The Future: Eighteen for ’18 and beyond

Here are some random predictions for 2018 and beyond. No rhyme or reason to the list, but just a zany way to usher in the New Year.

1) Autonomous vehicles will rule the roads, after the requisite number of high-profile crashes.

2) Electric vehicles will shut down the power grid, precipitating wholesale revolt from those who cleave to their combustion engines.

3) Problems with returning online purchases will move legions of shoppers back to brick and mortar retail.

4) The piles of stuff due to #3 will continue to grow, further increasing the National Crisis of Clutter.

5) Additional attempts to humble Silicon Valley will be made by East Coasters jealous of the Golden State (of Mind).

6) Tax Reform will prompt Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook to establish their own off-shore banking system built around an encrypted currency that only they can trade in.

7) Cadence will end up on the auction block at last, purchased through encrypted currency issued by Synopsys.

8) Third-party system-level tools will become a thing of the misty past as system integrators build their own tools to meet their own highly specific needs.

9) The world will be plunged into darkness as all the LED lightbulbs we’re snapping up at Home Depot stop working at the same hour and day because the advertised 25,000 hours of product life was highly exaggerated. Or because they were hacked.

10) We will all be required to have our DNA analyzed to figure out, once and for all, if the left-brain versus right-brain thing is Nature or Nuture.

11) Only left-handed scientists will be allowed to earn PhDs.

12) The ultimate data breach will publish all of our “secure” medical data and we’ll finally find out who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

13) The current kludge of fitbit/phone/camera/keys/tablet/eReader/earphones/chargers/laptop/library.card will be resolved into one mega-mobile device surgically attached at the elbow that we control through voice activation.

14) The art of penmanship will die out once and for all. The pen-and-ink industry will be buried next to the slide rule industry. RIP.

15) Reading text on paper will become a historical art form performed only by curators at museums sitting in hermetically sealed chambers.

16) Drones will become more ubiquitous than mosquitos and will have to be abated through areal spraying.

17) AI, deep learning, big data, and neuromorphic computing will allow us to predict the outcome of every scenario of human behavior, hence eliminating the need for war or peace. Or anything else.

18) My last blog written for EDACafe will be published in 2017.

It’s time to say adieu, and to send a zillion thanks to Sanjay and Anita Gangal, Nitai Fraenkel, and Liz Tadman for the opportunity to work with the IBSystems family. It’s been a blast.

Also, it’s time to say thanks to Nanette Collins for being such a super professional colleague for so many years, to Mike Robinson for inviting me into the frenetic world of Editorial way back in the last millennium, to John Sanguinetti for being the ultimate role model as a technologist and human being, and to John Cooley’s outrageous trumpian bullhorn that gifted me years ago with the best exit line ever …

Mic drop: Granny out.

Tags: Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, LED, Penmanship, Silicon Valley

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2017 at 8:59 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.