My predictions for 2030 (from 2020)

In January 2020 I wrote a bunch of predictions in my apple notes app about what I thought would happen by 2030. I didn't think anything of it at the time but I forgot about it until recently.

I wanted to publish it so that I can do a progress report at the halfway point and in 2030 do a full reflection. I can't prove this is authentic but I promise it is.

Here are my predictions presented without edits (or punctuation a lot of the time):

Self driving cars

• Most people will have ridden in one
• 10% of private cars have self driving capability
• 30-50% of ride sharing is self driving
• All privately owned cars still have steering wheels but self driving cars will be safer by far than humans

Climate change

• electric cars are at least 30% of all new cars (likely more)
• Vehicle to grid batteries account for 1/3 or more of all energy storage
• Renewables will be adopted way faster than we even predicted in 2020 75% of new power production. Coal is mostly phased out. Driven mostly by solar
• Renewables will actually drive up electricity costs and create brown outs for consumers because of a lack of storage infrastructure
• Still struggling to push industrial processes to be electrified but the economics finally make sense for all new projects
• Large scale regenerative agriculture is ramping up to save farms and forests
• Large Desalination projects are starting to use excess renewable energy in dry and relatively wealthy regions (California, Australia, Mediterranean)

Social media / internet

• splintering of social media and tech companies along ideological lines
• AR and VR is what video is today (TikTok / twitch / etc) the same way pictures were 10 years ago (Snapchat / Instagram)
• Big tech gets broken up (amazon, google, Facebook mostly)
• Most office jobs are remote
• There is no one “internet” anymore. Geopolitical spheres have their own internet’s with different portals to enter (google/Facebook vs Russia’s search and social media vs China’s state media and finance systems)
• Spotify and it’s next competitor will become successor to record labels. Instead of “discovering” talent they just bump up internal monetisation for already-trending artists and add their machine (merch, tours, etc)

Domestic politics

• mass unemployment from automation has stranded 10-20% of the workforce
• 20% of Gen Z are making more than 20% of their income from an influence-based labor (youtubing, podcasting, only fans, twitch, etc)
• Unapologetic right-wing authoritarians are going head to head with democratic socialists at the national level even though independents make up > 50% of US voters
• Nearly complete collapse of centralised news organisations (NYT, Fox News, WaPo, etc) and becomes social media based in forms like long form podcasting, short form video by individuals, etc.

Geopolitics

• Russia and US are in a not-so-shadow cyberwar constantly
• US is actively trying to extricate dependency on Chinese manufacturing and debt purchasing
• EU / NATO splinters from Turkey

Moonshots

• Do have people on Mars (but not on the moon)
• Will have cured blindness/deafness and some paralysis with BMIs
• Beginnings of asteroid mining -> orbital fueling infrastructure
• Bitcoin or some stablecoins are standard stores of value more stable than US treasuries
• Unstable countries have more mobile-based cryptocurrency-based transactions than transactions denoted in the local currency
• Most recreational drugs (mushrooms, ecstasy, cocaine, lsd, weed but not heroin or meth) are legal or decriminalized in the US but war on drugs continues