My predictions for 2023-2030<p>2023 will be a year of endings and beginnings. The endings will be dramatic and the beginnings will only be understood in hindsight. Here's what happens.<p>The collapse continues, manifesting now as a culture war that goes floor-by-floor throughout every industry. Twitter, sure, but everywhere, now, and faster.<p>2022's incredible advances in AI diffuse through civil society. Awareness that some fundamental contract with the nature of the world is straining, is perhaps breaking, seeps through the groundwater of the collective unconscious. This growing unease at the idea of <i>productive capitalism without mass employment</i> eventually becomes <i>the</i> stand-out story of the decade. Along with climate change, of course, which is now much harder to address, because democratic consensus becomes impossible because of the proliferation of bots and AI-gen propaganda.<p>Over the ensuing decade, politics polarize even further, but there is also a second faultline, running on a sort of diagonal, between naturalist/ecologist/conservationist sensibility on one side, and technologist/rationalist/transhumanist ideology on the other. For example, a serious ecologist might reject (say) AI and euthanasia (neither being wholesomely natural), while still mostly voting in a left-aligned bloc; meanwhile a conservative might endorse science-based medicines and vaccines. Eventually this will seem normal, but in 2022 people will still be surprising each other.<p>But maybe this is too fine-grained. Perhaps it is enough to say that, in 2023, the creeping sense of dread you've had for the past half-decade comes closer to a head, but not so close that you can actually be rid of it. That will come in 2025, after the bitter election, or 2030-ish if you make it that far.<p>For now, rest up.