Future Technology 500

The Guardian has a good read concerning how future tech will change jobs in medicine, law and architecture.

Here are 3 of the key points:

• Medical computer diagnostics will take the place of some doctors for diagnosing common illnesses. Computers will be able to quickly cross reference millions of documents to come up with accurate diagnoses. Robotic surgeons will also play a bigger role in future medicine.
• Virtual courts will appear online for many forms of mundane legal cases such as traffic tickets. The traditional and current use of the courts is very inefficient and moving to an online system will save time and money for all parties involved.
• With access to cloud computing one-man architecture firms will become more prevalent and will architectural teams that collaborate among different continents.

Some people may think of Google X as the search bar that the Internet giant released on March 15, 2005and then rescinded a day later. And this was perhaps (or not) the first iteration of what has grown into a secret lab that is the modern day version of what Batman or perhaps even Maxwell Smart had at his disposal.

Forget the Smart Phone, Smart Car or Smart Home for a minute and think Smart Lab. According to the New York Times, “In a top-secret lab in an undisclosed Bay Area location where robots run free, the future is being imagined. It’s a place where your refrigerator could be connected to the Internet, so it could order groceries when they ran low. Your dinner plate could post to a social network what you’re eating. Your robot could go to the office while you stay home in your pajamas. And you could, perhaps, take an elevator to outer space.”

If you think this is far-fetched consider that earlier this year that Google came out with its own driverless car. The search giant is also the sponsor of the Google Lunar X-prize. Top scientists from Stanford and MIT are working on robotics, artificial intelligence and many other top secret projects that Google hopes will one day in the future pay off.

But, shareholders don’t like speculation and uncertainty. So Larry and Sergey are downplaying the secret lab by saying that this is only a very smart part of their business and that they spend most of their resources on their core search business. Exactly as one would expect. Wink, wink, nod, nod.