Investment Takeaways:
Boom in biotech!
This will be the decade of biology.
It will be “biology and”, engaging with other technologies and industries, issues and possibilities.
Tesla will be the company of the decade
- Tesla becomes Amazon sized due to the intersection of falling battery prices, solar prices, and the tipping point for ICE practicality
- Self driving long haul trucks will be the norm.Electric cars become the norm for everyone. Long haul trucking will be automated
[Tesla]Solar/wind/hydro electricity generation will become much more commonplace on personal properties. As electricity prices turn negative and not enough cost effective battery capacity to efficiently store it, power plants will be built/redesigned to turn electricity into hydrogen fuel. This will lead to auto companies creating electric/hydrogen cell hybrid cars.
It may be the decade of commodities, like it was in the 70s. [Lithium?]
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.
Genetic testing will become even more commonplace and even more useful.
AI will be a crucial component in discovering multiple clinical trial-stage drugs.
Medical functionality will enter consumer electronics. compact hospital-grade health and bio-Informatics devices being brought into the home and personal life.
Crispr or derivatives will be used to create cancer therapy for the masses.
[Crispr, ARKG]China will be a leader in software as well as hardware. “Emerging Market” outperforms US.
Stripe becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world. Cash transactions are phased out. Stripe will become a FAANG, or at least gain significant world relevance.
[Square, ADYN, Paypal, Venmo, careful of MA and Visa]Commonplace purchases will increasingly be made with point-of-sale loans and/or monthly leases.
[Affirm]- Sharing economy remains strong, but investors (at least in uber/lyft possibly others) are disappointed as it isn’t possible to maintain monopoly.
- Uber and Lyft will hit a crises as they keep losing money. They may still be around in 2029 but be smaller as their prices will be at “break even” levels.
[careful with Uber and Lyft]Ubiquitous Gigabit wifi/cellular/sat data across most of the world.
Remote work will continue to rise in popularity. Real-time collobration tools will continue to be needed.
[Zoom — household name and 2–80 brand, easy to use, not going away due to flexible working conditions]
[Docusign]LEO satellites will provide Internet access worldwide.
[Low or No Code products]
Bitcoin adoption increases due improvements in usability. Bitcoin’s value will hit $1M.
[Bitcoin]Data Analytics is critical as data is the new oil.
- VR finally takes off for real, creating the next app store style payday as killer apps come online.
- A VR content studio becomes a billion dollar businessAn AR phone device has the potential to become our main computing and communications device by the end of the decade.
Large scale video games will appear. 100k users will be able to play closely to each other in realtime fashion
[EA, Activision, Unity]Disney joins FAANG possibly by buying a video game company such as EA or Activision
While still prominent FAANG is no longer the “star”. There is a new era of growth companies dominating the charts.
“Facebook is the equivalent of digital cigarettes.” Avoid Facebook as usage declines.
[Avoid FB]Palantir will be the best performing stock of the decade.
[Palantir]Deep fakes will precipitate the need for digitally signed media.
Metal 3D-printers
Drone deliveries in urban and suburban environments
Expect urban micro-warehouse distribution centers to popup.
Plant based food will continue to expand (ie: artifical meat).
Cannabis will be legalised federally in the US and UK. Most medical benefits will prove to be hype.
Resurgence of The Trades — electricians, pumpers, HVAC, construction, etc.
[ServiceTitan]
Traditional higher ed becomes increasingly irrelevant.
[Chegg]
Lithium and Cobalt will become highly strategic resources, leading to political intrigue by super powers to control critical supplies in places like the Congo.
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.
Ads are no longer presented or indicated as such. All advertisement are paid product placements, advertorials, and sponsored dialogue in TV shows.
Corporate messaging becomes indistinguishable from random chatter on social networks.
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.
1.) As quantum computing advances, there will be at least one successful 51% attack on a major cryptocurrency.
2.) Tesla/SpaceX StarLink will become a major competitor in the ISP space. Most transmitted data throughout the world will touch a StarLink satellite.
3.) Financial downturn/semi-recession in mid-late decade primarily caused by excessive corporate stock buybacks artificially inflating stock prices. (Stock buybacks will be driven by executive compensation/bonuses continually being linked to earnings per share)
4.) Drone deliveries will become more common as drone automation tech improves. Airspace will become more regulated to facilitate this.
5.) It will be considered stylish and/or a power move to not own a cell phone.
6.) Solar/wind/hydro electricity generation will become much more commonplace on personal properties. As electricity prices turn negative and not enough cost effective battery capacity to efficiently store it, power plants will be built/redesigned to turn electricity into hydrogen fuel. This will lead to auto companies creating electric/hydrogen cell hybrid cars.
It may be the decade of commodities, like it was in the 70s. In which case the ROI for asteroid mining becomes acceptable to many.
1. Electric cars become the norm. All cars are fully autonomous on highways. A driverless highway transport service will go mainstream in some states. (California)
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.
1. Deep learning will enter its next wave with increased biomimicry end efficiency. Ai will continue to evolve linearly. AGI will still be decades off.
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.
1. At least one major US city will be substantially destroyed due to climate change. Probably Miami, Galveston, or New Orleans. It will not be fully rebuilt. (Much like Puerto Rico and Key West).
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.
1. Renewables are dominant source of energy. Every new house is energy positive. Wind and solar are primary for industrial sources.
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. At least 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.
- Wave of antitrust legislation takes hold and some large tech companies are broken up or forced to sell, making their owners even richer.
- 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.
- samples collected from the mars 2020 mission will be definitively negative for ancient life forms
- GI problems continue to plague developed nations
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.
6. Blockchain/crypto will be a niche thing, but will be interesting in that niche.
1. LEO satellites will provide Internet access worldwide. About 90% of the world’s population will be online by 2030.
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.
- AI based systems will start to replace humans in the more mechanical parts of the legal system. Judging traffic court cases could be one example.
- 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.
- 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
- way more people order food rather than cook for themselves
- Stripe becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world
Having a lightweight laptop that does nothing more than provide a portal to more powerful machines enters the consumer field (Stadia already exists, but other uses will appear). Probably offered by an existing cloud provider first.
* 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.
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
13. Most churches will lose their tax exempt status
14. Texas will have more people than California
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.
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. [Web Assembly]
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.
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.
There will be _the_ data leak.
Nuclear power is more popular, especially small-scale, and climate change isn’t really talked about any more in 2030
- Bitcoin’s value will hit $1M
- Nuclear power is more popular, especially small-scale, and climate change isn’t really talked about any more in 2030
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.
* Africa will begin to make huge economic waves in partnership with China and the western world will panic/intervene
1. This will be the decade of compact hospital-grade health and bio-Informatics devices being brought into the home and personal life. Think Startrek tricorder capability but in a (likely) larger package.
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.
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.
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
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.
4. China will be a leader in software as well as hardware.
7. A baby with 100+ edited alleles will be born and healthy, probably in China.
1. Trust in journalists and news publications will continue to crater due to their inability to resist clickbait, sloppy ethic controls, and constant hyperboles.
2. China will enter a pronounced recession that is it unable to hide from the world.
Pension bomb — as you see, is about to go off in Europe. US is a bit safer in that regard as a younger country, and less generous expectations for pension in general. China… yep, lights off on that. 2. Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods — just about to happen
5. Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce — a bitter marriage doesn’t simply crumble suddenly one day, it takes a life on its own and keeps biting you for years on: see Brexit
* 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.
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.
1. By 2025 there will be a quantum computer that can break RSA-2048 and shortly after that any conventional encryption. Alternatives based on post-quantum cryptography will have been developed but are not in widespread use. Adoption will take years.
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.
Remote work will continue to rise in popularity. Many large companies already have policies of every meeting having a video conference link. And there’s pressure for people to move out of high cost of living areas like San Francisco and New York City.
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.
6. Tech hubs in the Midwest begin to overtake the old tech hubs in activity and population.
1. Noise levels in workplaces (especially cafes, restaurants) will be increasingly recognized as contributing to stress and later-life hearing loss for people who work in those environments. What is considered a “safe” noise level will decrease drastically.
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)
major military conflict between US and China breaks out, but nuclear weapons are not used
* 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.
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.
I just want to direct everyone to the NIC’s natural resources projection report for 2020, 2030 & 2040. [0]
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...
1. Hardware: The only way to get more performance will be to adapting it to the workload. We’re going to see a lot more special purpose chips. “Managed Language Chips” with hw accelerated garbage collection. The Map operation of BigData’s MapReduce will be executed in-place in RAM with vast parallelism. RISC-V will have picked up steam and start chipping away in open-source mode at the Intels and NVIDIAs. Stacked computing will be a thing. There will be a lot of new letters in front of ‘PU’ (CPU, GPU, TPU, ?PU). New kinds of jobs will be created to help people navigate this jungle. Compiler infrastructures will get messy. It will be a Cambrian explosion of new architectures.
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.
1. Electric cars will be around 10% of the total cars in the world
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
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.
-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.
Stripe will become a FAANG, or at least gain significant world relevance.
8. Google becomes like Yahoo is right now, not because a better search engine emerges, but because search becomes less important.
Dozens of cities in the US will seriously invest money and adopt new policies to become the “next Silicon Valley.” One will reach Boston-level success. Probably in a Southern state along the East Coast.
* 50%-60% of cars on the road will be replaced by electric / hybrid cars (very likely)
* 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
* Uber and Lyft will hit a crises as they keep losing money. They may still be around in 2029 but be smaller as their prices will be at “break even” levels.
* 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.
Tesla will be the company of the decade
In the next 10 years, there will be a major change in education which will resemble Alfred North Whitehead’s the Rhythm of Education.[0] This will not happen independent of John Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism, learning by doing, participation, connecting personally to ideas, and democracy in the classroom, but will also have a focus on discipline and precision. Whitehead’s three stages involve a period of romance, becoming acquainted to a subject and knowledge, precision, systematically learning the facts connected with the subject introduced in the romance period, and, lastly, generalization, where facts are used to create new theory and independent thought by the student beyond what is known. Whitehead explains that this isn’t a linear process, like our current approach to education, but rather cyclic.
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.)
[0] https://mast.queensu.ca/~peter/essays/whitehead.pdf
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.
1. Bitcoin will remain largely as it is today — a niche “currency” not used by many people due to it remaining difficult to use, impossible to insure, and prone to large swings in value.
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.
1. Electric cars will be 25–35% of new cars sold in the US by 2030.
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.
* VR finally takes off for real, creating the next app store style payday as killer apps come online.
* A VR content studio becomes a billion dollar business
* Tesla becomes Amazon sized due to the intersection of falling battery prices, solar prices, and the tipping point for ICE practicality
Someone will try to dethrone Youtube, making a big fuss, and fail miserably.
1. Electric vehicles will be mainstream.
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.
- self driving cars: Improvements and advances, but not enough to handle the complexity of old European cities with their twisting roads and nonsensical street plans.
- 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 and have a broad 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.
While still prominent FAANG is no longer the “star”. There is a new era of growth companies dominating the charts.
ServiceTitan
Resurgence of The Trades — electricians, pumpers, HVAC, construction, etc.
the “artisanal urbanization” of food similar to how the microbrewery movement occurred.
Biotech — cancer and disease breakthroughs
data is the new oil. Analytics is important.
robotic surgeries
College debt will burst. Small colleges will go out of business.
China’s demographics will start to bite, Japan’s will have bitten. The once default supremacy of the old rich world will be seen to be over, with equivalent shifts in political power. Over-compensation in military systems can be expected: the old man buying a sports car syndrome. OPEC will fail in the light of static oil demand and a growing population accustomed to subsidy. Europe becomes increasingly insular, feeling itself Right But Slighted by everyone else, beleaguered by African and middle Eastern migrants and, in general, like a US left wing student in the Trump years.
This will be the decade of biology. The development of a bio-rational covid vaccine from a cold start in eight months to mass delivery is a signal of a maturing industry. The implications for human health and ageing is imponderable but with huge sociopolitical ramifications: pensions, welfare, state funding. the 2020s will be the decade when state pension systems fall over, and with them social welfare mechanisms in many rich countries.
Cost to train neural net models will continue to fall at an unbelievable pace. If the pace that has held so far continues then some models will be tens of thousands of times cheaper to train by 2030 than they are today. Imagine GPT3 costing just a few dollars to train and running inference locally on an edge device.
Only electric cars will be sold in many countries by 2030. We will reach level 5 autonomy im cars,
fully affordable lab grown meat/fish by 2030.
Also quantum computers of more than 100 qubits by 2025.
AR, VR will become mainstream by 2025.
Coastal populations will move towards the great lakes region and California will continue a population distribution elsewhere in the country.
Oh we will also have solid state batteries and room temperature super conductors by 2030 IMSO.
All new vehicles will be electric and level 4 autonomous at least
Major car companies that won’t adapt or move too slow go broke (Ford and GM? Yeah, I know, they suddenly announced new electric SUVs that are years away)
Solar + renewables the dominant form of energy supply
Mainstream acknowledgement that automation is displacing human workers.
AI commonly used to recognise fake news or propaganda based on factual evidence rather than opinion or political bias.
Or without a trustworthy AI, accelerating political chaos powered by social media and deep fakes
fully autonomous cars are going to take longer to mainstream. We’ll have lots of electric vehicles with increasingly advanced driving assist features, and then specialized zones where autonomous shuttles and taxis have been thoroughly vetted. In lots of places the terrain will still be too rough or unpredictable for AVs until the 2030s or 40s.
Significant advances in medicine and medical technology. ML and AI, along with a move towards personalized and algorithmic care, will radically change how we receive basic medical care, manage chronic diseases, and perhaps with cheap genomics we will see an increase in lifespan through optimized medical care. Medical imaging will become exponentially cheaper, with sub-cellular resolution, and more likely to happen in-office if this tech works out. It will revolutionize medical care long before we get into the computer-brain interface and telepathy crap.
Smart Phones will be come less cell-phone based. An AR device has the potential to become our main computing and communications device by the end of the decade.
Autonomous vehicles will, by 2030, have replaced most vehicle miles traveled. There will also be a huge land bonanza as the need for surface parking precipitously declines. … autonomous ride share fleets. … This will affect: gas stations, parking, body shops, car dealerships, lube shops, car smog checks, brake shops, car insurance, tow trucks, traffic cops and courts, Title Loans, car upgrades and accessories. Cars will be built to be autonomous and electric with longer life spans and maintenance services moving away from targeting individual car owners and moving towards fleet management models. This will also increase local digital shopping as you should be able to purchase groceries online and have them autonomously delivered. Expect urban micro-warehouse distribution centers to popup. May see an increase in food establishments as the cost for a local eatery to offer delivered food drops over time. You will likely see many autonomous vehicles, where the vehicle does not quite rise up to the size a full car, that will specialize in last mile deliveries.
Many HR and Payroll functions will be automated. It won’t mean the end of these jobs, just fewer people doing them. fewer supervisors needed.
VR will come into significance. It’s still kind of meh. It will become not meh, with better hardware, and the software finally catching up with the hardware that does exist.
AR will come into significance in day to day “real life,” companies will take advantage of that by building augmented reality displays into their real life locations.
The social consequences of artificial companionship, AI, sexbots, etc. will have not hit in a big way yet, but will be looming on the horizon sufficiently that it will be a major topic of discussion. It won’t be “normal and common” for people to consider an artificial intelligence or construct their best friend or lover, but it will be common enough that it will be normal and common “to know a guy” who either does, or who has given up on humans and is just waiting for the technology to improve.
Full autonomy L5 self driving cars will exist, but the grand rollout will still be in process
Retail automation and self checkout will have become normal and common, and it will be “good enough” that even grannies will be using it, though many people will still be uncomfortable with it “because it feels like stealing.”
At least one thing involving biotechnology will happen that if it were to happen today, would shock and horrify the average person. But whatever it is, there will be people eagerly and enthusiastically doing it and calling it the future.
The European, Japanese and Chinese demographic times bombs will begin a slow detonation. Underfunded pensions will demand state intervention: other welfare programs are trimmed, free services become ‘for pay’ and hands begin to creep into other people’s pockets.
Political power shifts inexorably to the emerging nations, which are avid competitors, not inclined to support social programs or subsidies, users of the cheapest available option. There may be old fashioned wars over territory amongst these nations.
this is the decade when biology steps out of the fog of complexity in which it lives and asserts itself as an industry. It will be “biology and”, engaging with other technologies and industries, issues and possibilities.
