1) Significant increases in payment/banking technology (ease and speed of transfers, primarily) and the continued erosion of cash in society. There's too much low-hanging fruit for the status quo to continue. Cross-border transfers may continue to be problematic, for political reasons.
2) Continued improvements in VR will result in first-generation serious attempts to replace business flying with virtual meetings, by mid-decade. Serious adoption will start by the end of the deacde, as issues such as eye contact, body tracking, processing power, and sufficient network bandwidth are solved.
3) In the absence of regulator intervention or government initiative, a FAANG will begin to make serious investments in digital provenance / trust. Ultimately the value of network effects is undermined if new connections cannot be trusted. Initial attempts like Login With Google/Facebook/Apple, combined with a stranglehold over messaging, will morph into fuller identity-management products with implications for contracts, reputation checks, and more.
4) Increasing geopolitical instability will have no effect on global markets. Trade will prove to be the new nuclear bomb - MAD will prevent global powers from going to war.
5) Political pressure for economic solutions for the poorest classes will continue, whether for UBI, guaranteed housing, what have you. Aside from isolated experiments, no financial commitments by government will be made and economic desperation will continue. In the United States, cheap "bread and circuses" (food stamps and streaming) will continue to serve as an effective tamper on revolution. The private sector will continue to experiment with remote work, to deal with continually rising cost of living in urban clusters, but dramatic, industry-wide changes won't happen until VR advances materialize.
6) We will see a serious PaaS emerge for Kubernetes that is sufficient for 80% of LoB development, that will continue to bury traditional ops roles for most companies, and do more for NoOps than Lambda and similar FaaS.
2) Continued improvements in VR will result in first-generation serious attempts to replace business flying with virtual meetings, by mid-decade. Serious adoption will start by the end of the deacde, as issues such as eye contact, body tracking, processing power, and sufficient network bandwidth are solved.
3) In the absence of regulator intervention or government initiative, a FAANG will begin to make serious investments in digital provenance / trust. Ultimately the value of network effects is undermined if new connections cannot be trusted. Initial attempts like Login With Google/Facebook/Apple, combined with a stranglehold over messaging, will morph into fuller identity-management products with implications for contracts, reputation checks, and more.
4) Increasing geopolitical instability will have no effect on global markets. Trade will prove to be the new nuclear bomb - MAD will prevent global powers from going to war.
5) Political pressure for economic solutions for the poorest classes will continue, whether for UBI, guaranteed housing, what have you. Aside from isolated experiments, no financial commitments by government will be made and economic desperation will continue. In the United States, cheap "bread and circuses" (food stamps and streaming) will continue to serve as an effective tamper on revolution. The private sector will continue to experiment with remote work, to deal with continually rising cost of living in urban clusters, but dramatic, industry-wide changes won't happen until VR advances materialize.
6) We will see a serious PaaS emerge for Kubernetes that is sufficient for 80% of LoB development, that will continue to bury traditional ops roles for most companies, and do more for NoOps than Lambda and similar FaaS.