First, fat was dangerous, while carbohydrates were great. Fibers and vitamins were great too.
Then, we discovered that carbohydrates make us fat, too. It's not difficult to picture the board meetings at companies like Nestle and Kraft foods, and a number of dairy producers across the world. "Ok, so we can sell low-fat, and we can sell low-carb, but those are both negatives, we need a more positive message... Oh wait, I got it: Let's sell high-protein!!!"
Fast-forward a few years and we see high protein products everywhere, from bread to pasta to dairy, where carbohydrats used to roam freely. Now, let's consider for a minute: Did normal office workers who only exercise moderately eat too little protein? Is the high-protein campaign in any way designed to give us additional health benefits? Or is it simply where marketing had to go? With the exception of athletes and body builders, sorry to say, for the rest of us it's just marketing. And as usual we're falling for it. Because protein doesn't make us fat, and we don't want to be fat. At least that's the current theory. I'm guessing that, since proteins contain calories, and we eat more of those than we burn, eventually eating lots of protein will also make us fat.
Prediction: By 2030, several credible scientific studies will show that over-consumption of protein has adverse health effects on people in the developed world. Accordingly, by 2035, the marketing will have shifted to something else. How about "balanced" or "unprocessed"?
Monday, February 29, 2016
Political crisis due to debt - and a way out
When debt serving exceeds cash flow for a nation, the only solutions will be either to print money to create inflation to reduce the debt in relative terms, or to stop servicing the debt.
We've already seen lots and lots of money printing since the financial crisis of 2008. It's ending up in the hands of asset owners, though, and not reaching into the overall economy. Thus there has been inflation but only in very specific sectors. Housing, stocks, luxury goods, collectibles, etc. Automation and globalization are pushing prices down for many other goods.
This causes increased inequality. This causes loss of belief in a better future for the bottom of the pyramid. This is fertile ground for populism. The best way to get rid of populism is to inspire hope for the future in the population. Without it, populism is almost sure to win eventually when people tire of "traditional" politicians failing to make their lives better, and "want to try something else". That's where our dictators come from. That's where racism and chauvinism come from. That's where social violence comes from. That's where wars come from.
In the end, those at the top of the pyramid must take care to protect their consumers. If nobody buys all their goods and services, they too will ultimately suffer. This already exists today; it's called salary. Everyone who works creating a good or service, gets their wage, and then consumes that entire wage on goods and services is in fact serving as a source of recurring income for the owners of the good sand service companies. To get out of that hamster wheel, people need to improve their cash flow, go plus every month, and create savings. There is no other way.
Today, automation and low wage pressures are higher than ever. It makes it harder to create those savings. Less skilled human brains and bodies are left behind by the inexorable progress of technology.
Like so many other things the US have exported, they will also export an increased fixation on money, at the cost of culture, history, arts and traditions that aren't economically "efficient".
And eventually, those in the hamster wheel will meet the populists and hit it off big time. When that happens, we will have protectionism, reduced world trade, falling GNBs, layoffs, and perhaps resource wars.
Now there's another way to view all this: If automation were sufficiently simple to achieve that most people could do it... Then why couldn't this turn into a scenario of careless abundance instead? We replicate our food and goods, there is housing with VR+AR for everyone, autonomous cars zip us around freely, we educate ourselves wherever we like, we spend our time pursuing our passions. If it were so simple to PRODUCE what we want that we ourselves could do it. It won't work as long as production is in the hands of a few, unless they share their income drastically more than is done today, e.g. with basic income-like schemes.
I'm rambling. Anyway, prediction: By 2025, three EU countries or more will have become dictatorships. 10 countries or more will have defaulted on sovereign debt. But, by 2030, at least two highly developed countries will have implemented basic income schemes in a way that doesn't inhibit their ability as a nation to provide welfare for its citizens and wealth for its people.
We've already seen lots and lots of money printing since the financial crisis of 2008. It's ending up in the hands of asset owners, though, and not reaching into the overall economy. Thus there has been inflation but only in very specific sectors. Housing, stocks, luxury goods, collectibles, etc. Automation and globalization are pushing prices down for many other goods.
This causes increased inequality. This causes loss of belief in a better future for the bottom of the pyramid. This is fertile ground for populism. The best way to get rid of populism is to inspire hope for the future in the population. Without it, populism is almost sure to win eventually when people tire of "traditional" politicians failing to make their lives better, and "want to try something else". That's where our dictators come from. That's where racism and chauvinism come from. That's where social violence comes from. That's where wars come from.
In the end, those at the top of the pyramid must take care to protect their consumers. If nobody buys all their goods and services, they too will ultimately suffer. This already exists today; it's called salary. Everyone who works creating a good or service, gets their wage, and then consumes that entire wage on goods and services is in fact serving as a source of recurring income for the owners of the good sand service companies. To get out of that hamster wheel, people need to improve their cash flow, go plus every month, and create savings. There is no other way.
Today, automation and low wage pressures are higher than ever. It makes it harder to create those savings. Less skilled human brains and bodies are left behind by the inexorable progress of technology.
Like so many other things the US have exported, they will also export an increased fixation on money, at the cost of culture, history, arts and traditions that aren't economically "efficient".
And eventually, those in the hamster wheel will meet the populists and hit it off big time. When that happens, we will have protectionism, reduced world trade, falling GNBs, layoffs, and perhaps resource wars.
Now there's another way to view all this: If automation were sufficiently simple to achieve that most people could do it... Then why couldn't this turn into a scenario of careless abundance instead? We replicate our food and goods, there is housing with VR+AR for everyone, autonomous cars zip us around freely, we educate ourselves wherever we like, we spend our time pursuing our passions. If it were so simple to PRODUCE what we want that we ourselves could do it. It won't work as long as production is in the hands of a few, unless they share their income drastically more than is done today, e.g. with basic income-like schemes.
I'm rambling. Anyway, prediction: By 2025, three EU countries or more will have become dictatorships. 10 countries or more will have defaulted on sovereign debt. But, by 2030, at least two highly developed countries will have implemented basic income schemes in a way that doesn't inhibit their ability as a nation to provide welfare for its citizens and wealth for its people.
Obesity and VR
It will just keep growing. Literally. Why? We're sitting down more now, and that's BEFORE the entire VR/AR revolution! Imagine what it will be like once we have immersive experiences. So geared towards hammering our brains' rewards systems that most people won't stand a chance resisting it. Live life like on Facebook, but better, all the time! We already have water and drains in our homes, it's just a question of adding a nutrition soup type which can be fed without distracting from the virtual environment and we're done. Matrix, but with fat people.
Prediction: 5 years after VR/AR becomes mainstream (let's predict that doesn't happen until 2025), obesity will have risen sharply in the US by over 25%.
Prediction: 5 years after VR/AR becomes mainstream (let's predict that doesn't happen until 2025), obesity will have risen sharply in the US by over 25%.
Mobile processing
Today, we still tend to move data to processing, though in the datacenter the trend is in the other direction: We move processing to the data.
I see it as highly likely that as smartphones become ever more powerful, the nodes of smartphones and their mostly idle capacity will eventually become available for crowdprocessing of problems, like SETI for PCs long ago. The main counter-argument is that it will cost battery life, and that the energy-per-computation cost will remain prohibitively high compared to transporting data to a data center and computing there instead. Depending on battery tech evolution, this may well be a killer counter-argument.
The other trend is that it will be expensive to send lots of data to clouds, so data processing will be done closer to the source in order to reduce transmission footprint. The best, most wide-spread sensors in the world are the one in your smartphone. The smartphones will get packed with more and more sensors over time. It would make perfect sense to create docking interfaces in the smartphones to allow additional sensors to be attached, as long as the sensors are small and don't cause discomfort.
The key question is then, how should the request/allow/deny protocol for on-smartphone processing work? It wouldn't make sense to bother the user every single time, there has to be a policy with opt-ins. This already exists today in the App installation permissions. What about security concerns? Eating battery life doesn't hurt your integrity, so as long as permissions are kept low, this can be overcome.
It is likely the best incentive would be crowdsourcing (already happening on a massive scale, e.g. for traffic applications like Waze) or crowdcharity. What else might convince users to give up their battery life? There would need to be a way to identify a simple and direct connection between compute cycles for a distributed problem, and value (to somebody). Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency farming might be an option, though it raises hairy security issues and it's also not near economically viable (see e.g. http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/mobile-security/325365-it-takes-14-million-android-phones-to-earn-one-bitcoin). Something along the lines of, "Every hour a child in the Amazonas receives a smartphone thanks to your use of app X thanks to the contributed computation of N users".
Worth thinking about. Hard to make a prediction. It all boils down to using unused capacity, same underlying mechanics as replacing owned (non-moving 95% of the time) cars with fleets of autonomous cars constantly in motion. The difference being that there is no natural recharge point for the mobile phone. Inductive charging surfaces might be a long-term solution to that problem, but feels far-fetched.
Oh well. Prediction: By 2020, there is at least one well-known mobile processing app used by more than 5M people, whose purpose is to only do this (unlike the already-existing multitude of apps that among other things also compute and collect sensor data).
I see it as highly likely that as smartphones become ever more powerful, the nodes of smartphones and their mostly idle capacity will eventually become available for crowdprocessing of problems, like SETI for PCs long ago. The main counter-argument is that it will cost battery life, and that the energy-per-computation cost will remain prohibitively high compared to transporting data to a data center and computing there instead. Depending on battery tech evolution, this may well be a killer counter-argument.
The other trend is that it will be expensive to send lots of data to clouds, so data processing will be done closer to the source in order to reduce transmission footprint. The best, most wide-spread sensors in the world are the one in your smartphone. The smartphones will get packed with more and more sensors over time. It would make perfect sense to create docking interfaces in the smartphones to allow additional sensors to be attached, as long as the sensors are small and don't cause discomfort.
The key question is then, how should the request/allow/deny protocol for on-smartphone processing work? It wouldn't make sense to bother the user every single time, there has to be a policy with opt-ins. This already exists today in the App installation permissions. What about security concerns? Eating battery life doesn't hurt your integrity, so as long as permissions are kept low, this can be overcome.
It is likely the best incentive would be crowdsourcing (already happening on a massive scale, e.g. for traffic applications like Waze) or crowdcharity. What else might convince users to give up their battery life? There would need to be a way to identify a simple and direct connection between compute cycles for a distributed problem, and value (to somebody). Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency farming might be an option, though it raises hairy security issues and it's also not near economically viable (see e.g. http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/mobile-security/325365-it-takes-14-million-android-phones-to-earn-one-bitcoin). Something along the lines of, "Every hour a child in the Amazonas receives a smartphone thanks to your use of app X thanks to the contributed computation of N users".
Worth thinking about. Hard to make a prediction. It all boils down to using unused capacity, same underlying mechanics as replacing owned (non-moving 95% of the time) cars with fleets of autonomous cars constantly in motion. The difference being that there is no natural recharge point for the mobile phone. Inductive charging surfaces might be a long-term solution to that problem, but feels far-fetched.
Oh well. Prediction: By 2020, there is at least one well-known mobile processing app used by more than 5M people, whose purpose is to only do this (unlike the already-existing multitude of apps that among other things also compute and collect sensor data).
Electric Cars
I heard of Tesla Motors for the first time in 2011. Now they're the new Apple in terms of follower loyalty.
I really, really WANT to believe that cars will become electric ASAP, but it's going to take a while yet. But I believe Tesla will be the Bredbandsbolaget of Electric Cars, the catalyst of the change.
Trends:
- Battery prices are going down steadily.
- Battery supply capacity is increasing fast (Gigafactory).
- Manufacturing automation and 3D printing is advancing fast.
- Cars will be our first robots, not humanoid robots.
- Cars are learning to drive autonomously.
- Companies like Uber are ready to kill the owned car paradigm completely, replacing it with autonomous car fleets in urban areas (no parking, no maintenance, no commute time spent holding the wheel - it's so convenient it's inevitable).
- Environmentalism is spreading, either voluntarily like in Sweden, or forced by smog and health issues like in China.
Negative trends:
- Regulation is slow regarding autonomous cars.
- The ethics question isn't resolved yet, though Volvo as a first claimed that the manufacturer should be responsible for accidents caused by autonomous cars.
- It will take time to build out the charging ecosystem for electric cars.
- The charging of the car takes much longer than tanking gasoline - this one isn't so easily overcome.
Even so, I predict an exponential electric car growth once the price reaches the tipping point and electric cars become cheaper. Forward-looking countries are subsidizing today (Norway in particular stands out).
By 2020, 1% of new cars sold in Sweden will be electric. By 2030, 20%. By 2040, 50%. Will this happen?
By 2020, no autonomous car will have a driver's permit yet. By 2030, Google and one other company will have a permit. By 2040, autonomous cars will represent over 33% of all cars in Sweden.
I really, really WANT to believe that cars will become electric ASAP, but it's going to take a while yet. But I believe Tesla will be the Bredbandsbolaget of Electric Cars, the catalyst of the change.
Trends:
- Battery prices are going down steadily.
- Battery supply capacity is increasing fast (Gigafactory).
- Manufacturing automation and 3D printing is advancing fast.
- Cars will be our first robots, not humanoid robots.
- Cars are learning to drive autonomously.
- Companies like Uber are ready to kill the owned car paradigm completely, replacing it with autonomous car fleets in urban areas (no parking, no maintenance, no commute time spent holding the wheel - it's so convenient it's inevitable).
- Environmentalism is spreading, either voluntarily like in Sweden, or forced by smog and health issues like in China.
Negative trends:
- Regulation is slow regarding autonomous cars.
- The ethics question isn't resolved yet, though Volvo as a first claimed that the manufacturer should be responsible for accidents caused by autonomous cars.
- It will take time to build out the charging ecosystem for electric cars.
- The charging of the car takes much longer than tanking gasoline - this one isn't so easily overcome.
Even so, I predict an exponential electric car growth once the price reaches the tipping point and electric cars become cheaper. Forward-looking countries are subsidizing today (Norway in particular stands out).
By 2020, 1% of new cars sold in Sweden will be electric. By 2030, 20%. By 2040, 50%. Will this happen?
By 2020, no autonomous car will have a driver's permit yet. By 2030, Google and one other company will have a permit. By 2040, autonomous cars will represent over 33% of all cars in Sweden.
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