In the spirit of the year number itself, here are 20 predictions made in early 2020.
1. The US stops subsidizing the global order, pulling back substantially from international involvement. Its continued international presence is primarily felt through alliances, but its military more openly acts like a mercenary force. Global geopolitics reverts to the mean, and a series of wars between now-unshackled regional powers in other areas of the world follows.
2. The US builds a military presence on another celestial body.
3. The US and UK ink a trade agreement after Brexit. The agreement is comparable to Lend-Lease in its blatant favoritism for the American side. The Brits take it anyway because it protects them from an economic depression.
4. The US intervenes in Canadian and Mexican politics/internal affairs.
5. China's Communist Party collapses. Capital flight and a demographic inversion (reaping what was sown by the One-Child Policy) produces a nation that cannot stand up to the survival pressures of a more-disorderly world. Unable to continue subsidizing its aging population, the current central planners lose their grip on power and something new replaces their influence.
6. The European Union fractures. Germany rearms itself.
7. Renewable energy turns out to be overhyped almost everywhere - except Texas, which leads the world in renewable energy production.
8. The US federal government legalizes at least one current Schedule I substance.
9. Medicine, law, and real estate are disrupted by technology in the way taxis and hotels were in the 10's. Medtech, lawtech, and proptech become popular buzzwords. Retired/aging Baby Boomers invest their money heavily in these sectors during the decade, fueling a new wave of startups in each field.
10. Investigative journalism exposes something horrifying a big tech company did (think something comparable to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"), and that exposure galvanizes public opinion in favor of substantially increasing regulations on tech companies. SaaS margins go down across the board as a result.
11. MMT becomes the prevailing ideology for economists, who use it to justify continued quantitative easing. Goldbugs and bitcoiners continue rooting for the collapse of fiat money, and central banks aren't really questioned outside the political fringes until the end of the decade.
12. AI research - another AI winter. No major advances of the state of the art.
13. AI application - we invent many more ways to apply neural networks, and solve many practical problems previously thought unsolvable.
14. The political gyre widens in the US, as the factions continue to live in their own alternate versions of reality. A major crisis shatters this polarization, eventually leading to a renewed American nationalism and civic pride as old institutions are destroyed and new ones are built in their place.
15. Cryptography becomes the only "trustworthy" way to verify digital information in a world of deepfakes. A big public blockchain gets a new lease on life as a public identity management system.
16. The first consumer-grade quantum computing hardware is launched, with a minimum of 8 qubits.
17. There is an IOT confidence crisis. When people realize their smart devices power botnets, a de-teching consumer movement brings purely mechanical devices "with no computer attached" back into vogue.
18. There is significant pollution cleanup in the oceans. Unfortunately, it's not driven by climate altruism - it's driven by a desire to harvest and reuse plastics, because oil is too expensive for much of the rest of the world to consider making them from scratch.
19. Genetic engineering cures cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, or some other major disease. The ethics of genetic engineering thus enters the public consciousness and debate - and the tone of that debate is just as divisive as the abortion debate.
20. We discover some sort of physical anomaly which violates the Standard Model. A flurry of new activity in physics follows.
I wish you all continued success and happiness in the coming decade!