What an interesting post!
- can you think of other things that have come along to change society that aren't electronic?
Vegetarianism. Communism. The metric system of weights and measures. Environmental awareness. Rock music. Votes for women. Air travel. Freeways. Contraception. Antibiotics. Are these the kind of things you're thinking of?
- what is the language of these groups... is there a pattern?
Perhaps the only pattern is that these things came into being because of people who weren't afraid of doing something new and different.
I find being in these areas interesting and I tend to gravitate toward them.
Me too. CB Radio in the 1970s, Relational databases in the late 1970s, 4GLs in the early 1980s, Desktop Publishing in the mid 1980s, Internet from 1993, Wikipedia from its second day of operation, OpenStreetMap from 2007, Bitcoin from 2010.
And what do you see that is like this with a potential... but small now in those early stages?
If I knew the answer to that, I'd be there right now!
Bitcoin, of course, is a current hotspot that will soon become something really big. Once Bitcoin is entrenched, it will open up a huge range of new opportunities, just as the internet had to become entrenched before Bitcoin could become a possibility.
Let me throw in some guesses as to what might become big in the next decade or two:
- The system of education and qualifications is going to be shaken up like never before. Dinosaur-like traditional institutions based on years and years of structured learning will wither away, to be replaced by a system of education based around micro-courses that can be plugged together in different ways to meet different needs. That, in turn, will create a demand for new types of testing and certification bodies that can address these more-flexible educational processes.
- Thanks to Bitcoin (and probably via some kind of Bitcoin-linked subchain), micropayments will finally have a good enough infrastructure to prosper. I can see even the tiniest API call carrying a micropayment along with it. There are already lots of business ideas that would become profitable if micropayments could be used to call a Search API or a Maps API. As their advertising revenue stagnates, companies such as Google will find economic salvation in the provision of micropayment-based API services
- Some time soon a tipping-point will arrive, after which it will be possible (and desirable) for people to live in alternative ways: in undersea cities, or on linked platforms floating on the sea, or underground, or even in the air (at any one time, there are already half a million people in the air!). Mass colonisation of the moon and mars is probably much further away.
- Immersive virtual worlds are improving so fast that at some point they will become the preferred way for many people to live. This will open up all sorts of interesting possibilities (and will have environmental benefits too)
- Huge amounts of data will be recorded about everything. Every aspect of our lives will generate video data, transactional data, location data, opinion data etc. This will open up new opportunities to process this data. For example, our car insurance might have its cost determined by how many near misses we have had. For example, automatically-condensed highlights of a person's life could be offered for sale to the person as an annual one-hour movie.
- Self-driving cars are definitely coming. It might be 10 years or it might be 15, but it won't be 20. This will change the way that we travel in so many ways. (On the other hand, mass-market flying cars are not coming, even if Bill Gates will own one.)
What are
your thoughts?
