20 years from today…
- As tech hubs, Bangalore and Beijing lead Silicon Valley. Some way behind are London, New York, Dublin, Boston, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Seoul.
- Python is the world’s leading programming language.
- 70% of the world’s population own a smartphone, 20% wear a smartwatch, 2% wear Google Glass or an equivalent product.
- Smartphones and tablets, fairly similar to ones 20 years ago, are common. Android has 95% market share.
- Laptops with keyboards are alive and kicking. Windows and Chromebook are fighting it out for market leadership in terms of unit sales. MacBook comes in a distant 3rd yet is still the most profitable.
- Voice recognition finally works damn well. We’re talking a lot to technology.
- 95% of cars produced are completely autonomous. 90% of them end up being owned by taxi-app companies and 60% of them are powered by Waymo. Most car manufacturers from 20 years ago have gone bust.
- Drone deliveries went mainstream in developed countries nearly a decade ago. Items are frequently delivered within an hour of order.
- Remote-working has revolutionised white-collar working – resulting in a dramatic reduction in demand for office space.
- To order a Big Mac and fries, with a Coke to help wash it down, you talk to a bot. Your order will also be made, packaged and given to you by bots.
- Automation has decimated the manual labour market. Global unemployment levels have risen from 8% to 15% over last two decades – plenty of long-term untrainable unemployed workers in that 15%. This results in record levels of crime and xenophobia in developed countries.
- Paper-currency has ceased being legal tender in a handful of countries, the first of which was Singapore. Government-backed currencies, in electronic forms, are the most widely used currencies. The Wild West cryptocurrency bubble burst well over 15 years ago.
- Higher-education has embraced technology far faster than primary and secondary education. A fundamental shift is that most courses, including those run by Ivy League schools and Oxbridge, are now available as MOOCs.
- There are as many fresh MTE (Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship) grads as there are fresh MBAs. Stanford’s MTE is the most prestigious in the world.
- For every graduate that goes into finance three go into technology.
- Globally there are 25x as many tech startups this year as there were in 2018.
- 19 out of the 20 largest companies are technology ones – Alphabet and Amazon are the largest – both with market caps of over US$4T.
- The richest person in the world is a tech entrepreneur worth US$500B.
- The number of unicorns has gone up from around 300 20 years ago to 5,000.
- There is a colony of 5 people with Tesla buggies on Mars. Each coloniser will stay for at least a decade as it’s extremely expensive coming back.
- Technology has made us many times more productive but it hasn’t made us happier. Suicide rates are the highest in human history.