The Contrafabulists – Kin Lane and Audrey Watters – monitor predictions that technologists and marketers make about the future of technology. No surprise, most of the predictions are made about AI, a development whose future folks have been predicting incorrectly since the 1950s. Here are the predictions made this week:
“Could a Robot Be President?” Politico asks. According to Zoltan Istvan, “our computer leader could be here in less than 30 years.”
“By 2025, Swarms of Self-Driving Vehicles Will Transport Students to Learning Sites,” the venture capitalist Tom Vander Ark predicts, touting the capabilities of facial recognition to keep troublemakers in line.
Electric vehicles will be 54% of car sales by 2040, and they’ll be cheaper than cars with internal combustion engines by 2025, according to Bloomberg.
“By 2035 more than 12 million fully autonomous vehicles are expected to be sold per year annually,” BCG predicts.
Mintel predicts that the sale of e-books will fall in 2017, while “over the next five years sales of print books are forecast to grow by 25 per cent.”
Advice from Robert Scoble on "the future of mixed reality.“ Among the predictions: ”Probably in the next 2–4 years you’re going to see a variety of mixed reality glasses come out."
“Are we on track?” asks Ed-Tech Strategies’ Doug Levin in part 2 of his look at the prediction made by Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn that “by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.”
Benjamin Doxtdator looks at the origins of the prediction that “We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet.”
“Within 15 years, artificial intelligence will take over 38% of U.S. jobs,” according to a report by PwC, cited by CMRubinWorld. “9% to 50% of the labor forces of developed countries are susceptible to automation in the coming decades.”
“Online courses will eventually replace traditional education,” predicts an op-ed in The Daily Californian.
Market research from the International Data Corp predicts that worldwide IT spending will reach $2.1 trillion by 2018.