I’m on a flight back to SF after over a month of travel to Costa Rica, Toronto, NY, Baltimore, Madrid, and Cuba. It was a fabulous 5 weeks of signing a new client and leading two investment deals, followed by adventure-filled vacations, strengthening new and old friendships, and a full week of zero technology for writing, meditating, connecting, and exploring the beautiful and fascinatingly different country of Cuba.
The Cuba trip was with a close group of friends for 10 days over New Years, we all shared in the reflective state that comes with this time of year and as a result, spent many of our nightly dinners sharing them. On the last day, we decided to write out our predictions for the future. We spent a couple of hours of wifi-less individual brainstorming and writing ideas that we later shared with each other over dinner, I post mine below. And, according to a great book called Superforecasting, one of the reasons humans are bad at making predictions is because we don’t follow up on them. To make sure we would, we set two calendar invites for 5 yrs and 10 yrs from now as a promise to check in with each other and see how right or wrong we were.
2020 is a special new year, partly because the number feels so clean and positive but more obviously because it marks a new decade, a useful marker to brainstorm what we expect next with technology, industry, policy, lifestyle, economics, and other societal changes for the next ten years.
I spent 40 minutes or so writing these, I could go deeper and longer but stopped where I felt I hit the ones most pertinent to me. Naturally, there’s a focus on health and technology as a result, with a few more sprinkled ideas I explore.
The number of people in cities will decline due to the improvement in access to data, remote tools, distribution of goods, and transportation. The common lifestyle will move back towards our primal nature, in natural environments with tight-knit communities. In 30-40 years, cities will be solely for food and goods production and distribution, drug development, research, data centers, and other technical infrastructure we can’t predict at this point.
Transportation to and from cities and within cities will be more automated and connected. Real estate development in towns outside of cities will flourish. More cities will have a network of public transport that’s electric, autonomous, fast, cheap, and efficient. The Boring Company and Tesla will be the main players in getting that going, and a wave of startups will follow.
The food industry will change to reduce our obesity epidemic. The healthy food movement will move from the coasts to the rest of the US, shrinking the market for packaged foods. Food companies will be pressured to address the new market for healthy whole foods, More money will be invested into lab-grown meat and fish and environment-simulated greenhouses in cities. Diabetes and heart disease will finally start to decline.
There will be AI-driven diagnosis and treatment technologies for cancer that customize treatments by individual and cancer types. This will reduce cancer mortalities to only those who don’t seek treatment.
The average lifespan will increase to 90
Restaurants and brick and mortar stores will focus more on providing an experience. People will go out to eat and shop for that experience. For purely functional eating/purchasing that will all be virtual and direct-to-door delivery (already moving in that direction now)
Air transport will get cheaper, faster, and more efficient, closer to what public transport is today
Inequality will continue to increase in the US, access to new longevity and chronic illness drugs and treatments will start as expensive and only accessible to the upper class. There will be protests and movements to combat this.
Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google will continue to grow in size and power, they will attempt to shield that and address the desire for small, authentic brands by owning multiple smaller companies under different names as is the case now with companies like Kraft and Coca Cola. Facebook will become less relevant and zero in on Groups, messenger, and Friends (essentially our digital contact book). The company will direct more investment and product expansion towards Whatsapp and Instagram.
Remote education, work, and communication will become more common and closer simulate in-person experiences in an attempt to address the loneliness epidemic that will come with it. It won’t replace our need for human connection, and mental health problems will start to surpass diabetes in terms of economic costs.
Wifi will be on all planes for free
With SpaceX satellites, access to data will span to the most remote areas of the globe
MDMA will be legal in controlled, prescribed therapeutic settings and will become a go-to treatment for mental health disorders. Psilocybin will be sold in microdosed products just as cannabis is today, LSD will be on track to be the same. In 10-20 years, antidepressants will phase out and be replaced by a yet undiscovered drug developed from a blend of both synthesized and natural psychedelic molecules.
The next smartphone will be an earpiece. It will become our virtual assistant, communication tool, translator, and speaker—A better version of Siri that we have access to 24/7. In 20-30 years these will be installed to wire into our brains as a brain-computer interface. The phones we use today will be used for visuals like viewing photos and videos, eventually being replaced with contact lenses so screen time will no longer be a concept.
We will all have passive wearables in and on our skin that track blood and organ biomarkers, sensors on our beds, mirrors, toilets, and toothbrushes. These will continuously feed into a comprehensive health dashboard we look at every morning and is shared with a remote care team, and warns us when there’s an issue.