2021, The Decade to Come

2021, The Decade to Come – Trustnodes2021, The Decade to Come – Trustnodes

Genetics, bot systems, decentralized finance, industrial robotics, the space economy and solar energy are the big themes that we can see will most likely transform the globe this decade.

The rapid developments going on in crispr, that led this year to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, indicates there might be some breakthrough in medicine this decade.

The field has suffered from a guild like mentality that has robbed it from the speed of discoveries seen in physics. A backlash against that in biohacking might put some pressure, with ideologists trying to make more accessible some of these tools and knowledge.

That clash of sorts, which fundamentally is about power and who controls it the most, may at last bring the rate of innovation we have seen in other fields to medicine.

Bio therefore is starting to become hot because there are many promising new developments, and thus many promising new startups, leading to increasing speculation among investors, with it probable something will come out of it.

While for bot systems, the field is too big and too pervasive for it to be just a speculators playground as here we’re talking about what eventually will be common tools for everyone.

Practical coding may well be generally taught at school from an early age by the time the decade closes as handling these bot systems requires it and such bot systems will probably be required for many daily tasks.

A simple example is news. Instead of going to NYT and then Wapo and then some industrial paper, you can modify a template that ranks the news by whatever criteria you want to display them in one place.

That’s what we can do today but the public tends to go to curated agenda driven aggregators like Reddit, instead of customizing its own platform.

That’s because Reddit was seen as better and even empowering. Recently however Reddit has changed significantly, and thus the pendulum towards decentralized systems may well swing again, especially as basic coding becomes a more common skill.

Just as you can do this platform modification with news content, bot systems can facilitate the modification of any data and can by themselves act on it based on given criteria.

Making this a tool that is seen as the premise of big corporations like Google, but will become a lot more accessible to individuals especially at a professional level.

Commanding bots on a daily basis will probably be part of most jobs by the end of the decade in a way that many jobs can not be done without these tools.

As the harnessing of these bot systems is a competitive advantage, even at an individual level, their accessibility could be artificially barriered especially when it comes to individual use.

Therefore it might be necessary for limited government intervention like ordering the free public accessibility of academic papers published prior to say a month or six months ago.

Data nationalism in addition might have arisen out of a confusion of just what these tools are, as they run on data but the capability comes from how they make sense of the data and what they do with it, with the capability bigger the more have access to these tools as they’re effectively a revolution of sorts in management.

While industrial robotics is a revolution in not just production, but in the nature of machines themselves, like cars which even today can drive themselves.

By the end of the decade, self-running hard systems may be a lot more ubiquitous, with things like rail-tracks being aware in a way of any potential damage.

This robotic economy is the hardware that needs these bot systems as software to manage and make sense of events, with industrialization already beginning to become more digitization as effectively everything starts running on code.

Including your house, which by the end of the decade will most probably have a solar roof, if it doesn’t already.

That solar roof may well be ‘talking’ to your car’s battery as the two trade energy both with themself as well as with their neighbors or other grids, all underpinned by code or bot systems.

And since your roof might be talking to your neighbors’ car instead of yours, the method of value exchange also needs to be code based, and thus a crypto.

From these industrial needs therefore rise the crypto financial markets, which were bootstrapped through speculation but quickly found uses in silk road initially and nowadays more in international trade or exchange as well as to bypass restrictions like capital controls or to act as a store of value hedge or diversifier with the list of use cases constantly growing.

Their biggest use case may be as bot money, the currency of all things digital, including these cars and solar roofs and perhaps even shipping containers or rail-tracks by the end of the decade.

And so you get an entire bot economy with its own hardware, software and currency which has its own bank bots or dapps as they called and code running financial market.

Currently they’re also in space, with a bitcoin satellite beeping to earth, but by the end of the decade the space economy will probably be of a different scale, especially if industrial digitization and bot systems become pervasive.

That’s because such systems need to know things like location, as well as potentially the location of other systems, all in real time and constantly.

Much of this is what has already began, but is at the early stages and thus at the stage of fastly growing.

They’re things we can see, but not quite mainstream. Yet can somewhat easily predict their direction, because they’re all out of the prototype stage and are now in the adoption stage.

What we can’t see is what inventions these inventions might bring. What something like bitcoin or these bot systems can make possible that previously was not possible.

Such inventions probably will arise in the course of adoption as someone somewhere stumbles upon something, but what we can already see suggests that this decade, intellect will have an even higher premium because in effect intellect is being extended by it becoming actionable in code systems.

And thus individuals will be even more empowered as the decade closes, with meritocracy the only real currency in these mentioned fields.

The overall effect may end up being transformational as previous rigidities, including in monetary terms, become softer or vanish completely as anyone of skill and will can gain the same capabilities as someone with many employees.

That could create tensions as current power structures try to maintain their grip, but the code’s quality of being like the written word probably gives then no other choice than to adapt.

And thus the world in 2030 might look quite different than currently with the revolting millennial generation keen to open up systems so as to increase our capabilities to bring about the space age.