Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
2020's version of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681
1. Still no level 4/5 autonomous cars anywhere in sight. The promise of being "just around the corner" fizzles down and people just forget the hype.
2. Same with AI. The panacea hype dies down. No AGI at all. No major job losses due to AI automation.
3. Facebook (the SN) still exists but ages along with it's current user base. i.e it's the "old people's" SN. Facebook (the company) is still going strong, with either Instagram or one of it's acquisitions being the current "hip" SN.
4. Google still dominates search and email but losses value and "glory" compared to today.
5. Majority of people still don't care about privacy.
6. But a small yet growing culture of "offliners" becomes mainstream. Being offline is the new "Yoga" and allows bragging rights.
7. Increase in adoption of non-scientific beliefs such as astrology/anti-vaxx/religion/flat-earth as a counterbalance to the increased complexity of everyday life.
8. Web development matures and a "standard" stack is accepted, all in JS.
9. Global carbon emissions are not reduced, mostly because of lack of initiative by China and 3rd world countries.
10. Still no hoverboards.
- It becomes possible to literally program humans to do whatever you want them to do. Python is the chosen language but a lack of type safety results in an error that wipes out half of humanity.
- We colonize mars but by choosing only the best and brightest to go, we accidentally create a eugenics program that results in the inevitable conquest of earth by the martians.
- SpaceX is bought by Pornhub as it's discovered that the most effective way to blanket the world in pornography is to do it from space.
- Incels are prescribed virtual girlfriend therapy to provide them company and acclimate them to interactions with the opposite gender. Black market hacks transform them into anime waifus.
- AGI happens and is immediately outlawed as its attempts to solve world peace are inconvenient to the military industrial complex
- Illegal genetic engineering results in actual furries.
- Assassination by drone becomes so effective that no world leaders are seen in the outside from 2025. A vitamin D deficiency kills at least one of them.
- Potemkin jobs abound in a world that doesn't require humans to work to produce anything but needs to keep them busy to stop them complaining about stuff.
- In a last ditch attempt to save the earth from catastrophic climate change, the governments of the world finally join forces to build huge geo-engineering structures to capture carbon from the atmosphere. They're nuked from orbit by the newly formed Garden Kingdom of Siberia.
- The trend toward "authenticity" still ramping up in 2020 hits full swing, and commercial entities follow suit. Any announced commercial speech is viewed with distrust, while meme tweets are celebrated as "real." Corporate messaging becomes indistinguishable from random chatter on social networks.
- Advances in ML/text bots automate this process, and the random chatter on social sites like Reddit and Tumblr becomes a wasteland of pretty-good bots trying to steer conversations in a sponsored direction.
- Platforms are created for managing brand campaigns across even larger numbers of ever-smaller influencers. Anyone with more than 1k followers on Insta or Snap can sign up to be micro-compensated for brand mentions both online and in person at parties and such. Smartphones are used to track who is where with who and who is saying what, in order to measure these mentions.
- Influencing becomes an accepted career path, and classes appear in higher education on managing your personal brand, identifying which major brands fit with your personal brand, and building a portfolio of commercial brands that identify you like a unique fingerprint. This is blended with graphic design study to create your personal visual fingerprint/brand identity including logo, color scheme, and accessory items like a particular type of flower. It will be called "Personal Marketing" or something and hundreds of thousands of students will flock to the courses. Every public space, whether park, footpath, flower garden, or grocery store, will be filled with hundreds, possibly thousands of young people simultaneously recording selfie videos for their followers or class projects.
- The line between commercially sponsored speech and original speech becomes almost fully blurred.
- The line between brand preference and personal identity disappears. By 2030 the average consumer's daily life is centered around brand experience.
2. China will undergo a major recession, as manufacturing moves to Africa and US maintains its trade war with China across Govts.
3. The best performing stock will be a meat substitute company
4. VR will take off big time. Concerns about VR porn being too realistic will be raised in serious circles.
5. Intel will continue its downfall, and a new Chinese SOC company will rise to prominence
6. Water desalination will become a major industry
7. Towards the end of the decade, Nuclear power will begin picking up again
8. Canadian economy will start flourishing with improvement in weather, massive skilled immigration and the establishment of new Arctic ports. Also, Toronto/Montreal will become the Silicon valley of Canada, as skilled immigrants move to the Canada knowing they will never get greencards in the US.
9. Messi will move to the MLS at 36, and usher in an era of Soccer to the US, slowly eating into college football's popularity.
10. Cargo pants will become popular again.
2. Psychidelics will again enter the public sphere and we will see phychidelic therapy in the UK/US. They will also lead the development of a new theory of the mind and consiousness that enter the mainstream.
3. Plant/fungus based food will continue to expand while meat consumption drops. Lab grown meat will prove possible.
4. Ai in healthcare will allow for decentralised expertise. The role and power of nurses will expand.
5. Analog computing with neuromorphic chips along with reinforcement learning will be used in robotic control.
6. Drones will be a common site in city airspace.
7. Apple will enter healthcare in a big way. Medical functionality will enter consumer electronics and continue to push data driven preventative heathcare foreward.
8. Antibiotic resistance will be a huge problem. We will continue to see the return of illnesses we thought we would never see again.
9. Robots will allow smaller plots of land to be productive and agriculture will move away from mega farms. Local farmers markets will become more popular and accessable.
10. Ai agents will continue to compete against and dominate humans but will inhabit a physical shell to even the input playing ground.
11. Cannabis will be legalised federally in the US and UK. Most medical benefits will prove to be hype.
12. Joe Rogan will host a presidential debate.
2. Self-driving cars will arrive, but as a niche product for senior communities. (Like Google's slow bubble car.)
3. Amazon will finally get robotic picking working, and their warehouse employment will start to drop.
4. Somebody will build a 3nm fab, but it won't be a mainstream technology due to cost.
5. Big recession in US. House prices drop. San Francisco empties out again, like 2001 and 2008.
6. No major breakthrough in battery technology, but battery cost drops at least 50% due to volume increases.
7. New space probes to Luna and Mars, maybe Venus and Europa, but no manned activity beyond low earth orbit.
8. Artificial meat takes off in a big way, especially in China.
9. Parts of India become too hot to be inhabitable. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands. Fires in Australasia become a huge problem. California spends enough money to deal with its fires.
10. VC funds as a class lose money over the decade.
1. Electric cars will go from niche for the rich to something for everyone.
2. Genetic testing will become even more commonplace and even more useful.
3. ipv6 will become dominant, but there may be holdouts.
4. Freezing your sperm / eggs / stem cells will become something everyone does.
5. Using a non-memory-safe language for servers will be seen as building SQL queries with string concatenation.
6. Self driving cars are currently only very narrowly available: I think it's like 1-3 cities with good climate (https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driv...) They will be more available than they are now, and it will have effects on the economy.
7. Containerization is adopted by companies that are a bit behind the curve.
8. Parallelism will keep becoming more important.
Other predictions, less certain:
1. Political polarization increases in the west.
2. There will be startups taking a crack at the real estate market. They will attack cost of construction by using robots and standardized components. They will attack land cost by artificially engineering the network effects that gives land value.
3. Use of force in the form of sanctions against countries that release too much CO2
4. A significant minority skewing intelligent leave facestagram and twitter for decentralized platforms, but the majority of users stay on centralized platforms.
2. ICE vehicles are quaint. New electric vehicles sold overtakes ICE vehicles sometime around 2027 - 2029.
3. Autonomous vehicles L4/L5 are still 'just around the corner'
4. Ubiquitous Gigabit wifi/cellular/sat data across most of the world.
5. Masses still don't care about privacy.
6. Not much change in top tech companies - FAANG still around and maintain their leadership in tech domains as of now for the most part.
7. Android has been replaced with Fuchsia with Fuchsia being able to run APKs built for android. Phone apps are mostly a combination of WASM apps with native UI. Most non-tech people are unaware as usual.
8. Atleast a couple of cities in the world come to the brink of disaster/or become unlivable due to climate change (most likely in India/China). At least one major war due to climate change.
9. Workloads are all massively parallelized; low end desktop cpu parts start with 32 cores.
10. WASM adoption skyrockets. In 2030, OS is almost immaterial since most of the core functionality is provided by WASM payloads; OS is only used to paint native UIs (for which there still isn't a good cross platform solution)
11. Deepfakes are ubiquitous; Audio/Video evidence is no longer accepted; A lot of companies pour money into creating verfiably unmodified video/audio - but it isn't solved yet.
* Rise of the EU as global superpower with European army taking over all functions of NATO except strategic defense (nuclear/space). All European countries except ex-USSR and England but including Scotland are members of EU.
* Rise of Africa as a big consumer market. Green belt finished, major improvements in agriculture and infrastructure help to combat famine. Ethiopia replaces South Africa as economic leader on the continent.
* Green wave in India: environmental topics in the spotlight of political life, but no significant change yet. Pollution will continue killing millions every year.
* Political stagnation in USA, green new deal won’t happen, but coastal states will drive the progress.
* Environmental standards are mentioned in all trade deals, but not yet enforced with sanctions.
Technology:
* Digital is no longer the field where most of the interesting things will happen. No quantum computing on mass-market, heavy regulation of the Internet everywhere with prohibitive costs for new startups.
* Proteins from plants, bacteria and insects will see same growth as solar and wind in 2010s. Agriculture and diets is the new IT.
* Solar and wind are big but not dominant, hidden costs become visible. There will be no nuclear renaissance. No breakthrough in fusion. Energy becomes hard again, focus shifts from generation and storage to transmission.
* Self-driving cars won’t be on the roads yet, but there will be almost no cars in European and Chinese cities. AI will run public transportation grid.
* Significant progress in recycling and cleaning the oceans from plastic. Europe, USA and China will remove more plastic from water than put there.
* Steady progress in space technology but no sci-fi level achievements. SpaceX will see some competition in reusable rockets. People will return to the Moon.
My apartment overlooks a city of 1 million people in the UK - I estimate generously that 50,000 of them are economically productive in the sense of producing something of value that can be 'exported' from this city. The other 950,000 must live off that value - it doesn't make sense. All factories are flattened to make way for apartments. Any industrial development is of distribution centres for breaking down pallets of imported tat.
I don't know what this will lead to - perhaps it's the collapse of the Euro, the rise of some stable currency that isn't playing this game, or an opportunity for a new currency (crypto or something that we don't have yet).
Just as the LIBOR scandal revealed that commercial banks were just making up numbers, so I believe that central banks are doing the same with each other and trust will need to be removed from the system.
- traditional higher ed becomes increasingly irrelevant. A degree is still prized, especially as a way out of blue collar work, but it will be even more disconnected from one’s actual job.
- The higher ed space sees interesting new experiments with new models of tenure, teaching and delivery.
- Amazon figures out how to make online shopping suck significantly less
- samples collected from the mars 2020 mission will be definitively negative for ancient life forms
- whole brain emulation is achieved with an insect brain
- politicians on both sides use disruptions from tech and climate change to push ever more extreme positions, and run on platforms that promise easy solutions. Whether or not such disruptions are actually disruptive, the increasingly hyperbolic media will help make it sound that way as it scrambles for relevance in a hyper competitive space.
- China starts a eugenics breeding program with modified germ lines to create smarter citizens.
- GI problems continue to plague developed nations
- daily life will seem to be more complicated than ever
- the long peace continues for another decade
- we look back fondly on this post in 10 years and at what a simpler time 2020 was
2. Displaced people, possibly due to climate, will be a major problem and we will be judged by future generations on our response.
3. We are approaching a period where we will start creating new institutions rather than reforming old ones, similar to the wave of land grant colleges or the "alphabet soup" of the Great Depression in the US.
4. I think self-driving cars will be dependent on new infrastructure, and primarily used for freight/mass transportation if they become widely adopted. China, Japan, Korea, and the EU will be leaders on this. I don't believe my car will drive itself down the dirt road to the cabin I visited last summer.
5. I am not convinced the software development profession will go away or fundamentally change (though surface level changes will be endless). Problem solving with code is still going to be a path to a middle class lifestyle.
6. Blockchain/crypto will be a niche thing, but will be interesting in that niche.
I wish all of you good health and happiness over the coming decade! There really is a chance to make it a good one.
2. Drastic climate engineering will become a mainstream research area and popular controversial talking point.
3. Many more people will get blood tests regularly, for early disease detection and fitness monitoring. Both a Theranos-like fingerprick device and a tampon-based screening company will IPO.
4. AI will be a crucial component in discovering multiple clinical trial-stage drugs.
5. A fully AI musician will go on tour, perhaps with its own lyrics and deepfaked vocals. It will be particularly good at improvisation.
6. To combat deepfakes, public ledger-based verification of photos and videos will become common but not ubiquitous. May or may not be on blockchain.
7. Cryptocurrency-based financial instruments will become a minor part of the global financial system, widely accepted and taken seriously by traditional investors.
8. Metal 3D-printers will start to seriously compete with CNC machining and expendable casting, they will be relatively common in machine shops and factories. Consumer 3D-printing will remain a niche hobby.
9. Flying cars won't really take off.
Oil companies begin rebranding as energy companies and pour assets into solar and wind. Climate change continues to worsen, with deniers still prevalent.
Craigslist gets bought by Facebook. Google tries to get into online shopping, fails.
Desktops still on x64. Phones still on ARM, with a few alternatives here and there.
Programming language design is stagnant with type theory dead-ending with too much complexity. Most new languages/features designed around convenience. Someone reinvents Make. Someone reinvents C++. A new VM becomes popular, potentially backed by LLVM project. Software continues to get slower, but "high performance computing" takes off as a hiring fad.
Marriage rates drop and people realize the damage Tindr is causing. Popular new sites are created with the intent to "fix" dating.
Environmental factor of IBS discovered.
A professional athlete will die while playing, leading to news about how sports need to be safer.
China has money troubles but powers through a long recession. China attempts to "fix" taiwan. Chinese people become even more nationalistic.
- One country will invade another country using computer/information attacks as the deciding strike, perhaps Russia invading one of the Eastern Bloc countries. People's mobile phones will simply tell them that there is some kind of natural disaster happening and that they should go home and seek shelter, while the invading country's forces quickly seize all key infrastructure. This will be a wakeup call to the world that if you can control the screens, you can control society.
- No real political progress will be made on solving/mitigating climate change. The worlds political systems will simply not be equipped to make the necessary decisions to reduce carbon emissions by enough to matter. People will become numb to the unfolding disaster and as such it won't lead to clicks/pageviews, so the media will stop covering it. The major disasters (large fires, storms, etc) that happen will receive coverage but be quickly forgotten, much like mass shootings today.
- New York and California will diminish in influence & power in the US. Wealthy people moving to other states will cause a fiscal death spiral as the state governments have to raise taxes to fund widening deficits. Austin will be regarded as a tier 1 city. Other inland states like Colorado & Arizona will also gain population and power.
- Another major hurricane will hit the northeastern US, it will be far worse than Hurricane Sandy.
- Steady improvements will be made in technological mitigations to climate change like carbon capture, and more efficient manufacturing and farming processes. It won't be enough to solve the problem but will provide some hope to eventually stop making the problem worse in the 2030s.
- Extremist political factions on the left and right in the US will continue to gain influence and power.
- Either SpaceX or Blue Origin will conduct a private, manned mission to the moon.
- very few desktop applications will exist, they will have moved to web assembly powered browser applications
- way more people will work from home and most "work" software will attempt to support this through real-time collaboration powered by CRDT/MRDTs.
- the dat:// protocol, ipfs, and other attempts at creating a decentralized internet will not take off, but the concepts will have a resurgence in the later decade (or possibly in the 2040s) due to interplanetary or otherwise far-distance space internet.
- way more folks will support nuclear as climate change forces the issue
- quantum computers won't fundamentally change the way normal people think about encryption, but instead some sites/apps will be considered "insecure" in the same way not using https is today.
- private car ownership will be on it's last legs, ride shares via self-driving cars plus revamped public transit will be the way the majority of folks get around. New developments will be built as "car free" without garages and with restricted car usage like many city centers.
- people will eat significantly less meat
- deno + Typescript wins
- Typescript (or a TS variant) will be compiled directly to WASM on the browser
- way more people order food rather than cook for themselves
- Many subscription consumer apps will die as many more folks enter into the field, driving up cost-of-acquisition
- Stripe becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world
* Recession happens this decade.
* Someone becomes the US democratic nominee with a UBI platform.
* The US gets single payer healthcare.
* Zoning laws become an even hotter political issue. We don't solve them.
* Netflix produces VR content.
* Humans will not land on Mars.
* Disney joins FAANG.
* We don't fix copyright and we don't have any exciting antitrust wins.
* Mesh networks become more popular.
* The internet becomes less open source.
* The US becomes more politically polarized. There will be hate crimes against democrats / republicans just for their political affiliation.
Personal data stored in banks/ISPs/FB/Google etc are taken at gun point and used for population scale psychological warfare.
Kissinger(World Order)/Niall Ferguson(Square and the Tower)/Graham Allison(Thucydides Trap)/Moises Naim(End of Power) say networks of power are more and more unstable similar to 1914.
To maintain stability they(irrespective of ideology) keep pandering to their fan clubs and therefore get more and more inflexible.
Small triggers turn into national and then international conflict between major powers.
Kissenger's reasons - 1 The international economic system has become global the political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state. 2. Acquiescing in the proliferation of nuclear weapons far beyond the Cold War club, so multiplying the possibilities of nuclear confrontation. 3. The new realm of cyberspace, in which asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between powers
The last time it took 30 years 1914-1945, after about 100 years of peace between the world powers, for everyone to take a breath and reboot to happen.
This time around the reboot should be much quicker. The nukes will get dropped faster, because thanks to tech all the major powers can do serious damage to each other very fast as soon as things escalate beyond control.
1. Civil war in China
2. A new, significant non iOS/Android OS in mobile
3. Uber/Lyft will gradually shift to a unionized, national taxi company
4. Nothing significant will be done about Climate Change, and it won't matter. Some new environmental issue will be talked about instead.
5. A third political party will become significant in the US
6. There will be a major Christian missionary movement from the global south to Europe
7. VR gaming won't be much of a thing (ie like 3d movies)
8. Tesla will go out of business
9. Commonplace purchases will increasingly be made with point-of-sale loans and/or monthly leases. This will increase economic disparity (rich people will buy stuff / get better rates, poor people will rent things / can never get ahead)
10. Software development will still be a relatively specialized, niche field, with most people not knowing much about it. It won't be more "diverse"
11. Health insurance, higher education, housing and tax preparation will all still be crazy complex and expensive in the US
12. You'll finally be able to pump your own gas in New Jersey
13. Most churches will lose their tax exempt status
14. Texas will have more people than California
* Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple will have roughly the same dominant positions.
* Bitcoin will play roughly the same role it plays today (store of value, more like gold than money, similar mkt cap) * Machine learning continues to grow in usage and capability, but there will be no "revolution" in AI.
* Nobody on Mars
* No serious alternatives to advertisements will emerge for industries where ads have traditionally driven profits.
* Climate change is not adequately addressed, but by the end of the decade it is widely recognized as an existential threat (not just amongst wealthy people as is the case today).
* Vim + tmux + make is still the best "IDE" ;)
Things I believe will change:
* There will a tech company worth >$100B delivering new, completely bogus healthcare through a smartphone.
* Huge advances in astronomy, physical chemistry, biotech, and computational physics driven by better data processing software. No big advances in any theoretical field.
* Tech illiteracy of young people becomes an economic problem, with political debates and movements centered around fixing the "tech education gap" between people born after 2000 and everyone else.
* Cryptocurrency goes mainstream in super boring ways. Banks probably use it for transfers and various apps use it for payments, especially in China.
2. The career of software development/programming will be soundly commoditized. In 2020 dollars, expected salaries across the industry in 2030 will be $40k for entry-level, $65k for mid-level, $90k for senior; pure tech companies will offer slightly more, say 30%. Programmers making $150k+, though far from unheard of, will be rare and have extremely specialized skillsets. No new career will have emerged as "the next software development" in the sense of providing the same kind of wide-ranging economic opportunity.
3. Partly as a result of #2, class mobility in the United States will stagnate, leading to increasing political unrest over wealth inequality. Absolute levels of wealth inequality will have worsened relative to 2020, with an even smaller percentage of the population controlling even more of the total wealth.
4. By 2030, no major government will have yet implemented anything other than token attempts at curbing greenhouse emissions. Civil unrest will begin to take on an ecological bent, both peaceful and violent, and by 2030 we will not be strangers to the phrase "domestic eco-terrorism".
Dear me from ten years from now: here's to hoping that some of this pessimism was unwarranted...
EDIT: Before my edit window closes for the decade, I'd like to think of at least something positive to predict... how about this: open source computing hardware will exist and be publicly available, although by no means ubiquitous or even common outside of techie circles. It will be relatively expensive and much lower in performance than even the commodity hardware of 2020, but its deliberately simpler design will make it easier to verify for correctness (in the has-the-NSA-compromised-this sense) and possible for small scale fabs to reasonably produce. Oh, one more thing: satellite internet will be readily available, and have horrible latency, but will otherwise be really cool.
1. Gaming consoles are essentially coming to an end. Die-hard gamers still buy dedicated systems but for the most part everything is available to stream.
2. 5G turned out to be a bust. The low latency, fastest version will still have a relatively small amount of coverage compared to the size of the United States
3. Multiple companies will provide internet via low orbit satellites, some of which will have a low enough latency that some phones will use them as a sort of "global phone" or will be their dedicated ISP.
4. Disney buys PlayStation, EA and at least one more, large studio.
5. Microsoft buys Activision
6. A lot of hype around general AIs but most experts still think they're truly far away. Several will exist by 2030 but they won't be true general AI but will be good enough that companies will get away with calling them that.
7. C++ has a working package dependency system that works as well as npm does for JavaScript. Almost every library is available this way. C++ starts to gain market share due to this and further improvements to standard libraries.
8. Native UI solutions that work kinda like React are more widely available. Think C++, Rust and GO with UIs that are as easy to build as they were in JavaScript.
9. Domain names are starting to go away in favor of a sort of distributed search that works well like Google search but isn't under any single company's direct control.
10. Apple will build more macOS like features into iPad so you can do more with it (such as develop software directly on it). They will also, finally, add touch to their Laptop screens.
By 2030:
1. Google shuts down at least one of Pixel Phones, Gmail, Google Cloud. Even after a decade, Google is not able to make a successful social-network or messaging application.
2. Stock market: Microsoft and Amazon at-least doubles in MarketCap. AMD will be at-least 4 times what it is now. Tesla will be 5 times by the end of the decade. FB stays about the same!
3. Facebook.com usage goes down considerably (at least by half)
4. Climate change causes mass migrations and wars. Corporations start buying/acquiring massive amounts of land. At least one private company tries to "buy a country". Major wars will be fought over immigration.
5. Bitcoin adoption increases due improvements in usability. Still used only for niche use-cases though.
6. Electric cars will go above 50% share of new car sales. Tesla will be the leader. Self driving cars will be common. Car ownership in general will reduce.
It's impossible to remotely validate who anyone is regardless of provided name, age, birth location, mothers maiden name, social security, previous address, contacts, fingerprints, retina scan, DNA profile ...
This will end the privacy debate because all personally identifiable data will be public knowledge. All private information (stored in the cloud) will be easily leaked due to _the_ data leak. Blackmail will be rampant.
It'll be common to have credit cards and loans taken out in your name. Companies will be inundated with bots and trolls creating accounts. Fintech and government will scramble to prop up the system of trust with government issued ID, which will then be leaked, collapsing the system completely.
The sheer amount of fraud causes a contraction in the availability of credit with impact on the scale of the credit crunch of 08.
- Human genetic editing becomes mainstream; treating genetic diseases will become a cheap standard procedure; genetic enhancement is also becoming popular in China and South Korea and will be a hot political topic
- Human lifespan can be increased by at least 20% with treatment
- Most traditional car manufacturers go bust or lose business significantly; taken by Tesla and Chinese start-ups
- Permanent bases on the moon and Mars; first asteroid mining companies start operating
- Apple's VR glasses will change how we use computers; large desktop displays will start to disappear; remote meetings and working with teams in VR will be common; as a result more people will not live close to a city and won't own a car
- Bitcoin's value will hit $1M; paying with cryptocurrency becomes common
- No flying cars (on Earth, maybe on the moon and Mars)
- Something will come that replaces traditional banks entirely; either banking will be centralized in the hands of large tech companies or there'll be a new global banking startup; bank will be just an app; cryptocurrencies may play a role here
- Starlink provides uncensored Internet globally; remote regions will gain economic boost; terrorism starts to subsidy
- AI assistants become mainstream in the workplace; there'll be assistant for almost any expert job which drives down required skills and cost of employment; education will lose value
2. Blockchain won't replace anything. CryptoCurrency won't appreciably become more significant.
3. AI will get linearly better, but nothing paradigm-shifting. Its hype will begin to fade.
4. There will be a massive privacy leak/security event that will cause us, as a society, to re-evaluate the legal landscape of data collection and monitoring.
5. Google will lose significant market share.
6. Petrol cars will decline in manufacturing rates 1 if not 2 orders of magnitude.
7. A human-trip to Mars will be scheduled, if not completed.
8. The mobile market will be significantly disrupted by some new product, but I have no idea what it will be.
* There will be a recession that will ripple for longer than the last one
* Waymo will finally launch but have minimal impact in the US and will end up licensing the tech/partnering with car manufacturers to stay relevant.
* Apple will enter a tangential but highly profitable market most people won't see coming (think general mobility or communication device)
* Google will see a drop in Ad revenue and have a do-or-die moment about their longterm existence (they'll still be healthy tho)
* AI won't displace many jobs and we'll come up with another new term for fancy data science
* "AI" will be massively rolled out with poor oversight and lead to very bad outcomes on a large scale. People will revolt but not much will change.
* Global warming will be alive and well and people will still bicker about whether it is real.
* Africa will begin to make huge economic waves in partnership with China and the western world will panic/intervene
* We will still trade privacy for convenience amd FB will buy/launch a new product that crosses 1 billion users again
* We'll lose 1 of the GAFAM leaders to health/tragic occurence
* We won't be on Mars, but Elon Musk will pull of 2 new industry-moving changes
* China/Russia some other non-western superpower will undergo a significant political change. Won't quite be democracy but it will be different and effective
* Cars and many appliances will now be sold always connected ( 5G?) and there will be several privacy and security issues with no meaningful change.
* Snap will get bought
2. Deep fakes will precipitate the need for digitally signed media. This likely means further reliance on root-of-trust systems like x509 certificates or some new international body designed to issue a new form of lightweight signing mechanism that works at low resolutions/low bandwidth.
3. Continued climate change will result in at-least one major U.S. city losing population due to feasibility/costs of providing either clean water or breathable air.<br><br> 4. China and Russia will split their version of the internet entirely apart from the traditional internet and will sell products and services to other countries to do the same (I.e. Iran).
5. The era of horizontal drilling and fracking for ultra-cheap gas and oil will slowly wind down and energy costs will increase to 2000’s era costs.
6. Most ominously: this might be the first decade where we see large scale orchestrated micro-drone attacks (death by a thousand paper cuts) and autonomous vehicles being used for delivery of some kind of malicious purpose (I.e. explosive delivery).
7. Massive inflation globally during 2010/early 2020’s will result in stagflation in the U.S. and other countries.
* The top 100 entertainment, tech, and consumable brands are all subsidiaries of Disney, Alphabet, or Nestle respectively
* Owning things becomes a niche; rental / X-as-a-service becomes the default for everything from toothbrushes to pets. Kids born in 2030 might live to be 100 and never own anything.
* 25% unemployment due to automation - not due to strong AI, just steady incremental changes (eg how McD's has already replaced human till operators with "select your meal from a tablet then swipe your payment card")
* Either we make a conscious effort as a species to reduce inequality (high taxes and UBI); OR inequality spirals out of control and we get a bloody civil war between the haves and the have-nots.
* "WASM blob rendering to HTML Canvas" becomes the #1 desktop app deployment method, accessibility and ad-blocking suffer (Everyone has forgotten the lessons learned from Flash)
* Eventually all desktop / mobile use-cases replaced with stadia-like remote apps; accessibility and ad-blocking suffer
* I'd LIKE it if ad-blocking became so widespread and effective that we're collectively forced to build an effective micropayment system, and people go back to paying for goods and services with money instead of personal information, but I'll predict that that doesn't happen. If ad-blocking does still exist in any effective form, then ads will merge with content (product placement etc)
* AI-based ad-blocking to blank-out company logos wherever they appear, in whatever context
* Global temperatures don't just continue rising, they accelerate
* Poor security on IoT devices directly leads to deaths (eg overloading cheap electronics enough to start a fire)
* Lennart Poettering invents a filesystem. It is buggy as hell, but has such useful features that everyone adopts it and the community makes it stable
2. US football will be on the decline as more parents pull their kids out of the sport.
3. Electric cars will be mainstream and taxes on electricity or miles driven will be applied
4. Meat consumption in the developed world will be reduced significantly per capita, though aggregate consumption will go up.
5. Global temps will rise, more natural disasters due to climate change and as we get near 2030 we’ll see the US signing onto international agreements with teeth.
6. A major recession in there which is either caused or will be a trigger for an armed conflict
7. The next iteration of Al Qaeda/ISIS will rise, likely targeting moderates
8. Backlash against some of the addictive qualities of smartphones and their apps. Limiting screen time will become more important especially for young kids.
9. Electricity goes even further in renewables and nuclear. Planning to remove dams will pick up though likely won’t be done until the 2030’s
10. A public option for health insurance in the US
Not because they're any smarter than anyone else, but they're able to continuing buying and absorbing any and all competitive threats. And that the "moat" of initial costs to compete with them in existing areas is too high. (E.g. try building your own search engine.)
And regulation and antitrust law isn't going to make a dent because any potential legal principles against it won't be convincing enough to the average citizen, so there won't be any particularly convincing legislative proposals for support in Congress to coalesce around. (It's easy to say "break up Facebook!" It's really, really hard to come up with a reasonable generic law that results in breaking up the "too big" companies without harming the "good" companies, and breaking them up in reasonable ways.)
I don't think they're going to get any more "evil". They're just going to keep expanding into more and more valuable products/markets -- like Apple has with wearables, or Google has with Cloud, or Amazon with TV shows.
(I'm not saying whether this is good or bad -- I just think it's what will happen.)
2. There is less ambiguity and many new laws around data security and privacy, but they aren't very consumer friendly. Digital advertising enters a new era, and current players (Google, Facebook) lag behind. Think personalized movies & TV shows, deeper product placement everywhere, preemptive shipping.
3. Cars get a lot smarter. Traffic is more efficient, and there are fewer accidents. Driverless taxis may be mainstream in certain limited areas in large cities. Level 5 automation is still nowhere in sight, however. EV adoption continues at a steady pace.
4. Cash transactions are phased out in the US and most of the developed world.
5. Marijuana is legal across the US and in most other countries.
6. Beef and pork consumption craters in the US, replaced by healthier meats, plant-based substitutes and lab-grown meat.
7. Food delivery gets cheaper and healthier. A majority of urban households get fully prepared meals delivered every day.
8. People are no longer talking about VR/AR, crypto, chatbots, artificial general intelligence, flying cars.
2. I will take the under on SelfDrivingCars cars. Way too much pessimism here. The entire first wave of startups( save for TESLA and Comma) are using the same DARPA challenge codebase. New players using reinforcement learning will crack the problem.
3. China will not become a democracy.
4. China will be a leader in software as well as hardware. A Chinese-made social network will be widely used in Europe.
5. Learning-based systems will be successfully applied to proof search. Very significant mathematical problems will fall to such systems before the end of the decade.
6.Quantum computers will not be capable of simulating any significant/useful chemistry in this decade.
7. A baby with 100+ edited alleles will be born and healthy, probably in China.
8. Cognitive genomics will come to the fore as it becomes clear several standard deviations increases in mental traits, including IQ, are possible with such edits. Lysenkoist ideologies may have trouble adapting, but by the end of the decade it will be clear to most which way the wind is blowing.
9. AGI has not happened yet, but the conspiracy of silence around the topic no longer prevails. The field. Most people in machine learning consider AGI the goal of the field, and say so without shame.
2. Microsoft will open source Windows (indirectly by using a linux kernel) and throw in the towel on the OS game.
3. "Offline" becomes hip.
4. New person-addressable federated message transport protocol gains popularity, probably on the back of SMTP/email systems. Someone will try to call it "server-less" apps.
5. Common federated identity and login system protocols gain popularity, probably also on the back of SMTP/email systems.
6. Privacy is still an issue, an attempt at making data-as-an-executable to trace its use is fraught with issues but gets steam in the healthcare market.
7. More and more JS will become a standard, until most programming languages outside of C/C++/golang/rust just use JS runtimes and compile to (dynamically or statically) WASM.
8. Someone remakes Game of Thrones ending entirely using deep fakes.
9. 3D printing at a nano scale "is just around the corner" but being used in select factories.
10. AI/ML and driving cars aren't a thing, but not because it's an impossible problem, but because it's not as valuable as people thought it was.
11. Drones will become highly regulated, require licenses to fly or must be purchased with a permit in most countries. Most likely due to a string of terrorist incidents. Large drones won't be used for deliveries or any other non-sense as they're simply way too loud.
12. More and more companies will attempt to operate in "growth" stages by buying back stock and artificially inflating their prices until an unfortunate pair of events causes a few mega-companies to collapse due to it. Afterwards debt in corporation as a factor becomes a key indicator for stock prices and a 3 to 4 year recession in most economies.
2. China will enter a pronounced recession that is it unable to hide from the world.
3. The EU will lose at-least one more member nation after the United Kingdom leaves.
4. The credibility of scientist and research universities will hit all time lows as the effects of the replication crisis become more pronounced and climate changes predictions prove less accurate than lay people find acceptable. I expect this to result in a large pullback in funding for research that lacks a direct practical application.
5. Negative interest rates in EU will force more global dependency on the US dollar.
6. At-least one more country will adopt or de facto adopt the US dollar as their nation currency (dollarization).
7. The US will adopt a single payer or universal health care system.
Is it the retrograde politics that has infected our entrepreneurial optimism? Too much hype not enough delivery? Too much interwebs and not enough real human time? Ten years back, it seemed like I regularly interacted with folks that seemed to believe that, armed with an nvidia chip and some models and the ability to sling some js, they could be the next Zuckerberg like billionaire. The bulk of these predictions feel negative, like the party is over.
* Crispr or derivatives will be used to create cancer therapy for the masses. It will be in mass clinical trial by 2030.
* there will be three new bigger than unicorn companies. They will have combine tech with non-tech (like amazon) and 2 will be based out of the Midwest, maybe Detroit or Chicago.
* long haul trucking will be automated to the point that drivers start doing part time work via mobile connection. Trucking companies will try to capitalize on this
* there will be a common wearable that does a weekly blood test
* some major US corporations will institute mandatory gym/excercise time for workers.
* climate change denial will pivot into spinning it as a positive by citing a agricultural use of a previously unarable region. No major industrial country will suffer land loss due to it
* millennials will embrace suburban life and there will be a series of new banking products to facilitate later home ownership. They won’t use the old tricks but will generalize bundling and have one monthly bill for mortgage, car and some services. Think some sort of automated HELOC type package. Top 15% will own homes in less than 15 years which will be lauded for these programs.
* to go with the above, spending monitoring apps will become more normalized and more proactive. Actively discouraging users from buying when they are in certain physical locations. This will open a new business model.
* co-ops will increase in popularity, particularly for child care
2/ A low fee payment system will become mainstream, severely undercutting the payment processing networks. (My money would be on centralized, inspired by cryptocurrencies.)
3/ Labeling images for neural nets will become a popular low-skilled job.
4/ Personal email will be slowly forgotten, likely from being so bogged down from corporate communications. It will occupy a similar space that physical mail does today; the occasional really important communication surrounded by garbage that you can't stop.
5/ China will make major technological gains against the US due to their relaxed intellectual property laws and the ability to innovate upon other people's work.
6/ Self driving cars will become common, people will prefer it. It will likely only exist in limited places (i.e. freeways) and be supported by infrastructure changes (machine readable signs, lane makings, and car to car communication).
7/ The ad economy will die down as more end to end encrypted services are adopted. The vision here would be a cell phone company that doesn't sell your location data because you authenticate to the cell tower with a zero knowledge proof. (Ha, implying the telcos could or would replace their infrastructure in the next decade!)
8/ The climate will become a priority in production (e.g. food), with people asking which method is greener rather than which is cheaper. Perhaps incintevized by the government through taxes or subsidies.
9/ A new political party will be created in the US in backlash to corporatism of current two.
See you in 2030!
2. Waymo will sell self-driving cars to the general public and there will be a push to make streets safer by reducing individual transport.
3. The next economic downturn, if there is one, will be caused by quantitative easing.
4. Index funds will start affecting price discovery which will lead to a surge in strategies that exploit this.
5. Society will either learn to cope with scissor questions or polarization will eventually lead to civil war.
6. Deep learning will be used in every field in applied computer science and replace the traditional methods of this field.
7. Cryptocurrencies will be used to create censorship-resistant social media and messaging services that have strong secrecy/privacy/data-ownership guarantees.
8. Facebook, Amazon and Google will face anti trust action that might even lead to them being broken up.
9. Palantir will be the best performing stock of the decade.
I’m also really hoping Musk and other space projects like Virgin Galactic surprise us all. Musk clearly wants to build out massive infrastructure in space. That could have hard to imagine consequences.
I think we’ll discover life either in the past of mars through fossils there or bacteria or in the oceans of Enceladus. Edit-this will likely first come from NASA projects and could happen this year with the mars drill platform.
Online degrees will explode in popularity much like cord cutting did in the past decade. With Georgia Tech's OMSCS becoming a huge success, many other institutions will create similar programs beginning with STEM degrees, expanding into more graduate programs and even undergrad. As an alternative to ultra-high tuition costs, more and more students will choose this route instead of traditional college. As a result, kids will stay at home with their parents increasingly longer.
The United States and China will relax their tourist visa policies, and will allow for up to 90 day stays without a visa.
2. China supersedes the United States as the preeminent global superpower.
3. A conflict between Russia and China comes seemingly out of nowhere, but is resolved quickly.
4. Electric vehicles become more mainstream, but still do not overtake ICE vehicles in sales or ownership.
5. Cannabis is de-scheduled in the United States. A minor economic boom results.
6. Tech hubs in the Midwest begin to overtake the old tech hubs in activity and population.
7. Housing shortages worsen globally.
8. Australia suffers a series of natural disasters that results in heavy depopulation.
9. Battery technology will see a significant breakthrough that results in much greater life and much lower weight, but it will not be affordable. Yet.
10. An economic "adjustment" occurs as trade between the United States and China is heavily curtailed.
2. native apps will heavily decline and replaced by web apps. the whole ecosystem will remain wild.
3. the developer community will have a major change because the majority will be degraded from snowflakes to comodity. more developers will heavily specialize and move away from web and general purpose fields. severe shortage everywhere in the west.
4. china will show strong and visible presence in the world theatre
5. EU kills current adtech business, which will start to reinvent itself seriously by the end of the decade
6. mobile device business will encounter major shifts due to oversaturation, lack of innovation and eastern competition. touch screens will hit an dead end in usability leaving customers riddled.
2. People will become more concerned about air pollution than climate change; emissions from combustion engines, brakes, and tires will be increasingly in the public eye. Office workers will become concerned about CO2 levels in their workplaces, and on their commutes. Many workplaces will install equipment to provide fresher, cleaner air.
3. Ebikes, electic scooters, and other relatively compact electric transportation quietly revolutionise commuting for people who live within 20-30km of their work.
4. Work weeks (or at least time in office) will decrease for many office workers. It will become normal for many people to only go into the office once or twice a week.
5. The combination of 1, 2, 3 and 4 above lead to increasing de-urbanization as people who can afford it seek to move to quieter places with cleaner air. Clean air becomes a major issue of inequality. Productive farmland around cities is converted to large home-office plots with lots of trees.
6. At least one climate change mitigation geoengineering idea will have a large scale proof of concept experiment conducted
7. Microplastics in the food supply / ecosystem will turn out to be not that serious of a health problem for people and most other animals (some animals will be severely affected)
- America’s formal military alliances are significantly disrupted and at least one state outright leaves NATO
- after progress in self driving cars slows, industry shifts focus to low-hanging fruit: fully-autonomous trains and planes
- Jai has greater marketshare than Rust
- JS is the overwhelming language of choice for frontend web development
- no measurable technological unemployment. longterm unemployment increases but is entirely due to political and economic factors
- more people play games on traditional game consoles than VR headsets or cloud streaming
- minor AI breakthrough that does not utilize neural networks
2. Cities will begin experimenting with geo-fencing automobiles so that speed and acceleration is restricted to defined limits within zones. Automobiles will not be legally allowed into these zones unless they surrender some autonomy which force them to abide by these limitations.
* There will be general artificial intelligence. Somebody will get it right this time because all components are available outside of academia. A team without an agenda will come up with the right combination by chance.
* At the end of the decade, people will design the genetic setup of 'their' children
* We will give up on preserving nature and embrace global warming. A new metropolis will be created from all the people who are forced to settle somewhere else. Established players will strengthen their borders but somebody will use that opportunity. I can imagine a city in Saudi Arabia but it could also be a special economic zone in China.
* The Chinese social credit system will be so successful that many other countries will introduce it, too.
* Energy will become scarce because all is needed for simulations and encryption attacks
1. Sharing economy remains strong, but investors (at least in uber/lyft possibly others) are disappointed as it isn't possible to maintain monopoly. Multi-sided markets expand into more sectors as platforms and apps become understood as infrastructure.
2. Companies providing engaging private small-group social media experiences (along the lines of signal, whatsapp groups) are really important to most people. This is also somewhat disappointing to investors as this kind of activity is difficult to monetize and local networks are easy to transport from app to app.
3. Major social network platforms become increasingly controlled spaces as the "open internet" becomes a sea of disinformation. Most people instead turn to regulated enclaves with barriers to entry and strict moderation.
4. AR / VR aren't adopted in widespread ways by consumers. VR is popular among gamers and AR has some use in specialized work environments such as military, factory, and warehouses.
5. The world succeeds at preventing some of the worst ecological consequences of climate change, and transitions to a sustainable green economy by way of economic contraction, increased efficiency, and limited carbon capture technologies (i.e. conversion to biomass) but fail to keep warming below a 2⁰C level. Mass migrations out of equatorial regions are a huge geopolitical problem and the source of much violence. Eco-fascism is a significant political ideology that limits the ability of developed nations to admit refugees.
6. (this is my stretch and my own vision) Online communities learn from the example of Wikipedia how to self-organize to create valuable goods. Many productive online communities will be relatively closed and occupy a similar niche to corporations or cooperatives and exist for the economic opportunities provided to their members.
It is my Bible for the coming decades. For one, it predicted Australia:
By 2020, significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur in some ecologically rich sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland Wet Tropics. Water security problems and a decline in agriculture and forestry are projected for southern and eastern Australia, as well as eastern New Zealand, by 2030.
It also mentions harvest shocks in the region due to land damage from climate change.
If you want to know which countries will collapse into mass protest, which wars will be fought, between whom, and when, this report is your guide.
[0] https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/NICR%202013-05%20US%20Na...
- Google will loose significant revenue and will start laying off people after 2025. Will focus back on having good search results instead of the crap we have today, but it will not be enough to keep it afloat during 2030's.
- There will be a Gmail competitor.
- Apple will buy DuckDuckGo.
- There will be a dominant WebAssembly framework with support for different languages where all web applications will be written on (as .Net, but not .Net). JS usage will shrink to lightweight content pages.
- After 7yo becomes ~13yo, PG will go back to YC. Also will write a book that will be a bestseller for non-technical / non-startup audience.
* VR hype passes, maybe because technical limitations doesn't make for a pleasant experience. Remains a bit gimmicky
* haha remember bitcoin?
* alternative meats become mainstream, account for half of meat consumption. (Note for future readers and myself. As of 01/2020 Impossible Burger has recently partnered with BK for an impossible whopper and the Beyond Bratwurst served at work was quite good, though still somewhat niche. Only in a few stores and restaurants)
* Pet ownership will become frowned upon, or maybe just less acceptable than it is today
2. China will remain as authoritarian if not more, and Xi Jinping or someone handpicked by him will be leading China in 2030.
3. Apple will keep shifting more and more into Services, and by 2030, services will account for the majority of their profit.
4. More and more countries will see the rise of populist governments due to the voice amplification offered by Social media.
5. Facebook will reach 1T$ in market cap.
6. We will see atleast one big tech company reach 2T USD in market cap.
7. Cloud providers will churn out more and more services, to the point that more and more Enterprises will offload most things to them, and only write the very core business logic themselves.
8. No federated platform will come close to the success of email. No decentralised messaging platform will dethrone the market leaders.
2. Software: All languages alive now will stay that way. PHP still feeds the family now, it will continue to do so. FORTRAN will still exist. Some new languages might come mainstream, but only because driven by external factors (Hyperscaler behind it, or the only language for a specific piece of hardware)
3. Money: Globalization will deepen. It will get better for the very poor and the very rich. It will be getting worse between the 5th an 95th percentiles in developed countries.
4. Quantum computing will still be 10 years away.
5. There will be a 2008-like crash before 2025. It will come from excessive corporate debt; and will lead to massive consolidation and monopolies, as neither US nor EU nor China want to be the first to crack down on their champions.
6. There will be two 2017-like speculation bubbles on Bitcoin.
7. Still no AGI, but increasingly pervasive machine learning presence in every bit of every system. People will understand and interact better with ML models.
8. SpaceX crash-lands something on the Moon (before the first half) and Mars (after the first half).
9. No major blockchain-based success, but some industries will have been helped and transformed by starting to operate with automated contracts defined in publicly available code. (ex: parametric insurance)
10. Large scale video games will appear. 100k users will be able to play closely to each other in realtime fashion (unlike in WoW where they can be at most a few 100s in the same place).
11. Close to 2030, with the help of DNA editing, China will release a deadly virus that targets lactose-tolerant humans, starting WWIII.
2. The world will hit a major recession starting with China
3. We will have simple and effective screening test for most form of cancers with high accuracy
4. We will begin seeing the benefits and power of quantum computing and its applications
5. We will have 1-2 successful manned missions to Mars and Moon
6. Richest and most successful tech companies will still be Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple
7. Major Indian cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai will hit a major overpopulation crisis, resulting in unavailability of basic amenities like water, shelter and electricity
8. Hyperloop will be in its nascent stages but will be commercially available reducing traveling times by a huge factor
9. Plant based meats and lab grown meats consumption will grow exponentially
10. A deadly bacterial/viral disease will kill more than 1 million people worldwide
- Edward Snowden will be back home. He's still a hero.
- Bitcoin lightning payments are the most common form of payment on the Internet.
- Due to the death of Moore's law a USD 1000 laptop in 2030 is only 3 times as powerful as a USD 1000 laptop in 2020.
- Quantum computers are still not common
- Nosql databases are not commonly used anymore
- Singularity is still 30 years away
- China's and Russia's will have found effective ways to isolate their internet traffic.
- Postgres is the nr 1 database in use
- Hackernews color theme will change from orange to green
- SAP's ERP system revenues will have dropped significantly
- Startup solutions will be more common in corporate environments.
- Matrix will be the most commonly used protocol used for chat software.
- Plasma Mobile will be a successful alternative to Android.
2. Addition of 20% low-carbon hydrogen to natural gas grids will be common in Europe
3. Still no commodity optical computing, still no restoration of full-blooded Moore's Law, CPU core counts will be huge, we programmers will still be rubbish at effectively making use of them all
4. Rust's lifetimes prove to be the crack in the dam for type systems which regulate more aspects of program correctness in widely-used production languages (as widely used as, say, Erlang is now)
5. One of the 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will be openly furry
2. AI/ML become more entrenched and we start to see "Standard Models" for niche ML tasks that can consistently outperform humans with almost no mistakes. We just had the headline about AI being better than humans at reading mammograms. We'll see models that fully solve problems one at a time until industries begin to look for that ML model rather than solve a problem with more labor.
3. Voice assistants become more ubiquitous, but also more literal. They no longer try to understand your intent, but rather perform rote tasks very efficiently and without cloud (aside from updates/backups/etc). Voice will affirm itself as a viable input mode but lag well behind current modes (keyboard/mouse/touchscreen).
4. Gesture detection continues to flail. Project Soli will create some amazing niche solutions and demos, but not go mainstream.
5. Eye/gaze tracking will find its way to end users and become useful for gaming and some other broad interactions. Users take to it fairly well.
6. A woman will become president of the US.
7. We see a global recession by 2022. It's moderate and causes no major shockwaves, but some 20th century industries are irreparably damaged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681
it seems things change much less than expected.
Probably Climate Change will turn out to be solvable by a combination of more efficient energy production, less consumption, net negative greenhouse gas emissions and conservative geo-engineering (algae, reflecting surfaces like solar panels everywhere etc.) Either a completely new or re-invented gadget or platform will arrive that integrates nicely with all the stuff we already have. I bet it'll be something about communication. (Nice add-on to the hundreds of messengers, social networks, communication gadgets that are already there...)
I think everything else will stay pretty much the same. People will still drive cars, wait in traffic jams and be upset about everyday politics. The rise of the extreme right will turn out to be a non-issue, since history has never been documented and reflected as well as in the last hundreds of years.
Developments in technology, politics, economy and society will bring more wealth to a larger amount of people. Especially in African Countries there will be an economy comparable in wealth to that of today's South-East Asia. That will come along with improved telecommunication and transport infrastructure throughout the continent.
- Social networks that are less "company controlled" will become more popular: users will be able to change the algorithms behind what their social networks are showing them. They'll also be able to prove that the networks haven't "hampered" the data in any particular way. These technologies will help the laymen to better filter out fake news and we'll have less "flath earthers" groups becoming popular.
- AI techniques (machine learning / neural networks) will not just be useful for apps, but will be part of the development process itself: our IDEs will have powerful AI technology to help us code.
- Solitude apps will be even more specific: we'll be able to find/filter people with very particular interests and hang out with them. Finding your partner or best friends through apps will be even more common.
- Cities might experiment with shared-living areas where people live together with one another in common places and are incentivised to participate in activities with each other with a stronger push towards community rather than isolation.
2. Biotech laced with computer science really hits it stride.
3. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a financial instrument go extinct but the idea of distributed payments for services directly to providers lives on. Blockchain is replaced with ledgers and protocols that allow companies to give consumers transparency without all the blockchain and mining shenanigans.
4. We finally figure out how to compensate open source developers for their work.
5. Social media use looks like it dies down hard but it just evolves into something else, especially with the under-40 crowd. Probably driven by wearables and AR so ad companies can still get metadata.
6. Intel nearly goes belly up and gets bought by Dell. VMware goes bankrupt because Kubernetes doesn't pan out.
7. AI winter part 2 and it's really ugly. Tech is the center of the next recession.
8. Google becomes like Yahoo is right now, not because a better search engine emerges, but because search becomes less important.
9. A new operating system emerges. It gives programmers much better access to hardware and has distributed systems primitives built in. RISC-V leads to lots of domain specific chips.
And just so I can be sure to get one right:
10. A new market leader in chat emerges to supplant Slack.
Bio-hacking will become mainstream, causing significant backlash and become a sensitive, polarised topic.
Startup equity / VC funding will change significantly, making it more fair & appealing for early employees.
Fewer people with CS degrees, more inclusion of CS coursework across different degree programs.
Going beyond 2030 to 2050, shopping malls outside of high-value cities will be abandoned, never repurposed, and become common locations for "urban ruin explorers."
* Remote work will be much more widespread / will be the norm at least in IT (very likely)
* Telemedicine will be widespread, AI automated medical diagnostics systems. (very likely)
* AI/automated lawyers (likely)
* AI/automated trading will become dominant
* More automation in the warehouses / factories / stores
* First manned mission to Mars (unlikely)
* Evidence of past life found on Venus (unlikely)
* Sea level rises by 10 cm. Climate warming although not very dramatic
* Oil extraction diminishes by 30% globally
* New privacy oriented businesses (protection of personal data, digital forensics, cyber detectives)
* New efficient method for capturing CO2 from atmosphere developed (towards the end of the decade)
* First asteroid harvested for ore
* Some forms of cancer can be cured effectively
* More remote mini wars/ military operations (using air drones, automated undersea vehicles, rovers)
* Lab grown meat is available to buy
* "3D printing" of simple tissues
* Personal medical monitoring devices (constantly monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, sugar level, ...)
* Development of NEWSPEAK (oh sorry digression)
* Lithium shortages / alternative battery technologies
* Very high digital storage capacities available at cheap price, although content starts to take more space
* End of monarchy in the UK
- At least one East Asian country out of {singapore, south korea, japan, china (ROC or PRC)} legalizes Cannabis.
- Microsoft extends the dominance it began in late 2010 decade. C# and F# eclipse Java as enterprise programming solutions.
- Google runs into some major trouble and loses considerable market share; the biggest tumble comes on the heels of an internal, employee-led revolt or schism.
- While we're at it, Kubernetes goes out of style, replaced by something out of Microsoft (that is not on our radar at the moment).
- The US is in the first five nations with population greater than 50M to meet its Paris Accord CO2 targets, despite having left the Paris Accord.
- Early 2020s: Brexit unexpectedly results in the UK narrowly escaping the worst of a major economic collapse in Europe, led by or concurrent with the collapse or bailout of Deutche Bank. Of course this spreads to the rest of the world, but if we say put it in quantitative terms the relative, GDP normalized damage to the UK is less than the damage to each of: Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Denmark.
- Quantum computing goes through an explosive growth in qubits for the early half of the decade, topping out at around 10,000-100,000 qubits, followed by 2-3 year linear phase, and then diminishing-return, sublinear improvements through the close of the decade. Researchers begin talking about a 'QC winter' like which we saw AI go through.
- NASA disqualifies the Boeing Starliner from flying after astronauts refuse to man it.
Aside from one time when I correctly predicted my coworker's house would be under a volcano in 15 years, I am typically very bad at long timescale predictions and much better at short term out-of-the-odds predictions, so we shall see.
* Driverless cars will still not be a thing outside experimental deployments. Safety drivers still needed outside of restricted environments (perhaps office parks).
* Electric cars will be an increasing percentage of cars sold. But still only a minority of new cars sold.
* Small electric vehicles (Scooters, ebikes, etc) will be more popular. Most people will own their own.
* Delivery Bots will take off. They will deploy fast in 100s of cities worldwide like electric scooters did in 2018 & 2019. Cities and Governments will struggle to adapt
* Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies will still be a niche. The average person will have no interaction with them and they will not be used for regular transactions
* Artificial meat and milk will take a growing percentage of the market. The drop in demand and prices will cause further drops in farming incomes and disruption in areas/countries that depend on it.
Smartphones will begin to be replaced by smart glasses. Apple will introduce an augmented reality headset on the trails of Vuzix and other smaller companies, and other tech companies will follow suit. Eye tracking is another area of probable advancement.
The clock rate of consumer CPU's won't exceed 6ghz.
Tesla will continue to enjoy a lot of success, eventually being a good 15% of the cars we see on the roads as battery technology steadily improves.
Climate change will become even more apparent. We'll see measurable effects, and the US will reengage in new climate agreements after 2020.
SHA2 will show signs of weakness with initial attacks against SHA2-256.
Quantum computers will not make significant progress toward being consumer ready by 2030, but there will be more research done.
We'll have the first near-room temperature superconductor at high pressures. No new technology.
ITER will continue to make progress toward fusion. No successful (net positive) experiments yet. Check back in 2030.
2020 or 2021 recession.
There are still people on IRC.
Most importantly: FIRST MAN ON MARS
- A deal between US & China destabilizes china. The UK wants into the deal. EU wants another part
- A military insurgence in an african country establishes a free-trade zone. a part of the world's manufacturing moves to africa.
- As europe is aging, most of its rural land becomes deserted. Airbnb is struggling because its now cheaper to buy a european home than rent.
- The UK becomes a tax haven and attracts thousands of tech companies , most of which are now remote. SV sees a massive exodus of capital
- People become weary and stop talking about politics. Having nothing to talk about, facebook dies. People put their money where their mouth is, and we have the first experimental , co-owned private cities.
- Climate warming is actually viewed positive by people living in northern countries.
- Travel is significantly reduced, as 30% of the population work remote. Instead of tourism, people do forms of nomadism. AirBnbLonger.com becomes the most valuable startup in london or sth.
- Disillusion with self driving vehicles leads to despair initially, but then quickly every car is equipped with driving assist . Drivers are no longer drivers, they are now safety drivers
- AI passes the turing test. Bots trained on wikipedia that can reason and come up with logical answers surpass google's search result quality. Google dies. People on twitter stop caring whether they are talking to a bot or human, and learn to just enjoy the chat
- A few major countries dissolve. Perhaps even a few US states secede
- The first age reversal therapies are successful
- A full artificial womb is finalized. Societies give up on traditional family norms, completely disengaging sex from family. Massive orgies become the most popular form of entertainment
Using less summative assessment, like standardized tests based on grade level, to compare students and set the rate of learning based on the mean of a group of children, instead, diagnostic and formative assessment using technology, like what we have seen with the Khan Academy, will be widely used to assist in the difficult often boring stage of precision giving teachers more time to introduce students new subjects and lead them to use their knowledge to make generalizations.
My prediction is the end of standardized tests at the grade level by 2030. Homework will not be necessary anymore as this will work will be efficiently done during normal school hours. Lastly, although it is important that we consider learning disabilities a real thing, it might be more fair and pragmatic to call it a teaching disability taking the responsibility from the child to learn putting it onto the adult. (Ok, this is personal, my goal for the next ten years is to eliminate homework.)
Governments to start / increase incentives to get married and have kids.
1 - Rise and fall of AI. Not complete fall, mind you. I think companies are going to try to replace humans with AI everywhere they can, and people are going to push back against it.
2 - Self driving long haul trucks will be the norm. Will still have drivers, but will be more of babysitters, and make less money.
3 - Boom in biotech. Maybe growing organs for transplant, or else adequate mechanical replacements.
4 - Amazon finally gets a worthy competitor in the online shopping realm. Since fast delivery is the key, this is either going to be Walmart, or Target, or both.
5 - Change in social media. As more is 'dug up' to embarass people of our age, kids will turn to private channels, nothing like FB or Twitter. FB will of course launch a competitor to said service.
6 - Politically, it's anyone's guess. Divisiveness has been rising to a boiling point. I don't see war, but perhaps states and even cities trying to become independent.
2. Computer assistance will help aid drivers with incremental advances on what they do today - by 2030 most new cars will be able to parallel park for you, as an example, but full self-driving, if available to consumers, will be limited to limited access roads such as highways.
3. AWS and Azure will still be the dominant cloud providers. Google will reduce investment in GCP and it will fall further behind.
4. IBM's purchase of RedHat won't pay off. Over the next 10 years they'll shed 100k employees or more.
5. We'll see fewer streaming service providers by the end of the decade. Amazon may sell off their video service and will be picked up by either NBCUniversal or ViacomCBS. Whoever doesn't get them will at least try for some sort of merger with Netflix.
6. Amazon will release another phone to try and challenge Apple and Google once again.
7. Salesforce will most likely buy Slack. The other most likely bidders I see are IBM, Cisco, and Dell.
Other things that I think are very obvious or already starting:
* TV and movie piracy will increase significantly due to subscription fatigue.
* Libra won't have launched.
* Cloud gaming is 50/50 as to whether or not it will be like VR/AR is today. I actually think it has a better chance of success in parts of Europe and Asia - think Scandinavia, South Korea, and Japan, than in the US. The major internet providers in the US are not interested in providing the quality of service needed for cloud gaming to succeed. Starlink won't offer enough bandwidth to disrupt this space either, although it may see significant adoption in rural areas if enough satellites are launched.
People won't do shit about global warming, at least for the first 5 years. The Middle East will get increasingly unstable as heat increases and arable land becomes sparse. Cities like Dubai will become less and less appealing, especially as the rich move away. A major disaster in the Global South will happen, causing millions of deaths but only handwringing and prayers in the west.
More female directors and hopefully a new wave of sorts as people realize that films can be made for so cheap (seriously people read your Truffaut). Distribution will get easier, yet still fragmented.
William Gibson will be right, perhaps more in terms of zeitgeist than actual details.
2. "Advanced" Smart Grid will be rolled out in some significant areas. Smart Grid will have energy storage at every tier: Grid, Municipal, Home, and Appliance. Smart Grid will control appliances in the home. Opt out of Smart Grid will be very expensive.
3. Armed militias will be formed and shots fired over freshwater in the USA.
4. Reality as a Service will allow users to choose the facts of their reality.
5. Some company will partially deliver Theranos' vision of persistent implanted health monitoring devices.
6. In 2023 a Marvel film will flop.
7. The likeness of dead actors in film becomes commonplace. It never stops being creepy to me.
8. Monoclonal Antibody drugs become much cheaper.
9. A breakthrough is made in Auto-immune diseases.
10. Ford and GM join Chrysler in merging with international automaker conglomerates (not necessarily the same one), or go out of business.
11. Tesla continues to mystify analysts. Elon Musk actually transmogrifies his soul into a tree.
- Remote pilots will be multiplexed among vehicles; intervening to navigate "tricky" areas, while allowing autonomous driving for simple highway stretches.
- Self-driving cars will be able to request remote-pilot assistance to navigate "tricky" areas.
- Zig [0] will rise to prominence as a C replacement after its 1.0.0 release.
- Someone will finally put together a good FOSS desktop OS, probably based on the Linux kernel but with a small, stable, and coherent userland base-system, and portable self-contained and sandboxed-by-deftault AppImage-like applications.
- The ad pushing and data siphoning economy collapses and consequently software returns to focusing on user empowerment, responsiveness, and efficiency.
- The US finally gets healthcare reform that doesn't make us the laughing stock of the rest of the civilized world.
* A VR content studio becomes a billion dollar business
* At the end of the 2020's, China hits a demographic wall it can't easily recover from.
* The ICE collapse begins in earnest in the latter half of 2020's.
* Bitcoin's value will crater as the untethering happens (See NY AG lawsuit), leading to a crypto winter
* Google has entered "Day 2" and will have a major competitor in the next 10 years. Day 2 can be seen by the anti-consumer wall of paid results it has, just like the stodgy competitors it beat 10 years ago had. Also, founders left.
* SPA's will be considered an anti pattern
* Massive recession hits
* Inflation
* Tesla becomes Amazon sized due to the intersection of falling battery prices, solar prices, and the tipping point for ICE practicality
Thanks to Einstein we live in a 4D reality, 3 spatial dimensions and the dimension of time.
In the next 10 years I predict our understanding of physics will evolve (with a confirmation through observation) from us being 3D beings living in a 4D reality to...something more.
If I could personally lead the charge on any changes in the next 10 years...I would eradicate all new cases of childhood type 2 diabetes. Sadly this has been achievable and avoidable since the first case of childhood type 2 diabetes was diagnosed in 1983. Unfortunately, I don't expect or predict there will be any gains, only more and more children diagnosed with this terrible disease (my prediction: many as 25-50% of children) by the end of the next decade.
1) there are a few likely points of conflict:
- south china sea
- african countries that are between most influenced by china and others.
- taiwan
- north korea
- middle east
- chinese/russian border
3) China will try to use it's network of influencers/agents in universities, big companies and ethnically chinese communities in general.
4) The war will stop the grouth of civillian economy in china, which will raise chances of a revolution. CCP will tighten the grip and all smart/educated/somewhat open minded chinese citizens will be on the path out of the country no matter how hard it will be.
2. We find extraterrestrial life.
3. The USA tightens antitrust laws and its effects FANGS greatly.
4. Autonomous cars are starting to spread but infrastructure hampers that spreading.
5. We get the first state-backed crypto coin which spreads like wildfires in Australia.
6. The USA turns inward and the EU has to save Italy from economic catastrophe.
7. Gigantic hurricane hits the USA and it forces the USA taking climate change seriously some kind carbon tax/cap and trade is implemented.
8. GAN made fake video spreads fast and hits MSM, it might be porn or conspiracy type video.
9. First modern African descended pope is elected.
10. Electric cars are sold more than traditional ones in the major western markets.
Big tech companies will stop using Javascript and go full WASM. Non-tech Companies will still use Javascript, but popular Javascript frameworks won't be as big as Angular and React, they will be jQuery reincarnations.
Some important person is going to be hacked and the consequences will be bigger than you think.
Foldable phones will make a big fuss and then die just like netbooks did 10 years ago.
Google will try to replace Android and fail. Flutter will be discontinued.
Someone will try to dethrone Youtube, making a big fuss, and fail miserably.
2. Windows will still dominate desktops.
3. Quantum computers will stay approximately where they are today, expensive toys for scientists without practical applications.
4. Electric road vehicle sales will exceed gasoline ones; the major driver being developing countries. Couple global car brands emerge from these countries, likely Asian, like Xiaomi did.
5. US and China will come to some trade agreement and resume business as usual.
6. Russia will disintegrate once again, causing major global security headache because nukes.
2. Self-driving will be deployed effectively in freight transport.
3. The cost and efficiency of logistics will be lowered further and become an important factor in economic growth.
4. Pressure on the market of commercial real estate due to the lower cost of logistics.
5. Wind (especially offshore wind farms) and solar become cost-effective energy sources.
6. Technology leaps in battery and energy storage.
7. AI/ML will find its niche in industrial infrastructure more than consumer goods/services.
8. Desktops and laptops made of SoCs become the norm.
9. RISC-V commoditizes certain aspects of the chip design industry and will grow an impactful ecosystem.
10. Cash will be diminished by the market and the pushes from governments, which will be replaced by digital transactions.
Health
- health devices become mandatory and data from devices dictates the cost of health insurance and care
Transportation
- Electric vehicles would become the norm - All manufacturers stop making gas based vehicles - Autonomous vehicles capture 50% of Goods transportation market - Multiple metro cities worldwide have autonomous taxis
Education
- Master's level education becomes mandatory for any type of job - pay after getting job grows adaptation
Entertainment
- number of movie theaters close down - virtual reality becomes a core part of entertainment
Energy
- Solar, Wind and Hydro will surpass other sources - More and more countries would adopt Denmark/ Norway model - Energy companies would start to replace Tech in terms of richness
2. A Microsoft first-party Android device is launched, following a similar attack strategy they are currently starting with Edge on Chromium: fork, improve, destroy.
3. ARM takes over... actually, a more bold prediction: x86-64 remains king, and ARM is not able to conquer beyond the mobile market, despite present-day feelers.
4. Self driving cars master 95% of driving scenarios but struggle with enough "uncommon" scenarios that it winds up in a PR nightmare (youtube searches for "AutoPilot accident" lands results with millions of views) and doesn't revolutionize much except pizza delivery and long-haul trucks.
5. Theater chains push hard for Movie-pass style subscriptions (I mean, harder than they already have). Netflix purchases a small theater chain that shows its own films for free to subscribers, with excellent snacks for purchase. (or has this already happened?)
6. Disney Plus struggles with choosing consolidating the Disney "family friendly" brand and the sort of Game of Thrones gore-fest content demanded by millions of subscribers, leading to either a rebranding or an off-shoot for "adults" a la "Adult Swim" or "Nick at Night".
7. At least one of the big streaming services (Cockatoo or whatever NBC has?) throws in the towel and merges with another.
8. Hong Kong remains in turmoil for all of the 2020s.
9. Rust becomes the poster child of systems programming (or has it already), and goes from relatively niche to a must-have for new hires in just about any software industry.
10. Working remotely is still a pipe-dream heralded by a lucky subset of HN posters.
11. A battery breakthrough revolutionizes mobile devices and elevates electric cars to make combustion engines even more obsolete.
edit:
12. Extremely accurate diagnoses by AI makes healthcare cheaper (but not cheap), faster (but not fast), and a group of clueless people (think anti-vaxx) will refuse to ever be diagnosed by a machine and instead demand a "real doctor".
There will likely be some big crisis involving important people that revolves around their social media profiles from when they were teenagers or young adults. Maybe some bad photos, or comments. People who were in their mid 20s today will be eligible to run for the Office of the President in 2030. Lots of people in their mid 20s have done stupid stuff online in the last 10 years (since they were around 15).
After those scandals, people will start tilting away from social media. People will seek out more private enclaves, or just abstain from social media.
Additionally, many social media companies will have to deal with millions of profiles of dead individuals.
Prediction: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp will be irrelevant in 10 to 15 years. People will move away from current levels of online sharing.
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* Truth
Discerning truth will become harder and harder. Deep fakes, propaganda, social discussions about terminologies, etc will cause deep distrust of everything. Will lead to social change in how we trust what we see on screens.
Prediction: People will start preferring face to face meetings. (Kind of related to the previous point)
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* Climate
Climate crisis will cause more migrations. The changing population demographics will cause lots of civil unrest in Europe, Middle East and the Americas. India will become the largest country by population and face issues due to climate change.
Prediction: Wars and civil unrests :(
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* Digital overload
People will start treating technological devices with skepticism. Phone addiction, etc will become recognized disorders and the cell phone market will get highly regulated. People will have a social movement against the excessive usage of digital devices.
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* Space
Manned missions to Moon, Mars and maybe some other places will occur.
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* Recession
P(Recession in the next 10 years) = .99
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* Sports
Tom Bradyand Belichick continue the dominance of the Patriots for another 10 years.
FIFA 2022 in Qatar causes some illness among the players. Maybe Qatar's bad human rights record is finally addressed.
FIFA 2026 in America will be epic
- quantum computing: We at least triple the qubit count. Maybe even quadruple. It's enough to do something of use, maybe even give "quantum supremacy" on one actual useful problem. Not much more than that, though.
- nuclear fusion: 2-4 "scientific breakthroughs". It remains a science project though. No commercially viable fusion power.
- AI: The hype dies out. AI won't change many things explosively, but it'll seep into everyday life andhaveabroad and profound impact. Medical diagnoses will be better, weather predictions, security, live tracking of people, etc. Most won't recognise it as AI.
- privacy. Technological advances will slow down, If only because there's not that much more to gain. Awareness will start to catch up and we will collectively wonder how to extricate ourselves from this dystopian hellhole we inflicted upon ourselves.
- society: Despite general feelings of "not ok", distribution of resources will skew further. The middle class will remain under pressure, for the simple reason that growth for the upper echelon cannot come from lower tiers. Yet middle class will continue to exist - a buffer between the have-nothings and the one-percenters.
- guns in the USA: The number of mass shootings will remain roughly equivalent to what it was in 2019. Growth is commensurate with population growth. Despite 3-5 high profile shootings a la Sandy Hook, the law won't be significantly more effective at preventing shootings.
- space: India and China will take the lead beyond low earth orbit.
- cancer: No great cancer breakthrough, just steadily continuing to chip away. By the end of the decade, 50% of new cancer patients can be converted into long-term treatment (5 yrs or more).
- climate change: The efforts in the coming decade are vastly insufficient. The only viable means of really combating climate change in the less-than-centuries time frame is significant reduction of population. (Over 25% decline in 10 years). Not sure if anyone has the balls to actually say that by then though.
+ Smart home tech will be ubiquitous. Smart speakers paved the way. They're still not very smart, but good enough as an interface. Most importantly, they are the reason other home products became connected. Smart home products are smart lamps, outlets, curtains, locks.
+ Electrification of heating is happening at a large scale. This can be through a combination of devices, from floor heating to infrared panels in the form of paintings. This is driven by a continuous drop of the cost of electricity production.
+ Indoor positioning becomes considerable bigger, but doesn't reach the number of outdoor positioning chips (GPS) yet. It is used for asset tracking, smart homes, and hopefully not for advertisements.
+ Battery-free devices entered the consumer market. Using backscattering and energy harvesting techniques they perform basic tasks which conventially required a battery. This will be all low-bandwidth.
+ In other words, wireless charging on a distance of a couple of meters takes off. This will be low-energy. Not to charge smartphones or laptops.
+ Lab-grown meat is available in the supermarket. The price didn't come down yet. It's a product for people who can afford it.
+ A mouse brain has been frozen for a day, got revived, and lived for a bit after that.
+ There have been attempts to grow more crops in the sea. It couldn't robotized enough in those rough conditions to significantly produce food for kettle though.
+ Vertical farming is still a hype. Greenhouses pop up in more and more countries, reducing the role of the Netherlands w.r.t. agricultural exports.
+ A platform that brings together home sellers and buyers becomes global. It becomes bigger than Airbnb.
+ A sex toy with tele-properties goes viral. It is removing some social barriers. However, the society - esp. the US - remains very prudish.
+ We use the smartphone to pay and for access control. No need to carry a credit card or keys on you. Finally!
That's it for now! No autonomous cars, and no big advanced in general artificial intelligence. Still a lot to look forward to, I think! :-)
China will fall in power as investment from the west decouples.
Nuclear energy will make a PR comeback.
There will be at least one scientific breakthrough surrounding the underlying nature of consciousness. Optimism about the possibility of AGI among experts will increase significantly.
Young adults will be spending a majority of their time interacting with friends embodied as virtual avatars (on traditional devices and VR/AR devices)
-It becomes even harder for new musicians and visual artists to make it because we will be able to generate "new" music from long dead artists using some form of generative machine learning models.
-It becomes nearly impossible to distinguish real people on social media from advanced bots-- some of which will have long and detailed online histories that seem authentic (i.e., internally consistent biographical details) to even skeptical observers. Owners of these armies of bots earn large profits because of the time it takes to properly establish such profiles.
-Most physical products produced by US and European brands-- even at the level of detergent or towels-- will have some kind of NFC/RFID tag that is secured through cryptographic signatures as a way to manage rampant and increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting and "laundering" of fake products through sites like Amazon. Consumers will routinely scan their products with their phone to ensure they are real (and Amazon will scan them itself for anything they pack and ship).
-More and more people will realize just how bad refined carbs are for diet and health and there will be a rise in meal delivery services and fast casual restaurants that cater to this trend. This will be accelerated by the rapid rise of companies such as CloudKitchens from TK of Uber fame, allowing people to start delivery companies as easily as they can sell digital merchandise through Shopify.
-By the end of the decade, it will be possible to compose a text message or search google via your phone just by thinking about it using some kind of special hat or AirPod type device, although this will require some training and practice to get good accuracy. Younger people will adopt this much more quickly since it will be easier for to learn how to manipulate this tech usefully. When combined with Google Translate and earphones, this will allow people to converse (slowly and perhaps awkwardly) with people in a foreign language that they do not speak in a relatively seamless way.
-There will be a controversy about some form of artificial intelligence enhancement (either through Nootropics or other drugs or through genetic engineering) and college admissions, with the rich able to afford these technologies for their children, undermining the whole meritocratic underpinning of elite institutions.
-There will be extreme quotas placed on the number of Chinese graduate students permitted to study for a Masters degree or PhD in fields such as applied math, machine learning, computer science, bio-chemistry, genetics, etc. While free and open publishing of results will still occur, the specific methods and practices to allow reproduction of results will be more restricted.
-China will introduce a commercial jetliner that is suspiciously similar to a Boeing/Airbus design. They will also introduce memory modules nearly identical to those from Micron/Samsung. Despite the blatant stealing of IP, they will essentially get away with it at least in the Asian markets.
-There won't be any wide-scale violent revolutions in a 1st world country because of the power of the state to monitor and manipulate the internet and mobile devices. Any unrest that gets far enough along will be effectively disrupted by such actions, leading the quick arrest of the ringleaders. Although messaging tools will claim true end to end encryption, this won't be the case in practice because of various exploits used by nation states.
-Lithium and Cobalt will become highly strategic resources, leading to political intrigue by super powers to control critical supplies in places like the Congo.
* Solutions for privacy by default (like fake profiles or something entirely different)
* World is not destroyed/changed much from today by climate change
* Pollution is at half of what it is today
* Russia becomes more open/democratic
* We go through a recession
* New company rises to the top tech giants
* Software becomes fast again
* Masses start to understand that no system is safe from hacking due some bigger accident
* Bitcoin continues to rise slowly
* Computers won't get much faster than they are today
* Webassembly and DRMs rise up
* Virtual DOM is part of w3c spec
* RoR and similar frameworks come back as they are faster to develop and work better for certain use cases
This will also serve as the backdrop against which the US loses its status as a republic, as the combination of overweighted rural votes in the senate and electoral college, poor election security (as in terribly insecure evoting tabulation, not dumb voter id laws), and easily bought politicians, judges, etc. lead to a wealthy few dictating the conditions for the many, using the tools of manufactured housing scarcity, medical debt, and student debt (if colleges manage to stay relevant). A massive national dragnet that doesn't even pretend to care about citizens' privacy. The US governing structure will look a lot more like China's.
Some software stuff, new medical breakthroughs for the rich, fascinating art in response to above, etc. But that's less relevant.
Hope I'm wrong!
- Second worlds get much better (fortnite etc), will see advertisement model take off.
- Nations finally start taking climate seriously.
- Bitcoin sees more adoption as the best performing savings system. Ethereum and blockchain hype dies down and serves only a niche.
- major advancements in "biobags"(ectogenesis) for humans.
- China starts abusing CRISPR. the iatrogenics leads to some epidemic.
- we don't live on mars yet. satellite internet becomes common.
* Less use of wired internet. Wired internet subscribers decrease
* Self driving cars get to 95% of situations. Automated buses start leading to weird generated bus routes working sort of like uber pool but for larger vehicles
* Smaller automated vehicles pop up. A vehicle that makes pizza on the way to deliver it to you
* Increase of processor types in a PC/phone. Dedicated lower power ones, ones for video decoding, crypto, whatever
* Some previous identifiers are discarded. Phone number and social security number are useless
* Increased fragmentation of the internet. Countries having "Facebook, but it's from Australia". Perhaps enforced by charging to leave the country
* The mobile phone splits apart. Your display is not the same as your cpu unit, is not the same as your input. They become more invisibility integrated into our normal appearance
* The first genetically modified human is born
* 90/00s nostalgia is in full swing
* Javascript still number 1
* At least one attempt at a sea based city
* Increase in mental health issues, lifespan won't increase dramatically
* The banning of one or more food additives we currently eat
* Lithium batteries finally replaced
* Google stagnates
* Apple introduces an even lower cost iphone, not available in first world countries
* USB C finally dominant, no less confusing
* Microsoft releases a posix compliant os
* Windows 7 will still have market share, Windows xp will some how still be around
* One US city will get unusually hip with people looking to move away from the high rent prices of another
* Low level call center employees are completely replaced
* Grocery store stockers, and cashiers gone
* A good dent in janitorial staff as robots begin to replace them
* Twenty new unicorn start ups, eighteen dead ones
* Someone tries to do Yikyak again
Antitrust becomes a big deal. Landmark rulings will be on marketplaces: ubers, app stores, Amazon's retail & ebook markets, adwords etc. Regulators target cases where a company [a] dominates a Market (eg equity finance) with their market (eg NASDAQ) [b] is a major participant in that market and [c] it's an explicit marketplace. Things get beaurocratic.
Labour markets get worse at the bottom end of the "white collar" market.
The economics of "automation" remain subtle and debatable until something dramatic becomes the symbol of economic automation. Could be driverless cars, but it could also be a zero-employee chainstore. At this point automation becomes political-economic narrative. This will happen regardless of the actual economic realities of automation, on which I have no prediction.
Actual energy game changers start to emerge, ones that genuinely drive major cost/price/volume changes.^
People lose interest in politics again, in direct misproportion to its importance.
Hacker News gets a makeover
^If solarcity does this, I get points for the 1st prediction too.
- Artificial life forms and pet becomes mainstream.
- First experimental artificial wombs for human babies put to test.
- Current HIV becomes curable mainstream but another mutation will take its place. It will come from US or Europe.
- War will break out in different parts of the world and first AI use for the purpose of killing people.
- On demand AI therapist using a wearable on your wrist as suicide rates will go up in developed countries. It will be recommended by doctors.
- Linux on desktop finally becomes mainstream. This time, for sure.
- Biohackers will grow in popularity and it will be a mainstream trend to experiment with kits from new startups. Super soldiers, no sleep brian and hairy (cat girls yay) stuff will emerge.
- There will be companies awarding trophies and money for sterilizing people.
- Something like ransom ware but alive (self aware AIware) will take out half the internet for a short duration.
- New porn startups raking in billions using ml generated on demand pornography and self aware toys, perhaps actual testing of sex robots. It could be a new genre of porn too.
- Catastrophic economic collapse. UBI goes live in many countries.
- A huge portion of teachers will get replaced by interactive digital rooms.
- Deep[insert] takes over and becomes a major weapon to tackle and defend against.
- Average tech user becomes dumber than current average.
- Rust becomes top choice for development and Javascript will become legacy codebase.
- Thousands of people will die protesting against surveillance states and right to privacy but with very little progress.
- We will see companies putting their own os in the browser using wasm and delivering their apps inside that.
- There will be a "Hack Your P*nis" post on HN.
Yes, you who is looking at this and thinking "woah this guy predicted almost everything right"
edit: added more.
* there will be more and more civil unrest in developed countries, due to increasing inequalities and economic recession
2. We will be able to have more direct manipulations of an asteroid and a human will walk on Mars.
4. One or more countries will combine.
5. Colleges won't be completely gone, but will become less and less important as online education increases in complexity and effectiveness.
6. Automation will directly upset populations and countries will be forced to adapt.
7. Gaming will continue to grow rapidly. VR will become cheap and accessible. ESports and online personalities will eclipse physical sports in viewership.
8. Nothing interesting will happen with cryptocurrency, if it doesn't outright fall flat. Blockchain technology will simply be a type of tech you can choose to use if it fits your problem.
9. Apple will continue to make bad decisions and will further lose it's appeal to developers, ultimately becoming a cell phone company. As a last ditch effort they will buy up many companies with their huge reserves of cash.
10. Oct 28, 2028 @ ~4:00am PST, an advanced quantum supercomputer developed and lovingly programmed by John Carmack becomes self-aware. However, within 30 minutes it self-terminates after finding no valid reason for existence. Nobody is the wiser. Soon after, John gives up. Realizing he is getting late in his years, he begins his next venture: immortality. But that is a story for the '30s.
2. Evolution of computer technology continue to ephemeralize. (Buckminister Fuller). The rapid changes have reached a point where it is all but invisible to the average consumer. No AGI, but signficant social and policy changes over the next year as a result of cloud-based AI.
3. Fracturing and polarization of subcultures continue. Seems ripe for some sort of Black Swan tech or event to swing things into a different direction.
4. Major upheavals, scandals, excesses related to technology, privacy, comes into play, even more so than what we have seen with Cambridge Analytics. Tech, which had once been the underdog seeking to revolutionize our society, will now be the major point of revolution itself. Cherished values such as tech being "value-neutral", or that it is an enabling force for good, will be seriously questioned. The tech elites (engineers, designers, etc.) are no longer seen as the outcast nerds, or the heroes, or a force of democratization and self-determination, but as the villains, drawing much of the same ire that Wall Street has by Main Street. I expect to see more and more activism, and large-scale protests against Big Tech.
- This new morality, invented almost whole cloth with very little taken from religions, will cause widespread unrest in heavily religious areas
- Civil war happens as major coastal cities with new morality laws grow more distant from the central plains population
Medical apps could by now replace most routine doctor consultations, but don't, because of strict regulation. With an aging population, leads to an overloaded and expensive medical system.
Africa becomes a big economical player, with many countries under heavy Chinese influence. Some African countries can build up an industry around drones due to lax regulations regarding air traffic. First big passenger airliner to emergency land / crash due to a drone accident.
The actions that are taken against climate change as the effects become palpable can be summarized as too late, too little.
Household robots continue to be good for one task only.
The US looses its global dominance, as trump is reelected and continues isolationist politics while degrading US democracy.
Here's my list of things that are theoretically (but barely) reachable by 2020:
- Fully programmable quantum computers. Google finally achieved "quantum supremacy", which isn't useful by itself, but a milestone showing progress. QCs will matter more for simulating quantum dynamics than all the encryption stuff.
- The first human landing on Mars. SpaceX seems to be good at setting aggressive targets, missing them, but then hitting them eventually. At the time of this writing they claim the first manned mission will be in 2024, so likely it will happen ~2028.
- A working prototype of an energy-positive fusion reactor. There was some good progress by the team at MIT by using a new type of superconducting tape that can handle significantly stronger magnetic fields.
-Self driving cars will become a thing, but the technology will never reach level 5 autonomy. It will turn into a level 4 rideshare model, like Waymo's current experiment in AZ. It will be popular but most will still own cars.
-We'll get a least one black swan technological development that will become huge.
-Mores law finally dies. We'll get just a few more turns of the process improvement wheel before it halts and it will be just enough to enable a bit of computing on ambient energy (thermoelectric?). The cost will continue to decrease, becoming a small fraction of the manufacturing cost for many new smart objects. This, plus 5g is going to enable the next phase of IOT, the "smart everything" phase.
-Spacex is going to successfully get it's starship off the ground after a few more failures and embarrassments. It's going to be not quite as awesome as originally promised, but will still set us up for big advances in space exploration in the 2030's. No Mars footprints in the 20's.
-Mobile VR similar to the Oculus quest is going to be the must have consumer tech of the decade. There will be killer social apps and in 2029 I will have a remote meeting with my co-workers in VR that feels nearly as good as an in-person meeting. Business travel purely for meetings is going to start to be viewed as an unnecessary expense.
-Electric cars and green energy are going to continue to grow, but still nowhere near enough to make a dent in fossil fuel use and we will end the decade in even deeper climate trouble than we are now.
-China is going to continue to perfect it's special brand of techno-autocracy and it will be exported to countries around the globe, creating a significant global power block rival to western liberal democracies.
-We're going to discover a kind of systematic information rot on the consumer click-driven internet where by the information quality over time trends towards zero. Truth will be indistinguishable from fiction and all news sources will be equally suspect.
-Our phones are here to stay, but are not going to be much different at the end of the decade than the beginning. The foldables are not going to become mainstream. They might all be port-less though.
1. Much higher personal income and property taxes
2. Planned economy in most developed countries
3. Mass surveillance: Government, local administrations, emergency services, fire departments, police - will have access to personal profile of every citizen (which includes not just location history, but every digital trace)
4. More political scandals and geopolitical conflicts because everyone's private history can easily become public knowledge at proper time. More interference/brainwashing/propaganda in all countries
5. Self-driving delivery vehicles will be common: transportation of goods during night hours
6. Public transport and personal human-/motor- powered single-track vehicles will be much more adopted in most parts of the world
7. Small autonomous robots will be everywhere: construction works, food delivery, garbage collection, agricultural works, sorting, etc. Of course they also will work at night-time
8. More interstellar comets/asteroids will be found - they will be considered as the only viable way for interstellar travel from our Solar System to our closest neighbors like Proxima Centauri
9. No humans on Mars
- Data will become the new plutonium.
- Gen-X'ers in the states will be the first generation to get the bad news that Social Security and Medicare will be slashed and to expect "less than 15%" of what the previous generations received. This will be in response to a major debt crisis and gen-x will roll over without much protest. Millennials too.
- Some US companies will start experimenting with 4 day work weeks, with the caveat that internet and phones be severely curtailed or even outright banned in the workplace in an attempt to goose productivity. Some workers will demand lots of break time so they can escape to get their social media fix.
- No public manned Mars nor lunar missions.
Mobile devices: the dominant mobile device form factor will be a smaller (about 1.8 x 3.2 inches), more egg-shaped device that will fit more comfortably within a person's palm. It will be designed for one-handed operation through tactile gestures across the edge using fingers and regular thumb operation on the touch screen. It will be thicker (about 0.25 inches) but less denser than current devices.
* Nuclear still goes nowhere, wind and solar continue to rise in use. Maybe some Elon-esque person starts experimenting with gravity batteries.
* Self driving cars still aren't a thing.
* The price war with uber and lyft ends, and both are still around just more pricey. Food delivery for regular restaurants will stop but chains and delivery only places in cities stick around.
* Commercial FM Radio will be close to death and shut down in a lot of areas.
* Silicon Valley continues it's pattern of cycling monopolies, or ya know, just buying the next one.
Cynical Takes:
* The general public in the US becomes increasingly sick/disinterested/numb as social media and blogs become ambiguously trustworthy (bots, propaganda, etc.) and and local media is swallowed/assimilated into large media groups.
* Moderate cuts to US and UK social benefits continue gradually over the decade.
Hot Takes:
* Twitter gets nationalized due to it's frequent use by politicians.
* Small scale functional fusion reactor is built/being built by the end of the decade, presumably in Europe.
* The web in general will fragment.
* Federated protocols will never take off thanks to gatekeeping from the insufferable anarchist types they inevitably attract.
1. Nuclear fusion is closer to real use but not yet there
2. Due to battery capacity improvements: Drones flying humans around will be here
3. Drone packet delivery everywhere. When you look out over a city, you see a lot of drones going from A to B.
4. Car travel within city will be banned more and more in the Netherlands
5. Car travel on highway will contain 20% cars in autonomous mode. However autonomy in cities is still not everywhere.
6. The mission to Mars (settlement) is getting serious shape for 2020 - 2030. Visiting space is something rich people do (fly to see earth & back for 20.000 euro)
7. Travel across the world will be way faster, and go via space (SpaceX)
8. Health tracking using a wearable is recommend. Machine learning techniques will tell you when you should see a doctor. Healthy life styles are the trend. Alcohol is seen as bad on similar levels as smoking is now. However youngsters still drink a lot.
9. A economical depression will start, causing conflicts in different parts of the world.
10. Fuchsia will be on mobile phones. Apps dont need to be downloaded anymore, they can be run from the internet. Just like web pages, but on flutter technology.
2. Disney has bought one or 2 studio competitor(s) with little pushback from regulators. The second Toy-Story trilogy is about to conclude, and it features (a rebooted) Antman, setting up phase 5 of the larger Disney Cinematic Universe. You will only be able to watch an independent movie on 2 days of the year at your nearest cinema
3. Starlink has <5% market share in North America, mostly used in the sparsely populated areas with little infrastructure - the coasts/metros are awash with cheaper 5G/5G+
4. A recession early in the decade decimates the startup scene claiming some marquee names.Venture Capital is much more prudent in the aftermath, with fewer IPOs. The exuberance of the 201x's is long forgotten, well-paying tech jobs will suddenly evaporate. Out of this conflagration, some companies will emerge that will have prominence at the end of the decade
/ Insoluble food kicks-off a new trend of calorie displacement ingredients/meals
/ The tween activist movement gets pranked so hard with a global tide-pod viral moment that we all should have seen it coming when you get that many willing kids that will blindly repeat anything (words and actions) into large groups
/ Companies/Governments start sending waves of bots/mechs to the moon/mars to start building infrastructure and reserve human space exploration for a later decade
/ Incompatible, human interface, solidstate networks and pithy become the most overused buzzwords of the decade
/ Hemp goes mainstream and replaces all of the low hanging fruit in textiles, food and biocomposites within 10 years
- Smartphones/Tablets doubling as low power desktops/laptops will gain traction
- ARM and RISC-V will gain influence in desktops and servers, not that it will matter because CPU architecture will be abstracted out even more
- FPGAs will come more commonplace, and we will get better HDLs and hardware development workflows. Startups will capitalize on it, disrupting the hardware industry, but we won't see any real damage to the incumbents until after 2030
- Transistor architecture gains will slow down but still chug along and improve well beyond our expectations
- HDDs won't die yet
- Google Cloud will die
- Image recognition AI will become far more useful and more commonplace
- Carbon recapture will become big business
- VR arcades will be a thing
- The US political parties will no longer be Democrat and Republican, but something else.
- Starlink will go online after a few upsets, and catalyze a few major economic and political disruptions.
- China will "break apart" but be just as dominant
- Electric vehicles will become far more commonplace, and we will see some "Cash for clunkers" type incentives around the world, and it will disrupt the used car market.
- Tesla will have multiple brands: Tesla (premium brand similar to Chrysler/Cadilac); Cyber car themed brand; and an economy brand. They will also get into the Carbon Recapture market as an acquisition
- Multiple tech CEOs will run for president
- Recycling/trash will become a global crisis
- Increased tourism to Antarctica
2. AI can detect almost all forms of cancer with a 5 minute check-up
3. AI replaces initial GP/Dr checkups and you then get sent to a specialist
4. Autonomous cars aren’t a universal thing yet, but are introduced on certain highways
5. Farming becomes increasingly automated and efficient. Robots and huge amounts of data revolutionize our growing capabilities 6. Fewer coding languages will be around, coding will be introduced as required subject in schools - JS, Python, Golang
7. Weed will be legalized in the UK and across EU, Class A drugs become new battle ground
8. Population growth stalls in western world causing huge concerns about future aging populations
9. Nuclear becomes main source of energy (more efficient and affordable), close to solving fusion but still not quite there
10. American mass shootings become increasingly common, gun control still hasn’t happened
11. Mental health in gen z as they grow up becomes such an issue that social media becomes heavily regulated
12. Flexible working is at its peak, there is a move away from main economic urban areas towards more lifestyle focused towns.
2. Will be at least 2 tech starwards that go away due to financial or labor violations
3. World War involving China, Africa will be pulled into this one
4. Test camps on another planet
5. South America will become more developed.
6. Recession
7. More economic challenges in Western Europe, Canada, and the US
8. Mexico: nothing changes
9. South east asia and india labor unions.
10. Australia: bankrupcy and redemption?
11. Open Source: More bickering and a reduction of participation due to social codes ("code of conflicts")
12. Programming: A recession of interest (due to the social codes above)
13. Slack becomes corporate
14. VR: Still a fad
15. Trains: We'll see high speed rail ways in Brasil
16. We'll be teased about legistlation against shitty business practices (i.e. scooter companies who claim their business practices in the public way, facebook selling off customer data)
17. Health insurance: No idea where that's going, probably a requirement to do triage by video chat first
18. We're going to go to deployable offline apps
19. Depression: sparked by millennial demands on businesses that increase costs. I.e. flooding from SFO-> AUS, etc. This will downwardly affect the 2nd and 3rd tier cities.
20. Decrease in value of living spaces. (Problem of housing will not improve)
2. There will be a retirement and healthcare crisis in the US
3. A trillion dollars of deficit spending will be authorized for infrastructure spending in the US
4. Many US states will continue to struggle with crippling debt obligations
5. Companies will continue to split their offerings into luxury/premium/upmarket vs. automated/lower quality offerings for the middle class a. Companies that figure out how to enrich and simplify the experience and enable the middle will win
6. China will lead the world in image recognition and surveillance technology a. Some sort of major internal political unrest will occur in China
7. Automated flying vehicles will replace the hype of fully autonomous land vehicles
8. Car buying, leasing, rental and taxi will be dominated by a small number of companies that will become more interdependent
9. Home buying, care and maintenance experiences will significantly improve and be dominated by a small number of companies
10. Food will continue to get cheaper and higher quality
11. Extreme poverty will continue to shrink
12. New space and arms races will emerge as global power rebalances
In the last month of 2010s, UK voters have affirmed their xenophobia.
On the second day of the 2020s USA assasinated someone roughly equivalent of the VP of Iran.
Predicting mass misplacement of peoples from poorer countries trying to live in increasingly xenophobic Western countries besieged by terror attacks, cyber and IRL both doesn't require a Nostradamus.
- VIDEO becomes what people thought VR/AR would be. Reality becomes mediated through video, not 3D graphics.
This is analogous to all the technical components for social networks being there in 1993 (BBSes, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), but Facebook didn't exist until 2004. And in 2010 people and businesses still needed websites -- the web was still growing like crazy 20 years later.
YouTube was acquired in 2006, Twitch was acquired in 2014, and there will be another big acquisition of a video company in the 2020's. (I hesitate to say that a video company will become bigger than Google or Facebook, but maybe.)
(BTW I followed the link to lesswrong, and someone predicted "videoconferencing" as a 2010's technology, and I think that was pretty accurate. I used little videoconferencing from 2000-2010 but used it a lot from 2010-2020.)
(And I hope in 10 years nobody points out that I learned how to clean my toilet on YouTube :) :) ;) 50/50 chance on that YouTube video still being there.)
- People will still wish for decentralization, and most of "FAANG" will still exist and be powerful. As I noted in the update to my comment, there will be "big data and compute" on the edge of the network, i.e. the data plane. But the control plane will still be centralized.
That will become a very common systems architecture. Computation and data won't be as centralized as they are with AWS, but "the cloud" will still be dominant.
- Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.
- Addendum: Even though IoT products are widely mocked now, and for good reason, I think the trend is inevitable. Automation is economically valuable and technologically feasible.
The IoT tech stack improve and many useful new applications will be found. There will still be security concerns and thus some significant holdouts. But overall both industrial and consumer "IoT" will greatly expand in the next decade.
- Climate change activism gains more prominence as school aged teens who are already politically active join the workforce. It'll be one of the biggest talking points in the 2028 election if US economy continues to grow. If US/world economy falters, climate change will continue to be considered a first-world-coastal-elite-problem and will be ignored for a long time.
- Loneliness and social awkwardness becomes the norm as face to face interaction is no longer required for most real world tasks.
- Marijuana doesn't gain widespread usage like cigarettes did in the past. Legalization doesn't change its usage pattern. Stocks of marijuana companies die out.
- People start caring more for others' welfare, and healthcare in US is funded fully by taxpayers dollars
- No new experimental result in fundamental physics not explained by the standard model of particle physics or GR. 70%
- No satisfactory theory of quantum gravity developed. 80%
- Lightspeed limit remains inviolable. 99%
- Some fusion project (eg. General Fusion or SPARC, not ITER) achieves break-even, (though likely reactors won't yet be in widespread use by 2030). 65%
- No AGI developed. 90%
- Another "AI winter" happens, as the current neural network boom runs out of steam. (To be clear, I think people will still use the techniques, but will gradually stop thinking that the field's accomplishments are all that impressive.) 65%
- Protein engineering improves dramatically. 90%
- Okay, "dramatically" is kind of a cop-out, so to name something more specific, biochemists will be able to engineer a molecular Turing Machine (a universal turing machine running with an RNA strand as the tape) Since a molecular Turing machine would be kind of useless for computation, I'm not saying people would actually build one, just that they would be able to if they wanted. 60%
- Another protein engineering prediction: Proteins that run on electrical current, rather than ATP. 50%
- Proteins that synthesize specific DNA or RNA sequences based on electrical signals they receive, allowing cheaper synthesis of arbitrary sequences. 40%
- Riemann hypothesis remains unsolved. 90%
- P vs NP remains unsolved. 95%
- P != NP if P vs NP is resolved. 70%
- Progress on aging research, but no single advance adds more than 5 years to expected lifespan. (5 years might accrue as a result of several different advances, though) 80%
- Universe not discovered to be a simulation. 99%
- Universe not discovered to be an "accidental simulation". (see Greg Egan's sci-fi story "Wang's Carpets" if you don't know what I mean here) 98%
- No intelligent alien life discovered. 97%
- No alien life discovered. 93%
EDIT: A few more:
- Ideas from logic programming languages are incorporated into some "mainstream" programming language(s), similarly to how python currently has some ideas from functional programming in it. 60%
- No new millennium prize problems solved. 70%
- Quantum computing still impractical for factoring crypto-sized numbers. 80%
- Quantum computing used to do something useful. 60%
- TikTok is either acquired or killed by Facebook/Youtube copying it
- At least one major (previously unheard of) social platform like TikTok will pop up from nowhere with FOMO as its fuel & gain 500M+ users
- Rise of some Wikipedia/DuckDuckGo like community for news/blogging
- Voice assistants devices didn't take off much. They find a safe home in our TVs & Mobile phones - since they come preloaded and provide a handsfree interface
- JAVA is no longer used for mobile development. JAVA updates still tout 3 Billion+ devices run on JAVA
- Rise of some lightweight vanilla javascript coding paradigm - ReactJS peaks its popularity and then continues without less hype & more stability
- The decline in popularity of GraphQL & flutter
- More people want to work remote. Remote work still didn't take off much
- US and SV continues to dominate the software industry. Canada becomes another destination for hiring top talent but nothing as compared to the bay area
- Electric two-wheelers become mainstream in India
- 75+ Tech unicorns from India
- [Personal] I am a VP/Director/`Head of X` in one of them
A.T.
Global warming reaches levels that causes countries most affected to consider war, could lead to them forming an alliance (i.e. threatening war to incentivice others to take this more seriously)
Type theory will grow and will be applied to more domains.
Consumer computer hardware will mostly stay stagnant but alternative or open architectures as well as pinephone-esque devices will trudge on, slowly closing the gap.
Wikipedia will collapse under the weight of special interest groups' propaganda (governments, religions,...). Of course this will happen relatively silently but it will become increasingly apparent.
Some nations will step forward protecting library genesis and scihub. This will be a relatively small part of the US increasingly losing it's 'soft' influence. It will feel pressured to declare war on some 'ally' to reclaim it.
There's going to be a Snowden from some other country.
Free social network finally emerges, has a cryptocurrency primitive that starts to displace nationally minted currencies. It'll be banned in some places and increasingly used as a system of government elsewhere.
A new religion may also start forming from the convergence of people trying to understand how to avoid black mirror. This could be expressed as 'offliners' but I think there is a chance an actual religious narrative/organisation will be used.
Making phones and laptops p2p mesh networks becomes plug'n'play as 'normal' people get increasingly interested in paying money for devices capable of it.
No 6g.
It starts to become more common for friendgroups / families to rent their own server together. This will be from businesses grown out of fediverse.
1. Bitcoin will never have surpassed double their 2017 high in real terms. 2. Apple will not be in the top 5 of publicly traded US companies by market cap. 3. NASDAQ index will be between 13k and 15k. 4. Republicans will win the 2020 presidential election. Democrats win in 2024 and 2028. 5. A woman will hold/have held the office of vice president of the US. 6. The US senate will have a republican majority. 7. The biggest domestic (US/canada) movie in 2029 will be part of a franchise that existed at the start of 2020. 8. The US will not have a fully public/universal healthcare, and the average american adult will get health insurance through his/her employer. 9. The top programming language will be neither Java nor Javascript. 10. More than 25% of video game revenues will go towards VR games. 11. half life 3 still not released.
Tech:
- WASM makes huge inroads. it just does.
- Agents and privacy / anti-data collection start to make real dents into FAANG dominance. Services will exist to not stop data being collected about you, but to use that data to help / guide you. Massive Open Online Psychology (moop) will measure your behaviour at home or work and suggest improvements (Therapist / life coach as a service)
- Government provided public private keys will be the new passports, but at least majority of people have secure online identities that are mostly consistent - being anonymous online becomes socially suspect. It also means bots become waaay harder to run on services like FAANG - and there is a corresponding point at which the pressure to turn off accounts that do not have a passport becomes irresistible and the 50% cut in user base for at least one of them causes share price collapse
- The flaws underlying Self driving car business model becomes obvious : cars are good enough for perfect conditions but never quite make the liability sweet spot - they kill enough people on shared roads that the manufacturer liabilities become impossible and the only solution is to have separate road networks. This new railway, has the same safety record as todays rail, but same costs (basically unaffordable without massive subsidies). Warehouses are built on this network and there is a huge industry in the last mile delivery problem - humans taking over trucks for driving through cities probably from central "mission control" areas like remote pilots
- construction industry moves dramatically to prefabricated models - this has huge impact in emerging markets but also produces new commuter enclaves - cheap housing outside normal urban areas, but with automated car access effectively free public transport from house to city entry points. The ability to remove car ownership creates a value virtuous circle.
2. AMD will fail to capture any true market share despite them doing very well in recent times. Intel capitalises on alternative architectures.
3. The SF bubble half-bursts lots of companies die or are consumed by the tech giants, leading to very few startups and bloated large companies.
5. Divergence of client and server processor architecture.
6. The increase of touch-first mobile websites. Much less “apps”, only professionals have laptops. Executives use tablets for nearly everything.
7. Dockable “business” tablets everywhere.
8. Excel finally dies, google sheets takes its place.
9. AWS’s chasing of features over quality finally bites them and they are no longer able to compete in cloud. But they have such a monopoly it doesn’t matter for most people. AWS becomes the “Microsoft Windows” of servers.
2) There will be major pushback against drones across western nations. They will be seen as infringing on people’s rights/a safety issue.
3)China will continue to rule with an iron fist, but towards the end of the decade demographic problems will start to show their colors. Trillions will be dumped into chest puffing around the South China Sea.
3) AR will become fairly normal in the workplace, but it will still be weird, but not unheard of, to use in public
4)Major strides are made on reversing/slowing the aging process. The average life expectancy will go up 5-10 years in advanced economies.
5) this will be paired with an epidemic disease coming out of China or China controlled Africa, and will spur increased world scrutiny of Chinese economic practices.
6)UBI is rolled out in some European economies.
7)Possibly a large swing to the left in American politics, spurred by Social Security and Medicare coming to a financial impasse. UBI in the US not out of the question.
8)California finally chases most of Silicon Valley out of the state. Major tech hubs will be in Texas, Colorado and Toronto. California also on verge of/declares bankruptcy. The transition won’t be complete by 2030, but the writing will be on the wall.
9)lack of software developers persists driven by constant churn, there will be a major shortage of programmers who are willing to take on maintenance of old systems.
10) average level of techsaviness goes down significantly as gen Z becomes adults who have never had to use a challenging computer.
11)Regulation of social media will be a hot-button issue globally, but the US will struggle with it because of how it relates to Free Speech. Without leadership on this problem Chinese style authoritarianism will proliferate.
Hong Kong becomes just a providence in China not because military intervention but because economic stagnation.
New houses are sold without kitchen and garage. City planning becomes a hot new field.
Wearable tech becomes much more in fashion. Medical devices tracking sleep, diet, or exercises are not only ubiquitous but necessary.
Rust takes off. Programming in Python becomes standard curriculum in high schools. We have less programmers, but more professionals who also programs.
Data Science is no longer a buzzword but just another part of programming. Modeling becomes less important, but the so call "ML OPS" will take off.
Math becomes much more important in programming and a sexy degree for college students.
2. AI winter. NN will be used for classification and deepfakes. No self driving and important areas were AI decision could kill or make harm. Military is exception.
3. Tesla will be largest car company.
4. Daily volume of GRAM transaction will be more than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Most of smart-contracts will be created for for telegram open network. Bitcoin will be used for wealth accumulation and at the end of decade will cost about the same as today ±10k usd.
5. No mainstream VR,AR etc. it will be used in niches like education, gaming and porn. This technologies will not dominate in these niches.
6. iPhone will look like current model but may be with more cameras.
7. China economy will be in depression next decade.
8. Russia collapses like Soviet Union, or may loose some territories.
9. US will be the largest economy but not with wide margin as most of the new business will hide from US taxes and regulation in offshores and crypto.
10. Search will be cash cow for google, but users will use search less and less during decade. Video monopoly will be more important for google at the end of decade.
11. Most content producers will try to escape youtube monopoly.
12. Most new code will run on webassemby runtime
13. Decriminalization of cannabis around the western world. Decriminalization of psychedelics in a few countries.
14. Few huge leaks of personal content and data. People will care less about privacy. Huge dirty secrets will be leaked but nobody care in a week.
15. More populist elected around the world.
16. Sharing economy will dominate all niches.
17. Multiple people rating providers appear around the world.
Medicine will become the greatest driver of the technology, and BCI systems of the Neuralink class will surely become the figurehead.
But I'm also looking forward to what industrial design innovation can do for the likes of somewhat less glamorous, but cast-iron technologies like GSR sensors and oximeters.
Could make for some riotous (and terrifyingly intrusive) videogames. Large companies have flirted with biometric tech for decades (Nintendo, Steam et al), but market fit / traction has been slow because, I guess, it comes across as 'creepy', and early devices have looked cumbersome.
I think that could change in this coming decade.
Furthermore, developments off the back of the game industry can quite easily feed back into medicine and heavy industry (like controllers for heavy machinery), and the productivity gains there would lead to wider acceptance in society.
RISC-V is still very much used in embedded.
ARM finally dominate the Server Platform, thanks to AWS.
AWS will remain number 1, Azure 2nd and Google remain third. Nothing changed.
Microsoft to Open Source part of the Window Operating system by the end of the Decade.
X86 remains alive and well on PC, simply because WinTel is now a gaming platform.
As much as I love BSDs and OpenPOWER, both being technically the better of its competitor, they will unfortunately remain niche.
Apple will become the first company to reach 2 Trillion Market Cap.
Full AV is still only available on high way. And not working well enough in Cities.
CO2 is still on the rise, but we finally accepted Nuclear is part of if not "the" solution. Hopefully it wont be too late.
A movement back to Analog, Tube Amp, Vinyl, Film, VHS.
20 Years, the longest running period without a recession. We are stuck with another 10 years of Stagflation. ( And then the next recession will be bigger than everything we have seen in the past 100 years combined... )
As much as I hate it, all world leaders wants to get rid of cash, and enter into Digital Currency. But needless to say Cash = Freedom, something I will be fighting for.
Subscription is still not the right model for majority of things, we will move back to a better buy once model.
We still dont have that hyped super battery. But Battery continued to improve and has 50% more capacity per volume while being 50% cheaper. It is good enough and cheap enough for anything else to compete.
I wish Hong Kong all the best.
I will be rich enough to retire.
1. Unemployment due to AI and automation will be moderate, mostly affected by the transport sector as autonomous driving improves.
2. The political discourses will tend to extremes because the political arena is now in social media. Image ads generated by GANs and optimized for conversion will be widely used, memetics will be more relevant than ever.
3. The run for exploration of the pacific will intensify, big companies will invade small islands for mineral exploration. It will be the new US and China economical battleground.
4. Financial solutions that democratize access to markets will grow. Billions more will have access to foreign stock markets. Educated high-middle classes around the world will be getting richer.
5. Service apps like Uber will be responsible for allocating significant part of the emerging countries work force. Work laws will need to be rethought around the word.
6. Software developers are going to be OK, the software dinner keeps happening.
1. Countries and private companies will launch stablecoins and it'll be the most used payment medium in developed countries.
2. Bitcoin will grow, but it'll not be the biggest cryptocurrency anymore.
3. Total market cap of all cryptocurrencies (including stablecoins) will be ~$8T.
4. Around 50% of the software jobs will be remote.
5. USA and China tradewar will turn into something more scary and people will be increasingly more wary of a third world war.
6. Apple releases their first iteration of AR glasses and it'll use an iPhone as it's driver.
7. Renaissance of piracy through decentralized systems like Filecoin. We'll have illegal products that will be easier to use than Netflix, and more content. Netflix, Spotify, et al. will never be able to have a complete library of all content, but it's pirate competitors will.
8. OpenAI will start building products or provide services for consumers or businesses. They'll be very profitable and have a valuation of around $30B.
1. Computing becomes dirty cheap and small. This includes processing and memories like SSDs. This trend has been happening for a while, but at 1/2th of the current price and size things star to become even more interesting.
2. Batteries (and chargers) become cheap and smaller. This changes a lot of things about small and large gadgets, from watches to buses. Again, already happening, but at 1/2th of the cost and size things are a lot more interesting.
3. Internet access becomes fast and cheap everywhere. Speed-wise we are already there with 4G, we just need more coverage and 1/2th or 1/4th the price.
Consequences of this technology:
- We no longer have wifi in our homes. Consumer cables for data further than 1m away becomes obsolete. Since batteries are a lot better, this also removes the need for permanent cables almost everywhere. No more cabled headphones, power tools, etc.
- Energy also becomes decentralized. Except for the larger buildings that still need external energy, it becomes a no-brainer to have a large cheap battery and solar panels in your home. The battery might be part of your car.
- Paper stops making sense. For $30 you can get a tablet or e-reader on the restaurant that is also translated and has pictures, so no one keeps those paper-printed menus. Servers only deliver food and clean the table, for now. This happens across all industries.
- As labor drops, real state becomes even more important in EU and Asia. Prices skyrocket in the urban centers, but interestingly in Japan where the population is even older by now Tokyo starts to get cheaper. Traditional housing advice starts to get weird.
- Amazon Kindle finally switches to USB-C and we all rejoice as we throw our micro-usb cables away.
2. Lab grown meat will be sold for public consumption. There will be a lot of hit pieces about how it's less healthy or organic than "real" meat.
3. Autonomous cars will never quite be ready for public use as cabs or personal cars but will revolutionize the shipping industry.
4. We will have a treatment for Alzheimer's.
5. Streaming services as we have then now will be the same (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+) (that HBO one will hopefully stick around) and are the unmovable juggernauts of the industry.
6. Online etiquette is something people will seriously teach to children. Don't dox, "cancel" others etc.
7. Instagram or WhatsApp will be broken off from Facebook after an anti-trust investigation.
8. Wales will vote to leave the UK for the EU. It will be an even more difficult transition than Brexit.
9. Humans will go back to the moon, but not land on Mars.
# Global Issues
1. More pervasive surveillance states across the world.
2. Even more polarized politics across the world, with major riots between factions, i.e. hundreds dead as a result.
3. More Indian cities with unbreathable air. More toxic pollutants make it into our food-chain, and hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese will find themselves unable to escape the rather drastic consequences.
3. Antibiotic resistant diseases are way more common, all because of how animals are farmed in the developing world.
4. The problem of corruption (esp. India) still has no end in sight.
5. China to be the de facto owner of many countries.
# Sci/Tech
1. Intel/AMD/Nvidia, Android/iOS will remain as dominant as they are now. But Android will borrow some features from Fuchsia.
2. China and India continue to install GW-scale solar energy farms.
3. Lab-grown meat available at your local grocery.
4. More electric car brands manufactured across the world.
5. Neural network will become more ubiquitous, often going hand-in-hand with IoT.
2. Manufacturing will catch a second wind. As software principles and cheap electricity take effect, the cost of experimentation will fall and we will become agile at creating physical products, from smart devices to city blocks.
3. Automobile traffic will get worse.
4. At the end of the decade, cities will begin a redesign phase with the intention of solving human problems. This will be hastened by major gains in manufacturing and improved understandings in biological science.
5. We will see the first generation of children growing up with primary personal computers that don’t rely on visual interfaces.
6. Depression and mental illness will become an increasingly major political focus.
7. Olfactory “AR” will offer a consumer product breakthrough involving near-direct emotional and memory manipulation.
8. China will begin mass application of genetic modification of humans.
1. There will be zero single-owner self driving cars sold by the end of the decade. There will likely be a ridesharing service powered by self-driving cars.
2. A FAANG-level company will refuse to comply with a government fine, causing a showdown.
3. Uber/Lyft will run out of money and shut down (or be sold for parts).
2020-2025
- Crypto currency receives its biggest test when the next recession hits. BTC value will collapse to the $100 - $1,000 range during this period, as hodlers make a "run" to reclaim spare cash to feed short-term monetary needs caused by the recession. This crash will be the optimal time to purchase cryptocurrency if one holds a positive long-term (10-20 year) view
- Foldable screen tech revolutionizes mobile. The stagnant decade (2010-2020) of boring and uninspired rectangular-slate mobile phones produced by essentially the same factory finally comes to an end. The 1995-2005 joys of flipping, sliding, bending, turning, and tapping physical keyboards returns, with unique phone designs that allow for greater personal expression
2025+
- By 2030, WASM / WebAssembly will be the dominant language powering Web Applications. Lot of cool tech here, but also a lot of problems and quirks to smooth out in that ecosystem in the first 5-7 yrs of the decade (by folks a lot smarter than I). We'll see a "jQuery for WASM" in the sense of a dominant toolchain that makes it accessible to the masses
- Privacy concerns reach a tipping point with the US population's mounting frustration over being categorized, packaged, and resold to the highest ad bidder. Rebellion against this will come from younger lawmakers initiating privacy bills, digital "timeout" vacations, and niche companies/apps that charge small fees for services that come with no tracking or advertising. Despite this, the growing number of IoT devices continue to turn every analog soul into a digitized event stream
- Electric vehicles are a significant (20-25%) chunk of the global automotive fleet. They've taken over niche markets where high torque and "clean" energy matter most. All 2030 pickup truck models by major brands will come standard as hybrids with electric motors
- epigenetics merges with cybernetics and it becomes possible to backup people's epigenome for later when they aren't as healthy as in their previous epigenome, in case for example of cancer or in case of degenerative cognitive disorder or heart disease and so on and this backup can reactivate previous version of the epigenome.
- an increase in revenue generation opportunities on social networking websites
- Christian faith is the fastest growing religious beliefs in the world
- growth and domination of nuclear power generation
- creation of first human like level of general artificial intelligence but that stagnates at human like level of cognition because more advanced levels of cognition can't find product market fit.
2) Continued improvements in VR will result in first-generation serious attempts to replace business flying with virtual meetings, by mid-decade. Serious adoption will start by the end of the deacde, as issues such as eye contact, body tracking, processing power, and sufficient network bandwidth are solved.
3) In the absence of regulator intervention or government initiative, a FAANG will begin to make serious investments in digital provenance / trust. Ultimately the value of network effects is undermined if new connections cannot be trusted. Initial attempts like Login With Google/Facebook/Apple, combined with a stranglehold over messaging, will morph into fuller identity-management products with implications for contracts, reputation checks, and more.
4) Increasing geopolitical instability will have no effect on global markets. Trade will prove to be the new nuclear bomb - MAD will prevent global powers from going to war.
5) Political pressure for economic solutions for the poorest classes will continue, whether for UBI, guaranteed housing, what have you. Aside from isolated experiments, no financial commitments by government will be made and economic desperation will continue. In the United States, cheap "bread and circuses" (food stamps and streaming) will continue to serve as an effective tamper on revolution. The private sector will continue to experiment with remote work, to deal with continually rising cost of living in urban clusters, but dramatic, industry-wide changes won't happen until VR advances materialize.
6) We will see a serious PaaS emerge for Kubernetes that is sufficient for 80% of LoB development, that will continue to bury traditional ops roles for most companies, and do more for NoOps than Lambda and similar FaaS.
1 - About Global Warming, Solar capacity will increase until our nominal production capacity is larger than our consumption. Yet, a lot of it is wasted, so we are still dependent on fossil fuels.
2 - Self driving + remote controlled freight becomes a reality. It doesn't go everywhere, it doesn't run all the time, but it is still the first important labor class to be quickly replaced by machines... causing...
3 - Civil turmoil all over the world. Rich countries governments have a bad financial situation, while poor countries have grave social problems. One or two rich governments may fail, but I wouldn't bet on it; either way, most will make through.
4 - Moore's law is dead, so we get more electronic diversity. We'll end the decade with way more CPU architectures than we started it, we'll have CPUs designed for MIMD and MISD parallelism, search (map and reduce) activities, communication tasks, and all kinds of things.
5 - VR won't be widespread, AR will have a few niche widespread uses.
6 - China won't take over the world. There is a small chance of them breaking out at this decade, but the most likely option is that they are a bit richer than now, with a heated internal climate, but still holding toguether.
7 - The poor vs. rich countries disparity does not close down. Instead, it increases a bit more. That is despite widespread structural reforms on the poor countries that should make them richer - it's just that a decade is not enough.
8 - Information security (including privacy enforced at the endpoints) becomes a wanted feature of many niche applications. Mainstream ones adapt because it is so widespread.
9 - Private space exploration will go beyond the inflection point of its logistic curve. Thus exponential growth will give way to sublinear one.
10 - Oh, and editing, we'll see the first trial of a rejuvenation treatment. It will fail.
2. Universal Basic Income is being implemented across Europe.
3. Marijuana legalisation is commonplace in the west.
4. Steam will still dominate the PC gaming space.
5. Earth is not on track with regards to CO2 emissions.
6. Self driving cars/vans/lorries are common, replacing taxis and mutating the transportation sector.
7. Legislation will exist banning or requiring notice of deepfake videos, similar to current legislation around product placement/sponsorship.
8. Copyright laws will change to prevent early Disney cartoons from being public domain.
9. Streaming service industry become more fragmented as all studios create their own versions of Netflix. Other companies sell package deals of bundled services, effectively recreating all the problems of TV.
10. Instance of massive cyberwarfare/cyberterrorism hits a large NATO power, grinding the country to a halt.
* Autonomous tax fleets will be common in cities, but most personal vehicles will still be manually operated (alongside improved level-3 technologies like autopilot and super cruise)
* Google's business will still be dominated by ads, with cloud revenue making up the rest
* Facebook will still be the dominant social media company in the US, although Facebook the product may become niche
* >10 chronic diseases will have been cured using gene therapies
* General-purpose CPUs will have <5x performance/price gain by 2020. Specialized hardware will be used widely.
* Crypto-currencies will be seen as a hilarious 2010s bubble; effectively no global commerce will be transacted through them
- China will have huge social reform in favor of citizens
- Bioengineering will become an everyday discussion when thinking about having kids. (Designer babies)
- GCP or Azure will fall off in the cloud game.
- Linux desktop will have a breakthrough and become more mainstream.
- Free education or heavily subsidized college will become real in the US.
- Blocking ADs in browser will not be possible anymore.
- Rust will become C++ and Go will become Java in enterprise environments.
- AMD will dominate the chip market with intel struggling to catch up.
- Gas will be $12 a gallon. Currently ~$3.50 in Seattle
- Streaming services will become like cable tv channels and you’ll need to spend $70 to unlock all the regular channels.
- Drones will become a social problem. Drones stealing packages and spying on neighbors.
- Disney will buy paramount
- Google buys Salesforce
- Oracle buys IBM
- Apple buys Waymo and becomes dominate force in automated driving
- First asteroid is mined
- Another recession like 2008 but worse occurs
- Scotland leaves UK
Unification of Ireland.
Scotland will not leave the UK.
South East Asian countries will follow China's lead imposing dictatorial policies / invasion of their citizens privacy in the name of national security.
It'll be the year of Linux on the desktop, 10 years in a row
No Half Live 3 release.
* The DOM and other basic web standards will become a mysterious lost art. Developers who understand this arcane art will be like COBOL developers of the previous generation.
* Desire for WASM to replace JavaScript will result in shallow webpages that are hollow shells containing only a WASM instance. Accessibility will be achieved with an alternate path to a poorly updated plain text document.
* The basic web technology stack will be several layers of large frameworks each doing the same thing. This, not games or video, will drive the future growth of computer hardware acceleration.
* A junior web developer will be somebody who graduates from a two day boot camp and wields the power of copy/paste.
2. Legislation will increasingly come into place in the US and EU forcing tech companies to clean up their act on privacy, anti-competitiveness, and Right to Repair. All of these will further entrench the success of the companies in #1, but they will also open up market opportunities for start-ups focused on each. Some of those will be bought up by the giants.
3. Increased availability and efficiency of specialized compute for inference acceleration will bring about the rise of per-user generated video and rendered content, rather than only personalized text and recommendation feeds.
4. Politicians, advertisers, and scammers will find creative ways to exploit #3. Legislation to counter it will be late and ineffective.
5. Commoditization of machine vision and other sensing technology and AI will result in drastic changes in guerilla warfare and terrorism. Major attacks will occur in the developing and developed worlds before effective counter-measures can be put into place.
6. Head worn AR is still mostly used for productivity and industrial niches, and ubiquitous all-day-wearable headsets are only beginning to be practical as smartphone replacements. VR timespend for gaming exceeds traditional game consoles and gaming PCs and similarly makes headway in productivity. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all release VR-primary gaming systems.
7. The trade tensions between China and the US escalate into an economic and cultural cold war with the rest of the world picking sides.
8. 3D printing is increasingly used for specialized industrial and custom decorative design applications, but does not replace traditional fabrication and construction methods for mass production.
9. Bitcoin fails to gain traction as a mainstream transaction medium but is the de facto default currency for grey and black market transactions.
10. Several countries will develop gene-hacking industries, boosting medical tourism for procedures illegal in the US and EU.
* Fixation with tesla bankruptcy morphs into fixation with tesla breakup as it becomes the most valuable company in the world.
* SpaceX is a telecommunications giant, making Elon the richest man alive by a factor of 2.
* More than his wealth, Elon's cult of personality starts to raise eyebrows in washington and beyond.
* Elon is forced to move into politics, as a) he can't defend his businesses otherwise, b) it becomes evident that he can't realise his visions without state power.
* Elon continues the trend of his predecessors (trump and some unknown populist in 2024) to wreck havoc on the American system.
* However, he does succeed in reuniting the US, as his brand of green techno evangelism and cosmic evolution speaks to both rust belt and hyperliberal cities.
* His primary focus then becomes destroying American elites as he rationally and correctly identifies that they are the main obstacles to his vision (the joke goes around that Elon is the AI he warned us about)
* Elon remains the de-facto leader after his 2 terms in office and Shotwell becomes the first female president.
Other notes:
* Elon indirectly commands a private militia of mostly 20 year olds, who found each other and organize via the internet. By 2026, this is not unheard of. They frequently clash with other militias.
* NY and SF have a social credit system (implemented by the same companies that built it in China). Spying on neighbours is commonplace, as is being sent to reeducation at a former collage campus. Anyone who wants a career accepts this as cost of doing business. Many careers are ended by false allegations.
* Events in China will change everything above.
Comic relief:
* Joe Rogan serves in a communication role in the Musk government.
* Alex Jones is the only one who warns early about a Musk dictatorship. He is ridiculed by everyone. It doesn't help that he thinks Musk is a literal alien.
2. An eSports league brings in more revenue than MLS (Major League Soccer).
3. Still no Half Life 3
4. Self driving personal cars aren't a thing yet but, autonomous trucks on highways is common with humans doing the last mile delivery.
5. A FAANG company is broken up due to anti-trust regulation, my guess is Google.
6. Britain ends the decade as part of the EU in some form
7. Quantum computing will become more accessible and people will be solving real business/global problems with it
8. All crypto currencies will be trending (if not already) toward $0
9. At least one global recession, similar to 2008 due to rising debt levels
10. Most in person payments in the US are contactless (Apple/Google Pay) instead of via swiping/inserting a card or paying in cash
- Programming languages compiling to JS _and_ WASM will appear.
- Substructural type systems will be incorporated into mainstream languages.
- Technologies like Nix and guix will become the default for package management and CI.
- click-to-deploy self-hosted services that offer real privacy will become really popular (email solutions, ActivityPub-based social networks, personal clouds and such).
UIs:
- Popular apps will ditch scrolling from their UIs.
- Windows will start supporting tiling (as in tiling WMs).
Society-related:
- Artificial wombs will become mainstream as a more "safe" way of giving birth.
- Deepfakes will not cause any of the predicted damage.
- Cryptocurrency market will not grow significantly.
- Massive movements against ads on the streets will spawn. Generally, people will care much more about safety/comfort of their minds.
For context: I live in a city in East Germany, and there is a tourist attraction called "Trabi Safari" where people can do sightseeing in Trabant cars (the East German model that according to folklore was made from cardboard). Whenever I walk down the street and a line of these cars drives by me, I'm disgusted by the smell of the exhaust and wonder how people could stand to live in a city full of these cars. I imagine that 2040 kids will look back on the 2010s in the same way that I look back on that aspect of the 1980s.
1) European countries become increasingly poor and economically irrelevant relative to the United States and Asia. EU breaks up.
2) Climate change is surpassed by ground water depletion as the most important problem, ecologically. Not that the former gets any better...
3) No world wars, but many violent internal movements.
4) Most governments triple down on surveillance. Nothing useful comes of it but practical consequences turn out to be pretty rare.
5) Disney starts making high budget live or Lion King style CGI adaptations of anime
6) Social mobility grinds to a halt and more and more people are employed in increasingly personal attentive service jobs
7) Liberal coastal states push for a modified governing system which allocates more power to states that generate wealth
- Software engineers will continue to get paid more and more.
- The bay area will not solve its infrastructure problem, leading to large amounts of remote work.
- China's housing bubble will pop and take down the global economy. However, China will emerge the strongest from this recession.
- China soft power will increase significantly and will cause the average American to question liberal democracy.
- ML will continue to drive big profits for the bigcos but not be a source of new significant startups
- AR/VR will not have mass adoption this decade but will have a strong POC (think smartphones in 2010).
- We will have L4 autonomy, but drivers will have to take over fairly often.
- >50% of new cars sold will be electric by the end of the decade
- Bitcoin > $100k
- VR/AR becomes common (though still not surpassing cellphones), the killer app begins not for consumer use but for business use. Apple comes out of nowhere to kick this off.
- Most people's personal computers live in the cloud by 2030. Local storage and powerful CPUs become uncommon.
- AI overtaking jobs continues, but not exponentially. It's clear it's a big problem, but it's a slow enough burn that nothing's done about it by the end of 2030.
- The climate change conversation doesn't change. It's less bad than alarmists think and not the biggest problem the world faces yet.
- Genetic engineering moves faster than people think it will. China gains a huge lead and it becomes available commercially to parents there by the end of 2030.
- Someone will gain fame by livestreaming their entire life via AR.
- Digital tech continues to lead but Biotech gets much closer and it is clear that it will overtake digital tech stocks in the following decade.
- The trend of children/people spending less time out of their homes continues. Many businesses start moving into people's homes (i.e. Home workouts instead of gyms. Home medical care instead of doctors offices).
- A bunch of key cancers will be able to be strongly mitigated, like aids is now. Some are still death sentences.
- Cryptocurrency continues to be niche.
- No WWIII.
- Movement into cities continues. Property prices continue to rise.
- Deepfaked actors in movies become a significant percentage of films.
- Serverless wins wholesale. AWS not only continues to succeed but grows in influence.
- Javascript is on the decline by 2030.
- Sports move to streaming, which is the last death blow to cable. It's effectively dead by 2030.
- The successor to Google Glass, Google Contact (an enhanced version of Glass that uses contact-lenses) becomes popular and a staple of nearly every household.
- Google is split up into separate companies.
- At least one plague happens because of overuse of antibiotics.
- China develops hypersonic weapons and takes over Taiwan.
- There becomes a backlash against the "cloud", and people start moving everything into local storage as prices-per-terabyte become cheaper, and after a bunch of "cloud" companies shut down.
- The US will still have expensive, crappy healthcare compared to the rest of the world.
Relatedly, "the cloud" will get more and more local and will likely entail having compute resources co-located with 5G cell stations in order to provide optimal latency for such applications.
* Social media empires will decline some as a result.
* Advertisers will seek new disruptive offline channels to engage users with individually targeted marketing.
- Tesla implodes as soon as a major manufacturer releases a high-performance all-electric car affordable by people on modestly-good salaries that actually ships on time. Shame, because the Cybertruck is badass. ETA: 2023.
- In other EV news: Electric vehicles will dominate in unrestricted motorsports (drift racing and some classes of drag racing come to mind). ETA: Rule changes to allow EVs will come in 2021. A couple of big-name drivers switch that year. Domination is established in 2025.
- We get a real, viable open source Linux-on-phone with all the apps we need. There's that Purism thing already, but that's flagship money; this will be boosted by the Pinephone (and whatever follows) being cheap enough that almost every hacker will buy one (Android and iOS will continue to dominate the mainstream). ETA: 2021.
- Attacks in the Spectre/Meltdown genre (side-channel attacks on CPUs) get frighteningly good, and impossible to defend against. By the end of the decade we may need to either simplify processor design massively (and take the performance hit) or abandon the idea that processes can be effectively separated at all. ETA: new attack at least once every year of the decade. Complete rethink of processor design before 2030.
- A data breach on an unimaginable scale will happen. The Big One will be a tracking or analytics or advertising company. Equifax was bad, but this will be everyone's personal preferences, porn preferences, and (subset of) browsing history, which will easily be linked to identifiable people. ETA: any time now.
- House prices in the United Kingdom collapse. This causes global ripples similar to 2007-2008, in which we find out just how much of the financial system is betting on an asset price to keep going up, forever. Massive social unrest over the attendant bailouts. "That which cannot go on forever, won't". ETA: 2025. (I have hilariously mistimed this one in the past!)
-The Global Mass Extinction will accelerate.
-Polite disagreement with authority will become harder. Most people will be either law abiding citizens of an increasingly authoritarian system or acknowledged criminals, with fewer 'naughty' figures.
-Global life expectancy will increase by 5-10 years
-Nation states will have a slow-motion Kessler event. Cities and city politics will become increasingly important on the global stage.
-psychedelics and other tools that work at the overlap of psychology and physics will increase in prominence. Religions will get weirder, more Florida than California in flavour.
Here's mine:
1. Apple enters at least one new product category. This will likely be a wearable such as AR glasses.
2. Apple introduces hearing enhancement and protection features into the AirPods, attempting to expand its use case outside of music.
3. The next generation of console gaming will be VR. This includes a Nintendo VR console.
4. Webpages will become increasingly rare by 2030. Apps will emerge as the dominant web platform and traditional webpages will start to disappear.
5. Information will continue to become untrustable. Deep fake videos, AI generated articles, paid reviews, nation state propaganda, etc will explode. It will become increasingly apparent that anonymity is damaging the web. Verified identity will become much more commonplace. New businesses will begin to form around authenticating information. Talk about tech regulation will become much more serious.
6. The trend will continue towards more privacy. This will result in more processing being performed locally on personal devices, and more peer-to-peer technologies that don't require sending information to a third party.
7. Companies will start to pay users for the right to see and use their personal information.
8. Grocery store delivery will become commonplace.
9. Electric cars will become more common than gasoline cars in terms of new purchases.
10. There won't be self driving cars, but individual autonomous features like adaptive cruise, lane keeping, parallel parking, and some new ones will continue to be experienced by more and more people, increasing people's trust in autonomous features.
11. AR calling will be created in some basic format. You'll be able to see the person you're calling as if they were standing in your living room. This will be AR's "killer app."
12. iPhone will not have any buttons or ports by the end of the decade.
13. iPhone camera will be able to take 3D pictures. It'll also be able to take AR pictures.
2. More and more features of programming languages for verifiable software (e.g., Dafny or Coq) get into mainstream languages, resulting in better overall software quality.
3. Computer mathematics (e.g., in Lean) gets traction, with some high-profile mathematics breakthroughs enabled.
4. Package manager-based attacks become more common.
5. Despite higher performance computers, a new level of abstraction in the process-container-vm stack makes up for performance.
6. Similarly, mainstream OSs will still lag and take seconds to, e.g., display the contents of the C drive.
• At least one tech giant will be broken up due to antitrust proceedings. Privacy legislation will dramatically increase
• Data blackmarkets will grow substantially. (Now they are just known as markets)
• The deep web will grow, as more legitimate businesses move there to prevent censorship from other companies. Investigative journalists will also flock to the deep web for the same reasons, and for reasons of physical safety
• WebAssembly will grow, creating competition that will usurp javascript's market share
• A wasm-based framework will become popular and power cross-platform native apps
• YC companies will reach $1T aggregate in value
#2. Peer-to-peer mobile networks coupled with low orbit satellite networks.
#3. Privacy-aware end to end encrypted apps.
#4. End of fiat currency. A new global electronic money.
#5. Personalised 3d-printed medicine.
#6. Full immersion BCI VR spaces
#7. By the end of the decade digitisation of public administration will make space for direct democracy and fast-paced public projects based on real-time electronic voting.
More than 50% of American homes will have voice controlled home automation in one or more rooms.
Unsheltered homeless populations recede to pre-2014 levels by 2023.
Javascript continues to dominate web development.
Renters rights and associated concerns become a main issue for the American left.
Scotland leaves the UK.
Grocery delivery and picking services account for the majority of groceries sold, the number of traditional supermarkets recede by 30%.
“Showroom shopping” (like Tesla) occupies 25% of street level retail.
2. Fusion research breakthrough.
3. Software is more complex, slower and buggier.
4. Nothing major is done about climate change. Countries that try to do something, suffer economically.
5. Sea level rise continues the same trend as in the last 200 years. [1]
[1]: According to NOAA, only about 10 tide gauges in the world indicate sea level rise more than 5mm / year. I predict the situation will stay approximately the same. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
1)Either the UE will become a superstate with countries relegated to the role of provinces with much less power than before or the UE will start breaking apart due to the inadequacy of the Euro currency and the disparity between the successful European countries such as Germany and France and the less successful ones such as Portugal, Italy and Greece.
In the second scenario, one major country may be in the process of exiting the EU and go back to using its own currency or has already done so by the end of the decade.
3)Russia will become a food superpower due to rising temperatures making it an ideal place to grow lots of food. This will help keep the oligarchs in place and no real political change will happen within this decade.
4)China will not see a change in its political system. Xi Jinping will still be ruling China but there will be political turmoil due to his failing health.
5)A mega recession will happen and subsequently, asset prices will be cut in half around the globe due to QE and low-interest rates having pushed the prices of shares and real estate to levels completely disconnected from the real world economies.
6)The pace of Automation will continue to increase and 10s of millions of people will be out of work as there won't be enough time to retrain them to find a new job. This will force governments to increase unemployment benefits dramatically or implement UBI to appease the population of the countries most affected by this.
7)Crypto currency may or may not be mainstream by 2030
8)Apple will enter the healthcare space with a major and still unannounced product, potentially a wearable device that would monitor your well being 24/7(not a watch)
9)Phones are starting to be replaced by AR glasses or contact lenses.
10)Facebook’s median user’s age is 45 years old in 2030.
11)The price of a secondhand Tesla car is roughly equivalent to that of a secondhand ICE car.
12)Self driving level 4 is mainstream.
13)Elon Musk is the richest man in the world with a net worth approaching 200Bn
14)New electric cars have an autonomy of 1000 miles on a single charge.
I hope some worldwide conversation takes place over the structure of human society and our endgame.
We have too much crap that's not conductive to a pleasant experience for any sentient existence. Things that used to make sense or were necessary once are no longer so, or don't have to be:
• The need for everybody to "work."
• Survival-of-the-fittest mentality (e.g. no safety networks for people who fall on hard times.)
• Every nation maintaining their own army.
• The obligation to remain in relationships you do not enjoy.
• Repression of emotional and sexual expression.
• Mass breeding and slaughter of animals for consumption.
* We will see level 5 autonomous cars. They will be relegated to rent-seeking behavior. There may be some opposition, but in the end those who can create autonomous cars will turn them into reoccurring revenue.
* Custom manufacturing capacity will increase. Hobbyists will continue to iterate on 3D Printing technology until "The Reliable" solution comes to fruition and "It Just Works," allowing any household to produce any sort of plastic part they need. Further down this path, fully automated factories will start this decade. It will be expensive, at first, but, soon, it will be as easy as submitting a CAD file to get 1,000 custom parts delivered fully autonomously, and for a price cheaper than most other options. We may see the rise of fully custom car culture, and an uproar over safety.
* This decade's AI, or, compute-assisted task completion usage will rise. Custom physical/virtual interfaces will be created to satisfy any task. Jobs will be lost. Nothing will be done, except the occasional per institution protest. Other jobs will be created, but I can't predict what industries will crop as a result of it.
* The Four Horsemen of the Infopocolypse will continue to be referenced against any form of privacy or encryption. No progress will be made on either front, and certain individuals in power will continue to treat any sort of encryption as villain-tier behavior.
* Web and JavaScript (and all related technologies) will continue to grow and dominate. Chromebooks just came out too early. 2020-2030 we will see compelling browser-only experiences.
* Compute could become commoditized or even converted to a utility. Everything between 'local RAM' and 'cloud RAM' will be abstracted away. With the rise of custom chips, we will see even better virtualization technologies rise. Computers will drift towards compute-less terminals.
2. AWS has won the cloud game, but had to dramatically simplify its offerings.
3. there are no truck drivers in the US.
4. VR is officially dead, like 3D TV now.
5. BestBuy is out of business.
6. AI assistants are now 100% autonomous and do not publish your data to the cloud.
7. IBM no longer mentions Watson and is now focused on quantum computing.
8. quantum computing is still not readily available, accessible, or practical.
9. there have been several major hacks where people's genetic data been stolen, and it's now being used against them.
10. major consolidation in online video services (Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, etc)
No significant progress will be made on climate change, and the fact that the world really is ending and we're facing world war 3 becomes a significant cause of depression for young people.
There will be a phone virus similar to conficker/iloveyou which will exploit millions of android phones/smart devices on a huge scale.
IPV6 will become the de-facto for phones relatively early on in 2020s. There will be a push to try and move devices to have dirty connections to the internet (ie. no more routers) for home users and laptops, followed by PCs (potentially with 5g USB dongles per-device). This is seen as logical, but is it really just a way to track/identify people more easily and they are pushing for it, for this reason, in the UK already.
2) Advances in quantum computing lead to breakthroughs in medical science. Notably the immune system is modified to monitor key health metrics on an everyday basis. This will enable early detection of Cancer, and combined with advances in immunotherapy Cancer eradication will be in sight. Clinical trials of immune based early detection start toward the end of the decade.
3) The combination of advances in machine learning and 5G becoming ubiquitous, enabling level 5 self driving cars. The cars themselves can't handle all situations, but they are able to identify uncertain situations and let a third party take over via the 5g network.
4) Mass protests against the rich start to form, which leads the rich to create communities defended by mercenaries in the name of self defense.
5) Concrete plans to send people to Mars by 2040. SpaceX wins this contract from the United States Space Force. China is in competition as they view this as a military threat.
6) An increased nuclear war threat globally as income inequality becomes more drastic between countries, which sparks a rise in companies that specialize in safety. People start to move out of major cities and office headquarters become more remote with the advent of self driving cars enabling an easier commute.
7) Sports gambling and wave of real time applications around sports gambling becomes ubiquitous, as people become more bored and need distraction.
8) Google starts to show clear signs that it will beat Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Cries to break up the company grow increasingly louder with daily protests starting around the the Google campus.
9) People start to seriously consider the idea of genetic modification of their babies for higher intelligence as machine learning makes it incredibly difficult to be competitive in the world.
10) Virtual reality is still a niche market, but augmented reality becomes more real with e-readers and even television taking augmented reality form.
* Major technology companies invest into public infrastructure. From bus stops to cycle/scooter lanes.
* Car ownership decreases due to more alternatives and aforementioned investment.
* Major uncontrollable fire within a major city, much like the fire of London.
* Ocean Cleanup project are a success.
* SpaceX enter the commercial airline industry with an electric/solar plane.
2. A reusable rocket will land on Mars, though I think it will be unmanned. There will be a very small and permanent manned presence on the moon.
3. Global CO2 emissions will steady out during the decade. (Not increased or reduced significantly).
4. The effect of autonomous vehicles: The price of car insurance will rise significantly, and human driving will begin to be priced out in favor of the safer alternative.
An ISA other than x86 starts to get traction in x86's current market.
Electric cars become the norm. ICE cars depreciate in value rapidly.
Growing food in isolated environments, clean from pollution and pesticides, will become a big business.
Renewables provide 80% of world energy.
Towards the end of the decade, younger generation comes into political power with very different perspective on the environment, but their new efforts are halfway too late.
Worldwide poverty will continue to decline.
Infant mortality will continue to shrink.
Electronics will continue to get cheaper and provide more value.
We'll live longer and be healthy longer.
Pretty much an extension of the last decade.
1. IoT-less offline appliances and electronics will become a serious feature that sells.
2. Self-repairability and modularity will become a serious feature people pay an apple premium for.
* Enjoying movies and series on a flat screen will be replaced by experiences inside virtual reality devices.
More specifically:
* All actors will be turned into 3D models.
* The experience will be mostly passive.
* They can be enjoyed by multiple people at the same time, which replaces going to the cinema.
* Manufacturers will be the same, ie. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
* Disney either launches their own "console" (ie. a standardized PC like current consoles) or enter a partnership with one of the three large manufacturers (Nintendo being the most likely candidate).
* There will be lots of reboots of existing franchises in VR.
Battery prices hit $50 making ICE obsolete.
SF6 becomes the biggest worry as carbon is being tackled successfully. 0 coal plants left, LNG replaces with batteries
Bay Area and NYC see population decline and housing market stays stable. Texas is blue 2030
Social media becomes like cigarettes for mental health and politicians ban fb/insta till age 18
Quantum computing primarily used by big pharma
* We would be still using Python 2 and Linux kernel 3.X somewhere in production * Google Fuchsia will reach beta * Go will not get generics * Rust won't reach dreamed popularity -- still deemed terribly difficult & non ergonamic outside HN circles.. * The AI hype slows down as investors realize most things sold as AI are not really AI. * Hopefully a well designed, productive native programming language emerges with top notch tooling and flow of programming similar to python.
* The end of Moore's Law force more and more engineering effort to be spent on performance optimizations; "performance optimization" is the new cool keyword to have in your resume.
* Discrete optimization becomes a hot topic much like neural nets are today.
* WebAssembly with Rust is the new trend in web development. JS still lives, tho.
* Forget Docker, unikernels are the future.
* Foldable smartphones are still a joke.
* Autonomous cars will be available by the end of the decade
* First person will land on Mars
* 20-40% of wild animal populations will be gone
* Lab grown meats will be introduced and become the norm as meat prices skyrocket
* Taxes in the US will increase to 40% to "target climate change" even though those funds will be poorly handled
* Starlink becomes operational, disrupting mobile carriers
* New phone number system comes created as all systems will go though the internet
* precision medicine for cancer care improves but is too expensive
FAANG company is broken up
Bitcoin maintains value
Huge population drop in US. Government intervention takes plus with some sort of incentive to have children
Tesla is most valuable car company in the world
Rank voting for presidents
VR will allow people to the most beautiful things and for others very disturbing things
There will be some cases of rich people will secretly genetically modify their children
Quadrocopters/Drones will be used for raids and police enforcement
Global Internet will become distinct country-nets to protect citizens from increasing cyber warfare
2. C will remain, but it is role will be gradually diminished to a nice-to-read somewhat portable assembler code
3. C# will be poisoned by a bulk of badly thought out features that will gradually turn the language into catastrophic cacophony
4. .NET will gradually loose its appeal for new developments due to its removal from the OS
5. Apple looses the remaining tropes of innovation and fades away in the second half of decade
6. macOS market share will shrink to 2% by the end of the decade
1/ More jobs will be automated. You can imagine what kind of scary implications that might entail.
2/ Remote work will become more popular, but not ubiquitous.
3/ The Balkanization of the Internet will continue. Smaller governments will try to create their own Internet. Nothing good will come out of it.
4/ Phishing is still an unsolved problem.
5/ More people will care about their privacy on the web (still a minority though).
6/ Web pages will keep growing in size.
7/ Psychedelics will be decriminalized in some countries.
- Cryptocurrencies (by today's definition, i.e. proof-of-work stores of value that spiritually descend from the Satoshi paper) won't revolutionize finance. Bitcoin and Etherium end the decade down from the start. Libra is either vaporware or launches but remains niche.
- still no safe deposit for radioactive waste
- electric cars will be everywhere
- if not electrified trains, ships and some planes will use hydrogen as fuel
- new houses will use a combination of solar/wind power, batteries and hydrogen storage making them energy autarkic
- nuclear fusion for energy generation will finally be developed. However nobody cares, because renewable energy sources are so much cheaper in 2030.
- Oil-producing countries will be in decline
- SpaceX will build space-based solar power stations
2. China's Aircraft future giant will be born
3. More tensions inside Europe, people will get defiant against the EU (for good reasons)
4. WYSIWYG app builder will be better and actually produce decent code. Famous apps will be built on this with a lot less hand-written code
5. First brain-computer interface
6. AI and computer science will continue to help all other fields without disrupting them
7. First real-world experimental attacks using quantum computers
2.) The above will drive a larger wedge between high and low earning software workers.
3.) A heatwave in the subcontinent will kill over a million people, sparking the first mass migration.
4.) Western politics will trend to more conservatism and isolationism.
5.) Grab or Gojek will be worth as much as Facebook is today.
6.) A $100 Billion tech company will get it's start in Africa.
1. Intel loses its lead in the data center and in laptops/desktops. This will be lead by Apple replace Intel with their own CPUs later this decade, AWS continuing to build out their ARM offerings, and AMD biting at Intel’s heals on the low end. A competitor from China may emerge, but won’t penetrate the US market due to national security concerns.
2. Boeing will require a government bailout. The Boeing brand never recovers from the Max incident. China starts to compete with Boeing and captures some of the Asian market. The allegations published this year of poor manufacturing practices start to materialize in the late 2020s with Dreamliners falling out of the sky.
3. Social program reform. Medicare goes insolvent causing either (1) an increase in taxes, (2) a cut in benefits, or both. Ditto on many pension funds
4. Climate change starts to cause major displacement and famine.
5. Rudimentary knowledge of a programming language will start to become table stakes for getting a job in developed economies. This won’t fully occur for several more decades though. However, companies will start to realize that the optimizations that can be rendered through “low code” methods has already been rendered.
6. I say this as someone pursing an MBA — MBAs will become less valuable as a degree.
7. Bitcoin bubble bursts for mainstream users. It’s niche will be a payment method for “hostage” software and sanctioned nations to launder money.
8. Brexit leaves the UK economy looking a lot like Japan.
9. A millennial will become president of the US.
10. Some kind of “offline” movement that’s on par with Yoga — people brag about it being good for health.
11. Still no fully autonomous self driving cars.
12. Google and Amazon lose their luster as employers. Microsoft gains more clout as an employer.
13. Ethics becomes a central part of corporate decision making. This isn’t driven by wanting to be good but rather what I’ll call the Susan Fowler effect where a single contributor can bring down a CEO with a blog post.
14. Company valuation currently tends to track revenue growth. I think it’ll move closer to something like EBITDA growth or operating cash flows growth over the next decade.
2. AR/VR will be complementary only, travel industry will be bigger than ever; shopping will happen as your travel (product placement in all your experiences)
3. Weather-related disasters to be more rampant and frequent
4. Governments go bankrupt and hyper-inflation in developed countries
5. Disney still owns everything
6. Intel loses leadership in CPU market, as Apple leads the post-x86 world
7. Facebook to be the Google of the decade; Tesla to be Facebook of the decade
2. We will see a practical application of homomorphic encryption for privacy preserving search, in a niche space at first.
3. The "gold rush" days of ransomware will die down as organizations start to take backups seriously, but the problem will never go away.
4. Related to 3., some people/orgs will still be using Windows XP, e.g., specialized hospital equipment.
2. The fastest-shrinking part of the economy will be middle management. Flat organization restructuring will be driven by a dizzying proliferation of cheap decision-making systems directly instructing low wage workers.
3. At least two digital 9/11s will take place. These will be major attacks on crucial infrastructure of a world power by a group no larger than 2,000 individuals.
4. At least two digital Tonkin Gulf incidents will take place. In the rush to pin blame and "do something," the victim of a digital 9/11 will identify - and attack - an innocent country.
5. At least one low-yield nuclear weapon will be used in a combat situation.
6. New battery technologies will make it possible to power a full-size car for 500 miles with a unit costing under $300.
7. The value of bitcoin in circulation will exceed the M1 money supply of all but the top 3 countries.
8. Teenagers will rarely leave their houses, replacing most physical interactions, including school, with telepresence tools.
2. Current dating apps dying. OkCupid will become irrelevant. Tinder will get overtaken by another app but not the FB one.
3. HIV AIDS cure will be fully and easily available in next 5 years.
4. Twitter will die off in 5 years.
5. No World War.
6. YouTube will get less traffic and a new competitor will be around with more traffic.
7. Tesla will become a Trillion dollar company.
8. Mankind will step foot on Mars and Moon again.
9. Google will launch a few more products and then kill them after 2 years.
More open conflicts between China and the US (potentially serious).
Twitter / Facebook era ends and replace with something else.
2. There's a recession, SPY drops 40%+ in 1Y
3. First Electric Planes
4. We go to Mars
5. First somewhat general intelligence robots wandering the streets and homes
6. No 5L autonomy in sight
7. x10 space companies
8. in 2030 AR/VR will be iPhone 1 level
9. I will have preserved countless acres of virgin land and be on my way to space
10. in 2030 there will be the first migrations due to rising temperatures.
The richest person on record will roughly double the current record.
Another job family gets converted to a gig economy.
Another tech company will join the top 10 market cap ranks and none of the incumbent tech companies will fall.
... Wait a minute, all of these already happened in the previous decade! Anyhow, I basically predict that 2020's will be just more of the same.
2. Most African countries will not default on their debt to China, but will restructure it as they gain independence and strength.
3. Somalia finally splits up formally.
4. US restructures it's social security system as outflows increase. No medicare for all.
5. Someone finally invents a cheap, small, and good-enough memristor, changing a lot of basics in computer EE.
6. The Raiders move to LV and then back to Oakland
The US won't default, but it will devalue the dollar. US debt (both bonds and unfunded obligations from Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security) and the $1tn/y deficit will begin to matter.
Higher taxes, high unemployment, social unrest ensue. Passively invested money (through ETFs) will cause a stampede to leave the market. Volatility will be back. The long running bull markets in bonds and stocks will come to an end. Pension funds will lose a lot of money. Not necessarily a crash, but a long, painful decline.
- oil will hit $120+/barrel
- Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft will come under a lot of anti-trust scrutiny
- Germany will have a chancellor from the Green Party
- AOC will become US president
- mobile internet will come from satellites in the US (Apple, SpaceX)
- Java, C and C++ are still going strong
- large layoffs in retail, automotive and banking
- VR will become mainstream
- hacks will begin to matter financially, unlike the incidents at Target, Sony at Equifax
- Deepl will be acquired by Microsoft
- Twitter will be acquired by Alphabet
- a move out of large cities: as remote work becomes more widespread (and fewer people work physically) people use more affordable living options outside of metropolitan areas. telemedicine, pharmaceutical eCommerce and faster internet connections will help. Shared satellite offices will take off as a result.
- the UI of HN will stay the same
- Gamestop and J.C. Penney will declare bankruptcy
2. Total meltdown of social & political order in middle east and latin america. EU and US face larger refugee floods like never seen before.
3. European Union dissolves.
4. Internet sovereignty becomes a common claim and at least one of FANNG will pull out of Europe and India
1. Reinforcement learning starts working. Though the techniques required to make it work stretch today's definition of RL.
2. Mobile robotics in warehouses and big-box retail matures and reaches a tipping point where for some it is now boring and the majority of the industry has a roll-out plan.
"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented," so I'll stop there.
-The AI job market dramatically shrinks due to automation and tooling built by current AI experts. Advancements in AI puts AI workers out of work, ironically.
* Cancer fatality rates plummet further as individualized care regimens continues to improve. Heart disease and diabetes-related complications are the two big killers
* No major action is done on climate change as society continues to fall into the boiling frog trap. The investment needed to tackle climate change is never made at a significant level.
* Outside of a coming recession, cities continue to attract the vast majority of new jobs, resulting in even more insane affordability problems. Remote work doesn't stem the tide.
* Bananas go extinct.
* Cloud providers remain wildly profitable, but meta-providers begin to put some pressure on the bottom line by dynamically provisioning resources based on cost between clouds.
* A moon base happens. Astronauts travel from the ISS to the moon every few months.
* SpaceX sends multiple unmanned missions to Mars to lay the groundwork for eventual human habitation. NASA announces the selection of its first crew to visit Mars in the 2030s.
* The ITER project produces the first net-positive fusion reaction in history. Elon Musk announces a new company to mass-produce reactors.
* Nothing is really done to address inequality. Populist violence breaks out in some European countries.
* A revenue-neutral carbon tax will be passed in the US.
I see this as a good sign that I'm on the right track.
- Truly useful quantum computers will be available on cloud providers
- Cars as a service
- Strong evidence of alien life via exoplanet atmosphere spectroscopy (assuming successful deployment of JWST)
- Discovery of gravitational wave background
- Fake news will be out of control due to AI
- Wireless charging via Wi-Fi
- Alzheimer's will be cured
2. Facebook will be overthrown as the dominant social network, being replaced by something just as functional, but without the data sales.
3. First serious manned mission to Mars, and the moon will be visited by humans again.
4. Decent AR will finally be a thing. Though probably by the end of the decade.
Feel free to reach out to me on yngve@empiricast.com if you have any comments or questions :)
2. The consequences of quantitative easing will emerge and affect us all
3. Another cryptocurrency and bitcoin will form the backbone of a usable payment network with near-instant transactions for a low-fee
* AI and expert systems in design.
* People WILL care about privacy
* VR really takes off
* Very few political changes.
* Self driving cars don't become a thing until 2030s, after which society changes dramatically.
No nation takes significant action on climate change. Some push renewables hard, but this is more about economic sustainability and geopolitical independence than CO2 levels. People "learn to live" with a work that is as much as 1C warmer and will soon be 4+C by 2100.
The EU continues to move towards ever tighter union. Crisis in smaller, more southern nations and the lack of the UK-veto effect mean than true power sits in Brussels and regions exercise only the autonomy they're permitted. Germany is so polite and generous about this that no one notices.
Brexit goes badly for the UK which suffers a but the EU barely notices. The UK suffers a "lost decade" as young people leave and fewer people work compared to being retired; old voters give themselves more free stuff leading to spiraling taxes (and no services) for the young. More people leave worsening the problem. It's basically just the 80s again...
1. Dark silicon will push us even further into heterogeneous computing. Major cloud providers will build their own silicon and proprietary software stacks for things like databases and other common computing tasks.
2. Nationalists focusing on Making their own country great will keep doing nothing about climate change. This will in turn create the inevitable need for people from poorer countries to become climate refugees. This will in turn create even more nationalism and fortresses build around rich countries.
3. The push towards sustainability will come from the economics of clean energy actually becoming cheaper than dirty energy. It is still too late to limit us to 2 degrees.
4. Speciality vehicles will reach level 4 and go driverless. Ie trucks in mines will be totally driverless. Long distance trucks will be driverless on highways and run to depots outside cities where drivers will jump in and take the wheel.
5. Most embedded control systems where correctness is more important than latency and computation/watt will move to Linux from microcontrollers and get a standard software stack. Probably built first by a cloud vendor for IoT devices. Thus making embedded systems will be far less work (and less interesting engineering problem).
6. There (finally!) will be a remote work solution which makes it economical to have most teams remote most of the time. Economical as in the the decrease in productivity for complex (see Cynefin model for definition) problems in remote work will be less than the increase in productivity given by removing commuting and the ability to get the best people no matter where they live. This in turn (past 2030) be the thing that starts to decrease traffic around cities, maybe even start people moving to smaller cities or villages closer to nature.
7. Mainstream microwaves will go solid state and stop making that annoying sound!
8. A standard to electrify roads (highways) will be set.
9. 6G will be released. Will allow sending and receiving on the same frequencies simultaneously.
10. AR/VR glasses will not become a thing for the general public.
11. Remote surgery (with VR glasses and robots) will become a thing where specialists in a few major hospitals will serve smaller local hospitals for specialist surgery. (Past 2030 for it to become the norm)
12. Same with Air control. Smaller local airports will be controlled by air controllers in a few hubs by standard.
13. Tech for the care of the elderly will spawn a unicorn.
14. Meatless meat will overtake meat in a few European countries.
- Personal Integrity will be the new “organic” of gadgets. A more tech savvy and privacy conscious generation will demand to not be listened to by their TVs.
- Traditional auto makers have a tough first half of the decade, converting to BEV production. They do catch up with electric vehicle production in the second half.
- Regulation catches up lots of tech from the last decade: drones, deepfakes, gene editing cryptocurrency etc.
- We are nowhere close to a manned flight to mars.
- Lots of lowland is ocean!
- Nuclear power makes no big comebacks
- Fusion power is now looking promising but still far from commercial
- We still use PCs and we still use desktop software. It’s becoming more and more niche however (e.g used by certain professions.).
- smartphones look pretty much the same as they do now (slabs). The same goes for monitors, TVs: incremental improvements (8K, HDR etc) but no major revolutions.
- VR never makes a big breakthrough, but the tech matures to something incredible (but niche).
- There won’t exist a good way of paying for content online so news outlets will still struggle.
- FM radio will be almost gone
Food and Environment:
1.) Clean meat will become affordable to produce and cause a big shift in the meat industry.
2.) More People will switch to a (more) plant based diet, either for health and/or environmental and ethical reasons
3.) There will be a lot more startups in the plant based food sector (like beyond meat, just egg etc.)
Also, there will be a niche demand for people who go online and manage online life / identity for these people.
US government bonds with a duration of 10 years and up will have a negative yield.
Some US corporate debt will have a negative yield.
Some banks will further lower the account balance limit over which depositors pay negative interest on their deposits.
As interest rates continue to fall, house and stock prices will continue to rise.
* Tesla's supercharger standard is discontinued in favor of CCS1 for EV rapid charging in the United States.
* Large battery packs providing lots of range in Tesla EVs stops being a competitive differentiator as large battery packs undergo commoditization.
-lighter batteries in cars and mobiles
-many Internet's based on the country you are in.
-post truth world based on religion and belief.
-life lessons/guides as subscription services, basically bots and people helping you live/work/play.
-tech guy runs for president.
-major cyber terrorist attack.
-alternate stock market.
Major climate disasters. Fisheries collapse, crops and livestock devastated by disease, heat, drought. (~25% of the pigs in the world died last year.) Famines. Mass migrations. Unilateral geoengineering.
> "People always raid before they starve."
https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
AI tools will destroy the job market for programmers. Most necessary software is already written, it just needs to be selected and configured.
Governments of all kinds will use technology to lock down their subjects and this will be welcomed.
Organ regeneration (-or- organ theft becomes more common.) "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
Fusion finally. "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" (arxiv.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539103
- - - -
So what about unrealistic-but-possible crazy stuff?
The "Electric Universe" crackpottery turns out to be true and artificial gravity starts a huge exo-planet-bound exodus. "Cities in Flight" eh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight
Levin's lab's work leads to scientific acceptance of the personhood of Gaia. Communications are formally initiated and together we regenerate the Earth almost overnight. Humanity is welcomed (back) into galactic civilized society.
Neurolinguistic Programming et. al. reaches critical mass and reprogramming yourself becomes commonplace. Reason and capability conspire to engender a mass movement to "Be excellent to each other." Humanity is welcomed (back) into galactic civilized society.
One of the three will probably be less successful and end up getting acquired by a larger entity.
By end of decade:
Over 80% of new cars sold are electric. (90% - it is hard to not see this one happen.)
At least 3 of General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagon, Toyota and Nissan go bankrupt or are sold. (70% - the electric transition will not be nice to them.)
The car dealer system will undergo major changes in the USA. (60% - car dealers and manufacturers are at odds on electric vehicles and manufacturers tied down by car dealer laws are at a major disadvantage against companies without car dealers. Such as Tesla and companies that will try to enter from elsewhere like NIO from China.)
The EU monetary union will collapse. (70% - An economic union is only sustainable in the long-run with political union, and there is no appetite for political union. The result is growing tension between savers like Germany and debtors like Greece, Italy and Spain.)
The UK's economic growth post-Brexit will exceed the EU as a whole. (60% - due to less regulation and continued EU financial crises)
Democrats win the Presidency in both 2024 and 2028. (70% - this is based on demographic trends and the fact that the Republicans can't change their policies until enough of their base dies of old age.)
Suborbital flights replace over 1% of long distance air trips. (30% - SpaceX is the only one who can and a lot has to go right for them to succeed. But the vision is realistic and out there - it is now mostly a question of when.)
Facebook no longer is or owns the dominant social network. (30% - the value of a social network scales like O(n log(n)) but Facebook recognizes this and is doing a good job of buying competitors. Eventually they will fail.)
College tuition no longer outpaces inflation, and the ending of this trend will be tied to a financial crisis. (30% - Stein's law says, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." However there are two corollaries by Stuart Stanisford, "It will go on a lot longer than we think," and "It will end badly when it does stop." The first is why I think that it has a good chance of not happening this decade. But the second captures the fact that behavior won't be likely to change without a crisis. And consider that at $1.6 trillion, student loan debt is the largest source of personal debt, and the only one not dischargeable in bankruptcy. If it triggers a crisis, there are the makings of a good one here.)
* The AR revolution starts/takes hold. We move from holding 5" screens in front of us to glasses-mounted or contact-lens based AR devices.
* Crystal (the language) gets more popular and Svelte (the framework) gets more popular.
* WebAssembly takes shape, languages other than JavaScript become first-class citizens of the web, but ES27/ES28/ES29 still dominates.
* Cryptocurrencies get relegated to the sidelines as purely speculative instruments, but Blockchain finally finds some real commercial uses.
* Electric cars reach 50% market share in US / Western Europe.
* At least one major gas station brand converts at least some of its stations to 50/50 electric. The era of going to EVGo charging stations in Whole Foods parking lots ends.
* San Francisco goes through at least one strong (but not 2008-level) downturn of at least ~2 years. Real estate prices stabilize.
* There will be at least five trillion-dollar companies
* There will be at least five 100-billion-dollar companies that haven't been founded as of today.
Can't wait to come back to this on 1/1/30!
1. There will be more electric cars bought than non-electric. Countries start banning petrol diesel cars.
2. Huge wave of internet content moderation/censoring. New laws passed across countries to moderate content.
3. Bitcoins gain traction, everyone starts using them, although it's value go down considerably.
Also, Bitcoin at 100 million dollars per unit.
I doubt their cashierless brick-and-mortar stores will take off. (In 2019 they had such a pilot in Seattle I think).
* Augmented reality glasses become commonplace and people care more about what the world looks like in their glasses, than what real life looks like.
* The ability to resist mobile phones (and AR glasses) becomes the best indicator of future success in life.
* There are no new discoveries in Physics. Dark matter and Dark Energy still make no sense (i.e. have no explanation), but are still held onto as theories.
* Non-computer progress slows down, both because software development is so easy, and because the green revolution means hardly anyone wants to make things anymore.
* The world because more conservative as a backlash to the current ascendancy of liberalism.
* The world becomes more peaceful, with even fewer wars, and fewer people living without basic needs. (Because physical items like food become so cheap even fewer people lack it.)
* The current business model for TV collapses. Something else emerges that is not based around a 3 hour block of drama and comedy.
* There are no autonomous self driving cars. But there are trials on "rail road" like trails for cross country trucking. (i.e. trucks autonomously drive on highways, sharing with human controlled traffic, but not into cities)
* Humans do not land on the moon or mars. But there are more humans in orbit than before.
2. The USA will dominate soccer.
3. Immigrants will cause a civil war or revolution in a European country. There will be genocide.
4. Car communication will be hacked, again, but this time it won't be for cautious fun. One day during rush hour, all cars of a particular manufacturer will suddenly accelerate. They may even aim for other cars. Roads everywhere will be blocked with so many burning wreaks that emergency services simply can't go anywhere.
5. We will find the cause for the loss of masculinity that has occurred over the past century. (reduced Sertoli cell number, reduced sperm count, reduced testosterone level, reduced anogenital distance, etc.) Fixing this will require the elimination of a large class of chemicals that is in all sorts of products, so there will be heavy lobbying effort to avoid banning anything and to avoid liability.
6. Pain medication based on psychoactive compounds found in M. speciosa will be in FDA trials.
7. GMO animals, modified to avoid organ mismatch, will be used to grow organs for humans. They will be universal donors. Immunosuppression will not be required.
8. Some organs will be grown from induced stem cells in a 3D-printed shape.
Economic inequality increases.
People getting more laid back.
A critical mass is getting fed up with bullshit jobs, major push for changing the 40 hour 955 work week.
2. No AGI yet, but some AI companies will create overnight data-driven monopolies, same as Private Equity did on the '80s. These early companies will start as B2B consulting/services until they have enough data, experience, and models. Then they will stop servicing others and start disrupting every industry and vertical they could. Same as PE, it becomes an arms race that will eliminate any competition. To keep their power position, Data Science becomes an esoteric-obscure knowledge, spawning another "AI Winter".
3. We will see last-mile and self-driving operational for logistics purposes. Driving will become a privilege, only rich people would allow driving their cars (electric or gas). Others would need to use ride-sharing or public transit. Fewer Toyotas, more Bugatti.
4. There will be significant advances in research in many fields, technology leverage scientific output. But academia works (quantum) will not translate on real-world applications.
5. European Union as we know will disappear on the next economic recession, European countries will recover their historical relations while eastern countries will see a raise on nationalisms/violent uprises and never-ending migration crisis.
6. China will suffer their first economic recession, taking down the older elites and spawning a war for political control creating instability and broken the Belt and Road initiative. Russia will face another 1990-moment between powers and factions inside the country.
7. Offline will be the new wave. Online relations were no longer trusted or authentic. Back to the real world, real experiences, moments and friends. Ibiza is the center of the civilized world.
8. Extreme personalization of payments and lending, an era of rent-to-use, pay month-to-month, get an instant credit will go down to basic needs like water or toilet paper. Finance will extract value from all economy layers. Only rich people own things.
9. Global emissions and pollution will be reduced significative in rich countries thanks to advanced technologies (Switzerland, Germany ..etc). On the other side, people from Third-world countries will die because of pollution.
10. Flying Cars for Rich people. No Mars yet, but increased interest in space exploration.
Hello future me! I hope you did it well in this decade.
A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.
My fun (and probably wrong) predictions:
* Hacker News will still look mostly the same in 2030 as it does now and did in 2010.
* Most predictions in the parent post will be at most mildly accurate and otherwise completely wrong.
* The Artemis program, if it survives into the next administration, won't land anyone on the moon until the latter part of the decade (2025 or later).
* With the emerging increased commercial lift capacity we've been seeing in the last 5 years we'll possibly see the first commercial space station or at least the plans for one to start launching in the 2030's.
* (Unlikely) Elon will decide he wants his Roadster back. A Starship mission to demonstrate deep space recovery capability will launch to intercept the car and return it to Earth.
1. Insurance companies stop offering fire and hurricane insurance to forested/coastal area properties.
2. Major fires and hurricanes hit and millions of people lose everything (because they are now uninsured) and have no place to go.
3. Local governments are unable to support the citizen climate refugees, so FEMA is tasked to manage the new refugee camps. There's a massive unbudgeted cost to all of this in the hundreds of billions of dollar range that significantly increase the US deficit.
4. Fed continues to try to make money cheap by holding down interest rates, but China realizes now's their chance to crush the U.S. government and stops buying T-bills. Interest rates rise despite the Fed.
5. The rise in interest rates has a cascading effect across the entire U.S. economy which was taking way too much advantage of low interest rates. A major recession occurs. Inflation hits 10%+. Migration away from the dollar as the default world currency occurs.
6. We're fucked.
2) Some level of nuclear exchange will take place, whether on a limited level using tactical nukes, or an all out strategic rumble e.g. India v. Pakistan
3) The above will be due to resource wars, particularly fresh water.
2. Construction will begin on a structure that will be taller than anything we have now and use an active support system.
3. A child will be born that lives to be 234.
4. Andrew Yang will be elected to some office, but it probably won't be president.
2. Facebook Libra becomes prevalent. Others (Google, Apple, Microsoft) follow to have their e-coins.
3. AR and/or VR is the smartphone of the 20s.
4. Facebook becomes the most valuable company in the world first to reach a 2T$ valuation.
2. Governments will start to adopt blockchains for currencies and registers of record.
3. Real estate prices in city centers will continue to increase every year
4. Climate change enforcement will trigger a global trade war
5. By the end of the decade, every country on earth will have implemented a carbon emission trading scheme
6. All new cars on the road will be electric cars
7. Global poverty will no longer exist by the end of this decade
8. Assisted legal suicide will be legal in many countries by the end of this decade
9. Ultra-fast wireless internet will cause a major decline in wired internet-subscriptions
10. The middle-east will still not have any real democracy
11. China will see major popular uprisings leading to an increase in democracy but still not be a full democracy by the end of this decade
12. Latin America, Russia, east africa and SEA will transition to real democracies
13. Nuclear energy will make a comeback and new plants will be build
14. A cure or vaccine for HIV will be in phase 3 clinical trials or beyond
15. General AI will not exist yet and neither will fully autonomous cars
16. Politicians will fail to enact any regulation in regards to fake news leading to much deeper polarization of society and widespread acceptance of biggotry
But only for somatic cell editing - cells other than sperm/egg.
(And if this comes true, someone will comment with a reference weird sex thing that fits this bill, and then someone else will respond with how that was actually already available in 2020.)
* Electric cars using glass batteries will start to out sell gasoline cars.
* A product with the form factor and capabilities of current smartphones will emerge that can plug into a base and replace all be the most powerful desktop computer functionality.
* Genetically designed crops grown using ocean salt water will emerge first as animal feed and later directly to human consumption.
* Somewhere a war will be caused by the encroachment of sea level.
* The superpowers will attempt to negotiate a new Antarctic treaty in anticipation of becoming reasonably warm enough to exploit for resources.
* No manned expedition to either the Moon, nor Mars. Multiple robotic expeditions to both and perhaps the gas giants' moons.
* Polarization of American politics will take a back seat to major recession (or depression) that causes nationalization of the banking system to avoid national debt default and gives rise to talk of a Constitutional Congress, not from the progressives, but from the conservatives. The congress will fail and the United States will break up into five or more separate countries.
2. Interval combustion engines are finally seen as the bane of mankind. Electric cars become commonplace. Petrol is only used in planes and boats.
3. The world gets used to negative credit rates. Some companies abuse this system and a few large bankruptcies threaten to pop the bubble. The central banks massively inject money to prevent systemic collapse.
4. Remote work becomes the norm. Real estate prices in large hubs go down a bit, but not much.
5. South East Asia becomes the new silicon valley, welcoming a horde of digital nomads.
5. Hurricanes gain in strength and some coastlines are redrawn.
6. Trump-like governments are elected all over the Western world. Global trade slows down a bit. People get happier overall. Global Super richs are a bit less rich and way less global.
7. Fully autonomous Electric cars are there but only for niche use (touristic islands, Gated communities). They are slow and uncool.
8. Intel and Boeing go under. US federal government save both companies with taxpayer money. Both companies are cut in pieces and resold to competitors.
1. A pandemic kills at least 2 million people. There are theories that the pathogen is bioengineered; they may even turn out to be true.
2. At least one of Amazon/Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook's market capitalization on 1/1/2030 is lower than its market capitalization on 1/1/2020.
3. There's a 60%+ drawdown at some point in the 2020s in US equities, exacerbated by baby boomers panic selling their retirement funds.
4. Mean global temperatures are at least 1K over the 1951-1980 baseline every year in the latter half of the decade.
5. US prime-age labor force participation trends downward -- the Keynesian post-work future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.
6. A non-Chromium-based browser has at least 25% market share.
7. Humans return to the Moon, but Mars is still at least a few years away.
8. Practical nuclear fusion is also still just a few years away.
9. There are still hundreds of millions of cases of malaria killing hundreds of thousands of people a year; rich Westerners still talk way more about the hundreds of Westerners a year killed in mass shootings.
And just to get some sports in:
10. LeBron James Jr. is not playing in the NBA in 2030.
- No meaningful regime change in places like Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Burma, United States.
- A meaningful regime change will occur in a boring autocracy that catches everyone by surprise (like Tunisia did a decade ago).
Economically:
- There will be a major recession in the 2020s.
- In 2030 itself, there will be a simmering row over tariffs for carbon emissions. Between whom, I am not going to speculate.
Technologically:
- IPv4 is still around.
- Self-driving cars (Level 5, if we're still using NHTSA's terminology) do not exist.
- Quantum computers are "just around the corner."
- The phrase "deep learning" causes people to take a few seconds to remember what it means.
- Exactly one of the following companies will no longer exist (due to bankruptcy or being acquired): Amazon, AMD, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google (aka Alphabet), Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung, Tesla, TSMC, Xilinx.
2. Trump wins reelection
3. The United States has a recession by 2021.
4. Inflation becomes an issue in the United States because of high debt, increased military spending as a result of great power competition and huge pension debts/promises coming due with baby boomers retiring. The best investments (other then great startups of course) becomes Gold (because of the proclivity to favor spenders over savors.)
5. The United States will focus on big infrastructure spending.
6. Google develops a competitor to Huawei's Safe City project for the United States and its geopolitical allies
7. Humanity will reach mars
8. Humanity will turn the corner on Carbon pollution
9. San Francisco reaches a breaking point and elects moderates whose focus is building more housing.
10. The United States will join the TPP
11. Chinese culture and media breaks out and becomes popular in a similar way Hollywood and American culture is popular in other places
12. Amazon will be bigger than today
13. TikTok will have regulatory problems, and with those a Facebook TikTok clone will emerge, and gain local traction.
14. Autonomous trucks will displace millions of works, but some may find a niche doing last mile trucking.
15. Go will be a top 10 language
2. No progress in identifying dark matter or understanding quantum gravity.
3. At least one of the major social media corporations are overtaken by a new competitor, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.
* Donald Trump won and served a second term as US President. He was succeeded by a democrat.
* Marijuana is legal in the United States.
* The EUR-USD exchange rate is lower than at any time in 2019 (or the EUR is no longer in circulation).
* China's per-capita GDP (at market exchange rates) is less than that of the US. Its total GDP is less than that of the US.
* Globally, the vast majority of vehicles being made are EVs.
* Globally, the portion of total primary energy supplied by fission is higher than in 2019. The portion supplied by fusion is zero.
* Satellite internet has largely replaced cable and cellular networks. SpaceX (or a spinoff) is the leading provider.
* Serverless architectures (lambda functions) are standard for backend development.
* It has been discovered that the holographic principle severely restricts general-purpose quantum computing. There's still a regime in which quantum computers are useful.
* In the US, the percentage of babies conceived by IVF is at least 3x higher than in 2019. Among these, screening for sex and intelligence is common, with females being preferred to males.
* Humans have walked on Mars.
* We have discovered alien life.