Technology is advancing so rapidly in the US that we will experience radical changes in societies worldwide during our lifetimes. Already computers, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping our daily lives and entire industries.
In this era of accelerating change, many assumptions that we relied upon in the past will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Among them:
Anything that can be digitised will be. Digitisation began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into media, such as movies, images and music. Moreover complex business functions, medical tools, industrial processes and transportation systems have moved into the digital realm. Now, we are digitising everything about our daily lives: our actions, words and thoughts. Inexpensive DNA sequencing and machine learning have become the keys for unlocking life support systems. Cheap, ubiquitous sensors are documenting everything we do and building rich digital records of our entire lives.
Your job has a significant chance of being eliminated. In every industry and even households, machines and robots are beginning to do the work of humans. A global movement to digitise jobs is acquiring momentum in low-salary service industries. Amazon relies on robots to do a significant proportion of its warehouse work. American corporates such as Safeway and Home Depot are rapidly introducing self-service checkouts. Soon, self-driving cars will eliminate millions of driving jobs. Automated medical diagnosis will replace doctors in medical sub-disciplines such as radiology, dermatology and pathology. The exceptions will be in creative industries and businesses such as marketing, entrepreneurship, strategy and advanced technical fields. New jobs beyond our imagination will emerge, but they won’t replace all lost jobs. We must be ready for a world of perennially high unemployment rates. But don’t worry, because…
Living will become so affordable that survival won’t be dependent on employment. Note how cellphone minutes are almost free and computers have become cheaper and more powerful over the past decades. As technologies such as computing, sensors and solar energy advance, their unit costs drop. Life as we know it, will become much cheaper. Apps such as Uber enable a new generation to do without the desire or need to own a car. Healthcare, food, telecommunications, electricity and computation will all become cheaper very quickly as technology reinvents their parent industries.
Your fate and destiny will be in your own hands as never before. The benefit of plummeting costs of living will be that the technology and tools required to keep human beings healthy, happy, well-educated and well-informed will be cheap or free. Online learning of almost all subjects and disciplines is already free. Healthcare costs are also falling with mobile-based medical devices enabling us to make sophisticated self-diagnoses and treat a significant percentage of our health problems using only a smartphone and smart distributed software.
Simultaneously, modular and open-source kits are making DIY (do-it-yourself) manufacture easier, empowering individuals to make their own products. With 3-D printers, you can design your own toys. Soon, they will allow you to “print” common household goods and even electronics. The technology behind these massive improvements in efficiency will also make mass personalisation and distributed production a reality. Yes, you will soon be able to start a small factory in your garage, and ditto your neighbours.
Abundance will become a far bigger problem than poverty. With technology making all goods and services cheaper and more abundant, mankind’s problems will arise from over rather than under consumption. This is already the case in some parts of the world, especially in the developed OECD countries, where diseases of affluence — obesity, diabetes and cardiac arrest — are the biggest killers. These maladies have quickly spread, along with the Western diet, to the developing world. Human genes adapted to conditions of scarcity are woefully unprepared for conditions of caloric cornucopia.
The rise of social media, the Internet and the era of constant connection are other sources of danger. Human beings have evolved to manage tasks serially rather than simultaneously. The significant degradation of our attention spans and precipitous increase in attention-deficit problems we are already experiencing are partly attributable to our attention being spread too thin.
Distinction between man and machine will become unclear. The controversy over Google Glass showed that society remains uneasy over melding man and machine. Remember those strange-looking glasses people would wear, that were recording everything around them? Google discontinued them because of a social uproar, but miniaturised versions will soon be available. Implanted retinas already use silicon to replace neurons. Custom prosthetics that operate with the help of software will become personalised, highly specific extensions of our bodies.
As a result, the very idea of what it means to be human will change, and it will become increasingly difficult to differentiate between humans and machines.
Vivek Wadhwa is distinguished fellow, Carnegie Mellon University Engineering at Silicon Valley, USA)