Predictions For 2011

After revisiting my list of predictions, I realized that I didn’t have very many for 2011, due to my focus on things at least five years out. In honor of the new year, here are some of my predictions for 2011, in no particular order:

Electronic wallet? There’s an app for that. On December 16, 2010, Google and Samsung released the Nexus S, the first smartphone equipped with near-field communication. Near-field communication is an emerging technology that enables the transfer of data between devices at a range of 4 inches or less. This will eventually replace boarding passes, credit cards, and ATM cards among other things and will allow the easy transfer of money over the phone. 2011 is the year when the technology will first be useful, if not exactly mainstream yet. The places where it will take off the most quickly are developing countrieswhere credit card companies have never posed a lot of competition. Those of us in the US and Europe will probably have to wait a couple more years.

Is that a television or a computer? 2011 will be the year when the television and computer converge, just as the cell phone and computer have done in the last three years. An assortment of devices that hit the market in the last half of 2010 will serve up video content from the internet onto the television. The immediate effects will be relatively unimportant – people will be able to enjoy their favorite videos from YouTube, Netflix, Vevo, and Hulu on a much larger screen. In the longer term, this will change the way people view television and make them question if paying for channels they never use is really a good investment, especially if the same content is available online.

Human development will be widespread. Last year, all but seven countries in the world improved their score on the UN's Human Development Index (5 of those were stagnant while 2 actually lost ground). Emerging markets developed much more rapidly than wealthy nations. The long-term global trend has always been toward higher standards of living, and barring another severe economic downturn, we can expect the same from 2011. The vast majority of countries will share in economic gains, and developing countries will continue to outpace the US, Europe, and Japan.

At least one company offers genome sequencing for $1,000 or less. This one may be a bit of a reach, but I’m going to predict that 2011 will be the year that the holy grail of genomics – the $1,000 genome – is finally reached. For the last several years, the cost of genome sequencing has been following a Moore’s Law like trajectory, dropping nearly tenfold per year. A year ago, the cost of a simple genome sequencing was $6,000 and $10,000 from the two leading companies, Life Technologies and Illumina, respectively. It is therefore possible that by the end of 2011 a company will be able to do it for $1,000 which will throw open the doors to many more customers. Shortly after this milestone is reached, health insurance companies may begin covering the service, and the era of personalized medicine will dawn.

Shake-ups in the Axis of Evil. In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George Bush famously labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the “Axis of Evil” and called for regime change in the three nations. During his presidency, Bush only deposed one of those regimes, but in 2011 he may get his wish in at least one more. Kim Jong-il, the supreme leader of North Korea, is believed to have suffered a stroke and has appeared very frail in his recent public appearances. He has been hastily creating a succession plan to transfer power to his 26-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, but the younger Kim has very little influence with key military officers who are necessary to sustain the regime. Wikileaks recently reported that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran has terminal leukemia. Khamenei is the glue holding the regime together; for example, he recently intervened personally to dissuade the Iranian Parliament from impeaching President Ahmadinejad. It is unclear if the Iranian regime can survive in any form without Khamenei. If either Kim or Khamenei dies, there will be a power struggle as various factions within the governments jockey for position in the power vacuum left in the deceased leader’s wake. Iran stands a real chance of serious democratic reform. North Korea does not (barring a total collapse and reunification with South Korea), but a shakeup could at least generate some Chinese-style economic reforms and perhaps an end to the bellicosity on the Korean Peninsula.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2011 – Near-field communication comes equipped in many new smartphones. Mobile payments become even more popular in the developing world, and makes inroads in Europe and the United States.
By 2011 – Internet-equipped televisions or add-ons will become popular.
By 2011 – At least 75% of countries improve their score on the Human Development Index compared to 2010, with the biggest improvements in developing countries.
By 2011 – At least one company offers genome sequencing for $1,000 or less.
By 2011 – There will be a major shakeup (or a total implosion) in the top leadership of North Korea and/or Iran.
By 2011 – Tablet computers continue to sell well. The market will become competitive with several new tablets seriously challenging Apple’s iPad.
By 2011 – Gaming (led by Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect) will begin to become gesture-based, rather than controller-based.
By 2011 – Voice Over IP services, such as Skype, become popular on smartphones, thus portending the eventual demise of traditional voice-telephone services.

Update on Driverless Cars

A few months ago, I wrote about self-driving cars. At the time, the last information publicly available came from 2007, in which the DARPA Urban Challenge demonstrated the possibility of cars that could safely navigate through a city without human interference. At the time, only 6 of the 11 autonomous cars that competed in the challenge were able to complete a course in a makeshift "city" on an unused military base. The vehicles traveled extremely slowly (about 13 miles per hour) and the course was only 50 miles long. There were no tricks, surprises, or unusual circumstances...the vehicles just had to drive themselves and react to normal traffic.

I was excited at even this rudimentary amount of progress in 2007, so I was even more delighted when the New York Times provided an update on self-driving cars yesterday. The technology has progressed immensely in the last three years, much more quickly than I would have guessed. Google has secretly been testing autonomous vehicles, working with none other than Sebastian Thrun, the lead engineer of the Stanford Racing Team, which took second place in the DARPA Urban Challenge, and first place in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The cars have been driving on actual highways, city streets, and rural roads in California, navigating their way through real traffic. There is always a human sitting behind the wheel who has the power to override the self-driving computer, just in case something goes wrong. In the last year, the Google Cars have driven over 1,000 miles on the streets of California without any assistance, and 140,000 miles with only minimal human assistance. They no longer travel at crawling speeds; Google has programmed the speed limits of all the relevant streets into the system and the vehicles are capable of traveling at the speed limit. In the Google Car fleet, there has only been one minor mishap in the last year: when another driver rear-ended a Google Car at a stoplight.

The New York Times article implies that it will be about eight years before self-driving cars are publicly available. Given the unpredictable nature of technological roadblocks and legislative paralysis, I'm opting to be a little more conservative, standing by my previous estimate: they'll be on the roads no later than 2020.

The NYT is quite bullish on their prospects, implying (via technologists and futurists) that "they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has." That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but only because the Internet has transformed so much of our society. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that self-driving cars will fundamentally alter the way in which we design cities, will reduce the annual automobile fatalities nationwide from approximately 40,000 to approximately zero, will greatly reduce traffic and pollution, will help alleviate poverty by eliminating the need for most people to own a personal car (instead you could summon one to pick you up like a taxi, but available in non-urban areas and without the high fees), and will allow us to enjoy our commutes more by freeing up our time to do things other than watch the road.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2020 - Driverless cars are commercially-available and street-legal somewhere in the United States.
By 2027 - New driverless cars outnumber new cars requiring at least some human control, in the US market.
By 2035 - Driverless cars are widely perceived as safer than human drivers. Somewhere in the United States, it is illegal for humans to drive.

The Future of Privacy - Radical Openness

Generally, my visions of tomorrow are quite optimistic. But there is one area where I am decidedly a pessimist. The future of privacy seems bleak. Many of us who are relatively tech-savvy have already given up much of our privacy voluntarily for the sake of convenience, fun, or money. I am a member of a social network which tracks my every movement by allowing me to check in with my smartphone to nearly every location I visit. Another of my social networks allows me to publish my every thought in real time, as long as it doesn’t exceed 140 characters. A popular financial website requires that users turn over the passwords to their bank accounts, then analyzes the users’ financial habits. Nearly all young people belong to a social network which makes no secret of its desire to collect our personal information to mine the data.

Ten years ago, most people would have been shocked by these technologies. Who would have thought that the biggest threat to our privacy would come from us voluntarily giving up our information? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rightly received a lot of criticism by forcing Facebook users to publicly reveal their personal information by default, then claiming that Facebook was merely adapting to users’ declining expectations of privacy. Zuckerberg’s claim was certainly untrue – Facebook is one of the driving forces behind declining expectations of privacy, rather than merely a response to it – but his instinct is probably correct that users will tolerate more intrusions on their privacy once they are accustomed to it.

My fellow futurist blogger David Houle notes, “As technology advances, privacy declines.” I think this is unfortunately correct, and very little can be done to change it. Tech-savvy young people in developed countries certainly have less privacy than they did a decade ago, and are mostly OK with that. In the coming decades, society will have to radically redefine its notions of privacy. I imagine that there may come a time when it is no longer practical to expect to be able to travel anywhere without your visit ending up in an online database, perhaps publicly available to anyone who cares. In the not too distant future, there may be vast government or corporate databases of genomes and other biometric indicators from nearly everyone in the nation.

Does this mean that an Orwellian dictatorship is likely? I don’t think so. Chances are, people will be willing to adjust their privacy expectations downward for the sake of convenience, just as they do now for Facebook. It remains to be seen if lowered expectations of privacy will actually help dictatorships thrive. Repressive states are increasingly blocking the very same tools that are responsible for the declining expectations of privacy – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Foursquare. It seems that these governments view them more as tools for subversion than as useful ways to snoop on political opponents.

This past week, the US Senate voted to confirm Elena Kagan as the next Supreme Court Justice. Much of her testimony dealt with her constitutional views on the right to privacy. In the United States at the present time, this is mostly just a code phrase for a nominee’s views on abortion, but I think that the right to privacy will become a more important issue in its own right for future confirmation hearings. The Supreme Court will probably eventually need to define what the right to privacy entails, who it protects, and from whom it protects them.

In the legislature, stronger safeguards for privacy can help prevent the emergence of corporate Big Brothers. Google recently decided to withdraw from China instead of obeying China’s censorship laws or facilitating its eavesdropping on its citizens. As commendable as this is, most large corporations are not as civic-minded. Yahoo! has been known to turn over personal emails from political dissidents to dictatorships. A law modeled on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prevents US companies from infringing on their users’ privacy, wherever in the world they are located, would be a major step toward keeping Big Brother at bay. American companies would no longer have the excuse that they will be singled out for persecution if they refuse to participate in invasions of privacy by the governments of the countries in which they operate. Very few nations could feasibly ban every American company merely for obeying US laws.

Ultimately, government action and corporate good deeds can only slow the inevitable shift toward less privacy, and perhaps prevent some of its worst excesses. In the future, governments, corporations, and individuals can and will gain access to far more information about us than is currently available in the public domain. The totalitarianism of Big Brother probably isn’t going to happen…but hundreds of Little Brothers may be watching you soon, if they aren’t already.

The Future of Health Care - The Genomic Revolution

For the first time in decades, we are due for a completely transformational change in health care. We are on the cusp of the Genomic Revolution, and we will start seeing the earliest results in the immediate future. Personal genomics – the practice of tailoring prescriptions, treatments, and lifestyle choices to an individual based on their genes – will soon depose the old paradigm of medicine. No longer will doctors merely give patients the drugs with the highest chance of success; they will be able to predict whether or not the drug will be effective for a specific person. No longer will patients try to base their diet and exercise habits on generic recommendations of what is healthy and what is not; instead, they can determine the healthiest lifestyle for their genetic makeup specifically. Health care will become mostly preventative, rather than reactive.

Why now? What is the driving force behind this paradigm shift? For the first time in human history, we have enough computing power to cheaply and quickly sequence the human genome. In the very near future, nearly everyone will have access to their entire DNA code, which they can carry on their smartphones. When Craig Venter became the first person to have his genome sequenced in 2000 as part of the Human Genome Project, it cost $3 billion and took thirteen years. When James Watson had his genome sequenced in 2007, it cost $2 million and took two months. Today, sequencing a human genome costs about $6,000 and takes a couple weeks. Within the next year, it is very likely that companies will offer genome sequencing for less than $1,000. Some observers view the $1,000 mark as a tipping point: the point at which average people can afford the service, and at which health insurers may start covering it. And after we have $1,000 genomes, $1 genomes won’t be far behind. Let’s not forget that the cost has dropped nearly a thousandfold in the last three years. Fast-forward a few more years, and it is conceivable that the cost of genome sequencing will be essentially nothing. I envision a day in the not-too-distant future when Walgreens and CVS will have self-service genome sequencing machines, as quick, cheap, and user-friendly as self-service photo machines.

Of course, merely knowing one's genetic code is worthless without knowing how to interpret it. While biologists have identified thousands of disease markers, there is vastly more that we don’t know about our genetic code. Some services available now, such as Google-funded 23AndMe, can test DNA to determine one’s predisposition to a narrow range of diseases, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. As the cost of genome sequencing approaches zero, nearly everyone will have it done. As the total number of genomes grows from thousands to millions to billions, scientists will have a treasure trove of data to analyze diseases and patient responses to medication. A machine called a microarray allows scientists to compare different DNA sequences and search for correlations. As more and more human genomes are available to be analyzed, patterns will become more evident and it will become much easier to unearth the specific genes associated with certain diseases. Patients who know the diseases for which they are at risk will be able to modify their lifestyle to prevent them from arising.

Those who are unlucky enough to get a disease in spite of (or because of) their lifestyle will have access to much more robust treatments than those currently available. By pinpointing the genetic location of a particular disease, scientists will be able to understand what caused the disease and how it can be reversed. Think of our genetic code like a computer program: Understanding the cause and location of the bugs will enable us to fix them. In the slightly more distant future, it will be possible to directly repair defective genes, such as those that cause cancer, through genetic therapy.

The next ten years will be the most transformative decade in human history for medicine, as we finally unlock the secrets of our genetic code which have been a mystery since the dawn of humanity. The things I have described here are by no means a comprehensive description of the benefits of the Genomic Revolution, and the new paradigm will not be without problems of its own. To be continued in another blog post…

PREDICTIONS:
By 2011 – At least one company offers genome sequencing for $1,000 or less
By 2014 – At least one company offers genome sequencing for $100 or less
By 2019 – Over half of all Americans have had their genomes sequenced
By 2021 – U.S. sales of personalized medicine (i.e. drugs tailored to the patient’s specific genetic profile) are greater than sales of non-personalized, mass-market medicine