At the end of 2022, the world was introduced to ChatGPT, which has been a watershed moment for artificial intelligence as it enables millions of regular users to experiment with AI. In just a year, it has changed so much of how we work and search for information on the internet. So, what will 2024 and beyond hold in store for us? In this interview with BizNews, futurist Pieter Geldenhuys, the Director at the Institute for Technology and Innovation, dives into several technological developments that are shaping our world including robo air taxis, moon mining for helium-3 as an alternative energy source, post-quantum computing, smart glasses, and the hu.ma.ne smart pin. Underlining these technology developments, he says, are currents that are shaping our world which includes a demographic decline in the northern hemisphere that will lead to a severe drop in consumption. By 3035, he says, “A reality might be that a company would be proud to announce that our revenue only fell by 3% while our competitors fell by 8%.” Peak consumption will have a severe impact on Africa with its growing population but the light at the end of the tunnel for Africa, he says, is for the continent to embrace new types of technology, but that “does mean that the mindset of technology adoption will have to change significantly.” – Linda van Tilburg
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Relevant timestamps from the interview
00:00 – Introduction
01:09 – 2024 trends
01:55 – Peak Consumption and Demographic Decline
06:03 – The Potential for Growth in Africa
13:00 – Concerns about AI
21:35 – Tangible technologies
30:28 – Technology we can buy
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Excerpts from the interview
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The underlying trends shaping our world
To use a metaphor; the news is but surface ripples of underlying currents that are shaping our world and now and again, as a futurist, we need to understand when these currents change course and a variety of trends have changed course in the last 2 or 3 years. So, the idea that we’ll ever return to a world pre-COVID will never happen. The world is fundamentally changed. When we understand what these trends are, it also gives us the context of understanding what the technologies are and how they will play a role.
Peak consumption as populations in parts of Europe, South Korea, Japan decline
When we take a look at the demographic decline in big parts of the world, we see that South Korea, China, Japan, Italy and big parts of Europe are experiencing a severe demographic decline. This means not only that you have a smaller population, but the population is constituted of different age groups. So, you get a larger or older age group, which tends to vote more conservatively, and this has a huge impact on the focus of technology. For example, in Japan, they’re replacing people with robots. When you go to a hotel, a robot will welcome you and serve you food. The same will happen in restaurants. Security guards are now robots in South Korea because of a lack of humans. We’ve seen technological developments in large parts of the world, which is supplanting humans.
So the key challenge you face is normally when you’re between the ages of 25 and 45, you spend the biggest amounts of money. Why? Because you get kids. You don’t have a choice to spend money. But normally when you reach the age of 55, your kids are out of the house, and then every bit of money that you get in, you put away for your pension. So, it means that you don’t consume as much. It also means there is a large part of people in the rest of the world that will stop consuming. They will save money, they will perhaps consume services based on health care and maybe the elderly going on vacation. But a large part of the population will stop spending money, and that will have a severe impact on our consumption.
Falling revenue for companies, stock market growth could be turned on its head
We can even see the early signs with toy companies now taking strain because the affluent world has fewer kids. So, that’s an early warning signal and this will then ripple throughout the entire economy in the years ahead. Now, this is quite concerning because, for the last 200 years, we’ve seen dramatic growth in most economies around the world because our market grew. By 2035, the reality might be that a company would say, we’re very proud to announce that our revenue only fell by 3% while our competitors fell by 8%. So, the whole idea of our stock markets being priced in for a price-earnings ratio of 2025 or 30 with the assumption that it’ll keep on growing for the next 30 years might be turned on its head.
This has a huge impact on countries in Africa as well because they normally export their goods to the rest of the world and if no one buys your goods anymore, how will that impact the economies? Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that is new economic regimes or a new economic wave will fundamentally reshape our economic equation, but that’s to be stated later. So, that’s one of the major trends, peak consumption that we will face perhaps in the next ten years.
US and Africa see positive population growth, US benefits from wealthy consumer base
In other parts of the world, specifically the middle of Africa and the USA, the population growth will be positive. So, there’s a very positive growth in birth rates in both of these regions. The unfortunate side effect is that in Africa they don’t have expendable income. So we’re going to have a severe problem with the population on the continent increasing from 1.2 billion to about 3.5 billion by 2100. America is not growing as much, but America is in a far more advantageous position because they are sitting with a huge bunch of consumers in subsequent years and therefore they’re looking pretty good when compared to the rest of the world.
Population growth and peak consumption pose challenges for Africa, mindset change needed
Now, there is light at the end of the tunnel for Africa but we will need to have a completely new economic regime as well as a technological regime that will enable us. If we take a look at the 1900s, for example, in the early 1900s, between 1890 and 1910, we saw the introduction of internal combustion engines, electricity, telephones, chemicals, and fundamentally, that reshaped the entire economy. So, similar types of technological advancements can then enable Africa to grow because you could have small-scale nuclear reactors to power plants, solar energy, better food technology, and vertical farming that can enable these communities to look after themselves. So, new types of technology can lead to massive growth in Africa, but it does mean that the mindset of technology adoption will have to change significantly.
Energy abundance by the year 2050?
An unbelievable amount of developments are currently taking hold. I think the big question right now is what will our energy future look like. We can enter an era of energy abundance, several futurists think that by 2050 we might enter a year of energy abundance. But this means significant breakthroughs in fields like nuclear fusion, and maybe a hydrogen economy. The problem with the EV environment, and the electric vehicle ecosystem is the supply chains. For an internal combustion engine, you can have a four-country supply chain and you can get and resource your material from a variety of origins. The problem with any EV ecosystem is that currently, you need about 15 countries in your supply chain.
Deglobalisation, homeland economics
We are seeing that the United States is more internally focused and more isolationist. The question is, will the Bretton Woods system be retained in its current form? Because what America is doing is to say, I’m energy self-sufficient, I’m food self-sufficient. Do I need to keep the world’s seas safe? Is it my responsibility to do so? The far left on the far right is now saying, no, it’s not.
So, if America pulls back from the rest of the world, that means that the idea of globalisation is over. You’re going to have smaller trade blocs. You might have trade barriers being erected in different countries, the so-called homeland economics, where you look at only your national interest because America will have a positive demographic and the other richer countries might not. We might see a move towards it where America says, you know, everyone wants my consumers; so, if you want to play with me, you’re going to have to pay the tax to do so. Either you make your goods inside America or not. Those are the two trends we picked up in the Semiconductor Act and the Inflation Reduction Act in America.
That’s also, unfortunately, one of the key changes we picked up as well, is that the world is becoming a bit more isolationist. The idea of globalisation is over and the economic regimes are shifting. We had an economic regime after the Second World War that was mainly labour-led, so labour-led growth. But with any system comes into play, inconsistencies build up in the system and after 30 years it normally fails. So, we’ve seen that in the 70s with high inflation and then the world pivoted towards a more capital-intensive growth model. This was between 1980 and 2010. And again, this capitalist system led to, let’s go and make things the cheap way where we can manufacture them at the lowest possible cost. So, a more capital model and China leveraged that trend quite effectively.
More independence from semiconductor factories in Taiwan
Both America, the USA and Europe are looking at opening up semiconductor factories in both of these continents to be more independent from the supply chain that we currently get from Taiwan. If there’s a military action or a blockade of Taiwan from China, then there will be a severe problem in terms of the supply of microchips. So, those are some of the technologies. It might be more expensive, so it might be 15, to 20% more expensive than we normally used to pay for microchips. But at least you will have the guarantee of your supply chain. That’s one of the key trends we’ll pick up.
In 2007 that economic system changed and quantitative easing kept the patient on life-support for a couple of years and now we’re seeing a new economic regime. This is one that’s called homeland economics, it’s a more isolationist protective measurement. This means that we are looking at technology replacement rather than shared growth. I’m more of a supporter of a globalised free world but that’s the reality that we are facing and this will impact technological choices. The high inflationary environment will also severely hamper some technologies. A lot of us were quite excited about the smaller-scale nuclear reactors. But, in the last couple of months, we’ve seen that the financial model isn’t there.
Technological advances might be constrained due to high inflationary environment
The high inflationary environment will also severely hamper some technologies. A lot of us were quite excited about the smaller-scale nuclear reactors. But, in the last couple of months, we’ve seen that the financial model isn’t there. So, due to our high inflationary environment, some of the technological advances might be constrained or delayed for a decade or so. So, it’s going to be very difficult for us to predict when these technologies will appear. Some of the technologies that have already gone past the R&D phase into early start prototyping; there’s enough money to push them through the supply chain. But I think there might be some issues with brand new technologies and maturing them in the next 5 to 6 years due to a high inflationary environment. So, those are some of the scenarios we’re looking at.
There’s a very interesting economist by the name of Kondratiev and Schumpeter picked up on it called the Kondratiev Wave. The Kondratieve wave shows that we go through the spring, the summer, the autumn and the winter of each of these waves where you can see unbelievable growth in your economy. It starts creating a bubble, it collapses, we go into a recession and then the wave emerges again. We’ve seen five of these waves. We might see a sixth wave emerging by 2026, or 2027 but that remains to be seen. It all depends on the government debt.
So, unfortunately, government debt is significant to most countries around the world and a lot of the debt is being rolled over. That means that the governments will have to refinance a lot of that debt at a far higher rate. It was normally 0.5%. Next year, America will have to refinance it at 5% or 5% or more and this will suck a tremendous amount of money out of the economy and also into technological development. So, the longer we have a high inflation environment, the longer we will struggle to support some of these massive breakthroughs in technology.
Gold rush expected as AI is imbedded inside organisations
In the next couple of years in terms of technology trends, we’ll see companies embedding those technologies inside their organisations. So suddenly you don’t, as a large organisation, want to expose the rest of the world to some proprietary information on your end. So, what we will see is an absolute gold rush. We will see several organisations taking these models and deploying them in the organisation. Let me give you a metaphor.
On my phone, I can look at my phone and it unlocks because it can recognise my face. But the moment I get my phone I need to train it to identify my face. Now, originally you needed artificial intelligence to identify someone’s face. But once the model has been trained, we can now store it as an algorithm. Now, algorithms are like a recipe. You want to bake a cake, take so much of that to so much of that and put it in the oven for so long and that’s the recipe. That’s an algorithm. Once that algorithm has been defined, that can then be stored on the device and then I retrain it with my face so it unlocks my face.
The same will happen with large language models. The large language model will become far smaller. You deploy it inside the organisation and then you will retrain it with your corporate data and then unbelievable productivity improvements will come because now you can say, give me all the sales statistics of the last five years, create a presentation around it and give me an analysis of what happened, what worked and what didn’t work.
The AI will then utilise the large language model in your organisation, train on your corporate data and give you the report almost in real time. Now that is on our doorstep and it’s already happening in large organisations. So, that’s the next big gold rush that will unlock a huge amount of value. At the same time as these models then become better, they use mathematical reasoning and the emergence of intelligence is then enhanced. We will truly unlock a huge amount of productivity and small organisations will now be able to do the same as large organisations because they can harness AI to reach that level of productivity.
Starlink satellites will create opportunities in logistics
The Starlink system is quite important. It gives us low latency, as well as low-orbiting satellites. Normally, our geostationary satellites were 36,500 km away from us. You don’t get something like escape altitude, you only get escape velocity. But the closer you are to the planet, the faster the satellites should spin and that’s what Elon Musk did with SpaceX is that these re-launchable space vehicles gave him a wonderful opportunity to create a revenue stream that would cover the entire world with these low latency satellites.
There are wonderful opportunities in logistics because you can put intelligent locks on your big containers, and scan them with X-rays. The moment you load it on a ship, when you offload it somewhere else, you can see if someone tampered with it and that can make the logistic chain far simpler if you link it to a blockchain. Then, talking about SpaceX’s wonderful vehicle if the starship can get going.
Helium-3 as a new source of energy
When we look at nuclear fusion, it seems like helium three is a far better fuel to utilise than deuterium or isotopes of hydrogen and helium 3 will have less radioactivity as a result. Unfortunately, it is extremely scarce. But several people say there’s an abundance of it on the surface of the moon. So, when we talk about the cost of it, I’m speaking under correction. It’s something close to about $4 billion for a ton of helium three. So, it’s unbelieve and it’s or seems to be in abundance on the surface of the moon. So, we might see SpaceX, which is a space exploration technology utilising these starships to do space mining in the next ten years. That might be a very interesting debate. Now, the Chinese have already mapped the areas on the moon that have huge concentrations of helium-3. They’ve done that about 6 or 7 years ago. So, it’s not new, but that might be one of the interesting stories or angles that we’ll see popping up in the future.
Robot air taxis: three companies well-positioned to unlock the market
One of the companies is E-hang in China, while the other two are Joby and Archer in the United States. Archer and Joby use VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) technology, which allows them to take off vertically, and then change the route to fly like an aircraft that lands again. They can carry about 6 or 7 people, work on batteries, and are completely pilotless. E-hang, on the other hand, can only carry about two people and is a drone. However, the cost per trip is about a 10th of the cost of a helicopter trip. With companies like Toyota investing in Joby and Uber driving Archer, we’re going to see a land grab with vertiports in the not-too-distant future.
In India, some companies are already looking at opening up 3D ports next to the airports and then having vertiports in the city where they can drop you off at a building. Normally, it would take you two hours in Sao Paulo to get to your destination. If you’re a first-class traveller, you can climb out of the aircraft, climb onto one of these drones, and it takes you to your destination in six minutes. So, this isn’t far away.
The first commercial service is already underway in China, and in the next 2 to 3 years, we might see Joby and Archer coming as well. There are about ten other companies that have similar technologies, but they were a bit too late because the amount of money that went into that market was cut dramatically, and only about 1 billion was given to the top three players in the field. That’s why I say some of the technologies that have gone beyond the prototype stage might be developed. Some earlier technologies might find it a bit more difficult. So, watch out for four-passenger taxis or robot drone taxis very soon.
The post-quantum computing era could pose security risks to networks
We’re already very far advanced with quantum key distribution. The Chinese have been playing with it since 2004. They’ve been implemented into the satellite ecosystem as well as into the cable and submarine systems. That is the way they project power satellites and cables while Americans use satellites and aircraft battlegroups. But in terms of commercial utilisation, most of the banks that do the reconciliation every night have already embedded that technology and we see several other companies will start using that technology as well. With the G20, in Italy Telecom Italia had a demo or a demonstration on quantum entanglement on their cellular network. So, quantum key distribution will be one of the tools we can utilise to bridge this challenge of the new quantum era. There are several other changes in protocols as well. But one of the predictions is that in the next 3 to 4 years, we’re going to see fundamental changes in how organisations prepare for this post-quantum world to make their networks more secure.
Smart glasses, hu.ma.ne wearable AI pin
When we look at these glasses and you it’s something that people are prepared to wear in public. It seems like Meta decided to forgo the idea of projecting images on your glass and in the subsequent updates on the glasses, the glasses will be able to identify or take a picture of your surroundings and then use A.I. to interpret what it sees. I think there are huge advances for people who have difficulty with sight because by putting these glasses on, you can enter a room. It’ll say there’s a door on your left, there are five chairs, two people and it automatically will tell you in your ears what it’s seeing. It’s wonderful for language translation. You know these transformer models can be utilised to do real-time learning language translation. Someone listening to this conversation will be able to have it translated into a different language. The A.I. in terms of its generative capacity, but also its pattern recognition capabilities from a sound as well as image perspective can unlock unbelievable opportunities.
What you could do with hu.ma.ne e is to look at the food that you eat and get an idea of what you’re consuming. You can look at a product and it’ll tell you what it is, and it also projects an image on your hand to play music or to communicate, to interact with someone. So, wearable computing is still in its early phases and the exact form factor that will drive the biggest amounts of adoption we don’t know yet. But there’s a huge amount of experiments. So, several companies are putting these probes in the market and as in a complex adaptive system, there’s not a prediction about what will work, but rather a probe and then you want to see if the probe creates a deeper attractor. A concept called purposeful emergence. So we are now in an era of experimentation and if you ask me which of these devices will be the dominant one in the future, we don’t know yet. Let’s go and see how the experiments in the consumer market are working.
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