14 Predictions for 2020

2010 is here. It seems like only yesterday that we partied like it was 1999. Here are my predictions for what the world will look like in ten years.

1. There will be a massively noticeable jump in the battery technology. If today, we are struggling to get the hybrid plug-ins on the road, in 10 years, electric vehicles will rule. Why? Because right now there are way too many people are working on improving the batteries – someone is bound to make a breakthrough. Most new vehicles sold will be electric.
2. The vehicles themselves will be similar to what we have today. With one significant difference – they will have internet connectivity, which changes everything. All of a sudden the entertainment options quadruple. The kids in the back can watch whatever. The vehicle will do a lot of self-diagnostics and possible let you know ahead of time about needed maintenance, etc…
3. Solar for residential home will be a no brainer. The improvement in the efficiency of solar panel will go through the roof and the price will drastically come down. Thus it will make no sense to keep on paying the electric company when you can produce it yourself and potentially sell it back to the utilities (although the last part will most likely not last). The reason for Solar’s success lies in the basic research that has been going on for a decade now. There will most likely be laws mandating solar roofs for new buildings (commercial at first, then residential).
4. Facebook will be history. People will simply get bored with it. It will be replaced by another fad.
5. The number of significant mobile phone operating systems will shrink significantly. Nokia’s Symbian and Maemo will be gone. Same fate awaits Palm’s WebOS. The battle will be fought between the Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, Rim’s BlackBerry and Microsoft’s next mobile OS. I don’t foresee any new entrants, as all the major players now have an OS, which is really difficult to build without a ton of people.
6. We will still have general purpose computers, even though by 2020 the mobile devices will be able to do pretty much anything the desktop counterparts can. But they’ll be smaller and more stylish. Windows will still be dominant. Google’s Chrome OS will be nowhere to be seen.
7. We will not have landed a human on Mars because it is devilishly difficult to bring that person back to earth. But the Red planet will become increasingly polluted with all kind of hardware from Earth (e.g. rovers, etc…).
8. One of the Voyager spacecraft encounters a signal or an anomaly that could possibly be construed as alien in nature.
9. Here is an easy one – most of our data is in the cloud. Even desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office, operate on data residing in the cloud. In other words, when you go File/New – a file gets created in the cloud.
10. The TV will be different. First of all, the coolest toy that everyone will want in 2020 is a foldable TV. Other TVs will simply look like glass when turned off. But beyond that the TV will be connected, there will be an App Store for the TV that does all kinds of things.
11. Geek stats: Typical bandwidth will be about 500 megabits per second. Hard drives will mostly be solid state, typical drive – 1 petabyte. The CPUs for mobile devices will come with multiple cores. Typical servers will easily contain 64 cores.
12. Combine predictions about solar and batteries. For commercial deliveries it’s absolutely huge. All of a sudden your largest expense (gasoline) is history because your vehicles run on batteries using electricity produced by the solar panels installed on the roof of the warehouse. This enables cheaper deliveries on a large scale. Thus the refrigerator will do the shopping for us. It will quickly scan the contents and communicate to your grocery store what you are running out of. Items you are short on will be brought to you as a part of your weekly deliveries.
13. We’ve all seen how citizen journalism changed things in the Iran protests. All of a sudden 100 people with cheap camcorders were telling the world what was really happening in the streets of Tehran. Fast forward 10 years and now you got thousands of people live video-blogging from their iPhone 8G to services such as Ustream. This makes it very difficult of oppressive regimes to go on, though they surely will.
14. North Korea no longer exists – it will have merged with the South – it will happen very quickly and unexpectedly. Cuba’s 50 year experiment with communism is over after the death of Fidel and his brother. Arabs and Jews are still at it (albeit after at least one major war). USA continues to have all kinds of problems stemming from living beyond means, unworkable and corruptible legislature, exploding medical costs for the baby boomers, etc… China experiences another Tiananmen square like event, although the results are far more explosive.