Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
1. Public pensions in the US will start cutting benefits and&#x2F;or getting tax increases to avoid bankruptcy. Which of these is done will vary by state&#x2F;city; both will lead to drawn-out legal battles. Social Security&#x27;s reserve won&#x27;t quite be depleted, but people will be talking more seriously about how to address it. Democrat politicians will be mixed between cutting benefits and increasing payroll taxes; Republican politicians will support just rolling over the deficit into the general fund, further increasing the national debt.<p>2. The US won&#x27;t be formally at war, but it will be engaged in one or more significant, costly occupations or proxy wars based on questionable pretenses (a la WMDs in Iraq) despite public opposition. DRC is my best guess as to the location.<p>3. The IRR of commercial solar and wind installations will be over 30% annualized. However, natural gas will continue to be the single largest energy source in the US, and new coal plants will still be constructed due mostly to special-interest-driven subsidies. Nuclear fusion still won&#x27;t be viable, and fission still won&#x27;t be adopted at any significant scale in the US.<p>4. China&#x27;s GDP will exceed the US&#x27;s, though not on a per-capita basis. It will continue to indoctrinate its citizens and perpetrate human rights violations comparable to Nazi Germany (though not at the same scale), and the Western world will continue to generally not care. Hong Kong will not gain sovereignty and will mostly lose its autonomy.<p>5. Negligible measures will have been taken to address climate change, including in the US. Warming continues to outpace even the most aggressive projections. The National Flood Insurance Program will consistently have shortfalls in the tens of billions per year, effectively subsidizing coastal properties in Florida just as it does today.<p>6. US health insurance will continue to be dominated by employer-provided coverage. There will be a public option, but few care providers will accept it because it reimburses at a lower rate than private insurance, and it will only be used by &quot;gig economy&quot; workers, or whatever that sector evolves into. Spending per capita will be about double that of the rest of the Western world.<p>7. Amazon will be forced to spin off AWS; this will be big news at the time but mostly won&#x27;t have much effect. Each will be a trillion-dollar company. Amazon Retail will finally figure out how to automate &quot;boring&quot; everyday purchases including groceries. (For posterity: currently they only have Subscribe And Save, which is great if you know exactly how long it takes you to use a tube of toothpaste.)<p>8. Microsoft will open-source the Windows kernel. Azure will be larger than AWS despite a generally inferior product suite. People will still be writing VBA for the Azure version of Excel.<p>9. Facebook will still be ubiquitous, but young people won&#x27;t even bother adding their friends on it anymore, since they only use it to keep up with extended family. Instagram will go the way of MySpace. Facebook will own the most popular dating app for a year or two, though that whole space will be a revolving door.<p>10. GCP will be shuttered, since Google still won&#x27;t figure out how to sell to enterprise. Meanwhile, they&#x27;ll use data from one or more genetic testing companies to figure out the exact genes that determine susceptibility to different forms of advertising. Also, they&#x27;ll release another messaging app.<p>11. Netflix will be far less valuable and less ubiquitous than it is today, to the point that its inclusion in &quot;FAANG&quot; will seem anachronistic. Apple will still make the best mobile devices, but it will undermine its position as a status symbol due to the introduction of cheaper devices.<p>12. SF&#x27;s housing issues will only get worse. Saudi-backed VC funding for US startups will dry up, and while capital will still be available, it will no longer make financial sense for most startups to start in the Bay Area. The only new startups in SF will be started by, and exclusively hire, former employees of FAANG + unicorns. (More generally, programmers&#x27; salaries will become even more bimodal, and the relationship between coding ability and salary will become even more tenuous.) For other startups, there won&#x27;t be a new centralized startup hub (though Austin will probably be the closest), and this decentralization will lead to increases in bootstrapping and remote work.<p>13. Urban and inner-ring suburban housing in desirable US cities will continue to get more expensive, and housing elsewhere will continue to get cheaper, since new college grads will increasingly need to move to these cities to find decent jobs. (Empty nesters mostly won&#x27;t downsize to condos, although there will be an uptick in news articles presenting anecdotes about the ones who do.) Urban taxpayers will increasingly subsidize infrastructure for rural communities as this happens, though they&#x27;ll continue to mostly not notice or care. Most, though not all, of these cities will have implemented good housing policy by 2030, but new construction still won&#x27;t keep up with demand, and the lack of construction in the 2010s will have a lasting impact on the availability of housing in the 2nd and 3rd price quintiles.<p>14. Wealth inequality in the US will continue to increase. The US will implement a wealth tax, but it will have so many exemptions (housing, trusts, holdings in certain corporate entities) that the only beneficiaries are tax lawyers. Low-income people will only ever see a tiny fraction of their paychecks, as landlords and utility companies will require that employers pay them directly.<p>15. Despite continued subsidies for the meat and dairy industries, cheap fast food (e.g., whatever replaces the McDouble) will be plant-based by 2030. We still won&#x27;t have a good lab-grown steak, but most staples will have readily available plant-based replacements, some of which will be better than the real thing. Vegans will still only make up a couple percent of adults in the US (and ~10% of yuppies), but the median American will only eat real meat 2-3 meals a week.<p>16. Python will finally get good tooling for EDA and become the de facto standard for data science. R will be viewed in industry the same way SAS is viewed today, though it will continue to see use in academia.<p>17. Non-tech companies will rightly give up on building out ML teams in-house for basic&#x2F;standard problems, outsourcing that work to platforms like Sagemaker instead. They will continue to hire people with the job title Data Scientist, who will mostly be responsible for conveying to management a combination of pretty graphs and basic statistical reasoning.<p>18. Document databases will mostly disappear. They&#x27;ll be replaced in part by JSONB-style columns in relational databases, but more importantly, better tooling will make schema changes (and integration with application code) for relational databases much less painful, and keeping the schema in the database will be widely accepted as a Good Thing.<p>19. Home Internet service will be uncommon, except for geeks and people in rural areas - most will pay for mobile network access on a per-device basis, including for computers. People will occasionally reminisce about the funny SSID names they came up with back when wi-fi was a thing.<p>20. The current state of the art in ML is a dead end when it comes to achieving AGI, and we are approaching another AI winter, though this will still be controversial in 2030. It&#x27;s still good enough to achieve autonomous cars that outperform human drivers, though they&#x27;ll still be niche.<p>21. Quantum computing will make significant progress, though it won&#x27;t have any practical applications yet. Many cryptocurrencies based on quantum cryptography will be developed; these won&#x27;t see significant adoption as mediums of exchange, though they&#x27;ll create a new generation of crypto millionaires in much the same way as last time. Today&#x27;s cryptocurrencies will fade into irrelevance over time, and Libra will never materialize.