10 Disruptive Predictions for next Decade

Predicting uncertainty and finding disruptive trends has been source for competitive edge and often deciding factor for survival of organizations. Disruptions are very different from incremental innovation, change, optimization or even transformation. Disruptions change the course of human development, nature of industries, it’s mix and path forward. Below are the next 10 most impactful disruptive predictions that will change the world in the next 10 years from what we know it as today. ?Let me know what you think in the comments.

1.?Gen AI and AGI

Generative AI has been the talk for the year 2023, social media and LinkedIn have posts flooded with articles around AI, Generative AI, Large language models, Transformer models etc. While modality of these models is expanding to include all forms like text to text, text to image, text to video and vice versa, the next set of proprietary models like Gemini from Google, and next version of GPT-4 from OpenAI will handle all forms of modality and will accelerate the development of several use cases for almost all kinds of organizations.

Proprietary model versus Open-Source Models: Advancements in proprietary models like GPT, Gemini, etc will fuel developers to build product and tools around them, the broader growth and disruption in industry will happen from open-source multimodal models like LLaMa from Meta, Mistral, Bloom, Falcon etc. These open-source models have been catching up very fast in performance metrics to those of proprietary models. However, as contribution and adoption of open-source models increases, algorithms will become common knowledge, but data will become more difficult and costly to collect for training these models.

Regulation and Diffusion- Tradeoffs between data, scale, accuracy, and biases will warrant regulation sooner rather than later. Privacy, data protection, intellectual property and copyrights will be other factors that will need tighter regulations. Regulators will have to catch up with technology and they will use AI to regulate AI. This may slow down the diffusion of technology, compel organizations to find regulated adjacencies but it will foster transparency, ethics and explainability in AI race.

AGI

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is construct in which AI can perform as good as human in all abilities/aspects. While this is far in future than talks going, some form of AGI augmented with robots (maybe we call them humanoids) will be feasible by 2030. However specific AI augmented with robots to handle specific tasks like assembly line, etc. will become available sooner by 2025.

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2.?Workforce, Employment and Productivity gains

With the above developments in AI, organizations will struggle to adapt or perish in the process. This process will come at high flux with employees and broader workforce in economy. Initially AI will increase productivity of employees and spur growth and will demand specific skills in economy, but it will cause a disruption in overall workforce. Automations will force the demand of skills for creative, cognitive, strategic tasks. This will create the demand for silver workers, or people with wide experiences, and will force them to work longer in their life. This will also lead to an increase in specialty, part-time job creations. Tools like copilot and other innovations will make development, language independent leading to third disruption.

3. AI enabled modernization of legacy infra

Opportunity cost of modernizing, refactoring and maintaining legacy infrastructure will reduce significantly due to use of AI. All current and future developments will automatically be self-documented with AI. As lack of documentation and dependencies are root causes of legacy infrastructure challenges. AI will analyze legacy codes and explain the purpose, dependencies, and gaps. Organizations will be able to reduce their technical debts significantly in coming years.

4. Laggards will leapfrog

Above disruptions can play some balancing force in industry mix, as startups will be the risk takers and innovators with ideas involving AI, however the scale, investments and need of funds will provide unique opportunities to conservative firms with strong cash balances to acquire these moonshots or big bets. There will be multiple waves of S-curves around tools and products using AI in different contexts. However, laggards will have to move fast in these times as the pool of startups will diminish over time.

5. AI compatible hardware (GPU) race

Today’s AI hardware dominance of NVIDIA is reflected in its current valuation growth. In coming years this will warrant growth and innovation in hardware with growing demand for AI needs. Microsoft’s Maia 100, Intel’s Gaudi2 GPU, ARM and Apple are just start of it. With hardware needs and growth there will be a need for resiliency with increasing risks that I will discuss below.

6.?Augmented and Virtual Reality resurgence

While Meta rebranded and started building the foundation pieces enabling VR in 2022, Apple’s launch of vision pro in 2024, VR will again take front seat in coming years. Multimodal AI developments will fuel Augmented and VR innovations and applications in coming years.

7.?Space Race 2.0

We will enter space race 2.0 after the space race of cold war (We may also end up in cold war II but will cover that later in separate article). New private enterprises like SpaceX and Blue Origin along with government agencies will very soon start a new space race. Just like cheaper storage and compute costs have enabled the AI disruption. With ever declining payload costs, coupled by AI we are on verge of space outreach disruption. AI will enable new resources exploration and AI powered robots will start working 24*7 on moon’s surface by 2028. Their need for energy will be fulfilled by solar panels made from materials from space itself. Companies will start branding and acquiring new resources in space by 2030. This will interact and will be disrupted by geopolitical order.

8.?New Geo-political order

Year 2024 is the year of global elections. 64 countries along with the EU are expected to have national elections in next 2 years. That encompasses more than 50% of the world population and more than 80% of global GDP. ?This includes major countries USA, India, EU, Russia, Ukraine, UK, Israel, Iran etc. Also, we will see more right governments making through these elections taking the geopolitical risk at new height. Coupled with inflation and supply chain distress, the world will see a very different order than the one in past. World foreign policies will see dramatic changes which can be covered in a separate article. CEOs and executives will have to anticipate these changes and prioritize their global strategies. AI and new space frontiers will also change the competitive advantages of countries which will have both a cause and effect on above disruptions.

9. External existential risks

With COVID just been past 3 years, existential risk will increase in coming years, and they will not come from AI. We have heightened risk of pandemic or external celestial risks like Solar flares or Geo magnetic storm etc. as described by Daryl Plummer in his Gartner presentation – “7 Disruptions you might not see coming: 2023-2028”. Even if they are not of extinction level our low orbit satellite communications, internet, power grids, and other essential services may come under significant halt risk for an extended time.

10. New hope for humanity, peace, and climate change reversal

2023 shattered all climate records, accompanied by extreme weather causing a trail of devastation and despair worldwide. With global temperature increase inching at 1.45 degree Celsius we are not far from verge of non-reversible cliff of 2 degree Celsius rise. However, the above disruptions will bring a new hope and if capitalized we may be able to reverse the entire climate change. Renewable energy capacity will grow significantly with solar panel efficiency, AI and robotic developments. Using AI in various fields we may optimize and limit greenhouse gas emissions, especially in Agriculture. New space frontiers and changing world order will shift competitive advantages of countries and may provide new level playing field. Using AI led innovations we can make the world a much better place for humanity to thrive.