Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
1. As a result of worsening urban&#x2F;rural political divide, the inhabitants of cities will start to believe they have more in common with fellow urbanites from different nations than with ruralites from their own nation. Major cities will begin to engage in diplomacy with each other directly and, probing the limits of their sovereignty, engage in informal treaties and lightweight alliances (of an economic and social sort, rather than militarily). A small number of vocal denizens will begin to associate with an emergent trans-national urban cultural identity and distance themselves from the traditional cultural identity of their broader country.<p>2. The career of software development&#x2F;programming will be soundly commoditized. In 2020 dollars, expected salaries across the industry in 2030 will be $40k for entry-level, $65k for mid-level, $90k for senior; pure tech companies will offer slightly more, say 30%. Programmers making $150k+, though far from unheard of, will be rare and have extremely specialized skillsets. No new career will have emerged as &quot;the next software development&quot; in the sense of providing the same kind of wide-ranging economic opportunity.<p>3. Partly as a result of #2, class mobility in the United States will stagnate, leading to increasing political unrest over wealth inequality. Absolute levels of wealth inequality will have worsened relative to 2020, with an even smaller percentage of the population controlling even more of the total wealth.<p>4. By 2030, no major government will have yet implemented anything other than token attempts at curbing greenhouse emissions. Civil unrest will begin to take on an ecological bent, both peaceful and violent, and by 2030 we will not be strangers to the phrase &quot;domestic eco-terrorism&quot;.<p>Dear me from ten years from now: here&#x27;s to hoping that some of this pessimism was unwarranted...<p>EDIT: Before my edit window closes for the decade, I&#x27;d like to think of at least <i>something</i> positive to predict... how about this: open source computing hardware will exist and be publicly available, although by no means ubiquitous or even common outside of techie circles. It will be relatively expensive and much lower in performance than even the commodity hardware of 2020, but its deliberately simpler design will make it easier to verify for correctness (in the has-the-NSA-compromised-this sense) and possible for small scale fabs to reasonably produce. Oh, one more thing: satellite internet will be readily available, and have horrible latency, but will otherwise be really cool.