What does the world look like in 10 years?

The goal here is to make a sober prediction of trends based on extrapolating from known macro forces and well documented work already in progress:

I pick ten years because Jane McGonigal recommends trying to look about 10 years out at the future. Not further. Not less. Her work with the IFTF and at Stanford constitute a general body of practice shared by many futurists - and it seems a reasonable distance given no other criteria.

If we look back to the 2010's some of us did anticipate the popularity of smart phones but the true impacts were not entirely visible; we didn't entirely expect a world where every single person was glued to their smart device all waking hours. Other trends that we did expect to occur did not - we didn't see any large scale robotic revolution at the consumer level for example nor was the rise of Amazon predicted. If we look forward 10 years we have a problem of exponential computational growth, which in some ways is harder to predict. But as well we are in a maturing technical landscape that won't have the same kinds of newness that occurred in the past. A person living in the 1900's saw more significant change than a person in 2010 did. And older but large macro-trends are still continuing to reverberate through our world. For example electrification is just now catching cars and power distribution grids in its wake.

If we look at the present, at the time of this writing, circa 2021, we are still in the midst of a world wide pandemic that has sorely tested our fledgling abilities to be digital; to work online, to virtualize our interactions. Even excluding such surprises what will the next ten years hold?

🌪️ Ecology

What environmental trends seem likely over the next decade?

1. WEATHER EVENTS. Unexpected heat-events that kill millions of people, these constitute wakeup calls, also increased flooding, freezing events. There will be single events that frighten people.

2. EARLY CLIMATE MIGRATION. People who can afford to do so begin to select for more stable climates. Others suffer. We should expect to see a reluctance to allow large migrations between countries and testing of borders by climate refugees.

3. CO2 EMISSIONS ENFORCEMENT. Begins in earnest as climate concerns begin to really worry people.

4. SHORTER SUPPLY CHAINS. Becomes common for food and some physical artifacts due to technologies such as vertical farming in urban settings, higher quality 3d printing and growing consumer preferences as well as co2 cost pressures.

5. KNOCK ON EVENTS. We're starting to feel knock on effects from the unpredictable and overwhelming complexity of natural forces. It will be harder to predict but we can expect the cost of fish to rise rapidly for example.

6. EARTH SENSING. At the same time satellite based earth sensing, modeling and prediction continues to improve dramatically. We start to be able to build whole system models of the outcomes of the intersection of land use, law and policy.

7. DIE OFFS. Coral reefs are dying, fish populations continue decline, diversity continues to decline.

8. SHIFTING HUMAN POPULATIONS. Older human populations double. Many more women working. Many more online.

📱 Technology - Hardware

Our technology hardware capabilities technologies seem to be the next foundation tier that many other outcomes rely on. Predictably we see at least five more "halving events" where a devices capabilities double while the form factor halves. These trends feel the most predictable.

1. ROBOTICS. Robotics has mastered the physical world; and this with AI is eroding manual labor, information worker and craft labor classes.

2. AMBIENT COMPUTING. Your “phone” like device is the size of a pen (or is mostly air). Computing starts to move into background fabric. Services are available around you without you specifically having to carry a device.

3. AR GLASSES MATURE. AR glasses work well and are widely available. The impact of this cannot be overstated.

4. JIT PRODUCTION. Industrial scale just-in-time production is available for many products; products are becoming more bespoke and distributed equally.

5. COMMODITY WARFARE. War fighting has some troubling new concerns with disposable warfare; this may impact first world nations and cause fear.

6. BIOREVOLUTION. The biomedical revolution is upon us, unfortunately also including bioweapons.

7. SPACE RACE. The space race is underway and for those alive in the 2030's will be like Science Fiction to witness. China has put people on the moon. China/Russia moon orbiting station. Americans are back on the moon as well; hopefully to stay.

8. SPACE BASED INTERNET. The Internet is moving to space with satellite constellations beaming it around the world. It's becoming cheaper to just put the whole thing in orbit.

🤖 Technology - Software

1. AI REVOLUTION. AI and computation increasing radically; continues to be the major trend of this era (by now largely indistinguishable from human 1.0).

2. MERGED DIGITAL/REAL. The end of “look down” interfaces and the maturation of “look through”; end of keyboards and screens; kids don’t learn to type.

3. UX RADICALLY IMPROVES. User Interfaces are entirely different from what we use today. Gestural interfaces, much better organizational tools, stronger assistive software agents to organize, curate, perform discovery, and mediate user interactions.

4. FAAS. Functions as a service. Continued packaging of enterprise services in portable ways such as Kubernetes and Docker like strategies.

5. JIT APPS. Rise of just in time applications delivering rich new apps and data to you for a specific purpose

6. SYNTHESIS APPS. Rise of apps that synthesize data from several sources into one holistic view; rather than one app one view.

7. PROVENANCE. Rise of provenance tracing as an anti-spam measure; more rigor in what gets into information streams

8. TRUST GRAPHS. Rise of Improved trust graphs and filtering of bad actors (social networks finally start to mature); disinformation is harder

9. PRIVACY ENDS. Fall of privacy (extremely hard to retain personal privacy in most day to day activities).

10. STREET CRIME ENDS. Fall of blue collar crime.

11. FIAT CURRENCIES END. Fall of fiat currencies (and an end of using money as as policy tool).

12. SINGLE INTERNET. Fall of bifurcated Internets (which rise in the mid 2025's for a few years). Language barriers fall and it's found to be impossible to prevent traffic from routing around barriers especially with space based Internet.

13. END OF WALLED GARDENS. Fall of walled gardens and closed ecosystems such as App Stores and disjoint social networks due to market and political forces

14. END OF BROWSERS. Fall of several classic web browser focused ventures such as Mozilla either pivot or go bankrupt and cease operations

🧧 Economy

Technology macro-trends will impact our economies in the large scale.

1. The most significant trend seems to be the burgeoning decentralization of economies due to solar power, shortened supply chains, digital currencies and the Internet moving into space; power moves away from the center.

2. Rise of Corporations, Cities and States as dominant entities (as a product of decentralization). Nations relegated to side-status.

3. Individually unionization efforts (pushing back against gig economies) are starting to give way to UBI by this time.

4. There's a burden of legacy infrastructure in First World Nations requiring huge investments to rebuild.

5. Fall of the large online retailers such as Amazon, Alibaba, Taobao, Flipkart, Otto (or they will pivot).

6. USA Debt 50t https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/broken-debt

🧑🏿‍🤝‍🧑🏿 People

1. Internet population grows from 4.4 billion in 2020 to 7.5 billion by 2030 - according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

2. Rise of virtual lives; significant percentage of people spend most of their waking hours in virtual online worlds.

3. Rise of virtual selves; many people outsource social interactions to bots.

4. Rise of virtual fashion and virtual identity. People earn non-forgeable credits for accomplishments and wear them as fashion.

5. Continued rise of cults, clans and affinity group based identity based on perceived self-similar yet superficial traits.

6. Fascist or “might is right” strong man approaches continues to thrive as people fall prey to demagogues even though it is harder to lie.

7. Older people can participate more; high quality participation with new assistive devices helps share wisdom.

8. Rise of digital law; law is cleaned up by software agents

9. Improved voting; we finally get around to fixing some of the voting issues we have.

10. Increased social value of real world; there is a back to the earth movement.

11. Return of geographical communities built around common physical needs; communities emerge to share burdens and move away from dollars.