The Future is Coming, The Future is Coming !!

Blueone

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Jan 24, 2007
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Some of these are already here today... some are a bit far fetched for the near future...but makes you think


1 — Auto repair shops will disappear.


2 — A gas/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.


3 — Faulty electric motors are NOT repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with ROBOTS.


4 — Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a car wash and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee. Then your car comes out on the other side with a new electric motor or component.


5 — Gas stations will go away!


6 — Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations. In fact they've already started in developed countries.


7 — Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start building new plants that build ONLY electric cars.


8 — The coal industry will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling for oil will stop. So, say goodbye to OPEC. The Middle East is in trouble!


9 — Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use. It will be sold back to the grid. The grid will store and dispense it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof?


10 — A baby of today will only see "personal cars" in museums. The FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can handle.


11 — In 1998 Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?


12 — What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in the next 5–10 years and most people don't even see it coming.


13 — Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures on film again? With today's smartphones, who has a camera these days?


14 — Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels but followed Moore's law. As with exponential technologies, it was a disappointment in the beginning before it became superior and mainstream in only a few short years.


15 — It will now happen again (but much faster) with artificial intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.


16 — Forget the book "Future Shock." Welcome to the 4th industrial revolution.


17 — Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5 to 10 years.


18 — UBER is just a software tool (they don't own any cars) and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Ask a taxi driver if they saw that coming!


19 — AIR-BnB is now the biggest hotel company in the world but they don't own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels or Marriott if they saw that coming!


20 — Artificial intelligence (AI): computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year a computer beat the best Go-player in the world (10 years earlier than expected).


21 — In the USA, young lawyers already don't get jobs (because of IBM's WATSON). You can get legal advice within a few seconds for the basic stuff with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you're studying law, STOP IMMEDIATELY! There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future. What a thought! Only omniscient specialists will remain.


22 — WATSON already helps nurses diagnosing cancer. It's 4 times more accurate and many times faster than human nurses.


23 — Facebook now has 'face recognition' software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030 computers will become more intelligent than humans!


24 — Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars were already here. In the next few years, the entire auto industry will be disrupted. You won't want to own a car anymore since you will call for a car with your phone and it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.


25 — You will not need to park it. You will pay only for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. Young children of today will never get a driver's license and they will never own a car.


26 — This will change our cities because we will need 90% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into green city parks.


27 — About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide, including distracted or drunk drivers. Currently, there is one accident per every 60,000 miles driven. However, with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in about 6 million miles. That will save a million-plus lives each year!


28 — Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. They will try the evolutionary approach and build a better car while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take a revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.


29 — Look at what Volvo is doing right now... no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2020 models. They are using all-electric or hybrids only with the intent of phasing out hybrid models in the not-too-distant future.


30 — Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla. Look at all the companies now offering all-electric vehicles. That was unheard of only a few years ago.


31 — Insurance companies will have massive trouble too, because without accidents, the cost of insurance will become cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.


32 — Real estate will change, because if you can work while you commute or you can work from your home, people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful and affordable properties.


33 — Electric cars will become mainstream by 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run ONLY on electricity.


34 — Cities will have much cleaner air.


35 — Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean and eventually, free!


36 — Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact and it's just starting to get ramped up.


37 — Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply cannot continue. Technology will take care of that strategy in the not-too-distant future.


38 — Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are companies who will build a medical device called the "Tricorder" that works with your phone and takes your retina scan, a sample of your blood, then you breathe into it. It then analyzes 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health.
 
Ugh, as an engineer in an auto manufacturer I often think about things like this. I know my company has already started to build electric cars, but point 28 scares me:

"They will try the evolutionary approach and build a better car while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take a revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels."

I've always had something like that in the back of my mind that my company wouldn't be able to keep up.. we shall see
 
If the coal industry dies and oil goes away, where do we get the electricity to charge cars? Someone posted a video from Prager U here that said the Tesla battery factory (largest ever built) would take 500 years to build enough batteries to hold 1 day's worth of power for the US. The other vexing question is what do we do with all of these batteries after they expire? I see a world where the whole planet is either a road or a battery landfill (yes, an exaggeration). This all reminds me of Rush's Red Barchetta. Maybe the late, great Neal Peart was a true visionary....
 
Wow!:) quite the shopping list of predictions and observations.

Let's see, about half are observations of recent disruptive business models, like AirBnB and Uber/Lyft.
I agree this will continue to happen, maybe faster maybe not, because in reality many of those things took decades to catch on. Things don't always happen as fast as we feel they do, they start slow "under the radar" and then BAM! Suddenly everyone is talking of that technology or business.

But of course things will change, and the trend is faster as each technology helps accelerate the curve to the next technology.

As many of the predictions tie into the changes in vehicles and fossil fuels I'll lump them together:

Oil will not go away in my lifetime, nor my daughters.
It will be out of certain markets yes, personal and small cars electric likely.
But there are serious logistic problems with enough minerals to build the needed Li based batteries.
Right now it isn't green at all just off-shored the pollution. And the electric now still comes 80+% from fossil fuels.

Li will NOT be the battery of choice for stationary use such as homes, business, wind farms, solar farms.
Where weight and space is not an issue there are many other battery technologies under development that will be cheaper and much more truly green than any Li based battery. But again all this is 5-10 years out and another 10 to scale up to impactful levels. Software is quick, infrastructure has to be physically "built" and that takes time.

Batteries in trucks and planes are not practical. Anything you've seen is strictly demonstration ideas. No battery comes near the density of diesel/JetA fuel per pound or cubic foot. Hybrids are possible for local delivery trucks. But planes, rail and over the road trucks run like our boats, those engines are working hard 75-100% of the time.

As to electric everything without fossil fuels, unless some new unknown tech comes along, it has to be nuclear. It is the only emission free power source. But of course has its own risks and disposal challenges.
 
Lots of these things are already underway. It's evolutionary. Businesses adjust all the time. Those that can't go away.

Kodak was very short sighted. They invented the digital camera. But it didn't fit their model of selling film, chemicals, and paper so they ignored it. They could have been the leader in the technology.

Oil isn't going away. Energy use may be shifted to solar-based, but oil is used many other things. Including plastics and fertilizer you can't make those out of sunlight alone.

I'm already producing a lot of solar power. I have a 10 kWH system on my roof and plans to add another ~6kWH to cover my new pool and heater. I could have added more but the power company caps residential production to something like 105% of your annual usage.

My local utility is starting to add local battery backups for capacity storage. They want to use a local property next to their substation to install a bunch of Tesla-made battery banks.

30 - Musk has oft stated that part of his goal was to show that electric vehicles had long term viability. This was to be a means to get other makers to develop and produce their own electric vehicles. He's shared a lot of his patents.
 
Lots of interesting things in that list. I agree with most and especially the areas involving electric vehicles. WA has already passed legislation banning sales of new vehicles in 2030 that are not electric. Current vehicles powered by gas/diesel are grandfathered.

Lots to ponder in that list.
 
I just got a quote for a self sustained system for our cabin. $57,000 for a 500sq ft cabin. Guy said batteries are $18,000 alone.
 
Batteries in trucks and planes are not practical. Anything you've seen is strictly demonstration ideas. No battery comes near the density of diesel/JetA fuel per pound or cubic foot. Hybrids are possible for local delivery trucks. But planes, rail and over the road trucks run like our boats, those engines are working hard 75-100% of the time.

Today I can jump start a 6.2L gas engine with a battery I charged using my computers USB socket, fits in my back pocket and weighs a pound or two. Don't add me to the list of people that believe we'll never develop a battery that can fly :)

upload_2021-2-10_12-20-21.png
 
Today I can jump start a 6.2L gas engine with a battery I charged using my computers USB socket, fits in my back pocket and weighs a pound or two. Don't add me to the list of people that believe we'll never develop a battery that can fly :)

View attachment 99281

"Never" is a very long time...

A 737 Max carries 6,800 gallons of JetA for an energy of 240 Mega Watts and weighs 45,200 pounds
And that weight gets less as the fuel burns off during the flight.

LiFePo4 has an energy density of 440 W/lb - so 240MW weighs 545,454 pounds and would be just as heavy when it gets to the end of the flight.

Got a ways to go....
 
Some of these are already here today... some are a bit far fetched for the near future...but makes you think


1 — Auto repair shops will disappear.


2 — A gas/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has 20. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired only by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an electric motor.


3 — Faulty electric motors are NOT repaired in the dealership but are sent to a regional repair shop that repairs them with ROBOTS.


4 — Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, so you drive up to what looks like a car wash and your car is towed through while you have a cup of coffee. Then your car comes out on the other side with a new electric motor or component.


5 — Gas stations will go away!


6 — Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity. Companies will install electrical recharging stations. In fact they've already started in developed countries.


7 — Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start building new plants that build ONLY electric cars.


8 — The coal industry will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling for oil will stop. So, say goodbye to OPEC. The Middle East is in trouble!


9 — Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they use. It will be sold back to the grid. The grid will store and dispense it to industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla roof?


10 — A baby of today will only see "personal cars" in museums. The FUTURE is approaching faster than most of us can handle.


11 — In 1998 Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?


12 — What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in the next 5–10 years and most people don't even see it coming.


13 — Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later, you would never take pictures on film again? With today's smartphones, who has a camera these days?


14 — Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels but followed Moore's law. As with exponential technologies, it was a disappointment in the beginning before it became superior and mainstream in only a few short years.


15 — It will now happen again (but much faster) with artificial intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.


16 — Forget the book "Future Shock." Welcome to the 4th industrial revolution.


17 — Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5 to 10 years.


18 — UBER is just a software tool (they don't own any cars) and are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Ask a taxi driver if they saw that coming!


19 — AIR-BnB is now the biggest hotel company in the world but they don't own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels or Marriott if they saw that coming!


20 — Artificial intelligence (AI): computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year a computer beat the best Go-player in the world (10 years earlier than expected).


21 — In the USA, young lawyers already don't get jobs (because of IBM's WATSON). You can get legal advice within a few seconds for the basic stuff with 90% accuracy compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you're studying law, STOP IMMEDIATELY! There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future. What a thought! Only omniscient specialists will remain.


22 — WATSON already helps nurses diagnosing cancer. It's 4 times more accurate and many times faster than human nurses.


23 — Facebook now has 'face recognition' software that can recognize faces better than humans. In 2030 computers will become more intelligent than humans!


24 — Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars were already here. In the next few years, the entire auto industry will be disrupted. You won't want to own a car anymore since you will call for a car with your phone and it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination.


25 — You will not need to park it. You will pay only for the driven distance and you can be productive while driving. Young children of today will never get a driver's license and they will never own a car.


26 — This will change our cities because we will need 90% fewer cars. We can transform former parking spaces into green city parks.


27 — About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide, including distracted or drunk drivers. Currently, there is one accident per every 60,000 miles driven. However, with autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in about 6 million miles. That will save a million-plus lives each year!


28 — Most traditional car companies will doubtless become bankrupt. They will try the evolutionary approach and build a better car while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take a revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels.


29 — Look at what Volvo is doing right now... no more internal combustion engines in their vehicles starting this year with the 2020 models. They are using all-electric or hybrids only with the intent of phasing out hybrid models in the not-too-distant future.


30 — Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla. Look at all the companies now offering all-electric vehicles. That was unheard of only a few years ago.


31 — Insurance companies will have massive trouble too, because without accidents, the cost of insurance will become cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.


32 — Real estate will change, because if you can work while you commute or you can work from your home, people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful and affordable properties.


33 — Electric cars will become mainstream by 2030. Cities will be less noisy because all new cars will run ONLY on electricity.


34 — Cities will have much cleaner air.


35 — Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean and eventually, free!


36 — Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you can now see the burgeoning impact and it's just starting to get ramped up.


37 — Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid to prevent competition from home solar installations, but that simply cannot continue. Technology will take care of that strategy in the not-too-distant future.


38 — Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year. There are companies who will build a medical device called the "Tricorder" that works with your phone and takes your retina scan, a sample of your blood, then you breathe into it. It then analyzes 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any disease. There are dozens of phone apps out there right now for health.
Ha I work for Jasper Engines and Transmissions
 
Will fun be outlawed too? We might as well go full Total-Recall-Style and rather than actually do anything, just get those memories implanted in our brain for much cheaper :eek:
 
Lots of interesting things in that list. I agree with most and especially the areas involving electric vehicles. WA has already passed legislation banning sales of new vehicles in 2030 that are not electric. Current vehicles powered by gas/diesel are grandfathered.

Lots to ponder in that list.

You said the magic word: grandfathered :)
 
You know the only winner at the end of all this are sail boaters :eek: ...its a nightmare I tell ya
 
"Never" is a very long time...

A 737 Max carries 6,800 gallons of JetA for an energy of 240 Mega Watts and weighs 45,200 pounds
And that weight gets less as the fuel burns off during the flight.

LiFePo4 has an energy density of 440 W/lb - so 240MW weighs 545,454 pounds and would be just as heavy when it gets to the end of the flight.

Got a ways to go....

Very interesting stuff! Thanks for creating 10 minutes of info-rich google searching for me :)

Looks like there are several innovators out there "very close" to 500Wh/kg...which is 1100Wh/lb. We're just a stones throw from 215,000lbs of batteries onboard. Of course once they reduce the weight another 75% the only remaining downside would be having to replace the batteries every 350 flights...ha.

Were I a battery innovator I'd sign up for breaking the 100,000lbs barrier and leave the rest to the aerospace guys. Can they get the remaining 50klbs out of the engines, fuel systems, fire control systems? Stretch goals :)
 
Kodak was very short sighted. They invented the digital camera. But it didn't fit their model of selling film, chemicals, and paper so they ignored it. They could have been the leader in the technology.
Great point,I always say Sears should have been Amazon. They had the customer base and just did not follow thru digitally.


Battery tech has to go way up, storage is critical. electricity only travels so far.
AEP has been dumping $$$$ in transmission.
 
Anyone talking about "green" electricity without including nuclear is a fraud.

Nuclear is the cleanest most sustainable power source. Other parts of the world are using it without issues and the day will come the US will have to get over its fear of nuclear. Batteries will have to become recycled to conserve natural resources. Hydrogen power for cars is also a viable source for internal combustion engines but people are afraid of it because the Hindeburg blew up eons ago. People are stupid most of the time.
 
I can see all of this happening except #35. unless you can produce your own electricity, it wont be free, you will have to pay 'somebody' for it.
I agree it will never be free. renewable energy has a cost in the equipment and then it must be maintained.
 
"Never" is a very long time...

A 737 Max carries 6,800 gallons of JetA for an energy of 240 Mega Watts and weighs 45,200 pounds
And that weight gets less as the fuel burns off during the flight.

LiFePo4 has an energy density of 440 W/lb - so 240MW weighs 545,454 pounds and would be just as heavy when it gets to the end of the flight.

Got a ways to go....
I saw a Tesla engineers presentation once, he said electrification of flight is the last one to convert, after grid, after cars, trucks, boats, etc. I saw an interim technology today, a rotary engine with better fuel efficiency than an equivalent hp Diesel, and 1/2, or less, the weight and volume. It was super small, not sure if it will scale, but they seem to think it can.
 

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