Glimpse of the Future
Biz world’s looming shake-up
CHANGES in technology are happening at a scale which was unimaginable before and will cause disruption in industry after industry. We are not ready for this change, and most of our leading companies won’t exist 1520 years from now. Here are five sectors to keep an eye on:
1. Manufacturing. Robotics and 3D printing have made it cheaper to manufacture in the United States and Europe than in China. Robots such as Baxter, from Rethink Robotics, and UR10, from Universal Robots, have arms, screens which show you their emotions, and sensors that detect what is happening around them.
The cost of operating these is less than the cost of human labor. We can now have robots working 24/7. These robots will become ever more sophisticated and do most human jobs. The manufacturing industry is surely going to be disrupted in a very big way.
This is good news for America, Europe and parts of Asia, because it will become a local industry. But this will be bad for the Chinese economy — which is largely dependent on manufacturing jobs.
In the next decade, robots will likely go on strike, because we won’t need them anymore. They will be replaced by 3D printers. Within 15 to 20 years, we will even be able to 3D print electronics. Imagine being able to design your own iPhone and print it at home.
2. Finance. We are already witnessing a controversy over Bitcoin. Crowdfunding is shaking up the venturecapital industry. We will soon be able to crowdfund loans for houses, cars and other goods. With cardless transactions for purchasing goods, we won’t need the types of physical banks and financial institutions we have.
3. Health care. Apple recently announced Healthkit, its platform for health information. It wants to store data from the wearable sensors that will soon be monitoring our blood pressure, blood oxygenation, heart rhythms, temperature, activity levels and other symptoms. Google, Microsoft and Samsung will surely not be left behind.
With these data, they will be able to warn us when we are about to get sick. AIbased physicians will advise us on what we need to do to get healthy.
Medicaltest data, especially in fields such as oncology, is often so complex that doctors cannot understand it. This will become even more difficult when they have genomics data to correlate.
When you combine these data with the medicalsensor data tech companies are collecting on their cloud platforms, we will have a medical revolution. We won’t need doctors for daytoday medical advice. Robotic surgeons will also do the most sophisticated surgeries.
4. Energy. Five years ago, we were worried about America run ning out of oil; today we’re talking about Saudi America, because of fracking.
And then there’s solar energy. Solar prices have dropped about 97 percent over the past 35 years, and by the end of this decade we will achieve grid parity. Grid parity means it’s cheaper to produce energy at home on your solar cells than to buy it from utilities. Move forward another 10 or 20 years, and it will cost a fraction as much to produce your own energy as to buy it from the grid.
Utility companies will be in serious trouble. If solar keeps advancing in the way it is, it will eclipse the fossilfuel industry. Solar is only one of maybe a hundred technologies that could disrupt the energy industry.
When we have unlimited energy, we can have unlimited clean water, because we can simply boil as much ocean water as we want. We can afford to grow food locally in vertical farms.
5. Communications. Note how AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have seen their landline businesses disappear. These were replaced by mobile — which is now being replaced by data. When I travel abroad, I don’t make longdistance calls any more, because I just call over Skype. Soon we will have WiFi everywhere.
In practically every industry, I see a major disruption. The vast majority of companies that are presently the leaders will likely not even exist. Executives either are not aware of the changes that are coming, are reluctant to invest the money required for them to reinvent themselves or are protecting legacy businesses. Most are focused on shortterm performance.
New trilliondollar industries will come out of nowhere and wipe out existing trilliondollar industries. This is the future we’re headed into, for better or for worse.