Dieter Zetsche
CEO of Daimler Benz
Alvin Toffler
Future Shock 1970
"too much change in too short a period of time". 
The illiterate of the 21st century
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
Yogi Berra
The future ain’t what it used to be.
THE FUTURE
IS HERE
Dieter Zetsche
Zetsche’s Predictions
their [Daimler Benz] competitors are no longer other car companies, but Tesla (obviously), and now, Google, Apple, Amazon 'et al'
in the next 5-10 years
Software will disrupt most traditional industries
just a software tool
Uber is just a software tool, they don't own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world.
Airbnb
Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't own any properties.
AI
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.
Don’t go to law school
In the U.S., young lawyers already can't get jobs.  Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice (so far for more or less basic stuff) within seconds, with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans.
Specialists Only
So, if you study law, stop immediately.  There will be 90% less lawyers in the future, only specialists will remain.
Diagnosis
Watson already helps nurses diagnosing cancer, 4 times more accurate than human nurses
You look familiar
Facebook now has a pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans
Smarty Pants
. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than humans.
Autonomous cars
 In 2018 the first self-driving cars will appear for the public.  Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted.  You don't want to own a car anymore.  You will call a car with your phone, it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. 
Autonomous cars
You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving.
 Our kids will never get a driver's license and will never own a car.

Car Usage
will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% less cars for that.  We can transform former parking spaces into parks. 
Auto Accidents
1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide.  We now have one accident every 60,000 miles (100,000 km),
with autonomous driving that will drop to one accident in 6 million miles (10 million km).  That will save a million lives each year.
a computer on wheels.
Most car companies will probably go bankrupt.  Traditional car companies will try the traditional approach and try to build a better car,
 while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.
terrified of Tesla
Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla.
Auto Insurance companies
will have massive trouble because without accidents, car insurance will become much cheaper.  Their car insurance business model will slowly disappear.
Real estate will change
. Because if you can work while you commute, people will move further away to live in a more beautiful neighborhood.
(TELECOMMUTING)
Electric cars
Electric cars will become mainstream about 2020.  Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run on electricity. 
Cheap Electricity
Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean:  Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, and now you can now see the burgeoning impact.

solar energy
Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil.   Energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that can't last.  Technology will take care of that strategy.
abundant water
With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water.  Desalination of salt water now only needs 2kwh per cubic meter (@ 0.25 cents). 
We don't have scarce water in most places, we only have scarce drinking water. 
Imagine what will be possible if anyone can have as much clean water as he wants, for nearly no cost.
Health innovations
The Tricorder X price will be announced this year.  There are companies who will build a medical device (called the "Tricorder" from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample, and you can breath into it.
Access to medical analysis 
It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease.  It will be cheap, so in a few years everyone on this planet will have access to world class medical analysis, nearly for free.  
3D Printing
The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from $18,000 to $400 within 10 years.  In the same time, it became 100 times faster.  All major shoe companies have already started 3D printing shoes.
Airplane Parts
Some common spare airplane parts are already 3D printed in remote airports.  The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to keep in the past.
Print your own shoes
At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities.  You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoes at home.
6-story office building
In China, they already 3D printed and built a complete 6-story office building.  By 2027, 10% of everything that's being produced will be 3D printed.
Has to work with your phone
If it doesn't work with your phone, forget the idea.  And any idea designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st century.
Work
70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years.  There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear if there will be enough new jobs in such a small time.
Agriculture
There will be a $100 agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their field instead of working all day on their fields.
Aeroponics and Hydroponics
will need much less water.
Petri dish veal
 The first Petri dish that produced veal is now available and will be cheaper than cow produced veal in 2018.  Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces is used for cows.  Imagine if we don't need that space anymore. 

Cultured Meat
meat grown in cell culture instead of inside animals.[1] It is a form of cellular agriculture. Cultured meat is produced using many of the same tissue engineering techniques traditionally used in regenerative medicine.[2]
Cultured Meat
The first cultured beef burger patty, created by Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University, was eaten at a demonstration for the press in London in August 2013.[3] In part due to technical challenges associated with scaling and cost-reduction, cultured meat has not yet been commercialized.
 In addition, it has yet to be seen whether consumers will accept cultured meat as meat.

Fried Bugs?
There are several startups who will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat.  It will be labeled as "alternative protein source" (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).
moodies
There is an app called "moodies" which can already tell in which mood you're in.
 By 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions, if you are lying. 
 Imagine a political debate where it's being displayed when they're telling the truth and when they're not.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin may even become the default reserve currency ... Of the world!
Longevity
:  Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year.  Four years ago, the life span used to be 79 years, now it's 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more than one year increase per year.  So, we all might live for a long time, probably way more than 100.
Education
The cheapest smart phones are already at $10 in Africa and Asia.  By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smart phone.  That means, everyone has the same access to world class education.
Khan academy
Every child can use Khan academy for everything a child needs to learn at school in First World countries. There have already been releases of software in Indonesia and soon there will be releases in Arabic, Swahili, and Chinese this summer.
I can see enormous potential if we give the English app for free, so that children in Africa and everywhere else can become fluent in English.  And that could happen within half a year.
Khan Academy
The organization started in 2004 when Salman Khan tutored one of his cousins on the Internet using a service called Yahoo! Doodle Images. After a while, Khan's other cousins began to use his tutoring service.
 Because of the demand, Khan decided to make his videos watchable on the Internet, so he published his content on YouTube
Khan Academy
Khan Academy is a non-profit[6] educational organization created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan with a goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students.[7] The organization produces short lectures in the form of YouTube videos.[8] Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators.

Kahn Academy
All resources are available to users of the website. The website and its content are provided mainly in English, but are also available in other languages,

That’s all, folks!

BRAVE NEW WORLD

WHAT WILL LIFE BE LIFE IN 20 YEARS?                                

When Rip Van Winkle woke up from his 20-year snooze, he found that a lot of things had changed. If we tried Rip’s trick, we would find that quite lot will have changed in the next 20 years. It would not, however, be a complete shock, because most of these transformations are already in the works.

In the future fewer people will have personal computers. They won’t need them because they will be able to use devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home, not so much to turn lights on or start the coffee, as to get information: news, weather, flight time, traffic on the way to work, distance to a place they’re going, what movies are playing at the cinema, who is buried in Grant’s tomb, etc. They might find it makes economic sense to use a smart thermostat to save on heating/cooling bills. People will be able to ask their gadget to play music. Lonely people will even be able to talk to their devices. The more you interact with your Echo or Home, the more it will learn about you and be able to carry on a life-like conversation with you.

When you’re away from home, you will be able to keep in touch with the world with your smartphone, and everyone will have to have one. Your smart phone will carry your identification, so you will need it to get into some places. You won’t need a wallet because you will be able to pay for almost everything with your phone, and your driver’s license will be on your phone. Zimbabwe is practically a cashless society, and Sweden is moving in that direction.

If you get lost, your phone will tell you how to get where you want to go. If you get lost out in the boonies, your family will be able to track you. You’ll be able to order pizza or anything else on your smartphone or you smart home device. If you find yourself waiting in a line someplace, you will be able to read the world news or your favorite eBook on your phone.

If you’re ambitious, you will be able to advance yourself by taking college courses or even working on a degree from home. You’ll probably want an actual computer if you take courses. You’ll need it to write papers for your courses. You won’t have to go on campus to get your degree. You’ll be able to do the whole thing from your home.

If your vision has deteriorated to the point that you can’t see well enough to drive at night or you can’t renew your driver’s license, you won’t need to call a taxi. You will be able to order a self-driving car to take you where you want to go. If you use a car only a few times a month, it will be cheaper than car payments and auto maintenance.  You won’t need to go to stores as much anyway. You will do a lot of your shopping online. You will be able to order a lot of stuff from you smart home device, but if you want to see a picture of what you’re buying, you can look at it on your smartphone.

When the stuff you order is delivered, it will probably be delivered by a self-driving vehicle, though probably not a drone. When a bunch of drones are flying around delivering Christmas merchandise, there will be too much possibility of an accident. However, self-driving motor vehicles would not have that problem.  Future city residents will see Amazon trucks driving around delivering packages. How will the goods get from the truck to your house? That looks like a job for a robot. The robot won’t be driving, but it will be able to carry the package to your house and ask for a signature if it is required.

People will think nothing of seeing robots performing all kinds of jobs. ATMs have been doing the work of bank tellers for decades. Robots have replaced human beings in many industrial sites. They do a good job working in a warehouse. They can gather information in some cases better than humans. A machine can gather medical or legal information as well as a person can. Bots can even gather sports information to write a sports article or enough financial data to create a financial report. For the past five years the UCSF Medical Center has filled prescriptions with a robot pharmacy. The pills are then delivered by a fleet of autonomous bots. It’s nice to have a robot as part of a bomb squad. The machine can defuse the bomb without endangering human life. There has been talk about robot soldiers. Many question the wisdom and ethics of such a move, though.

What will happen to the truck drivers, the pharmacists, the people who ask questions and assemble data? The job market will evolve, as it did for bank tellers. The job market will change with new jobs being created. Some of the jobs that the next generation will be doing never existed before. Some of them have not been created yet, but they will be. In my immediate family (children and grandchildren) four people work in the computer industry.

As new technologies develop, new jobs will be created. There will be more jobs in green energy. Every day new jobs in computer technology come into being. Here is a list of jobs that did not exist five or ten years: Digital market specialist, Blogger, SEO (search engine optimizer) specialist, app designer, cloud service, specialist, big data analyst, drone operator. There are more, and still more will come.

Think of all the new products that have come along in the last five or ten years. We will see even more in the years to come. Workers will be needed to produce, package, sell, and distribute these new gadgets. It will, indeed, be a brave new world.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

                           

When Rip Van Winkle woke up from his 20-year snooze, he found that a lot of things had changed. If we tried Rip’s trick, we would find that quite lot will have changed in the next 20 years. It would not, however, be a complete shock, because most of these transformations are already in the works.

In the future fewer people will have personal computers. They won’t need them because they will be able to use devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home, not so much to turn lights on or start the coffee, as to get information: news, weather, flight time, traffic on the way to work, distance to a place they’re going, what movies are playing at the cinema, who is buried in Grant’s tomb, etc. They might find it makes economic sense to use a smart thermostat to save on heating/cooling bills. People will be able to ask their gadget to play music. Lonely people will even be able to talk to their devices. The more you interact with your Echo or Home, the more it will learn about you and be able to carry on a life-like conversation with you.

When you’re away from home, you will be able to keep in touch with the world with your smartphone, and everyone will have to have one. Your smart phone will carry your identification, so you will need it to get into some places. You won’t need a wallet because you will be able to pay for almost everything with your phone, and your driver’s license will be on your phone. Zimbabwe is practically a cashless society, and Sweden is moving in that direction.

If you get lost, your phone will tell you how to get where you want to go. If you get lost out in the boonies, your family will be able to track you. You’ll be able to order pizza or anything else on your smartphone or you smart home device. If you find yourself waiting in a line someplace, you will be able to read the world news or your favorite eBook on your phone.

If you’re ambitious, you will be able to advance yourself by taking college courses or even working on a degree from home. You’ll probably want an actual computer if you take courses. You’ll need it to write papers for your courses. You won’t have to go on campus to get your degree. You’ll be able to do the whole thing from your home.

If your vision has deteriorated to the point that you can’t see well enough to drive at night or you can’t renew your driver’s license, you won’t need to call a taxi. You will be able to order a self-driving car to take you where you want to go. If you use a car only a few times a month, it will be cheaper than car payments and auto maintenance.  You won’t need to go to stores as much anyway. You will do a lot of your shopping online. You will be able to order a lot of stuff from you smart home device, but if you want to see a picture of what you’re buying, you can look at it on your smartphone.

When the stuff you order is delivered, it will probably be delivered by a self-driving vehicle, though probably not a drone. When a bunch of drones are flying around delivering Christmas merchandise, there will be too much possibility of an accident. However, self-driving motor vehicles would not have that problem.  Future city residents will see Amazon trucks driving around delivering packages. How will the goods get from the truck to your house? That looks like a job for a robot. The robot won’t be driving, but it will be able to carry the package to your house and ask for a signature if it is required.

People will think nothing of seeing robots performing all kinds of jobs. ATMs have been doing the work of bank tellers for decades. Robots have replaced human beings in many industrial sites. They do a good job working in a warehouse. They can gather information in some cases better than humans. A machine can gather medical or legal information as well as a person can. Bots can even gather sports information to write a sports article or enough financial data to create a financial report. For the past five years the UCSF Medical Center has filled prescriptions with a robot pharmacy. The pills are then delivered by a fleet of autonomous bots. It’s nice to have a robot as part of a bomb squad. The machine can defuse the bomb without endangering human life. There has been talk about robot soldiers. Many question the wisdom and ethics of such a move, though.

What will happen to the truck drivers, the pharmacists, the people who ask questions and assemble data? The job market will evolve, as it did for bank tellers. The job market will change with new jobs being created. Some of the jobs that the next generation will be doing never existed before. Some of them have not been created yet, but they will be. In my immediate family (children and grandchildren) four people work in the computer industry.

As new technologies develop, new jobs will be created. There will be more jobs in green energy. Every day new jobs in computer technology come into being. Here is a list of jobs that did not exist five or ten years: Digital market specialist, Blogger, SEO (search engine optimizer) specialist, app designer, cloud service, specialist, big data analyst, drone operator. There are more, and still more will come.

Think of all the new products that have come along in the last five or ten years. We will see even more in the years to come. Workers will be needed to produce, package, sell, and distribute these new gadgets. It will, indeed, be a brave new world.

TO UPGRADE OR NOT TO UPGRADE: THAT IS THE QUESTION

If you still have Windows 7 or 8/8.1 on your computer, you have just a few weeks to get a free upgrade to Windows 10. You will still be able to upgrade after the July 29, but it will cost you $110. I bought my laptop with Windows 8. Like almost everyone else, I hated it, and I upgraded it to Windows 10 as soon as it became available last summer. I have Windows 7 on my desktop, and I am keeping it.

Windows 8 is a monstrosity. When it came out, Microsoft was seeing a decline in PC sales. More and more people were connecting to the internet with smart phones and tablets. That was the wave of the future, and the geniuses at Redmond, WA, decided to grab the future by the tail and created a new system that would combine PCs with mobile devices. Their new system (Windows 8) would have tiles that you could touch and move around the screen to open programs, just like the icons on your smart phone. Neat, huh?

No, it wasn’t. People were used to operating their computers through a mouse and keyboard. Further, most new computers did not have a touch screen, so the touch feature was useless to most users. Not only that, but a lot of familiar features were gone. There was no start button. How do you shut the damned thing off except by holding the power button, something we had been told not to do? While, we’re at it, where’s the control panel? A lot of features once reached through the control panel were now done through the control button, more like a smart phone.

Experienced computer users suddenly didn’t know how to do some of the most basic things on their new computers. It was like getting into a new car and finding all the controls had been moved or modified or both.

Computer users were very unhappy. A week after Windows 8 came out in October 2012, Steve Sinofsky, head of the Windows Division at Microsoft, was gone. Early in 2013 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that he too was leaving as soon as they found a new CEO, which they did the following summer.

The new boss, Satya Nadella, was faced with a mess. The first improvement that came out was a new version of the operating system, Windows 8.1. This came out a year after the original Windows 8. The new version fixed some of the problems with Windows 8, like restoring the start button that people had been used to for two decades. Also Microsoft started right away on a new system. The new system, Windows 10, came out July 2015, less than three years after Windows 8’s disastrous debut.

Windows 10 is not a terrible operating system. It moved back closer to Windows 7. It also had a couple of entirely new features, the Edge browser and the Cortana, the digital assistant. Using Edge is not like using Chrome or Firefox for the first time. An experienced computer user could just go to Chrome or Firefox and start using them. With Edge you have to figure some things out before you use it, like: Where are my favorites? Edge has some new features. For example, you can write on a web page and save it that way. However, when I use my Windows 10 laptop, if I go on the internet, I use
Chrome rather than Edge. I don’t use Cortana much. However, I do use another digital assistant, Google Now, on my Android phone.

Windows 10 is not and could not be a well-designed system. That is because it had to be build on top of Windows 8.  Otherwise people who had Windows 8 or 8.1 would be shut out. Some people like 8.1 and don’t want to upgrade to 10. If Windows 8 had been an extention/improvement on 7, instead of an attempt to redesign the whole thing, it would have been much better. One thing I don’t like about Windows 10 is that it still has the tiles from Windows 8. That is not a big problem, though, because you can get rid of them if you want.

Shortly after I loaded Windows 10 onto my laptop, I downloaded a program called Start 10. This program makes the user interface in Windows 10 function very much like that of Windows 7. I am happy with that.

Ironically the Windows 10/Windows phone thing didn’t work out for Microsoft. A year after Windows 8’s debut Microsoft bought cell phone maker Nokia for $7.2 billion. Part of the plan was for Microsoft to emulate Apple and make its own mobile devices. Nokia was to make Windows phones. Windows phones never really got off the ground. They had to compete with iPhones and Android phones, which together hold about 95 percent of the smart phone market. Last year Microsoft wrote off a loss of $7.6 billion on its investment in Nokia.

HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE ON THE STOCK MARKET

Okay, I lied. I have no idea about how to make a fortune on the stock market, but I do know where you can get a lot of information about stocks. If you know something about a stock before you buy it, you’ll be less likely to lose your shirt on a bad investment.

There are lots of sources of information about investments on the internet. I’m going to use Yahoo Finance, but there are many others, including AOL finance that are just as good.

First we have to pick a stock to research. I don’t have a lot of money to invest. I don’t expect to get in at the bottom of the next Google or Facebook, so I am going to look for stocks with a high dividend yield. One of the things available on Yahoo Finance is a stock screener, so I can use that to find my high dividend stock. I am particularly interested in a particular type of stock, real estate investment trust (REIT). REITs have to pay out 90 percent of their profit as dividends to their investors, so they tend to have really a really high yield . These instruments make different kinds of investments in real estate. Some own rental properties or hotels. Others own medical buildings, including nursing homes. Still others specialize in mortgages.

The company I want to research is CorEnergy Infrastructure Trust (CORR).  That sounds like an energy company, but it is a REIT. The real estate it owns hold pipelines and storage tanks. If one of the big petroleum companies want to send some oil through the pipeline or store it in one of the tanks, they have to pay CORR for the use of their facilities.

I got this information from Yahoo Finance, which has a company profile, news, press releases, message boards, and all kinds of statistical information, going back several years. Right now (June 22 at 3:15 p.m.) it is selling for $27.97 a share. On May 13 it paid a quarterly dividend of $0.75 a share.

Things in the news affect the prices of all stocks. At the end of 2015 the price of these shares dropped to about $10.00 Early in 2016 the company decided to make a reverse split of 15:1. In other words, if you owned 150 shares, after the reverse split you would have only 10 shares. At the same time the company raised the dividend. Evidently they hoped that these actions would raise the share price. At first the stock went down even further, but with the high dividend payment, the price started moving up, reaching $23 in mid-spring. Then word came out that one of the companies that used CORR’s pipelines was going bankrupt. The stock headed back down.

But wait! The company didn’t go bankrupt after all, and CorEnergy headed back up. As of today, as we saw, it is selling at almost $28 a share.

If you are interested in numbers, Yahoo Finance has lots of them, including price/earnings ratio, the day’s price range, and the price range for the last year ($10.90 - $33.20). The site is full of valuable information for investors, including analysts’ opinions of the stock.  

The price of the stock has more than doubled in the last four or five months. That sounds good, but the price could just as easily go down. However, I find the dividend yield interesting: $0.75 per quarter or $3.00 per share over a year. At the current price of the stock ($27.97), the dividend yield is over 10 percent. If you bought 100 shares of CORR, you would earn $300 a year in dividends, as long as the dividend stayed the same.

DIGITAL ASSISTANT

The first electronic computers like ENIAC were too big to fit into an ordinary room. They were programmed by hooking wires to various places on the frame. By the sixties computers had shrunk enough that they could fit into one room. Technicians programmed through computer languages such as COBOL, FORTRAN, and PASCAL.

With the advent of personal computers in the late seventies, you did not have to be a technician to use a computer, and ordinary users did not program their machines. Early PCs used keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl + S to save a document and Shift + Insert to paste something into a document. It wasn’t long before icons and computer mice made it even easier to operate a computer.

The latest development, something that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called “the next big thing,” is chatbots or electronic digital assistants. The first one of these was Siri, who came with the iPhone. You didn’t even have to use the virtual keyboard. All you had to do was ask a question or give a direction in plain English, assuming that English was your language. The digital assistant could understand commands in over 20 languages and give answers in any of these languages.

Soon Microsoft came out with Cortana, a digital assistant that accompanied Windows 10. Cortana could tell you who won the World Series in 1975, open your calendar, make appointments for you, or even send an email for you. All of this is done with just voice commands.

One of the latest devices comes from Amazon.com. Echo is a cylindrical device that doesn’t even look like a computer. Echo has a voice that is called Alexa. Alexa can adjust the thermostat or turn lights on or off. It can also answer your questions, just like Siri or Cortana.

We can’t forget Google Now, a digital assistant that is available for Android as well as Apple devices. This assistant is also available on any PC. You just go to Google and say “OK Google” or tap on the microphone icon and say what you want. Google Now is very fast and very good at hearing and understanding your request. You can ask Google Now things like: “In what play does Marc Antony give a funeral oration?” Or “In what movie does Clark Gable say, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’?” The assistant quickly comes up with answers to these questions or tells you how far it is from Boston to New York or anything else you want to know.

Computers keep getting smaller and more powerful at the same time and also easier to use. You don’t need to know a computer language to communicate with your machine; you just talk to it, just as you would to any intelligent friend. It is like having a companion with encyclopedic knowledge. You can hold the device in your hand and ask it anything.

This revolution is still going on. Google is working on a newer version of Google Now. It promises to be even better than the present one. The engineers who first developed Siri have created a new digital assistant they call Viv. Viv is not available yet, but in its test run in May, a group of engineers ordered a pizza by talking to it. They just told the assistant where they wanted the pizza to come from. They kept changing the order, adding toppings and taking them off. It was the kind of thing that would have confused most human operators. But Viv had no problem with the order. A short while later the pizza as ordered was delivered to the engineers. All of this was done without touching a phone or a keyboard, doing a Google search, or downloading an app from the pizza maker.

I agree with Satya Nadella that digital assistants are the next big thing.” If you don’t believe me, just ask Siri or Cortana or Alexa or Google Now.