Predictions for the 2020s

As this decade come to a close, I’ve been reflecting on what the next one will bring and written this hodge-podge of predictions across politics, economics, culture, and science.

Technology

• Virtual personal assistants will be the most noticeable consumer technology change of the decade. They’ll be able to research and synthesize, comparison-shop and purchase, coordinate with other virtual personal assistants, curate content, re-touch photos, identify objects in view, and interface with the continued rollout of smart home technologies.
• Electric cars will hit the charger-density inflection point, so that cars can be driven indefinite ranges with high-speed chargers as ubiquitous as gas stations. More than half of cars sold in 2029 worldwide will be electric, as India and countries across Europe push for their 2030–2040 deadlines to end sales of internal-combustion cars.
• Fully autonomous cars will be available, but only as a very high-end niche product (like electric cars today) as the cost of the on-board computational and sensory hardware will prevent a software-led high-volume low-price model. Autonomous taxis will be slowly rolled out across specific geo-fenced areas throughout the decade, but will still be more of a novelty than a game-changer.
• Plant-based meat will be available near-ubiquitously across the US and Europe. Flavor and texture for ground meat and meat pieces (e.g., carne asada burrito) will be indistinguishable from animal-based meat by >80% of people, and prices will be parity or lower with equivalent animal-based products. Animal-based meat consumption will fall by >25% across the United States and Europe.
• Child trait-selection will be available but niche and expensive. Couples willing to spend the money (and maybe travel out of country) will be able to fertilize & sequence several zygotes, get a crude prediction on height, intelligence, attractiveness, eye & hair color, etc. and choose which to inseminate.
• Automation will continue at the pace of software development, not all at once with some crazy AI breakthrough. Warehouse management, accounting, radiology, and paralegals will be most-displaced professions.
• Virtual reality will be a stable, money-making, niche business catering to serious gamers, but not much beyond that.
• 5G and fiber will allow near global availability of connectivity that supports no-lag video. Load times will finally decrease as media file sizes asymptote to human-perceivable spatial and temporal resolutions.
• Laptops and touchscreen phones will still be the dominant form-factors for digital technology as they align so well to bags, pockets, and hands. Battery life will finally stretch into multiple days on iPhones. Noise-canceling will become cheap and get unbelievably good.
• Bitcoin will settle under $100 each and blockchain projects will be quietly wrapped up.

Global politics and economics

• A major recession will occur as boomers begin to liquidate assets and investors pull out of oversubscribed index funds that are inflating the value of the entire market. Central banks that have already cut interest rates will be left with few tools to mitigate a major slide which will have significant ripple effects throughout the economy.
• Climate disasters including hurricanes/typhoons, wildfires, and seasonal flooding will continue to increase, but not yet agriculture collapses or mass migration. Carbon dioxide emissions will not peak, all but ensuring we’ll miss the 2C mark. Global sea level will rise about 2 inches and atmospheric carbon dioxide will pass 435 ppm.
• A swing to the left will take place across the United States, Europe, Brazil, and Australia as current right-wing leaders are blamed for the recession and initial impacts of climate change create an appetite for clear confrontation.
• A paradigm shift in economic policy will take place as the neoliberal, privatization-oriented, supply-side economic ideology promulgated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school that was implemented since Reagan-Thatcher and through Clinton-Blair-Obama-Trump will finally give way to the recent proposals of Stiglitz and Piketty to dramatically increase upper-bound taxation, disincentivize rent-seeking, and increase public investment in research and technology.
• Green new deal legislation will be enacted in the United States in the face of the recession, employing modern monetary theory to unleash unprecedented public spending on healthcare and deployment and R&D of green technology.
• World trade organizations will either be re-formulated to enforce both trade and emissions commitments with the United States and China as primary co-sponsors, or they’ll be rebooted as ways to promote USA-Europe economic hegemony, but will compete with new parallel BRIC-led organizations.
• African manufacturing exports will begin to take off, beginning with textiles, plastics, and other cheap consumer goods for burgeoning middle classes in China and India. Nigeria will be the largest African manufacturing powerhouse.
• Made in China will shift from meaning cheap and low-quality as it does today to well-engineered and robust similar to the current connotation of Made in Japan.

Culture

• Fourth-wave feminism will demand a policy-based approach to enshrine pragmatic equal-footing in law, including equal pay for equal work, state-sponsored childcare, guaranteed maternity leave, and equal-wait-time bathroom architectures.
• Marijuana prohibition will end throughout North America and Europe. Some US states will continue to prohibit the cultivation and distribution within their state.
• Diverse representation in media will continue to increase, not only on screen but with director, writer, and producer roles reflecting the diversity of audiences by the end of the decade.
• Genre-blending music production inspired by the breakout of Billie Eilish and Fineas O’Connell will ripple throughout pop music.
• Latin music and K-pop will rival US-made pop in terms of US and global popularity. Pitbull will still be doing feat. verses on pop songs.
• Mandarin collars will come into style after the first few years of the decade are spent recycling 80s and 90s US fashion.
• Cultural nichification will continue to grow as online communities and targeted ads help people find small creators and fan groups aligned to their niche tastes.

Science

• Cosmology and astronomy will be hot fields with many novel discoveries and measurements of small and dim objects by the James Webb Space Telescope and CHEOPS. Major changes will be made to current theories around dark energy, dark matter, and black holes.
• Protein-folding will be effectively solved by AI-based approaches, unlocking new classes of protein-based therapies manufactured through fermentation.
• Theories of consciousness will gain credence in neuroscience based on some witch’s brew of entropy, scale invariance, free energy, information theory, and chaos theory. It will mathematically explain why we experience consciousness and may push AI theory, but it intuitively it won’t mean much to people.