Always hard to predict, but one area where I'm sure there's lots of room is starting startups in industries that didn't previously have them. To use one example of many, LendUp.
The cliche phrase "software is eating the world" doesn't quite do the future justice. "Startups in industries that didn't previously have them" does it much better: that's agriculture (Sourcerly), payments (WePay, Stripe, Balanced, Slidepay, Square), lending (LendUp, Lending Club), startup investing (Anglelist, WeFunder), banking (Palintir, Standard Treasury), insurance (Oscar) fashion (La Tote, Crowdery), and more. So many industries can still be improved with the startup ethos of disruption, growth, efficiency, data, etc.
As a co-founder of Tiny Farms[1], we're betting on the growing need for alternative sources of protein. Humanity's current protein supply is inefficient, unsustainable and won't scale to feed the future world.
Our particular domain is edible insects; we wrote this article about why entrepreneurs should get involved:
I'm very curious about how you're tackling this problem. It's no longer a secret that insects could provide a rich and abundant source or protein, the biggest problem I've seen this far is how to farm them, in other words what is the sustainable input into these farms?
As the other commenter pointed out, black soldier flies are a wonderful output, but from my research I've seen that they need meat for to grow and their larva to hatch.
Let's extrapolate from present trends. More robotics and automation means people will work fewer hours but still have disposable income. Medical advances mean people will live longer, healthier lives.
Conclusion? There's going to be a lot of energetic, healthy people with time on their hands -- even more than at present. So there will be many future opportunities in the areas of entertainment, computer games and travel.
Also, on the medical front, because psychiatry and psychology are in the midst of a historic meltdown, in the future society will increasingly look to neuroscience for guidance about the issues that psychiatrists and psychologists are mishandling right now. My favorite example showing what the possibilities may be, is the story of a severely depressed woman who didn't respond to the available anti-depression drugs and was finally institutionalized, her life essentially over.
But a new procedure has come out of brain research (not mind research) called deep brain stimulation, that shows great promise for addressing depression's cause, rather than its symptoms (the present treatment approach).
In this specific case, after electrodes were put in place, the neurosurgeon threw a switch that began stimulation of a location of present neurological research called "area 25" that seems to play a role in depression. The woman's depression lifted instantly -- instantly -- something that no other treatment had been able to accomplish.
This is still very experimental, and the procedure is still too risky for everyday use, but if it matures and is made safe, it will revolutionize the treatment of depression. It will also accelerate the present trend away from psychiatry and psychology toward neuroscience.
I disagree about people working fewer hours. Work that used to be performed by humans has already been automated to a large degree.
Rather than a uniform reduction in hours, the result appears to be a swelling class of unemployed and increasing hours worked by those who are employed.
Those who have time do not have money and vice versa.
Clinical psychiatry and psychology are areas of neuroscience these days, so I don't quite understand the "historic meltdown" point, any references on that?
Brain technology. Eventually 'wireheading' is going to stop being science fiction and start being science fact. The people who commercialize that technology first are going to swim in oceans of money.
Since developed countries are experiencing population aging, I would guess if someone could help women prolong their window of having healthy births.
I say this because if you look at the last ten years, the rate of births in the age ranges of < 18, 18-35 have been decreasing while the age of women getting pregnant in the 35+ range has been increasing.
The birth rate of the United States is only as high as is now largely because of the immigrant population.
As more women in developed countries choose to have careers and go through higher education, the median age of pregnancies will continue to rise.
An aging industry, small margins for the older economic structure of small/medium holdings, little existing use of new technologies at scale.
As the industry demographic shifts and as 'new' technologies such as drones, robotics, remote sensing, pervasive wireless data, vat-grown meat and mixed land/marine farming are adopted there will be a lot of money to be made feeding the world.
In some sense you're right, but you shouldn't underestimate either the innovation that is going on or the intelligence of farmers.
There's a word for a stupid or wasteful farmer, and that word is "broke". You can't make it in agriculture unless you can make it against fierce global competition.
Ten years ago there was a lot of apocalyptic talk about the opposition of organic vs. GMO crops but the truth is that organic and GMO crops have both thrived. GMO crops are getting better, yet organic methods are advancing too and are being cherry-picked by conventional farmers when they are competitive. Robotic tractors are a reality today.
Perhaps the most astute observation in here. Lost count the number of times I've missed the 'the next big thing' when it was right in my face. Each time I tell myself that I'll pay more attention next time. But we all know the definition of crazy.
Read Asimov. It's all there. It comes down to space travel.
Presumably, the ultimate propulsion will be nuclear-boiled water ejected out of a nozzle as steam. I suppose you could do something similar with other low molecular weight (stable bonds), low atomic weight (plentiful in post-stellar debris) fluids, but water's on a sweet spot in terms of caloric density. Hydrocarbons would probably be good, so I suppose you could mine the atmospheres of the gas giants for those. Interstellar travel will involve strapping a reactor to a large iceberg lassoed from the Ort belt and accelerating for one half of the trip, then decelerating for the other half.
Space travel will require space mining (uranium, water, gold, titanium, lithium, etc)
Think of all the things involved: mining equipment, (robots) depots, transport, refueling stations, distribution. SpaceX has already shown vast industries are going to be largely robotic. But people will go to the same places as the mining, because something will always go wrong with something, and those will be the well-developed trade routes.
Those people will have all the same issues they have here. Governance, gambling, hepatitis, surgery. But there will be new issues as well. There will likely be founder effect: segments of humanity will venture off to planets many light years away. It will take decades to get there. How do you maintain the concept of "humanity" if they land on a planet with slightly more gravity, slightly colder, slightly less oxygen, so everyone becomes what we would consider a furry dwarf with an IQ of 170?
Synthetic genomics will be big in all sorts of ways, some related to the founder effects of space travel.
We will not travel faster than the speed of light and hibernation is a fiction. Our bodies just aren't made for that. I think this is a thing people haven't started really planning for very well. Interstellar travel is going to involve very large vessels.
but once we do Mars and the asteroid belt, there's not much left in this system.
If the rapid obsolescence cycle of chip fabs end (ie, Moore's law ends and process nodes stop getting smaller so there's no reason to change processes), it will kick off a golden age of ASICs and a Cambrian explosion of chip diversity and software design tool progress.
You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be.
Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.
Package delivery using drones. A DPS (Drone Parcel Service) base truck could roll into a neighborhood and a swarm of drones would fly out with packages under a certain weight and deliver them, while the base truck delivers any packages too heavy. The drones keep informed of where the truck is so they can return (even when the truck is in motion) to recharge until the next neighborhood.
With county budgets being stressed and more areas considering converting paved roads to gravel roads, any kind of delivery system that can avoid roads will be a benefit.
I'm with a startup called PetroFeed and we're looking to tap into the huge potential in the industry[1]. Most startups in the O&G industry are concerned with building better drilling technologies, or finding new resource pockets; leaving lots of room for companies like ours. ;)
3d printing. I saw someone saying that 3d printers are the beginnings of replicators from Star Trek, and that really struck home for me. I think we'll see a lot of physical goods get redesigned to be made via single-material extrusion, and 3d printers will get smarter about how to manipulate that single material (some kind of plastic) to achieve a variety of qualities (texture, strength, color, etc.).
Drones - Drone first responders for accidents, for emergency coverage remote telepresence assistance as well as news recording. Drones replacing photographers, meter maids, small package delivery and distribution especially stuff that bike and car couriers are doing now. Crop dusting (already happening), site inspections. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the marriage of flying drone and telepresence rolling robots where the drone lands out in your driveway folds up and rolls in the front door.
Everyone connected and addressed via internet. Eventually everyone personally will have an internet "address" that would combine voice, email etc. when you fill out forms and apply for credit, etc that will be part of your personal identification as well as the primary way to contact you.
Self driving long-haul delivery trucks, probably be accepted quicker than personal cars. Still will be manned initially to handle problems and to dissuade looters, or drive in hard to navigate areas.
3D Printing (a nearly infinite number of knock-on effects).
Legal drugs (prohibition is once again losing its sway).
Care for people who are 80+ years old.
Autonomous vehicles.
Space travel - I'd love to predict fortunes in it, but it's still a wildcard and a dream.
99.99% of online educational videos suck. For example, watching the video is so painful that all I can think about is "how do I get out of here?". (Possibly I am spoiled from watching too many popular vlogs on YouTube.)
The other 0.01% of online educational videos that don't suck prove that it is possible to make such videos. The best examples I can find are RailsCasts and "Math Antics" (the first is for grownups, the second is aimed more at children, but I would watch something like Math Antics that had more advanced content).
Health, to produce better treatments agaisnt sickness, cure for cancer and other applications like regenerative i guess will be the ones who will coin a lot of dollars, specially from labs.
Space and robotics to produce better transportation, manufacturing and other hardware potential advancements.
Food. The food industry will work for sure o new sintetic food, to mass produce as well to produce safe transgenic meat.
[+] [-] pg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildermuthn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanI-S|12 years ago|reply
Our particular domain is edible insects; we wrote this article about why entrepreneurs should get involved:
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-dr...
[1] http://www.tiny-farms.com
[+] [-] ar4s|12 years ago|reply
As the other commenter pointed out, black soldier flies are a wonderful output, but from my research I've seen that they need meat for to grow and their larva to hatch.
[+] [-] 31reasons|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pstuart|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lutusp|12 years ago|reply
Conclusion? There's going to be a lot of energetic, healthy people with time on their hands -- even more than at present. So there will be many future opportunities in the areas of entertainment, computer games and travel.
Also, on the medical front, because psychiatry and psychology are in the midst of a historic meltdown, in the future society will increasingly look to neuroscience for guidance about the issues that psychiatrists and psychologists are mishandling right now. My favorite example showing what the possibilities may be, is the story of a severely depressed woman who didn't respond to the available anti-depression drugs and was finally institutionalized, her life essentially over.
But a new procedure has come out of brain research (not mind research) called deep brain stimulation, that shows great promise for addressing depression's cause, rather than its symptoms (the present treatment approach).
In this specific case, after electrodes were put in place, the neurosurgeon threw a switch that began stimulation of a location of present neurological research called "area 25" that seems to play a role in depression. The woman's depression lifted instantly -- instantly -- something that no other treatment had been able to accomplish.
This is still very experimental, and the procedure is still too risky for everyday use, but if it matures and is made safe, it will revolutionize the treatment of depression. It will also accelerate the present trend away from psychiatry and psychology toward neuroscience.
Reference:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...
[+] [-] tspike|12 years ago|reply
Rather than a uniform reduction in hours, the result appears to be a swelling class of unemployed and increasing hours worked by those who are employed.
Those who have time do not have money and vice versa.
[+] [-] kamaal|12 years ago|reply
To some extent its correct.
But by and large there will be a lot of energetic, healthy people who will want to make more money with that extra time on their hands.
[+] [-] mapist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rollo_tommasi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] colmvp|12 years ago|reply
I say this because if you look at the last ten years, the rate of births in the age ranges of < 18, 18-35 have been decreasing while the age of women getting pregnant in the 35+ range has been increasing.
The birth rate of the United States is only as high as is now largely because of the immigrant population.
As more women in developed countries choose to have careers and go through higher education, the median age of pregnancies will continue to rise.
[+] [-] oracuk|12 years ago|reply
An aging industry, small margins for the older economic structure of small/medium holdings, little existing use of new technologies at scale.
As the industry demographic shifts and as 'new' technologies such as drones, robotics, remote sensing, pervasive wireless data, vat-grown meat and mixed land/marine farming are adopted there will be a lot of money to be made feeding the world.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|12 years ago|reply
There's a word for a stupid or wasteful farmer, and that word is "broke". You can't make it in agriculture unless you can make it against fierce global competition.
Ten years ago there was a lot of apocalyptic talk about the opposition of organic vs. GMO crops but the truth is that organic and GMO crops have both thrived. GMO crops are getting better, yet organic methods are advancing too and are being cherry-picked by conventional farmers when they are competitive. Robotic tractors are a reality today.
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yashodhan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niels_olson|12 years ago|reply
Presumably, the ultimate propulsion will be nuclear-boiled water ejected out of a nozzle as steam. I suppose you could do something similar with other low molecular weight (stable bonds), low atomic weight (plentiful in post-stellar debris) fluids, but water's on a sweet spot in terms of caloric density. Hydrocarbons would probably be good, so I suppose you could mine the atmospheres of the gas giants for those. Interstellar travel will involve strapping a reactor to a large iceberg lassoed from the Ort belt and accelerating for one half of the trip, then decelerating for the other half.
Space travel will require space mining (uranium, water, gold, titanium, lithium, etc)
Think of all the things involved: mining equipment, (robots) depots, transport, refueling stations, distribution. SpaceX has already shown vast industries are going to be largely robotic. But people will go to the same places as the mining, because something will always go wrong with something, and those will be the well-developed trade routes.
Those people will have all the same issues they have here. Governance, gambling, hepatitis, surgery. But there will be new issues as well. There will likely be founder effect: segments of humanity will venture off to planets many light years away. It will take decades to get there. How do you maintain the concept of "humanity" if they land on a planet with slightly more gravity, slightly colder, slightly less oxygen, so everyone becomes what we would consider a furry dwarf with an IQ of 170?
Synthetic genomics will be big in all sorts of ways, some related to the founder effects of space travel.
We will not travel faster than the speed of light and hibernation is a fiction. Our bodies just aren't made for that. I think this is a thing people haven't started really planning for very well. Interstellar travel is going to involve very large vessels.
but once we do Mars and the asteroid belt, there's not much left in this system.
[+] [-] Nicholas_C|12 years ago|reply
How many people thought the sound barrier couldn't be broken?
[+] [-] a3voices|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samelawrence|12 years ago|reply
Marijuana, online privacy, personal defense weapons, batteries, patent law.
Big fortunes:
Ocean mining, fuel and energy, long-distance wireless communications, medicines, education.
[+] [-] bcoates|12 years ago|reply
You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be.
Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.
[+] [-] jrn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deftnerd|12 years ago|reply
With county budgets being stressed and more areas considering converting paved roads to gravel roads, any kind of delivery system that can avoid roads will be a benefit.
[+] [-] gavingmiller|12 years ago|reply
I'm with a startup called PetroFeed and we're looking to tap into the huge potential in the industry[1]. Most startups in the O&G industry are concerned with building better drilling technologies, or finding new resource pockets; leaving lots of room for companies like ours. ;)
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_com...
[+] [-] pyoung|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JayNeely|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LarryMade2|12 years ago|reply
Everyone connected and addressed via internet. Eventually everyone personally will have an internet "address" that would combine voice, email etc. when you fill out forms and apply for credit, etc that will be part of your personal identification as well as the primary way to contact you.
Self driving long-haul delivery trucks, probably be accepted quicker than personal cars. Still will be manned initially to handle problems and to dissuade looters, or drive in hard to navigate areas.
[+] [-] bfitz|12 years ago|reply
Space travel - I'd love to predict fortunes in it, but it's still a wildcard and a dream.
[+] [-] dome82|12 years ago|reply
Self-treatments on demand: someday, you wont need to go in a doctor office for diagnoses, medical check-ups and treatments.
[+] [-] pjdorrell|12 years ago|reply
99.99% of online educational videos suck. For example, watching the video is so painful that all I can think about is "how do I get out of here?". (Possibly I am spoiled from watching too many popular vlogs on YouTube.)
The other 0.01% of online educational videos that don't suck prove that it is possible to make such videos. The best examples I can find are RailsCasts and "Math Antics" (the first is for grownups, the second is aimed more at children, but I would watch something like Math Antics that had more advanced content).
[+] [-] aaron695|12 years ago|reply
Education, Medicine, Law, Jobs, Banking, Sins (Most already there), Importation (3d printers).
My guess.
[+] [-] vincie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meerita|12 years ago|reply
Health, Space, Robotics and Food imho.
Health, to produce better treatments agaisnt sickness, cure for cancer and other applications like regenerative i guess will be the ones who will coin a lot of dollars, specially from labs.
Space and robotics to produce better transportation, manufacturing and other hardware potential advancements.
Food. The food industry will work for sure o new sintetic food, to mass produce as well to produce safe transgenic meat.