Two Sure Bets

It's a scary thing to try to predict the future.

AT&T once asked a well-known consultancy to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The analysts concluded that the total market would be about 900,000.

They got it wrong by a factor of 100. By the year 2000, 900 million mobile phones would in people's pockets.

Any long-term prediction is likely to be flawed. But Forbes' Rich Karlgaard still dares to give it a shot.

The time to start is now. Enjoy.

By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor

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Two Sure Bets

By Rich Karlgaard

Remember when non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were a thing? Not long ago, right? How about the metaverse? These were technologies poised to change the world. They had the world’s attention. Get aboard or get run over! Adapt or die!

Corporate boards and CEOs were pressing their CIOs and CTOs for plans – like right now! – to deal with these disruptive technologies. What are we going to do?

Google Trends is a wonderful website where you can, in the quiet of your office, while sipping tea and listening to relaxing music on Spotify, look back at these once red-hot memes. It’s fun to see when the memes actually peaked on Google searches. For example:

Non-fungible token (NFT)

Metaverse

The peaks look like Mt. Ranier near Seattle. It’s all sea-level flat, then minor foothills. Then straight up to 14,411 feet. Then back down.

Each year brings a volcanic eruption of stories about revolutionary technologies and the coming disruptions to business and societies. Let’s be honest: These stories are fun to read. They get our blood pumping. The force us to look around the bend and see what the future might hold. They keep us on our toes.

Years pass. History reveals that fevered predictions about these disruptive technologies fall into three buckets:

1. The hot technology was actually cold fusion (or the equivalent). It never would have worked. Maybe one day it will. But that day is decades in the future.
2. The technology was real. But ahead of its time by a few years, because the revolution and disruption depended on all parts working. The Internet of the 1990s was like that. It was real. Great forecasts were made. Tech stocks went to the moon. But dial-up modems and skinny bandwidth held the revolution back. The Internet commerce era only really started in the early 2000s and took off with the iPhone in 2007. It’s possible that the metaverse, blockchain and NFTs will be like this. They will be hot again, and more sustainably so. But they await a more complete infrastructure of unlimited compute and bandwidth.
3. The technology is real and we actually underestimate the time-frame of its revolutionary effects. Nuclear fission was like that. Smart phones. Now GenAI looks like that.

But time will tell. “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” said the former American baseball player, Yogi Berra. The old catcher’s cheeky warning aside, let me offer two predictions. They are as close to sure bets as can be.

Nuclear’s Return

The late Intel CEO, Andy Grove, said he was lucky to have chosen semiconductors over nuclear power as his life’s work. Born in Hungary, Grove escaped his Soviet-occupied land to America, where he got his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. The civilian nuclear industry was young and glamorous. It attracted many of the smartest physicists and chemical engineers on earth. Semiconductors weren’t even a thing until invented in 1959.

Despite nuclear’s promise, the hype faded. Nuclear lost the public’s trust and today supplies only 4% of the global energy mix and 10% of its electricity. But now nuclear is again in fashion. The drive for more carbon-neutral economies, combined with a surge in demand from AI-class data centers and EVs, spells a far greater role for nuclear in the coming decades.

Side note: I like nuclear and maybe you don’t. To answer my friends who rationally worry about nuclear’s safety, I would point to the diagnostic and situational awareness technologies available today that were not available at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011): Sensors everywhere. Predictive analytics software. Awesome compute and storage. Large screen panels. Digital twins. It’s a different world, and terrific for the safe operations of large industrial operations of all kinds.

Chinese Robotics Powerhouse

China’s manufacturing and export push has puzzled outsiders, since the world has reacted not with checkbooks, but skepticism and tariffs. Why is China furiously making what the world may not want? Several possibilities. One is to keep people employed following the real estate bust and post-Covid slowdown. Another is to wait out the skeptics and who will eventually want, China thinks, $10,000 EVs. A third possibility is to build a world class manufacturing base to support a strong military.

“China wants to be the Amazon of countries — Amazon is the everything store, China wants to be the ‘make everything’ country,” says Damien Ma of US think tank Macropolo. “The vision is to bring a complete supply chain to China.”

Whatever its reasons, China’s labor shortages are sure to rise. The country is rapidly aging while births have plummeted. The highly educated refuse to work in factories. Hence, China will have to press full-speed on robotics. Put another way, China can’t grow its economy without robotics. The world’s robotics boom will be centered in China.

Question for you

What are your near-term future predictions? What are most people underestimating? (And overestimating?)

Rich Karlgaard was the Forbes publisher from 1998 to 2018. He is now the publication’s editor-at-large, global futurist, and columnist for Forbes Asia.

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