Whew! Where to start? I'm a historian (16th-century Europe), not a futurist. But when I see how people who know little about history project backwards it gives me an idea about how people who know little about the future (that is all of us) project forward.
The largest point is certainly right - many jobs will be eliminated. As information systems get smarter, there will be fewer and fewer jobs where humans reign supreme. I was once considered one of the premier French paleographers (reader of old manuscripts) in the world. Paleography is basically like solving the CAPTCHA from Hell. But as I told my students in this summer's seminar, I would expect that in 20-30 years computers will be better at paleography than humans. It's mostly a horsepower problem.
That said, his vision of a future only a couple of decades away is farcical.
Everyone interested in thinking about the future should read Stewart Brand's book "The Clock of the Long Now." One of the points he makes is that the primary utility of long-range forecasting is to identify present needs. The forecasts are always wrong because they always discount the 1 in a billion events. And yet, played out over billions of events over a hundred years, one of those 1 in a billion events that changes everything is bound to happen.
-- the general problem with the article --
The general problem is that people project current trends way out into the future. I see this a lot with non-historians thinking about the past. They think that because their parents familes were larger and their grandparents' families even larger, that in the distant past families were generally very large. It's simply not the case. The typical household in Renaissance Florence was 4 persons, including servants (see Herlihy and Klapish, Les Toscans et leurs familles). This "futurism" is a similar sort of project.
Stewart Brand illustrates the problem with a nice anecdote. In the 1980s, the Swedish navy received notice from the national forester that their trees were ready. Nobody in the navy knew, but in the 18th century, the navy had identified a key strategic problem that would cause Swedish military power to decline: an impending shortage of trees suitable for building masts. So the navy ordered the forester to plant a forest so that in 200 years they would still have trees to harvest for masts. Of course, 200 years later, masts had no strategic importance. However, old growth forest had a value all its own and Sweden now has an old growth forest thanks to long-term thinkers in the navy. That's what I mean about the utility of long-range planning being useful for setting current priorities. Huge trees had a value in 1785 and in 1985. The reason was totally different, but the long-range thinking allowed the value and the need to be identified. It did not, however, result in anything like an accurate picture of the future.
As to the details in the article...
Starting at the top....
Within two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food, and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores
Let's start with the obvious... In two decades....
-- "robots will drive our cars" --
The average age of a car on the road today is 11.4 years[1] and that number has been generally rising as cars last longer (remember when it was a feat to get 100K miles out of a car). If ALL new cars become robot-driven 8 years from now, that means that two decades from now at most half of the cars on the road will be robot-driven. Do I need to say that 8 years from now, few if any production cars will be robot-driven. Verdict: utter fantasy.
-- "unlimited energy" --
How about this quote: "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."
-- Lewis Strauss, 1954 [2]
When I was in high school 25 years later, we were seeing the fastest rise in energy prices in history, not free electricity. I did a term paper on nuclear fusion. From everything I read, nuclear fusion and crazy cheap electricity were two decades away.
I believe that "free" energy will always be two decades away. Energy, as a proportion of personal income, is astronomically cheaper today than it was in the past. According to one study, the cost of 1000 lumens in ancient Babylon was 58 hours of labor for a typical worker. The cost in 1992 for a 1000 lumens was equivalent to 0.00012 hours of work for a typical worker [3].
By historical measures, we have "almost unlimited energy"
today. Raise your hand if you feel that your energy costs are approaching zero and if a survey of geopolitics suggests that energy feels unlimited currently?
-- food --
Climate change is stressing all of our food systems and our food systems are feeding climate change. Beef in particular can't become "unlimited" if we are going to actually keep the planet from zinging past 10 degrees Farenheit. And looking at it from the other side, the best projections are for food production to decline. There are all sorts of inefficiencies in the food production and distributions systems, but I don't see unlimited food. We are likely, at some point, to see a falling planetary population and possibly planet-wide deflation as a result, but first we need to get over the "hump" in the form of African population explosion (European and North American and Japanese fertility have cratered already, South America and most of Asia are, I believe, slowing down, but Africa is poised for a population explosion if it ever gets past its political problems. If you've seen the Hans Rosling TED talks, we can guess that's coming.
-- clean water --
Read Cadillac Desert. America is pumping its aquifers dry. Most people don't realize that about half of the water used to grow food in the Great Plains is pumped from the ground, mostly from the Oglala Aquifer. That is a bank of water left over from the last Ice Age. The best data suggest we've used most of it up already. Is there another 20 years in there? Another 30? Similarly, the wells in the Central Valley of California are going dry. Many have gone dry this year. The drought is driving it because it's forcing people to pump more, but a few years of rain will not replenish ancient underground water. In other words, the drought has only accelerated the draw down. It's been many, many years since Californians were pulling water out at the replacement rate.
If energy becomes super cheap, then desalination becomes an option, but it's going to take a huge amount of energy to desalinate it and then pump it to eastern Colorado. If the energy prediction doesn't come true, we can guarantee the water one won't either. And if the water prediction doesn't come true, say goodbye to the food prediction.
-- advances in medicine will allow us to live longer lives --
That's probably true, though at the moment the current generation of kids in America is the first one in history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents due to preventable diseases related to obesity and sedentary lifestyle. But if it does come true, it exacerbates the food, water and energy problem. It will also divide the haves and the have-nots unless prices truly crash. We will need a lot more Theranos-style innovation for that to happen.
1.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ihs-automotive-average-age-car-20140609-story.html2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter3.
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6064.pdf - Table 1.4 (pp. 46-47).
