Most of your predictions seem extremely reasonable, but your comment about car companies, in 2015, predicting they’d make self-driving cars by 2020, makes me question the sanity of anyone writing those announcements. It takes (and has taken for decades, this is the standard assumption for anyone doing automotive R&D or market research on the industry) 3-5 years to bring a car to production from the time you produce the first concept. Also, 2020 models come out in late 2019. So the only way any of those companies should have made that prediction in 2015 would be if they were ready to unveil a concept within the next couple of months, and believed that there would be literally no additional delays caused by technological or regulatory or supply chain challenges in bringing the first self-driving vehicles to market.
I wonder if asteroid mining advances will finally prod governments into developing defenses against Earth-bound asteroids. “Multiple private and foreign actors can direct big chunks of space rock at you, at will, and you won’t find out until after they’ve done it” is so much more motivating than “Someday an asteroid could spontaneously wipe us all out.”
On drug resistance: changes in medical practice about antibiotic use are important and I hope they continue, but I think the bigger shift is going to come from livestock production. Cellular agriculture would be great for that (probably), but in the meantime we’re already finally starting to see serious investments in prebiotics, probiotics, vaccines, bacteriophage therapies, and other treatments and feed additives.
Subjectively, this year I’ve noticed a huge increase in new foods appearing in normal grocery stores—plant based meats being one example. These are often products that have exited for a while but are just now leaving specialty and higher end stores. I’ve been assuming it’s not coincidence that this seemed to happen right in the middle of covid-induced supply chain disruptions (stores want to fill their shelves with something). I think that shaves a few years off my expected timeline for the shift away from conventional livestock.
Most of your predictions seem extremely reasonable, but your comment about car companies, in 2015, predicting they’d make self-driving cars by 2020, makes me question the sanity of anyone writing those announcements. It takes (and has taken for decades, this is the standard assumption for anyone doing automotive R&D or market research on the industry) 3-5 years to bring a car to production from the time you produce the first concept. Also, 2020 models come out in late 2019. So the only way any of those companies should have made that prediction in 2015 would be if they were ready to unveil a concept within the next couple of months, and believed that there would be literally no additional delays caused by technological or regulatory or supply chain challenges in bringing the first self-driving vehicles to market.
I wonder if asteroid mining advances will finally prod governments into developing defenses against Earth-bound asteroids. “Multiple private and foreign actors can direct big chunks of space rock at you, at will, and you won’t find out until after they’ve done it” is so much more motivating than “Someday an asteroid could spontaneously wipe us all out.”
On drug resistance: changes in medical practice about antibiotic use are important and I hope they continue, but I think the bigger shift is going to come from livestock production. Cellular agriculture would be great for that (probably), but in the meantime we’re already finally starting to see serious investments in prebiotics, probiotics, vaccines, bacteriophage therapies, and other treatments and feed additives.
Subjectively, this year I’ve noticed a huge increase in new foods appearing in normal grocery stores—plant based meats being one example. These are often products that have exited for a while but are just now leaving specialty and higher end stores. I’ve been assuming it’s not coincidence that this seemed to happen right in the middle of covid-induced supply chain disruptions (stores want to fill their shelves with something). I think that shaves a few years off my expected timeline for the shift away from conventional livestock.
That all makes sense to me:)