Into the unknown: Futurists predict what’s ahead for Las Vegas and the world

Monday, Jan. 11, 2016 | 2 a.m.

What does the future — say, 20 years down the line — hold for Las Vegas?

We asked the people who should know best: futurists, who study the future and make predictions about it based on current trends.

What their crystal balls show is a city that has been and will continue to be swept along by shifting tides, an apt metaphor given that the availability of water will play such a big a role in deciding the valley’s long-term fate.

Solutions rely on awareness

While some futurists envision a parched Las Vegas, water doesn’t have to be a limiting factor for Southern Nevada’s growth and development.

There’s no silver bullet to solve the West’s water woes, but experts say a combination of aggressive conservation, particularly in agriculture, coupled with tapping new and recycled water sources, offers a realistic path forward.

Las Vegas already has invested more than $1 billion in new intake and pumping facilities at Lake Mead and instituted conservation measures that cut water consumption by 23 percent, even as the valley’s population grew by half a million people. In April, Gov. Brian Sandoval created the Drought Forum, a panel of water experts, industry representatives and municipal officials, to recommend technologies and policy changes to mitigate the impacts of the ongoing drought. The panel’s initial suggestions included statewide water metering, tiered rate structures, crop covering and drip irrigation.

Other conservation possibilities that water experts tout include collecting overflow from storms, desalinization, limiting the use of water to cool power plants and treating agricultural and industrial wastewater to make it potable.

Predictions

By 2035, Clark County will be home to about 2.8 million thirsty people. Current water sources should be enough to supply the city until then, given continuing conservation efforts and assuming the drought is not a sign of things to come. After that, the county looks increasingly unsustainable.

Las Vegas has done a spectacular job of reducing its per-capita water consumption, now down about 30 percent from its peak. However, another study at UNLV estimates that conservation can keep the city going only until its population reaches about 2.6 million. Above that, there will be no margin for drought.

At 3.2 million people, the first dry spell will bring emergency water restrictions that will result in drastic reductions in farming throughout the region. Golfers will find themselves playing on sand or Astroturf.

— Owen Davies, executive editor of TechCastGlobal.com, a research-based forecasting corporation

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Population growth in the Las Vegas region will be the highest in the nation for about 10 years, as retirees and migrants choose Nevada and Arizona. The economy, however, will not grow as it has in the past and will steadily decline because unemployment will be a growing and persistent problem.

Besides water concerns limiting growth, declines in the growth of the gaming industry due to many factors, including technology and the growth of other gaming locations, will be a major factor negatively impacting the Las Vegas economy.

Health care, however, will be a growth industry, helping unskilled workers move to the next rung on the prosperity ladder. Who pays — government, private or a partnership of the two — will depend on how much further in debt the nation can go without lenders such as China pulling the plug on further loans.

— Barry Minkin, futurist, speaker and principal at Minkin Affiliates, a management consulting firm

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The ability of Las Vegas to grow depends on its ability to sustain a constant supply of water. Without access to an ever-increasing source of water, the cost of living will skyrocket, creating in essence three Las Vegases — one populated by the monied elite, another occupied by a declining flow of tourists and the third made up of workers whose stressed budgets will make living possible but not enjoyable.

Ironically, in a city whose identity has been shaped at will, the intractable issue of nature’s water cycle may be the critical wild card in the future.

Assuming for a moment — and I’m not comfortable with the assumption — that water is not an issue, Las Vegas will continue to gain population, especially in the Hispanic demographic. Looking forward 20 years, this Latinization of Las Vegas will come at a time when Hispanic social, political and economic power is at a historical high point.

— Ryan Mathews, futurist and CEO of Black Monk Consulting

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Las Vegas as we know it was the product of the cheap oil techno-industrial economy, which now is winding down. That economy represented the idea that there would always be more of everything: more wealth, more credit, more comfort, more profits, more progress. We now are facing an economic contraction that will continue as far ahead as we can forecast. The future will be defined by resource and capital scarcity, and no amount of wishing for technological rescue remedies will change that.

When it comes to the upscale leisure/vacation industry, fuggeddabowdit. We’ll be lucky if the global economy — i.e., a set of transient trade and banking relations — unwinds without a major war. In any case, the world is going to become a larger place again, and the major nations will retreat into their own regions. There already is a demographic shift underway in the Middle East and North Africa, with refugees flooding into Europe. Expect more desperate behavior in many other economically and politically unfavorable parts of the world, including China.

Before long, the human population will contract. The American public will struggle for subsistence, with many industries and occupations no longer in existence. The country could well break up into smaller autonomous regions. Economies will be centered on local agricultural production and activities that support it. The concepts of “upscale” and “vacation” will be obsolete.

— James Howard Kunstler, author and lecturer

The evolution of Las Vegas

By 2035, we project the population of the Las Vegas metropolitan statistical area will reach 3.2 million people, with a job base of 1.3 million workers. That’s a growth of 900,000 people and 500,000 jobs. We expect that by 2035, the Southern Nevada economy will be much more diversified than it is today with a few caveats: that the community be relentlessly pragmatic in what our competitive advantages are and what they aren’t; that adequate investments are made in needed physical infrastructure, especially water and transportation; that we have tax and regulatory structures that are conducive to economic development and investment; and that a healthy jobs-housing balance is maintained to protect commercially and industrially zoned land.

We believe that Southern Nevada will see a doubling of its manufacturing workforce from our 22,000 to about 45,000 and that health care will grow from around 86,000 jobs to 120,000 jobs. Many of the manufacturing jobs will support the hospitality industry, but we do believe we’ll see a notable amount of jobs in the alternative-energy sector and in robotics, including drones. On the medical front, the establishment of the UNLV Medical School and our ongoing efforts in the medical tourism arena will make us more competitive as a midsize health care hub.

Of course, the resort industry will be an important industry, but it won’t dominate like it does today.

And we will continue to grow as a midsized distribution hub if we take the necessary steps of protecting our industrial land base.

— John Restrepo, principal of RCG Economics in Las Vegas

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Since young people would much rather play fast-action, rapidly advancing video games, and gambling laws for slot machines and roulette tables haven’t changed much since the 1950s, look for casinos to build large video game tournament centers and allow people to bet on the action, similar to betting on college basketball. Major hotels throughout the city could be retrofitted into video game tournament centers, where every major title from “Call of Duty” to “Middle Earth,” “Bayonetta,” “Wolfenstein” and “Destiny” would have annual competitions. Las Vegas once again could reclaim its position, only this time with a new kind of gambling that appeals in a huge way to today’s young people.

Las Vegas will become the first city to operate an ET3-hyperloop super-high-speed tube transportation system. Both ET3 and Hyperloop are working on the next generation of transportation, where specially designed capsules are placed into sealed tubes and shot, much like rockets, to their destination. While high-speed trains are breaking the 300 mph speed barrier, tube transportation has the potential to make speeds of 4,000 mph a common everyday occurrence. A successful pilot project will lead to the first city-to-city project, and once successful, a rush to be next will ensue. A global consortium will be assembled to map out plans for international trunk lines, and individual countries will begin thinking through feeder line strategies to connect to the cross-continent central system. The city that takes the lead will quickly become home to a massive new multibillion-dollar industry.

— Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute and innovation editor of The Futurist magazine

Global predictions

There will be almost no poor countries in the world. Almost all countries will be lower-middle income or richer as residents learn from global neighbors and benefit from innovations such as new vaccines, better seeds and the digital revolution.

— Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft

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Traditional pharmaceuticals will be replaced by hyper-individualized medicines that are manufactured when they are ordered.

— Thomas Frey, executive director of the DaVinci Institute, a nonprofit futurist think tank in Colorado, and innovation editor of The Futurist magazine

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The world will have seen more than 2 billion jobs disappear, with most coming back in different industries. More than 50 percent will be structured as freelance projects rather than full-time jobs. More than 50 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will have disappeared, more than 50 percent of traditional colleges will have collapsed, and India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world.

— Thomas Frey

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The average person in the United States will have 4-plus packages a week delivered by flying drone.

— Thomas Frey

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The $225 trillion worldwide debt bubble will burst, and a global recession/depression will prevail.

— Gerald Celente, trend forecaster and publisher of Trends Journal

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Global carbon dioxide emissions will increase 43 percent. Most of the new energy consumption will come from China, India and other developing countries as they churn out steel, build more power plants and drive more cars.

— U.S. Energy Information Administration

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Religion will make a resurgence, with communities of faith growing by almost 50 percent.

— Thomas Frey

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Driving will be a hobby for Americans, and stop signs will be passé. Self-driving cars will optimize intersections so vehicles can pass safely without coming to a stop.

— Oren Etzioni, CEI of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Washington

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Computer helpers — less like Apple’s Siri and “more like Sherlock Holmes’ Watson: a super intelligent, knowledgeable and loyal assistant” — will be go-to tools for scientists and will revolutionize the field.

— Oren Etzioni

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Humans will be software hybrids powered by computers. Our brains will be able to connect directly to the cloud, and mind uploading will have been perfected. Thinking will involve a biological and nonbiological, and our brains will be able to be fully backed up.

— Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist and director of engineering at Google

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Computers will be smarter than humans. The number of transistors on a computer circuit will exceed the number of brain cells in a human, by a factor of almost 100.

— Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese telecommunications company