Many are starting to dive deeper into forecasting about what is going to happen throughout the rest of the decade. We are a little over 5 years before we see the calendar hit 2030, and technology is moving ahead.
What will things look like then?
Will Bitcoin be $1 million like Cathie Wood asserts? Are we going to have self driving cars? Will we be connected to the Internet by our brains? Will jobs be eradicated?
All of these are things people are pondering. In this article we will approach some of them to see where things are at.
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Cloud Expansion
The cloud keeps growing.
This is something that can be phrased in a number of ways. Some like to call it the global brain. Personally, I prefer the world's knowledge base.
Whatever the terminology, the information pool that we have just keeps growing. Tied to this is the infrastructure that stores and processes everything. We have servers all over the world that are connected, processing requests and delivering information at growing rates. The volume along with the speed of delivery keeps growing.
On top of this, we have advancements in software. We can use the catchall title of AI or can simply go with software. The point here is this is becoming a larger part of our total economic output.
In other words, everything tied to the Internet keeps growing regardless of the metric. Data generated, processing power, storage capability, number of nodes, and people using it all are moving higher at an incredible pace.
All of this is feeding into the cloud.
Sci-fi Coming To Life?
Some people like Ray Kurzweil believe we will have some Sci-Fi moments by 2030. I view his forecasts as being off by about a decade but he does grasp the general trend of things.
Depending upon your age, you might think 5 years not a long time. How quickly does 60 months pass? We are now 54 months into the 2020s, so that might put it in perspective.
With the pace of things, that is a long time. Consider the fact that November 2022 was only 19 months ago. Why is that important? That was when ChatGPT was introduced to the world. If we think about the progress in generative AI since that date, what will happen in another 36 months. Certainly some slowdown with regards to advancement can happen but when we look at the progress in chips by a company like NVIDIA, it tends to put things in perspective.
Thus, we could be looking at some Sci-Fi moments between now and 2030. However, there will be a lot of life that is still the same. Technology tends to be more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Even chatbots, which are moving at an astounding rate, are being implemented in an evolutionary manner.
For this reason, anything like mind uploading or radical life extension will not be present by 2030. Nor will we be traveling into space (resist the urge to book your next space tourism vacation).
What we will see is a consistent expansion in the areas which are already formulating. This is going to change how we are work, are entertained, and interact.
Here is a guess at a few things we will have.
Personal AI Assistants
By 2030 there will be personal AI assistants.
The combination of data, LLMs investment, and application development will lead to the creation of personal AI assistants. It is hard to pinpoint what they will be like at that time but we will have a general framework to build from.
These will be trained on our own personal data, able to cater to our preferences, needs, and likes. Consider it like an assistant that a company executive has expect being digital.
Autonomous Transportation
We will have autonomous transportation by 2030. Vehicles will be able to drive themselves and integrated into many areas.
Again, how widespread the penetration is depends upon factors such as regulation, number of units available and, of course, the technology.
That said, the moving of people along with cargo will be automated to a great degree. People will still drive yet a lot of the human involvement will be removed. It might be not the majority of the miles driven but will be growing.
Plethora of Robots
The industrial world is about to be overrun with robots.
By 2030, we will have millions of them in operation. We probably will not be to the point where robots are walking down the street. These will likely be confined mostly to factories and plants.
Many will be in humanoid form. This will allow them to easily integrate into the world we already designed.
There might be some in home humanoid robots but that will be at the luxury end of the market. The price in 2030 will likely not be at a level where most people can afford it, especially with the job situation.
Loss of Jobs
This is nothing new.
The labor force participation rate, for both the US and world, has declined for decades. The US peaked in 1998 with the world going downhill since 1991.
What this means is job creation has not kept up with population growth. Even though we created millions of useless jobs in the United States, it did not offset the destruction through technology. This is not surprising once we realize that technology, by its nature, is deflationary. What this means is jobs end up being affected.
Many still debate this is going to happen but I believe the pace is undeniable. When Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, says that it is his company's goal to make coding obsolete, that should tell us something.
Blue collar jobs are likely better insulated than white collar. The trades will be defended better simply due to the evolution of the technology coupled with the integration. Robots on a construction site have more issues than on a factory floor. They are also a lot more complicated than translating documents from foreign subsidiaries.
Tokenization
We are going to see the tokenization of everything.
Naturally, this will not take place by 2030 but we will keep moving along the path. Wall Street investment banks are already starting to get into the game. The Bitcoin ETF was just one piece of a puzzle that is going to come together over the next 5 years.
There will be many real world assets tokenized. We could see a lot of this coming from the DeFi realm as that expands to more countries.
One of the things that I think gets overlooked is the fact that, to fund a lot of what we are discussing, trillions of dollars is required. We have a system that is constrained for various reasons. Crypto is where radical expansion is possible simply because it was born in the digital realm.
The viewpoint that crypto is going to disappear is 100% wrong. Not only is it here to stay, it will radically expand over the next 5 years. Crypto is not a new asset class. Instead, every asset class will be tied to crypto.
This makes sense when we view this through the prism of networks. A crypto coin basically is tied to blocks of information. What did we start this discussion with? The cloud. Hence, there is no way to separate the two.
Centralized systems are not going to be the only game in town. The present Internet structure is being augmented by decentralized and distributed architectures. This is where crypto enters.
It is a completely new ownership structure. We will likely see innovation where assets such as autonomous vehicles are owned by crypto holders.
In Conclusion
These are a few of the things that I see emerging by 2030.
Web 3.0 is read-write-own. The last part is key because it is what changes everything. If people are not focusing upon asset accumulation, which crypto offers, they are missing a major piece of the pie.
As stated in numerous articles, my view is that crypto is what allows for the offsetting of job destruction and reduction of income capital. Many will be calling for UBI, something that I omitted from this list. While there will be discussions, it will not be implemented by 2030.
A better solution might be universal basic asset. This is something that could be done with tokenization. The challenge there is reputable digital identification, something that is questionable whether we will have by 2030.