Technology has shaped our civilization as it grew down the centuries, and since the industrial revolution, each new generation seems defined by some new technological revolution… So what will the next revolution be? Planes, trains, and automobiles helped shape the world we live in today, down to the very layout of our homes and cities, and the advent of running water, electricity, the internet, and now wi-fi continues these trends. It's not really accurate to say one single technology defines a generation, sometimes it’s several, sometimes they avalanche more quickly, and what they all seem to have in common is they often seem to sweep out of nowhere, while at the same time they often do seem like they were obvious in hindsight, or even sometimes in advance.
Everyone knew internet commerce would become a big thing, and cell phones, but we never really imagined the forms they would take. As we go through today, we’ll be looking at a couple dozen major technological sectors and asking what they’re up to and where they're going. I'll also give a quick definition or clarification of the ones that might be less obvious.
We’ll be covering them alphabetically and many have longer sections, for instance we’ll dwell a lot on Energy Technologies, to discuss updates on solar, nuclear, other renewables, batteries, and so on. Here are those categories for today: 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, 5G and Telecommunications, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, Autonomous Vehicles and Electric Vehicles, Big Data and Analytics, Biotechnology, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, Energy Technologies, Financial Technology, Health Tech and Digital Health, Information Technology, the Internet of Things, Nanotechnology, Quantum Computing, Retail Applications and Trends, Robotics and Automation, Smart Cities and Infrastructure, Smart Home Technology, Space Technology, and Wearable Technology. Like any categorization system it is a bit arbitrary, for instance, we could have had construction or materials on there, or looked at consumer technology or advances in utilities, and that would be just as valid, as would be looking at in terms of, say, the 11 S&P sectors, but while we will be looking at near term technologies more today, we will also at times be jumping further ahead in time, so phrasing everything in modern economic contexts isn’t ideal.
And speaking of the S&P 500, it probably goes without saying that none of our discussion today should be taken as investment advice. Which is a good point to expand on, because while our goal today is to try to see what the next big thing will be, that technological trend that defines a decade or generation the way personal computers, the internet, and smartphones did for the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, and how AI will probably do for the 2020s, we obviously don’t have a crystal ball. It also is never as simple as saying ‘this decade was about this technology’, that statement will rarely be accurate.
Moreover, predicting general trends isn’t that hard but predicting companies is, nobody was very surprised by the emergence of lots of business being done on the internet, but predicting Amazon or Ebay specifically is a lot harder and that’s really where investment is at. I think we’ll see a lot more automated and electric cars on the roads this upcoming decade, and doubtless Tesla will be a big brand in that, but it's harder to say who the primary competitors will be and what the market for automated or semi-automated freight vehicles might look like. And any number of things change in their economic outlooks if you encounter problems manufacturing your devices as cheaply as planned, or someone figures out a way to make them cheaper, or some rival technology improves too, which is a good place to segue into our first category.
3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 3D printing lets us make relatively simple items at home, which can represent a time or convenience advantage. Generally you can produce the same widget cheaper, better, faster, or all of the above in some dedicated factory, which is why I often discourage folks overhyping 3D printing technology and its impact on the future. It is not a star trek replicator, and as we discussed in our episode the Santa Clause Machine, it isn’t likely we’d ever have that technology or 3D printers even vaguely in that zone of speed and detail.
It’s handy for space travel for instance because you’re a billion miles from the nearest store and you’re looking at potentially months or years for a delivery at a cost of many thousands of dollars per kilogram. So if your 3D printer can crank out a new screwdriver for you, or some tool that you didn’t expect to need, maybe a 1% chance, and thus choose not to pack along, then even if it is printing out an inferior tool, if it gets the job done and now, it’s all good. We may one day be able to print any item as good as a factory would and even getting nearly as good for a few times the price is likely to heavily upend retail and manufacturing models.
We may even be able to print food this way, from base stocks of some easy to grow and produce feedstock. Thus, it really does have the potential to become a huge technological revolution, when you can make things at home, and the competitor there will be advances that improve the cost and speed of delivery. This is a great example of how improvements to one technology can prevent another from avalanching into a huge thing.
If I can print a decent screwdriver at home in an hour, and presumably with little effort for me to queue that up, and for, say, an effective cost of 10 bucks, then it has some advantage over a delivery for 6 bucks for tomorrow, or me running to the local big box store now and buying it for 5 bucks. If I don’t need the tool till tomorrow, I will order it. If I am preparing for a project next week, it goes on the shopping list.
If I am just restocking something I’m running low on, then I add it to my list of things to keep an eye out for at a discount or used. All three options, print, deliver, and brick and mortar store are clearly competitive in that example and it would depend on the object and person which won and on which occasions. Paying twice as much for a car or house to get it a week earlier is very different from doing it for a screwdriver or minor widget, especially one that might be critical to a bigger project I’m doing on a timeline.
Clearly improvements to a 3D printer could alter that decision matrix, but so could drone deliveries that get the widget to your house in under an hour or having a daily delivery from your store like some upgraded version of the postal service, and I would tend to think the post office in its current incarnation is living on borrowed time and this would be a way it could adapt. Larger mailboxes with coded remote unlocking available to you and them seems almost certain to be more widely in use this decade too. I think everyone knows the term 3D printing but additive manufacturing is a little less used and yet just as important a concept here.
Simply form, if I’m carving a stone or whittling a wood block to make something, that’s a subtractive process, I’m removing things, whereas 3D printing is additive, and generally speaking there’s going to be a lot of different cases where one works better than the other but at a fundamental level, subtractive creations generate waste you either need to recycle, use for some other task, or pay money to dispose of. It isn’t very likely you will find something equally profitable to do with that material as whatever you were manufacturing, and splitting your focus to try to make and market two products can be troublesome too, so often you end up either selling it to someone else to make stuff at a discount or actually paying to get rid of it. Needless to say, all things being equal - which admittedly is rarely the case - additive is better than subtractive as it bypasses the waste issue.
You also have a much easier time doing intricate work on the inside of an object if you’re building it layer by layer rather than taking a big block and trying to get in there to make changes. This is another reason I think 3D printing, and additive manufacturing more generally, will play a big role in the next century. 5G and Telecommunications Of course to order things from stores or download a printing template, you need good communications, and given that a fairly large portion of most folks' monthly budget is paying their phone and internet bills, I don’t think I have to explain the importance of this sector.
This section is a bit of misnomer for its title though because it's not really 5G that interests us, or even really 6G, or Sixth Generation, but more where it’s going in the future. , and I don’t think there’s any huge new shifts here, we aim for more and faster data, to more seamlessly connect us to it, and to make those connections lighter, longer range, lower battery draw, and maybe more casually integrated into us, smart watches or connections to augmented reality or so on. I think we will see a lot more shift to Zoom style formats of casual visual options not just audio, in your classic phone call, but nothing too universal or massive, and I’m not seeing much short term progress in holograms that’s going to see you having a smartwatch that generates a hologram walking next to you, scifi style.
That’s likely to be in the augmented reality area and that has its own category today, as does energy tech for batteries and artificial intelligence, and so we’ll bypass those improvements for more general discussion under their own categories. If I had to guess for the nearest big technology upgrade in communications, I would say it would be a trend for superapps, where you only have one streaming app that interfaces as needed with the others and gets you that media you want under the UI, or user interface that you prefer. Same for social media, I don’t think you see the companies disappear so much as apps bundling together more or having a blanket app meant for seamlessly using all of them simultaneously.
I think we also see a lot more AI involvement in replying, where it generates some suggested replies in text, and I think we might see this emerge with some personalized deep-fake options. Companies have an obvious motive to use more AI in their customer service and tech support wings, and a clear and conversational AI talking to you is obviously a big and sought after benchmark. But the secondary effect is going to be folks using it for both small business and personal applications, and as an example, if your phone can fake your voice and is authorized to reply to certain people on certain topics, it might be able to take a call for you and reply with things like “I’ll be there in 19 minutes.
” One can imagine any number of ways this could go wrong or offend people too, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t get done, and there’s nothing new about artificial intelligence being problematic. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Speaking of AI, this is ironically going to be one of our shorter sections even though it is also obviously our lead candidate for the biggest technological revolution of this decade and probably the next couple. We’re keeping it short because we’re going to discuss its applications under a lot of other headings, and on the one hand folks are already very familiar with its pros and cons, while on the other we could spend the whole episode just talking about AI and not even vaguely exhaust the topic.
Admittedly that’s true of any of our categories today, and we’ll run a poll on our community tab on youtube afterwards to see which topic people would like to see a whole episode on, but AI won’t be one of the 4 options. It’s just too big and too obviously an up-and-coming game changer. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Speaking of games, one of the more amusing trends of the smartphone era was seeing more simple types of games become popular to make them compatible with the limitations of smartphones compared to PCs or consoles.
Obviously the role of virtual reality in gaming can not be understated though I expect it to be slow to really roll out and less cyber-punky than originally thought. The true big role of virtual reality to me is still a ways off, where we might see many folks spending all their time in VR environments. See our episode virtual worlds for more discussion of that, but while I expect this to keep growing and improving rather aggressively, it’s further ahead in its main impact and I think it’s augmented reality that’s probably the big gamechanger of the two for the next generation.
This is where you have glasses or contacts or potentially even direct implants into your brain to let you see and hear things projected into your real world environment. In early versions, this is wonderful stuff like an AI reading someone’s face and pulling their name and other bio basics up as text on your vision to see next to their head, or maybe your phone simply querying their phone for that information and displaying it. And in the short term that might just be on the phone, popping up when you take a call from someone, or into your earbud to tell you about that person when you shift and look at them for a minute.
As we improve display technologies, getting that overlaid onto your glasses or contacts is more the ideal, and this is an area that benefits hugely from improvements to AI in almost every category. I mentioned a watch displaying a hologram of someone as nice sci fi style improvement to phone technology, but this is where we would expect Augmented Reality instead, where the person appears in your vision as though they were there, or maybe with a certain halo or transparency to make sure you didn’t think they really were there. Where AI comes in here would be to regenerate that person’s appearance to conform to the environment.
So they’re chatting with you from their sofa while you’re walking, but instead of appearing to be on a moving couch, or even showing their actual background, the AI kicks in to alter their image into one of them walking next to you like a friend and maybe even dodge other pedestrians, and possibly even with AI overrides that would let them hijack that to have them suddenly shout ‘look out’ to dodge traffic, or more normally, to suddenly have your augmented reality overlay blow a horn and start flashing a warning and highlighting the dangerous vehicle. So too, an augmented reality overlay could bring up an AI showing you how to perform CPR or summon a doctor who could tell and show you how to treat someone who just got hit by a car. Autonomous Vehicles and Electric Vehicles Traffic injuries are a huge source of both loss of life and long term injuries to people that damage their quality of life, and while I know a lot of folks hate the idea of their car driving for them, I think most can think of some other drivers they’d much prefer to see letting a computer take over the wheel for.
In the end, I think the safety issue will drive the introduction of self-driving vehicles into the mainstream market. The form that will take though will be as more and better machine-assisted features, like crash warnings, and less of an auto-pilot than an AI co-pilot who can take the wheel while you’re distracted or for long freeway trips to let you nap or watch a show. I think the winning tech here in the short term will be those that focus on helping you drive rather than driving for you, and also on the marketing side, those that focus on the technology’s usefulness to new drivers and old drivers.
A lot of seniors lose the ability to drive and often gradually, so this is good tech for them as it lets them maintain the autonomy of having a car at their disposal without needing to Uber or catch a bus or ride. So too, one of the scariest things for parents when thinking of their teenage kids, probably right after dating and drugs, is driving, call them the 3 D’s, plus anymore Ds on their report card, and having a lot of safety features on cars is probably the major reason I’ve heard from parents as to why they bought their kid a newer car rather than letting them get an older junker. So self-driving or co-piloting vehicles that have features only the owner can disengage, like a breathalyzer or collision avoidance, might drive a lot of purchases.
Longer term, those copiloting and autopiloting features having the ability to seamlessly shift who is running things is probably the key user interface angle. “Alexa, you drive now” is all well and good but having it be able to near-instantly snatch control away when you start coughing or have looked down at the console are pretty important too. Next week’s episode takes us back into space and the deeper future to contemplate spaceships and battlefleets, and a point we will make there is that our meat brain can only react so fast, and indeed even a smarter AI will have this limitation.
Dumb and simple is fastest to react. Virtually all driving decisions are actually very simple and require little brains, just a lot of speed, and computers are very good at that. They will come to dominate the market because of that, and I would predict within 20 to 30 years, as those key improvements get made and we build up a big pool of performance data, that we will see big social pushes to let the computer do the driving, ranging from data-driven guilt trips, to actual laws, for good or ill, but probably for less vehicle deaths at least.
I think we will see it come in the co-pilot role a lot in freight vehicles too, as those long drives make a copilot very handy, and yet there’s not a huge economic incentive to remove drivers from freight vehicles, as they are not the primary cost of transport, the fuel and vehicle maintenance is, and they’re often going to be of benefit on the front and back end of the trip. I think automated freight is coming too, but not quite as rapidly as some predict. Same for electric vehicles, they are finally getting a non-niche role in the vehicle sector but how much they get adopted is going to depend a lot on how battery and energy production technologies advance.
Expect to see more charging stations, but I think it is likely to be ‘vehicle number 2’ for households needing multiple vehicles for a while, especially away from cities and charging infrastructure, rather than the only vehicle they own. Electric vehicles have definitely arrived now and won’t be going away, though I think it will be quite some time before they move from a smaller fraction of vehicles to the super-majority, and possibly never if certain energy techs do or don’t develop, which we’ll get to later. Big Data and Analytics We mentioned data and analysis eventually altering public policy on autonomous vehicles a bit ago, and it would be redundant to say data will play a big role in deciding our policy and laws in the future since it's such a huge aspect of it now, but in short form it will play a bigger and probably more accurate role in the future.
Though doubtless efforts to distort or manipulate that data will grow in sophistication too. I don’t think this will be the next big technological revolution, but instead, like now, just keep playing a major role in improvements to others. Biotechnology Biotechnology is so broad a field we’re separating it from general medicine and nanotechnology today, and for the sake of brevity I’ll limit this to saying that I think the best pathway for this being the next big generation dominating technology would be to find ways to more safely pierce the skin, so that we could have injection ports for monitors or wires in people, or to improve rejection-preventing technologies, so that machines or replacement organs can be used more easily in humans.
There are also non-human and non-medical options to consider too. Improvements in designing bacteria and other organisms with desired properties will also continue being part of manufacture of useful substances or on the other side of the pipeline their decomposition and recycling, what is known as bioremediation. Needless to say genetically modified organisms will remain a huge and controversial topic.
Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Speaking of controversial topics: While we continue to find novel ways to employ block chain, including some we discussed years back in our episode on Cryptocurrency and Blockchain, I don’t think anything here, even options like safe and secure online voting, is going to be a big history or culture altering tech at this time. And as we predicted in that Cryptocurrency episode in 2016, cryptocurrency wasn’t going anywhere and would grow in use, and I think that’s still true, but as we said there, I don’t see it becoming the dominant means of moving or storing money anytime soon either. Longer term, I don't see any big move away from fiat currencies back to commodity currencies, particularly the obvious ones like gold or silver or oil for that matter, though moving to something like energy units overall is a decent possibility much further down the road.
Energy In physics, energy is the measurement of how much work you can get done, and that’s very appropriate as it is basically the backbone of everything we do, so we’ll give it a little bit more time than some of the other categories. The last decade has seen some very strong improvements in solar power, so that it is beginning to finally get truly competitive with other energy technologies and further improvements to that could make this the century of solar power in much the same way we experienced or predicted an era of steam-power, coal and oil, and an atomic age. I am particularly fond of using a mix of ground and space based solar in conjunction with nuclear, and other opportune renewables, depending on locations, and we’ll be doing a deep dive of the mechanics, challenges, and economics of space based solar later this year as the National Space Society wraps up its study of the current proposed systems.
On the atomic or nuclear front, we continue to move the needle on nuclear fusion but not as fast as we might hope. I hate when folks say it's the technology of 20 years from now and always will be, but I also think at the moment 20 years would be very optimistic for fusion power plants to come online. On the other hand folks finally seem to be thawing out on their attitudes about nuclear power in general, and while improvements to solar have made it less urgent to adopt nuclear as a replacement for fossil fuels, it still remains a powerful option.
We are seeing Small Modular Reactors getting built and more pushes for new reactors, though the problem of retiring the old, outdated, and more legitimately problematic old reactors might have negative impacts on this. Of our other three big renewables, Hydroelectric, Geothermal, and Wind, I think both hydro and wind remain sources used mostly for where they are good opportunities, a very windy area where people also won’t mind giant turbines, and larger hydroelectric dams. Small wind power units for individual homes are likely to see a niche role with home solar for folks who view it as a nice supplement to solar on stormy days or night time generation, and which they feel offer them personal independence and security over the grid even if it might be a bit cheaper, but it’s really geothermal that I think of as the big growth option.
Temperature doesn’t change much the deeper you get underground and heating cooling are two very large uses of energy, so I think if we get improvements in digging and burrowing technologies, as well as material advances that will make piping systems long-lived and better at moving heat, that we’ll see these begin being more common features on homes. Home battery systems seem very likely to grow in usage too, especially if batteries make some of the big jumps that might be possible thanks to 2D materials. This is one of those cases where a lot depends on how manufacturing technologies roles out, because I could well imagine houses 20 or 30 years down the road all featuring a wired connection to the grid like now but also having some solar, some wind, some geothermal, plenty of batteries, and a big backup generator waiting to kick on.
I would not be surprised if we saw more motion to off-the-grid technologies for water and sewer kicking in too, and maybe you get your backup generator fuel from methane produced by your septic tank. But while we focus on moving away from fossil fuels, this gets confused as moving away from hydrocarbons in general, and while it takes more energy to make a hydrocarbon than you get when burning it, they are great for long term storage and portability compared to batteries. In a solar or nuclear age, we may see excess power generation off from peak hours used to create hydrocarbons by the Sabatier process, which would be carbon neutral and is actually a good way to remove carbon from air or water.
If that developed fast enough, it might bury electric cars as it would get around the huge cost of converting our vehicles and infrastructure to support them. Though unless you’re making gasoline, which is a bit harder and costlier than making methane, you would still have a conversion cost to what amounted to natural gas powered vehicles. Financial Technology With the possible exception of those of us very devoted to science fiction and futurism topics, no area watches technological predictions as much as the finance sector, which needs to be ready for lots of surprises.
However, I do not believe this area is going to produce many civilization-changing surprises in and of itself. That said, more seamless and casual budgeting and investing apps, and AI devoted to hunting for the best deals, might really alter the way folks spend their money, and much like the energy sector, any major change to how folks spend money massively alters the entire economy and civilization it’s built on. As a simple example, these days there’s a big concern about new houses getting built fast enough to make up for the rise in demand coupled with folks not wanting a lot of the older houses and a lot of older folks not wanting to sell their homes either and living in them longer.
Lifespans also have a big role in pension and retirement options, and I think easier interfaces and better AI will help folks be able to have a clearer picture of their own options and stay more engaged on that front. Also, how you build homes, single-family big dwellings or large apartments or tiny homes, all plays a big role in what technologies folks want and which will succeed, and so does the general availability, mobility, and cost of money. Also it is worth noting that a lot of our economy is based around folks making what economically speaking are bad decisions, impulse buys, and so on, or recurring costs that are small and build up unnoticed, and such apps might help cut down on those, which might massively alter a lot of retail or big purchases like cars or houses.
Health Tech and Digital Health Speaking of folks living longer, it is difficult to overestimate the sheer impact improvements in medicine have on our lifespan, quality of life, and everything else that hinges on them, and I would say that while I think we have a good chance of beating cancer and some other chronic issues in the next generation like diabetes and obesity, it’s really telemedicine and digital health that are going to be the gamechangers for this industry. These make it easier for folks to interact with their health professionals, letting those health professionals do those interactions better but faster and easier, and letting us better collect and utilize data from all our wonderful medical machines, including things like personal health monitors, which we’ll touch on more in wearable technologies at the end. Digital health may also overlap with advances in AR and VR allowing patients to be operated on by the world’s best surgeons or experts on special procedures even if they reside on the other side of the globe.
Doctors may also use AR as a guide similar to drivers using GPS – indeed, that is how doctors testing prototypes of this technology described the experience. Information Technology Handling information is obviously important but not flashy, and in many ways, while I think the so-called information age was overhyped decades back, it’s understated now. We won’t spend long on this one today because we already gave some of its sub-topics like VR, smart homes, or Quantum Computing bigger treatments, but it is blanket area with lots of interesting developments like Edge & Cloud Computing, cybersecurity and privacy improvements, or challenges, but it remains a vital but non-flashy field that tends to be a bit arcane to folks, and I’m not expecting that to shift any time soon.
The Internet of Things One exception to that is the Internet of things, which while I tend to feel has gotten a bit overhyped itself in recent years, is still a big emerging and life-shifting category of technologies. The basic notion remains that a lot of devices you use would be interfaced to your phone or computer and able to trade data and work together in ways that personalize things to you better and minimize waste, cut down on irritations, raise productivity, and generally make life more pleasant. I think this is going to be the natural evolution of personal technologies for the next decade or so but that it is also an area still trying to find its equivalent to the smartphone or iphone or windows 95 equivalent that really brings it fully and overwhelming into daily life for everyone.
And when it does, I think that will be one of those technologies or interfaces or inventions that historians note as a big game changer. Nanotechnology Nanotechnology is absolutely a big candidate for revolutionary new tech, as it holds the potential keys to radical life extension and nigh-immunity from injury, ailment, or disease, but while I feel we will see major progress on it continue this century, I do not feel it’s the big one for the 2020s or 30s or even 40s. Quantum Computing The same remains for quantum computing, it was massively overhyped some years back and we talked about that in its own episode back then, along with its many genuine uses, and it has indeed made some big improvements since then, but I don’t feel this is going to be the area we point at and say ‘this changed civilization in the 21st century’, at least not the first half.
Retail How we shop and sell things is pretty critical to civilization and you can't really discuss our recent history without talking about the impact of places like Walmart or the rise and fall of the American Mall or the impact of Amazon or Ebay or even Facebook Marketplace. I think we will see a continued push for faster and cheaper home delivery, and as I was saying pre-Covid, I think a lot of folks will shift to shopping for groceries online and having them delivered, and the effect of Covid in my opinion is only hastening that, much as it pushed faster developments in online and remote work and teleconferencing options. I would also guess that our increased use of personal devices tracking us and talking to us and each other will see the introduction of a lot more tailored and customized clothing and apparel.
Your phone will likely soon always know how much you weigh, how tall you are, if one of your legs is a bit shorter or longer than the other, or an arm, your very exact shoe size and state of the arches in your foot, what kind of walking you do and how long you stand a day, and so on, so that you will never be ordering for sizes for yourself, you’ll just order a shirt style or shoe style and either get the closest mass-produced match rapidly delivered or some robot tailor is going to perfectly make you a suit jacket, or chat to your washer and dryer and tell you it's time to replace a piece of clothes or have your pants let out or taken in, or the robot cobbler is going to make you a great shoe fit based on each of your feet, your medical profile and personal activities, and general lifestyle. Rapid mass production of general sizes or categories of widget isn’t going anywhere, but more customized personal gear that can be ordered without lots of time or effort strikes me as the big growth area for the next couple decades… as will probably be more personalized and more prevalent advertising. Robotics and Automation Much like Energy, Artificial Intelligence, and IT; robotics is a giant sector where major improvements are occurring constantly and making major changes and improvements in our lives.
Two I’ll mention though that strike of big note are soft robotics, and the impact those would also have on recycling and inventory in conjunction with object identification by AI. Soft robotics is all about robots that are made with softer or more flexible materials and can have lighter touches, to more easily interact with humans for instance. Its role in agriculture, producing food for us, is a big one too, since it lets you mass harvest things like fruits and vegetables at lower cost, letting them be more affordable like staple crops such as wheat, corn, or rice.
This could radically change our diets and farming practices, especially as it makes alternatives to open air agriculture like poly-culture and mass-greenhousing much more viable, which could then let us support vastly more people on vastly less land than we do now, with major advantages to preserving or restoring the environment. There’s way more applications of soft robotics, especially in the home environment, but in a broader ecological and environmental context, our ability to manage our waste is a big one here, and recycling gets so much easier if you have some soft robotics working with AI to pick through garbage in the home or on conveyors belts and move them to the right waste bin. So I think improvements to soft robotics will be a big one for the next generation, if not necessarily very flashy.
I would say sexy but sexbots would actually be an example of soft robotics, and as with more adult uses of Virtual Reality, while we’ll not dip into that topic further for the sake of keeping the show family friendly and tasteful, those would also tend to have major impacts on civilization. Smart Cities and Infrastructure Civilization is a word that originates from the idea of cities themselves and citizens trying to live together in larger quantities without tripping over each other or murdering each other. So you can't really talk about civilization-changing technology without talking about how cities themselves will change, but we did give this an extended treatment in our episode on Smart Cities in 2023.
I think we will generally see a lot more use of robots and automation for creating and maintaining green spaces of parks and gardens, along with improvements to traffic management and air quality, which while that might sound minor, is likely to have a huge impact on the folks living there and their personal happiness and stress levels. Also expect to see minor features like apartment buildings with shared facilities that would let you know how many washers and dryers were free in the laundry room or reserve one, or know how many seconds the elevator will be before arriving. I’m also expecting at some point to see the neighborhood watch idea that was pretty big when I was a kid see a resurgence in activity and presence as more smart cities and internet of things features pop up.
This is likely to include a lot of first responder roles too, though only supplementally assisting the professionals by, for instance, beeping the five nearest people with CPR certification to let them know someone is in need right nearby and give them directions and information about the situation. Another aspect of smart cities is management itself and that might be the sort of program a city council enacts and supports by giving tax credits to those who volunteer or free training too. Smart Home Technology Smart home technology is very tied into the internet of things and data analysis, and I would say the big advance is going to be when someone develops the equivalent of Windows for your home.
Everything is ready for this next step, but a good and universal user interface isn’t really there yet, though we have some good initial candidates. Ultimately this leads to the house that knows every resident’s preference and habits and can query guests' phones for any preferences they have and are willing to share. This is the technology that seamlessly alters temperature, humidity, and lighting to your current preferences, not just something general, so it knows to dim and redden the lights and to play some of your favorite light classical for a headache and to send the robot drone over with some water with a slice of lemon.
This is going to be big area of gradual and major improvements, and also includes your lawn and garden, and we’ll see a lot features of home and garden shift with these improvements too, like more elaborate gardens as they get pruned and watered automatically by robots who monitor the weather too, who also go wash and wax your car and make sure it gets recharged or refueled or even parked after it drops you at your doorstep. Speaking of lawns and gardens, this is the same sort of tech that could give you a heads up that things in your garden are making you react or warning you that an apartment or park you were interested in had a lot of plants you were allergic to nearby. Space Technology We get a lot of Ages suggested, Age of Sail, Age of Steam, Atomic Age, Information Age, and the Space Age, and as you might guess I’m fond of that one but to me it's an age that doesn’t begin till at least a couple percent of the human population doesn’t live on Earth anymore, and then it continues forever on.
We spend a lot of time talking about space travel here so it’s not a big topic for us today, and while I think we will see our first Moon base, first crewed mission to Mars, and maybe even our first asteroid mine in the next generation or two, I don’t think the big revolutionary new tech of this generation is going to involve space that much. I think we will see some militarization of space, some more space stations, some niche space tourism, and a lot more satellites, but I’m not expecting a space elevator or orbital ring to be built in the next couple decades or anything else that would totally alter that landscape. With the possible exception of space-based solar, if that did get itself going and competitive, which would be introducing a multi-trillion dollar economic sector to space.
Wearable Technology We’re going to close out today with our last topic, wearable technology, not just because it’s alphabetically last but because I do think it’s a zone that’s likely to be one of the biggest life changing areas. It already is in many ways, we don’t actually wear our phones but we carry them, and glasses, hearing aids, and clothing themselves are amongst our most useful and important technologies. Smart watches, more comfortable earbuds or wearable cameras and microphones, glasses with augmented reality, and various health monitors all offer not just convenience but greater safety.
Also more concerns of privacy but technological change isn’t not identical to technological improvement, and we’ll talk about privacy concerns in depth next month. And while that is a downside I think we can manage, it also comes with a vastly greater safety from accidents and quicker emergency response to fewer crimes. It’s just hard to make a career out of mugging people if everyone has health, positional monitors, and cameras on them constantly, which can not only alert authorities of crimes against them but also switch on to track that fleeing criminal as they flee past other people or local traffic cameras.
It also means if you suddenly have a heart attack first responders know right away, and that same tech might let them instantly ping anyone nearby with the necessary skill sets. But more importantly it means your health monitors already knew your health conditions and heart rate and blood pressure and knew how much risk you were at and warned you well in advance and also could tell you to sit down and relax before the actual attack while they patched you through to medical services. It’s the tech that lets you know you’re dehydrated or more drunk than you think you are, or that several of the things you’re allergic to are present.
It’s also the alternative to cybernetics and augmentation, that many of us look forward to but many others do not. Technologies implanted into you worry many folks, and may never be necessary if wearable options can achieve similar results, or even just modest equivalents. So this can be your augmented reality or extended reality goggles or glasses, this could be your jacket that has some batteries in it that wirelessly charge all your widgets and recharges itself whenever you sit down.
It could be a jacket that heats and cools you, or even performs CPR on you, or the exoskeleton that lets you lift bigger objects or walk if you have spinal damage. Many technologies can change your life but those you incorporate into yourself or wear certainly have an advantage in that respect when it comes to proximity. So that’s our overview of major technology types and how they might change and revolutionize our lives in the upcoming decade or two or three.
If I had to pick the biggest game-changer, I would put my money down on AI, but that’s probably not a very big gamble or a surprising one. Wearable Technology, Smart Homes, and the Internet of Things are my loose blanket category for second place, at least in terms of major personal life impact the way smart phones and the internet and PCs were. Let me know what your runner ups are in the comments on this episode, or candidates you think we missed, or if you think something besides AI, robots, and automation in general should be in there instead as number one.
But above all else, almost all of these offer great improvements to our lives, and even if only a few develop in the next few decades with even half the promise they often get hyped to have, I think it means an improvement in life for all of us. As we saw today, it’s hard to guess what the next technological change will be, and there’s always a chance it's going to bring about the apocalypse. But Armageddon doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom, and if you’re looking for a fun way for you and your friends to enjoy the end, let me suggest Doomlings, a delightful card game for the end of the world, and an easy to play, fast game that I, and my family, loved.
Somewhere on a doomed and distant planet, life has emerged, competing for dominance until the world’s inevitable destruction. Score points by playing traits for your Doomlings’ species, making them more adaptable, resilient, and mischievous as the new ages occur and catastrophes befall. As you know, I love board games and card games, especially ones you can enjoy with adults or with kids, and my kids took to Doomlings as fast as they did Uno, Pokemon, or Exploding Kittens.
Doomlings is a lighthearted, cheeky, goofy, funny card game that is easy to learn and still focuses on strategy. Enjoy yourself while world ends, find out more at doomlings. com So that’s it for today but join us next week where we’ll jump into the distant future and the topic of space warfare to explore the role and makeup of Battlefleets, on August 22nd.
And speaking of jumping around in time, the week after that we’ll examine the idea of retrocausality and how events could proceed their causes under known science and theory. Then we’ll finish August up by journeying to the Gardens of the Moon, to explore a period of early lunar settlement. If you’d like to get alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to hit the like, subscribe, and notification buttons.
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nebula. tv/isaacarthur. As always, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
