2030 - An experiment in thinking about the future

Online events (sports, music, religious services) will be the site of most innovation, but work and education will also be impacted greatly. This in turn has repercussions for lots of other domains.

In 2026, learning, accreditation, and task completion will be vastly improved by agile provision of resources just in time. The data on us will be very fine grained. We will feel we have control over privacy, but not justifiably so. A private company SafID will challenge nation states in managing identity online, and it will be headquartered in a new jurisdiction, managed by Singapore.

Predicting 2026 (as opposed to 2023) means moving away from solid ground, from prediction towards fiction. Here goes: A new jurisdiction will be created by 2026 to serve the interests of the largest companies in data management, straddling East and West. Also, in 2026, there will be a widespread sense that it is worth experimenting with new, de-centralized ways of political decision-making, with more accountability to the populace – and pilot projects will be carried out in many places.

Ordinary citizens in China have experienced many obstacles to peacefully planning their lives. But since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government has provided ever more structures within which to plan for the future. It's not rule of law - Western Style - but it provides some of the same features. Developing countries could provide similar avenues to the goal-directed life. 

Planning is ubiquitous - for individuals, companies, and governments. Planning is easier in societies facilitating predictability. In the Western world this is done through the rule of law. The Chinese Communist Party is attempting to provide the same by ruling in conformity with legal provisions. The goal-directed life satisfies humans deeply.

#thinkingaboutthefuture falls somewhere between two poles, the ordinary quotidian experience of planning, and the extraordinary experience of awe.

The ability to distinguish between the enduring and the transient is vital to any realistic program of social action in the present, John Tosh, in "The Pursuit of History"

We are going through something like a paradigm shift in models, from centralized to decentralized. And not too soon. Decentralized models would help us in #thinkingaboutthefuture

Decision-making is increasingly guided by data science. One needs good data, and a good way of combining data into a view of the world, a model of how things work. A "good" model that is fed "good" data yields "good" thinking about the future - and requires adaptation to that model in the now.

Identifying the most common argument (which I use myself): there is this pattern in the past, continue it into the future ... and that's what the future will look like.