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 interesting if you’re alone.
- 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 tons 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 COVID response, and this has created some deep 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 very expensive and legislatively complicated.
- Justification: The self-driving vehicles need to be more reliable than humans for most people to give up their trust to 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 (who 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 back-end, probably 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 2022 March, the Federal Reserve bond rate skyrocketed. When those bonds reach maturity, people will want to cash out on them.
- Justification: As of 2022 December, the Biden administration is trying desperately to prevent a formal recession with tons of market-doping tricks. It’s only a matter of time before it crashes, and would crash and recover by 2027 March if they let go and watch 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/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: This is the path of least resistance for indecisive consumers, similar to MS-DOS running on anything in the 1980s (thereby largely invalidating what hardware to buy as long as it hit min spec) and the dot-com boom (thereby largely invalidating what OS as long as it got onto the internet).
2023
2045 – There will be at least a few wildly successful entrepreneurs who 3D printed their goods/services.