| Broadly speaking, my bet is on three to four major ones: * AI * Cryptocurrency * Solar * Biotech/Bioinformatics Doing some back of the envelope calculations you can get a rough guess that we'll have "human level AI" by 2030 or so. The current trend of AI producing spectacular results will, in my opinion, not cease but continue to pick up pace. Back of the envelope estimates can show cryptocurrency holding, conservatively, 20% of the worlds wealth by 2030. I suspect the growth of cryptocurrency won't be independent of other technologies. Cryptocurrency gets a lot of flack here and other places but I'll remind people, yet again, that many of the critiques against cryptocurrency are eerily similar to critiques of the internet, email, the world wide web and social networks in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Back of the envelope estimates can show solar producing over half of the worlds energy needs by 2040. In addition to solar panels, there's battery technology, microgrids, etc. so this is really about what technologies are rolled out to satisfy the 2.5% yearly energy usage growth rate. I don't see any other technology that has "Moore's law"-like behavior in terms of the energy harvested vs. the energy invested than solar and battery technology. Biotech and bioinformatics will have profound consequences for health, longevity and a host of other issues but I don't have a good sense for what the major innovations are that need to happen before this becomes widely adopted. I suspect AI will help with bio-engineering crops, drugs, food and help with general medicine but I don't quite know what that looks like. We silently hit a roughly $100 whole genome sequencing [0], so it's progressing, I just don't know what rough goals to predict or what to look out for. All of the above are relying on a sort of "generalized Moore's law" in that the reason the innovation and adoption is so quick is because cost is dropping exponentially. I created a small post about it with some simple justifications for where the timelines come from [1]. [0] https://nebula.org/whole-genome-sequencing-dna-test/ [1] https://mechaelephant.com/dev/Future-Predictions.html |