As I said in a recent blog entry, my interest in futurism and my habit of making written predictions about the future predate the creation of this blog by many years. Previously, I used Facebook as my platform for publishing those ideas, and in December 2009, I took my first shot at making a written list of personal predictions. The document’s title, “Predictions for the next decade,” is self-explanatory, and as it is now the end of the decade, I’d like to rate my accuracy. [Spoiler: I did a great job overall.]
Below, I’ve coped and pasted the text of the original Facebook note, and interspersed present-day evaluations of my predictions in square brackets and bold text. I’ve even carried over the pictures that were embedded in the original.
============================================================
Predictions for the next decade
December 25, 2009 at 2:57 PM
The first decade of the 2000’s (which should actually be called the “Oughties”) is just a few days from being over, and I thought I’d render a couple serious predictions for the “teen years.” Most of you probably don’t know this, but I am a futurist and like reading serious books written by scientists about what they think the future will be like. The granddaddy of these people is Ray Kurzweil, and I encourage you to take a couple minutes to read about the guy’s life, beliefs and predictions (failed and confirmed) here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_kurzweil
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0275.html [Broken link to what was a Ray Kurzweil self-assessment of his 2009 predictions]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Raymond_Kurzweil
As you can see from Kurzweil’s “2009” predictions, he’s about 50% right, 25% maybe right or wrong, and 25% flat wrong. While I think he’s definitely on the right track with his predictions, his big problems are that he overestimates the rate of technological advance–particularly where it concerns improvements to the “thinking” abilities of computers–and the willingness of people to accept new technologies. Kurzweil also sticks his neck out too often by proclaiming that one, specific type of technology will be in use by year X. When it doesn’t happen, his credibility is impeached.
[I still believe these things.]
Anyway, a detailed overview of my views on Kurzweil will have to wait for a later note. For now, let me tell you what I think the world will be like by the end of 2019.
The Political World
Obama wins the 2012 elections. Let’s face it: The same coalition of minorities and young people that elected Obama in 2008 are going to rally to his defense in 2012. The Republicans don’t have any obvious “golden boy” right now either. The only way Obama can lose is if he colossally screws up (or at least if Americans perceive it that way), which doesn’t seem likely given his intelligence. I’m not sure if Biden will run in 2016, but just remember that the guy will be 74 at that time, which will make him older than McCain was in 2008. There’s no way in hell I or anyone else can guess about who will win the 2016 elections, so I won’t try.
[I was right about everything! Also, I think the Democrats now have these same problems going in to the 2020 election: They don’t have an obvious “golden boy,” there’s not enough time left for one to emerge out of the woodwork, all of their Presidential candidates are seriously flawed in some way, and Joe Biden’s age problem is worse than ever! However, Trump’s voter base today is smaller than Obama’s voter base was in 2012, so even a seriously flawed Democratic opponent could beat him. The 2020 race is on such a knife’s edge that I can’t assign odds right now to the outcome, other than to say whoever wins will be disappointing.]
Sorry folks, but we still have a two-party system in 2019. Our institutions and people are simply too heavily geared towards supporting it.
[Sadly, I was right. However, since 2009, I’ve become less convinced that a three- or four-party system will help much, so we’re not much worse off as a nation than we otherwise would have been. Other governments show that, as the amount of political diversity grows, so does political gridlock. The need to sacrifice principles to make pragmatic, messy compromises that “keep the lights on” never goes away. My changed attitude towards this issue is a good example of how I’ve become less idealistic/more jaded over the last ten years from having more time to observe how the world really works.]
The U.S. will still be the world’s most powerful country politically, economically, militarily, culturally, diplomatically, and technologically, though China has closed much of that gap. On the subject of China, I think it’s important to remember that it is a country currently in social, political and economic transition, and it faces enormous challenges and pressures for change in the future. In no particular order, let me go through these. First, China has a growing gender imbalance that could threaten its internal stability. Thanks to a patriarchal culture and the one-child-per-family policy, abortions of female children are widespread and produce a sex disparity in the population (i.e. – If you can only have one kid, might as well make it count and have a boy). By the end of 2019, 24 million young Chinese men of marrying age will be unable to find wives. Having a lot of young, unattached males who aren’t getting enough sex hanging around inside your country is bad news, as the conservative societies of the Middle East show us. These guys tend to start a lot of trouble (terrorism, riots, reform movements, etc.).
[I was right! In fact, the Chinese sex imbalance is even worse than I estimated (some sources say there are 34 million more men than women there). Fortunately for China, this hasn’t translated into a mass civil unrest, and the single, young men are handling it with stiff upper lips and lots of erotic anime cartoons. The ongoing protests in Hong Kong aren’t being driven by the sex imbalance, and in fact, the city has a significant surplus of single, young women.]
Second, China faces another demographic problem in the form of its aging population: By the end of 2019, around 20% of all Chinese will be 60 or older, and that proportion will only grow with time. Frankly speaking (as I always do), old people sap national resources through pensions and medical services, as we see in our own country with Social Security and Medicare (and it is even worse at the state level in many cases). The graying of China’s population is going to cause large, direct decreases in the GDP growth rate, which will have a ripple effect through the entire country and all other segments of its society. Of course, the Chinese would be able to overcome this problem by increasing the number of young people to support the old through taxes, though it’s questionable whether such increases could be accomplished by 2019: Even if the Chinese government were to rescind the birth restrictions, it probably wouldn’t lead to sufficient population growth since many Chinese now have a Westernized mindset and are more concerned with personal growth and accomplishment than they are with having kids. Increasing immigration is another possibility, and while I do think a significantly greater share of China’s population will be foreign by 2019, the Chinese are simply too xenophobic to allow enough immigrants in anytime soon.
[I was mostly right! The share of China’s population that is 60 or older is in fact 17-18% now, so my original estimate was too high (not sure where I got it from) but still in the ballpark. In 2015, China raised the birth limit to two children per family, but it failed to spur a baby boom that was large enough to alter the country’s negative demographic trajectory. Mass immigration of workers also hasn’t happened in China.]
Third, China’s rapid industrial growth has caused serious environmental damage that will be much worse by 2019 and that will put another constraint on their GDP growth. Not only is the country the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, it is also the worst offender (or one of the worst) when it comes to a slew of other types of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and heavy metals. Fishing stocks near China’s coasts have also been almost exhausted, northern China is facing desertification and depletion of aquifers, and elsewhere in the country people riot on a near-daily basis over pollution and its effects. I’m not going to go into this in full detail, but there’s a great 2007 article in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Great Leap Backwards?” that covers the full extent of the damage if you want to read about it.
[Thankfully, the most dire extrapolations of China’s pollution trends didn’t pan out. China’s CO2 emissions have grown over the last ten years, so it pumps out more of the gas than ever before, but the rate of that growth has gotten much lower. Its levels of sulfur dioxide and air particulate emissions have also dropped over the last decade thanks to stricter laws. Environmental damage is probably hurting Chinese GDP growth less than I predicted, which actually makes me happy.]
Fourth, I think China’s global influence is going to hit a wall because the country doesn’t really stand for anything. It’s international behavior is clearly self-interested in all respects, and the country doesn’t have much of a vision–ideological or otherwise–to offer the world. Contrast this with the U.S., which has for decades sought to spread political freedom, economic freedom, free trade, and human rights, and which openly works for a future world free from want and oppression. Yes, I know that sounds very preachy of me, and yes, I realize that our pursuit of those goals has been inconsistent for various reasons, but I think we do the best we can given the constraints and that our presence moves the world in a positive direction overall. Having grand ideas and a nice-sounding ideology resonates with people across the world on a very basic level, and this is an area in which China is severely lacking.
[I was right. China is still viewed as a self-interested player on the international stage and has few good friends. The friends it has made through investment in Africa and in the Belt and Road Initiative would walk away as soon as the money stopped flowing.]
Fifth, by 2019, China’s economic growth rate will have slowed no matter what since there are only so many low-hanging fruits you can harvest. China’s statism isn’t going to be able to deliver results once the country’s economy moves beyond a low-wage export model and innovation and entrepreneurship become the pillars of further growth, as they are in the Developed World. Really, that touches upon one of China’s biggest problems–it’s government. Ignoring the traditional American complaints about the disregard for human and political rights (most Chinese don’t really care about these), the Chinese Communist Party simply isn’t going to be efficient enough or responsive enough to meet the expectations of the Chinese people once they become more educated, sophisticated and wealthy and once the aforementioned problems start to have a real impact. Political change and a period of social instability in China are hence inevitable and might happen by 2019 or be about to happen. The operative word in that sentence is “might.”
[I was right about China’s economic growth rate shrinking during the 2010s, but wrong about the CCP’s ability to hold on to power. The last decade has shown the Party to be more adept at tracking and shaping the opinions of its people and defusing potential crises than I anticipated.]
Such a transition might lead to a wonderful outcome or to disaster. It’s always possible that the CCP could, during a time of internal crisis, try to divert attention and to unify the country by playing on the strong nationalism of its people and agitating over Taiwan, the Spratly Islands or something else (Pride, and somewhat by extension nationalism, is the quintessential human flaw). That, of course, would bring China into conflict with us, but the such a subject is too large to be discussed here. Suffice it to say that any U.S.-China military conflict–even if waged with strictly conventional weapons–would be terrible no matter who won and would lead to a dramatically altered international economic and diplomatic balance of power that the losing side would be extremely bitter over. Let me be clear: A war between China and the U.S. is extremely unlikely (largely due to economic linkages), and I think it would only have a chance of happening if China’s government got really desperate and felt it had more to gain from such a war than it would lose or if some fool in Taiwan tried to declare independence. The point is that there’s a possibility of conflict.
In any case, by 2019, China won’t be able to beat the U.S. in combat under most circumstances. They might be able to win the opening stages of a war over Taiwan, but that’s only because Taiwan is just a few miles from China whereas it’s across the biggest ocean in the world from the U.S. In an all-out industrial war like WWII, China will still get beaten as badly in 2019 as in 2009, assuming the American people are willing to fight as hard as they did in WWII (actually not such a safe assumption). On that note, it’s worth keeping in mind that, while China’s military capabilities are rapidly growing, they have a very long way to go to catch up to America’s. We’re talking at least 50 years here. The exact same applies to their economy. Think China’s rich? Compare their per capita GDP with America’s. Even adjusted for PPP, it’s not even close.
[I was right. Today, China remains too weak to beat the U.S. military, and is too weak to take over and hold onto Taiwan. Regarding my “50 year” prediction, I think China’s naval and air forces could be strong enough in as little as 20 years to beat U.S. forces in a war for the “First Island Chain,” but that’s not the same as saying China’s military will be better in every way, and able to beat the U.S. military in any type of engagement and in any part of the world.]
I think it’s useful to remember another episode from our recent history when thinking about China’s projected rise. In the 1980’s, Americans were absolutely convinced that Japan was going to surpass us and become the world’s economic superpower. All of the economic trend lines pointed to such an outcome. But guess what happened? Overinvestment in land and the stock market (done out of the expectation of high future returns indicated by all those upward trend lines) formed a bubble, which popped and led to a recession (similar to our current problem). Unemployment went up, causing consumer spending to go way down. Government stimulus attempts were ineffective. Japan’s elderly population was also a major drain. Something similar could happen to China (though a gradual leveling of GDP growth is also possible), and at some point in the future, we might all be laughing about how worried we were back in 2009 or 2019 about this other Asian juggernaut.
[A Japan-style economic slowdown could still hit China, so my prediction from 2009 still stands. However, I’m far less concerned about the “total meltdown” scenario where China has an economic depression AND a political implosion AND attacks its neighbors, dragging in the U.S. Over the last decade, the CCP has proven itself smarter and more cool-headed than to let such a thing happen.]
[In the original Facebook note, I detoured into a discussion of Chinese history at this point. While interesting, I’m omitting it because it isn’t about futurism.]
…The Chinese respect Americans and Europeans for their accomplishments, but still believe that it was really just a fluke that the West happened to be more advanced than China back starting in the 1800’s when it began expanding into East Asia. The Chinese are extremely proud of their country’s economic, political and military ascension and think that the end result will merely be the righting of wrongs and the establishment of the world order as it always should have been, with China at the natural center. The problem is, there is a real chance these ambitions could be frustrated for the reasons I have discussed, and a wounded and bitter China obsessed with failed expectations would be a menace to everyone.
There is a small chance we could see such a world by 2019, or that we could see it on the horizon. Or, China might defy all expectations, overcome its problems and be on its way to taking the reins of global leadership. Or it could be in some middle ground. The point is that China’s future is really uncertain, and owing to the country’s size and strength, this is a major issue we will need to involve ourselves with.
Moving on, Iraq has an at least even chance of still being a stable country by 2019, with a democratic–albeit highly corrupt–government. I’m not saying it’s going to be paradise, but it will be able to take care of itself, and no one will worry about it facing state collapse. Iraq will still be getting a lot of U.S. aid to keep it stable, and I could see small numbers of American troops still in the country for special purposes like training the Iraqi army and fighting terrorists, but we’re not going to be losing many guys, so no one will care. On the other hand, there’s also the real chance that Iraq could hold together for only a short period after the U.S. withdraw, and then start disintegrating again. Such a development would initiate a new national debate over here on whether or not to send troops back in, which I believe we ultimately would.
[I was right! When I wrote the original note, there were about 125,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. By early 2012, it had dropped to 5,000. As I thought might happen, Iraq started disintegrating shortly after, and in 2014, ISIS took over large parts of the country. To confront the new threat, U.S. troop levels again increased, but the intensification of combat was tolerated by the American public because our casualties were low. In 2019, Iraq has returned to being a stable country with a corrupt, democratic government.]
As seemingly hopeless as Afghanistan is, I don’t think Obama is going to cut and run and let it degenerate like we did in the 1990’s. The country will surely be a dump in 2019, but there will be some stability.
[I was right. Afghanistan is probably better than it has been in its history, but the social and economic progress it has made thanks to the U.S. and other countries is paper-thin, and would disintegrate if Afghanistan were left to its own devices. Even Afghans acknowledge this.]
I have no idea how the Iranian nuclear problem is going to be resolved, but some kind of solution will have to be found by 2019. They’ll definitely have the ability to make nukes and warheads by then. Considering the downsides of attacking their nuclear infrastructure, I think it’s entirely possible we might just have to let Iran get the bomb, or at least leave them with the capability to do so.
[An “OK” nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran existed from 2015-18, and hit the pause button on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Had the deal never existed, and had Iran chosen to develop nuclear weapons as fast as possible, it would have built a nuclear bomb by now. The situation is now in a weird holding pattern, where the Trump administration half-believes it can use sanctions to force Iran to give up nuclear weapons, and Iran is mad about the sanctions but not so much that it’s willing to fully resume nuclear weapon development and risk even worse punishment. As was the case in 2009, I have no idea how this dispute will resolve itself.]
There’s also a good chance the that whole “War on Terror” might have wound down and receded from public consciousness by 2019. Sure, crazy Islamists are always going to be a threat, but I could see the momentum being on our side by 2019 and the enemy ranks thinned to a manageable level. It won’t necessarily happen, but it’s a real possibility.
[I was right!]
Also, at current rates, Medicare will go bankrupt in 2019. Expect this to be a big political issue in the 2016 elections. We’ll find a solution to the problem, though I doubt it will be an efficient or cheap one.
[I was wrong. This hurts because it was a particularly sloppy prediction of mine. The Medicare program, by design, can’t “go bankrupt,” nor was there any chance of it running out of money by 2019. I have no idea what inspired that prediction.]
Oh yeah, Fidel Castro dies by 2019 for sure. Kim Jong-Il also has a good chance of being dead by then. I’m not sure what effect it will have on either country, though I’m more optimistic about Cuba moderating in the coming years. Hosni Mubarak is also going to be kicking the bucket, along with Pope Benedict.
[Muhaha! Castro and Kim died in 2016 and 2011, respectively, and Cuba did “moderate” a great deal during the 2010s, though it is still not a free country. Mubarak and Benedict didn’t die, but they both were effectively removed from the picture due to a coup (2011) and resignation (2013), respectively.]
Warfare and military stuff
By 2019, unmanned military vehicles are going to be more prolific and advanced than they are now. Expect to see unmanned boats and trucks in common American military use. The machines will mostly be under the control of remote human operators.
[I got ahead of myself. Unmanned aircraft are more sophisticated and more numerous in the U.S. military and peer militaries, but unmanned land vehicles and ships are still experimental, so I don’t consider them to be in “common” use.]
Of course, the core of our fighting forces will still be human beings, and you’ll still be seeing guys kicking down doors, sleeping in tents and chasing down some rusted AK-47 wielding bums out in some forsaken country even in 2019. Expect that to continue for a couple more decades.
On that note, in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will doubtless involve itself in a number of small conflicts and operations in the Third World. Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in Africa seem like the best bets for this.
[Wow, I was super right! The level of violence in Yemen is much worse than it was in 2009, and though U.S. troops aren’t on the ground there, American weapons and indirect support are propping up one faction. U.S. troops did combat operations in Somalia over the past decade and there is now at least one U.S. base there. Elsewhere in Africa, the U.S. military involved itself in conflicts in Libya and Niger, and built a base in the latter. The U.S. also intervened in the Syrian civil war and actually invaded the country. I predict this kind of global policing will continue at about the same level during the 2020s. ]
WWIII–as in, a huge war between the major powers–is highly unlikely though not impossible. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Cyberwarfare and possibly bioterrorism are much greater threats over the next decade, and I would expect a couple major cyberattacks, not necessarily on the U.S. but against some developed nation. I doubt this would take the form of crippling an entire country, but shutting down all the electricity to a big city isn’t out of the question. While a bioattack could occur, it’s almost certainly just going to involve a normal pathogen like anthrax and won’t be some genetically engineered superbug that kills off half the human race. Sorry to disappoint you apocalypse movie buffs.
[Cyberwarfare did surge in the 2010s, though it overwhelmingly took the form of hacking to steal sensitive data from governments and big companies. There was only one instance of a successful cyberattack meant to shut down a public utility, and it was perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine in 2015.]
The economy
I’m loath to make any predictions here given the huge swings in the global economy we’ve seen over the last two years, but I doubt that we’re headed for some Great Depression part two. The economy will slowly recover, the recession will end, and many Americans will start trying to resume their reckless spending habits. It’s simply an immutable fact about our culture that we are shortsighted and materialistic. I’m not saying things will be as good as they were in 1999 or 2005, but the economy will recover from the recession and will become healthier.
[I was right! In fact, by many measures, the U.S. economy is now stronger than it was in 1999 and 2005. Today’s unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 50 years. Reckless spending habits are back with a vengeance! SUV sales are higher than ever, and newly constructed houses are bigger than ever.]
However, there’s a giant issue on the horizon that could throw a monkey wrench into all of this–the U.S. budget deficit. This is a major, MAJOR problem that has been kept on the back-burner for years and years while people piddled on about socialized healthcare and the wars. Basically, the U.S. federal government has for almost ten years now been spending way more money than it receives in taxes–the traditional means through which governments are funded. To cover the shortfall, the U.S. has been borrowing money from countries like China, Japan and Saudi Arabia. We now owe these countries trillions of dollars, plus billions in interest, and there are no signs that this dependency is going to shrink in the future if we stay on the present course.
[In the original Facebook note, I went into almost a rant about politics and overspending at this point. I’m omitting most of it because it isn’t relevant to this analysis.]
…Past experience has shown that once national debt reaches a certain % of GDP, foreign and domestic investors start getting spooked about the country’s ability to repay, and they stop lending money to it. Well, we’re getting very close to that point, and between now and 2019, the U.S. will have to make major spending and taxation changes to avoid total disaster. If we don’t take the initiative, most likely our main foreign creditors (China, Japan, Saudi Arabia) are going to start pressuring us in various ways to cut spending and raise taxes. If we don’t, they’ll start reducing their purchases of our Treasury securities.
If we really screw things up by failing to reach some kind of fiscal compromise in Washington, life in America could really, REALLY suck come 2019. However, I think it’s more probable that we will end up going through some tortuous debate within government that ends up with us raising taxes, cutting federal programs, or probably a little of both by 2019, which will avert a major economic crisis.
[I was wrong. At the time, I didn’t realize that there is no hard-and-fast rule about how high your country’s debt-to-GDP ratio level has to get before you have a fiscal crisis. Since the U.S. has the world’s biggest economy, trades heavily with all other major countries, and prints its own currency–which, very importantly, is also the world’s reserve currency–special rules apply to it. To see what happens when your country lacks these advantages, look at what happened to Greece in 2015. That said, I haven’t started thinking that the rising national debt isn’t a problem for the U.S. There are just so many variables at play that I can’t predict when or if a sovereign debt crisis will hit, or how bad it will get before we agree to a solution.]
Technology
There are several clear trends that will continue into 2019. For one, we see the vanishing of physical media to hold data. By 2019, the big DVD and Blu-Ray collections you see in peoples’ houses will largely be a thing of the past, at least among people with half a brain or more. People will just download movies into their computers or computer/TV’s, or pay like $1 to watch them On Demand. The same will also be happening to video games: Instead of having to buy an expensive console and a bunch of game cartridges, or a high-end computer, people will use high-speed Internet connections to stream video game feeds from remote central locations. People will be able to play any game they want at any time at low cost, and they won’t have to buy any hardware except controllers and maybe an adapter. The overall costs to gamers will decrease significantly while access to games will increase tremendously. There will still be a lot of highly advanced consoles around by 2019, but the transition to the new technology will be well underway, and the trend will be clear by that point.
[I was mostly right. Sales of DVDs and Blu Ray discs declined over the last decade while movie streaming has exploded and become the norm. Had you bought Netflix stock in December 2009, when its streaming service was in its infancy, your investment would today be worth 33x as much. I don’t see physical storage media bouncing back. Today’s gamers also do have access to a wider variety of games at lower prices than ever thanks to streaming, as the Playstation Network (PSN) and Steam show. My prediction about the end of game consoles might have been a little optimistic, as Sony and Microsoft are planning to release a new generation of consoles next year, but I still think it will come true at some point. Industry insiders are still talking about the impending transition to streaming.]
Hollywood and the video game industry are going to try hard to push 3D TV on the masses, but I’m not sure how quickly it’s going to catch on. People ARE NOT going to put on a pair of 3D glasses every time they watch TV, especially if the glasses cost a lot of money and each household needs to buy several of them so all family members can watch. Hardcore video gamers might be willing to do it to enhance the gaming experience, but not average people just watching the Cooking Channel or something. People might be more amenable to 3D movies in the theaters, but it’s not going to work at home. I don’t think 3D is really going to catch on until holographic TV’s that can produce 3D pictures for the naked eyes are invented, and I could see these at least being in the prototype stage by 2019.
Don’t get me wrong–3D TV definitely seems like the next big thing (after all, at some point, you can’t increase the resolution of 2D TV any further to be discernable to human eyes, and the industry has to start heading in new directions), but I think the 3D glasses are going to be a big stumbling block, and it’s going to take longer for the technology to gain mass acceptance than industry insiders would like. Another major problem is the fact that regular TV’s–including the expensive flatscreen HDTV’s–can’t display 3D images, and normal Blu-Ray players can’t play them, meaning everyone will have to pay a couple thousand bucks again to get everything replaced. There’s also no standard yet for 3D signal broadcasts, and TV signal bandwidths are going to need time to expand to handle them, anyway.
[I was right! And I’m darn proud about this since, in late 2009, we were in the grips of Avatar hysteria, and one of the film’s selling points was that it was made to be seen in 3D. And yes, glasses-free 3D TV prototypes now exist, including one made by “Mopic.”]
Once 3D motion pictures do start to gain widespread appeal, a mini-industry will spring up to “convert” the old 2D movies to 3D in much the same way that old black and white films were colorized. This might start happening by 2019.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to see digital cameras being sold in stores by 2019 that take both 2D and 3D photos, so you could look at them normally or put on your 3D glasses and see them popping out of the computer screen.
[3D movies and photos still haven’t caught on, and I worded my predictions on this to indicate my justified doubts. When glasses-free 3D TVs and advanced VR/AR eyewear become mature technologies, the conversions of older 2D visual content into 3D format will begin. This will probably start by 2029, and will certainly be widespread by 2039. Additionally, there are indeed digital cameras being sold in stores today that can take 3D photos (such as the $350 Vuze XR), but they aren’t very popular.]
E-readers are finally going to go mainstream within a few years, and will be ubiquitous and cheap by 2019. Sure, there will still be people soldiering on with normal newspapers and books, but those will be on their way out for most people, especially younger ones. You’ll go on a bus or a subway or something and see a whole bunch of people looking at their personal e-readers.
[I was basically right. A brand new, high-quality Amazon Kindle 6″ e-reader costs less than $100 today. E-readers are in fact obsolete now because tablet computers got much cheaper and better over the last decade and have many more functions than e-readers. It’s worth it to pay a little extra money to get a device that is so much better. Larger smartphones (sometimes called “phablets”) have also eaten up part of the e-reader market share. It is indeed very common, and in fact the norm, to see people on buses or subways looking at their personal devices, though most of the time it’s a smartphone instead of an e-reader.]
Along those lines, by 2019, I think almost every college student will have a laptop or some tabletlike portable computer (maybe an e-reader with an attached stylus and keyboard) that they would bring to class and do most of their work on. These should also be pretty common among high schoolers, though don’t expect pencils and paper to be anywhere near gone by 2019 in schools.
[I was right. 81% of college students now use laptops during class lectures. Among the remaining 19%, I bet some are using tablet computers or even smartphones to take notes. https://www.pcmag.com/news/370271/the-average-college-laptop-shopper-prioritizes-price-speed ]
There’s also going to be a massive increase in the number of amateur recorded videos. At the rates that computer memory costs are decreasing and digital camcorder technology is improving, by 2019 you could feasibly record every second of your entire, boring life–in good quality video–and save it onto your computer or put it onto the Internet. By 2019, also expect basically half the human race to have a high-quality digital camcorder built into their cell phone, computer, slim digital camera, or WHATEVER, and also expect there to be a lot more surveillance cameras everywhere. Between those developments, expect an explosion in “citizen journalism” and voyeurism, and expect for virtually every single disaster (plane crash, tornado, riot), public crime, or act of public obnoxiousness to be recorded and posted onto the Internet within hours for everyone around the world to see. Yeah, I know things are already kind of like this, I’m just saying you should expect it to be ten times more intense and pervasive by 2019. And things will only get worse from there.
[Oh my God I was right! You could strap a GoPro camera to your chest, record 720p footage with audio, and make 90 GB of video per day (assuming you skip the nine hours per day when you’re sleeping and showering). Applying lossless compression to the footage, you could reduce the file size by at least 50%. The resulting 45 GB of data you made each day could be saved onto personal hard drives. A 2TB HDD costs $50 today, and could store 44.4 days worth of videos, meaning it would only cost slightly more than $1/day to make and save recordings of almost all your waking hours. That price will of course drop in the future as computer memory gets cheaper. Moving on, in rich and middle-income countries, over half of adults have smartphones. Even in poor India, over 24% have smartphones, and another 40% have “dumb cell phones,” most of which surely have built-in cameras. My prediction about an explosion in the amount of amateur and semi-professional video content being uploaded to the Internet was also obviously right. In fact, it’s now common for public crimes and acts of obnoxiousness to be recorded by multiple people and from different angles.]
More generally, by 2019, physical computer memory will be so cheap that for about $50 you could buy more memory than you could ever put to any practical use. For instance, if you scanned every important personal document, photograph and home movie into your computer and also added in all the songs you liked along with pdf copies of all your favorite books, it wouldn’t come anywhere close to filling up your hard disk. By 2019, the only way you could exceed the memory capacity of an average computer would be extreme and pointless hording of data: You would have to save 100 or more Blu-Ray quality movies onto your hard drive, or download hundreds of thousands of songs (which would easily include every famous song ever written), have dozens of high-end computer games (circa 2019) on your computer at once, or record every second of your life with hi-def cameras in order to have a problem with disk space. Bottom line: By 2019, computer hard disk space is effectively infinite for normal people.
[I was right. As mentioned, $50 today will buy you a 2TB hard drive, which contains more space than the vast majority of people need. There’s no reason to save movies and music onto your personal drives thanks to cloud storage and streaming.]
It will also be a lot faster and easier to upload videos and pictures to the Internet by 2019. I could see a lot of people using digital cameras that have GPS sensors in them or some other type of location fixing device/software, so every picture and video would automatically be tagged by the device with information on where it was taken. People could easily search and view videos and pictures over the Internet by searching for images of a certain geographic area.
[I was right about it all! Smartphones automatically embed the GPS coordinates into a photo’s metadata at the moment the photo is taken, though this feature can be disabled. ]
I’d also expect electronic media to be embedded in a lot of magazines, books, wall ads, and products by 2019, meaning you open up a copy of the December 2019 issue of Maxim, and several of the pages feature paper-thin computer displays with moving images and sounds. Most of these will probably be advertisements. I could also see a lot of billboards and wall ads being like this by 2019, and people no longer being shocked or fascinated by them–they’ll just be an everyday thing. If you want an idea of what I’m talking about, watch Minority Report and Children of Men. This was already done for the first time in some magazine this year.
[I was wrong. Paper-thin computer display technology didn’t get cheaper and better as fast as I predicted, and I think we might have to wait until the 2030s for the price/quality level to be good enough to make this a reality. A bigger problem, however, is the decline of the print industry, which includes the magazine sub-industry. Over the last ten years, magazine sales have shrunk by about 50% as people have switched to reading things off of screens instead of paper, and I don’t see how this transition can be stopped. By the time it is possible to make paper-thin digital displays that are so cheap that buyers will be OK with throwing them away, there won’t be much of a magazine industry left. Case in point: Maxim, which I mentioned in my prediction, went from 12 to 10 issues per year in 2012, and has had declining revenues and profits over the last decade.]
By 2019, every new car except the very cheapest will come with a GPS and an MP3 player. Being horribly dependent upon one’s GPS for navigation will be a common thing among new drivers. I wouldn’t be surprised if some computerized, self-driving cars were also on the roads by 2019, though they’ll definitely be an expensive novelty and most people will be scared to ride in them. Far more common will be cars that use some form of computer assistance for things like collision warnings and parallel parking. Affordable hybrids and reliable battery-powered cars with respectable range will be a lot more numerous in 2019 (in part thanks to all the used, circa-2009 Priuses that will be still circulating), though the roads will still be dominated by normal internal combustion vehicles driven by stupid human beings like today. It takes many years for the vehicle fleet to “turn over.”
[I was right about almost everything! The 2019 Hyundai Accent base version, which is a cheaper car model but not one of “the very cheapest,” comes with an integral MP3 player, but no GPS. However, this is a moot point since MP3 drives and GPS receivers built in to cars have been rendered redundant by smartphones, which have both of those features. The future actually turned out more convenient than I thought. Self-driving cars are on the roads in the form of Teslas, they are still expensive novelties, and a recent poll showed most Americans are afraid to ride in them. ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2019/03/28/most-americans-still-afraid-to-ride-in-self-driving-cars/#3991842432da ) Hybrids and pure electric cars are indeed more common today, but gas-powered cars still dominate.]
Solar technology will be cheaper and better than ever in 2019. For just a few thousand dollars, you can buy enough solar panels from Wal-Mart or Home Depot to cover your entire roof. The human labor needed to install it properly might actually end up costing more than the panels themselves. Tens of millions of working- and middle-class people find it within their means to install the solar panels on their property without major financial strain, and rooftop solar arrays become a common sight in the U.S., though such upgrades are still only made to a minority of homes.
[I was right! Also, I got a 7.5 kW solar array installed on my own roof in 2019, and the cost after all tax breaks and other discounts was about $10,000, which is affordable for a middle-class person. Even a working-class income person could buy it thanks to loans. Rooftop solar panels indeed became common sights across the U.S. during the 2010s.]
Along the lines of what Kurzweil keeps harping on, I could see a lot of people using glasses with computers built into them. There’s a clear trend for computers to get smaller, more convenient to use, more portable, and more integrated into everyday life. Just look at how many people have iPhones, which are essentially small computers. A logical next stage would be to have the computer display permanently in your field of vision, meaning a ghosted heads-up display overlaying what you see in the real world. The glasses themselves might have their own independent computers, or they might function like Bluetooths and be dependent upon signals received from the iPhone in your pocket. At the very least, these would be useful for navigation and for displaying information about stores, places and things you encounter. I’m not going to screw myself over like Kurzweil and make a bunch of specific predictions about how the glasses will work, etc., but I think it would make sense for the makers of these glasses to first start marketing them to people who wear glasses anyway thanks to bad eyesight. Maybe you’re going in to get your frames changed or something, and you fork over the extra $100 to get the little computer built into your new frame. Pretty soon, you’re bragging to all your normally sighted friends about it, you let them wear it for a couple minutes so they can see what it’s like, and maybe that pushes them to start buying glasses of their own even though they ordinarily never wear them. By no means do I think the majority of people will have these things by 2019, but I could see them being a viable technology by then that people don’t consider weird. Let me also make a highly specific prediction about this: Once Apple gets into making these things, it will call them–what else–but the iGlass. Ha ha ha!!!
[I was wrong. Google tried to introduce the first augmented reality glasses in 2013, and it was possibly the biggest tech industry failure of the decade. Once large numbers of people started using them, problems that I didn’t foresee in 2009 became clear, such as the unwillingness of many normally sighted people to wear glasses all the time, and dismay from other people that someone else’s AR glasses could be surreptitiously recording them. The 2010s were also the decade when technology fatigue, social media addiction, and “fear of missing out” (FOMO) became real problems, and people realized that being connected to the virtual world all the time with devices like AR glasses might be a bad thing. Again, I couldn’t have foreseen this. That said, I don’t think AR eyewear is dead forever, and in fact I predict it will return as a niche product in the 2020s once the technology is better and cheaper.]
At the very least, by 2019, most everyone will have the equivalent of an iPhone. Normal cell phones strictly for calling other people and sending text messages will be rare.
Just more generally, computers will become more ubiquitous, helpful and user-friendly. By 2019, you’ll be able to just type a natural language question into your computer (probably your iPhone or whatever equivalent you have) or some website (“What’s a really good, cheap Chinese restaurant around here?”) or maybe even speak the question into the computer’s microphone, and it will be able to understand you and give a useful answer (“Ho Fat’s: Average rating is four stars, average entree price is $7, located four blocks ahead.”). It won’t work all the time, but will be effective and reliable enough for many people to use it and benefit from it.
[I was right about everything! Our devices and computers will get better at these things over the 2020s, and will evolve from merely responding to our requests to anticipating our needs and proactively suggesting useful things to us. In the near future, your life will be better if you follow your computer’s daily advice.]
In terms of health technology, by 2019, anyone will be able to submit a blood or saliva sample to a lab and get a copy of their personal genome for a few hundred bucks, if not less. Instead of getting some horribly long printout, you would get the data on a thumbdrive or something like that. People would find the information valuable for health purposes since it would inform them of hereditary health risks they might face, and would allow them to take precautions beforehand, but it is not going to lead to the revolution in personal healthcare by 2019 that some are expecting. Maybe it would add two or three years onto the average life expectancy of the population.
[I was right! Dante Labs does high-quality, whole-genome sequencing for $600, and you send them your DNA with a “spit kit.” The genomic data are returned to you in the form of a .txt file. The personal health benefits of having this information are small because we still don’t understand most of the human genome.]
By 2019, there will be a prescription pill on the market that slows the human aging process, delaying death and extending life. But expect it to cost a lot and to deliver minimal benefits, like you take it every day starting in your 20’s and you end up living to 90 instead of 88.
[It’s not clear if I was right. The problem with my prediction was, to prove that a pill extends human lifespan, decades of clinical trials would need to happen so differences in mortality and rate of aging could be discerned between people who took the pill and people who didn’t. Giving it only ten years for science to settle the matter was a mistake. That said, I’m heartened by the number of new drugs that were popularized over the last decade that have some scientific basis for having “life extension” properties (metformin and rapamycin), and in the fullness of time, I predict we’ll have conclusive evidence that at least one of today’s unproven anti-aging drugs does extend human lifespan.]
Household robots will be fairly common by 2019 and will be doing stuff like vacuuming the floor, mowing the lawn and dragging the trashcans to the curb. They won’t be humanoid in shape and instead will have very utilitarian and function-specific designs. Industrial robots will be more advanced, and I could see greater use of robots in labor-intensive industries doing things like picking fruits and vegetables from farm fields, which would erode our demand for illegal immigrant labor and mitigate the demographic shifts we’re expecting. A lot of the technologies necessary for creating these affordable, dependable robots will come from military research.
[I was mostly wrong. Vacuum cleaner robots have gotten much cheaper and more common since 2009, but that’s the only inroad robots made into people’s homes. Human hands still do almost all of the fruit- and vegetable-picking on farms, though experimental robots have gotten much better. The technologies just didn’t advance as fast as I thought.]
Many more people will telecommute. Also, taking college classes remotely will be a lot more common and more respectable by 2019 (which will be a good thing), though the vast majority of young people will still want to be physically present in the classroom and get the campus/college life experience.
[I was right.]
Space
I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2019, space probes had discovered life or proof of life elsewhere in our Solar System. I’m not talking about little green men, I mean microbes and fungi. We’re most likely to find this stuff in the soils of Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Instead of destroying the basis for religions like Christianity, I think their adherents will find a way to rationalize it and reconcile it with their beliefs.
[I was not wrong or right because I hedged my statement with the uncertain phrase “I wouldn’t be surprised if…” In fact, I didn’t even make a real prediction. Life still hasn’t been found outside of Earth, but I still think it’s very possible that simple alien life forms like microbes and fungi exist in our Solar System and beyond. I can’t predict when we might find an sample.]
I also wouldn’t be surprised if one of our telescopes spotted a distant planet with Earth-like conditions by 2019. It would be pretty cool, the first grainy pictures of the planet would be on the cover of TIME magazine, and I’m sure it would change the way people thought about the importance of the space program, but we’d really just continue with our daily lives. A lot of our whacko, conspiracy theory types would latch onto these findings and start renewing their paranoia over aliens.
[Many potentially habitable exoplanets have been discovered since 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extrasolar_candidates_for_liquid_water ), but we don’t have proof they have life. We don’t have quality photos of these exoplanets because we don’t have multi-trillion dollar space telescopes whose lenses are several square kilometers in area, which is what would be needed to capture enough of the infinitesimal visible light reflecting off an exoplanet to make a photograph. Because I now have an elementary grasp of optics, I understand why a detailed photo of an exoplanet won’t grace the cover of TIME magazine for a long time.]
By 2019, we’ll probably be in a mini-space race with China to go back to the Moon. No one will have landed humans there, but the time for such an event would be measurably close.
[I think I was right. China landed its first rover on the Moon recently, is planning a second one, and probably has the long-term goal of landing a man on the Moon. The U.S. Vice President has also declared that there is a new space race with China, and that America’s response should be a manned Moon landing by 2024. I predict that deadline will slip, but a landing by the end of this decade is plausible.]
“Special” problems
The world isn’t going to face any major risks in 2012, at least not because of anything the ancient Mayans said. Keep in mind that the Mayans were such great futurists that they didn’t predict the Spanish showing up in the 1500’s and massacring them. It’s also unclear whether the Mayans even believed 2012 would bring any kind of disasters to the world. If anything, they would have been happy about the milestone. Finally, let’s keep in mind that the Mayan calendar isn’t really ending in 2012, we’re just supposedly transitioning into a new age of mankind. According to the Mayans, this has happened several times in human history, the last occurrence being in 3114 BC, (Year Zero to the Mayans) when the current age of mankind began. If the transition dates between each age of man are times of great death and disaster as 2012 proponents claim, then 3114 BC should have likewise been a period of great suffering, but historical and archaeological records show no evidence of and problems that year. It looks like–gasp-the Mayans made it all up.
[Mayan doomsday didn’t happen, and I remember spending the first half of December 21, 2012 filling out boring paperwork at a bank.]
The world’s climate almost certainly won’t be detectably different ten years from now. Sure, it will be 0.1 degrees Celsius warmer, but you’re not going to see any major changes in coastlines or weather thanks to that. Runaway global warming is a possibility, just as the Earth getting hit by a giant asteroid is, though the mainstream of climatologists dismisses the theory. If anything, I think the threat of global warming is exaggerated.
[I was right. In spite of the breathless, dour pronouncements that “Global warming MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED to this latest disaster” that are now daily pablum on the news, the planet’s overall climate is not noticeably different to people than it was ten years ago. I still consider “runaway global warming” to be a very remote possibility. ]
Peak Oil may or may not happen during the teen years. This is another outcome that is very difficult to predict. Once the recession ends and petroleum demand picks up again, we’re going to see $4 gasoline again pretty soon, and I don’t see it getting much cheaper than that. But we’re not going to “run out” of oil EVER. There’s simply too much on this planet–the biggest bottleneck is our ability to extract and process it. By 2019, gas could easily be north of $4 per gallon, and there might be many more people taking mass transit or using battery powered cars, but there’s not going to be any collapse in oil supplies. We’ll just get used to it.
[Overall, I’d rate my prediction as “wrong.” Not only did Peak Oil not happen, but gas prices have stayed below the $3.00 mark in most of the U.S. for the last five years in spite of a booming economy. Fracking changed everything. It was a change I didn’t see coming, but I was in good company.]
[I’m leaving out two paragraphs from my original Facebook Note where I talk about and debunk the “Prophecy of the Popes” because the whole topic is silly and unscientific. You can research it on your own if you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes ]
California seems kind of overdue for a big earthquake, doesn’t it? (I probably should say this right now since I’m actually in San Diego at the moment, right over a faultline) I would expect a significant one by 2019.
[I was wrong, and I quit the business of “earthquake prediction” years ago. Even the best seismologists in the world can’t make useful forecasts.]
I’d like to end this section by making an important point: I’ve come to realize that most people have a natural tendency to believe that the world is always getting worse, to be pessimistic and to believe that the worst case scenario will occur. You can see this in the slew of zombie horror movies, books and films about 2012 and the apocalypse, and among commonly held views about the future of the world. I believe that this mostly stems from a perverse fascination that people have with spectacle and disaster, from the millennialist tradition of the Abrahamic faiths that predominate in the West, and from a strong and usually secret desire among many people–particularly survivalists, young men, and individuals frustrated by their low ranking in the current, orderly society–to experience adventure and “natural” living instead of their boring, normal lives. Often, these desires are informed by immaturity and by mistaken notions of what such a postapocalyptic world would be like (imagine being in Mogadishu or Darfur and being just as poor, starving, stuck, and badly armed as everyone else).
A common retort is that “this time it’s different” because there are so many “signs” of impending disaster occurring at once. Really? I hope that I’ve shown here the flaws of such prophecies, and just because there are a lot of them doesn’t mean anything. 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 0. Moreover, I think to a large extent that the paranoia is being fueled by the media and by the entertainment industry, which themselves are just essentially parroting to the masses what they know they want to hear and not tapping into some kind of cosmic truth about the future. The “experts” who also harp on catastrophes like Peak Oil, 2012 and the Biblical apocalypse and lend seeming credence to them usually stand something to gain (typically money, resume padding, fame, or just an ego boost) from being in the public light, and they almost always lack the necessary facts and data to assert their ideas with anything approaching true certainty. Of course, the experts on the opposing side who claim that things actually aren’t as bad as most people think and won’t end calamitously are usually ignored by average people because they’re not as exciting as the other guys. The whole phenomenon is silly and shows the consequences of irrational human thinking.
[I still stand by all of this! These beliefs have in fact been strengthened by things I learned over the last decade about evolutionary psychology and the negativity bias.]
The Edster
Eddie will be 35 and will be in a mid-management position at some big company or probably the government. Hopefully, his mind won’t be dulled yet by the drudgery of the workplace, and he will still be creative.
Perhaps there shall be a Mrs. Eddie…or perhaps not. In any case, Eddie will be feeling the desire to generate Eddie Jrs in the next few years if he does not already have them since having kids at 50 would be too old and Eddie would be a stodgy and out-of-touch dad. 2019 would start the optimal time window for Eddie to start reproducing.
Eddie will have read an enormous number of books by this point and will have more advanced knowledge in several fields, including evolutionary psychology and philosophy. Eddie will also have traveled widely by this point and will have visited many countries, definitely including Thailand, Britain, Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. Eddie will have visited all 50 states and will own a small RV and boat to assist with these travels.
There is a chance that Eddie might be involved in a Ph.D. program in 2019.
By 2019, Eddie will own several houses that he will rent out to tenants on the side. Eddie will have enough of these by 2019 to start seriously thinking about quitting his normal day job and just working 15 hours a week doing rental real estate and spending the rest of his time at leisure and doing personal pursuits. Perhaps Eddie will begin making serious plans to work his way into the Travelers’ Century Club.
[I hit the nail on the head! My math was miraculously right, and I did indeed turn 35 ten years after I turned 25. My career situation closely matches my predictions, I’ve traveled widely (though I fell one state short of my 50 state goal), but don’t have the RV. Also, after visiting the first 17 countries, I realized there is a lot of repetition in the world and some places just aren’t worth seeing, so I dropped my long-term goal of seeing 100+ countries so I can hang out with old people in the Travelers’ Century Club. Very fortunately, I opted against pursuing a Ph.D and invested my time in wiser endeavors like playing more video games.]
[That’s the end of the original Facebook Note. However, over the next few years, I added new predictions to it in the form of Comments, which I’m posting below this, along with their timestamps and my evaluations of them.]
March 26, 2011: Another thing to add under the “Technology” section: By the end of 2019, the 2-D TV paradigm will have finally reached maturity. The problems and tradeoffs that currently dog digital TV sets (motion blur, bad-looking anti-jitter settings, dull blacks and whites, etc.) will be solved, and the picture quality will be perfect at last. The price for digital TV sets will also have come down so much that a 60″ monster will cost a thousand bucks or less, so having such an appliance will be the new standard. Almost all types of big-screen TV’s circa-2019 will be less than two inches thick, and some might in fact be incredibly thin and light. Of course, rather than let us be happy with this, Hollywood and the electronics industry will keep pushing us to buy even better TV technologies. As I’ve said, there’s a good chance we will be transitioning to 3-D TV’s in large numbers, and by the end of 2019, its possible that holographic TV’s might be in mass production. The industry might also have some new, ultra-high res format better than 1080×1920 that it’s trying to push on consumers for 2-D TV’s, though I don’t see why anyone in their right mind would NEED something higher res than Blu-Ray.
[I was mostly right. New 2D TVs have solved all the technical problems with accurately displaying colors and moving objects. They actually improved more on all the metrics I listed than I predicted they would. The industry is now pushing 4K format on consumers, and people are buying it even though few of them need it.]
March 26, 2011: Also, let me clarify something. By 2019, I believe that DVD’s and Blu-Rays will be largely obsolete and that most people will stream hi-def movies over the Internet whenever they want to watch them. However, that doesn’t mean all of those discs are going to magically disappear. Yeah, you’ll still see them for sale at Wal-Mart and you’ll still see them cluttering up peoples’ houses, just in the same way you can still find VHS tapes all over the place. But by that far in the future, discs will be old technology that is clearly on its way out. Sales will be way down and still declining, and stores will probably have to slash prices way down on Blu-Rays to $5 to get anyone to buy them. Redbox might still exist and still rent Blu-Rays, but the technology’s niche in our lives will have shrunk to the margins.
[I was right! Wal-Mart now literally sells Blu-Ray movies in unorganized bargain bins. Redbox still exists and rents discs to people, but the company has been ailing for years due to the rise of competitors that deliver streamed content.]
December 16, 2011: By 2019, LED lights will finally be perfected and will be the new standard for industrial, commercial and residential lighting. LED’s will be cheap, will produce natural-looking light, and of course won’t burn out for 10+ years.
[I was right!]
December 27, 2011: By the end of 2019, the following gadgets will be obsolete:
1) Standalone GPS devices (GPS features will be built into other devices you will still carry)
2) Tablets exclusively used for E-reading (tablet tech will be so advanced that there will be no point in buying such limited devices)
3) Cellphones that aren’t smart phones (smart phones will be so cheap that there won’t be any point in buying a “dumb” phone)
4) Pocket digital cameras (will be replaced by cameras built into smart phones–DSLR’s will still have a niche, though)
5) DVD players (Blu-Ray players and disc will be dirt cheap by the end of 2019)
6) Recordable CD’s and DVD’s (thumbdrives, cloud storage and streamed content will replace discs)
Yes, I took this from a recent Yahoo news article entitled “7 Gadgets that won’t be around in 2020.”
[I was right.]
December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, most new digital cameras will capture pictures in 3D and through use of multifocus technology, whereby one push of the shutter button actually takes multiple pictures of the same image at different fields of depth, so that the viewer can later “zoom” in and out of any given photograph to see images of the foreground, background, or any arbitrary distance from the lens in focus. Computer facial recognition technology will also be so advanced that computers could automatically identify all the faces shown in a given photo.
[The first prediction about multifocus camera tech being the norm was wrong, but the second prediction about facial recognition was right.]
December 27, 2011: Also, by the end of 2019, I believe free cell phone service will exist. It will probably be just basic talk and text, and a company like Google or Apple will run the service.
[I was wrong, though the cost of a typical cell phone plan dropped.]
[And that’s a wrap! If you’re curious to know what my predictions are for ten years hence, this month I’m publishing a big list of predictions for that and other future dates, so stay tuned!]