Looking Forward: 2022
“The best way to predict your future is to create it.” — Abraham Lincoln
At the end of every year, I try to predict the future.
Last year for 2021, I focused on dancing fast food restaurant robots, quantum internet for the teleportation of people, and radiation eating mushrooms for long-term space travel.
Here are my hits and misses -
Labor Shortages in 2022 Will Lead To Innovation and Contradiction
Hit. Maybe we didn’t see dancing fast-food restaurants, but Walmart is looking to remove all cashiers from its stores. Arby’s installed A.I. conversational bots to take orders via its drive-thrus. The employment crunch in 2022 is going to hasten the adoption for robots to take over roles usually set aside for humans in retail, food & beverage, and hospitality. As baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) who are now bridging the employment gap by working as retail stockers, drive-thru attendants, and everything in between, will age out or begin to pass away in rising numbers.
As Millenials focus more on the digital and gig economies, trade jobs (plumbers, electricians, mechanics, etc) will begin to also struggle to keep up with hiring. Demand for these trade jobs will steadily rise as more tech-enabled or college-educated people continue to work from home but have no DIY skills to fix the issues of the homes they occupy.
Anti-immigrant sentiment will mix into anti-robot, anti-automation sentiment. The irony is these same people who boast anti-immigration and anti-automation will refuse jobs that pay Federal minimum wage locked to $7.25 for the majority of the United States. And these people will refuse to elect Politicians who pledge to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. With even more inconsistency, those that receive unemployment benefits because they say they can’t find a job will use a percentage of that money to buy things online — that uses mostly retail automation and robots. Or worse yet, those with unemployment will give their money to neighborhood retail establishments that care more about the retail stock price than the safety of their employees.
Quantum Needs A Commercialization Strategy
Miss. Quantum internet didn’t happen in 2021 because there is no synergy between researchers and industry. Imagine how far the World Wide Web would have stretched if Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist, in 1989 hadn’t made his research open.
The number one reason for Quantum internet not happening is the need for lots more quantum computers. And a second reason is that the current quantum computers might be the Betamax of quantum computers — as they are not compatible with a more revolutionary design — those that require flawed diamonds.
Flawed diamonds — atomic defects where carbon is replaced by nitrogen — could offer a close-to-perfect interface for quantum. The only issue is that these diamond nitrogen-vacancy centers, controlled via a magnetic field, are incompatible with existing quantum devices.
As for quantum teleportation, researchers from Europe and Asia have claimed quantum entanglement of a frozen tardigrades. Quantum entanglement occurs when subatomic particles interact with each other despite being apart from each other, a process Albert Einstein nicknamed “spooky action at a distance.”
The results have yet to be peer-reviewed.
Space Tourism Begins
Hit & miss. Space travel has reached a milestone when the Federal Aviation Administration announced it will soon no longer give out commercial astronaut wings due to the rise in the popularity of space tourism. Starting in 2022, people who reach space will be recognized only with their names on the FAA website.
Overall, 2021 has had 22 space tourists: four with SpaceX, four with Virgin Galactic, and fourteen with Blue Origin. This includes Virgin Galatic’s Sir Richard Branson, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, Star Trek’s William Shatner, and Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan. This does not include Russia’s film crew filming “Вызов” (“Challenge” in English). This follows the fictional story of a surgeon who is launched to the station to perform emergency surgery on a cosmonaut.
NASA is scheduled for an unmanned flight around the moon for February 2022 with its Orion spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis-1 mission.
And Elon Musk, who himself has not been to space but launched Starman in its Red Telsa Roadster in 2018, but Starman is embarking on its third orbit around the Sun in 2022.
No reason to use radiation-eating mushrooms just yet.
COVID Normalcy
One prognostication that goes without saying is regarding the pandemic. COVID won’t be going anywhere in 2022. But based on all previous pandemics, the third year is when a pandemic slowly tapers off. As I outlined in my article, “After The Curve Flattens” which I wrote in March 2020, it won’t be the pandemic that the world continues to fear, it will be the drastic culture change and people revolutions that pandemics always usher in. Examples such as -
- Black Death: 1347–1351 ushered in the Renaissance
- Spanish Flu: 1918–1920 ushered in Mahatma Gandhi and the Bolshevik Revolution
Some of 2022’s Future Highlights
As for 2022, creating the future will be about -
- Fusion Energy Becomes Attainable
- Metaverse Becomes Entangled with Quantum Computing
- Space Becomes A Dangerous Dump
Creating Artificial Suns
China already has its plan to start generating power by around 2040 with fusion energy. China has already spent around 6 billion yuan ($893 million) on a large doughnut-shaped installation known as a tokamak, which uses extremely high temperatures to boil hydrogen isotopes into a plasma, fusing them together and releasing energy.
Technology start-up CFS — which is backed by investors including Bill Gates, and fossil energy giants Eni and Equinor — said they successfully created a magnetic field of 20 tesla, the most powerful yet of its type using high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet technology that will sit at the heart of planned nuclear fusion systems.
Nuclear fusion is very different from its cousin, nuclear fission, with a promise to deliver unlimited zero-carbon energy by fusing atoms, a process free of the risks of fission, which splits atoms apart.
Fusion still remains difficult because of the physics involved and is the subject of a standing joke that “fusion will always be 40 years away”.
However, in 2022, advances and competition will speed up innovation in fusion energy. This includes the terabytes of data processed from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe that gets assessed, the insights on how the Sun works could be instrumental in helping humanity build a true ‘artificial sun’ on Earth. This could create attainability.
The Metaverse Begins
The seven layers outlined above for the Metaverse include -
- Experience is what we actually engage with: games, social experiences, live music, etc.
- Discovery is how people learn that an experience exists.
- The Creator Economy is everything that helps creators make and monetize things for the metaverse: design tools, animation systems, graphics tools, monetization technologies, etc.
- Spatial Computing refers to the software that brings objects into 3D, computing into objects in the world, and allowing us to interact with them. It includes 3D engines, gesture recognition, spatial mapping, and AI to support it.
- Decentralization is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group.
- Human Interface refers to the hardware that helps us access the metaverse — everything from mobile devices to VR headsets to future technologies like advanced haptics and smartglasses.
- Infrastructure is the semiconductors, material science, cloud computing, and telecommunications networks that make it possible to construct any of the higher layers. Some have even said the infrastructure of the metaverse would require quantum computing.
None of this takes into effect the psychological effects of the metaverse for us as humans and especially in children as I wrote about here.
But just focusing on the technology, the biggest obstacle to all of the seven layers above is having one monopoly control it all — such as Meta/Facebook.
But in 2022, two technology companies are hoping to build the metaverse first.
The video game industry is consolidating and everyone is chasing the “blue ocean”, a market strategy where competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are still being set. Simply said, everyone is still swimming to get to shore.
To achieve a metaverse future, Epic Games (creator of the Unreal Engine and Fortnite) is gobbling up digital studios left and right. Consolidation could be seen as the enemy of diversity. Does anyone remember the AOL/Time Warner merger and its failure?
Unity’s strategy is different. Unity is a cross-platform game engine and the company’s software powers millions of games, including 71% of the top 1,000 mobile apps and half of all PC and console games. More than 2.5 billion people play games with Unity, and perhaps 4–5 billion devices have Unity—powered software on them. So no need to gobble up studios, it simply needs to create the guardrails for what the metaverse should look like and allow developers to build it. That means it needs to wrestle the universe part away from Meta.
But that’s where quantum could come in. Quantum needs its own version of a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows entry-level developers a way to interact and connect — regardless if a developer understands what a qubit is. This could proliferate the need for quantum computers and quantum internet.
But quantum needs to be wary if it is to become the duct tape that connects the metaverse — as it doesn’t give rise to its own Adobe Flash. Adobe Flash became the go-to development tool for websites, games, and interactive media sites in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, Flash was euthanized by the tech community that helped create it because it was a permanent security risk. It wasn’t until an open letter by Steve Jobs discussing Adobe Flash and Google Chrome disabling Flash support by default that Adobe Flash was turned away from.
And its major issue — Adobe’s Flash products were 100% proprietary.
If the metaverse becomes 100% proprietary to one technology firm, it will die.
The metaverse will only flourish when it becomes part of an open community consortium. And if the metaverse becomes faster than Web3 thanks to quantum — it will truly become the new reality.
Space Is Trashed
In 2022, the first catastrophe with human deaths due to space debris will occur.
It’s not a prediction that I want to come true but Low Earth and Middle Earth Orbits are becoming increasingly crowded. Yes, Space is vast but Earth’s gravity plays on all things discarded at a mere 160 km (100 miles) from sea level.
And what will happen when the International Space Station impacts with space debris from shards of a Russian satellite that Russia destroyed itself? Will Russia account for the deaths of international astronauts? Would Russia re-compensate for billions of dollars of technology and research that become orbiting trash?
Would the US create a space mission to retrieve the frozen bodies of its dead astronauts left in space — to do a proper burial and prevent more damage by the frozen bodies impacting other satellites and spacecraft?
What if debris causes fatalities on a space tourism flight? Will the space tourism company sue a foreign country for its losses?
This type of catastrophe could result in a tit-for-tat space battle between the international community and the originator of the debris that could create a Kessler Syndrome — where Earth’s orbits are littered with debris where no human or automated spacecraft could pass. Humans would then look up at the Moon and realize humans will never leave their footprints on its surface again.
The private space sector needs to start creating plans to avert such a crisis. Private space needs to create technology now that becomes the garbage trucks in orbit — and it must be done quickly. Or else, the private space investment must be returned to Earth — and focus put on preventing global warming, pollution, and speeding up fusion energy.
“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.” — Albert Einstein
It only takes one space debris incident to prevent humans from ever calling another planet home. This wouldn’t just impact the year 2022, to quote Buzz Lightyear, it would be for “infinity and beyond.”
