This is a collection of my predictions about the future. As a human being on this planet, I suck at them, but here are my expectations for what will happen.
2020
2021 — The US government will coalesce with social media to create an aggregate that will police public discourse.
- Justification: Everything that happened in 2020 (COVID-19 psyop, BLM, election interference, etc.) and the social media suppression that followed.
- DISPROVEN: People have generally stopped using social media as a response or found alternate social media channels that foster freeze peach.
2030 — VR will take over movies and TV as a preferred medium of passive consumption within 10 years.
- Justification: This requires faster computers, but is far more useful for solo activities.
- Addendum: The trend will really take off if VR and its requirements get cheap enough that 2-player VR games are accessible.
2021
2025 — The 2024 election aftermath will create large-scale unrest and, if there’s lots of voter fraud, people will die and civil liberties will be redefined.
- Justification: Many people weren’t particularly satisfied with the 2020 election results and the SARS-CoV-2 response, and this has created profound trust issues with formerly trustworthy groups.
2030 — Quantum computing will be mature enough to compete with binary computing for enterprise-sized needs.
- Justification: Working with super-states is becoming more attainable and stable.
2035 — Level 3 autonomous vehicles will be reliable enough to drive but will be expensive and legislatively complicated.
- Justification: The self-driving vehicles need to be more reliable than humans for most people to trust them (similar to the horseless carriage getting cheaper than a horse by a large margin).
- Caveat: This will probably start adoption more quickly by a liberal government (which may require government-issued GPS-tracked AVs as part of a license reinstatement program).
2036 — Windows will eventually have to adopt the Unix-style kernel on the backend, likely within 15 years.
- Justification: Windows is already moving that way with WSL, but the Windows 10 OS is tolerable enough that there’s no reason to dramatically change anything that quickly.
- Justification: Outside of OEM commissions, Microsoft doesn’t make that much money on Windows anymore.
2022
2027 — Assuming no major upsets, either the United States economy will start losing its foothold on the world economy, the world economy will overall collapse, or the world will formally adopt cryptocurrency as its reserve currency.
- Justification: As of March 2022, the Federal Reserve bond rate had skyrocketed. When those bonds reach maturity, people will want to cash out on them.
- Justification: As of December 2022, the Biden administration is desperately trying to prevent a formal recession with tons of market-doping tricks. It’s only a matter of time before it crashes, and it would crash and recover by March 2027 if they let go and watched what happened, so the inevitable cycle will probably coincide with 2027.
- Justification: Markets wobble because people are afraid of what might happen and how they imagine the future to shake down. For that reason, a massive glut of currency devaluation will create a rippling Great-Depression-Era bank run trend for mature Federal Reserve notes, flooding the world over with untold dollars.
2030 — Consumers will become concerned about cybersecurity and privacy to the point that it’ll be the deal-maker for new consumer electronics.
- Justification: There are incessant stories of people getting hacked, data getting made public, doxxing from publicly made data, and it has people spooked.
- Justification: For indecisive consumers, a “safe” computer is the path of least resistance. This is similar to MS-DOS running on anything in the 1980s (which made hardware irrelevant as long as it hit min spec) and the dot-com boom (which made the OS irrelevant as long as it could use a web browser).
2023
2045 — There will be at least a few wildly successful entrepreneurs who 3D-print goods that were historically delivered from a factory.
2024
2025 — There’s a possibility of a worst-case scenario for the USA.
- Election fraud-not-fraud, same as 2020.
- Lots of lawfare, on both sides for key battleground states, with claims of election fraud drowning out pretty much anything else in the public discourse.
- Trump wins within 5 percentage points as of 1/5/2025, simply because the independent vote hates both Biden and Trump.
- Kamala does NOT send over the slate of electors (i.e., the opposite of what Pence did).
- DISPROVEN: Kamala took over for Biden as of 2024-08.
- The rightward states, led by Texas, conduct lawfare, that asserts Trump’s lawful presence as President.
- There’s some suspiciously convenient and strangely severe violent activity, such as a shooting at a peaceful demonstration, and Biden calls out the military to “suppress insurrection”.
- There’s a civil war across the USA, but probably most centered between Texas and Washington, DC.
- The winner will either be the more equipped group (many rural citizens who already have guns and basic survival skills) or the more populated one (many technically overspecialized city-dwellers conscripted to fight).
- The actual fight won’t last too long, since the goals are vaguely defined and most Americans are wimps who want the same autonomous independence.
2034 – Advances in technology will empower social media adoption of low-quality and ubiquitous “game-like” interactive experiences, similar to how videos are presently easy to make and share.
- Justification: Games convey a more immersive experience (and therefore likely more meaning) than video.
- Justification: Computers are getting faster, and game development is getting easier, especially with machine learning.