Wake up; tomorrow arrived last night!

If there is anything that rankles me in my part of the world, it is how we go about doing things as if the rest of the world waits for us. It is sad that in the 21st century, we still base the largest percentage of our fiscal projections on a product that is on its way to irrelevance in most parts of the world! All over the world, fossil fuels are being replaced with fervor and speed. Yet not one Naira is allocated to research into areas that would take us out of our monolithic economy. Value is migrating while we are stagnating. Tomorrow is upon us but we are still snoring!

A house divided: Why strike is not fully implemented in OAU

In December of 2016, France built a one-kilometre road made of solar panels, the first of a projection of 1,000 kilometres. The solar-panel roads will power public lighting in the cities where they are built. They will also have the capacity to charge electric vehicles driven on them!

In most parts of the world, very soon, mechanical auto repair shops will become history. An electrical vehicle has less than two hundred individual parts, compared to 20,000 for the gasoline engine.  Electric cars are usually sold with lifetime guarantees and are only repaired by dealers in facilities where a faulty electrical motor or battery can be replaced in less than twenty minutes! And these jobs will largely be handled by robots! Bye-bye to monthly tune-up visits to mechanic workshops!

Anyone in the auto-repair business who does not upgrade his skill will soon find his bed taken from under him and his bread and butter delivered to another.

We should expect that petrol stations will be replaced with electric charging stations. In fact, many electric cars come with solar panel roofs that recharge the vehicle on the go!

The Swedish car manufacturer, Volvo, is phasing out all internal combustion engines from 2019. This is while we are still basing our budget on $60/barrel world price of crude oil which, as I write, has fallen below $50/barrel! No matter what we do, oil will never become $100/barrel anymore. Not ever! OPEC meetings will soon become a perfunctory gathering to shake heads, not hands! Unfortunately, we only produce the crude but lack the capacity to refine even for our local consumption!

Who will need coal to generate power? More and more homes in the developed world are using alternative energy for supply of power. Who in the future, would care about drilling or prospecting for crude oil except to manufacture plastics and cosmetics?

We are already seeing the production of the autonomous car. Driven by several sensors, it is believed that accident rates will drop very drastically as the car, unless it malfunctions, is able to predict and sense danger and get out of harm’s way before a tragedy happens. These are not just better cars; they are computers on wheels! Most of the children being born today may never own a driver’s license because with an autonomous car, who needs a license to drive? Who needs to live in an expensive house in a part of the city just to be close to work to avoid long hours of commuting if he can begin his work in the car on his way to work?

As recently as 20 years ago, Kodak had 170,000 employees and 85 per cent of the market share of the photo market worldwide. Today, it is history, courtesy of executive inertia. The fate of Polaroid was no different from Kodak. With the advent of amateur photography facilitated by self-tutored photographers armed with smartphones that outperform some brand-name cameras, who knows which company is next. Yet, when it first showed up in the late seventies, digital photography boasted only 1.0 megapixels of camera resolution. People seemed to prefer to stick to their photo films. But through continuous improvement, even smartphones today do as high as 20 megapixels of camera resolution with an astounding capacity for handling low light conditions. With that, who needs heavy cameras?

The knowledge economy is evolving and taking over the development landscape worldwide. Nations are building smart cities where different types of electronic sensors and applications are used to gather and supply information which are then used to manage resources and assets in an efficient manner. Meanwhile we struggle to produce and distribute 7,000 megawatts of electricity (mostly gas-powered) for a population of 180 million people who require no less than 40,000 megawatts!

Artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing human, brute energy in the performance of several tasks. Some cars are now fitted with sensors that apply the brakes of a car automatically if the car gets too close to another object that poses any danger. How about cars that self-park even after the driver has disembarked? Equipment parts are now being produced using 3D print technology instead of an extensive, labour-intensive industrial process!

In the health sector, virtual theater technology that allows doctors from different parts of the world participate online via video in surgical processes has become a reality. In some cases, tumours can now be removed or stones in the kidney or gall bladder dissolved with laser rays without cutting a patient open! But here, we can hardly maintain ordinary x-ray machines in our public hospitals. Aside of several phone apps that can be used to get medical diagnosis, the Tricorder X is supposed to be released for public use shortly. Working with your smartphone, the Tricorder X can take your retina scan, your blood sample and you can breathe into it.  It then analyses 54 bio-markers that will identify nearly any disease in the body. This can help early detection of potentially deadly diseases before they become fatal.

Agriculture has moved from the hoe and cutlass style that our governments still promote. Processes are not only mechanized but higher yield/acre is the norm in many parts of the world. Hydroponic farming translates to the fact that even if there is no soil around you, you can still produce food! Drones are deployed to monitor developments on the farm or administer pesticides. While some of us are killing others just to preserve grazing routes, the rest of the world has turned to ranching and consequently produce better, more well-nourished cows with better and higher milk and healthy meat yield.

Disruptive technology will continue to challenge and upturn the way we have done or continue to do things. The world’s biggest hotel company, Airbnb, has no hotel. It is run purely online and makes more sales for hotels worldwide than walk-in customers!

It is possible to get legal advice on any matter online within seconds and with a higher degree of accuracy than you will get from human lawyers! What this portends for the future of a profession that is currently largely elitist and commands jugular-puncturing professional fees can only be imagined.

Unfortunately, the future is a fleeting visitor. It doesn’t stay in the same place for too long. If you want it, you must prepare for and move with it. If you don’t, it simply leaves you behind in the dustbin, or at best, the museum of history, the current home of dinosaurs!

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!