Frenchman Fabrice Grinda has always loved taking risks - he has successfully invested in hundreds of companies: Alibaba, Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, Uber, and even the Russian analogue of Booking - the Oktogo service. He has a special flair for trends, for what the future could be.
Monsieur Grinda not only invested in other people's businesses, but also created his own. For example, the online bulletin board OLX, which is used by hundreds of millions of people, is his brainchild.
In addition, sometimes he devotes time to literary creativity and writes rather controversial, but curious essays. About what is and what will be. He is interested in the future - both as an investor and as a visionary.
A few years ago, he was interviewed by Alliancy magazine discussing the world in 2030.
Alliance magazine: What major changes do you see in 10 years?
Fabrice: The Internet of Things, such as refrigerators that order groceries when they run out, drone delivery, and the like. All this is coming. In addition, I see some important breakthroughs in five areas: automobiles, communications, medicine, education, and energy. Technologies exist, the future has already arrived, it's just not uniform everywhere. For large-scale deployment, you need to reduce costs and simplify use.
Cars will become "common". To date, self-driving cars have already driven millions of miles without accidents. But if an ordinary car in the States costs less than $20.000 on average, then a system that allows you to turn it into a self-driving car costs about $100.000. From a financial point of view, general application is still impossible. There is also no legal basis, since it is necessary to determine who will be responsible in the event of an accident.
What about profitability?
Cars are the second source of household budget expenses, although they are idle about 95% of the time. People continue to buy cars because it's cheaper than using an Uber and a driver, and the car is available at any time, especially in sparsely populated areas.
But when driver costs disappear, when cars become autonomous, depreciation over several years will become the main expense. A "shared" car used 90% of the time will become much cheaper - thus, at all levels, owning a car will no longer make sense. Businesses will buy fleets of cars and then provide them to other businesses like Uber that will operate them on a busy enough schedule that a car will be available in a couple of minutes, including in less densely populated areas. This will especially change society, since in the United States the main source of employment is driving a car. A lot of working hands will be released, the cost of driving will decrease.
Has there been a communications revolution?
No. The most common tool, without which it is difficult to imagine life, the mobile phone, will disappear completely. In principle, we have already made significant progress in "reading the brain" and are at the stage where voice recognition was 15 years ago. Then for these purposes, you needed a powerful specialized card and hours of training so that your voice could be effectively recognized. Today, putting a helmet on your head with 128 electrodes with the same hours of training, you can learn how to mentally control the cursor on the screen, how to pilot an airplane. In 2013, a brain-brain connection was even made, someone, using the power of thought, was able to move the hand of another person ...
In 2030, we will work where we want, when we want, and for as long as we want.
What are we waiting for?
It is possible that in 10 years we will have a pair of transparent and invisible electrodes in the brain, allowing us to use our thoughts to transmit instructions to a miniature computer to show us emails, texts using lasers on glasses that will display them on the retina or with using smart contact lenses.
We will have a kind of "improved telepathy", we will exchange information mentally: I think the text, I send it to you, you read it on the retina or on contact lenses. We will no longer need a wearable device with a small screen and constantly tilted head to it, which distracts us and limits our field of vision. But 10 years from now, this will only be the beginning. There are lasers that can send images to the retina, but the lenses are still of poor quality. Mind reading is still approximate and requires a supercomputer with 128 electrodes. In 2030, the equivalent of such a supercomputer will cost $50. It may take 20-25 years to finalize sufficiently small and efficient electrodes, as well as corresponding programs. However, smartphones will inevitably disappear.
What about medicine?
Today, five doctors can make five different diagnoses for the same disease because people aren't that good at diagnosing. For example, Watson, IBM's supercomputer, is better than doctors at identifying certain types of cancer. There is logic in this, since it takes into account every micron of the results of an MRI or X-ray, and the doctor looks no more than a couple of minutes. In 5 years only computers will have diagnostics, in 10 years we will have a universal diagnostic apparatus for all common diseases, including the common cold, HIV and others.
Around the same time, a revolution will also occur in surgery. The robot doctor "Da Vinci" has already performed five million operations. Surgery will continue to become increasingly robotic or automated, which will narrow the productivity gap between surgeons. For the first time, the cost of medicines will begin to decrease. In addition, all paper work and administrative inefficiency will disappear after the introduction of electronic medical records. In 10 years, we will have diagnostics with constant feedback on what we should be doing in terms of nutrition, drugs, increasingly effective surgery, and much lower medical costs.
Another revolution - education?
If we transferred Socrates to our time, he would not understand anything, except for the way our children are educated: different teachers talk to a class of 15 to 35 students. It makes no sense to continue teaching our children the way it was done 2500 years ago, because each student has different skills and interests. And now, when the world is changing so fast, think how funny it is that education is limited in time and stops after graduation from school or university. Education should be a continuous process that takes place throughout life, as well as more efficient.
NB from the editor: I can imagine how surprised Socrates would be if he saw how our . If offline intensives before the coronavirus pandemic still somehow looked like classical education (lecture conference room, speaker-teachers, students at the tables, instead of clay tablets or papyrus, laptops and tablets, instead of βMaieuticsβ or βSocratic ironyβ or with practical cases), which has not changed much in instruments since ancient times, then lectures via Zoom, smoking and chatting in Telegram, presentations and video recordings of classes in your personal account ... Definitely, Socrates would not have understood this. So the future has already arrived - and we did not notice. And the coronavirus pandemic has pushed us to change.
How will this change our capabilities?
On sites like Coursera, the top professor in the industry offers online courses to 300.000 students. It makes much more sense for the best teacher to teach a large number of students! Only those who wish to earn a degree pay to take the exams. This makes the system much fairer.
What about primary and secondary schools?
Some schools are now testing an automated learning system. Here the teacher is no longer a talking machine, but a coach. Learning takes place with the help of software, which then asks questions and can adapt to students. If the student makes mistakes, the program repeats the material in other ways, and only after the student has understood everything, does it move to the next stage. Students in the same class go at their own pace. This is not the end of the school, because in addition to knowledge, you need to learn how to communicate and interact, for this you need the environment of other children. People are typical social beings.
Anything else?
The biggest breakthrough will be in lifelong education. Requirements are changing massively, in sales a few years ago it was important to know how to optimize your search engine visibility (SEO). Today you need to understand App Store Optimization (ASO). How to know? Take courses on sites like Udemy, the leader in this field. They are created by users and then available to everyone for $1 to $10β¦
NB from the editor: To be honest, personally I'm not sure that courses created by users, not practitioners, are such a good idea. The world is now filled with travel and beauty bloggers. If teachers-bloggers are additionally flooded, it will be difficult to find truly useful and professional material in a pile of content. to create a truly useful course on the same , based not on manuals and articles, but on practice and tested cases. Well, and on the met rake - where without them in the work and development of new tools.
In other words, is the world of workers bound to change?
Millennials (born after 2000) hate the 9 to 18 job, working for the boss, the boss himself. We are currently seeing a boom in entrepreneurship in the US, boosted by the availability of a range of on-demand service applications. Half of the jobs created since the 2008 crisis are self-employed or those who work for Uber, Postmates (home delivery), Instacart (food delivery from neighbors).
These are personalized services available upon requestβ¦
Services of cosmetologists, manicure, haircuts, transportation. All of these services have been reopened with more flexibility. These ideas are also true for programming, editing and design services. Work is becoming less incremental and takes less time. Millennials work day and night for the first week and then only five hours the next. Money for them is a means of gaining life experience. In 2030, they will make up half of the working population.
Will we be happier in 2030?
Not necessarily, since people quickly adjust to changes in their environment, this process is called hedonic adaptation. However, we will remain masters of our destiny. We will work as much or no more than we want. On average, people will have better health and education. The cost of most things will be lower, which will lead to a significant improvement in the quality of life.
So there will be no social inequality?
There is talk of widening inequality, but in reality there is a convergence of social classes. In 1900, rich people went on vacation, but not the poor. Today, one flies on a private jet, the other on an EasyJet, but both get on a plane and go on vacation. 99% of America's poor have water and electricity, and 70% of them own a car. Looking at factors like infant mortality and life expectancy, inequality is shrinking.
And what about climate change and the cost of energy, can they affect these achievements?
This issue will be resolved without regulation and state intervention. We are going to move to a coal-free economy, but for purely economic reasons. One megawatt of solar power already costs less than a dollar compared to $100 in 1975. This was achieved as a result of improved production processes and productivity. Equalization of the cost of solar energy has also been achieved in some regions where the creation of power plants is expensive. In 2025, the cost of a "solar" kilowatt will be less than the cost of a "coal" kilowatt without subsidies. Once that happens, tens of billions of dollars will be invested in the process. In 2030, the accelerated introduction of solar energy will begin. The cost of a megawatt will become much lower, which in turn will reduce the cost of many other things and improve the quality of life. I am very optimistic.
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
Do you believe the predictions of Fabrice Grind?
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28,9%Yes, I believe
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18,6%No, this can't be
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52,6%I've been there before, Doc, it's not like that.51
97 users voted. 25 users abstained.
Source: habr.com