We are transitioning from an industrial work-oriented economy to an automated workless economy. Far too few people realise what is happening due to our focus on our own lives, our intuitive linear thinking and lack of understanding of how technological change happens.
Technology may be in development for decades but transits from non-competitive to competitive suddenly then, if the prospects are good, investment and improvement accelerates usually taking us all by surprise. This is what happened with all major developments such as cars, PCs and mobile phones. The component technologies were decades in development but suddenly developed enough to make the product viable. Now, two critical technologies, AI and batteries that have been in development for decades have crossed the threshold to viability and enabling and are expected to continue developing exponentially thereafter thus attracting enormous investment and uptake.
But more importantly they are enabling three transformative technologies; power generation, transport and robotics which, with precision fermentation and longevity research, will transform our lives.
The changing world will be incontrovertible during 2025 and our lives will be completely different by around 2030.
Autonomous vehicles [AVs, especially robotaxis] are due to be launched in October 2024 and likely to begin mass production next year, with autonomous commercial vehicles following closely behind.
Charging outlets are being installed at a corresponding rate backed up by batteries. Production will accelerate replacing car ownership for commuting especially. Having no driver and 75% utilisation the cost per mile is expected to be 25% of the cost of car ownership. Car production will begin an irreversible decline to around 20% of current volumes with EVs replacing ICE cars. Rail travel will become uneconomic. Commercial vehicles are a year or so behind. Driving as a profession will disappear, logistics will be much more efficient, transport will be dominated by Tesla and a few Chinese companies, productivity will increase significantly creating a major deflation and unemployment challenge for governments. Solar and wind generation of power are now more cost effective than the alternatives in most of the world, held up by lack of infrastructure and intermittency so investment in these is forecast to ramp up as EVs develop and are deployed.
Dozens of firms are now producing robots. A huge range of sensors, controllers and materials have been developed over the years as complements to the core AI and battery technology. They can learn a billion times faster than any human due to machine learning and sharing. Obtaining a workforce will no longer rely on immigration, high birth rates and 20 years of very expensive education and development, but just producing or buying more robots at $10 to $15k each that then work 12 to 18 hour days with no personnel issues for 2 to 3 years. We will rapidly see robots replace workers in factories, farms and mines adding enormously to productivity and adding to the huge unemployment and deflation challenges governments face from AVs. 
And that's just the first generation. Production is forecast to increase tenfold every year for the indefinite future along with an exponential increase in the range of capabilities. They will require a conversion of gas power to electrical power locally, but this issue is being addressed with utility scale batteries and solar generation.
AI is based on human reasoning. Data is collected and processed by layers of nodes [neural networks] that refines the information leading to the output. It is widely predicted that tools [agents] will be able to do almost anything a human can do at Phd level in two or three years. AI is already replacing software engineering, helplines, making any work with a computer easier and will continue developing at an accelerating rate, many multiples per year. They may be in humanoid or non-humanoid robots, flying an aeroplane, manning a ship or doing human labour but could be in cell phones, laptops, as agents, street cleaning, helpers, or whatever.
Precision fermentation can be used for any protein but milk protein is almost developed. Precision fermentation will produce milk products, identical to cows, etc for less than 5% of current costs over the next three to five years. Precision fermentation is being developed for all animal based protein, which will save 95% of protein production costs and land equivalent to the whole of north and south America. Factory farming has not developed as expected because of power and labour costs but both will be solved in the coming years when power is cheap and robots replace workers.
It is settled science that any cell can be produced from any other cell [Yamanaka, 2006] and aging damage be reversed whilst preserving skin cell identity [ Babraham Institute, 2022]. This means, when the technology is fully developed, that longevity will become a multi trillion-dollar tissue regeneration industry. Every ailment either does not happen or is easily fixed by youthfulness. Treatment, for ailments or cosmetics, will be required by everybody lifelong using standardised technologies capable of being automated, standardised and thus compatible with current technology industries.
There is general agreement in the longevity industry that progress in protecting health will extend life expectancy by a year for every year that passes by 2030 to 2035. This will solve the current imbalanced demography of immigrant and native tribes.
The AI scientist [Sakana AI] is a fully AI driven system for automated scientific discovery applied to machine learning research. It automates the entire research life cycle from generating novel research ideas, writing any necessary code, executing experiments, summarising experimental results, visualising them and presenting its findings in a full scientific manuscript.
Peer review is also automated to evaluate generated papers, write feedback and further improve results and add them to a growing archive of knowledge thus imitating the human scientific community at a cost of $15 per paper. This will enable a significant acceleration in the speed and accuracy of scientific discovery. The world can have the equivalent of billions of PhD students producing new findings every five minutes costing $15 for each paper, 24/7/365.
AI development is the key to all other development. The AI scientist takes us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world's most challenging problems.
The quality of university education has fallen in line with expansion due to mixed ability, low standards of English in foreign students and destructive ideologies and increasing their costs disproportionately as productivity has fallen. Enrollment in UK universities has fallen. UK students pay £48,000 towards a three-year residential course and the government a further 150,000. Only a minority earn enough to pay off this debt and the decline in university students is pushing many universities to insolvency. A 2024 survey of 1,250 undergraduate students found that 53% used generative AI. A 2023 Literacy Trust report found that the percentage of 13- to 18-year-olds who used generative AI increased from 37.1% in 2023 to 77.1% in 2024.
It is a settled belief that learning is optimum when it is active, personalised and one to one. This is impossible in a traditional teaching situation. It has been possible for decades to automate learning, but it's been clunky and hasn't taken off. But AI teaching systems are improving rapidly. Many experts believe that ‘multimodal AI at PhD level’ is just two or three years away.
Many AI firms including Microsoft, are active in the AI education field. Using AI for industrial training is standard practice. Other nations are adopting AI based general education. AI education will teach anyone, anything, anywhere, anytime at nominal cost. Governments will find it impossible to continue with the status quo when international competitors have such a huge economic and cultural advantage, and students won’t spend 50k on education that's pointless when they can do just as well on a laptop and forums. Then, another sector will disappear forever.
Governments have been able to resist modernization for decades but with the world around them automating rapidly they will not be able to manage, or communicate with, the outside world without the same kinds of automation. Deflation and the compensatory reflation would make labour intensive work unaffordable.
The realisation that the revolution is real, during 2025, will force serious planning for it and a psychological change away from ambition and striving. Unemployment will rapidly accelerate thereafter as will productivity.
So although most people will not work, more than enough will be produced. The market and democracy will not work under these circumstances so technology to match supply and demand will be required, and goods will probably be distributed through automated shops, etc and it may be better to do useful things for money and buy goods, other than infrastructure and essentials, in the normal way rather than a UBI. Money supply will need to be managed differently in conditions of profound deflation, but doable with appropriate technology.
The ideology of equity, power, racism, etc will become irrelevant. There will be no coherent managerial class controlling an institution in the old way. For everyone, family, friends, community and hobbies will be the primary focus.
On current trends, European nations will lose their coherence and national identity replaced by collections of separate tribes although undesirable trends usually produce corrective measures. There will be no shortage of land and complete access to resources. There will be no need to travel to or work with people in other tribes. Tribes would be rivals but settled through sport, cooperative projects, etc and police robots would prevent violence. We are still at risk of malevolent powers grabbing the power for their own purposes but even then, control will rely upon AI and it will be pointless being ideological when everything's done by robots. War will be pointless as it would be solely fought between inanimate androids.