Real Estate Prices
As at least some parts of the world come out of their lockdowns
maybe we can go back to some sense of normality.
Fat chance. This mess will haunt us for
years, especially the market for real estate.
People unable to go to work can't afford to pay their rent.
They cant afford to pay their mortgage. The arrears start to
mount up.
Some of those people won't have a job to go back to, as I have
been trying to point out in my book on the future of life
after the insanity (How to Destroy the World & How to
Pay For it).
One thing is clear, there will be a slimming down on office
space. There will be a gradual, but massive, move to more
automation, and there will be a sharp rise in unemployment.
On top of this, the banks are in deep trouble, and mortgage
companies are going to be very careful about screening the
next batch of hopefuls.
With money tight and the banking system in trouble, property
prices are going to come down.
This decade, as I have been saying since it began, will be the
decade of massive change. If you think 2030 will be much like
2020 I think you will be surprised when it gets here.
There are already massive changes in medicine in the pipeline,
and that must be good news. But the robots are coming with a
vengeance. Will that be good news? It certainly will be for
me, but if you are relatively young and confined to a low paid
job that can be automated, you need to look out.
But it isn't just the low paid that are at risk. Certainly
lorry drivers will be going out of fashion. Conveyancing
solicitors will be queuing up at the labour exchange, and many
more jobs will be on the slide when blockchain businesses
start to take over.
The latest AIs are beating highly skilled people doing highly
skilled and critical work. The latest surprise was a recent
test set up by the US airforce. It pitted their best fighter
pilot against a machine in five mock dogfights. The machine
won all five contests.
The pilot had to admit that he couldn't adapt to the AI's
tactics anywhere quickly enough.
We are close to admitting that anything you can do an AI can
do better. We even have them writing computer manuals, and
they are definitely better than the average manual written by
humans. They can even write computer code, and some have been
given the task of writing stories.
I think rather a lot of people are going to have to start
thinking about what they are going to do when their jobs are
over-run by software that is a darn site smarter than they
are.
That day has already arrived. All it needs now, is a few years
to spread across the globe.
I hope you're prepared.