What Will Happen in the 2020s

Gen X did just fine. They created most of what we know of as the internet. You probably don't hear much about them because we've (Gen X -- I'm one) been focused on building new things and not complaining about old things. It's a model other generations should look at and emulate quite frankly.

    A decentralized internet
    will emerge

It already is decentralized. No single authority controls the routing of packets.

    led initially by decentralized
    infrastructure services like
    storage, bandwidth, compute, etc.

Seems like what he means is that more decentralized services will be built on top of the internet. Services, where you don't know who will provide the service you are buying. And where anybody can jump in to provide that service.

A bit like AirBnB, Uber etc. But probably he means that the rules of those new services will be enforced by protocols, rather then by companies. So I guess Bitcoin is the most prominent example of such a service that is already in existence.

#YangGang

"Failed to progress forward" - what are you talking about?

The United States - and really the world as a whole - has enjoyed its most prosperous time in all of human history during Gen-X's window of contribution.

Ah, from the mouths of babes.

1) Maybe. Or maybe we fuck it up and we are the penultimate generation of pre-Anthropocene human life. Hard to say for sure. So far, the rich and powerful seem to have little trouble selling their property.

2) Automation will not lead to some sort of wakefulness and critique of capitalism, but just more technocracy. The future is Google being too busy to offer you customer service.

3) China will collapse after their attempts to monopolize the South China Sea fall through.

4) Cryptocurrencies as a technology will collapse after several showstopping protocol-level issues are found. Most notably, a team will crack Satoshi's key and steal their BTC hoard, crashing almost all cryptocurrency prices, while as a runner-up effort, another team will successfully demonstrate forgery of high-difficulty blocks with ironic complexity analysis.

5) The various decentralized mesh networks around the globe will each grow to blanket their metropoloi, and some areas will see their mesh networks merge to create massive clouds of ambient connectivity. Disks will still be expensive, though. In fact, I'll predict another disk supply crash due to a natural disaster, akin to the tsunami from last decade.

6) Most folks around the world do not eat that much meat, and no numbers are listed, so I'll instead say that people will continue to not eat much meat. Perhaps meat consumption in USA, China, etc. will diminish, but probably not.

7) India and China step up their national space programs over the next decade, while ESA and NASA continue operating. Elon Musk is still around because of sheer willpower, but nobody else is really privatizing.

8) Already happened. It will continue to happen. The author's really showing off their bubble with this one.

9) Yes, many Boomers are near the end of their mortal coils. Don't be so morbid about it. I'm not sure if this prediction's at all interesting, since any actuary could make the same prediction without a single cup of coffee.

10) Gene therapy will still be sputtering and straining at the end of the next decade. CRISPR with Cas9 will have been long obsoleted, and nothing will have replaced it. There may be a field of genetic programming, though, where people specialize in writing code using DNA; there will certainly be a field of epigenetics which is distinct from traditional genetics.