* Cellular is replaced by global satellite coverage. Every single person has a smartphone with 24/7 unlimited high speed internet, with 100% geographical coverage globally.
* Satellite Internet censorship is managed by international bodies, and authoritarian countries can’t control it as tightly as today.
* Internet global culture continues to grow (through memes, social networks, games, blogs, news sites, etc..) and an internet language starts to emerge
* Wealth distribution across rich and poor continue to worsen, and we are basically back to seignorialism
* 30+ countries and startups have rovers / unmanned stations on the moon (or concrete plans to get there short term) and the Outer Space Treaty is being actively challenged as the main obstacle to sustainable investment in space conquest
* Environmentalism has grown massively and 90%+ of people globally cite environment in their top 3 concerns
* Yet we don’t know what to do to protect the environment, politicians are pushing for random stuff (like plastic straw interdiction). The lack of strong fact based recommendations means environmental protection is organised more like a religion, and environmental issues are very hard to reason about
* Well being for all and inclusion issues are not solved. Major institutions, universities, companies, open-source projects are paralised by those issues, up to the point where some of those institutions disappear
* Student debt bubble explodes. As with the subprimes, no banker go to prison, and the only consequence is merger between big players in the Banking / Asset Management industries. Finance is becoming more and more an oligopoly.
* Cars are totally banned from most city centers in Europe and Asia. e-cargo bikes are the main mode of transport globally.
* Parcel delivery are heavily taxed by environmental laws. Amazon goes bankrupt. Alibaba buys AWS, which now stands for Alibaba Web Services.
* Planes are heavily taxed, and it becomes hard to travel across the world
* Labour laws and classic employment contract are now seen as a way for the ultra rich to enslave people. People are now fighting for the freedom to work as freelancers.
* Apple watch and other wearable are still useless. Air-pods are still not a platform. The exception is smart glasses that start to appear in the second half of the decade
* Security on the internet is a major issue. 2FA is required by law, and companies must certify their backend by 3rd parties according to ISO certification (as it’s the case for most physical goods)
* Inequalities between developed and developing countries continue to decrease fast. This, + environmental laws on imported pollution, means it’s now better to manufacture locally. Factories are back in the US and in Europe.
* Crypto currencies are not a thing.
* Bitcoin still exists and is worth $100k+ but is still extremely volatile and is not used in real life.
* Cash is not accepted in most shop anymore
* Banking is global. Illegal activities, fraud and tax evasion becomes more and more difficult as all transactions are tracked and reconciled. In particular, credit card fraud on the internet is almost no longer a thing.
* Intelligence agencies have won the first war of privacy (i.e. they have backdoors in ISP, WhatsApp, FB, etc.). From now on, this war starts again every 5 years with new services trying to resist. Some try to operate from space.
* Ederly care is an unsolved problem globally. Scandal about mistreated ederly people appear every other week.
* Political debate in Europe is no longer about right or left wing, it’s National vs European, with the first European parties winning significant national elections by 2025
* Still no nuclear fusion
* Still no shortage of petrol
* A new scripting language appears, focusing on making network API calls easy and building GUIs. In particular, everything function call is by default asynchronous, so nothing special has to be done to call external APIs vs local code, and the standard lib will include a very powerful UI framework. Kids will use it as a toy (as with the early days of web), then it will replace spreadsheets, then ultimately it will replace HTML/CSS/JS first through WASM then through native implementation in browsers.