January 1, 2020 Log No. 875

It’s already the end of the second decade of the 2000s! (Well ACKSHULLY some people would say that won’t be til 2021, but let’s just go with it.) What were some of the biggest cultural changes of the last 10 years? (I’ll limit myself to 5 to keep the list concise.)

• Amazon got huge. Almost-instantaneous delivery is now a given of day-to-day life. The world’s online ordering consumption has probably increased by a hundred-fold at least.
• Streaming services are varied and have as much money (or more) than traditional studios to produce content, and almost as much prestige now.
• The smartphone battle has come down to Android vs iPhone–Microsoft and Blackberry phones are pretty much extinct.
• Climate change is THE global issue of the last couple of years.
• Ride-sharing, home-sharing–even concepts like cloud infrastructure where you’re essentially renting other company’s resources for your own use–the concept of resource sharing and casual freelancing is much more commonplace.
• Honorable mention: politically, the world has gone bonkers. (US, UK, China, just to name a few.)

Just off the top of my head, in no particular order. But I definitely feel like if I were to see this list at the start of 2010, I’d be baffled as to how some of these things would reasonably work.

And because backwards-looking lists aren’t nearly as fun without corresponding forward-looking predictions, what are my 5 predictions for 2020-2029?

• Amazon continues to get bigger, lol. It really starts to become like that “Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” episode (fittingly, on Amazon Prime) where the world becomes taken over by the Amazon order-fulfilling logistics machine.
• Self-driving cars start to gain traction. (The day cannot come fast enough–I HATE driving.)
• We start to see some actually usable/useful AR applications.
• We’re still arguing and stressing out about climate change.
• We finally get a person on Mars?!?!

Let’s see how right I am on Jan 1st, 2030 (when I’m 40 *shocked*). To a great 2020!!!