Predictions for 2020–2029

Under the section on “reimagining search”:<p>&gt; We live in a state of anxiety without a path to financial independence. The path to creating wealth from last century no longer applies. The path to reimagining search begins with helping people to understand their money. The first step starts with delivering insights into the stories that data can tell.<p>Not sure what financial independence has to do with search results? I’m not actually sure those sentences really mean anything at all...

This is interesting, but is essentially taking the present and multiplying it 10x. Which is never really how the future turns out, but always how humans think the future will turn out.

The section on Nationalism indicates to me that we&#x27;re heading towards a period of major, great-power conflict. I could see it being a lot of smaller, officially unrelated wars or one big one.<p>Since WW2 we have enjoyed the longest ever period without direct conflict between great powers. How much longer can we expect this to last?

Interesting. It is fun to look at this and imagine exciting future. Random things I remember predicted about 2020:<p>+ Moon &amp; Mars colonization<p>+ Touch-screen TVs<p>+ consumer computing moves to Google Glass<p>+ VR<p>+ Universal currency (BitCoin et al.)<p>+ Flying Cars<p>+ Cars that can run on Land &amp; Water<p>+ Household Garbage to electricity converter<p>+ Everything runs on Solar power<p>+ Doomsday<p>+ AGI<p>+ Self driving cars<p>+ Holographic displays(like in movies)<p>+ No. 5 from the article<p>+ Biomed breakthroughs (aka Theranos)<p>These are from various sources I have read. Interestingly, most rely heavily on trending topics&#x2F;techs of the time predictions were being made without accounting for how tech &amp; field suddenly changes, such as Theranos and blockchain. :)<p>[edit: fixing list formatting ]

What benefits does a distributed ledger such as blockchain provide enterprise scale users?

Regarding the section &quot;The World is on Fire&quot;: The farmers protests recently in Berlin were a normal expressions of freedom to demonstrate in Germany. Not much to worry about, and a sign of a healthy democracy.

Seriously, when will the frivolous soothsaying on every decade predictions ever stop? As soon as I saw (2) and (3) and below I had to stop reading. They are the same speculative lunatics that attempted to predict the price of Bitcoin to rise beyond $20k. After looking at these latest predictions, I just drew a big sigh.<p>I&#x27;m sorry but even my machine learning crystal ball forecasting an incoming tech crash in this decade is more accurate than the majority of these nonsensical &#x27;predictions&#x27;.

IMHO the search paradigm of 10 links itself needs to be reimagined. One idea is of that of a self-assembling, dynamically updating &quot;view&quot; of the underlying information (without the need to read documents).<p>I suspect several smart people are working on it and the challenges are many, but eventually, we will get there.

&gt; People are scared and want their leaders to protect their jobs from foreign competition.<p>It&#x27;s not &#x27;competition&#x27; that people are afraid of, it is unfair government intervention and tariffs. The idea with Trump&#x27;s trade wars is that if a country imposes tariff&#x27;s on US goods, the US will respond in kind until those tariff&#x27;s are removed and fair competition is restored. Whether or not this is actually happening in practice is another story, but to say nationalists are afraid of competition misses the mark.

I predict the vast majority of people will never again understand that new decades, centuries, and millenia begin on January 1st of years ending in &#x27;1&#x27; and not &#x27;0&#x27; because there never was a Year 0. Everyone knew that 50 years ago, which is why Kubrick didn&#x27;t call it &#x27;2000: A Space Odyssey.&#x27;