Thank you for tuning in to week 212 of the Lindahl Letter publication. A new edition arrives every Friday. This week the topic under consideration for the Lindahl Letter is, “The edge of realized technology.”
Welcome to the start of season 5. Don’t panic, we are still covering advancing technology including quantum, robotics, and artificial intelligence within the Lindahl Letter. I’ll be writing about the intersection of technology and modernity until the singularity. For better or worse, modernity’s shadow will continue to be the edge of realized technology. We are on the path to seeing a bunch of different technologies end up being realized in the not so distant future. That is why I’m so focused on the path toward realizing robotics, quantum, and agentic. That is where season 5 of the Lindahl Letter is going to pick up and start to dig into those topics at the edge of realized technology. To that end, I started to make a graphic of the timeline of major financial bubbles and extended it out to emerging technologies expected to deliver before 2045 [1]. You can modify the Python visualization code for this one if you want, I shared an executable version of it on GitHub.
Within that visualization I started to sketch out the next 10 most likely technologies we will see realized. Within each path toward realization is where private investment and ultimately retail investors will crowd into the market before it gets commoditized to the point where the initial leaders in the space have no first mover advantage and some type of bubble ensues. That does not mean these things won’t be game changing. I’m just expecting some type of financial crowding followed by pressure against expected profits that won’t be realized. Resulting from that would be some type of financial bubble which might very well be led by a huge windfall of some sort. People made money on tulips and pepper before those markets crashed out.
2026, “AI Bubble”, “Tech”
2028, “Metaverse and XR Bubble”, “Tech/Speculative”
2029, “Robotics Bubble”, “Tech”
2031, “Climate Tech Bubble”, “Climate Tech”
2032, “Space Economy Bubble”, “Space Economy”
2033, “Biotech and Longevity Bubble”, “Biotech/Longevity”
2034, “Synthetic Biology and Food Tech Bubble”, “Synthetic Bio/Food Tech”
2035, “Quantum Bubble”, “Tech”
2035, “Neurotech and BCI Bubble”, “Neurotech/BCI”
2040, “Fusion Energy Bubble”, “Energy”
These edges of technology realization might not be in the right order or tied exactly to the right year, but I do think that directionally this list will prove to be an accurate prediction of when technology will be achieved and we will see meaningful changes to modernity. Futurist considerations abound for what might end up happening. This was my swing at predicting what’s next. Only time will tell if it was an accurate swing or it will be disrupted by some other emerging technology.
Going forward you are going to see my weekly writing efforts get split into 4 distinct buckets. My general weekly think pieces will stay here within the relative safety of the standard Lindahl Letter publication, writing about civics, civility, and civil society will be over on the Civic Honors domain, blogging will be done within the Functional Journal, and my hope is to resume daily posting back over on the nels.ai domain. Ideally, enough content will be generated in the major domains that only a small amount of blogging will occur. Going forward it is far better to produce meaningful work than to complete passages of extended navel gazing. Sure being a reflective practitioner and blogging has its place, but sometimes all that writing about the process ends up being more circular than forward looking.
What’s next for the Lindahl Letter? New editions arrive every Friday. If you are still listening at this point and enjoyed this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend. If you are new to the Lindahl Letter, then please consider subscribing. Make sure to stay curious, stay informed, and enjoy the week ahead!
Links I’m sharing this week!
Footnotes:
[1] https://github.com/nelslindahlx/Data-Analysis/blob/master/TimelineofMajorFinancialBubbles.ipynb
