The Contrafabulists monitor predictions that technologists and marketers make each week about the future of technology:
“I think in the next 30 years, people only work four hours a day and maybe four days a week,” the chairman of Alibaba Jack Ma predicted.
EdTech Strategies’ Doug Levin revisits the predictions made in the 2008 book Disrupting Class that “the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.” “Are we on track?” Levin asks.
Education Week publishes the latest predictions from Futuresource: “In the pre-college market, the number of students who access virtual, augmented, or mixed reality through head-mounted displays will leap from 2.1 million in 2016 to nearly 83 million in 2021, Futuresource says.” (Do 2.1 million students use VR today?)
“By 2025, 50 percent of an undergraduate degree will become obsolete,” predicts a columnist on the ed-tech industry website Edsurge.
A venture capitalist predicts on Edsurge that “My bet is that by 2040, our children will look back on this period between 2015 and 2030 in education technology much the same way internet historians look to the period 1995 to 2010 as the birth of the commercial web.” I guess this prediction means that the history of education technology will be taught in schools? I’m not sure…
From the prediction company Strategy Analytics: “Our research finds that autonomous driving technology will enable a new Passenger Economy worth US$7 trillion in 2050.”
Another prediction about the future of transportation from RethinkTransportation: The transport-as-a-service industry “will provide 95% of the passenger miles traveled within 10 years.” How many miles are already traveled that way in things like, ya know, airplanes?
“Aviation experts think five years is a reasonable timeframe for the development of practical flying cars,” according to those aviation experts Wired Magazine asked, at least.
The UN predicts that the world’s population will reach 9.8 billion by 2050.