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.
2021
2020 prediction — 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 either:
- Stopped using social media as a response.
- Found alternate social media channels that foster open speech.
- PARTIALLY PROVEN: The US government doesn’t use several monolithic media entities anymore. Instead, they use back-end algorithmic tailoring to advance the messages they want to see. However, nobody has really proven this.
2025
2021 prediction — The 2024 election aftermath will create large-scale unrest. Plenty of voter fraud will cascade into people dying and civil liberties redefined.
- Justification: The 2020 election process and the SARS-CoV-2 response left many people dissatisfied. This has created profound trust issues with formerly trustworthy groups.
- DISPROVEN: It was a near-landslide victory for Trump, partially because the Obama/Clinton/Biden establishment did a terrible job with their campaign.
2024 prediction — 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. Election fraud claims would drown 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 (e.g., shooting at a peaceful demonstration). Biden then 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 between the two factions:
- The more equipped group (many rural citizens who already have guns and basic survival skills).
- The more populated one (many technically overspecialized city-dwellers conscripted to fight).
- The actual fight won’t last too long. The goals are vaguely defined, and most Americans are wimps who want the same autonomous independence.
- DISPROVEN: Nothing particularly interesting in the lens of history happened, and Trump won by a landslide.
2027
2022 prediction — Assuming no major upsets, there are three possibilities:
- The United States economy will start losing its foothold on the world economy.
- The world economy will overall collapse.
- 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 many market-doping tricks to prevent a formal recession. It will eventually crash, and it would crash and recover by March 2027 if they let it. 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 currency devaluation will create a rippling Great-Depression-Era bank run. This time, though, it’d be a trend to redeem mature Federal Reserve notes, flooding the world over with untold dollars.
2027-2037
2024 prediction – The machine learning boom will crash. It will become like the dot-com bubble, with the same pattern:
- A major collapse in investment as mass adoption doesn’t take off (~2027).
- Significant difficulty in the industry as many workers in that subdomain scramble to pay their bills (~2028-2036)
- People will adopt a separate new, adjacent technology later, leading to the first product becoming commonplace (~2037).
- Justification: AI is expensive, with a typical machine learning photo costing ~$0.92 in electricity to generate after all the training.
- Justification: The hype is absurd, drawing from many science fiction tropes to imply the dumb computer is now sentient. Most people see how stupid computers still are.
- Justification: machine learning has had no clear consumer-facing superiority, similar to the 1990s with the World Wide Web. This changed with the smartphone a few decades later.
2029
2025 prediction – The Democrat Party will go one of several directions in the upcoming election:
- Win the election, with a hyped-up increase in political lawfare and opposition to destroy the Republican Party.
- After a loss, stage a coup, which inevitably fails. This will lead to utter collapse that involves at least some violence and potential over-reach by the Republican Party. This will reframe some aspects of protected speech.
- An cascaded eruption of well-timed scandals that politically destroy the Democrat Party (e.g., Jeffrey Epstein files). This will come before they can win the support necessary to react to the election.
- Justification: The left makes most of violent rhetoric in the USA, which has intensified in the last decade or so.
- Justification: The right has been emboldened by events like Charlie Kirk’s killing (via religious devotion). Alongside this, the general collectivist mindset of “American” has rapidly decayed.
2030
2020 prediction — 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 to make 2-player VR games.
2021 prediction — 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.
2022 prediction — Consumers will become so concerned about cybersecurity and privacy that it’ll be the deal-maker for new consumer electronics.
- Justification: Constant stories about being hacked, data made public, and doxxing have started to scare people.
- Justification: For indecisive consumers, a “safe” computer is the path of least resistance. The trend reproduces how MS-DOS ran on anything in the 1980s. It made hardware irrelevant as long as it hit min spec.
- Justification: This trend also reproduces the dot-com boom. The OS became irrelevant as long as it could use a web browser.
2034
2024 prediction – Technological advances will increase social media adoption of low-quality and ubiquitous “game-like” interactive experiences. This would be similar to how videos are currently 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.
2035
2021 prediction — 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. This is 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. It may require government-issued GPS-tracked AVs as part of a license reinstatement program.
2036
2021 prediction — 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. The Normal Non-Nerd Human has no reason to dramatically change anything that quickly.
- Justification: Outside of OEM commissions, Microsoft doesn’t make that much money on Windows anymore.
2045
2023 prediction — At least a few wildly successful entrepreneurs will 3D-print goods which historically came from a factory.