What's an outcome that you think is high-probability but also non-obvious?
This is meant to be like a time capsule. On Jan 1st 2030 we can dig up out predictions and see how they aged.
1,000
3.00Self driving cars will make road quality worse. In the past, when roads are improved and upgraded, more people will drive on the roads. It’s impossible to decrease traffic due to this issue. Also, most people believe that ai taxis will lower traffic and parking lots, however the taxis do not just disappear when they finish their job. They will end up going into parking lots, or worse, continue to drive around. Competition for ai taxis will cause companies to attempt to create a faster call time for taxis, giving more of a reasons for cars just to drive around when not in use. If they drive in high population areas (areas with the most traffic) they can get to their pickup areas faster, increasing traffic further.
China's demand for fossil fuel will decrease as the existing fleet of combustion vehicles age out and are replaced by EVs. This could be non-obvious in two directions, depending on how much you know about EV adoption in China and about their fossil fuel demand. Are you surprised I'm saying it'll take that long or does it feel too soon?
More widespread human genetic engineering aimed at curing or resisting more diseases as CRISPR-CAS9 tech matures and regulation changes. I also expect this guy was not actually the first: https://www.science.org/content/article/creator-crispr-babies-nears-release-prison-where-does-embryo-editing-stand
But I don’t know if we’ll find out about an earlier case by 2030
Cool bounty idea :)
Shame the favourite button seems to have disappeared
Are there rewards depending on how interesting our answers are?
Between now and 2030, annual US commercial building energy use will decline. Three factors here:
Despite the gradual decline of remote work, new commercial building construction is essentially over. Companies want to refill their existing offices, but they won’t want to build new ones.
Soon, nearly every medium to large commercial building is going to start using AI to controls its HVAC system. I’m not talking about genAI/LLMs - I’m talking about a set of control schemes developed in the 2010s which use more traditional machine learning approaches. Currently, commercial buildings mostly use building automation software which is pretty similar to a programmable thermostat you might have at home. People invented much more efficient control schemes a while ago (10%+ reduction in HVAC energy use) but those are only now being deployed because the difficulty of getting older HVAC systems to talk to the cloud computers where these algorithms run.
Other critical energy saving technologies - heat pumps, new dehumidification technologies, etc. won’t necessarily be retrofitted, but they will be used in the vast majority of new builds.