Okay, here goes:<p>- At least one major court case plays out over AI, and that completely changes the future of the technology. I personally suspect it'll be found that using copyrighted materials for LLMs is copyright infringement (in the OpenAI sense), but whatever happens, all hell is breaking out online<p>- Social media declines in popularity. I suspect this is already happening post pandemic, since places like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc are seeing a huge decline in activity and many people I used to know on these services have dropped them altogether.<p>- Reddit follows Twitter's lead, changes name and collapses in popularity. Spez seems to be following Musk's playbook.<p>- No replacement appears for Twitter. Instead, a small percentage of the existing Twitter base is divided across Mastodon, BlueSky and Threads, and much of the rest just stop using any of them.<p>- The economy gets split between companies that go full remote work forever and those that go back to the office. Many of the former complain how hard it is to find employees now.<p>- Layoffs continue in tech related industries, as the growth expected during the pandemic doesn't pan out.<p>- Streaming services collapse in popularity due to their
move towards cable TV style setups (ads, content split across many platforms, etc). Piracy becomes a big thing again.<p>- Labour wins the UK general election. Considers possibility of reversing Brexit.<p>- The Nintendo Switch's successor is unveiled, but does worse than its predecessor at launch due to lack of an incentive to move to the new console (and people already having spent a ton on 2023/2024 Switch games)<p>- Antitrust cases start up against the iOS App Store and Google Play Store in more regions, as the companies are forced to open up those platforms.<p>- At least one more natural disaster becomes a huge international incident, and the severity gets tied to climate change.<p>- Renewable energy makes great strides (and becomes a larger contributor to the electrical grid worldwide), but it doesn't help enough to slow down climate change that much.<p>- The Russia/Ukraine conflict ends in a stalemate and peace agreement, as the Russian economy teeters on the brink of collapse.<p>- Civil war or conflict breaks out in at least one previously seemingly stable authoritarian country. Maybe Russia post Ukraine conflict?