> What are the revolutionary things that are starting right now that will be obvious in retrospect?
- The taxing of robotic / AI systems, to offset the losses in tax revenue from human labor. Regardless of whether I agree with it, it's guaranteed to happen. It'll dramatically reshape taxation.
- CRISPR (gene editing broadly). There won't be a major pharma/biotech company on earth that isn't working with it, within 10-15 years. We'll be able to cure dozens of major and minor diseases in a few decades using it. The public mostly has no idea what's coming nor how fast. The mainstream media has only just begun to cover it from time to time. There will hardly be a person in the developed world that doesn't utilize gene editing for something in their lifetime, within a generation (whether for improvement or therapy). This century we'll permanently strip dozens of diseases & serious medical problems from the human genome, it'll be akin to what vaccines have accomplished. CRISPR will also solve the antibiotic resistance problem (the first headlines on that have finally begun to show up, in a few years it'll be widely agreed with).
- Gene software. There will be a $100+ billion company created in the genetics space around software. AI + personal gene technology is interesting 15-20 years out. Persistent micro regulation of the genome through editing + AI guide. Instead of responding with gene altering treatment after disease has well set in, we'll quickly move to the next logical level which will be frequent early course correction & disruption. It'll make the most sense to have AI doing this for us on a productivity / cost effective level. Improvement (not therapy due to disease) will also obviously be a major segment. It'll take a while (50-70 years?), but eventually our bodies will be treated more like genetic software platforms; we'll likely deploy into ourselves some kind of human genome operating system, that will have updates & patches as improvements come along.
- Bio-reactors, growing organs, etc. Vast progress has been made here and it's moving very fast. 20-30 years out we'll have the ability to grow most organs for routine implant. Today it's a very, very (barely existent) small niche segment vs the traditional transplant market. This is interesting as well in line with CRISPR:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603857/crispr-may-speed-p...
- The scale of the worlds that will be built in VR and the demands that will place on all computing resources. It's not something that is being widely considered right now, even on HN you'll routinely run into high skepticism about the scale of what's coming. Whatever scale you think it'll be at in 20 years, multiply that by 100x, you'll probably still be undershooting.