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My Top 10 Predictions for the Next Decade: The True Arrival of Big Brother or a Brave New Digital World?

It is not easy predicting the future, and if we could do it well, we would all be billionaires. So, in this article, I will try to avoid the “it’ll get smaller” or “it’ll get faster” type of prediction, as they things will come naturally. And, while many paint an amazing future of automated cars, AI, and 5G, I believe that the world could be turned on its head in the 2020s, and where our old world will be probed as it has never been before. To me, governments — and society, in general — will clash with the Internet like never before, and that we will define the period between 1980 and 2020 as the initial prototyping of the Internet, and where the 2020s actually rebuilt our societies and reshaped our economic models.

So here we go:

1. Goodbye Centralised PKI and Hello To Distributed Trust. The next decade will really push public-key encryption to the fore and see the rise of digital signing, and where entities build their own trust infrastructures. This will move away from the flawed global PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) system, and move towards infrastructures such as IBM Hyperledger, and where each ecosystem will define their own rules for governance, ownership, rights, and consent. This will break down the dominance of the existing centralised…