The Futurist

The Solar Revolution is Near

I have long been optimistic about Solar Energy (whether photovoltaic or thermal) becoming our largest energy source within a few decades.  Earlier articles on the subject include :

A Future Timeline for Energy

Solar Energy Cost Curve

Several recent events and developments have led me to reinforce this view.  First of all, consider this article from Scientific American, detailing a Solar timeline to 2050. The article is not even Singularity-aware, yet details many steps that will enable Solar energy to expand by orders of magnitude above the level that it is today.  Secondly, two of the most uniquely brilliant people alive today, Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk (who I recently chatted with), have both provided compelling cases on why Solar will be our largest energy source by 2030.  Both Kurzweil and Musk reside in significantly different spheres, yet have arrived at the same prediction.

However, the third point is the one that I find to be the most compelling. There are a number of publicly traded companies selling solar energy products, many of which had IPOs in just the last three years.  Some of these companies, and their market capitalizations, are :

Now consider that the companies on this list alone amount to about $50 Billion in capitalization.  There are, additionally, many smaller companies not included on this list, many companies like Applied Materials (AMAT) and Cypress Semiconductor (CY) for which solar products comprise only a portion of their business, and large private companies like NanoSolar (which I have heavily profiled here) and SolFocus that may have valuations in the billions.  Thus, the market cap of the 'solar sector' is already between $60B and $100B, depending on what you include within the total.  This immense valuation has accumulated at a pace that has taken many casual observers by surprise.  A 2-year chart of some of the stocks listed above tells the story. 

While FirstSolar (FSLR) has been the brightest star, all the others have trounced the S&P500 to a degree that would put even Google or Apple to shame over this period.  Clearly, a dramatic ramp in Solar energy is about to make mainstream headlines very soon, even if the present valuations are too high. 

Is this a dot-com-like bubble?  Yes, in the near-term, it is.  However, after a sharp correction, the long term growth will resume for the companies that emerge as leaders.  I won't recommend a specific stock among this cluster just yet, as there are a wave of private companies with new technologies that could render any of these incumbents obsolete.  Specific company profiles will follow soon, but in the meantime, for more detail on the long-term trends in favor of Solar, refer to these additional articles of mine :

Why I Want Oil to Hit $120 per Barrel

Terrorism, Oil, Globalization, and the Impact of Computing

(crossposted on TechSector)

Ten Biotechnology Breakthroughs Soon to be Available

Popular Mechanics has assembled one of those captivating lists of new technologies that will improve our lives, this time on healthcare technologies (via Instapundit).  Just a few years ago, these would have appeared to be works of science fiction.  Go to the article to read about the ten technologies shown below. 

Most of these will be available to average consumers within the next 7-10 years, and will extend lifespans while dramatically lowering healthcare costs (mostly through enhanced capabilities of early detection and prevention, as well as shorter recovery times for patients).  This is consistent with my expectation that bionanotechnology is quietly moving along established trendlines despite escaping the notice of most people.  These technologies will also move us closer to Actuarial Escape Velocity, where the rate of lifespan increases exceed that of real time. 

Another angle that these technologies effect is the globalization of healthcare.  We have previously noted the success of 'medical tourism' in US and European patients seeking massive discounts on expensive procedures.  These technologies, given their potential to lower costs and recovery times, are even more suitable for medical offshoring than their predecessors, and thus could further enhance the competitive position of the countries that are quicker to adopt them.  If the US is at the forefront of using the 'bloodstream bot' to unclog arteries, the US thus once again becomes more attractive than getting a traditional procedure done in India or Thailand.  But if the lower cost destinations also adopt these technologies faster than the heavily regulated US, then even more revenue migrates overseas and the US healthcare sector would suffer further deserved blows, and be under even greater pressure to conform to market forces.  As technology once again acts as the great leveler, another spark of hope for reforming the dysfunctional US healthcare sector has emerged. 

These technologies are near enough to availability that you may even consider showing this article to your doctor, or writing a letter to your HMO.  Plant the seed into their minds...

Related :

Actuarial Escape Velocity

How Far Can 'Medical Tourism' Go?

Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico

Actuarial Escape Velocity

Every now and then, an obscure concept is so brilliantly encapsulated in a compact yet sublime term that it leaves the audience inspired enough to evangelize it. 

I have felt that way ever since I heard the words 'Actuarial Escape Velocity'.

For some background, please refer to an older article from early 2006, 'Are You Prepared to Live to 100?".  Notice the historical uptrend in human life expectancy, and the accelerating rate of increases.  For more, do also read the article "Are You Acceleration Aware?".

In analyzing the rate at which life expectancy is increasing in the wealthiest nations, we see that US life expectancy is now increasing by 0.2 years, every year.  Notably, the death rates from heart disease and cancer have been dropping by a rapid 2-4% each year, and these two leading causes of death are quickly falling off, despite rising obesity and a worsening American diet over the same period.  Just a few decades ago, the rate on increase in life expectancy was slower than 0.2 years per year.  In the 19th century, even the wealthiest societies were adding well under 0.1 years per year.  But how quickly can the rate of increase continue to rise, and does it eventually saturate as each unit of gain becomes increasingly harder to achieve?

Two of the leading thinkers in the field of life extension, Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, believe that by the 2020s, human life expectancy will increase by more than one year every year (in 2002 Kurzweil predicted that this would happen as soon as 2013, but this is just another example of him consistently overestimating the rate of change).  This means that death will approach the average person at a slower rate than the rate of technology-driven lifespan increases.  It does not mean all death suddenly stops, but it does mean than those who are not close to death do have a possibility of indefinite lifespan after AEV is reached.  David Gobel, founder of the Methuselah Foundation, has termed this as Actuarial Escape Velocity (AEV), essentially comparing the rate of lifespan extension to the speed at which a spacecraft can surpass the gravitiational pull of the planet it launches from, breaking free of the gravitational force.  Thus, life expectancy is currently, as of 2007 data, rising at 20% of Actuarial Escape Velocity.

I remain unconvinced that such improvements will be reached as soon as Ray Kurzeil and Aubrey de Grey predict.  I will be convinced after we clearly achieve 50% of AEV in developed countries, where six months are added to life expectancy every year.  It is possible that the interval between 50% and 100% of AEV comprises less than a decade, but I'll re-evaluate my assumptions when 50% is achieved. 

Serious research efforts are underway.  The Methuselah Mouse Prize will award a large grant to researchers that can demonstrate substantial increases in the lifespan of a mouse (more from The Economist).  Once credible gains can be demonstrated, funding for the research will increase by orders of magnitude. 

The enormous market demand for lifespan extension technologies is not in dispute.  There are currently 95,000 individuals in the world with a net worth greater than $30 million, including 1125 billionaires.  Accelerating Economic Growth is already growing the ranks of the ultrawealthy at a scorching pace.  If only some percentage of these individuals are willing to pay a large portion of their wealth in order to receive a decade or two more of healthy life, particularly since money can be earned back in the new lease on life, then such treatment already has a market opportunity in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  The reduction in the economic costs of disease, funerals, etc. are an added bonus.  Market demand, however, cannot always supercede the will of nature. 

This is only the second article on life extension that I have written on The Futurist, out of 154 total articles written to date.  While I certainly think aging will be slowed down to the extent that many of us will surpass the century mark, it will take much more for me to join the ranks of those who believe aging can be truly reversed.  To track progress in this field, keep one eye on the rate of decline in cancer and heart disease deaths, and another eye on the Methuselah Mouse Prize.  That such metrics are even advancing on a yearly basis is already remarkable, but monitoring anything more than these two measures, at this time, would be premature. 

So let's find out what the group prediction is, with a poll.  Keep in mind that most people are biased towards believing this date will fall within their own lifetimes :

When will Actuarial Escape Velocity be achieved for wealthy individuals?
	2010-2020
	2020-2030
	2030-2040
	2040-2050
	2050 or later, if ever
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Is Technology Diffusion in a Lull?

There are minor but growing elements of evidence that the rate of technological change has moderated in this decade.  Whether this is a temporary trough that merely precedes a return to the trendline, or whether the trendline itself was greatly overestimated, will not be decisively known for some years.  In this article, I will attempt to examine some datapoints to determine whether we are at, or behind, where we would expect to be in 2008. 

There is overwhelming evidence that many seemingly unrelated technologies are progressing at an accelerating rate.  However, the exact magnitude to the accelerating gradient - the second derivative - is difficult to measure with precision.  Furthermore, there are periods where advancement can be significantly above or below any such trendline. 

This brings us to the chart below from Ray Kurzweil (from Wikipedia) :

This chart appears prominently in many of Kurzweil's writings, and brilliantly conveys the concept of how each major consumer technology reached the mainstream (as defined by a 25% US household penetration rate) in successively shorter times.  The horizontal axis represents the year in which the technology was invented. 

This chart was produced some years ago, and therein lies the problem.  If we were to update the chart to the present day, which technology would be the next addition after 'The Web'? 

Many technologies can claim to be the ones to occupy the next position on the chart.  IPods and other portable mp3 players, various Web 2.0 applications like social networking, and flat-panel TVs all reached the 25% level of mainstream adoption in under 6 years in accordance with an extrapolation of the chart through 2008.  However, it is debatable that any of these are 'revolutionary' technologies like the ones on the chart, rather than merely increments above incumbent predecessors.  The iPod merely improved upon the capacity and flexibility of the walkman, the plasma TV merely consumed less space than the tube TV, etc.  The technologies on the chart are all infrastructures of some sort, and it is clear that after 'The Web', we are challenged to find a suitable candidate for the next entry. 

Thus, we either are on the brink of some overdue technology emerging to reach 25% penetration of US households in 6 years or less, or the rapid diffusion of the Internet truly was a historical anomaly, and for the period from 2001 to 2008 we were merely correcting back to a trendline of much slower diffusion (where it take 10-15 years for a technology to each 25% penetration in the US).  One of the two has to be true, at least for an affluent society like the US.

This brings us to the third and final dimension of possibility.  This being the decade of globalization, with globalization itself being an expected natural progression of technological change, perhaps a US-centric chart itself was inappropriate to begin with.  Landline telephones and television sets still do not have 25% penetration in countries like India, but mobile phones jumped from zero to 10% penetration in under 7 years.  The oft-cited 'leapfrogging' of technologies that developing nations can benefit from is a crucial piece of technological diffusion, which would thus show a much smaller interval between 'telephones' and 'mobile phones' than in the US-based chart above.  Perhaps '10% Worldwide Household Penetration' is a more suitable measure than '25% US Household Penetration', which would then possibly show that there is no lull in worldwide technological adoption at all. 

I may try to put together this new worldwide chart.  The horizontal axis would not change, but the placement of datapoints along the vertical axis would.  Perhaps Kurzweil merely has to break out of US-centricity in order to strengthen his case and rebut most of his critics. 

The future will disclose the results to us soon enough.

(crossposted on TechSector)

Related :

Are You Acceleration Aware?

The Impact of Computing

These are the Best of Times

Nine Tantalizing Small Companies

In scouring the startup universe for the companies and technologies that can reshape human society and create entirely new industries, one has to play the role of a prospective Venture Capitalist, yet not be constrained by the need for a financial exit 3-6 years hence. 

Therefore, I have assembled a list of nine small companies, each with technologies that have the potential to create trillion-dollar economic disruptions by 2020, disruptions that most people have scarcely begun to imagine today.  Note that the emphasis is on the technologies rather than the companies themselves, as a startup requires much more than a revolutionary technology in order to prosper.  Management skills, team synergy, and execution efficiency are all equally important.  I predict that out of this list of nine companies, perhaps one or two will become titans, while the others will be acquired by larger companies for modest sums, enabling the technology to reach the market through the acquiring company. 

1) NanoSolar : NanoSolar produces low-cost solar cells that are manufactured by a process analogous to 'printing'.  The company's technology was selected by Popular Mechanics as the 'Innovation of the Year' for 2007, and Nanosolar's solar cells are significantly ahead of the Solar Energy Cost Curve.  The flexible, thin nature of Nanosolar's cells may enable them to be quickly incorporated onto the surfaces of many types of commercial buildings.  Nanosolar's first shipments have already occurred, and if we see several large deployments in the near future, this might just be the company that finally makes solar energy a mass-adopted consumer technology.  Nanosolar itself calls this the 'third wave' of solar power technology. 

2) Tesla Motors : I wrote about Tesla Motors in late 2006.  Tesla produces fully electric cars that can consume as little as 1 cent of electricity per mile.  They are about to deliver the first few hundred units of the $98,000 Tesla Roadster to customers, and while the Roadster is not a car that can be marketed to average consumers, Tesla intends to release a 4-door $50,000 sedan named 'WhiteStar' in 2010, and a $30,000 sedan by 2013.  The press coverage devoted to Tesla Motors has been impressive, but until the WhiteStar sedan successfully sells at least 10,000 units, Tesla will not have silenced critics who say the technology cannot be brought down to mass-market costs. 

3) Aptera Motors : When I first wrote about Tesla Motors, it was before I had heard about Aptera Motors.  While Tesla is aiming to produce a $30,000 sedan for 2013, Aptera already has an all-electric car due for late 2008 that is priced at just $27,000, while delivering the equivalent of between 200 and 330 mpg.  The fact that the vehicle has just three wheels may reduce mainstream appeal to some degree, but the futuristic appearance of the car will attract others.  Aptera Motors is a top candidate for winning the Automotive X-Prize in 2010. 

The simultaneous use of Nanosolar's solar panels with the all-electric cars from Tesla and Aptera may enable automotive driving to be powered by solar generated electricity for the average single-family household.  The combination of these two technologies would be the 'killer ap' of getting off of oil and onto fully renewable energy for cars. 

Related : Why I Want Oil to Hit $120/Barrel.

4) 23andMe : This company gets some press due to the fact that co-founder Anne Wojcicki is married to Sergey Brin, even as Google has poured $3.9M into 23andMe.  Aside from this, what 23andMe offers is an individual's personal genome for just $1000.  What a personal genome provides is a profile of which health conditions the customer is more or less susceptible to, and thus enables the customer to provide this information to his physician, and make the preventive lifestyle adjustments well in advance.  Proactive consumers will be able to extend their lifespans by systematically reducing their risks of ailments they are genetically predisposed to.  As the service is a function of computational power, the price of a personal genome will, of course, drop, and might become an integral part of the average person's medical records, as well as an expense that insurance covers. 

5) Desktop Factory : In 2008, Desktop Factory will begin to sell a $5000 device that functions as a 3-D printer, printing solid objects one layer at a time.  A user can scan almost any object (including a hand, foot, or head) and reproduce a miniature model of it (up to 5 X 5 X 5 inches).  The material used by the 3-D printer costs about $1 per cubic inch. 

The $5000 printer is a successor to similar $100,000 devices used in mechanical engineering and manufacturing firms.  Due to the Impact of Computing, consumer-targeted devices costing under $1000 will be available no later than 2014.  I envision an ecosystem where people invent their own objects (statuettes, toys, tools, etc.) and share the scanned templates of these objects on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.  People can thus 'share' actual objects over the Internet, through printing a downloaded template.  The cost of the printing material will drop over time as well.  A lot of fun is to be had, and expect an impressive array of brilliant ideas to come from people below the age of 16. 

6) Zazzle : Welcome to the age of the instapreneur.  Zazzle enables anyone to design their own consumer commodities like T-shirts, mugs, calendars, bumper stickers, etc. on demand.  If you have an idea, you can produce it on Zazzle with no start-up costs, and no inventory risks.  You profit even from the very first unit you sell, with no worries about breakeven thresholds.  You can produce an infinite number of products, limited only by your imagination.  At this point, those of you reading this are probably in the midst of an avalanche of ideas of products you would like to produce. 

While the bulk of Zazzle users today are would merely be vanity users who manage to sell under ten units of their creations, this new paradigm of low-cost customization will inevitably creep up to major industrial supply chains.  Even more interesting, think about #5 on this list, Desktop Factory, combining with Zazzle's application, into an amazing transformation of the very economics of manufacturing and mass-production. 

7) A123 Systems : Read here about how battery technology is finally set to advance after decades of stagnation.  A123 Systems is at the forefront of these advances, and has already received over $148 Million in private funding, as well as an article from the prestigious MIT Technology Review.  A123 is a supplier for GM's upcoming Volt, and has already has begun to sell a module to convert a Toyota Prius into a plug-in hybrid.  For choices beyond those offered by the #2 and #3 companies on this list, A123 Systems is poised to enable the creation of many new electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles, greatly increasing the the choices available to consumers seeking the equivalent of more than 50 mpg.  A123 may just become the Intel of batteries.  Combine A123's batteries with Nanosolar's cells, and the posibilities become even more interesting. 

8) Luxim : Brightness of light is measured in Lumens, not Watts, which is a measure of power consumption.  Consumers are learning that CFL and LED bulbs offer the same Lumens with just a fifth or a tenth of the Watts consumed by a traditional incandescent bulb, and billions of tons of coal are already being saved by the adoption of CFLs and LEDs.  Luxim, however, aims to take this even further.  Luxim makes tiny bulbs that deliver 8 times as many Lumens per Watt as incandescent bulbs.  The bulbs are too expensive for home use, but are already going into projection TVs.  With $61 Million in funding to date, Luxim's main hurdle will be to reduce the cost of their products enough to penetrate the vast home and office lighting market, which consumes tens of billions of bulbs each year.   

9) Ugobe : Ugobe sells a robotic dinosaur toy known as the Pleo.  A mere toy, especially a $350 toy, would not normally be on a list of technologies that promise to crease the fabric of human society.  However, a closer look at the Pleo reveals many impressive increments in the march to make inexpensive robots more lifelike.  The skin of the Pleo covers the joints, the Pleo has more advanced 'learning' abilities than $2500 robots from a few years ago, and the Pleo even cries when tortured, to the extent that it is difficult to watch this. 

The reason Ugobe is on this list is that I am curious to see what is the next product on their roadmap, so that I can gauge how quickly the technology is advancing.  The next logical step would be an artificial mammal of some sort, with greater intelligence and realistic fur.  The successful creation of this generation of robot would provide the datapoints to enable us to project the approximate arrival of future humanoid robots, for better or for worse.  Another company may leapfrog Ugobe in the meantime, but they are currently at the forefront of the race to create low-priced robotic toys. 

This concludes the list of nine companies that each could greatly alter our lives within the next several years.  Of these nine, at least three, Nanosolar, Tesla Motors, and 23andMe, have Google or Google's founders as investors.  The next 24 months have important milestones for each of these companies to cross (by which time I might have a new list of new companies).  For those that clear their respective near-term bars, there might just be a chance of attaining the dizzy heights that Google, Microsoft, or Intel has. 

Related :

The Impact of Computing

A Future Timeline for Automobiles

A Future Timeline for Energy

The Imminent Revolution in Lighting

Batteries Set to Advance, Finally

(crossposted on TechSector)

The Top Ten Transhumanist Technologies

The Lifeboat Foundation has a special report detailing their view of the top ten transhumanist technologies that have some probability of 25 to 30-year availability.  Transhumanism is a movement devoted to using technologies to transcend biology and enhance human capabilities. 

I am going to list out each of the ten technologies described in the report, provide my own assessment of high, medium, or low probability or mass-market availability by a given time horizon, and link to prior articles written on The Futurist about the subject.

10. Cryonics : 2025 - Low, 2050 - Moderate

I can see the value in someone who is severely maimed or crippled opting to freeze themselves until better technologies become available for full restoration.  But outside of that, the problem with cryonics is that very few young people will opt to risk missing their present lives to go into freezing, and elderly people can only benefit after revival when or if age-reversal technologies become available.  Since going into cryonic freezing requires someone else to decide when to revive you, and any cryonic 'will' may not anticipate numerous future variables that could complicate execution of your instructions, this is a bit too risky, even if it were possible.

9. Virtual Reality : 2012 - Moderate, 2020 - High

The Technological Progression of Video Games

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment, Part I, II, and III

The Mainstreaming of Virtual Reality

8. Gene Therapy : 2015 - Moderate, 2025 - High

The good news here is that gene sequencing techniques continue to become faster due to the computers used in the process themselves benefiting from Moore's Law.  In the late 1980s, it was thought that the human genome would take decades to sequence.  It ended up taking only years by the late 1990s, and today, would take only months.  Soon, it will be cost-effective for every middle-class person to get their own personal genome sequenced, and get customized medicines made just for them. 

Are you Prepared to Live to 100?

7. Space Colonization : 2025 - Low, 2050 - Moderate

While this is a staple premise of most science fiction, I do not think that space colonization may ever take the form that is popularly imagined.  Technology #2 on this list, mind uploading, and technology #5, self-replicating robots, will probably appear sooner than any capability to build cities on Mars.  Thus, a large spaceship and human crew becomes far less efficient than entire human minds loaded into tiny or even microscopic robots that can self-replicate.  A human body may never visit another star system, but copies of human minds could very well do so.

Nonetheless, if other transhumanist technologies do not happen, advances in transportation speed may enable space exploration in upcoming centuries.

6. Cybernetics : 2015 - High

Artificial limbs, ears, and organs are already available, and continue to improve.  Artificial and enhanced muscle, skin, and eyes are not far. 

5. Autonomous Self-Replicating Robots : 2030 - Moderate

This is a technology that is frightening, due to the ease at which humans could be quickly driven to extinction through a malfunction that replicates rouge robots.  Assuming a disaster does not occur, this is the most practical means of space exploration and colonization, particular if the robots contain uploads of human minds, as per #2.

4. Molecular Manufacturing : 2020 - Moderate, 2030 - High

This is entirely predictable through the Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico curves. 

3. Megascale Engineering (in space) : 2040 - Moderate

From the Great Wall of China in ancient times to Dubai's Palm Islands today, man-made structures are already visible from space.  But to achieve transhumanism, the same must be done in space.  Eventually, elevators extending hundreds of miles into space, space stations much larger than the current ISS (240 feet), and vast orbital solar reflectors will be built.  But, as stated in item #7, I don't think true megascale projects (over 1000 km in width) will happen before other transhumanist technologies render the need for them obsolete.

2. Mind Uploading : 2050 - Moderate

This is what I believe to be the most important technology on this list.  Today, when a person's hardware dies, their software in the form of their thoughts, memories, and humor, necessarily must also die.  This is impractical in a world where software files in the form of video, music, spreadsheets, documents, etc. can be copied to an indefinite number of hardware objects. 

If human thoughts can reside on a substrate other than human brain matter, then the 'files' can be backed up.  That is all there is to it. 

1. Artificial General Intelligence : 2050 - Moderate

This is too vast of a subject to discuss here.  Some evidence of progress appears in unexpected places, such as when, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in a chess tournament.  Ray Kurzweil believes that an artificial intelligence will pass the Turing Test (a bellwether test of AI) by 2029.  We will have to wait and see, but expect the unexpected, when you least expect it. 

A Hornet-sized Robotic Insect Can Now Fly

A robotic insect, similar in size and weight to a wasp or hornet, has successfully taken flight at Harvard University (article and photo at MIT Technology Review).  This is an amazing breakthrough, because just a couple of years ago, such robots were pigeon-sized, and thus far less useful for detailed military and police surveillance. 

At the moment, the flight path is still only vertical, and the power source is external. Further advances in the carbon polymer materials used in this robot will reduce weight further, enabling greater flight capabilities.  Additional robotics advances will reduce size down to housefly or even mosquito dimensions.  Technological improvements in batteries will provide on-board power with enough flight time to be useful.  All of this will take 5-8 years to accomplish.  After that, it may take another 3 years to achieve the capabilities for mass-production.  Even then, the price may be greater than $10,000 per units.

Needless to say, by 2017-2020, this may be a very important military technology, where thousands of such insects are released across a country or region known to contain terrorists.  They could land on branches, light fixtures, and window panes, sending information to one another as well as to military intelligence.  Further into the future, if these are ever available for private use, than that could become quite complicated.

Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating, v2.0

If we were to make a list of subjects ranked by the gap between the civilizational importance of the topic and the lack of serious literature devoted to it, historical acceleration of economic growth would be very near the top of the list.  I wrote an article on the subject way back on January 29, 2006 (version 1.0), but now it is time for a much more substantial treatise. 

To whet your appetite, read the article "Are You Acceleration Aware?", which is the critical piece of any attempt at Futurism.

In the modern age, we take for granted that the US will grow at 3.5% a year, and that the world economy grows at 4% to 4.5% a year.  However, these are numbers that were unheard of in the 19th century, during which World GDP grew under 2% a year.  Prior to the 19th century, annual World GDP growth was so little that changes from one generation to the next were virtually zero.  Brad Delong has some data on World GDP from prehistoric times until 2000 AD. 

If I put historical per-capita GDP through 2000 in a logarithmic timescale, we see the following :

The theme of acceleration readily presents itself here, and even disruptive events like the Greagt Depression still do not cause more than a temporary deviation from the long-term trendline.  A different representation of the data would be to notice the shrinking intervals that it takes for per-capita World GDP to double.

10000 BC to 1500 : 11500 years without doubling

1500 to 1830 : 330 years

1830 to 1880 : 50 years

1880 to 1915 : 35 years

1915 to 1951 : 36 years (Great Depression and World Wars in this period)

1951 to 1975 : 24 years (recovery to trendline)

1975 to 2003 : 28 years

2003 to 2024-2027? : 21-24 years (on current trends)

This not only further reveals acceleration, but also indicates that massively disruptive world events still result in merely temporary deviations from the long-term trendline. 

Additionally, we can take the more granular IMF data of recent World GDP growth, and plot a trendline on it.  Both nominal and PPP growth rates are available, and are diverging due to the increasing size and growth rates of India and China.  Unfortunately, the IMF data only goes back to 1980, and 28 years are not enough to plot an ideal trendline, but nonetheless, the upward slope is distinct, and recessions (which still do not push World GDP growth into negative territory) are invariably followed by steep recoveries. 

It is also important to note that the standard deviation of the IMF data for World GDP growth rates is about 1% a year, for both the nominal and PPP series (1.07% and 1.14% respectively, to be exact).  The rules of standard deviations dictate that 68% of the time, a data point will be within one standard deviation of the mean, 95% will be between two standard deviations, and 99.7% will be within three. 

Thus, in a simple example, if the World GDP growth trendline is currently at 4% a year, there is a 68% chance that the next year will be between 3% and 5%, and there is only a 0.3% chance that the next year will be below 1% or above 7% growth.  This means that a worldwide recession with a year of negative growth is extremely improbable, just as improbable as a year with stupendous 8% growth.  There is not a single year in the 1980-2007 IMF data with negative GDP growth, and virtually none under 1% growth. 

Pessimists like to say that "the Great Depression will happen again", but not only was the Great Depression at a time when the trendline was at a lower annual growth rate than today, but the Great Depression comprised of 6 years of GDP falling below the trendline, simply because it followed a period of many years where GDP was substantially above the trendline.  Furthermore, this was for US GDP.  World GDP's deviations may have been even less severe, as some nations, such as France, Japan, and China, were left relatively unscathed by the Great Depression. 

Now, what happens if we project these trendlines through the 21st century?   The dotted red line represents the median trend assuming that nominal and PPP growth rates converge at some intermediate level. 

 

I can apply this trendline for World GDP growth, make assumptions of total world population to arrive at per capita World GDP growth, and add it back to the first graph.  The assumed growth rates, by decade, in per capita income are :

2007-2020 : 3.5%

2020-2030 : 3.5-4.0%

2030-2040 : 4.0-5.0%

2040-2050 : 5.0-6.0%

This leads to estimates for per-capita GDP at PPP, in 2007 dollars, to be :

2007 : $10,000

2020 : $15,155

2030 : $22,400

2040 : $32,600 - $36,000

2050 : $53,200 - $64,500

Which, when plotted, provides the following :

Or, when a longer view is taken, in terms of logarithmic periods going back from the year 2050, we see :

   

Needless to say, this degree of acceleration in economic growth affects nearly every possible facet of the world in the 21st century.  From a continually rising stock market to the proliferation of millionaires to the rapid upliftment of all metrics of human development, massive abundance is a certainty.  The inevitable derivatives of wealth, such as the spread of democracy, the upliftment in the sophistication of human psychology, and thus a corresponding drop in warfare, will soon follow.  Resolving current problems, such as reducing poverty in developing regions, to funding sophisticated healthcare technologies, to increasing literacy, to funding ambitious space exploration, are merely just a matter of time. 

Inevitably, even the average citizen in the mid-21st century will have access to many material and psychological opportunities that even the wealthiest of today do not have.  Turn that frown upside down, for you are in for an exciting time as you ride the tsunami of prosperity that is about to immerse you.

This article is the inaugural entry into a new category here at The Futurist titled "Core Articles".  These are the articles which are designed to form the cornerstone of a comprehensive understanding of the future, and are suggested reading for anyone interested in the subject.  Additional articles will be upgraded to "Core" status as augmentations to them accumulate. 

Related :

These Are the Best of Times

The Stock Market is Exponentially Accelerating

The Psychology of Economic Progress

The Age of Democracy

The Winds of War, the Sands of Time

Are You Acceleration Aware?

The Semantic Web

The World Wide Web, after just 12 years in mainstream use, has become an infrastructure accessed by hundreds of millions of people every day, and the medium through which trillions of dollars a year are transacted.  In this short period, the Web has already been through a boom, a crippling bust, and a renewal to full grandeur in the modern era of 'Web 2.0'.

But imagine, if you could, a Web in which web sites are not just readable in human languages, but in which information is understandable by software to the extent that computers themselves would be able to perform the task of sharing and combining information.  In other words, a Web in which machines can interpret the Web more readily, in order to make it more useful for humans.  This vision for a future Internet is known as the Semantic Web. 

Why is this useful?  Suppose that scientific research papers were published in a Semantic Web language that enabled their content to be integrated with other research publications across the world, making research collaboration vastly more efficient.  For example, a scientist running an experiment can publish his data in Semantic format, and another scientist not acquainted with the first one could search for the data and build off of it in real time.  Tim Berners-Lee, as far back as 2001, said that this "will likely profoundly change the very nature of how scientific knowledge is produced and shared, in ways that we can now barely imagine." 

Some are already referring to the Semantic Web as 'Web 3.0'.  This type of labeling is a reliable litmus test of a technology falling into the clutches of emotional hype, and thus caution is warranted in assessing the true impact of it.  I believe that the true impact of the Semantic Web will not manifest itself until 2012 or later.  Nonetheless, the Semantic Web could do for scientific research what email did for postal correspondence and what MapQuest did for finding directions - eliminate almost all of the time wasted in the exchange of information. 

New Gadgets for the Digital Home - A BusinessWeek Slideshow

BusinessWeek has a slideshow revealing new electronic devices that a consumer could use to enhance (or complicate) certain aspects of daily life.  Among these is the very promising Sunlight Direct System, which I discussed back on September 5, 2006.  Others, such as the Lawnbott ($2500), cost far more than the low-tech solution of hiring people to mow your lawn for the entire expected life of the device, ensuring that mass-market adoption is at least 4-5 years away. 

All of this is a very strong and predictable manifestation of The Impact of Computing, which mandates that entirely new categories of consumer electronics appear at regular intervals, and that they subsequently become cheaper yet more powerful at a consistent rate each year.  Let us observe each of these functional categories, and the rate of price declines/feature enhancements that they experience.

A Future Timeline for Automobiles

Many streams of accelerating technological change, from energy to The Impact of Computing, will find themselves intersecting in one of the largest consumer product industries of all.  Over 70 million automobiles were produced worldwide in 2006, with rapid market penetration underway in India and China.  Indisputably, cars greatly affect the lives of consumers, the economies of nations, and the market forces of technological change. 

I thus present a speculative timeline of technological and economic events that will happen for automobiles.  This has numerous points of intersection with the Future Timeline for Energy. 

2007 : The Tesla Roadster emerges to not only bring Silicon Valley change agents together to sow the seeds of disruption in the automotive industry, but also to immediately transform the image of electrical vehicles from 'punishment cars' to status symbols of dramatic sex appeal.  Even at the price of $92,000, demand outstrips supply by an impressive margin. 

2009 : The Automotive X-Prize of $25 Million (or more) is successfully claimed by a car designed to meet the 100 mpg/mass-producable goal set by the X Prize Foundation.  Numerous companies spring forth out of prototypes tested in the contest. 

2010 : Tesla Motors releases a fully electric 4-door family sedan for $50,000 to $70,000.  With gasoline at $4/gallon, established automobile companies simultaneously release plug-in hybrid vehicles.  Hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fully electrical cars represent 5% of total new automobiles sold in the US, even if tax incentives have been a large stimulus.  The habit of plugging in a car overnight to charge it starts to become routine for homeowners with such cars, but apartment dwellers are at a disadvantage in this regard, not having an outlet near their parking spot. 

2011 : Two or more iPod ports, 10-inch flat-screen displays for back seat passengers, parking space detection technology, and embedded Wi-Fi adapters that wirelessly can transfer files into the vehicle's hard drive from up to 500 feet away are standard features for many new cars in the $40,000+ price tier. 

2012 : Over 100 million new automobiles are produced in 2012, up from 70 million in 2006.  All major auto manufacturers are racing to incorporate new nanomaterials that are lighter than aluminium yet stronger and more malleable than steel.  The average weight of cars has dropped by about 5% from what it was for the equivalent style in 2007. 

2013 : Tesla Motors releases a fully electric 4-door sedan that is available for under $40,000, which is only 33% more than the $30,000 that the typical fully-loaded gasoline-only V6 Accord or Camry sells for in 2013. 

2014 : Self-driving cars are now available in the luxury tier (priced $100,000 or higher).  A user simply enters in the destination, and the car charts out a path (similar to Google Maps) and proceeds on it, in compliance with traffic laws.  However, a software malfunction results in a major traffic pile-up that garners national media attention for a week.  Subsequently, self-driving technologies are shunned despite their superior statistical performance relative to human drivers. 

2015 : As predicted in early 2006 on The Futurist, a 4-door sedan with a 240 hp engine, yet costing only 5 cents/mile to operate (the equivalent of 60 mpg of gasoline), is widely available for $35,000 (which is within the middle-class price band by 2015 under moderate assumptions for economic growth).  This is the result of combined advances in energy, lighter nanomaterials, and computerized systems. 

2016 : An odd change has occurred in the economics of car depreciation.  Between 1980 and 2007, annual car depreciation rates decreased due to higher quality materials and better engine design, reaching as little as 12-16% a year for the first 5 years of ownership.  Technology pushed back the forces of depreciation. 

However, by 2016, 40% of a car's initial purchase price is comprised of electronics (up from under 20% in 2007 and just 5% in 1985), which depreciate at a rate of 25-40% a year.  The entire value of the car is pulled along by the 40% of it that undergoes rapid price declines, and thus total car depreciation is now occuring at a faster rate of up to 20% a year for the first 5 years.  This is a natural progression of The Impact of Computing, and wealthier consumers are increasingly buying new cars as 'upgrades' to replace models with obsolete technologies after 5-7 years, much as they would upgrade a game console, rather than waiting until mechanical failure occurs in their current car.  Consumers also conduct their own upgrades of certain easily-replaced components, much as they would upgrade the memory or hard drive of a PC. Technology has thus accelerated the forces of depreciation. 

2018 : Among new cars sold, gasoline-only vehicles are now a minority.  Millions of electricity-only vehicles are charged through solar panels on a daily basis, relieving those consumers of a fuel expenditure that was as high as $2000/year in 2007.  Even when sunlight is obscured and the grid is used, some electrical vehicles cost as little as 1 cent/mile to operate.

2020 : New safety technologies that began to appear in mainstream cars around 2012, such as night vision, lane departure correction, and collision-avoiding cruise control, have replaced the existing fleet of older cars over the decade, and now US annual traffic fatalities have dropped to 25,000 in 2020 from 43,000 in 2005.  Given the larger US population in 2020 (about 350 Million), this is a reduction in traffic deaths by half on a per-capita basis. 

2024 : Self-driving cars have overcome the stigma of a decade prior, and are now widely used.  But they still have not fully displaced manual driving, due to user preferences in this regard.  Certain highways permit only self-driven cars, with common speed limits of 100 mph or more. 

2025-30 : Electricity (indeed, clean electricity) now fuels nearly all passenger car miles driven in the US.  There is no longer any significant fuel consumption cost associated with driving a car, although battery maintenance is a new aspect of car ownership.  Many car bodies now include solar energy absorbant materials that charge a parked car during periods of sunlight.  Leaving such cars out in the sun has supplanted the practice of parking in the shade or in covered parking.

Pervasive use of advanced nanomaterials has ensured that the average car weighs only 60% as much as a 2007 counterpart, but yet is over twice as resistant to dents. 

______________________________________________________________

I believe that this timeline represents the the combination of median forecasts across all technological and economic trends that influence cars, and will be perceived as too optimistic or too pessimistic by an equal number of readers.  Let's see how closely reality matches this timeline. 

World and Asian Semiconductor Revenue Growth

I stumbled upon something while reading the Asian Development Bank's report on the world economy.  No big surprises here, but one tiny chart stood out.  The column chart of WW and Asian semiconductor sales from 2001 to 2006 indicates that while Asia accounted for just one third of semiconductor sales in 2001, they comprise half of it today. 

This encompasses a number of the main topics I discuss on The Futurist.  From The Impact of Computing (which is thus higher in Asia than in the rest of the world) to the accelerating rate of GDP growth (which necessitates so many large Asian countries, totaling 3 billion people, to all grow at 6% or more per year, just to keep total world GDP at its trendline).  From cellphone dispersion to PC adoption to enterprise server and router usage, semiconductor sales are just about the best indicator of economic and technological progress. 

Let's see how big of a share of world seminconductor revenues Asia can ultimately consume before the relative maturity of the US market is emulated. 

Related :

Are You Acceleration Aware?

Economic Growth is Exponential and Accelerating

The Mainstreaming of Virtual Reality

BusinessWeek has an article and slideshow on the rapidly diversifying applications of advanced VR technology. 

This is a subject that has been discussed heavily here on The Futurist, through articles like The Next Big Thing in Entertainment, Parts I, II, and III, as well as Virtual Touch Brings VR Closer.  The coverage of this topic by BusinessWeek is a necessary and tantalizing step towards the creation of mass-market products and technologies that will enhance productivity, defense, healthcare, and entertainment. 

Technologically, these applications and systems are heavily encapsulated within The Impact of Computing with very few components that are not exponentially improving.  Thus, cost-performance improvements of 30-58% a year are guaranteed, and will result in stunningly compelling experiences as soon as 2012. 

To the extent that many people who seek reading material about futurism are primarily driven by the eagerness to experience 'new types of fun', this area, more than any other discussed here, will deliver the majority of new fun that consumers can experience in coming years. 

Update (4/7/07) : HP unveils a variety of new technologies, from screens to sensors, designed to augment the realism of games.   

2006 Technology Breakthrough Roundup

The MIT Technology Review has compiled a convenient list of the most significant technological advances of 2006.

The Year in Information Technology

The Year in Energy : Plug-in cars, batteries, solar energy.

The Year in Biotechnology : A cure for blindness, and more.

The Year in Nanotechnology : Displays, sensors, and nanotube computers.

Most of the innovations in the articles above are in the laboratory phase, which means that about half will never progress enough to make it to market, and those that do will take 5 to 15 years to directly affect the lives of average people (remember that the laboratory-to-market transition period itself continues to shorten in most fields).  But each one of these breakthroughs has world-changing potential, and that there are so many fields advancing simultaneously guarantees a massive new wave improvement to human lives. 

This scorching pace of innovation is entirely predictable, however.  To internalize the true rate of technological progress, one merely needs to appreciate :

The Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico curves

The Impact of Computing

The Accelerating Rate of Change

We are fortunate to live in an age when a single calendar year will invariably yield multiple technological breakthroughs, the details of which are easily accessible to laypeople.  In the 18th century, entire decades would pass without any observable technological improvements, and people knew that their children would experience a lifestyle identical to their own.  Today, we know with certainty that our lives in 2007 will have slight but distinct and numerous improvements in technological usage over 2006. 

Into the Future we continue, where 2007 awaits..

Are You Acceleration Aware?

The single most necessary component of any attempt to make predictions about the future is a deep internalized understanding of the accelerating, exponential rate of change.  So many supposed 'experts' merely project the rate of progress as a linear trend, or even worse, fail to recognize progress at all, and make predictions that end up being embarrassingly wrong.

For example, recall that in the early 1970s, everyone thought that by 2000, all of the Earth's oil would be used up.  It has not, and the average American spends fewer hours of wages on gasoline each week than in 1970.   

Equally simple-minded predictions are made today.  How often do we read things like :

"By 2080, Social Security will no longer be able pay benefits, leaving many middle Americans with insufficient retirement funds."

2080?!  By 2080, there will be no 'middle Americans'.  There will be no people in their current form, as per their own choice, as we shall see later in this article.

Or how about this one?  I see nonsense like this in Pat Buchanan's books. 

"Immigration to the US from third-world countries will make such people a majority of the US population by 2100, making the US a third-world country."

'Third-world'?  That term is already obsolete today as the Cold War has ended.  Plus, aren't a lot of these same isolationists worried that India and China are overtaking us economically and benefiting from 'outsourcing' of US jobs?  Isn't that mutually exclusive with a belief that the same countries will always be 'third-world'? 

In any event, the world of 2100 will be more different from 2006 than 2006 is different from 8000 BC.

Here is why :

The rate of change in many aspects of human society, and even some aspects of all life on Earth, moves on an exponential trend, not a simple linear one. 

Read Ray Kurzweil's essay on this topic first.  About 20% of his article is just too optimistic, but he does a good job of describing the evidence of accelerating change in multiple, unrelated areas.  The Wikipedia article is also useful. 

Additionally, right here on The Futurist, we have identified and discussed multiple accelerating trends across seemingly unrelated areas :

1) The Impact of Computing is a critically important concept, as it surrounds each of you in your homes every day.  Observation of the new gadgets you are adopting into your life reveals many things about what the future may hold, as simple acts such as upgrading your cellphone and buying a new iPod hold much deeper long-term significance.  This will cause major changes in entertainment, travel, autos, and business productivity in the very near future. 

2) Economic growth is exponential and accelerating.  World GDP grows at a trendline of 4.5% a year, as opposed to under 1% a year in the 18th century and under 0.1% a year before the 16th century.  More visible evidence of accelerating economic progress is found in long-term charts of the stock market.  Furthermore, the number of millionaires in the world is rising by several percent each year.  The ranks of the wealthy did not grow this rapidly even just a few decades ago. 

3) Astronomical observation technology is also accelerating exponentially, which will result in the detection of Earth-like planets around other stars as soon as 2011.  Transportation speeds also appear to be on an exponential curve of increase, even if significant jumps are decades apart.  The cost to send a man to the Moon today in relation to US GDP is only 1/30th as much as it was in 1969. 

4) Biotechnology is converging with information technology, and by some estimations medical knowledge is doubling every 8 years at this point.  There is a lot of research underway that could directly or indirectly increase human life expectancy, which does appear to have been increasing at an accelerating rate throughout human history.  But I am a bit more cautious to predict major gains here just yet, as each successive unit gain in lifespan might require increasingly greater research efforts.  Negatives are also rising, as the dropping cost of small-scale biotech projects increase the ease at which small groups could create bioterror agents.  The probability of a bioterror attack that kills over 1 million people before 2025 is very high. 

5) Even energy has burst forth from what appeared to be a century of stagnation into an area of rapid technological advances.  Beyond simple market forces like the price of oil, the revolutions in computing, biotechnology, and nanotechnology are all converging on the field of energy through multiple avenues to chip away at the seemingly gargantuan obstacles we face.  Energy, too, is in the process of becoming a knowledge-based technology, and hence guaranteed to see accelerating exponential innovation. 

The Milli, Micro, Nano, Pico curves are another dimension from which to view accelerating trends in an all-encompassing view.  Internalize this chart, and much of the technological progress of the last 50 years seems natural, as do all of the future predictions here that may take most people by surprise. 

Of course, not everything is accelerating.  If a cat catches a bird, that action is no different today than it was 30, 3000, or 3 million years ago.  The gestation period for a human is still 9 months, just as it was 30,000 years ago.  The trends we have seen above do not appear to be on a path to change these natural processes.  But don't assume that even these are permanently immune to change, as accelerating forces continue to swallow up more pieces of our world.

The Technological Singularity is defined as a time at which the rate of accelerating change increases to a point where it becomes human surpassing.  To visualize what this can mean, ponder this chart, and then this chart.  All credible futurists agree on such an event occurring, and differ only on predictions of the timing or nature of the Singularity.  My own prediction is for 2050, but this is a vast subject that we will save for another day. 

In any event, we need not worry just yet about whether the Singularity of 44 +/- 20 years hence will be a positive or a negative.  Much more will be written about that in coming years, as many more people grasp the concept.  For the present, just be observant of the accelerating trends that surround you, for the invisible forces that run the world gain much more clarity through that lens.  There is much to gain by being acceleration aware..

nVidia Graphics Technology Advancement

Check out nVidia's homepage for a sample of the graphics that it's new graphics processors are capable of.  Yes, that face is entirely computer generated, and can be rendered on a PC with nVidia's products available for a grand total of under $2000.  While this demonstration, of course, is constructed on optimal conditions to display pre-selected visuals for maximum 'Ooooh' effect, this will be the level of graphical detail that mainstream games will contain by 2012.  Our prediction of a radical reshaping of consumer entertainment appears to be on track. 

An important accomplishment of this demo is the apparent surmounting of the Uncanny Valley pitfall.  More demos are needed to confirm that this obstacle has been overcome, however.

Related :

The Technological Progress of Video Games

The Next Big Thing in Entertainment

Next Generation Graphics, a Good Intro

Telescope Power - Yet Another Accelerating Technology