Hyderabad Blues: [HM:258570] 20 Next Generation Predictions

During my last few blogs, I tried to establish a framework that can be used for enterprise and Service Provider companies and research organizations across the globe to help define how the next generation's set of innovation could potentially impact the way we live and operate our life in this century and beyond.

One way is to put together a list of innovations that can potentially have a major impact in personal and business life for facets of life on this planet, to look at what has happened and use stochastic processes in other predictive methods and use it to relatively show what could potentially happen. That is all one can do in our daily life outside of all the technical jargons we use every day. One can also look at all the new innovation at stake and make sense out of what is about to come in the next 50 years.

I can only achieve this by looking at the last 50 years when we had a major industrial revolution (Internet) which drove us to almost 150+ IP based applications, and my prediction almost two decades ago that IP will eat everything is becoming a reality. Although no one can fully and easily predict what exactly can be implemented over the next few decades as no one would have been able to predict companies such as Facebook or others and their impact on human society during last industrial revolution, all one can do is to learn from all the scientific work being done and make some predictions about the future about to come. But I am very confident that there will be billion dollar evaluated companies in years to come, like after March 1st with Snapchat.

It is very important to identify the challenges and then help accelerate solving these problems for the good of mankind no matter which continent we live in, knowing there may be a 7th continent that has been located below New Zealand. It can potentially drive many valuable minerals that could ultimately solve many of the diseases and shortages we are dealing with on a daily basis including the simple flu which no one has been able to identify a vaccine to help eliminate. The main objective should be to lower cycle time and then to eliminate the disease without taking too much medicine which no one and I mean no one can explain or even describe the full impact on human body over the long term. It is stated that any virus entering human body will take 2-3 days to start impacting other cells, getting to full flu but solving this problem is against all the drugs OTC companies who are about to lose billions of some useless products that still do not do anything except potentially slow down the rate of growth. We have done major advancements in our land on various levels of innovation but not much research has been done on what is our planet at bottom of the ocean except using sonar based technologies given the massive PSI extorted on any human being. New drones are needed to help accelerate and explore what we have available at bottom of the ocean as well, and a lot of scientific work is already under-way.

So, let me take a crack at some of my predictions or I should say, challenges that we need to consider and solve in order to help our people across the globe.

So, let me start my top 20 list:

People using contact lenses will end up having Terminator Vision. This could be well beyond the 20/20 vision that we may have been accustomed to and a new standard of care for vision that drives to such model. Look at how much one can save in the support of humanity across the globe.
Medical check-ups will be conducted by smart-phones. This can easily be done using sensors either inside or outside of the body, and finally deploying sensors that can approach the 1T sensors equivalent to estimate the number of neurons in the brain and then perform predictive analytics to identify issues well before it happens. I just put together a list of medical sensors which is the start of this revolution in the 21st century, and UCSD was the main university developing state of art sensors in their Nano-Engineering center.
There are over 130 million books on this planet, and I predict all will be digitized. All 130 million books on the planet will be digitized and indexed, and there will be a very easy way to locate any search words unlike what is being provided by Google. Using speech recognition technology can offer such capabilities to every language across the globe. Today, a small percentage of what has been developed is already digitized, indexed, and ready to search but I do believe a new way of search will be far different than what we got accustomed to in beginning of 21st century. Much more innovation around speech to text using a very accurate model will be developed with a massive advantage across the globe and do we know how much analog pictures and videos are yet to be digitized and then converted to 4K such as video.
Supersonic jets will return. We all remember Concord with over Mock 2.02 but the new type of supersonic jets can reach as high as Mock 5.0. You can imagine how fast it will take to go around the globe where speed of sound is 1500 meters per second. Speed can never substitute for anything we can ever innovate. It is speed and cycle time that finally drive companies with little investment to drive top line revenue but most companies miss this important Key Performance Indicator.
Our own refrigerator will place our grocery order and might even prepare certain type of food by using a new chip set card, like the movie Star Trek back in the 60s. I do believe we are not far off from getting to this point in real time. Look at what Amazon is doing in order to deliver what is missing from refrigerator inventory to fill it up when needed. Their main objective is speed and no one has been able to beat Amazon when it comes to speed of innovation since it is embedded in their culture.
The carpet in our homes home or business will detect intruders and summon help if you fall, only based on sensors deployed in the home and within the carpet, which is already in development. There will be no need for any other capability to inform first responders about the health of an individual using massive sensors that is about to be introduced.
As we move toward 1T sensors by 2030, lawn sensors will tell you which part of your yard need to be fertilized. Today, there is no such capability and US subsidizes over $40B for farmers due to many factors in US. We might be able to lower this price and use it to provide better education for human beings especially in poverty-based areas across the globe. It all becomes conservation of energy, and I am confident it will happen in due time with massive support from US government. Thinking about getting oil or any kind of energy without drilling and knowing the actual location of oil given drill bits are all IP-based going forward. There are companies who can get GPS of every inch of planet on a daily basis knowing what has changed and can use analytics to help drive new innovation.
The electric meter will monitor local power consumption and help you make full use of off peak rates, thus reducing need for electricity and optimizing using some very unique analytics and help you make full use of off-peak rates which can add up to massive savings for every home across the globe. It will lower the costs across the country and even globe and provide a hemisphere which is open enough that we can help generate enough electricity to support countries that still need oil to run businesses. This sensor technologies can even lower an electric bill by as much as 40% which is huge in the world of taxes, taxes and more taxes that we all pay to live in freedom.
I also believe within 30 years, humans will begin augmenting their brains by plugging the power of tomorrow's smartphones directly into their brains – This along with the massive number of sensors and what I call Cognitive Reality (CR) can drive the next-generation standards of care across the globe. Clearly, Oculus is prime example of such technology being in the center and a cornerstone of such innovation for healthcare. If we look at just pain and what people go through, it causes lack of sleep that can cause accidents on the road let alone texting and driving. We must focus on areas using analytics to help patients and insurance companies establish standards of care to help everyone handle the pain without getting into any type of accident which insurance companies love to do. Of course, given we are a passionate country, a pain clinic will never allow patients to suffer pain, period, and we must give them lot of credit in light of all the challenges coming from DC area.

10.Our high way infrastructure will be far more advanced than what we see today - this area will be very dicey to say the least and the reality is our highway and infrastructure should be able to handle 3 times as many cars. One would even ask how can this be possible given so much traffic in almost every state across the country. In addition, according to researchers at a very prominent university in US, at best 5 percent of a highway's road surface at any given time. If we let technology take the wheel, we could significantly increase the volume of traffic. In one example, a European semi-autonomous road train wirelessly connects a stream of cars to a truck driven by a professional. The self-driving cars mimic the speed and steering of the lead vehicle, safely decreasing the gaps while increasing fuel efficiency to help lower impact of climate and global warming. After all, these incremental approaches to solve traffic problem will never ever solve the needs of 21st century. Perhaps flying cars can solve this but I would not bet on this, given massive regulatory issues surrounding this issue with FAA and FCC.

11.Farmers will grow caffeine-free coffee beans. Taking caffeine out of coffee is no easy chemical feat, which is why decaf lacks the rich flavor of the high-test stuff. After years of research, Brazilian scientists have discovered a mutant strain of coffee that's naturally low in caffeine. They won't rest until they learn how to remove every last drop of the sleep-retarding stimulant. For more information, please look at 2 top universities (UC San Diego and RPI in Troy, NY). They have by far the best Nanoengineering department on this planet.

12.Real Estate Full Automation - Can you imagine when you buy a new home, how many documents one has to sign? It becomes unmanageable from a customer point of view but I do believe a virtual lawyer will help you plan your own estate. I do not mean avatars – I mean virtual people – self-contained, thinking organisms indistinguishable from humans. It may sound crazy to say the least, right? But surely you have seen the magic of CGI. What's to say you cannot attach a life-like visage to an interface fronting the crowd-sourced wisdom of Internet? Give it a nice head of hair, teach it how to smile, and you are now looking at a brilliant, legal eagle with awesome people skills.

13.Scientists will discover direct evidence of dark matter – It may account for 23-25 percent of the mass in the universe, yet it has not yet been confirmed that dark matter exists, though there are some evidence of it in CERN super collider. Some physicists believe the proof of such theory may be in hand in 15 years, allowing us to solve many of the problems unknown to humankind, like god particle developed by Higgs bottom.

14.Advances in Nano-technology will help us overcome not only illness but also the limits of being human. For example, robotic red blood cells called reciprocates could each hold 200 times the oxygen of their natural counterparts, enabling a man on a mission to, say, hide out underwater for half a day without a scuba tank. It could also help Navy seals hold their breath for over 4 hours during any mission.

15.Robots will rule the LV games! China started hosting the international humanoid robot Olympic games in 2010, and one of the inventors was pushing for high-tech competitors in Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 2016. The original Olympic skill sets were javelin throws, wrestling, and fighting skills that countries needed for defense. In the 21st century, sports should require modern skills like programming and mechanical prowess.

16.I also believe that the Pentagon will finally say goodbye to large submarines. With the steady improvement in sonar technology, our subs are already hard-pressed to evade detection using normal mode acoustic coupling. In the future, underwater robots with laser guided radar Nano-acoustic sensors will make the seas virtually transparent. So, how will we deploy our sensitive information? I believe new technology around hypersonic-based technologies will reach any area on the planet within 1 hour or less.

17.An Ion engine will reach the stars. If you are thinking of making the trip to Alpha Centauri, pack plenty of snacks. At 25.8 trillion miles, the voyage requires more than 4.3 years of travel at light speed, which has never been proven. One cannot even go that fast due to Einstein theory of relativity. This type of propulsion needs to be far different than what we normally use, which is liquid or solid fuel, and the spacecraft must be propelled by ions of xenon gas accelerated by an electric field. The space shuttle used 6M pounds of thrust to lift off but the Ion engine will require lot less thrust to get to escape velocity moving out of earth gravitational force.

18.A bigger assumption will be that our body will be truly connected, and doctors will check vital signs around the clock via many sensors which I estimate to be over 1T by 2030 time-frame. In addition, stomach chips will monitor people's diet to help one lose weight without any expensive programs. In addition, spinal cord implants will reverse paralysis once and for all. One can also use chips that will help you absorb data while you are sleep without any medication and brain interface that will also help us fully inhibit virtual worlds. In essence, doctors will be inside the human body and solve many of the issues people are facing this century.

19.Scientists will map the quadrillion connections between the brain's neurons. Quadrillion sounds like a made-up number, but we can be assured that the number is real. Those connections hold the answers to questions about mental illness, learning, and the whole nature versus nurture issue. If every one of them were a penny, one could stack them and build a tower 963 million miles high!!! It would stretch past Mars, Jupiter and Saturn and stop roughly halfway to Uranus. President Obama spent $100M to map the human brain but we need a lot more science and technology funding to truly understand how the brain operates, which is our central processor for the entire body.

20.Lastly, bridges will repair themselves with self-healing concrete. This is being invented by a University of Michigan engineer. The new composite is paced with micro-fibers that bed without breaking. Hairline fractures mend themselves within days when calcium ions in the mix react with rainwater and carbon dioxide to create a calcium carbonate patch. Let's not forget any type of crack in airplane wings which is not visible by eyes during initial inspection. This can save millions of lives for cracked line in many verticals that one can't even imagine.

CONCLUSION:

In summary, if industry and research organizations focus on these top 20 major innovations, one can imagine a superlative quality of life and can even solve what they call super bugs, which no anti-biotics can help. In my next series of predictions, I will take the predictions even further and try to drive more direct innovation, which we need to think about if we have any chance of driving the next-generation world for the people of this planet. I am fairly convinced the end state is well within our reach and with the diversity of ideas and opinion, we can get to our end state fairly quickly depending on the level of investment needed to make these inventions happen as quickly as possible.

Of course, any additional insights are welcome like always.

Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi