It is this same age that bankrupted Kodak, a 170,000+ person company with a monopoly on the photo paper and development market. It is the same age that both brought extreme success and failure to Napster, Blockbuster, Gawker, MGM (the Lion roaring at the beginning of movies), Borders, and many more.
Although technology has entirely changed the industry (mostly for the good), it will continue to revolutionize the way education is obtained, and how markets will be developed.
Most technologies follow Moore's Law (meaning their power and affordability double every year). This has begun what will be known as the exponential industrial revolution. Digital cameras were invented in 1975, having only 10,000 pixels, but following Moore's Law eradicated film cameras in 26 years. The same can be seen for CD's, records, books, and many other obtainables.
With a little foresight, this exponential proliferation can be applied to our lives now. In our lifetime we will see 3D printing become not only mainstream, but more efficient than any other material production process. This will change agriculture, the car industry, space travel and maintenance, and many others.
Once we gain the computational abilities to analyze extremely large and complex mathematical models (like human emotion, economics, and others), artificial intelligence will proliferate. This year, IBM's Watson beat the world's best Go player, 10 years ahead of what experts thought. IBM's Watson is able to tackle law research better than most lawyers, and soon enough only specialists will remain to make the arguments and draft documents. Before we needed a large industry to sift documents, now, a computer can do the same job faster, more effectively, and cheaper than any human which is both good and bad news for lawyers. Watson is also diagnosing lung cancer and many other cancers up to 40% more accurately than human doctors and nurses, which could also prove detrimental to the job outlook for this industry also.
Not only will this change jobs that used to require lots of research and industries requiring a lot of manpower, artificial intelligence will change personal lives as well. We've already seen major advances in autonomous driving thanks to Tesla and Google. As this becomes safer, the car insurance industry will be effectively eradicated. As electric cars become more popular oil and gas companies will suffer greatly.
This will change work, too. If you have a car that drives for you, with a wifi connection, more people will be able to work while driving, which will completely change real estate. Cities will become more quiet with electric cars, and people will move further away to more beautiful escapes if they can still work.
Because of the demand, solar power is also an exponential technology, and will likely become cheap enough and mainstream enough in the next 15-20 years that it will also be destructive to coal companies, mining companies, and a whole sector of the economy devoted to energy.
Soon enough we'll have 3D scanning on our phones, and we will be 3D printing our shoes and clothes. Most entrepreneurs will have to give up on their dreams if it doesn't work with a phone, or another intelligent device. Smartphones could be available all over the world, and that would give anyone access to Khan Academy or the like.
Yes, the future holds many things for us, but one of them is not jobs, sadly. Hopefully it looks more like Aldous Huxley's "A Brave New World," and not The Matrix. At some point we could see robots replacing every job humans would have, and devote our lives to philosophy and other societal discussion forums.
Although many of this should excite humanity, there are many hurdles ahead, lots of protests, and probable violent conflict. Hope we make it through, because the exponential industrial revolution will prove to change life completely.
This is a summary of last year's Singularity University summit, more technological feats and fears will be discussed this year in late August.
