Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

Predictions:

1. CIA becomes obsolete, they will not be able to keep their secrets and they have no asymmetric advantage in killing other country leaders while protecting their own leadership from being killed in retaliation. (mutually assured destruction on a small scale)

2. Garbage dump mining startups will have a capital hey-day (story about "bitcoin ladened trash-PC recovered" blows up in the headlines)

3. UFO stories become more and more prevalent in the news. Non-Newtonian aircraft presented by US space-force.

4. Quiet surveillance on the rise with sudden opportunities appearing for movement-leaders; security services disband-through-kindness rather than through cohesion.

5. Wealth becomes impossible to hide, oligarchs, corrupt politicians exposed through a series of leaks.

6. The internet is fragmented, but Elon Musk creates a network of networks which allows the American's to continue its colonization of all information systems.

7. Uni-gate, dept burdened millennials and post-millennials align politically and go after the universities/officials who have bankrupted their futures.

8. Meme-force established. Information cascades are monitored and foreign influencers are shut down or even forcibly stopped.

9. Google over-steps, internal anti-trust emails exposed, the search monopoly is broken and other search engines come online

10. Backlash against Chinese funded foreign nationals in western STEM programs.

11. First brain hack and thought probe occurs via a brain-to-computer interface mixed with an AI system.

12. Telepathy RFC introduced

13. Rene Girard's memetic theory gains in popularity as post-modernism continues to fall.

14. First massive state sponsored bank account attack wipes out hundreds of millions of electronic records; creating chaos in the western financial system. Crypto surges.

15. "Identity politics" based political arrests start to occur due to thought-crimes.

16. Small scale micro-voting systems innovate how small groups make decisions. (voting nerdom becomes a thing, democracy disrupted in a good way)

17. First asteroid mined

18. Mental health task-force (Chinese like system) established and funded to identify people who are competent enough to harm the whole (frequency of mass shootings reduced)

19. More political parties entirely bypass traditional (captured) media and talk directly to their base (Trump style political approach catches on)

20. Re-invention of the university system outside of the United States (Maybe from the African renaissance)

21. Factory farms are out-competed by lean and ethical agricultural systems. Ag-gag laws are unenforceable because drone surveillance become so inexpensive.

22. Mark Zuckerberg becomes president of the United States.

1. Manufactured "green" hydrocarbons will become a big business. Taking advantage of the existing fossil fuel economy, but using alternative processes to extract the carbon from the air, making for a high-density carbon neutral fuel source.

1. While neural network research continues at a somewhat steady pace (slightly increased by the influx of new grads influenced by the last decade's glow around AI), neural nets become very small building blocks for task-design (by that I mean that all current small advances with neural nets can be integrated in a bigger-picture kind of design software to quickly prototype higher-level concepts such as modelling certain subsets of the brain, such as many of the Vs in the visual cortex)

2. Surveillance increases throughout the world (in numbers of cameras, privacy-invading devices and techniques, changes in legislation, improvements in AI), as well as counter-measures to AI-powered tools (wearables/clothes with specifically crafted noise to deceive detection algorithms, randomize gait, etc). Very little is won by people on the legislation front despite protests, since tracking ties in so well with advertising that there is enormous financial leverage and lobbying working on it.

3. SpaceX puts rich people on space trips mostly in orbit around the earth & spacewalks, maybe on a moon trip

4. VCs overall bet on remote work, ecology, as well as more upfront sustainable business models than in the previous decade

5. EU learns (a bit late) to cope with migrant crisis and improve its immigration (in part due to a more diverse aging population), albeit at the cost of perhaps losing a couple Eastern-European members.

6. Still, the improvements don't compare quite as much with Canada, the population of which increases at the highest rate in western countries thanks to immigration (including a lot of skilled workers), its increasingly better weather (one of the only relatively lucky countries facing climate change), and its bridge between US-UK-EU via new agreements (with UK and perhaps EU).

6. Decentralized networks become mainstream for specific fields (not sure which), prompting an evolving dialogue about the future of the internet

7. A new form of betting-investment mimics the bitcoin craze of a few years ago, mixed with a patreon/kickstarter/gofundme-type structure (something that makes it easy for the layman to invest in exchange for perks or financial promises that supposedly beat the market at short term)

8. Either a non-white or a non-male US president is elected at least once

9. FDA-approved research around drugs that were traditionally shunned by older populations (thanks to the war on drugs) proves fruitful for very specific needs (certain types of depression, PTSD, BPD, insomnia, etc), thus progressively bringing them into mainstream at a pace only slightly higher than what happened with cannabis. Drugs involved are mostly psilocybin, ketamine and mdma.

10. A bit farfetched but why not: one astronomical event scares the bejesus out of the world, leading to substantial improvements in the following years. (Asteroid passing far too close without being noticed -> sharp increase in NASA and ESA budgets.. or Solar flare destroying power grids and electronics over an entire continent -> huge investments in shielding, or in alternative power sources perhaps even for individuals - depending on where the event happens)

> Daily volume of GRAM transaction will be more than all other cryptocurrencies combined

Isn't GRAM, like, already dead? You are overestimating it, even if it is not. It's only an embedded currency in one of moderately popular apps. Which is not even deployed yet.

I think the idea that a commodity etf outperforms every single equity is absurd. The best performing stocks can go up 100x in a decade. The only way a broad based commodify etf could go up that much is if there is hyperinflation, and in that case some companies (stocks) will benefit a lot more from that trend.