Right before 2010 began, I made a set of thematic predictions about 2020 and then backed them up with 86 specific claims. Having just reviewed and graded my now decade-old calls, it is time to make a new batch of predictions for 2030.
The optimist in me believes that having already done this exercise once as an adult, my hit rate on predictions should be higher for the coming decade. The pessimist in me worries that my age and experience is clouding my ability to see clearly what a world full of nearly 50-year-old millennials will look like.
Before diving in, one note on the format of these predictions: Having read a lot of the forward-looking thematic pieces by venture capitalists and company builders in the last month, I would urge anyone attempting a similar personal exercise this month to try to back up big-picture thinking with specific and measurable claims about 2030 as much as possible. From my own earlier exercises, I found that it is the specific claims related to the themes that are the most interesting to look back at in the future—because you can always squint at themes and justify them in the future.
Without further ado, here is my vision of 2030 in technology as of today.
The Big-Picture Social Challenges of 2030
The world will be defined for the next decade by “flight”—away from the massive and somewhat dissociating scale of the internet. If the last two decades were about the coming together of people globally online, we are now going to go through a reversal of that (and are already seeing the signs of this movement). For the first few years of the decade, many will position that trend as a healthy rebalancing of the world after a period of massive consolidation. But by 2030 they will view it as a social crisis of its own. Broadly, this flight will mean an intensification of identity politics and an escape into personalized realities and virtual reality. As the decade progresses, it will also present challenges in keeping people engaged in the real world.
Identity politics will continue to spread and intensify: I think a big portion of the identity politics we see today stems from an attempt of people to right-size their communities to smaller, more manageable segments. That helps people feel a sense of purpose and place, as opposed to facing the mass of humanity online.
The breakup of the internet will accelerate: The internet is already clearly fracturing into different spheres—the American, Chinese and to a lesser extent European internets are all different and play by different rules. This fracturing will intensify. And because of the general trend toward smaller-scale community and personal identity, there isn’t going to be much social pressure from people to hold the internet together.
Social spaces will be seemingly depressurized by fragmentation: For a globalist and humanist, the plus side of this is that at least good fences make good neighbors. In the physical world, people can isolate themselves from those they disagree with and surround themselves with neighbors like them. This makes them feel safe. In mass social spaces like the internet, people are constantly forced to see and interact with people whose ideology and identity conflict with their own. I believe that the flight to smaller social enclaves will continue and it might make people happier with their experience of the internet overall.
We will face a crisis of engagement in reality: The extreme version of flight to microcommunities and identity politics is people choosing to occupy fully personalized realities distinct from the broader real world. There is an argument that technology broadly, and VR in particular, is going to make personalized fantasy worlds far more compelling than reality to most people. This is already true to an extent on platforms like Instagram. Professional friends with touchups living amazing lives are far more compelling than photos from your “real” friends. The technology of the next decade is going to make this pattern more compelling and bring it mainstream. People are going to choose to live at scale in personal VR most of the time. Within 10 years I think this will be recognized as a legitimate social crisis.
The flight from reality will have recognized economic and political consequences: The birthrate is going to go down, as will sex, human friendships and employment in the west.
A public conversation will start about how to entice people back to reality and engagement with the physical world: For the first time in history, reality is going to have to compete head to head with fantasy for the attention of people, at scale. In many ways, personalized fantasy is going to be more compelling. Those that believe in the physical world and reality will start a public conversation about how to improve or change reality for people to get them to reengage in it.
The current “depression” narrative will shift to focus on social structural issues rather than technology alone: Depression will still be seen as a disease, but a recognition of social structural issues will confound debates about treatment. The debate will move beyond blaming technology to looking at how lack of opportunity, low wages, lack of sense of purpose, low birthrates and other factors are driving social and community depression.
Technopolitical Regulation
The politics around the internet and technology will continue to intensify. Chinese regulation and control of the digital sphere will be deep and complete. Regulation in the U.S. will not be effective but will cause many intense press cycles and a lot of national tension.
Antitrust regulation in the U.S. will fail: None of the major technology companies will be broken up in the U.S., though they will be practically barred from new major acquisitions. This generation of tech companies will have learned from Microsoft and will weather the regulatory storm better than Microsoft did.
Internet regionalization: Facebook will not have any consumer-facing services running in China and will be banned from at least five other countries. At least one of the big three internet companies (Google, Facebook and Amazon) will choose to turn off a major service in the EU rather than face its regulatory regime. At least a third of connected people in Africa will use Alipay. The U.S. will block the major Chinese internet players from entering the country in any meaningful way.
Digital citizenship: China and the U.S. will offer some form of digital citizenship to noncitizens that extends certain rights and inclusions within the legal frameworks of the respective countries. As part of this, China will in some form require foreign companies exporting from China to pay suppliers for goods using digital RMB—thereby driving the expansion of that currency. The U.S. will respond with some form of digital USD.
Privacy regulation will be nationalized in the U.S.: The U.S. will adopt a national privacy framework and the California Consumer Privacy Act will be phased out. The American internet framework will sadly look a lot like the European framework. This will stifle innovation and generally strengthen the current incumbent internet players. More here
Encryption and its limits: While the U.S. will allow Facebook to encrypt all its messenger products, the trifecta of encryption, targeting and ephemerality will be legally prevented and/or blocked as I describe here.
Deepfake regulation
The U.S. and Europe will have strong regulation around the production and distribution of deepfakes on the internet. However, the regulation will be ineffectual because most attention and engagement (and the sharing of deepfakes) will have moved to encrypted private messaging services where enforcement is not feasible. This will kick off an even more intense debate about the rights of citizens to have private spaces and communication.
Major internet services will remain fundamentally centralized: While cryptocurrency will have a role to play (more on that later), no major internet service will really be decentralized. The techno cycle of centralization followed by decentralization has been broken. There will not be a clear path back toward openness.
Political advertising on the web will be formally regulated: That will occur by regulating the specificity of targeting rather than the content. And political advertising will be more evenly experienced in the future than it is today. More here
Content moderation role of central platforms: The major platforms will be forced to walk back commitments against deepfakes and types of speech from a feasibility standpoint and because of inconsistency of policy application. There will be a lot of political tension around moderating speech deemed “public.” We will wrestle with how to manage truth in speech, and it will ultimately be left unresolved and highly contentious. More here.
There will be a discussion around the fundamental challenge of techno regulation: There will be a meaningful mainstream intellectual debate (meaning articles in outlets like The Atlantic) about the fundamental problem with regulation in our technological age. Legal rules work like code. Technology allows for enactment of far more complicated rules than ever before—and for the first time allows for near-perfect enforcement of those rules. However, technology also makes removing or refactoring rules extremely difficult.
Personal Hardware and Interfaces in 2030
The incumbent large hardware firms will dominate both the existing and already clearly emerging hardware segments. The speculative platforms like augmented reality will not deliver. VR will be the exception and will be dominated by Facebook. China will develop a competing and meaningful alternative ecosystem and will export it to Africa. My personal hardware usage will not change much in the coming decade.
Personal computers: Apple and Microsoft will continue to dominate globally. I personally will use a MacBook daily as I do today and it will continue to be my primary interface, though the vast majority of connected people globally will be phone only.
Phones: iOS will continue to dominate in the U.S. and Android will continue to be the biggest platform globally, the same as today. There will be one Chinese phone software platform that is a close second to Android in Africa but that is not available in the U.S.
Tablets: While the iPad brand will still exist in some form, tablets will no longer be seen as a category distinct from personal computers and phones. The current tablet market will dissolve into the personal computer and phone markets.
VR: Oculus will be the dominant platform. Unit sales will look similar to current console sales (about 30 million units a year) and Facebook will have over 50% market share.
Visual AR glasses: Apple, Google, Facebook and others will all have “glasses” products in the market. Magic Leap will not be in business. Of the visual AR glasses market overall, less than 5 million units will ship per year. It will be a niche product for business users and will not have meaningful consumer use.
Earbuds: Apple will sell more AirPods than iPhones per year. They will be nearly ubiquitous and will prove a limited but meaningful platform for developers.
Home devices: In the U.S., Amazon, Google and Apple will still be the three home ecosystem providers of smart speakers, cameras, and home services. Share will be reasonably split between the three. Facebook will not have a play and will have shut down its Portal device. Apple and Amazon are likely to have come to some sort of truce and be collaborative, while Google will continue to go it alone. More context here.
Forms of human production: The majority of my input will still be in the form of a physical keyboard. Onscreen keyboards will still be how we interact with phones. Voice recording will be ubiquitous in meetings, but voice commands will not have evolved much from where they are today. Gesture-based input will only be meaningful in VR environments. There will be zero consumer use of direct brain-interface devices. I will not type by thinking.
Forms of human consumption: Phones will dominate most people’s digital time, but the laptop will dominate mine. My desktop screen will be no more than 20% bigger. VR will be less than 10% of my digital time.
Core Software and Services in 2030
The incumbents will continue to dominate their respective zones of strengths. The experience of software will be much the same in 2030 as it is today. The exception is that things like virtual private networks and other privacy-focused technologies like password managers will go fully mainstream.
Email: Gmail will be the dominant email provider in the U.S. and globally. Email will continue to be the professional default for text-based communication, and my personal default mode of communication.
Messaging: iMessage will dominate in the U.S. but Facebook will dominate everywhere else. There will be very little change from today in terms of how messenger apps look and feel, except that the Facebook family of messengers will be integrated across products and will be encrypted by 2030 (though it will take a long time and be a huge point of regulatory tension).
Identity and login: There will be little change. Google will dominate service login globally. Facebook pixels and email will still be the primary keys for business customer relationship management and advertising.
Traditional work productivity suite: Google will broadly dominate the traditional white-collar work productivity suite (docs, spreadsheets and so on). A long list of already-in-existence work and productivity software companies will have slices of the collaboration ecosystem, including Asana, Airtable and Zapier (each of which will be worth between $5 billion and $25 billion).
Maps: Google Maps will be the largest mapping service (and the one I use). Apple Maps will be the only other relevant mapping engine. Google and Apple will both stop driving custom vehicles on the roads for mapping updates and will instead leverage clouds of car-embedded cameras and sensors for continuous updates.
Photos: Google and iCloud will dominate photos. Facebook will still be the place where most photos are shared daily, but it will not have a core photo-storage solution.
Privacy tech: Fifty percent of Americans will be using some sort of VPN provider for 80% of their internet usage. The major internet players will each offer their own. A quarter of Americans will be using a password manager distinct from the built-in options offered by iOS and Android. Five percent of Americans will rely on some form of a paid disinformation service that uses deepfake technology.
Use of VPNs in alternative jurisdictions: As is the case today in mainland China, most of the San Francisco technorati will run personal proxies or VPNs in at least one other jurisdiction globally for access to information or services they can’t get at home. I already do that today, and by 2030 I likely will maintain two.
Social networking services: The Facebook family of applications will continue to be the largest social networking platform by a wide margin. There will be at least 4 billion monthly active users on Facebook products (about 50% of the world population). There will be at least 10 non–Facebook-owned properties globally with a billion-plus users. Neither Twitter nor Snap will have a billion users. There will be at least 10 new social applications with 25 million–plus users in the U.S. as people add new social experiences on top of broad-based social networking.
Commerce and payments: Amazon will dominate e-commerce, obviously. Shopify will be a $200 billion company. Square will be a $100 billion company.
Video-streaming platforms: The ecosystem will look shockingly like it does today. YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon will be the largest players. Services like Disney Plus will exist and be healthy. Much as with social services, the average household will subscribe to three-plus video services.
Videoconferencing: Zoom will be a great business but will get more commoditized than it is today (one of the rare services on the list that will do so). Videoconferencing will feel embedded and commoditized in applications by 2030, much like voice is today.
Technology-Enabled Real-World Services
It will be a hard decade for real-world tech-enabled services. Many of the services we have today will survive, but they will not achieve the same growth trajectory or command the same sky-high valuations as the pure software services (where I expect pure software to compound its lead).
Transportation: Scooters will prove to not be a viable business. They will exist in cities as low-margin utilities. Ride-sharing services will exist but will refactionalize. Uber and Lyft will be the largest in the U.S. and will still be multibillion-dollar companies, but will have been hemmed in by regulation to perpetually low-margin utility status. There will be a popular premium player other than Uber.
Self-driving cars: Self-driving cars will not be meaningfully deployed on the road, though there will likely be some demonstration deployments at low volumes on specific routes. Alphabet will have divested its self-driving assets.
Food delivery: This will prove to be a very difficult business for the next decade just as it has recently. Doordash, Uber and Amazon will consolidate the market and be the last three standing in the U.S., having consolidated the other players in the market. Things like Zume Pizza will fade away.
Broad commerce delivery: This will look much as it does today. Amazon Prime Now will be rolled out further but will not be ubiquitous in the U.S. Drone delivery will not be done in major cities and neither will sidewalk bot delivery.
Cloud kitchens: These will not be a meaningful part of food delivery in 2030. Less than 5% of food volume will come from a cloud kitchen, though kitchen sharing and utilization will increase.
Hotels and housing: Airbnb will be a strong business, but much like other services that touch the real world, it will face continuously challenging regulatory issues that will prevent it from being a greater than $100 billion company in 2030.
Office space: The on-demand or monthly rental model popularized by WeWork will continue to grow rapidly. The number of workers working out of shared office space will grow five times from today. The most popular office space company will be a franchise model.
Education: U.S. college enrollment will drop as a percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds. The average cost of a four-year college education will have declined (finally). At least 10% of education will be financed through income sharing agreements. More here
Banking: Of the five top U.S. banks, four will still be top banks. At least five branchless consumer financial services players will be valued at between $5 billion and $25 billion, but none will be worth more than that.
Social Networking, Speech and Media
Large social networking services such as Snap, Facebook and Instagram will be professionalized: Most public content engagement on social networks will be with celebrities, characters and professional brands rather than friends. Professional friends are more entertaining. Private messaging and groups will subsume true personal content.
Influencers: The Rock will be the No. 1 most followed person on social media services, and will have 400 million–plus followers personally. Per my comments here, I believe that in the wake of an explosion of social capital, the winners on platforms like Instagram have been established and volatility in power will decrease. Seven of the top 10 influencers—defined by how much they are paid per post—will be female. Ten percent of the top 100 influencers on Instagram will not be real humans but synthetic characters. The Sussex Royals will have a bigger digital footprint than the mainline monarchy.
Advertising: Google and Facebook will remain dominant in the U.S. by a wide margin. Instagram will be Facebook’s biggest revenue-generating property. Google will have shed most of the Alphabet “other bets” and will be the most profitable company in the world.
Subscriptions: There will be at least 50 new digital subscription brands with over $50 million in revenue. There will be thousands of people supporting themselves full time on micro subscription services.
News publications: The current top brands for news—Wall Street Journal, New York Times and so on—will continue to be the dominant big brands. There will be several publications like The Information worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars, but without broad reach. Buzzfeed, Vice and their brethren will still exist as brands but will not be able to merge. They will be in decline from a traffic standpoint.
Music properties: Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube Music will be dominant in 2030, just as they are today. The music ecosystem will not meaningfully change/ There will not be another significant entrant.
Video platforms: Again, I expect little change. Netflix and Amazon will be the biggest platforms. Hulu and others will continue to knock around. Disney Plus will be in good shape. If it were anyone other than Apple, I would expect that Apple TV Plus would be shut down, but my sense is that Apple will continue to invest in the service. I don’t expect much consolidation, and I do expect that the insane investment in content will continue in similar form. It might pull back a bit, but not very much. I do not believe there will be another meaningful entrant.
Social media: I will be engaged in at least six real social network products. The average person in the U.S. will consider themselves engaged in four. Facebook and Instagram will still be the largest platforms. The next-generation services coming up will focus on curation and moderation, IRL experiences and new formats as outlined here. VR will not lead to a new dominant social platform replacing Facebook.
Tom Cruise: He will star in a major motion picture that will make more than $500 million that year.
Business Technology Platforms and Human Work Clouds
Human clouds: Clouds of people rather than machines will be the big business narrative by 2030. Just as the computer cloud dominated the story of the last decade, the next decade will see many of the computer cloud innovations adopted on the human side. Here is more context.
Many companies will have private human clouds organized around the idea that they employ people and can deploy structured processes against them, much the way they deploy code against servers today. This will mean that companies like Amazon and Google will run far more explicitly backed human-powered services to support their own products. Amazon, Google and maybe Salesforce will have at least semipublic clouds where they run human-driven work processes for third parties. Technology companies will acquire some forward-thinking business process outsourcers like TaskUs.
Middle management jobs will disappear: Automation and technology will make it easier for fewer managers to successfully manage far more people. This will remove the bulk of middle management jobs by 2030 and destroy historical job ladders in most knowledge work industries.
Human process instrumentation and measurement: The instrumentation of human work (such as the queue-based measurement that Fin Analytics applies to industrial processes) will be a major driver of efficiency and growth, as well as an enabler of human clouds. By 2030, at least 33% of workers in the U.S. will have process instrumentation of their everyday work.
Professional passive audio recording and transcription: This will be standard in meeting contexts and possibly more broadly. Speech commands will not be meaningfully more sophisticated or used than they are today—when people use them as cooking timers and for placing calls and selecting media to watch—but speech as a dataset and for recall will become second nature at work.
Other key human process cloud services: There will be the beginnings of standardized languages for human process documentation, and something like a GitHub for human processes, where people will write process, share it, fork it and so on. Work prioritization and routing will also be a key input to the human cloud. There will be at least 10 new billion-dollar companies in this space.
Robotic process automation: The RPA companies will exist, but will be seen as the first version of a larger and longer theme. At some point during the decade, a large enterprise player will acquire UiPath. Microsoft will be the leader in RPA by revenue and deployment.
CRM: Salesforce is going to have an awesome decade. By 2030, it will be at least three times as valuable as it is today. There will be at least five other vertical CRMs, founded since 2015, that are public companies and worth at least $10 billion.
Business messaging: The race by 2030 will be for brands to have personalized messaging and support experiences backed by humans and machines, not pure artificial intelligence. Companies will understand the life-time-value of each customer individually and will be able to look at service as an economic function to drive LTV.
Macro Economy, Society and Cities
The U.S. prison population will be down: It has to come down.
Business cycles: We will not have a technical recession in the 2020s. Expanded government spending will drive the next boom.
Interest rates: These will largely look like they do today. Several countries will be running negative interest rates, but the U.S. will be very low—roughly where it is today.
Climate: We will sadly not have made much progress. The Chinese will be seen as the most forward-leaning on climate, not the U.S., which will continue to be hamstrung. By 2030, climate change will replace abortion as the most important single issue in American politics.
Taxes: The top marginal tax rate in the U.S. will be higher than it is today, and separate capital gains taxes will go away. We will not have a meaningful wealth tax.
Employment: Unemployment will register about as low as it does today (around 3%), but about 50% of workers in the U.S. will be stuck within 20% of minimum wage.
Inflation: This will remain very low. Again, I don’t think the macroeconomy as it is measured is going to change much in the coming years.
Inequality: This will continue to grow. The Gini coefficient will continue to rise in the U.S. The increase in inequality will create more social unrest.
Immigration will be more open than it is today: It has to be. People will see that we face an increasing decline in birthrate and we will need more people.
San Francisco and New York: Neither will experience the skyrocketing cost of living and housing they saw in the last decade. Both will stagnate on those metrics. However, they will overall change less than people think. Many people will leave both cities for cost-of-living reasons, but many more will still be showing up to live in both places—especially San Francisco.
New tech cities: There will be at least two different next-generation technology cities founded on virgin ground—as opposed to taking over an existing city—by groups of Silicon Valley billionaires.
Unions: There will be a rise of labor activism. In the gig economy, this will look more like the lightning strikes I propose here. Technology companies will face a wave of issues at their hubs, but having a more globalized and distributed workforce than today’s will buffer them. Very high-skilled employees will have an ecosystem of self-service human resources and paid professional advocates and agents rather than relying on company-sponsored resources.
Healthcare: The fundamental structure of healthcare in the U.S. will sadly not have changed much from the current course and speed.
Edge Tech
AI: Hard short. We will not have anything like artificial general intelligence. The “state of the art” will mean pretty good image and speech recognition, and good deep-learning execution of games—but none of the fantasies people hope for. Many of my friends are far too optimistic here. They forget that just as with unlocking the secrets of life and DNA, there tends to always be another layer to unpeel.
Self-driving cars: This will not happen by 2030 in a meaningful way in the U.S. No self-driving car will drive down my street in San Francisco without a safety driver behind the steering wheel. I will not travel in one except in closed demos or for novelty. There will be a handful of dedicated routes or highways where self-driving vehicles will travel regularly.
Drones: These will still primarily be toys. They will not be seriously used in business or logistics. The Federal Aviation Administration will license them to fly roads and do surveillance and mapping work.
Electric airplanes: I will fly on one at least once in the next decade. They will not be widely used, but there will be hundreds of them in the world that are in regular commercial use.
Space: We will not be doing space mining. We will have reasonable space-based internet. We will have landed on the moon again—the Chinese will be there first in the decade. We will have found at least one planet that is believed to have life on it.
Public Companies and Venture Capital
Trillion-dollar companies: There will be ten trillion-dollar companies in the world. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook will make up half the list.
Big-tech leadership: Sundar Pichai will run Google. Mark Zuckerberg will run Facebook. Tim Cook will not run Apple and Jeff Bezos will not run Amazon. Jack Dorsey will live in Nigeria.
Late-stage funding: The trend toward vertical integration will continue, and venture capital firms will look more and more like investment banks. There will not be an actively investing SoftBank vision fund.
Early-stage funding: The death of seed funds will have been greatly overstated. I expect there will be more early-stage funds than there are today. And while some companies will opt in early to vertically integrated capital stacks, many will work with seed funds for their first financing needs. My mantra of early-stage capital raising—that most high-school marriages end in messy divorce—will be broadly accepted.
Digital Currency
Dominant crypto ecosystem: Bitcoin will be the most valuable crypto coin or token and the largest ecosystem by 10 times, as it is today. And it will be at least 10 times more valuable than it is today, but less than 100 times where it is today.
Privacy coins: These will exist and be used, but generally not by Americans.
Usage of crypto: There will not be meaningful DApps. Bitcoin will be a store of value, which is infrequently traded. There will be layer 2 distributed solutions like Lightning, and then more-centralized digital-less-distributed coins for daily use.
Crypto-speech platforms: The exception is that there will be some sort of distributed Twitter. It will not be heavily used, but it will exist, and it will be valuable in a world where the major social products are forced to lock down speech.
Computer Cloud
The centralized cloud: This will continue to be dominated by Amazon Web Services. Microsoft will be in second place. Google will have either spun out its business or reframed it strategically away from being a public cloud offering toward something more integrated with its business service offering.
The edge cloud: This is clearly what you need to deal with 5G. Things like self-driving cars and VR will be dominated by whoever can successfully boot and manage the biggest network of points of presence. Given the political issues surrounding big technology, this is the one place it is possible a smaller company could come out of nowhere and make it to the $1 trillion mark in the next decade, though the massive capital requirements to do so would be a challenge. If a big company ends up dominating the edge cloud, I think it will be Microsoft or perhaps Facebook. Microsoft could succeed because it is the least objectionable, but Facebook might step up because it will need the edge cloud for its own use the most, due to its VR play. If it is a small, already existing company, it could be someone like Cloudflare. It could also be someone new.