10 ms·

In what areas are the massive fortunes of the future going to be made?

58 points by Apane 13y ago

Let's discuss...

ccbrandenburg 13y ago
I would say one of them could be in making the utility (electricity, gas, water) more user friendly. Transparency hardly exists and there are seldom interactions between companies and subscribers. Focusing on user experience in this area could be an opportunity...
- saryant 13y ago
  So long as the power doesn't go out and the price is reasonable, why do I care if my utility company has a nice website?
  - msandford 13y ago
    For many people utility bills are a large expenditure, not an insignificant one. A company that can make it easier for folks to budget, plan, predict, etc could potentially reap rewards as they can take on lower income or risky utility customers who historically have high default rates and lower the default rate through proactive management. Furthermore a regular person might appreciate a utility company that bends over backwards to ensure there are no surprises on the monthly utility bill. The roughly 17 million people who are unbanked are the target market: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/09/why-poor-choose-go-without-bank-accounts/6783/ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/09/wh... That doesn't just go for electric power but other things as well like mobile phones, cable TV, internet, etc. I'm not optimistic that the Congress will get their shit together in the near future and force last-mile monopolies to provide access again like the FCC required for a while. But if they do, look out!
- PeterisP 13y ago
  Your post implies that rare interactions with the utility are somehow a problem - IMHO a perfect true utility would get even fewer interactions, ideally 0; just bill my account for what I owe for water and ensure that water always works... In an ideal world should have exactly 1 interaction with my utility ever - when I move in, give them my details and sign an agreement. If they need a second interaction, then that's likely due to some problem or failure.
oracuk 13y ago
Agriculture. An aging industry, small margins for the older economic structure of small/medium holdings, little existing use of new technologies at scale. As the industry demographic shifts and as 'new' technologies such as drones, robotics, remote sensing, pervasive wireless data, vat-grown meat and mixed land/marine farming are adopted there will be a lot of money to be made feeding the world.
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  In some sense you're right, but you shouldn't underestimate either the innovation that is going on or the intelligence of farmers. There's a word for a stupid or wasteful farmer, and that word is "broke". You can't make it in agriculture unless you can make it against fierce global competition. Ten years ago there was a lot of apocalyptic talk about the opposition of organic vs. GMO crops but the truth is that organic and GMO crops have both thrived. GMO crops are getting better, yet organic methods are advancing too and are being cherry-picked by conventional farmers when they are competitive. Robotic tractors are a reality today.
samelawrence 13y ago
Small fortunes: Marijuana, online privacy, personal defense weapons, batteries, patent law. Big fortunes: Ocean mining, fuel and energy, long-distance wireless communications, medicines, education.
pg 13y ago
Always hard to predict, but one area where I'm sure there's lots of room is starting startups in industries that didn't previously have them. To use one example of many, LendUp.
- zt 13y ago
  The cliche phrase "software is eating the world" doesn't quite do the future justice. "Startups in industries that didn't previously have them" does it much better: that's agriculture (Sourcerly), payments (WePay, Stripe, Balanced, Slidepay, Square), lending (LendUp, Lending Club), startup investing (Anglelist, WeFunder), banking (Palintir, Standard Treasury), insurance (Oscar) fashion (La Tote, Crowdery), and more. So many industries can still be improved with the startup ethos of disruption, growth, efficiency, data, etc.
  - 31reasons 13y ago
    Space, Robotics, Desktop Manufacturing, Augmented Reality
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      I would personally bet on payments, insurance, fashion, and banking over space, robotics, desktop manufacturing, and augmented reality. The former are things that virtually everybody does as part of their daily life. The latter are things that sound very sexy and have had some big wins in specific industries, but aren't related to what people do day-to-day. When pitting reality against dreams, reality usually tends to win out.
      - wildermuthn 13y ago
        The same could have been said about computers fifty years ago. No one used computer as part of their daily life when computers filled entire rooms. I'm glad Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't get into insurance.
        13y ago
josephpmay 13y ago
-Food (agriculture, livestock, protein from insects, lab grown meat, etc.) -Transportation (if you can find a way to decrease fuel costs) -Disruptive medicine (traditional drug companies will be making less and less money, but companies that develop cheaper cures to common world-wide ailments will be extremely successful) Basically, things that are necessities for living. Media/entertainment will become an increasingly zero-sum game.
t0 13y ago
I sometimes look here for ideas: http://www.futuretimeline.net/ http://www.futuretimeline.net/
rollo_tommasi 13y ago
Brain technology. Eventually 'wireheading' is going to stop being science fiction and start being science fact. The people who commercialize that technology first are going to swim in oceans of money.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
aaron695 13y ago
Anything that is currently controlled or regulated by governments will get decentralised to the net by private enterprise. Education, Medicine, Law, Jobs, Banking, Sins (Most already there), Importation (3d printers). My guess.
skadamat 13y ago
Space / asteroid mining http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR0kzklRE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR0kzklRE "Space is where the first trillionaires will be made"
- worldsayshi 13y ago
  Wouldn't it make more sense to dig deeper into the crust first? When it comes to minerals mine-able from an asteroid.
  - geuis 13y ago
    We have already been doing that. This is potentially a long discussion, but basically there are a few factors. Heat. It gets really hot the deeper you go. There are a lot of mines already where it's very difficult for humans to exist for very long. Also, availability. There's a lot of stuff in the earth. But after 4 billion years gravity happened. All elements have different densities. Turns out a lot of the metals that are really, really useful also turn out to be pretty dense. Think uranium and platinum as examples. Most of these elements have sank into the deep mantle and the core over time. The bits we find left over aren't even a taste of how much is collectively in the earth but can't get to. On a side note, it's been theorized that the massive amounts of uranium that sank to the core has been powering the earth for billions of years. Basically, the earth is a giant fission reactor. The third point is that there's a lot more stuff up there than down here. If you had to pick a direction to mine, in the long term it's going to be easier and more profitable to mine the stuff in space than to dig deeper into the ground.
    - kbutler 13y ago
      TIL "heat from radioactive decay contributes about half of Earth’s total heat flux." http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/abs/ngeo1205.html http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/abs/ngeo1205.html http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/...
MarkTanamil 13y ago
data mining
stretchwithme 13y ago
I think robotics. We'll eventually see robotic transportation, construction, supply chains, agriculture, and cooking. Much the home will be automated, includes search and storage and cleaning. It will get smaller, lose the need for a garage, and be easier to lease out, reconfigure, move, replicate.
gavingmiller 13y ago
Oil & Gas I'm with a startup called PetroFeed and we're looking to tap into the huge potential in the industry[1]. Most startups in the O&G industry are concerned with building better drilling technologies, or finding new resource pockets; leaving lots of room for companies like ours. ;) [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_companies_by_revenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_com...
- pyoung 13y ago
  I hope not. I would much prefer a future that relies more heavily on a sustainable form of energy.
return0 13y ago
Artificial Wombs Artificial/in vitro food
- deftnerd 13y ago
  I always thought that the anti-abortion crowd was missing out on an angle that could be taken advantage by science-types. The whole "no abortion for X weeks" is based on the age that it's plausible that a fetus can live outside of the womb. If the anti-abortion folk are so serious about their beliefs, they should fund a massive research project to create artificial wombs that very early babies can be placed into to finish their development. If anyone wants to work on the tech, that's the benefactors you should go after!
  - return0 13y ago
    There are considerable efforts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus But i wasn't thinking of the abortion crowd, just a more safe way to grow people.
niels_olson 13y ago
Read Asimov. It's all there. It comes down to space travel. Presumably, the ultimate propulsion will be nuclear-boiled water ejected out of a nozzle as steam. I suppose you could do something similar with other low molecular weight (stable bonds), low atomic weight (plentiful in post-stellar debris) fluids, but water's on a sweet spot in terms of caloric density. Hydrocarbons would probably be good, so I suppose you could mine the atmospheres of the gas giants for those. Interstellar travel will involve strapping a reactor to a large iceberg lassoed from the Ort belt and accelerating for one half of the trip, then decelerating for the other half. Space travel will require space mining (uranium, water, gold, titanium, lithium, etc) Think of all the things involved: mining equipment, (robots) depots, transport, refueling stations, distribution. SpaceX has already shown vast industries are going to be largely robotic. But people will go to the same places as the mining, because something will always go wrong with something, and those will be the well-developed trade routes. Those people will have all the same issues they have here. Governance, gambling, hepatitis, surgery. But there will be new issues as well. There will likely be founder effect: segments of humanity will venture off to planets many light years away. It will take decades to get there. How do you maintain the concept of "humanity" if they land on a planet with slightly more gravity, slightly colder, slightly less oxygen, so everyone becomes what we would consider a furry dwarf with an IQ of 170? Synthetic genomics will be big in all sorts of ways, some related to the founder effects of space travel. We will not travel faster than the speed of light and hibernation is a fiction. Our bodies just aren't made for that. I think this is a thing people haven't started really planning for very well. Interstellar travel is going to involve very large vessels. but once we do Mars and the asteroid belt, there's not much left in this system.
- a3voices 13y ago
  Alternatively, people might give up on space travel if simulated worlds become too enticing.
  - wildermuthn 13y ago
    That has already happened, if the absence of a moon base is any indication.
coldcode 13y ago
Most people won't see it when it first appears. Eventually you'll notice it when it's too late.
- yashodhan 13y ago
  Perhaps the most astute observation in here. Lost count the number of times I've missed the 'the next big thing' when it was right in my face. Each time I tell myself that I'll pay more attention next time. But we all know the definition of crazy.
lutusp 13y ago
Let's extrapolate from present trends. More robotics and automation means people will work fewer hours but still have disposable income. Medical advances mean people will live longer, healthier lives. Conclusion? There's going to be a lot of energetic, healthy people with time on their hands -- even more than at present. So there will be many future opportunities in the areas of entertainment, computer games and travel. Also, on the medical front, because psychiatry and psychology are in the midst of a historic meltdown, in the future society will increasingly look to neuroscience for guidance about the issues that psychiatrists and psychologists are mishandling right now. My favorite example showing what the possibilities may be, is the story of a severely depressed woman who didn't respond to the available anti-depression drugs and was finally institutionalized, her life essentially over. But a new procedure has come out of brain research (not mind research) called deep brain stimulation, that shows great promise for addressing depression's cause, rather than its symptoms (the present treatment approach). In this specific case, after electrodes were put in place, the neurosurgeon threw a switch that began stimulation of a location of present neurological research called "area 25" that seems to play a role in depression. The woman's depression lifted instantly -- instantly -- something that no other treatment had been able to accomplish. This is still very experimental, and the procedure is still too risky for everyday use, but if it matures and is made safe, it will revolutionize the treatment of depression. It will also accelerate the present trend away from psychiatry and psychology toward neuroscience. Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...
- tspike 13y ago
  I disagree about people working fewer hours. Work that used to be performed by humans has already been automated to a large degree. Rather than a uniform reduction in hours, the result appears to be a swelling class of unemployed and increasing hours worked by those who are employed. Those who have time do not have money and vice versa.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    Yes, that's true, I wasn't extrapolating from present conditions, in which people really do work long hours, in many cases much longer than they need to. I was just imagining that people might suddenly realize they could have a lot more free time than they do now, without a serious decline in standard of living. But current events certainly argue against this idea -- if anything, on average people are working more hours now that they did in the past.
mcot2 13y ago
Electric vehicles & associated infrastructure. Very high speed transportation air and ground transportation.
bcoates 13y ago
If the rapid obsolescence cycle of chip fabs end (ie, Moore's law ends and process nodes stop getting smaller so there's no reason to change processes), it will kick off a golden age of ASICs and a Cambrian explosion of chip diversity and software design tool progress. You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be. Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.
- jrn 13y ago
  I think this as well, but i'm also keeping my eye on graphene transistors. And then there is the quantum computer stuff which is beyond my ken.
wildermuthn 13y ago
Civilian-use drones and virtual reality culminating in the functional equivalents of androids and holodecks.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Computing and telecom are obvious. By 2050 it's fairly likely that a majority of the entire population of the Earth will own a computer (e.g. smartphone, tablet, or pc/laptop), which is pretty profound if you think about it. Fulfillment will be a place for fortunes to be made, as it always has been. Amazon has been executing exceedingly well in this area but it's not as though everyone else has been sitting on their ass. Over the next decades the sort of smart, high-tech, low latency fulfillment that we've come to associate with Amazon will be the worldwide standard anywhere and everywhere. Also look for infrastructural improvements along those lines. It used to be that people had visions of pneumatic tubes running everywhere. But consider some variations on that theme, a fully automated delivery system that could route standard sized containers across cities, continents, or maybe even the world. Maybe autonomous vehicles could play into that, but it seems as though building custom infrastructure would also provide a substantial RoI. Imagine how different the world would be if every housing structure had a 1m^3 "mail box" that you could receive packages in or send packages from which would immediately deliver them anywhere in the system 24/7 without human intervention. Economics changes a lot, consumerism changes a lot, industry changes a lot, and so on. Fully automated manufacturing and configurable manufacturing. These may not replace all manufacturing but they seem likely to me to become a "big deal", and people will make a lot of money off them. Imagine if you could go to a web page upload a bunch of plans (3D models, wiring diagrams, etc.) and place an order for a factory to manufacture something you've designed. This is more than just the home manufacturing (3D printing et al) revolution, it's something on an entirely different scale. Imagine how this sort of thing would affect the cost of production of material goods. Imagine how it would affect the iteration speed as well. And think about how it would affect the mass production society we've grown accustomed to. What happens when a designer can produce a batch of a few hundred or a few thousand custom designed smartphones or what-have-you? Instead of everyone buying from a small pool of mass produced goods does the market change to focus more on boutique versions of such things? Do people start buying things that are more customized in functionality? What happens when you create factories that can effectively replicate themselves? Education is slated to change dramatically over the next decades. Much of the world today lives in areas where formal education is not the norm. As those areas become developed there are education opportunities other than the traditional ones, especially when you consider the widespread abundance of computing devices in the future (see above). There is a huge market for learning software, on a multi-billion dollar per year scale, but a hell of a lot of work will have to go into creating all of that software to make it effective and practical. Space will be big business too but that can be a bit hard to predict. Through the 21st century the cost of launching things into space will drop by at least a factor of 10 if not a factor of 100 or more. That will cause an exponential increase in the amount of stuff and people we put in orbit which will create substantial off-Earth economic activity which will gain momentum due to positive feedback effects. By 2100 I'd expect millions of people to be living off-Earth and trillions of dollars in revenue to be involved in off-Earth commerce and industry. This starts to get really interesting when you consider what sort of potential advantages building things in space might have. Obviously it makes it easier to test spacecraft, of course, since you have access to the environment they'll operate in right there. But there are also some other interesting aspects. Vacuum is abundant and easy to get at. As is zero-g or nearly any level of g-forces you desire. A lot of manufacturing processes would be very different if vacuum conditions were cheap and easy to get at.
colmvp 13y ago
Since developed countries are experiencing population aging, I would guess if someone could help women prolong their window of having healthy births. I say this because if you look at the last ten years, the rate of births in the age ranges of < 18, 18-35 have been decreasing while the age of women getting pregnant in the 35+ range has been increasing. The birth rate of the United States is only as high as is now largely because of the immigrant population. As more women in developed countries choose to have careers and go through higher education, the median age of pregnancies will continue to rise.
Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
Sexbots.
jng 13y ago
A.I.
ArekDymalski 13y ago
Predictive analytics that works.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I hate to burst your bubble: http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-12-06.pdf http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-12-06.pdf
DanI-S 13y ago
As a co-founder of Tiny Farms[1], we're betting on the growing need for alternative sources of protein. Humanity's current protein supply is inefficient, unsustainable and won't scale to feed the future world. Our particular domain is edible insects; we wrote this article about why entrepreneurs should get involved: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-drop-everything-start-growing-bugs/ http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-dr... [1] http://www.tiny-farms.com http://www.tiny-farms.com
- pstuart 13y ago
  Black soldier flies and duckweed FTW.
- ar4s 13y ago
  I'm very curious about how you're tackling this problem. It's no longer a secret that insects could provide a rich and abundant source or protein, the biggest problem I've seen this far is how to farm them, in other words what is the sustainable input into these farms? As the other commenter pointed out, black soldier flies are a wonderful output, but from my research I've seen that they need meat for to grow and their larva to hatch.
  - DanI-S 13y ago
    We're working on a lot of fronts, from designing farming processes through to developing feed and the substrate that the animals occupy. With regards to sustainability of input: insects have an inherent feed conversion ratio far higher than conventional livestock, meaning they create more body mass per gram of food, but the actual food source varies from species to species. Since many species can consume things that are currently underutilized, like corn husks, there's a lot of potential for capturing wasted energy.
- 31reasons 13y ago
  "Tiny Farms is the edible insect company" Future is here. First Soylent and now this. FTW!
- stcredzero 13y ago
gbog 13y ago
In China obviously. It is already the case.
woofyman 13y ago
Security fences Armoured cars Autonomous armed guard killer robots
Neslit 13y ago
There is an increasing interest in life extension, so I think we'll also see wide demand for an interim solution to the whole death thing. E.g. brain plastination, cryonics, sufficiently detailed brain scans... whoever makes one of these scalable and effective at preserving a person (information-theoretically) will rake in like $O(10^9).
- stcredzero 13y ago
  Big O notation with a constant amount? If so, that's the same as O(1) or is that another notation I'm not familiar with?
  - Neslit 13y ago
    Ah sorry... I was just being sloppy, what I wrote doesn't make sense. What I meant was "order of magnitude", but I'm not sure how to write that; Big Theta says two functions grow within a constant factor of each other, which is vaguely similar to the notion of order of magnitude. Maybe it should have been "$~10^9$" or just "$10^9$". (By the way, my reasoning was 10^4 for current cryonics prices, times 10^7 or 10^8 people, times 10^-2 or 10^-3 assuming a fee of 1% to 0.1%.)
spre 13y ago
nano technology, alternative energy, space travel R&D
lrichardson 13y ago
driverless cars. I think google is years ahead of everyone else here, and it will be a product that will be high price, high margin. And the market is huge. I really don't see how google could walk away from that one without gobs of cash in their pockets.
- sharemywin 13y ago
  It's not legal. The technology is being introduced slowly by the current manufactures as well. Assisted parking. Enhanced cruise control. automatic braking. If they can manage to get it legalized quickly Google has a chance to disrupt the market. But the car companies are introducing products to market that people are buying.
n00b101 13y ago
software
deftnerd 13y ago
Package delivery using drones. A DPS (Drone Parcel Service) base truck could roll into a neighborhood and a swarm of drones would fly out with packages under a certain weight and deliver them, while the base truck delivers any packages too heavy. The drones keep informed of where the truck is so they can return (even when the truck is in motion) to recharge until the next neighborhood. With county budgets being stressed and more areas considering converting paved roads to gravel roads, any kind of delivery system that can avoid roads will be a benefit.
vincie 13y ago
Military, mass behavioural control & surveillance technology.
pjdorrell 13y ago
Online educational videos. 99.99% of online educational videos suck. For example, watching the video is so painful that all I can think about is "how do I get out of here?". (Possibly I am spoiled from watching too many popular vlogs on YouTube.) The other 0.01% of online educational videos that don't suck prove that it is possible to make such videos. The best examples I can find are RailsCasts and "Math Antics" (the first is for grownups, the second is aimed more at children, but I would watch something like Math Antics that had more advanced content).
dome82 13y ago
Healthcare: Cancer treatments and cancer drugs for fixing cancer and improving the patient's life. Sometimes, Chemio can be devastating. Self-treatments on demand: someday, you wont need to go in a doctor office for diagnoses, medical check-ups and treatments.
nofortunateson 13y ago
Broadly speaking, biology.
bfitz 13y ago
3D Printing (a nearly infinite number of knock-on effects). Legal drugs (prohibition is once again losing its sway). Care for people who are 80+ years old. Autonomous vehicles. Space travel - I'd love to predict fortunes in it, but it's still a wildcard and a dream.
nickthemagicman 13y ago
Medicine
meerita 13y ago
If I have to choose 4 things came to my mind: Health, Space, Robotics and Food imho. Health, to produce better treatments agaisnt sickness, cure for cancer and other applications like regenerative i guess will be the ones who will coin a lot of dollars, specially from labs. Space and robotics to produce better transportation, manufacturing and other hardware potential advancements. Food. The food industry will work for sure o new sintetic food, to mass produce as well to produce safe transgenic meat.
Toenex 13y ago
Personal decision support. I simply don't have time to search for the cheapest energy supplier/insurance provider/credit card/mortgage each month but I'm sure I could be saving money. The people who can demonstrably do so on my behalf have my interest.
- sharemywin 13y ago
  I think the biggest issue there is trust. Who do I trust with all my financial information?
  - Toenex 13y ago
    Absolutely, trust is a massive part of this. Many people have accountants so trust can be be given. Perhaps accounting institutes would be in a good place to do something like this. I'm probably going to be giving the organisation a limited Power of Attorney so they will need some serious credentials. Don't forget that your financial information will have real value which you may be willing to trade for the benefit of better deals i.e. they don't charge actual money for the service but get access to your spending pattern. Lots of issues but the point I was making was simply that a) I want the best deal possible b) I'm lazy. I reckon I'm not alone either.
Choronzon 13y ago
Healthcare Managing the automated transition of ageing populations with increasingly more automation and less budget per patient.
JayNeely 13y ago
3d printing. I saw someone saying that 3d printers are the beginnings of replicators from Star Trek, and that really struck home for me. I think we'll see a lot of physical goods get redesigned to be made via single-material extrusion, and 3d printers will get smarter about how to manipulate that single material (some kind of plastic) to achieve a variety of qualities (texture, strength, color, etc.).
sharemywin 13y ago
Marketplaces will become more and more common. Because Customer/Company/Employee is much more cumbersome (legally, administrativaly) than Customer/Maketplace(with reviews)/Independant Contractors. Robotic automation will take more jobs because they continue to do more and more cheaper.
LarryMade2 13y ago
Drones - Drone first responders for accidents, for emergency coverage remote telepresence assistance as well as news recording. Drones replacing photographers, meter maids, small package delivery and distribution especially stuff that bike and car couriers are doing now. Crop dusting (already happening), site inspections. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the marriage of flying drone and telepresence rolling robots where the drone lands out in your driveway folds up and rolls in the front door. Everyone connected and addressed via internet. Eventually everyone personally will have an internet "address" that would combine voice, email etc. when you fill out forms and apply for credit, etc that will be part of your personal identification as well as the primary way to contact you. Self driving long-haul delivery trucks, probably be accepted quicker than personal cars. Still will be manned initially to handle problems and to dissuade looters, or drive in hard to navigate areas.
patfla 13y ago
Energy is probably the largest industry in the world - our civilization runs on abundant energy. The world energy industry needs to be very substantially reworked otherwise there's a high chance that many (most) of us (or subsequent generations) will die. There are massive fossil incumbents who will be displaced. I'd say energy.
ghostdiver 13y ago
food production, healthcare

58 points by Apane 13y ago

Let's discuss...

I would say one of them could be in making the utility (electricity, gas, water) more user friendly. Transparency hardly exists and there are seldom interactions between companies and subscribers. Focusing on user experience in this area could be an opportunity...

saryant 13y ago
So long as the power doesn't go out and the price is reasonable, why do I care if my utility company has a nice website?
- msandford 13y ago
  For many people utility bills are a large expenditure, not an insignificant one. A company that can make it easier for folks to budget, plan, predict, etc could potentially reap rewards as they can take on lower income or risky utility customers who historically have high default rates and lower the default rate through proactive management. Furthermore a regular person might appreciate a utility company that bends over backwards to ensure there are no surprises on the monthly utility bill. The roughly 17 million people who are unbanked are the target market: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/09/why-poor-choose-go-without-bank-accounts/6783/ http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/09/wh... That doesn't just go for electric power but other things as well like mobile phones, cable TV, internet, etc. I'm not optimistic that the Congress will get their shit together in the near future and force last-mile monopolies to provide access again like the FCC required for a while. But if they do, look out!
PeterisP 13y ago
Your post implies that rare interactions with the utility are somehow a problem - IMHO a perfect true utility would get even fewer interactions, ideally 0; just bill my account for what I owe for water and ensure that water always works... In an ideal world should have exactly 1 interaction with my utility ever - when I move in, give them my details and sign an agreement. If they need a second interaction, then that's likely due to some problem or failure.

oracuk 13y ago

Agriculture. An aging industry, small margins for the older economic structure of small/medium holdings, little existing use of new technologies at scale. As the industry demographic shifts and as 'new' technologies such as drones, robotics, remote sensing, pervasive wireless data, vat-grown meat and mixed land/marine farming are adopted there will be a lot of money to be made feeding the world.

PaulHoule 13y ago
In some sense you're right, but you shouldn't underestimate either the innovation that is going on or the intelligence of farmers. There's a word for a stupid or wasteful farmer, and that word is "broke". You can't make it in agriculture unless you can make it against fierce global competition. Ten years ago there was a lot of apocalyptic talk about the opposition of organic vs. GMO crops but the truth is that organic and GMO crops have both thrived. GMO crops are getting better, yet organic methods are advancing too and are being cherry-picked by conventional farmers when they are competitive. Robotic tractors are a reality today.

samelawrence 13y ago

Small fortunes: Marijuana, online privacy, personal defense weapons, batteries, patent law. Big fortunes: Ocean mining, fuel and energy, long-distance wireless communications, medicines, education.

pg 13y ago

Always hard to predict, but one area where I'm sure there's lots of room is starting startups in industries that didn't previously have them. To use one example of many, LendUp.

zt 13y ago
The cliche phrase "software is eating the world" doesn't quite do the future justice. "Startups in industries that didn't previously have them" does it much better: that's agriculture (Sourcerly), payments (WePay, Stripe, Balanced, Slidepay, Square), lending (LendUp, Lending Club), startup investing (Anglelist, WeFunder), banking (Palintir, Standard Treasury), insurance (Oscar) fashion (La Tote, Crowdery), and more. So many industries can still be improved with the startup ethos of disruption, growth, efficiency, data, etc.
- 31reasons 13y ago
  Space, Robotics, Desktop Manufacturing, Augmented Reality
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    I would personally bet on payments, insurance, fashion, and banking over space, robotics, desktop manufacturing, and augmented reality. The former are things that virtually everybody does as part of their daily life. The latter are things that sound very sexy and have had some big wins in specific industries, but aren't related to what people do day-to-day. When pitting reality against dreams, reality usually tends to win out.
    - wildermuthn 13y ago
      The same could have been said about computers fifty years ago. No one used computer as part of their daily life when computers filled entire rooms. I'm glad Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't get into insurance.
      - 13y ago

josephpmay 13y ago

-Food (agriculture, livestock, protein from insects, lab grown meat, etc.) -Transportation (if you can find a way to decrease fuel costs) -Disruptive medicine (traditional drug companies will be making less and less money, but companies that develop cheaper cures to common world-wide ailments will be extremely successful) Basically, things that are necessities for living. Media/entertainment will become an increasingly zero-sum game.

t0 13y ago

I sometimes look here for ideas: http://www.futuretimeline.net/ http://www.futuretimeline.net/

rollo_tommasi 13y ago

Brain technology. Eventually 'wireheading' is going to stop being science fiction and start being science fact. The people who commercialize that technology first are going to swim in oceans of money.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

aaron695 13y ago

Anything that is currently controlled or regulated by governments will get decentralised to the net by private enterprise. Education, Medicine, Law, Jobs, Banking, Sins (Most already there), Importation (3d printers). My guess.

skadamat 13y ago

Space / asteroid mining http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR0kzklRE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVzR0kzklRE "Space is where the first trillionaires will be made"

worldsayshi 13y ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to dig deeper into the crust first? When it comes to minerals mine-able from an asteroid.
- geuis 13y ago
  We have already been doing that. This is potentially a long discussion, but basically there are a few factors. Heat. It gets really hot the deeper you go. There are a lot of mines already where it's very difficult for humans to exist for very long. Also, availability. There's a lot of stuff in the earth. But after 4 billion years gravity happened. All elements have different densities. Turns out a lot of the metals that are really, really useful also turn out to be pretty dense. Think uranium and platinum as examples. Most of these elements have sank into the deep mantle and the core over time. The bits we find left over aren't even a taste of how much is collectively in the earth but can't get to. On a side note, it's been theorized that the massive amounts of uranium that sank to the core has been powering the earth for billions of years. Basically, the earth is a giant fission reactor. The third point is that there's a lot more stuff up there than down here. If you had to pick a direction to mine, in the long term it's going to be easier and more profitable to mine the stuff in space than to dig deeper into the ground.
  - kbutler 13y ago
    TIL "heat from radioactive decay contributes about half of Earth’s total heat flux." http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/abs/ngeo1205.html http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n9/abs/ngeo1205.html http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/07/18/...

MarkTanamil 13y ago

data mining

stretchwithme 13y ago

I think robotics. We'll eventually see robotic transportation, construction, supply chains, agriculture, and cooking. Much the home will be automated, includes search and storage and cleaning. It will get smaller, lose the need for a garage, and be easier to lease out, reconfigure, move, replicate.

gavingmiller 13y ago

Oil & Gas I'm with a startup called PetroFeed and we're looking to tap into the huge potential in the industry[1]. Most startups in the O&G industry are concerned with building better drilling technologies, or finding new resource pockets; leaving lots of room for companies like ours. ;) [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_companies_by_revenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_com...

pyoung 13y ago
I hope not. I would much prefer a future that relies more heavily on a sustainable form of energy.

return0 13y ago

Artificial Wombs Artificial/in vitro food

deftnerd 13y ago
I always thought that the anti-abortion crowd was missing out on an angle that could be taken advantage by science-types. The whole "no abortion for X weeks" is based on the age that it's plausible that a fetus can live outside of the womb. If the anti-abortion folk are so serious about their beliefs, they should fund a massive research project to create artificial wombs that very early babies can be placed into to finish their development. If anyone wants to work on the tech, that's the benefactors you should go after!
- return0 13y ago
  There are considerable efforts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_uterus But i wasn't thinking of the abortion crowd, just a more safe way to grow people.

niels_olson 13y ago

Read Asimov. It's all there. It comes down to space travel. Presumably, the ultimate propulsion will be nuclear-boiled water ejected out of a nozzle as steam. I suppose you could do something similar with other low molecular weight (stable bonds), low atomic weight (plentiful in post-stellar debris) fluids, but water's on a sweet spot in terms of caloric density. Hydrocarbons would probably be good, so I suppose you could mine the atmospheres of the gas giants for those. Interstellar travel will involve strapping a reactor to a large iceberg lassoed from the Ort belt and accelerating for one half of the trip, then decelerating for the other half. Space travel will require space mining (uranium, water, gold, titanium, lithium, etc) Think of all the things involved: mining equipment, (robots) depots, transport, refueling stations, distribution. SpaceX has already shown vast industries are going to be largely robotic. But people will go to the same places as the mining, because something will always go wrong with something, and those will be the well-developed trade routes. Those people will have all the same issues they have here. Governance, gambling, hepatitis, surgery. But there will be new issues as well. There will likely be founder effect: segments of humanity will venture off to planets many light years away. It will take decades to get there. How do you maintain the concept of "humanity" if they land on a planet with slightly more gravity, slightly colder, slightly less oxygen, so everyone becomes what we would consider a furry dwarf with an IQ of 170? Synthetic genomics will be big in all sorts of ways, some related to the founder effects of space travel. We will not travel faster than the speed of light and hibernation is a fiction. Our bodies just aren't made for that. I think this is a thing people haven't started really planning for very well. Interstellar travel is going to involve very large vessels. but once we do Mars and the asteroid belt, there's not much left in this system.

a3voices 13y ago
Alternatively, people might give up on space travel if simulated worlds become too enticing.
- wildermuthn 13y ago
  That has already happened, if the absence of a moon base is any indication.

coldcode 13y ago

Most people won't see it when it first appears. Eventually you'll notice it when it's too late.

yashodhan 13y ago
Perhaps the most astute observation in here. Lost count the number of times I've missed the 'the next big thing' when it was right in my face. Each time I tell myself that I'll pay more attention next time. But we all know the definition of crazy.

lutusp 13y ago

Let's extrapolate from present trends. More robotics and automation means people will work fewer hours but still have disposable income. Medical advances mean people will live longer, healthier lives. Conclusion? There's going to be a lot of energetic, healthy people with time on their hands -- even more than at present. So there will be many future opportunities in the areas of entertainment, computer games and travel. Also, on the medical front, because psychiatry and psychology are in the midst of a historic meltdown, in the future society will increasingly look to neuroscience for guidance about the issues that psychiatrists and psychologists are mishandling right now. My favorite example showing what the possibilities may be, is the story of a severely depressed woman who didn't respond to the available anti-depression drugs and was finally institutionalized, her life essentially over. But a new procedure has come out of brain research (not mind research) called deep brain stimulation, that shows great promise for addressing depression's cause, rather than its symptoms (the present treatment approach). In this specific case, after electrodes were put in place, the neurosurgeon threw a switch that began stimulation of a location of present neurological research called "area 25" that seems to play a role in depression. The woman's depression lifted instantly -- instantly -- something that no other treatment had been able to accomplish. This is still very experimental, and the procedure is still too risky for everyday use, but if it matures and is made safe, it will revolutionize the treatment of depression. It will also accelerate the present trend away from psychiatry and psychology toward neuroscience. Reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/magazine/02depression.html...

tspike 13y ago
I disagree about people working fewer hours. Work that used to be performed by humans has already been automated to a large degree. Rather than a uniform reduction in hours, the result appears to be a swelling class of unemployed and increasing hours worked by those who are employed. Those who have time do not have money and vice versa.
- lutusp 13y ago
  Yes, that's true, I wasn't extrapolating from present conditions, in which people really do work long hours, in many cases much longer than they need to. I was just imagining that people might suddenly realize they could have a lot more free time than they do now, without a serious decline in standard of living. But current events certainly argue against this idea -- if anything, on average people are working more hours now that they did in the past.

mcot2 13y ago

Electric vehicles & associated infrastructure. Very high speed transportation air and ground transportation.

bcoates 13y ago

If the rapid obsolescence cycle of chip fabs end (ie, Moore's law ends and process nodes stop getting smaller so there's no reason to change processes), it will kick off a golden age of ASICs and a Cambrian explosion of chip diversity and software design tool progress. You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be. Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.

jrn 13y ago
I think this as well, but i'm also keeping my eye on graphene transistors. And then there is the quantum computer stuff which is beyond my ken.

wildermuthn 13y ago

Civilian-use drones and virtual reality culminating in the functional equivalents of androids and holodecks.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Computing and telecom are obvious. By 2050 it's fairly likely that a majority of the entire population of the Earth will own a computer (e.g. smartphone, tablet, or pc/laptop), which is pretty profound if you think about it. Fulfillment will be a place for fortunes to be made, as it always has been. Amazon has been executing exceedingly well in this area but it's not as though everyone else has been sitting on their ass. Over the next decades the sort of smart, high-tech, low latency fulfillment that we've come to associate with Amazon will be the worldwide standard anywhere and everywhere. Also look for infrastructural improvements along those lines. It used to be that people had visions of pneumatic tubes running everywhere. But consider some variations on that theme, a fully automated delivery system that could route standard sized containers across cities, continents, or maybe even the world. Maybe autonomous vehicles could play into that, but it seems as though building custom infrastructure would also provide a substantial RoI. Imagine how different the world would be if every housing structure had a 1m^3 "mail box" that you could receive packages in or send packages from which would immediately deliver them anywhere in the system 24/7 without human intervention. Economics changes a lot, consumerism changes a lot, industry changes a lot, and so on. Fully automated manufacturing and configurable manufacturing. These may not replace all manufacturing but they seem likely to me to become a "big deal", and people will make a lot of money off them. Imagine if you could go to a web page upload a bunch of plans (3D models, wiring diagrams, etc.) and place an order for a factory to manufacture something you've designed. This is more than just the home manufacturing (3D printing et al) revolution, it's something on an entirely different scale. Imagine how this sort of thing would affect the cost of production of material goods. Imagine how it would affect the iteration speed as well. And think about how it would affect the mass production society we've grown accustomed to. What happens when a designer can produce a batch of a few hundred or a few thousand custom designed smartphones or what-have-you? Instead of everyone buying from a small pool of mass produced goods does the market change to focus more on boutique versions of such things? Do people start buying things that are more customized in functionality? What happens when you create factories that can effectively replicate themselves? Education is slated to change dramatically over the next decades. Much of the world today lives in areas where formal education is not the norm. As those areas become developed there are education opportunities other than the traditional ones, especially when you consider the widespread abundance of computing devices in the future (see above). There is a huge market for learning software, on a multi-billion dollar per year scale, but a hell of a lot of work will have to go into creating all of that software to make it effective and practical. Space will be big business too but that can be a bit hard to predict. Through the 21st century the cost of launching things into space will drop by at least a factor of 10 if not a factor of 100 or more. That will cause an exponential increase in the amount of stuff and people we put in orbit which will create substantial off-Earth economic activity which will gain momentum due to positive feedback effects. By 2100 I'd expect millions of people to be living off-Earth and trillions of dollars in revenue to be involved in off-Earth commerce and industry. This starts to get really interesting when you consider what sort of potential advantages building things in space might have. Obviously it makes it easier to test spacecraft, of course, since you have access to the environment they'll operate in right there. But there are also some other interesting aspects. Vacuum is abundant and easy to get at. As is zero-g or nearly any level of g-forces you desire. A lot of manufacturing processes would be very different if vacuum conditions were cheap and easy to get at.

colmvp 13y ago

Since developed countries are experiencing population aging, I would guess if someone could help women prolong their window of having healthy births. I say this because if you look at the last ten years, the rate of births in the age ranges of < 18, 18-35 have been decreasing while the age of women getting pregnant in the 35+ range has been increasing. The birth rate of the United States is only as high as is now largely because of the immigrant population. As more women in developed countries choose to have careers and go through higher education, the median age of pregnancies will continue to rise.

Kudzu_Bob 13y ago

Sexbots.

jng 13y ago

A.I.

ArekDymalski 13y ago

Predictive analytics that works.

jacques_chester 13y ago
I hate to burst your bubble: http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-12-06.pdf http://www.idsia.ch/idsiareport/IDSIA-12-06.pdf

DanI-S 13y ago

As a co-founder of Tiny Farms[1], we're betting on the growing need for alternative sources of protein. Humanity's current protein supply is inefficient, unsustainable and won't scale to feed the future world. Our particular domain is edible insects; we wrote this article about why entrepreneurs should get involved: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-drop-everything-start-growing-bugs/ http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/09/10/5-reasons-dr... [1] http://www.tiny-farms.com http://www.tiny-farms.com

pstuart 13y ago
Black soldier flies and duckweed FTW.
ar4s 13y ago
I'm very curious about how you're tackling this problem. It's no longer a secret that insects could provide a rich and abundant source or protein, the biggest problem I've seen this far is how to farm them, in other words what is the sustainable input into these farms? As the other commenter pointed out, black soldier flies are a wonderful output, but from my research I've seen that they need meat for to grow and their larva to hatch.
- DanI-S 13y ago
  We're working on a lot of fronts, from designing farming processes through to developing feed and the substrate that the animals occupy. With regards to sustainability of input: insects have an inherent feed conversion ratio far higher than conventional livestock, meaning they create more body mass per gram of food, but the actual food source varies from species to species. Since many species can consume things that are currently underutilized, like corn husks, there's a lot of potential for capturing wasted energy.
31reasons 13y ago
"Tiny Farms is the edible insect company" Future is here. First Soylent and now this. FTW!
stcredzero 13y ago

gbog 13y ago

In China obviously. It is already the case.

woofyman 13y ago

Security fences Armoured cars Autonomous armed guard killer robots

Neslit 13y ago

There is an increasing interest in life extension, so I think we'll also see wide demand for an interim solution to the whole death thing. E.g. brain plastination, cryonics, sufficiently detailed brain scans... whoever makes one of these scalable and effective at preserving a person (information-theoretically) will rake in like $O(10^9).

stcredzero 13y ago
Big O notation with a constant amount? If so, that's the same as O(1) or is that another notation I'm not familiar with?
- Neslit 13y ago
  Ah sorry... I was just being sloppy, what I wrote doesn't make sense. What I meant was "order of magnitude", but I'm not sure how to write that; Big Theta says two functions grow within a constant factor of each other, which is vaguely similar to the notion of order of magnitude. Maybe it should have been "$~10^9$" or just "$10^9$". (By the way, my reasoning was 10^4 for current cryonics prices, times 10^7 or 10^8 people, times 10^-2 or 10^-3 assuming a fee of 1% to 0.1%.)

spre 13y ago

nano technology, alternative energy, space travel R&D

lrichardson 13y ago

driverless cars. I think google is years ahead of everyone else here, and it will be a product that will be high price, high margin. And the market is huge. I really don't see how google could walk away from that one without gobs of cash in their pockets.

sharemywin 13y ago
It's not legal. The technology is being introduced slowly by the current manufactures as well. Assisted parking. Enhanced cruise control. automatic braking. If they can manage to get it legalized quickly Google has a chance to disrupt the market. But the car companies are introducing products to market that people are buying.

n00b101 13y ago

software

deftnerd 13y ago

Package delivery using drones. A DPS (Drone Parcel Service) base truck could roll into a neighborhood and a swarm of drones would fly out with packages under a certain weight and deliver them, while the base truck delivers any packages too heavy. The drones keep informed of where the truck is so they can return (even when the truck is in motion) to recharge until the next neighborhood. With county budgets being stressed and more areas considering converting paved roads to gravel roads, any kind of delivery system that can avoid roads will be a benefit.

vincie 13y ago

Military, mass behavioural control & surveillance technology.

pjdorrell 13y ago

Online educational videos. 99.99% of online educational videos suck. For example, watching the video is so painful that all I can think about is "how do I get out of here?". (Possibly I am spoiled from watching too many popular vlogs on YouTube.) The other 0.01% of online educational videos that don't suck prove that it is possible to make such videos. The best examples I can find are RailsCasts and "Math Antics" (the first is for grownups, the second is aimed more at children, but I would watch something like Math Antics that had more advanced content).

dome82 13y ago

Healthcare: Cancer treatments and cancer drugs for fixing cancer and improving the patient's life. Sometimes, Chemio can be devastating. Self-treatments on demand: someday, you wont need to go in a doctor office for diagnoses, medical check-ups and treatments.

nofortunateson 13y ago

Broadly speaking, biology.

bfitz 13y ago

3D Printing (a nearly infinite number of knock-on effects). Legal drugs (prohibition is once again losing its sway). Care for people who are 80+ years old. Autonomous vehicles. Space travel - I'd love to predict fortunes in it, but it's still a wildcard and a dream.

nickthemagicman 13y ago

Medicine

meerita 13y ago

If I have to choose 4 things came to my mind: Health, Space, Robotics and Food imho. Health, to produce better treatments agaisnt sickness, cure for cancer and other applications like regenerative i guess will be the ones who will coin a lot of dollars, specially from labs. Space and robotics to produce better transportation, manufacturing and other hardware potential advancements. Food. The food industry will work for sure o new sintetic food, to mass produce as well to produce safe transgenic meat.

Toenex 13y ago

Personal decision support. I simply don't have time to search for the cheapest energy supplier/insurance provider/credit card/mortgage each month but I'm sure I could be saving money. The people who can demonstrably do so on my behalf have my interest.

sharemywin 13y ago
I think the biggest issue there is trust. Who do I trust with all my financial information?
- Toenex 13y ago
  Absolutely, trust is a massive part of this. Many people have accountants so trust can be be given. Perhaps accounting institutes would be in a good place to do something like this. I'm probably going to be giving the organisation a limited Power of Attorney so they will need some serious credentials. Don't forget that your financial information will have real value which you may be willing to trade for the benefit of better deals i.e. they don't charge actual money for the service but get access to your spending pattern. Lots of issues but the point I was making was simply that a) I want the best deal possible b) I'm lazy. I reckon I'm not alone either.

Choronzon 13y ago

Healthcare Managing the automated transition of ageing populations with increasingly more automation and less budget per patient.

JayNeely 13y ago

3d printing. I saw someone saying that 3d printers are the beginnings of replicators from Star Trek, and that really struck home for me. I think we'll see a lot of physical goods get redesigned to be made via single-material extrusion, and 3d printers will get smarter about how to manipulate that single material (some kind of plastic) to achieve a variety of qualities (texture, strength, color, etc.).

sharemywin 13y ago

Marketplaces will become more and more common. Because Customer/Company/Employee is much more cumbersome (legally, administrativaly) than Customer/Maketplace(with reviews)/Independant Contractors. Robotic automation will take more jobs because they continue to do more and more cheaper.

LarryMade2 13y ago

Drones - Drone first responders for accidents, for emergency coverage remote telepresence assistance as well as news recording. Drones replacing photographers, meter maids, small package delivery and distribution especially stuff that bike and car couriers are doing now. Crop dusting (already happening), site inspections. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the marriage of flying drone and telepresence rolling robots where the drone lands out in your driveway folds up and rolls in the front door. Everyone connected and addressed via internet. Eventually everyone personally will have an internet "address" that would combine voice, email etc. when you fill out forms and apply for credit, etc that will be part of your personal identification as well as the primary way to contact you. Self driving long-haul delivery trucks, probably be accepted quicker than personal cars. Still will be manned initially to handle problems and to dissuade looters, or drive in hard to navigate areas.

patfla 13y ago

Energy is probably the largest industry in the world - our civilization runs on abundant energy. The world energy industry needs to be very substantially reworked otherwise there's a high chance that many (most) of us (or subsequent generations) will die. There are massive fossil incumbents who will be displaced. I'd say energy.

ghostdiver 13y ago

food production, healthcare