Technology

Predictions: What Earth Will Be Like 100 Years in the Future

Published

8 years ago

August 16, 2016

Jeff Desjardins

Predicting the future can be a fool’s errand.

Need proof? Just look at our previous post showing a timeline of failed tech predictions by some of the biggest names in business, academia, and technology over the last two centuries.

Experts not only get it wrong – they get it embarrassingly wrong.

The Earth 100 Years in the Future

So why predict the future? Because it’s fun and it helps us critically think about how to take advantage of future investment and business opportunities.

In the case of today’s infographic from Futurism, the predictions are courtesy of a team of “futurists, architects, technological forecasters, and sociological soothsayers” that were hired by Samsung to look at what life may be like in the year 2116.

We’re happy that we’re not on the hook for any of these.

Predictions: What the Earth Will Be Like 100 Years in the Future

The full publication containing all predictions can be found here.

The types of predictions fall into three main categories:

Future Living
The report predicts that homes of the future will be be 3D-printed by swarms of drones, and that cities will take completely different shapes than what we are used to. Cities in the future will use stronger materials such as carbon nanotubes that will allow us to build skyscrapers that are unlike anything we’ve seen. On land they will be taller and stronger, but we will also be able to build cities underwater and underground, or in arcologies (architectural ecologies) that will dwarf today’s tallest structures.

Science and Research
The fusion of humans and machines will blur the lines of what is human and what is not.

(As a side note: Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that we have no option but to do this. He says that by 2045 “the pace of change will be so astonishingly quick that we won’t be able to keep up, unless we enhance our own intelligence by merging with the intelligent machines we are creating”.)

Medicine and Aging
In 100 years, much of healthcare will take place in our own homes. Walk-in medical capsules or pods capable of multispectral scanning will constantly assess our bodies for disease or damage.

Leisure and Travel
There will be a rise of a “nomadic and rootless” culture as private sub-orbital spaceflight blurs the lines between nations. 3D-printed homes may be folded up and moved to new locations.

Space Travel
Humans will become an multiplanetary species, using new propulsion technology to explore the solar system with manned flight.

Related Topics:tech predictions future 100 years kurzweil

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Technology

Ranked: Semiconductor Companies by Industry Revenue Share

Nvidia is coming for Intel’s crown. Samsung is losing ground. AI is transforming the space. We break down revenue for semiconductor companies.

Published

1 week ago

April 9, 2024

Pallavi Rao

A cropped pie chart showing the biggest semiconductor companies by the percentage share of the industry’s revenues in 2023.

Semiconductor Companies by Industry Revenue Share

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on Apple or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Did you know that some computer chips are now retailing for the price of a new BMW?

As computers invade nearly every sphere of life, so too have the chips that power them, raising the revenues of the businesses dedicated to designing them.

But how did various chipmakers measure against each other last year?

We rank the biggest semiconductor companies by their percentage share of the industry’s revenues in 2023, using data from Omdia research.

Which Chip Company Made the Most Money in 2023?

Market leader and industry-defining veteran Intel still holds the crown for the most revenue in the sector, crossing $50 billion in 2023, or 10% of the broader industry’s topline.

All is not well at Intel, however, with the company’s stock price down over 20% year-to-date after it revealed billion-dollar losses in its foundry business.

Rank	Company	2023 Revenue	% of Industry Revenue
1	Intel	$51B	9.4%
2	NVIDIA	$49B	9.0%
3	Samsung Electronics	$44B	8.1%
4	Qualcomm	$31B	5.7%
5	Broadcom	$28B	5.2%
6	SK Hynix	$24B	4.4%
7	AMD	$22B	4.1%
8	Apple	$19B	3.4%
9	Infineon Tech	$17B	3.2%
10	STMicroelectronics	$17B	3.2%
11	Texas Instruments	$17B	3.1%
12	Micron Technology	$16B	2.9%
13	MediaTek	$14B	2.6%
14	NXP	$13B	2.4%
15	Analog Devices	$12B	2.2%
16	Renesas Electronics Corporation	$11B	1.9%
17	Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corporation	$10B	1.9%
18	Microchip Technology	$8B	1.5%
19	Onsemi	$8B	1.4%
20	KIOXIA Corporation	$7B	1.3%
N/A	Others	$126B	23.2%
N/A	Total	$545B	100%

Note: Figures are rounded. Totals and percentages may not sum to 100.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is very close to overtaking Intel, after declaring $49 billion of topline revenue for 2023. This is more than double its 2022 revenue ($21 billion), increasing its share of industry revenues to 9%.

Nvidia’s meteoric rise has gotten a huge thumbs-up from investors. It became a trillion dollar stock last year, and broke the single-day gain record for market capitalization this year.

Other chipmakers haven’t been as successful. Out of the top 20 semiconductor companies by revenue, 12 did not match their 2022 revenues, including big names like Intel, Samsung, and AMD.

The Many Different Types of Chipmakers

All of these companies may belong to the same industry, but they don’t focus on the same niche.

According to Investopedia, there are four major types of chips, depending on their functionality: microprocessors, memory chips, standard chips, and complex systems on a chip.

Nvidia’s core business was once GPUs for computers (graphics processing units), but in recent years this has drastically shifted towards microprocessors for analytics and AI.

These specialized chips seem to be where the majority of growth is occurring within the sector. For example, companies that are largely in the memory segment—Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology—saw peak revenues in the mid-2010s.