12 Jan 2026 10 min read News

Progress report on predictions for 2030 (from 2020)

I'm either very lucky or 2020 me saw the future.

In my predictions for 2030 from 2020 I made some outlandish claims. Some that surprised me are turning out to be accurate, and some I'm laughing at myself for. Here's my progress report.

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

As of the end of 2025 Waymo and Tesla operate thousands of self driving cars in a handful of cities. Just about everyone in the tech industry has tried one and we are well on our way to self-driving cars dominating the road.

This was such a non-consensus prediction in 2020 but it's obvious now for people with eyes to see.

And once the prices of rides start normalizing around the costs of maintaining and operating an EV without a driver, we will start to see rides cheaper than a bus ticket to anywhere in a metro area. I already get around Austin for a few bucks in these robotaxis.

Once self driving cars are good enough to operate in airports and going medium distances (like 100 miles) there's absolutely never a reason to have a human driver in urban ride sharing environments. 50 percent is honestly too low for a 2030 prediction given today's understanding.

I also think it's true that most private cars won't come with fully self driving hardware/software by 2030. Legacy automakers are doing stuff like Blue Cruise and all that but those systems probably won't achieve human level safety by 2030. Teslas will all have it, but that won't be more than 10% of the sales of private cars in 2030.

By 2030 self driving cars will be so safe there will be a decent faction of people demanding "no human driver" zones in urban areas.

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 will be renewable. 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).

What I got right

I way underestimated EV adoption lol. It's 25% globally already and already 10% in the US and it's on an S curve. I'd predict 50% of new global auto sales are EVs by 2030 at this point.

I wayyyyy underestimated global renewable adoption too. 90% of new energy production globally was renewables last year and that blows past my prediction of 75% by 2030. And we're now crossing the 30% of all power generation globally being renewable this year.

And it's becoming clearer that solar + batteries is the real game changer. Wind is cool, but solar panels and batteries are getting cheaper faster than anyone predicted with no signs of slowing down.

Yeah and coal is considered a stranded asset in much of the world. It's more expensive to operate an existing coal plant than to build a new solar plant in many countries.

We are seeing more industrial processes be electrified, and many heat-based energy storage systems are coming into maturity. I'll bet by 2030 I'll be right about new industrial power being met by renewables.

What I got very unexpectedly right

I had this intuition that human stupidity would clash with extreme price collapse and we'd see solar and wind cause brown outs and price increases at first because people can't plan ahead.

Anyone that knows anything about grid operations know that it's better to have less power than have new power that's largely intermittent. Solar and wind are affected by weather. At the same time no grid had a "flexible load" or "demand response" program large enough to absorb all the planned solar.

So we had brown outs and price increases in most jurisdictions. The only place where power has gotten more reliable and cheaper (adjusted for inflation) is Texas. That's because they built storage and demand response programs. Yay ERCOT.

What I got wrong

As a response to the brown outs I expected people to freak out and demand a solution. I thought that solution would come from all these fat juicy batteries sitting in all these new EVs. Got that one wrong. Vehicle to grid has been a huge flop.

I was too idealistic about regenerative agriculture. I underestimated people's willingness to spend more on food to build "eco friendly" solutions. Instead of paying a bit more for chicken until regenerative farming became cheaper than normal framing; people just bought fake foods. Blech.

And desalination, my old friend. I'm working on this right now (Terraforming Texas) but I'm in Texas now because I underestimated the absolute suicidal stupidity of California.

My grandmother lives in Marin county and has been advocating FOR YEARS to add a desalination plant because they're running out of water, but they can't be bothered to LET someone build it even if they paid out of pocket. Wild.

There was a ballot measure years ago to invest in water infrastructure in California and it was like the ONLY one that didn't pass that year. People are just dumb sometimes.

So I'm doing it in the West Texas desert because the oil and gas industry is at least practical! For fucks sake. *gets off soapbox

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)

The SplinterNet

I really didn't know how right I was gonna be about the internet splintering apart geopolitically and even ideologically in the US. Wow.

So yeah China has its own internet. Russia the same deal. Seems like "the West" has one internet...ish? But Europe really focuses on a few tech platforms (Whatsapp, Insta, etc) whereas the US focuses on others (X, Bluesky, Insta, TikTok, etc), but they're still mutually accessible.

I had a feeling Trump supporters and Biden supporters would end up in their own echo chambers that would end up being their own companies. But fuck me man. I didn't expect it to be so spectacular of a divorce. X vs Bluesky. Rumble vs Youtube. Jeez, what a wild time it's been so far this decade.

Remote jobs

Ok remember. These predictions were BEFORE COVID. Most office jobs being remote was unthinkable in January 2020, but by 2021 it was obvious. I think that was mostly luck, but damn.

AR / VR

I'm of two minds about this. The Metaverse has been a laughing-stock on Wall St.

Yet this Christmas my little cousins and their father were all playing VR games. And the AR glasses Meta released recently were incredibly popular. And profitable. And don't look like ass.

AR is the obvious form factor in an AI driven future where humans are just lightly interacting with their swarm of AIs by talking to one and having data displayed as needed in their field of view.

Phones have only been dominant because 1) AR screens suck and are too intense/heavy for everyday use 2) the bit-rate for getting info from brain to computer is slower with voice than with typing.

Those are both being solved. I actually think this one might end up being true.

Big tech breakup

Dude if we had Trump through 2024 and a democrat 2025-2029 this totally would have happened.

It almost did under Biden. They went about it in the stupidest way possible, but they totally started that train.

I anticipated that the Dems would be so pissed about how effective Trump was on social media and how un-fact-checked social media was that they would use that shared anger to break up the tech companies once they got in power.

Spotify as a record label

When I first saw this I laughed at myself. How silly to think Spotify would get into the game of finding and signing artists. Booking tours, building up partnerships to sell outside of Spotify... Sigh. That was silly.

Then I remembered the Spotify <> Joe Rogan deal. 😲

Imma take that as an unexpected win! 😂

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.

Mass unemployment

😅 I may have....underestimated that number. I'm gonna ratchet that up to more like 30-40 percent maybe? That will be displaced by AI. The unemployment rate will be much lower though, there will be readjustments.

Gen Z and the "influencer" economy

I just...I...I am going to be right about this. I just wish it wasn't so heavily dominated by OnlyFans or OnlyFans-adjacent activities on streaming platforms.

Who's running for office?

Lol I can't believe I wrote this down. I thought it was a long shot.

I anticipate an AOC vs Nick Fuentes in general election in 2028. And EVERYone will be unhappy with the choices.

Collapse of the news orgs

For fuck's sake, why does everything happens WAY faster than I thought? Mainstream media's viewership is down what? 80%? And their average viewers on cable news are over 70 years old now? Yeah they're cooked. They've BEEN cooked and we aren't even most of the way to 2030 yet. Woof.

News is now X/Bluesky and podcasts via Spotify and Youtube. Everything else is just reporting on what's happening on there. The news anchors of tomorrow are the reaction channels of today.

Asmongold pulls in more views, engagement, influence and money in that dank basement in his pajamas than CNN does on their best primetime shows.

I'm here for it, but jeez.

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

China

So the China thing was pretty obvious to people who can think even like 2 steps ahead in a board game, but I remember it being non-consensus at the time. Specifically that it was "impossible."

As of Trump 2.0 we're already mostly there in many ways (chips, raw materials, etc). Still a long way to go on rare earths and general manufacturing capacity.

Russia vs US

I didn't see Ukraine coming, but I'm actually curious if I'm still right about this one. Hard to tell where the various cyberattacks originate but they're definitely happening.

EU/NATO vs Turkey

I was totally wrong about this. Turkey makes no sense to me. Why would they join NATO and the EU?

They don't really have a European identity. They're more closely tied to Islamic spheres of influence. I don't know why this splintering hasn't happened. The CIA must be very good at their jobs.

Moonshots (a wacky set of misc)

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

Moon vs Mars

I am going to be wrong about this. Elon's finally on the Moon train. If he wasn't convinced of this, I bet he would have bypassed the Moon. After all it takes more delta V to go from the Earth to the Moon and back than to get to Mars and back.

Asteroid mining and orbital refueling infra

A year ago I would have said I was wrong about this. But with everyone talking about data centers in space, yeah, it'll happen.

The war on drugs

Gonna be wrong on this one. Weed and shrooms are all people have stomach to legalize.

Curing blindness, deafness, some paralysis

Definitely gonna be right on blindness and deafness. I may be off a couple years on the paralysis cures. Neuralink is gonna do a blindness trial in humans in 2026. Deafness is way easier by comparison.

Bitcoin, stablecoins, and crypto in general

I didn't understand Bitcoin or what money is in 2020 the way I do now. But I'm gonna be right about this.

I'll redouble and refine my prediction: By 2030:

Bitcoin will be on central bank balance sheets
Stablecoins will dominate everyday transactions in fiat currencies, and even paying taxes.
The dollar will be struggling and we'll be on our way to a Bitcoin-backed currency system

I think this because the debt WILL kill the dollar. The decline of the usefulness of oil WILL eliminate the foundations of the petrodollar. The world WILL be multi-polar.

In that world people need a hard currency to exchange while doing international trade. Bitcoin is the obvious way to do this.

What I SERIOUSLY missed

LLMs

Jimminy Christmas this blindsided pretty much everyone, but damn does this change the timelines for human history.

I wrote my abundance essays in the depths of Covid (ignore the publish dates they were on a different blog platform when I wrote them) because I could see that future was rapidly coming due to self-driving cars, solar, batteries, and the advancements in robotics and brain machine interfaces. It's why my AI writing was so self-driving-car focused.

But LLMs changed the timeframe entirely. A future of abundance is imminent (5-10 years we will start to feel drastic effects), whereas I thought it was maybe 20 years off when I first wrote them.

US vs NATO

I didn't anticipate Trump being actively belligerent towards NATO allies. I anticipated want to extricate from propping them up given Russia is so weak now.

But actively trying to take Greenland even if it means war? Or at the very least being kicked out of Europe and being denied power projection across many important spheres of influence. Huge own goal.