The Decade of CHANGE

48 thoughts on “The Decade of CHANGE”

1. We said all these wonderful things two decades ago and even a decade ago. Yet we still rely on fossil fuels and nobody has a working MSR let alone fusion power

   • China’s working on a MSR:

     https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-molten-salt-reactor-cleared-for-start-up

     Not everyone thinks MSRs are the way to go though:

     https://theconversation.com/nuclear-power-why-molten-salt-reactors-are-problematic-and-canada-investing-in-them-is-a-waste-167019

2. My predictions : 1nm /quantum cpu with software capable to emulate past/present/imaginary humans; every dead person gets a surviving computer ghost. Life extension works a little but no miracle, no nanobots other than artificial cells (AI will help a lot but not replace hunan imagination and ingenuity). Fusion plants (at last) get online and allow humanity to avoid a carbon runaway catastrophe, with help from geo-engineering, new photovoltaics and energy comsuption reduction (imposed by law and necessity). Some African countries are hugely successful and attract people and money from everywhere. Amazon forest is 80% replaced by savannahs; African and Asian forest are following the same path. No large scale nuclear war after a limited exchange scares everyone. No large human population (10,000 ?) living outside of Earth until end of 21st century. Global human population tops below 10 billions while hundreds of millions spend most of their waking time in AR, possibly with implanted neuralinks. SETI still unsuccessful, but extrasolar living planets are discovered by sending scopes at the solar focal point. Etc etc… Am I not a futurist, he ?

   • dates and date ranges for your predictions. Specifics enough to generate a false result.
     When can we declare any of the predictions wrong? Without dates or more specifics then none are falsifiable. So you are not a futurist yet.

     You had one. always less than 10,000 people beyond the Earth before Dec 31, 2100.

3. Really? I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m not seeing it yet.

   One game changer on a personal level will be if “Turbuckle’s” C60 stem cell protocol works for me when I try it this fall.

4. I tend to think that the Power Problem has two equally realizable mid-term bright-swan events coming: cheap and scalable superconducting power transmission, and significant geothermal (or nuclear) power generation expansion.

   The SCPT allows power to grid the entire earth. It allows vast solar in deserts and potentially other locations to generate abundantly and push the electrons to the World Wide Grid for use anywhere else. No ohmic resistance is a marvelous thing.

   Likewise ramped up nuclear and geothermal bring intense generation where the investment makes sense, likely far from cities and industrially thirsty consumer centers.

   Both answer the How To Make It All Work question.

   So sez me

   • My concern about this sort of world-wide grid is that it enables world-wide blackouts. I mean, sure, it seems like a terribly efficient thing to do, but haven’t the last few years taught us yet that resiliency is as important as efficiency?

     Just imagine how attractive a target those long distance links would be, for Green terrorists!

     • Example: the Russia controlled oil pipeline feeding Europe.

       They basically have the EU grabbed by the …

       Imagine that with world wide electricity, produced somewhere sunny (and conflictive/dictatorial) and consumed some place rich and overly credulous, enough to have built that liability in the first place.

       Thanks, but no thanks. Such things ought to remain within the country level, with a few agreements that don’t look like Trojan horses plotted by some dictator.

       • USA and Australia have access to in-house large, sunny desert areas they can use for solar power and run long lines to their population centres.
         To much lesser extent, so does India, China and Russia.
         India – even the desert areas are not exactly deserted.
         India, China and Russia, they have dry deserts, but they have much less sunshine than ideal.
         Europe will have to work with one or more North African countries to be a reliable supplier for their needs. This has worked out before… but broke down around 470 AD and hasn’t been reliable since then. But hey, there’s a chance.

         • Yes, we do have the requisite desert areas in our own countries. But unless the long distance connections were run underground, they’re really exposed to anyone who wants to take them down.

           And government regulated utilities have a systematic problem investing in resiliency; It raises rates, and the regulators don’t want the rates raised. That’s why, for instance, we’re still horribly vulnerable to a large CME hitting the Earth, and don’t have the stockpiled transformers to bring the grid back up if an EMP takes it down.

           Or look at Texas, where their bidding system for power totally prioritizes whatever is cheapest at any given instant, no matter how unreliable it might be.

           It’s not so much that I don’t think it’s possible to do safely, as that I don’t think it WOULD be done safely.

         • If you’re concerned about “bad people” attacking long distance energy transport infrastructure, this also applies just as badly to gas and oil pipelines.
           And it’s been a century or so and so far the biggest threat to pipelines (within the civilized countries) has been “bad people” attacking them via the legal and political systems, not dynamite.

   • With a superconducting grid you could build 15GWe nuclear installations in the remote parts of Canada, far away from NIMBY concerns.

     • Superconducting grid is mostly not needed. Ultra high voltage power lines already built in China. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/12/superconductors-nears-room-temperature-but-uhv-lines-are-better-for-grid.html

       99.8% without energy loss over 100 miles of distance using 1 Megavolt voltages.

       • That makes 1000 mile transmission distances viable at a 10% loss but at intercontinental distances it’s clearly not viable.

   • I think of room-temperature superconductors as a similar problem to fusion: eternally ten years away.

     I’d love to be proven wrong, but…

     • The truth is, even if you had a room temperature superconductor, you’d likely need to cool it for most applications, to get a decent critical field.

     • The room temperature superconductors weren’t even a pipedream until about 1990 or so, when liquid nitrogen temp SC appeared on the scene in a black-swan like manner. That reset everyone’s opinion on what could happen in the SC area.

       So fusion has at least 40 years on HTSC when it comes to non-delivery.

5. Read Peter Zeihan for an almost opposite take on the coming decade

   • I don’t see a contradiction between Brian’s ideas (tech developments) and Zeihan’s ideas (geopolitical).

     Both could well occur at the same time.

6. Cars as we know them will become obsolete, replaced by micro-mobility options in major cities, and microcars in suburbs. Rural living will – and should – continue to lose population, since it is wasteful, inefficient, expensive when all road, utilities, wildfire exposure, policing, etc. are considered, and environmentally destructive.
   Even more important, Work From Home (WFH) is quickly replacing office and commuting, making the need for ANY car questionable, or at at least the need for two cars for a pair of simultaneously commuting spouses.
   So the idea that Teslas will one-for-one replace ICE vehicles while sticking with roughly the same 1-2 people per 4-5 capacity car is obsolete thinking.

   • Kinda/mostly agree Scott, mini electrics will take over and extend the range of what we consider bicycle commutes. I’ve been seeing more and more of electric bicycles on my route to work. However they’re not perfect, bad weather will soak you quickly but who knows what the market will do for that.

     As for teslas replacing ice one for one being a fallacy?
     I agree but not for the same reasons, self driving cars will let you do more with less.

     Say instead of a family of 4 having apx 2-3 cars in its driveway, with self driving they can readily make do with 1-2 self driving, as the car can drop people off and run the next errand instead of idly sit in a parking lot waiting for a driver.

     Coolest part is that we’ll have less paved lots, which is great!

     Bad news is that busy destinations entrances will turn into airport drop off style cluttered madness.

     • Hanging pod PRT is a technologically possible replacement for car use in cities. It might need all weather highway self drive in order to spring up on a uni campus or corporate campus somewhere.

   • Conversely, easily accessible internet and working from home might make rural living more attractive. It’s definitely happening here in Central Texas, where there are ever more and more folks glutting up the countryside. Of course, it’s not quite the same as rural Nebraska or some other boring flatland area.

   • Urban living is also likely the biggest cause of below replacement birth rates. Eventually we need to revise cities to be dramatically more livable for families – more spacious apartments, greener, more outdoor space in neighborhoods to give kids more independence while keeping them reasonably safe. But how to do that reasonably affordably?

     Isolating most traffic from pedestrians (and kids at play) would go a long way in that direction. SkyTran is one proposal that could work – except to be practical and financially viable it would need to be implemented over much of a city in fairly short order. The huge up-front investment needed unfortunately makes it hard to adopt.

     A more affordable approach will be to incrementally roof over streets to create traffic-free pedestrian plazas above, with elevated walkways and doors added to buildings for easy access. This can get started adjacent to high density high-rise apartments and office buildings where the benefit would be maximized. Roofing over streets will also encourage bike riding, providing more shelter from weather. Electric transport probably has to dominate to enable this, to reduce ICE exhausts that would otherwise be concentrated. So most cities probably can’t do this before 2040, though California cities may be able to start by 2030.

   • In the US people love giant vehicles like pickup trucks and 3-row SUVs. So even as the number of cars per person drops, this remains constant.

7. I am also quite optimistic that we will have commercial fusion by 2032. Despite the low cost of renewables, I believe fusion will also be a big game changer.

   • What good would that do?
     We already have cheap, clean and plentiful source of energy. If fusion would become the same there are plenty of actors that have trillion dollars annually to discredit it and have it banned. Just like with fission.

     • Well, it may just be because fusion doesn’t exist yet, but Greens do seem more accepting of fusion than fission, supposedly because of much lower radioactive waste.

       But even if workable fusion is somehow possible by 2032, it isn’t likely to be cheap, nor widely implemented before maybe 2070.

       • I think it basically IS because fusion doesn’t work yet. They’re using it as the perfect that’s the enemy of the good enough. As soon as it even starts to look feasible they’ll turn on it.

         • Some greens turned against wind exactly on schedule. Some haven’t. They aren’t a monolithic block.

           Though “wind power” isn’t a monolithic block either. It’s a viable power source in some places, a waste of money in others.

     • Though cheap power sources now exist, other than hydro they are highly variable and not suitable for meeting base load needs. This is where fusion power will shine.

   • only fusion reactors with concepts for de-heating the planet?

8. These technologies could lead to less transactions, one would think.

   The more advanced, capable and cheap the robots are, the more ‘autarkic’ people will economically become.

9. Hi Brian, the World GDP graph is misleading as there was a drastic population increase in the last century which contributed to GDP growth. Better measurement would be GDP/per person.

10. Son, I advise you to get into self-serving cars and bots. Also, with prolonged heat domes making the middle of America uninhabitable by 2050, move north young man. Also, with the growing collapse of democracies and big country military rivalry, you might want to hide out in a bunker in Alaska. (The idea that bots and self-serving cars will shape the next thousand years seems highly simplistic.)

    • Dad, would big country military rivalry still be around with super abundance of everything?

      • Cousin,
        By the standards of the 18th century, we already have super abundance of everything.

        To be fair, wars are on the decrease, but obviously not gone away completely yet.

    • Thinking a little about it, best choice seems to me Argentina.

11. THE decade of CHANGE

    Every decade is a decade of change. There’s a lot of hype here and not much real insight on why this one decade will be so special vs the last 17 decades since 1850.

    Humanoid robot developed from self-driving car is really stretching practical expectations to hopes and dreams. Sure, there will be progress. Even impressive progress. Still waiting for ACTUAL self-driving cars promise to be fulfilled. Fully autonomous, that last 5%, or 1% is most of the tough work. Self-driving cars to humanoid robots? Some very basic overlap in techniques and navigation. A robot needs to do far far more than navigate to be useful.

    • I believe that the Tesla FSD beta will be successful. It is already being used in over 100,000 cars. There is improvement in the software stack (unifying the highway, city streets and parking) into one neural net. There is improvement in the training (Dojo). There is youtube video evidence from testers that non-intervention driving is increasing. This is not geo limited like it is for Waymo, Cruise and others. There were tests and competitions to prove that steam trains were superior to alternatives in the 1820-1830 timeframe. Your definition of self driving car is robotaxi level. This will be later in 2023 or 2024. Maybe 2025 if significant delays. All Tesla’s will have FSD capability. So after market adoption is possible. 3M Tesla now on the roads. About 4M by the end of 2022 and 7M by the end of 2023, 12M by the end of 2024, 20M by the end of 2025. Once the FSD non-beta is ready and then robotaxi level, there will be over the air update options for the fleet of Tesla’s to adopt. Tesla Semi will be able to use FSD for platooning to increase efficiency by 30%. The FSD pure vision approach is one that will scale into lower cost Teslabots. Tesla has the manufacturing scale to mass produce successful Teslabots by the millions, billions and then beyond. They will have the R&D and the patience to drive through to the final vision.

12. Don’t forget lifespan extension.

    • I think that will start in earnest in the forties. In the meantime, I take my vitamins.

    • Was about to add this. In the next ten years I expect we will see treatments that will extend healthy human lifespans by 20-40 years even while cancer, heart disease, and other major causes of death plummet. Far from being a population disaster this will be a huge boon to countries that can afford it, especially since they are the ones most at risk by losing too much of their workforce (and taxpayers) too quickly.

      The decade following, especially with advanced AI to help, will likely see average human lifespan (for those that can afford treatment) become indefinite, not immortal, but indefinite. Immortality comes still later, depending on how you define it, of course. But it is likely there are people born in the twentieth century who will ride the wave long enough to see their one thousandth birthday — if human minds, augmented by various upgrades, can handle it without crashing like a Windows 98 desktop.

13. The issue is still the green energy availability to drive this change

    • We already have carbon neutral energy that can fulfill all of our future growth needs: nuclear fission.

      With it alone we could factorize ourselves out of the ecosphere, creating self sustained arcologies (e.g. dense cities) where we could live and prosper, with barely any impact on the ecosystem around. If we were less fretful and allowed it to happen, that is.

      Nuclear fusion would be nice and all too, but really not indispensable for such a future to happen.

      Solar power satellites would be cool as well, for those with a dislike for nuclear energy.

      And the better part, is that we could have them all at once.

      • I don’t see it happens, in Belgium , nuclear plants will be closed soon, only 2 reactors left open for a transition period if 10 years , after we get gas plants to replace them … what a shame to the politicians

        • What a shame to you for doubting the wisdom and foresight of your politicans.

          • Short term view and reelection

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