Good News for 2023

 Shopping Season 2022

Why 2023 is going to be great!

There are 8 million year-end retrospective and look back/look forward blog posts in the naked internet.

This is one of them.

(If you got that reference...sorry, you're old, too.)

Also, BAH HUMBUG IS IT SPRING YET?!?!?! (New England is not the worst place to experience winter, but it's not the best, either. We're beloved for our fall season, which is why I tolerate this place. Anyway...)
Here's a look at recent events that for me, form an obnoxiously optimistic view of how 2023 will turn out. 

Here are my predictions:

1. A Cure For Cancer

Wait, what?! Yes, you read that correctly.

Silly me, grumbling about CRISPR and thinking "Well, that might not turn out too well." Guess what? Genetic modification and editing is doing more than curbing world hunger and maybe kicking climate change in the butt - it has cured persons with cancer, and will no doubt cure more.

Who's next?! Alzheimers', strokes, HIV?! The sky is the limit.

And speaking of climate change:

2. Fossil Fuels are Much Closer to Obsolete

Nuclear fusion looks to be our last source for mass production of electricity.

It's a good thing, too, because giant batteries are now powering not just buildings and cars, but soon, planes, trains, and ships of every size. We're going to need a bigger charger...and now we have one!

(That's the last old timey pop reference, I hope.)

3. AI Is Coming For Your White Collar Job, too

OK, this one is a glass at 50% capacity item. But here's why things like Chat GPT is good: it eliminates the heavy lifting on everything from writing business correspondence to writing code and everything in between. We already create apps with one line in a terminal, and use UX tools like Figma or XD (for you Adobe fans) to generate the code. And now, if some particular task stumps you - say, retrieving data from the API and displaying it as a grid in your app - just tell Chat GPT to write the code in the language you're developing in, and presto! Want unit testing with that?

The implications for teaching are massive, too. I just completed a college algebra course at Arizona State University online (thanks, Uber! They're paying the smart drivers to retrain, you see...) It was entirely automated - receive instructions, solve problems. I almost never spoke to an instructor. I sometimes forgot the textbook was there - but it was, also online, with video explainers. And Khan Academy in another browser with supplemental learning. 

Have you used Leetcode? Yes, of course you can also do this with programming. Or chemistry - that would have saved those kids at NYU a lot of headaches... Or what other subjects?!

Or law?! ... actually, that's obviously where the line may end up drawn... 

Speaking of which:

4. Non-violent crime at an all time low, violent crime sure to follow

This will surprise anyone who just survived this year's USA election brouhaha. Republicans would love for you timid suburbanites to believe that it's 1981 all over again and the big cities of America are flaming war zones.

Yeah, no. Aside from the inevitable results of overcrowding and inflated cost of life that are par the course of urban living, no, crime is not spiking. Ask someone who lives there - or at least works there - and they'll tell you.

And it is at it's lowest rate historically. After all, why rob convenience stores and risk getting shot or beaten, when you can just set up a spam "business" and find suckers all over the English speaking world (and beyond, if you're bilingual) to soak? Not to mention former felonies like trading in marijuana or prostitution are fully legal in a growing number of states and countries, so...

And since violent crime tends to be "business" related, it stands to reason that less street crime will lead to less violence. And other things they don't want to discuss on cable TV "news".

In short, utopia is here if you want it.

Here's Why That's Bad For Joe Biden
(LOL)

The destruction of our economy is going to be unsettling. Are we ready to switch from almost global employment to almost global unemployment?!

I touched a bit on it above, but that's the tip of a big iceberg. Let's break this down:

Fighting climate change has always had one big problem - basically, how do you make the fat cats richer and fatter fighting climate change? Not to mention get the rabble off the street and in "good paying" jobs (context of cost of living never seems to matter in these discussions, does it?)
Well, nuclear fusion reactors are going to need massive amounts of manpower to build, run, maintain, and keep safe from exploding or something.

Just waiting with Anita for the conspiracy theories to roll in from the internet

Solar panels are already a booming local business, if only to funnel the electricity your roof harvests into the grid, which makes the grid barons richer while saving you 5 cents on the dollar off your utilities bill. Going off the grid is a big challenge for the less wealthy environmentalist, but it does happen.

For a while, we're still going to need solar panels. They now fit on the roof of electric cars, which is *chef's kiss*. Park outside and get free charging forever!

And solar windows. I mean...

All this stuff should be made here and not in China. We mine the lithium here, so make the batteries here. And the vehicles of every size as well. Jobs! 

But cities are going to have a problem when the coding jobs that seem to power 100% of the local economy dry up. Why should I, an overpaid and insecure CEO, pay these clowns 6 figures each to auto-generate code and paste it into the app? Why can't I just hire a office person to do that and pay them half what I pay a senior dev?
Layoffs will be rampant! Restaurants and cafes will empty out, theaters and art galleries will be abandoned! Meanwhile, outages and bugs will slow the internet to a crawl while the money people try to figure out why everyone is angry at them for the shitty performance of their apps. 

Time to hire some offshores for a day's work! That'll fix the problem! And we'll have lots of offshore workers as electricity - and with it, the internet - reaches every corner of the globe...

It will be hard on every kind of contractor and freelancer as well - you now have to fight not just the competition (not to mention insufferable clients and deadbeats) but an AI borg eating your work and spitting it out into the digital ether for chump change. Why should anyone buy your painting to put on their book cover, when they can make one with a command to Midjourney or Stable Diffusion and save literally hundreds of dollars?! (when they're not making porny renditions of classical art, that is...)

So AI is not entirely great.

BTW, I fibbed before. It's not actually coding that's 100% of your city's economy.

It's health care.

And curable diseases and treatable disabilities finally being treated is going to have the side effect of millions of jobs going away. Chemo? Substandard nursing homes and long-term care facilities? Home care aides for the demented? Those "cancer kids" hospitals?! The resulting unemployment is going to be devastating. Not to mention a catastrophic bust in revenue currently being siphoned out of the families of our society's weakest.

Meanwhile, millions of formerly sick and feeble people are going to re-enter society, which will be interesting.
Where will they live? How will they get food and staples to live? Can they work? What quality of life will they have?
Because we have such a great track record of taking care of our weakest citizens....

OK, so it's not all sunshine and flowers and hot sex with hot people. 

But is destroying cancer, Alzheimers', climate change, and global malnutrition of the mind and body worth suffering all these problems?

I think it is.

Have a great New Years'.