LIVING MORE CHEAPLY
Will your cost of living plummet in the next two decades? Peter Diamandis, the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, says it probably will.
Diamandis says advancing technology will foster massive reduction in the cost of living. If he is correct, food. fuel, housing, medical care, electricity, transportation, and education will cost a fraction of what they cost now. Internet services, robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and virtual reality will force revolutionary leaps in efficiency. All aspects of commerce: manufacturing, shipping, and personal services- to name a few- will be affected. The next great technological leap will leave no industry untouched.
As a percentage of income, the cost of food has dropped about 45% since 1960. This trend is likely to accelerate. Innovation in genetics and biology will multiply yields for a given plot of land, with far less water. Vertical farming will bring agriculture closer to the consumer’s home. Since 70% of the cost of providing food is in transportation, storage, and handling, vertical farming by itself will force massive price reduction.
Uber and Lyft are disrupting the mass transit industry. This is barely the beginning. Such services will soon be fully autonomous, meaning they won’t need human drivers. This development will lead to rapidly plummeting transportation costs. Much of your expense in car ownership is for insurance, repair, fuel, parking, and traffic tickets. When transport is a service, not something you own, you will be freed from these expenses. Diamandis estimates that this will reduce your cost of travel by five to ten times. In our view, he’s overly optimistic, but your costs certainly will drop sharply.
Fossil fuels are expensive chiefly because of the cost of extracting and shipping them. We soon may be able to do without them. Solar energy is becoming steadily more efficient. Inherently safe nuclear sources, such as thorium reactors, will provide extremely cheap energy, enough for thousands of years. Distributed energy sources, practical only with the newer fuel sources, will reduce our reliance on centralized grids. With fewer and shorter power lines, and with less maintenance expense, the cost of electricity will plummet.
Medical care is a big factor in the cost of living. Robotics, advanced biochemistry, and a faster internet will reduce costs dramatically. Artificial intelligence applications can diagnose patients more accurately than the best doctors can. They will have huge databases of patient history, genomics, and similar cases to draw from. They can analyze massive amounts of data in a few seconds, for only the cost of electricity. The best surgeons will be robots. They will be more accurate than any human surgeon, and they’ll have all the data from millions of previous surgeries. Automation will accelerate drug testing by several orders of magnitude. New drugs will reach the market much faster, and they can be customized for each patient. You are likely to have several diagnostic tools at home. You can diagnose most of your own ailments with sensors worn on your wrist.
Learning is necessary for living well. Education is expensive, though. Teacher salaries, buildings, bus routes, and an army of administrators add to the cost. Outmoded rules and outdated curricula add expense without adding value, so the student wastes time as well as money.
If you were in full control of your education, would that make a difference? How can you take control, though? How do you fit your classes around a busy work schedule? The internet can help. Skillsology, the Khan Academy, Coursera, and other online sources provide instruction and testing at your own pace. They are also far less expensive than standard college courses. Some universities have begun to adapt to the competitive threat. Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, among others, offer thousands of hours of online instruction. Online instruction is in its infancy, though. In the near future, your ‘professors’ are likely to be artificial intelligence apps. They will be the best instructors you’ve ever had. They will know your needs, abilities, weaknesses, desires, and personality almost perfectly. With this knowledge, they will teach exactly what you need, at the rate you can best absorb it, by the methods you respond to best. Automated education will cost almost nothing. The same schooling available to the billionaire’s child will be available to the pauper’s child.
These are only a few of the factors in the cost of living. Others, such as housing and entertainment, also will cost less as technology develops. If we can convince our public officials to leave markets alone so innovation can thrive, we can enjoy much higher standards of living- for much less money.
(To enhance your life, you need a reliable internet connection. To take advantage of the technologies that will reduce your cost of living, you need a reliable internet connection. Talk to us. We can help.)