Ever wonder what the next big thing is? What the future of technology holds? Well here’s four new next technologies that I think are going to be huge in the future. The weird part is all of these technologies exist today in the present. This is not future technology but present technology. You may think the future is a weird place, but you may be surprised to learn how weird the present is.
One computer to rule them all. I, like a lot of people own multiple computers. I own a laptop, a desktop an iPhone. It’s all a bit redundant and silly when you think about it. In the future(1-2 years?) as smart phones become more and more powerful there’s going to be no need for all that. Everything is going to be stored on your smart phone which you hook up to a laptop station or a monitor and keyboard or your TV.
Check out the new Motorola Atrix 4G below.
I’m not saying this specific phone and hook up are going to be huge, but as soon as Apple or Google comes out with something powerful enough and markets the crap out of it these are going to be huge and they are going to put a lot of people out of business. I once read a quote from Warren Buffet that went something like “If I were investing in the early 1900s I’d have no idea which car company to invest in but I’d sure love to short horses.” Who are the big losers when this technology reaches its tipping point? Dell and Microsoft come to mind. Winners? Hard to say. I would guess Google or Apple since they are the major players in the mobile industry nowadays. I think Apple may be slow to move on this as they seem to be pretty resistant to putting their own desktops and laptops out of business. If they don’t someone else will though, so they better move.
Cars of the Future. Self Driving Cars. Ya right you’re saying. In my dreams. Maybe in 20 years when the whole country is covered in roads with embedded with GPS trackers. Well, Google has leaked videos of their self driving cars as long as three months ago. Ya, that’s right Google has self driving cars today. (Embedding and comments disabled for this youtube video I’m sure because Google doesn’t want their competitors to know about it) Needless to say this is going to be huge and Google is doing everything to keep this on the down low to gain first mover advantage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0I5DHOETFE
They claim they are still at least five years the mass market, but who would have thought this was even possible in this day and age. Who are the big losers when this comes to the mass market? There’s a lot of them but it’s hard to figure out who the biggest ones will be until Google comes out with how they are going to sell this service.
Are they going to offer it as a zipcar/taxi service? Do they expect every individual to buy one of these? The former seems preferred to reduce the cost to the consumer but then you still have an issue of charging people per mile? Monthly fee? The low usage people get shafted with a monthly rate but this is how most bandwidth(think phone, internet, movie/netflix) services tend to work. This all points to the future of cars being in community shared self driving cars we pay a monthly fee for.
If you think about it personal car ownership is just as inefficient as owning three computers. Everybody owns a car these days and uses it maybe two hours a day on average. That’s a machine(the most expensive machine most people own) that is sitting idle 90% of the time and everyone has one. This points to less cars being needed in the future to serve more people. So finally we can start to think about who the big losers will be when this all comes to fruition. Clearly car insurance companies are going to struggle. Who needs insurance when you no longer drive and no longer own a car? Car manufacturers will struggle. We will still need new cars and new and improved technology for them year after year, but we are going to need a lot fewer of them when everyone’s sharing. How about the winners? Google and the ambulance chasing lawyer who lands the first case when one of these self driving cars kills a kid. It’s inevitable really and this is going to open up a whole new legal realm of rights and blame for intelligent computers capable of killing people.
I’m not going to comment too much on these next two topics of Organ Printers and Human Like Androids, but check out the videos and it shouldn’t take too much imagination to see where we’re heading. Androids smarter than humans? Ya, right that will never happen in my lifetime. That’s what I thought about self driving cars so who knows what the future holds. In the words of Ken Jennings, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
Organ Printers – Total Video is 17 minutes in length. Fast forward to the 10:30 mark to see the printer in action.
Human Like Androids