We planned on publishing a new ‘What We Use’ to mark the new year, but in doing so realized that our personal ‘stack’ has matured, and the lion’s share remains consistent with what was written in 2019.
Instead, to invite critique into our own amateur oraculism, and to catalyse peers into sharing their own thoughts, below you’ll find a list of outcomes we think likely in the next ten years.
Technology
- AMD supersedes Intel as the obvious and dominant choice in semiconductor manufacturing
- Quantum will functionally maintain it’s 2020 status quo; expensive scientific toys, without practical application to everyday compute
- Following a drone-involving terrorist incident, drone ownership and operation becomes heavily regulated in FVEY countries
- Apple buys DuckDuckGo. Disney buys Playstation. Microsoft buys Activision.
- Stripe will become a top-10 (publicly traded, US) market cap company
- Windows will still be the dominant desktop OS in 2030
Environment
- EV vehicle sales will exceed their ICE predecessors
- Radical climate engineering will become a well-funded research area and popular controversial talking point
- The percentage of total primary energy supplied by fission is higher than was in 2019 (11%) ~ the portion supplied by fusion remains zero
Finance
- Severe recession before 2025
- EUR:USD falls lower than it’s 2019 low (1.0990)
- 1 BTC is worth at least 5x more than its 31-12-2019 ($7193USD) value
Health
- A baby with 100+ edited alleles will be born healthy (probably in China)
- As economies of scale, awareness and social moires evolve, freezing sperm/eggs/stem cells will become at least two orders of magnitude more popular per capita than was in 2019
- The percentage of first-world babies conceived by IVF is at least 5x higher than was in 2019. Among these, screening for sex and intelligence is common, with females being preferred to males.
- Both a [functional!] Theranos-like device and a tampon-based screening company will IPO. At-home blood testing will become normalized (much like wearable trackers did last decade) as an extension of existing fitness centric product lines from Apple Health, Fitbit, Withings etc, most of whom will expand into 23andMe-style predictive disease detection
Geopolitics
- USA and China will sign something resembling a trade agreement
- Russia will (again) fracture in the latter half of the decade, fuelling geopolitical uncertainty due to unknowns about the custody of their nuclear arsenal
Culture
- Individuals in aggregate will continue to apathetically trade privacy for ‘security’ or convenience
- Corollary: a growing ‘unplugged’ subculture will become vogue ~ not owning a cellphone will be a status symbol
- Marriage rates drop, correlated with the ascension of app-based dating culture. Competitor apps, marketed as panacea to this trend, succeed in replacing 2019 incumbents, though current culture endures
- Increased adoption of counter-scientific beliefs (anti-vaxx/religion/astrology etc) as coping mechanism for the accelerating pace and complexity of everyday life
- Corollary: most religious organizations will be stripped of tax exemptions
- DeepFakes will birth a need for trust-asserted media, which will likely involve digital signatures, probably using X.509s but potentially via blockchain. Some way of hashing video content in near-real-time will be invented and monetized, but ultimately, LetsEncrypt will probably sign your news.
Headline
- Humans walk on Mars