The TechStuff 2017 Predictions Report Card

matched up to what actually happened. And usually, if I'm being really generous, I get about fift right. Uh. But it's always fun to try and make those predictions. And sometimes you're making predictions you don't want to come true and you hope that you end up being wrong. There were a few of those in the seventeen predictions. We'll have to see whether they ended up being the ones

that turned out to be wrong or not. Last year I also had the good fortune to call upon some of my friends in the tech journalism space and they joined me for the show and gave me a prediction or two about what they thought was going to happen the following year. So we'll talk about what their predictions were as they, you know, came out through the show. So I'm gonna tackle this by order of the predictions we made in the episode, So we're not going chronologically

through seen again. We just did that, but instead we're going to look at these predictions and kind of try and guess how well they did. Uh So, the first prediction that I made was that we would see a lot of VR and a R everywhere at c e S. In fact, these first few predictions are all c e S related because c e S takes place in January every year. That's the Sumer Electronics Show. It's a big

trade show that happens in Las Vegas every year. And we were getting ready to go, and I was trying to think of the things that we're going to be a big deal at c e SEN, and I said that VR and a R would definitely be up there, and that was true. V R and a R were huge, huge types of technology, categories of technology that were on display at c e S. Although these days we tend to use the term mixed reality instead of just virtual

reality or augmented reality. However, would not see all of the products and concepts that were on display at c e S make it through to the end of the year. Some of those ended up fizzling out. For example, Intel came to c e S and showed off a cool mixed reality headset concept called Project Alloy. Though the implementation

needed some refinement, it was pretty big and clunky. It didn't create a smooth experience that people were hoping for either, because it was using a different metho, the doology for head tracking external head tracking. As it stands, Intel would end up shelving Project Alloy at some point over the summer of sev UH. It didn't really make the news initially. It was only afterwards that the company came forward and said it was having trouble finding partners interested in making

the device. So while they had developed the internal technology for Project Alloy, they were having trouble finding anyone that would actually produce the hardware. Now, part of this issue probably stemmed from the fact that Microsoft was launching its own mixed reality headset platform and they were attracting a lot of interest from various partners, and so all these companies that might have worked on Project Alloy were instead

kind of hitching their wagons to Microsoft. Intel continues to invest in technologies that either played directly or indirectly into mixed reality technology. So it's not all a loss. It's not like Intel got out of the game Intel early. They just said, well, Project Alloy as it stands doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I also said that there would be a lot of smart home and automation stuff on display at c e S, which is kind

of a no brainer. Some of these predictions, I admit are are kind of lame because anyone could have said this. It's like saying, if you jump into the ocean, you're gonna get wet. Well, the Internet of Things continued its journey into becoming part of everything we can imagine, whether you can make a good case for it to be

there or not. For example, Cara Stace loreal And with Things or We Things, if you prefer, partnered to create the Carras Stas Hair Coach hair brush, which sends information from the brush to a smart device like a smartphone or a tablet, to give you feedback on how well you're brushing your hair. I see no point in this, but then I have no hair, so brushes are sort

of not my bag to begin with. But other devices like coffee makers, connected displays, things like that, they fit more into what we come to expect from connected smart devices. So there was a mixture. There was stuff that we could see a practical application for right away, and other stuff that seemed more frivolous or just absurd. I also said that there would be a lot more driver less car technology on display at the e S Show, and that was for sure the case. Everyone seemed to have

connected cars, or autonomous cars, or both. Chrysler showed off an electric minivan with autonomous capabilities called the Portal Faraday Future, the automotive startup company that we talked about back in It still seems weird to say automotive startup company, although you could argue Tesla did the same thing. They showed off their FF nine one concept, and this one was a slightly less futuristic looking vehicle than their sports car

concept they showed off the year earlier. Still pretty sleek and sexy, just more in a utilitarian approach than sports car. The f f n one is supposed to be able to park itself, so it's semi autonomous. Toyota showed off a concept of a vehicle that would be able to monitor the conditions and moods of the people inside the car, dynamically adjusting conditions and even the route based on that feedback.

It could also take over if you wanted to, so that was another concept that had this semi autonomous approach. There seemed to be a lot of of concepts that would allow for human control and then handing off that control to a computer if you wanted to. I also said there'd be a lot more drone stuff at CS, and there were tons of them. One drone was the hover camera Passport, which can hold a position around you and take photos of you, just in case you wanted

some robo paparazzi treating you like a Hollywood superstar. I guess. There were tons of other flying drones from various manufacturers, many equipped with high definition cameras, and just a few years ago, just the cameras would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now you can find these style cameras on flying machines that you can control by remote control for less than a grand It's kind of crazy. These devices really serve as evidence of how an emerging technology

can become commonplace in just a few years. There was also an underwater drone called the power Vision power Ray that is a fish finder and a fish hunter all in one. It can carry baited lures and help you snag a fish. This drone is a tethered drone. It has to be connected to its power source, and that makes sense because it also helps prevent it from drifting

too far away and then sleeping with the fish. Ees I also said there'd be a lot of three sixty degree cameras, and there were quite a few of those on display at c e S. But this is also where things get a little confusing, because there's no real standardized format for three six cameras. In my mind, if you say three sixty camera, I think of a camera that's capable of taking an image in a three hundred sixty degree arc, so a full circle around the the

the axis of the photographer. In other words, it would be like if you were standing in a place, took a photo, turned to the right, took another photo, and just did like a panoramic photo in a full circle. That's what I think of a three sixty degree cameras. And then you would use some other device like a phone or a headset to view the image and you could turn around in place and see the complete image as you turn in a physical space. That's what I

think of. But some companies capture only on eight degrees of arc. Some are capable of capturing three D images, some are only two D. Some people refer to these as VR cameras. I don't really like that term. I don't think of it as VR. To me, virtual reality requires a computer generated environment. It needs to be a virtual environment, not just a video overlay. Otherwise I would argue any movie as a virtual reality film. Uh, grant it.

Typically you can control the point of view because you could turn your head and you can change the perspective you're looking at. But that's the extent of interactivity for most of these computers, and I don't really think of that as being true virtual reality. I feel like you have to be able to affect your environment in some way,

apart from just being able to change your perspective. Anyway, there were a ton of these at c E S. There was the views VR camera, the Hublo four K thirty frames per second three D video camera, the lucid Cam one degree three D personal camera, the Insta three sixty pro. The list goes on and on. There were just tons of them. There were drones with three degree camera capabilities. It was just really popular technology on the floor. I'm not really sure that that popularity has translated to

great commercial success. I don't know that there have been a run on these sort of cameras. I don't think they've received like huge sales figures. And I haven't seen very many implementations that managed to get beyond the sort of gimmicky feel for the technology. But it's very early, so it may be that someone is really working on a really cool implementation that's going to be the killer app. In other words, I did not predict all the voice activation stuff, however, and there was a lot of that

on the show floor as well. You could find voice activated assistants incorporated into tons of different products, particularly in the automotive sections of the show floor, and you could also find the technology incorporated into other gadgets, such as Amazon's Alexa being included as a feature on LGS smart instabuw refrigerator, so you can ask your refrigerator if it's running and until it jokes. I also didn't predict that smart watches would have a less prominent space at c S,

though I really should have seen that one coming. Smart Watches are a category that have never really taken off, with the possible exception of Apple's Watch, and there were some notable departures in the field the year before, particularly Pebble once it got a quired by Fitbit. But while smart watches were mostly a no show, fitness trackers were everywhere at CE seen and they continue to be really popular. And I like the concept of fitness trackers, but I

honestly wonder how viable the category is for growth. After all, I have a tracker that works just fine, so I don't anticipate needing to replace it for a while, even if another one comes out that has more features than mine has. Unless those features are just incredibly compelling, there's just not really any incentive on my part to upgrade. So my feel is that once you hit market saturation, where all the people who want one of these essentially

have one, your your market drives up. You don't really I mean, how do you sell another fitness tracker to someone who already has one unless they just happened to have this kind of obsessive collection mentality. But at CES it was clear that many companies feel strongly that we've not yet reached this point. Now we'll move out out of the ce S predictions into some of the other ones I did. I made this prediction about Apple. I said, the new iPhone will be a bigger and boulder departure

from the traditional design. I was thinking this because it was the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, so I thought, well, Apple is going to have to do something to set it apart, because this is you know, we we set great importance on these things like ten year marks. Even though you could argue that's just completely arbitrary, we make it very important. That being said, the tenth anniversary of tech stuff is coming up pretty soon, I'm going to

have to start thinking about that. Well, the prediction ended up being true in some ways. At least, Apple introduced two phones at the same time. In case you don't remember, there was the iPhone eight, which was more of an evolutionary product. It was kind of following in the same sort of design footsteps as its predecessors. And then there was the iPhone ten or iPhone X, which was a

more dramatic departure from earlier iPhone designs. Now as Apple says, quote, our vision has always been to create an iPhone that is entirely screen end quote. It's actually from the Apple Store, and the iPhone ten incorporates features like voice commands and facial recognition more than earlier iPhones, though the eight has a few of those features as well, and some of the differences between the eight and the ten once you

get past the screen are really not that dramatic. So while the physical design might be a bit of a departure, I don't think it's really that bold of a change in design. And while both phones have more powerful processors and even more impressive photography algorithms and processing abilities, I don't know that I would call this prediction a total win, because it wasn't quite as dramatic as I was hoping for.

I also said we'd get a sneak peek at Apple's autonomous car technology, which we did, but only because some people in San Francisco have snapped photos of it. It's not because of Apple. McAlister Higgins, who has worked on autonomous car technology for a while, referred to the images of the car as the thing. But the code name for Apple's project is called Project Tighten the Cars have these big roof mounted sensor arrays that are all cased

in white plastic. It's very typical Apple approach, but they are extremely bulky looking and conspicuous. They also seem to contain a ton of sensors, including six Linar sensors, which is a bit of overkill. Apple applied for and received a permit to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in California in according to anonymous sources, so take this with a grain of salt. Apple shifted its strategy from building an entirely new vehicle to developing software that will power

other manufacturers autonomous cars. So there's been no official sneak peak from the company yet, just people spying on it from AFAR and then taking photos and uploading them to various social networking sites. I also said that more states would create formalized rules for autonomous cars operating on state roads, which is true. In twenty states introduced self driving car legislation. In thirty three states had car legislation for autonomous cars there,

so we've seen more movement on that front. Twenty one states Georgia among them, have enacted that legislation. Others it's still kind of in the process of that. In addition, the US federal government is weighing in. On September twelve, two thousand seventeen, the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration released federal guidelines for automated driving systems. So that one

was correct. Yea. I said that Uber will test an autonomous car with no one in the driver's seat in a major market before the end of and I haven't found any reports of that actually happening. I think perhaps Uber's seventeen was so rough that it may have slowed

down their bullish adoption of driverless vehicle technolog GEZ. The company is still enthusiastically pursuing this technology, but perhaps with a bit less gusto than they were at the end of twenty six before all of their legal troubles began. Part of that may be due to a crash that happened in Arizona that put the brakes literally on their

self driving tests in Phoenix, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. Police later determined the crash was not the Uber vehicle's fault, it was the fault of the other driver, and Pittsburgh residents have since become less enchanted with Uber overtime as the company has seemingly failed to follow through on many of the promises it made. When the original negotiations were taking place to use Pittsburgh as a test city, there were all these different promises Uber was making that it

seems to not have made good on. For example, there were reports that Uber was beginning to charge money for driverless car trips, when initially the agreement was that all these test drives would be provided free of charge to passengers. So I have to call this one a miss, because as far as I could tell, there was no case where there was no one in the driver's seat. There was always an operator standing by from all the reports

I could find. Keeping in mind that I'm recording this December, so I still have a few days for that one to come true. Maybe I said that hyperlop tests would prove to be sound from an engineering perspective, but would find the real challenge to be in the economics of laying out a hyper loop, and this one I think I nailed pretty well. There were several tests of hyperloop

like technology in twenty seen. Most of them used mag lev methodologies magnetic levitation to provide for transportation pods to float above tracks. This is different from the original design Elon Musk had in mind, which was to use what he called air skis, which the transportation pods would expel air downward against the track and that would create lift, kind of like an uh air hockey table turned upside

down and juiced up a whole bunch. But we did see several examples of the hyperlop technology working, including a test that saw a pod accelerate to more than two hundred miles per hour. So this is still far below what Musk's design originally proposed. And as for economic challenges,

I wasn't the only person to suggest this. Timo matin in A, an engineer from Finland, and I apologize for completely butchering his name, conducted a study about the potential for hyperloop concluded that the billions of dollars that would be necessary to make a working system meant the project had a chance of success that hovered somewhere around six percent.

That being said, Hyperloop one held a round of funding in the fall of seventeen and raised another eighty five million dollars, so we haven't exactly hit that barrier just yet still, until we see a real construction project connecting two distant cities together the hyper It remains an interesting proposition, but still is a long shot in my opinion. Now I have a lot more predictions to talk about, but before I get into all of those, let's take a

quick break to thank our sponsor. So in that predictions episode in seen my friend I as actar, a guy who works for c net came on and he made a prediction. He said that Alphabet will get into wireless internet service in a big way in ten and I would say, who's mostly right about this? It's still pretty early days all things considered, but clearly the momentum at Google is in wireless service. Alphabet is the parent company for Google, so I often will use the two interchangeably.

We saw an early seventeen that the company began to downsize employees working in the Google Fiber division, and it was abundantly clear that the company was scaling way back on its plans to connect cities with fiber and compete against entrenched Internet service providers. For one thing, Google had to continuously fight with various regulations that gave preferential treatment to traditional I s p s for stuff like access

to utility polls. So it's hard to supply cable to customers if you're not allowed to access the existing infrastructure. And while Project five remains a phone plan alternative that you can use if you so wish, Google's push is much much bigger than that. Ours Technica reported in February seen that the then new wireless division in Google Fiber called web Pass, had put out a call for a

new general manager to head up the division. Web Pass was a gigabit wireless company that Google acquired in October. By June, Google had expanded web Pass into its seventh market by opening up for business in Seattle, Washington. Google Fiber the wired version continued to operate in the cities where it had already been deployed, and in San Antonio. Google even dropped the price of its gigabit wired service to fifty dollars a month, which was down from seventy

seventy dollars a month in all other markets. Now back to one of my predictions, I said that was going to be a make or break year for VR, and I said there'd probably be more VR experiences and amusement parks and arcade style businesses rather than at the home. For Right now, that seems to more or less be true, though it's not necessarily going to be the case moving forward. Hardware manufacturers are trying to bring costs down to make

detect more attractive to a larger user base. HTC cut two dollars off it's VR kit, and there are a lot more developers creating virtual experiences for that hardware to leverage. This includes some big name ports over into the VR experience, such as Skyrim. Complicating my judgment of this prediction is that neither HTC nor Oculus release sales figures, so it's hard to judge how well they're doing. Though by August, most analysts felt that neither brand had sold as many

as five hundred thousand units. Sony fared better in ten, claiming the companies sold nine hundred fifteen thousand units of the PlayStation VR, but that number hadn't increased by much over the following several months. According to tech Crunch, Sony's total units sold had topped at one million in June. So think of it this way. The hardware debuts in and sells nine fifteen thousand units, but then over the next half year fewer than a hundred thousand more units

move off store shelves. That is not a good story. Gardner, however, estimates that VR has made it through the hype cycle for emerging technologies. Now, the hype cycle, it looks like a very sharp inverted the trench. Actually it's more of a hill, right. So if you start the very far left of a hype cycle chart, you have a technology that's just beginning to emerge. Then people get excited about it, and it starts to follow this very sharp curb until

it gets to the peak of its hype cycle. Then starts to come down as people begin to get frustrated. Maybe they're waiting too long for the technology to get into their hands, or maybe the early builds of the technology don't measure up to what you imagined it would be, and so it sharply goes down the hype cycle until it hits a trough, uh the trough of disillusionment, and then slowly starts to climb out of that and becomes a more stable technology. Gardner says that VR has finally

done that, it's made that turn. Not everyone agrees with this. Some people think so, but not everybody. So maybe VR has made it out of the woods and we'll just see it get adopted more gradually. It has become an integral component of many different high end and not so high end amusement park experiences. So I was kinder right about this one. The next prediction came to us courtesy of Mr Tom Merritt, the host of the daily tech news show, or co host, I should say he and

Sarah Lane host that show. By the end of seen, he said, the combined number of subscribers to new over the Internet live television services will be the number three largest cable company, behind Comcast and Spectrum. In other words, it would be in front of cable Vision or what

was then called cable Vision Now. Variety reported in September that twenty two point to million adults in the United States had cut the chord on traditional television service, which was an increase from twenty six and that the number of people who have never subscribed to a traditional television provider service rose to thirty four point four million people, which was an increase of five point eight percent from the previous year. But that's not quite the same thing

as what Tom was saying. He was talking about internet live televisi services, something like YouTube TV or who lose live TV service well. According to Variety, again, virtual subscription TV services like those actually helped reverse, though only slightly, a decline in pay TV subscribers. So if you include the virtual subscription services, the number of people in the United States subscribing to pay TV actually grew by ninety

thousand in the third quarter of seventeen. This was a number that had been in decline, but once you take in these alternative methods and you factor those in, the numbers change. Considering this was eventually going to be a pretty major decline, It's it's kind of interesting, but it does not mean people stopped cutting the cord, uh, but rather some people are shifting their traditional pay TV services around, so they'll go from cable or satellite for their television

to these virtual services. According to the Nielsen Total Audience or for a Q two of which was the latest one I could get before this recording, nine million, three four thousand Americans get their television from broadcast and broadband access, meaning they're only using and antenna and or internet services to access traditional pay TV content. Cable Vision, which Tom said would be pushed to fourth place after Internet pay tv was acquired by Altice USA in seventeen and was

rebranded as Optimum. Now the subscriber number for Optimum is

two point four million. So even if we assume most of that approximately nine point four million broadcast and broadcamp Broadcom number from the Nielsen report, even if most of them do not use Internet for pay TV and they just get television over the air, there's still a really good chance that Tom was right on this one, that more than two point four million people are getting their television through the Internet, and thus pushing Optimum to the

fourth place in cable. If you look at satellite providers, it's different. Satellite has larger numbers, but if you look at actual cable service, it would mean that Optimum is fourth place. I then had another prediction, which was that we'd see a big increase in Internet of things devices that work with personal assistants like Alexa or Google's Assistant and that sort of thing, and that we would see a lot of growth in that area, which is true.

There have been tons of different products that have compatibility with those services built into them. Even so, I think this is just the beginning, and we'll see an explosion of this technology in ten But I suppose I should probably save that one for the actual Predictions episode. The next one came from Shannon Morse of Hack five Fame. I've had Shannon on the show a couple of times.

She said that Marai, the big butt net that attacked Internet of Things devices, would create big changes from manufacturers and spur on new conversations about Internet of things security and lead us to ask tough questions as well as developed some new monitoring software that will look for potential vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Well, we did see a lot more talk about network security and Internet of things security and the wacom aray, but golly, we sure

saw some high profile security breaches too. Now, to be fair, some of those happened a while back and we just weren't told about them until later. But while security remains an ongoing conversation, we still see reports of vulnerabilities either going unchecked or purposefully unreported. For example, and this isn't an Internet of things example. This is more of a computer based example. But the Wanna cry virus, which could have been way worse had it not been for one

security researchers discovery of an Internet kill switch. It was based off a Windows vulnerability that was known by the n s A, but the n s A had allegedly decided against making Microsoft aware of the vulnerability in order for them to create their own agency specific exploit. A second virus targeting the exact same vulnerability, called Petya, caused problems, mostly in the Ukraine later in then there were the data breaches Equifax, which affected more than a hundred million people,

and then there were the ones that hit uber. I don't think we'll ever go a year without some sort of data breach or system uh hijacking. Tech security is just it's tricky. You've got a lot of systems that change with various updates. Sometimes that creates unintentional consequences such as vulnerabilities, And you still have human beings in the picture, and and we are manipulatable goofuses at times. I think Shannon is right that we saw more conversations about security.

I'm not sure that they did much good. I don't know that the Internet of things devices of today, the general ones, are that much more secure than the ones we were talking about a year ago. But then again, there's no way to really know about all the attacks that didn't happen because people took the right action or companies put in the right systems. We don't know about the ones that failed because there's nothing newsworthy about that.

We only know about the ones that succeeded. So maybe she is right, and it's quite possible she is, but it's hard to say back to some of my amazingly astute predictions, such as Moore's law would become less of a factor and now it would be more about optimization rather than pushing hardware capabilities. Well. Greg Garrick, who works for arm, a company that makes microprocessors, told the E n T back in May, I do think we are

approaching the limits of conventional scaling with silicon. If you just did the math, you could convince yourself that cost per transistor scaling will soon stop, and you get pretty pessimistic about the industry's future. This actually helps illustrate that Moore's law is more about economics than anything else. You might be able to figure out a way to perpet wait Moore's law, but the cost of doing so would

be so high that it would not be profitable. It wouldn't make any sense to do it from an economic standpoint. So it's not just the technological barriers but also the economic ones. Now, there are some other strategies we can employ, such as using three dimensional processors, which will stack elements on top of each other and allow for shorter transmission distances between memory and processor. That could speed things up even if we slow down on creating incredibly small components.

According to Media Text chairman Psi mn Kai, we may have only two more generations of shrinking transistors before we hit a real wall via physics, and making smaller components is expensive, so there's the question on whether you can make a return on the investment to build transistors that are that small. We've seen a lot more movement in optimizing software so it runs more efficiently on the hardware we've created, but I think we're still holding onto this

dream of Moore's law for a little while longer. I also said, and more companies will move services to the cloud rather than having everything on local devices, which was kind of a no brainer. According to all the articles I could find, that's the case, and it looks like it's still the beginning of a bigger trend to offload stuff like computing and data storage tasks to other platforms.

According to Waterford Technologies of businesses are planning to increase their investment in cloud technologies, with a big and mid size companies planning to increase spend compared spending on that compared to only thirty of smaller firms. So still going strong. But this one was kind of a gimme. Alright, We're coming up to the last few predictions, but before I jump into those, let's take another quick break and thank

our sponsor. Our next prediction comes from Jason Howell, who is a host over at twit and Jason Howell says push back on social media and over sharing online would happen in and you'd start to see people back away from social networks in general. And keep in mind he made this prediction uh in the wake of the election, which had stirred up an awful lot of ugliness on all sides about fake news, about trolling, about abuse, and there were a lot of people who were kind of

getting sick of social networks at the time. But it seems like this hasn't quite shaken out the way Jason originally imagined. According to a few reports over the summer, there was a slight dip in Facebook's active users during the summer months, but according to most analysts, that's pretty typical for that time of year. It just kind of happens. There were no indications of an actual decline and active

users on a year over year basis. Twitter also saw a growth in teen, though not at the rates that they want. According to the Balance, Twitter added about nine million new users from twenty team to the second quarter of uh There have been a lot of criticisms directed at social media in general and Facebook and Twitter in particular, again in those areas of harassment and spreading false information, but it hasn't quite convinced people to abandon the format entirely.

My next prediction was that Twitter would have a very roughen unless someone would acquire it. It could be in danger of going away, which is probably a little more doom and gloom than it merited, but I wanted to make a big prediction. There was this ongoing problem with harassment on Twitter, which is really only grown worse depending upon who you ask. Whom you ask, it's it's pretty

pretty ugly. Twitter is still around, though it's not teetering yet, but there have been some developments that show cause for concern. Jessica Really, who had been with the company, for nine years, essentially the entire history of Twitter left the company in December. Seen Really was the head of corporate development over at Twitter and the lead in the company acquisition efforts that it had throughout the years, but Twitter didn't make a move to acquire any other companies in Seen at all.

Business Insider reported that Twitter's ad business is quote demand constrained into quote, which is business speak for advertisers aren't gonna pay us more to do stuff. The Business Insider article identified two areas of opportunity for Twitter. One was to create a better return on investment measurement for businesses so that they can see how their marketing dollars are paying off when they use Twitter. The other was to create better technology for smaller advertisers that can't depend upon

big departments that larger companies have. The article also stated that users are leaving Twitter, though that contradicts the other report I saw earlier. Then again, a net gain and Twitter users could just mean that more people around the world are getting access to the basic technology like smartphones that allow you to get access to Twitter. The Motley Fool has a cautiously optimistic outlook for Twitter, but acknowledges the company still has a tough road ahead. It remains unprofitable,

and the growth in users has slowed significantly. I said also that there will be new attempts to curtail fake news online, and we've seen efforts from Google, Twitter, and Facebook to combat the fake news issue. These haven't been uniformly successful. In fact, in recent events, there have been reports of fake news articles giving misleading information on these

platforms and even rising to prominence through their algorithms. This will likely be a continuing issue in ten but definitely true that major companies are working hard to push back against the flood of misinformation out there. Whether it will be enough remains to be seen. Also said that there will be more automation in and there would also, as a result, be more at the kits for a universal basic income concept because we would see automation take over

some jobs that traditionally would be held by people. The story about automation and its effect on the job market

continued throughout teen. Mckensey Global Institute issued a report that predicts that by automation could eliminate as many as seventy three million jobs in the United States alone, But the report also states that the economic growth that happens will create more than enough new jobs to accommodate existing workers as well as new ones, So the report did acknowledge that the nature of the work would change quite a bit. This poses an enormous challenge because how do you port

somebody over from one job to another. It's not like the same basic skill set can be applied to any type of job. Forrester Research predicts that in two thousand eighteen, AI automation will eliminate nine of US jobs, these jobs largely being in the white collar sector. That's the sector that has relatively been safe from automation until fairly recently, and according to their research, Forrester says that the automation will only create two percent growth in jobs, so a

nine percent loss and a two percent growth offset. As for universal basic income, the concept has received a ton of media attention in ten. The basic idea is that a government will provide a base amount of money to all of its citizens that are qualifying for such an program. Usually it's based on age and regardless of that citizens other sources of income. So let's just say for argument's sake that it's twenty tho dollars everyone would get the

same basic twenty dollars. There are numerous examples of studies on this idea throughout the world, and there's a lot of disagreement about whether or not it would work. Meanwhile, more folks are eyeing the robots warily. This is another story I expect will continue to evolve inen with more people calling for a serious discussion about universal basic income. And then Shannon Morris also had another prediction, actually, and

I talked with her. This was her technically her first prediction, but I played it second in the episode, and it was that net neutrality will have a big hit in seen like, it'll take a big step back and privacy protections will get stripped away to create a more surveillance state. Now, I also said that I thought net neutrality would suffer an enormous setback in as I mentioned earlier, I'm recording

this episode on December. On December, the f c C met to vote on whether or not to overturn the regulations that had been passed two years previously that classified internet broadband as a public utility and gave the FCC the authority to regulate the industry. And just as I thought, just as everybody thought anyone could predict it. It was not a secret. The vote came down to party lines, three for overturning, two against. So those rules are being overturned. Uh, Again,

not a surprise. This was pretty much guaranteed to happen from the very beginning of seventeen, which is why that prediction was so easy to make a year ago. It was. It would have been a shock for it to turn out any other way. There was a lot of drama

to that story too. Throughout. Uh. There there's an ongoing investigation into false comments that were left in support of overturning the rules, millions of them that were falsely filed, attributing those comments to people, some of whom are dead and obviously could not have commented on the issue at all. So there's still that story that's ongoing. There's also going to be some lawsuits that will be filed in the

wake of this decision, so it's not a done deal. However, Uh, you could easily argue that net neutrality did take a major setback in twenty seventeen, which is what Shannon and I were both saying, So we both get a big check mark next to that one. Although This was one of those cases where I think we both would have

really liked to have been wrong. I also said that we're going to see some big movements in renewable energy with Google trying to go on renewable, and there was also the upcoming Testla Solar City merger, which was absolutely correct. Google did hit on renewable in December. According to Box, Google uses as much electricity as all of San Francisco. Google purchased three giga watts of renewable energy capacity in order to hit this earlier stated goal of being powered

by renewable energy sources, although that's a little misleading. Google purchased renewable energy certificates, which are meant to guarantee a certain amount of renewable energy is allocated to something, but the actual electricity powering Google's operations may or may not come from renewable energy sources themselves. Google's purchasing certific it gets that represent renewable energy. That doesn't mean renewable energy

is actually powering all of these Google centers. Google's paying a bill so that it might sell that renewable energy back to the market somewhere else. And this might sound a bit like a giant shell game to you, because I know it does to me. But Google is retired, retiring these certificates, so they can't just be bought and traded without anyone, you know, actually relying on the renewable

energy it has to be used. Otherwise you would have these sheets of paper that would represent blocks of energy, but maybe no one's actually cashing it in, which seems really weird, like humans are bizarre. I don't get economics, guys, technology I barely have a grasp on. But I'll probably have to do a full episode on renewable energy certificates at some point and really explore how they work and whether it actually means companies are switching to environmentally friendly

energy sources or whether it's just smoke and mirrors. By the way, smoke and mirrors are not environmentally friendly. Well that's it. Those are all the predictions I made for and I did all right, I think better than many other years. But I want to try for to make some more specific outlandish predictions, things that will be easy for me to say, yes it happened or no, that totally did not happen when it comes time for me to review all of my predictions and say whether I

got it right or wrong. So in our next episode, I will lay out my predictions for and then after that I will go home for a long winter's nap. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover in on tech stuff, whether it's a technology, I should talk about, a company, a personality. Maybe there's someone you want me to interview or have on as a guest host. You should get in touch with me and let me know.

The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text Stuff h s W. We have an Instagram account also tech Stuff hs W, if you want to follow along and watch all the pretty pictures come in with various hilarious commentary. We also stream live every single podcast recording at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff.

Just go there. You can find the schedule. I record on Wednesdays and Friday's uh so keep an eye out for that. You can join me there be in the chat room, be part of the HOI POLLOI as we all hash out what this technology stuff means you and I will talk to you again about really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it has staff works dot Com wh