaner air as well.

35- Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean.

36- Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact. And it’s just getting ramped up

37- Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations; but that simply cannot continue - technology will take care of that strategy.

38- Health: "Tricorder X" will be announced this year. There are companies which will build a medical device (called the Tricorder from Star Trek) that works with your phone – taking your retina scan, your blood sample, and you breathe into it. It then analyses 54 bio-markers that will identify nearly any disease. There are dozens of phone apps out right now for health.

WELCOME TO TOMORROW! – some of it actually arrived a few years ago.

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