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.