Azeem Azhar is a strategist, product entrepreneur, and analyst living in London. He is the curator of the weekly newsletter Exponential View, from which the following is adapted. You can (and should!) sign up here.

This is the first year I am presenting predictions for the coming year. I've received some incredibly helpful comments from readers via Twitter. This has encouraged me to stick my head above the parapet.

Many trends, in particular the convergence of multiple technologies which are improving exponentially, continue. Climate change will continue to be a most pressing issue, especially as we eat our way through our carbon budget.

As Bill Gates said, "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years." Likewise, most annual predictions overestimate what can occur in a year, and underestimate the power of the trend over time.

Here are 18 areas which I think will be interesting to watch in the coming year:

1. International relations, the political economy, and governance will desperately need new design patterns as we enter a new phase of the digital revolution.

These should be developed in the public sphere with a wide range of participants. Three major themes to explore:

The massive global platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the like—are defining a new political economy. Their corporate sovereignty will chafe with states’ own sovereignty. Those same nations will curry favor with the platforms to win the putative economic benefits provided by them. The large platforms know that governments will seek to rein in their power through regulation or legislation. These firms will accelerate their efforts to secure platform advantage and raise the baseline from which their settlement will be judged in the years to come.

Those same nations will curry favor with the platforms to win the putative economic benefits provided by them. The large platforms know that governments will seek to rein in their power through regulation or legislation. These firms will accelerate their efforts to secure platform advantage and raise the baseline from which their settlement will be judged in the years to come. National AI strategies will emerge from more countries. The result? More grounds for cooperation and more reason to argue about intellectual property, privacy, data, and license to operate.

Silicon Valley's political culture—and how that has been codified into software, corporate culture, and strategy—will continue to smell. The Valley will hire outsiders to fix these problems or, more likely, just for the optics. This will take years. And before we've tackled that smell, crypto whizzes will establish governance mechanisms on emerging blockchain networks. They will do so with a narrow, ideological framing that will threaten to hurt us in the coming decades, by which time these networks will mediate many of the resources we need. This matters because information technology systems affect how we build our understanding of the world; they affect how we perceive our set of choices; they affect how we act in that world. In short: they affect our understanding both of the "is" and the "ought."

2. While Silicon Valley leads, both innovation and scaling increasingly occur across the globe.

Europe and Central America lead the way in decarbonizing their energy chains. China is making huge strides in large-scale electrification of its urban transport systems. Its focus on AI, supported by the state and its homegrown tech giants, will show up as novel methods and large-scale implementations. And not just in personal surveillance.