The Technological Tipping Point - By Matt Ward -
"Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing" (1984, George Orwell).
It is no overstatement to say that we stand on the brink of a technological revolution that is going to change our world forever. This technological transformation is happening right now, and we will see significant change occur, not over the next couple of decades, but within the next couple of years. Very few people in today's busy world are aware of just how much their lives are about to change, and how unavoidable and irrevocable this change is going to be.
The technological innovations described in this article are widely believed to be those that will occur in only the next five years, mostly by 2022.
By the end of this year, 2018, it is estimated that up to 90% of all people in western countries will have truly unlimited and free mass data storage. Deleting files to make room for more because you lack storage capacity is a thing of the past. This is because hard drive costs per gigabyte continue to fall. This means more data than ever is now being created, and will be kept in perpetuity. Indeed, according to experts, 90% of all the data that has ever been created has been created in just the last two years.
By 2021, the first robotic pharmacists will arrive in the US. AI and robotics will soon begin routinely taking over huge swathes of western domestic job markets, leaving mass unemployment as a by-product. In the short term, robotics and AI are going to decimate all service-oriented industries. Millions of people from all spheres of society will lose their jobs in the coming few years, all because of increased automation powered by ever more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence systems.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer limited to just the assembly lines. Very soon, it is highly likely that all types of telemarketers, bookkeeping clerks, compensation and benefit managers, receptionists, couriers of all types, proofreaders, computer support assistants, marketing research analysts, salesmen and women, and drivers of all descriptions, are going to lose their jobs to automation augmented by AI.
A workplace revolution is coming that none of us can escape from. Even in my own profession of teaching, it is widely believed that AI may replace qualified teachers in the coming decade or shortly thereafter. We are all going to be affected by the emergence of AI.
So significant an impact will AI have on worldwide labour markets that Elon Musk, the CEO of Space-X and Tesla, believes that the only way to mitigate against the massive impact this will inevitably have, is for governments to provide a realistic living wage for every adult in society. Richard Branson agrees with him. The alternative, they argue, of millions of workers losing their jobs and with it any prospect of reemployment, all within the next decade or so, will be riots and even a breakdown in basic societal order.
It is therefore essential, so their argument goes, that governments plan to mitigate against this approaching mass unemployment with a basic, universal living wage for all.
By 2022, it is estimated that 1 trillion sensors from all across the globe will be connected to the internet. The world really is getting smaller and smaller, and our place to hide in it has almost disappeared. From the clothes that we all wear even down the ground that we walk on, it is all going to be connected to the internet, and soon. Developers argue that this will allow users to "fully perceive their environments." However, this also means that these same users will have every single facet of their lives, down to the frequency of brush strokes they use when they brush their teeth with their internet enabled toothbrushes, monitored, recorded and endlessly analyzed remotely.
By 2022, it is estimated that fully 10% of the clothes we wear will be connected to the internet, from watches, rings and jewelry to the running shoes we work out in. All reporting on our movements, our activities and our lifestyles. Everything we wear, use and come into contact with will eventually be sending back information, via the internet, to a third party.
By 2023, between 10-20% of reading glasses will be connected, in real time, to the internet. In theory, whoever is connected to these glasses will literally be able to see what you see, and be where you are. This will have a big impact in changing the way users interact with the world around them. Potentially it will allow users to access the internet at any time, and to call upon internet applications which would be optimized for enhanced or augmented reality-type experiences.
3D printing is going to revolutionize our society. 3D printers are becoming increasingly common, much more sophisticated and exceedingly powerful. Already a process used by many car companies, soon 3D printing will be used by almost everybody else, all of the time. Even guns are now being produced using 3D printing technology.
Yet the impact of 3D printing technology will not be confined to the industrial sector; medicine will be transformed by 3D printing technology. The first transplant using a 3D printed liver is predicted to take place by the year 2024, and things like human bones, tissue and organs will be produced as a matter of normal practice via 3D printing within the next decade. Even horrific, life ending injuries will very soon be able to be treated using this type of rapidly advancing technology.
Censuses are also coming to an end. It is not going to be necessary for our governments to collect information on us in the traditional way, using governmental records, as in the past. Our vast array of social media profiles and the plethora of growing information available on each of us via the internet will tell our governments everything they need to know about us and more.
The increasingly sophisticated way it can be collected, managed and understood using "big data," means that governments will soon start to use developing "big data" technologies to gather information on its citizens in a much more informal, and some would argue, underhand way, without ever the need to contact you in person.
Experts in this field believe that the first governments will begin replacing censuses with big data technology gathering techniques as soon as 2023. By that point, governments won't need censuses to tell them everything they need to know about you. Your records, online presence and your general interconnectivity to the internet will give them much more real time information on you than any census ever could.
By 2023, scientists and sociologists believe that 80% of all the people on this planet will have some form of a digital presence, largely as a consequence of drastically increasing internet connectivity. According to a recently published report, "digital life is becoming inextricably linked with a person's physical life." So important is this digital online life that it is widely accepted that very soon a person in the very short term future will not be able to buy or sell if they do not have even a basic digital presence. They believe that this threshold may be reached at some point within the next five short years, by 2022.
Cryptocurrencies and digital currency formats are also going to replace and make obsolete all hard cash. Cash in your pockets is a thing of the past. These digital currencies, which are based on mechanisms called block chains for their transactions, will likely be used by some western governments for the first time to collect taxes by 2022.
Block chain technologies, essentially continually updated ledgers, will likely soon be expanded out to encompass and incorporate other very large government databases, like titles to lands and other forms of deeds, medical or criminal records and a plethora of other such data. Even phone records, emails and intercepted communications will be amalgamated to this data. The NASDAQ is about to begin using block chain technology to record its trading in securities companies.
Block chain technologies will give anybody who wants to know anything about you access to almost any record regarding you and your life that they may wish for. And there will be no way to change or erase the data once it is uploaded to the continually updating and disseminated block chain.
By 2023, 90% of the population will have a supercomputer in their back pockets. People now use their smartphones more than they use their laptops. In poorer, developing countries it is this ease of communication, brought about through cheaper and more accessible mobile phones, that is also accounting for increased access to the internet.
Access to the internet itself is increasingly being seen as a basic human right, and this trend will only continue. Universal access to the internet is the holy grail. Big tech companies like Facebook and Google are racing to find the solution that will rapidly connect the other 4 billion potential users who will not have consistent access to the internet by this point.
Very, very soon the whole world really will be as one digitally. Nobody will escape from it.
I have written before about our increasing proximity to the Tribulation period: (1). Amazing change is going to occur within just the next half decade. We are now reaching a point in human history where almost everything we do, our habits, our preferences and biases, down to our associates, families, the properties we live in - all records about us anywhere and everywhere are going to be amalgamated, centralized and kept forever.
Collectively we are creating every day more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data. That amount is set to rise exponentially over the next decade. At present much of that data is "dark data," meaning that it exists, but it is not being analyzed because it is too decentralized. Soon though, the means to analyze that data will become more widely available, and it will begin to be used against you. Of that there is no doubt. Big data analyzing technology will enable governments to take all the disparate and unintegrated systems and the data that currently exists on you with them, and standardize all that data into one single place for analysis and interpretation.
Mass data technology means that we can never escape from what we have written, posted, emailed, what we have bought and from where, our loans, debts and paychecks, what we have messaged or WhatsApp'd. Every single piece of data that exists "out there" on us can and will soon be brought to bear against us. There is nowhere to hide.
I could literally go on and on. All of this information, and myriads more still to come that you will carry on creating, give a very revealing picture of "you," and of who "you" really are. The governments of this world won't have to arrest you and bring you in for detailed questioning if you concern them, because the information about you will already be right there, stored and ready for analysis. It will tell them more than they would ever need to know about your motivations, your loves and loyalties, and ultimately, how they can or cannot trust you. Or whether you pose a threat to them.
We know that it will be just these same types of technologies that the coming antichrist will bring to bear so effectively against all opposition, ultimately enslaving the whole world through them.
I have said before that the technology revealed in Revelation is the technology of now. It is not the technology of circa 2040.
The Tribulation isn't going to be in twenty years' time. The Tribulation is going to be soon. Really soon. We are about to reach a technological tipping point, one that nobody on this earth is going to escape from.
Jesus must literally be standing right at the door.
"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name" (Revelation 13:16-17).
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