“People often overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” - Bill Gates

“The future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.” - Ray Kurzweil

For some reason, we seem to struggle to think and comprehend trajectories in exponential terms.

So I thought it would be fun to try and flip that on its head and come up with a list of predictions for things I think will happen by 2030.

These are purposefully meant to seem wildly optimistic or far fetched today, but may feel obvious and marginal in 10 years time.

I’ll return here in 2030. I’m curious how many were directionally correct, objectively correct, or not.

30 Predictions For 2030 §

1. A majority (50%+) of US homes will have solar panels and/or energy storage in their homes, and large form batteries will be commonplace.

2. Spacex will be one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world.

3. Amazon will no longer have the largest % share of cloud computing market, Microsoft will.

4. Single use plastics will be illegal in liberal US states.

5. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum will be worth 100x current prices.

6. Github will no longer be the most popular ways to store or distribute public software programs or packages — there’ll be an entirely new platform.

7. Satellite based internet will force Comcast and Time Warner into bankruptcy or further consolidation.

8. New York City will become increasingly hostile to cars, as pedestrian populations outpace growth of sidewalks and bike lanes — cars will be banned from most streets, New York will embrace scooters or low powered single person electric vehicles.

9. We will find definitive evidence of life not on Earth, it will not be intelligent. _(This would be the most exciting one if true IMO)

10. We will have a breakthrough in carbon capture technology, and begin to change the trajectory of global warming. Our net carbon output will peak by 2030 and start declining to eventually be carbon neutral by 2040.

11. Where as this decade’s zeitgeist of work culture was defined by Google-esq perks like nap pods, beer, and foosball; remote work will be the defining characteristic of the most popular and successful companies this decade.

12. Electric planes will usher in affordable short distance air travel using a network of smaller, more distributed regional airports, even small footprint VTOL centers. Traditional airlines will consolidate and get nationalized, as majority of routes become unprofitable.

13. Energy infrastructure will become decentralized and digitized through micro grids, community solar farms, and cheap energy storage.

14. We will prove that P = NP, and quantum computing will break RSA encryption only to create a new generation of quantum encryption algorithms.

15. US companies will start giving salaried employees Fridays off, in a bid to win talent, in the most competitive labor market in history.

16. Using password managers will be mandated by law or tax deductible.

17. Lab grown meat will replace animal meat, and the majority of meat eaten in the year 2030 will be lab grown. It will be cheaper to produce, taste “better” and theoretically better for the environment than large scale animal farming (or at least I hope it is).

18. This is the decade we finally crack nuclear fusion.

19. Salesforce will no longer be the most popular CRM by market share.

20. Computer programming will be required learning in high school.

21. This will be the last decade of relevance for Visa as a payment processor.

22. There will be permanent US and Chinese colonies on the Moon and Mars.

23. Facebook and Instagram will no longer be relevant platforms for social media, no one will care that they never broke up Facebook, it will cease to be relevant all on its own.

24. Google and Amazon will still be dominant in search and e-commerce respectively.

25. We’ll get the first prototypes of self-replicating robots that will ultimately be used to autonomously mine asteroids.

26. We will have the first Trillionaire and there will be a handful of them.

27. Human and computer generated social media influencers will be indistinguishable from each other. There will be a shift in sponsor advertising dollars away from the long tail of creators back towards concentrated platforms that create these generated influencers en masse.

28. The college debt bubble will finally pop and the bottom 75% of colleges will be replaced with online only, vertically focused vocational education providers. Trades or industries that have regulatory capture and created onerous licensing requirements will find new entrants calling themselves something different to avoid licensing.

29. The concept of “enterprise” or “company” will be completely redefined through the software automation of business management; individual people will be fully capable of creating and running 100M revenue companies themselves.

30. We will have a functioning brain computer interface with a bandwidth of 1GB/s.

Let me know what you think!

Special thank you to Veena and Maddy, for sharing ideas and brainstorming with me, helping come up with this list.