Conference Presentation, Keynote
Mobile Is Eating the World, 2016
- Smartphone adoption is projected to double from approximately 2.5 billion to 5 billion users within a two-year timeframe, approaching saturation of the global population.
- The mobile market is predicted to overtake personal computers, shifting focus from creation to deployment, scaling, and maturity while moving past platform wars into a phase of steady incremental improvement.
- Tech giants including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are expected to deepen their integration into fundamental layers of retail, content, and chip manufacturing.
- Industry strategy is transitioning from "mobile first" to "AI first," reorienting all efforts toward combining mobile with artificial intelligence.
- Machine learning is characterized as being at the onset of a creation phase marked by a frenzy of invention.
- A projected baseline of one billion high-end smartphones is expected to eliminate historical market constraints regarding device access.
- Computing interfaces are forecast to evolve by eliminating user prompts for drivers, passwords, or file locations, effectively removing the need for user input.
- E-commerce is expected to pivot from logistics optimization to solving demand generation and systematic product discovery.
- Imaging and machine learning systems are anticipated to autonomously determine user preferences and purchasing needs.
- The automotive sector is predicted to be destabilized by electric vehicles unbundling proprietary engines into commodity batteries and motors.
- Level 5 fully autonomous driving is estimated to be five to 10 years away, with a focus on the latter half of that range.
- Upon achieving Level 5 autonomy, strategic value is expected to shift from hardware components to network effects derived from driving data and 3D mapping.
- Widespread electric and autonomous vehicle adoption is expected to fundamentally alter cities by potentially eliminating parking and congestion, impacting housing, logistics, and commercial real estate.
- Predictions regarding specific societal outcomes are noted to involve unknowable second-order effects similar to historical precedents like the rise of Walmart or freeways.
- The notion that current society will remain unchanged is dismissed, with autonomous cars predicted to bring unpredictable changes for both positive and negative outcomes.