Predictions for 2011

I’m sitting here right now waiting for a video to render on my studio computer, so while I’m waiting, I’d thought I’d take an hour on my laptop to type out some of my thoughts about the future. Call this a New Year’s predictions post, although it’s a few days late.

I pay a lot of attention to technology, history, and how technology might affect the future. Really, when you think about it, the study of history and predicting the future are almost the exact same thing, just in different temporal directions.

You’ll probably wonder why I’m qualified to make predictions about the future, and what my expected success rate will be. Well first, I’m no more qualified than anybody else with some common sense who studies historical trends and that sort of stuff. And as for my expected success rate, I’m sure I’ll be right on no more than 80% of the thoughts that I’m going to put down here. However, I’ve made a few good calls in the past. For instance, three years ago, I suggested that the price of gold would rise from $550 to more than $1200 per ounce within about two years. Right now it’s trading at over $1400. Check out this post, which I astutely made at the beginning of one of the worst months in US economic history. I also wrote publicly in March of 2005 that I figured the price of oil was on the verge of skyrocketing. At the time, it was trading around $40 and its all-time high was under $60. I predicted over $75 within 24 months. It took fourteen months to break through $80 per barrel. When it comes to guessing when aliens are going to reveal themselves to the public on Earth, I haven’t got a clue. But when it comes to other subjects, predicting events in the near future can be pretty easy, based upon past and current trends.

Here we go:
1. Oil (which has been trading in the $80-89 range for most of the past four months) will average over $100/barrel through 2011 as a whole.
2. Gold and silver, currently trading at record highs of $1415 and $31 per ounce respectively, will break through $2000 and $50.
3. Portugal and Spain will undergo further debt downgrades that will rock the Euro. These two countries, especially Spain, are much bigger problems than Greece or Ireland was. The future of the Euro is very shaky. The economic crisis of 2009 may seem minor compared to what is left to come, and this time it will originate in Europe.
4. Development for Mobile computing platforms will become more important than development for desktops.
5. Hundred of “traditional” media outlets will cease business operations because of digital information sharing. Specially, a large number of print newspapers will go out of business, and radio stations will be on the verge. See the next point.
6. This is more of a 2012/2013 prediction, but before long, hi-def video/audio will be able to be streamed effectively to all net-based devices, including mobile handsets. This will force traditional broadcast television and radio into a corner. Television producers are already changing their production focus, understanding that a lot of their content is being viewed on 3” screens and through headphones, so they are adjusting their video and audio work accordingly.
7. The concepts of “controlling content” versus “owning copyright” will turn intellectual property laws inside out.
8. Facebook needs to re-make itself to offer content. Maybe iTunes and Facebook should merge. iTunes needs social networking, and Facebook needs content.
9. Someone will crack and share The Insurance File from Wikileaks.
11. Within Canada, Bell and Telus will merge their cell-phone divisions.
10. The Toronto Maples Leafs will, once again, fail to win the Stanley Cup.


I read an interesting book a year or two ago that talked about how the acceleration of technology and development was happening at an exponential rate. The author talked about how eventually, development will reach a “critical mass” of sorts in which the entire human race will be transformed due to the technological developments. Looking ahead, I see that as happening in 2012 or maybe 2013. Think about all the things around you now that weren’t even conceivable five years ago. You can take a photo of a cheque with your cell phone and it is automatically deposited in your bank account. When I was in high school, cell phones (and email) didn’t even exist! And the possibility of having HD video cameras in cell phones was pretty unthinkable a few years ago, yet they are commonplace today. Very soon, wireless mobile networks will be fast enough to stream HD data in real-time.

Think about how far humans have come in the past century. Look back only one hundred years, and think about some of these facts:
- The average life expectancy was 47 years.
- There were only about 144 miles of paved roads in the world.
- Ninety percent of doctors had NO college education.
- Women usually only washed their hair once a month, often using egg yolks as shampoo.
- Indoor plumbing? Try out-houses, for a significant portion of the population.
- The population of Las Vegas was thirty people.
- Crossword puzzles and canned beer hadn’t been invented yet.
- Marijuana, heoin, and morphine were all available over-the-counter.
- More than 95% of all births took place at home.

That’s just a short list that shows you how far we’ve come in one hundred years. However, the developments that we see over the next two or three will be equally staggering.

Earth has already entered the beginning of a number of global crises. Fossil fuel depletion is going to cause an energy crisis in a few more years that will change our way of life. The possibility of global warming knocking out the western ice sheet in Antarctica is huge, and when (not if) it happens, it will raise global sea levels by almost twenty feet and displace billions of people (at least the banks won’t have to worry about the housing glut anymore). High energy prices will lead to global food shortages, and a complete reordering of how food reaches consumers (think regionalization of food supply chains). All of these topics are things that I’ve studied in depth for years, and they’re generally kind of terrifying. However, I like to think on the bright side, and hope that the human race can use technological advances to mitigate many of these problems.

Oh yeah, and as far as the aliens go, I don’t really expect them to land until between 2017 and 2020.