For 2021:
- coronavirus is still going strong in most of the developed world by March. By the end of the year it is still going strong in less rich parts of the world and there will still be measures to control it in most richer countries
- there won’t have been any successful antitrust action against a large us tech company (though perhaps some trials may be ongoing)
- there won’t be any large scale police reforms in the US
- there won’t be any new constitutional amendments getting the support of more than 20 US states
- tourism between rich countries in the northern hemisphere will increase significantly compared to 2020, and be similar to 2019 levels. Other tourism will not be close to 2019 levels.
- real estate prices will continue to rise in rich cities in the US and Europe
- relations between the US and China will sour slightly
- Belarus is effectively annexed by Russia
- hn commenters will move to the right, political flame wars will increase, and more people will complain about the site on Twitter. pg’s essays and responses to them will still regularly hit the front page.
For the 203rd decade:
- real estate prices (in rich cities) will have continued to rise above inflation. There will be more government schemes to somehow allow people to afford houses. Young people will complain about them but politicians won’t remove them.
- relations between China and the US/EU will sour. A smaller proportion of consumer goods will be made in China but some industries will be captured. Manufacturing will not have significantly returned to the US and manufacturing jobs certainly won’t have.
- brexit won’t have been a very good for the majority of people in the U.K.
- one of the following will happen: 1. Poland, Hungry, and other particularly conservative countries will leave the EU; 2. The constitution of the EU will change to prevent single members from vetoing policies; 3. (Most likely tbh) the EU gets into a US-style political deadlock where reforms can’t be made and bills come with loads of crazy things tacked on (either due to negotiations or because passing bills is so hard.)
- relations, and particularly public sentiment, between western countries and Turkey worsen, but those western countries will continue to need to make deals they don’t really like with Turkey.
- computer science courses at typical good universities in anglophone countries will be at least 65% male. Google will have made little progress trying to increase the gender balance of their workforce.
- hn will be a shadow of its former self and far fewer people will come here or post interesting comments.
- this will be the decade we realise we fucked it with climate change.
- oil prices and demand will go down. Some gulf states will be having significant political problems because of this, others will still be hanging on by relying on cash from better years.
- Statically typed languages with advanced type systems (in particular rust or something like it) will increase in popularity over the first half of the decade. Some new programming construct or paradigm will be invented that makes dynamic languages become more popular but maybe not as popular as they once were by the end of the decade. Garbage collection will still be very popular but some GC’d languages may offer more ways to have objects out of reach of the GC. Parallel programming, simd, and gpu programming will still be hard, even in the good languages. Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C# and Java will still be very popular.