Dust Off Your Crystal Ball!

If enough of us make differing, even opposing suggestions covering a whole spectrum, one of us may be correct and be regarded as brilliant..

Yes, we've all thought of (predicted) smaller, faster, smarter, lighter etc... knowing full well that it or a variation will happen sooner or later. Being from HP, the fella had a bit of an advantage over the average bloke.

Here are some of my predictions for technology in the USA in 2020:

1. 75% of teacher hours will be replaced with interactive education by electronic education technologies. This proportion will be heavily slanted toward secondary and university education. Primary education at the lower grades will be the principal source of employment for human teachers. This will all be driven by economics and unwillingness of voters to pay high taxes to support schools while being forced to pay interest on excessive government debt and entitlements.

2. Related to 1. above employers will rely less on the accreditation and reputation of individual institutions of higher learning and more on sophisticated profiles derived from electronic education records of job applicants. This will produce a large influence on the major research universities as they will struggle to provide resources for research in the face of dropping tuition revenues. These universities will seek out more paying foreign students and the results of that instruction will diminish quality of the US workforce.

3. Primary routine medical care will involve far lower direct labor costs as a vastly increasing amount of the diagnostic and treatment for routine and non emergency medical conditions is electronic based. Communication and software technology will provide much of the labor savings but the really spectacular advances will be in sensor, transducer and signal processing that communicate human body conditions without human intervention with the patient. Pharmaceutical technology will make spectacular advances as computer assisted decoding of the human genome proceeds. This will lead to universal medical care at a basic level for all Americans. A major higher tier will be enjoyed by those with insurance and/or group plan membership they can afford to pay. This will result in a significant reduction in average life expectancy for the US population without 2nd tier coverage. And this will lead to major savings in government payments for Social Security and Medicare.

4. Privacy for upper economic tier Americans will be greatly reduced as their detailed computer profiles will have to be disclosed for analysis before they are given access to places where large numbers of people congregate as well as public transportation systems and many workplaces. This will be a major inconvenience for owners of "old tech" firearms who do not want to be subjected to an onerous inspection and registration program. New technology guns will contain sophisticated electronic ID systems and will need far less specialized controls.

5. 3d printing, etc. We'll see lots more of this as machines get into volume production and new higher strength materials evolve. What we are unlikely to see is a consumer priced desktop 3d printer that will directly produce objects with the mechanical properties of common metals. We will likely see a proliferation of low cost computer controlled workshop tools for cutting, forming, direct measuring and other common workshop processes.

6. Automobiles. We already have computers in cars and trucks. That won't change. But they will pickup new capabilities as we automate our major transportation corridors. Also they will impose safer driving practices of drivers of lower skill levels. Mom and Dad will be able to set the limits for their teen drivers. Ditto governmental entities and business managers when drivers are "out of bounds". Drivers that fail to meet certain public exposure security requirements may find their entry to certain roads blocked.

7. Everybody of school age and up to infirmity will have a smart phone (or whatever the people of 2020 will call them) available. Most but not all will use them. The devices will be able to be set to automatically identify approved users and react as required. Automated communications for a variety of purposes will be possible. Implantable components will be an available technology; but their use will be specialized and shunned by most people. These devices will have a major influence on our lives for communication, learning, entertainment, work, medical care, political participation, buying and selling goods, services, security and financial management.

8. Much of one's life will be recorded in electronic databases. There will be a constant "rain" of disputes over the accuracy of these records and thwarted efforts to correct the data. Jurists will rate this as one of their biggest problems. Accessing and efficient archiving of data will be a continuing technological problem. Search algorithms will improve a lot in 10 years but the data volume will continue to outrun them. In spite of the flood of data much knowledge will continue to be lost due to restrictions of copyright laws combined with better search algorithms. Posting copyrighted text and sound sequences on line will be increasingly vulnerable to censors. Not so complex images, an area where software development is yet to mature. This will offer new incentives to people to learn cursive writing and rapidly evolving texting dialects.

9. Data storage formats will continue to change as new technologies emerge making the recovery of data in older formats a continuing challenge as well as opportunity for small businesses and electronic hardware and software makers. DVD's will be obsolete. The newest storage media type will have significantly better time vs. data integrity characteristic.

10. We should be well into the use of real time voice language translators available on mobile devices. There will be some rudimentary ability to naturalize the translation but it will still lack the sophisticated ability to sound natural in the translated form. Give that another decade.

11. Increasing safety and security concerns among people in the upper economic tier will make "my home" more like a castle complete with electronic gates , moats and other defenses. This will be a huge market opportunity. Active methods of home defense will be a current subject of controversy and attempts to frame suitable laws and protocols covering methods and devices.

12. Portability of personal possessions will become a bigger issue as people face a growing inability to own their homes and face more frequent relocations. This will include all manner of electronic devices. Hard coding them for personal use will become an increasingly viable deterrent to theft which will be an endemic fact of living as law enforcement availability to the average citizen becomes less available due to local government shrinkage.

Enough for now ......... Ed Weldon

Excellent writing Ed. GA.

Was that the one you had prepared for the occasion?

I'll have to think about this one for a while.

See you soon, Ky.

In dusting it off... I dropped it on my foot. I predict a period of recovery.