20 predictions for 2050
20 FORECASTS FOR 2050
“Forecasting the future is not my area of business.”
I sometimes hear this from people when discussing how future innovation will impact the next 20 years or so. While I know their point is that their exact line of work is not within business strategy development or similar, I fundamentally disagree with the statement.
Everyone has a stake in the future. Anticipating the most likely future is something most people already do in some way or another, and it does, to a smaller or larger extent, influence your actions.
Almost all people have some story of regret in terms of making the wrong decisions like not investing in stocks, not buying that house, or not jumping on some career opportunity, etc.
So no matter our lines of work, positioning ourselves correctly for the future makes a lot of sense.
Going back 25 years in time, we all have a clear playbook on how to become super successful by adjusting a few choices, right? Well, just buying a few Apple stocks or Bitcoins at the right time would have set you financially free.
Unfortunately, we cannot predict the future so that we can pick the next Apple stock, but we can do a lot more than nothing.
We can paint a picture of the most likely future in, for example, 2050. And before you scream "no way," try and hear me out!
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The Supertrends that shape the world are not something that just pops out of nowhere. They take a lot of time from invention to commercial release and then to widespread adoption. AI development began around the 1940s to 1960s, depending on how you define it, and the electrical car is actually about 200 years old.
So why don’t people forecast and try to predict the likely future? Throughout history, people and companies have “stayed on a sinking Titanic” because they were either paralyzed by fear or in “Analysis Paralysis.”
Think of Blockbuster – way before the bankruptcy in 2010. The company had a good 5 years of declining results to change their outdated business model to a Future-Proof one.
Think of the music industry from 2000-2010. The leadership was well aware that digital distribution would take over, yet they were very slow in adopting new digital offerings.
Looking back today, these are stories that make audiences laugh when shared in keynote speeches because it seemed too obvious that these companies had to embrace technology rather than resist it.
But here's the thing - analyzing the most probable future and acting on those predictions can be daunting for everyone. Predictions about the future often challenge us to step out of our comfort zones. It might tell us that we are on the verge of making some really bad decisions or that a career change is needed.
It is uncomfortable, which leads to the easy answer – we can’t predict the future! And true, we may have nuclear war, a zombie epidemic, or an alien invasion that could disrupt everything. If that happens, all planning goes out the window. However, if that doesn’t happen, I think a lot of the below predictions are a really good bet when predicting 2050.
So, I have no doubt that the aforementioned 20 forecasts will spark diverse opinions, and I don’t claim that they will all be accurate. However, many of them are interconnected and driven by innovation that is already in motion, so they aren't just pulled out of thin air.
Now, here's the tricky part: if you believe the most probable future looks like the one described above, how will you position yourself in the best possible way?
I will give my 5 cents on that in the next newsletter.
Partner Sympact.ai
1 年Daniel, perhaps an idea to analyze some worst case scenarios. Here are some suggestions: global pandemic that kills many millions or more, a 3 World war, huge meteor impact, a polar shift, huge volcanic erruption etc. I know these are dire scenarios, yet all of Them are potentially possible and some of Them Will happen sooner or later!
CEO ExecuteAI | CaiO AuthenticAI.app | Chairman @ KITEK | Innovation A.I. Management
1 年Self-driving, for sure. Level 8 even, prediction on your next ride from the messages you just sent to someone. And remember the car you only pay for this one trip. Not like today, where cars are on a car park 97% of the time. So if you buy a Tesla today the 100,000 you give for it, you only use the 3000 of these money, instead of 97K out the window. And regulation will change too, the old people who are now politicians and have a 1980 mindset will happen to have been replaced with the young generation that grew up with AI and quantum. They won't think like us, they know that the technology works flawlessly. The paradigm shift will also happen in our DNA, the Gene Pool. Because we do nutrition that is fit to us, and we do music that is made for us, we do video games that are made for us, we do VR that is made for us. Even our DNA is changed by Crisper and other mRNA technologies. One prediction that is the most important of all is that we will live forever. Even now, there are experiments on copying the Planarian can be cut in to over 250 pieces with a knife. And it replaces the part that you cut off, the head or the back, it simply reproduces itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU&t=2s
Partner Sympact.ai
1 年Interesting read, some Will happened quite a lot earlier than 2050 though