I’ve seen a number of people do predictions for 2025 and I thought I’d give it a go — I’ve always been extremely interested in what the future holds — I remember back to reading Bill Gates — The Road Ahead as an 8 year old child, so I guess I’ve been looking the future for some time! Some of these will probably be closer to 2030, however I’d like to think I’ve got the general direction of what I see as some of the most important changes of tech/culture/business/government together.

At the moment I’m also in an extremely fortunate position where I have forward visibility on projects we’re current looking to delivery over the next couple of years. I think we’re about to go through another revolution, both technically and organisationally, which should produce some amazing winners and loser. The year 2020 is going to a very interesting year for technology, we’ll finally be at a time where the majority of organisations are starting on a full scale Cloud/DevOps/Post-Digital transformation. Software has been eating the world for some time which in turn has lead to massive increases in the speed of disruption — we’re going to see these issues increasingly in the world at large.

Some of my predictions may seem slightly bleak — however that isn’t my purpose. I believe it’s extremely important that we look eyes wide open at the future and ensure that we make the world the best possible place for ourselves and future generations. Without confronting the reality of our situation we’ll be unable to do this.

The predictions below are in no particular order of likelihood or importance (and don’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer). For sake of simplicity in this article when I mention AI — I’m referring to an overall concept containing machine learning, neural networks, big data, neural simulation and statistics.

I’d also like to give myself some temporal leeway on some of this — some won’t have fully happened by 2025 — my predictions are more in the directional sense than a hard date. Some will have already happened; some will be in progress and some will yet to come.

I would recommend everyone to make predictions on things and try to imagine where you’d like to be in the future you envision occurring. This is our world to shape as we desire and see our place in it.

“We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” — Oscar Wilde

1) The nature and shape of work will change dramatically

The nature of work has been chaining for quite some time, however it will start to dramatically shift in the next few years. The average tenure of employees has been tracking steadily downwards for some time now combined with the rise of “on-demand” work and the rise of modern working practices such as Agile, DevOps all facilitated by flexible own-nothing infrastructure (Cloud).

This “on-demand”, smaller length employment pattern will start to move up the stack into traditionally more stable, higher end jobs. In the near-term specialised employees will work for short periods of time with micro contracts at employers. This has already started to happen with fiver, Uber’s move into more specialised employment and services such as TaskRabbit or Freelancer.com — however it has a long way to go. It will change the relationship the employers have with their staff, creating far increased demand for efficient knowledge management solutions, security of data/relationship management (one which a member of your staff might be working for the competition the next week), onboarding and training. They’ll also be some interested opportunities for credentialization systems — the traditional hiring approach of CVs and interviews ceases to be effective or efficient at this point — there’s too much friction and not enough actual assurance of capability. We’re starting to see this already with employers looking at GitHub repos of clients. I’d imagine a future where more information is gained on a possible candidate through looking at the public profile they chose to expose (Twitter, LinkedIn, Github, Quora, Medium, technical certification) combined with reviews/feedback from past projects all stored on a distributed ledger (as well as background checking on the individual). Recruitment companies that see this change coming and best handle it will be able to pick up huge opportunities. I also see it being extremely likely that part of this decision will be outsource to AI agents who’ll perform the first level of screening.

Closer to 2030–2035 this may also start to handle the payment on completion of tasks via agreed smart contracts between all parties and handling disputes automatically. This change will start to call into question what a company actually is. In the longer term we may find that this causes a change to the very nature of what we call a company; we already seen real changes in this via things such as Distributed Autonomous Organisationa (DAO) — we may find in the future some companies are extremely small and transient in nature, without a traditional governance structure — only being held together by an algorithm running on the blockchain selecting and buying the best talent for its immediate needs.

This change will give some amazing opportunities to smaller agile companies (see #4) however will result a significant threat to some larger companies. It’ll also change the very nature of work — with far more emphasis on life-long-learning. We’re going to have less security in our jobs, more demands on learning new skills and later retirement ages. It’ll be very interesting to see how society as a whole we face this. We need to start preparing our children for a world where the only certainty in their working life will be change. It also gives some great opportunities to shape your life they way you want it.

2) AI will start to make a real impact to the world in both positive and negative ways

The largest threat and opportunity to all of us exists in the developments that are occurring within AI, mostly behind closed doors and largely unregulated. There will be huge winners and losers to this and will further increase the income disparity which exists in the world between the haves and have-nots.

It’s been very hard for us to see the impact that AI has already whilst in the moment, however we’re now able to look back and already see the impact that it’s had over the last few years (as well as the changes in technology at large). Looking back to the 2007 recession we are now able to see the slowest recovery in known economic history. For me, some of the nature of this was for traditional structural reasons (structural debt issues, incorrect monetary policy) — however I feel a large amount of this has been as a result of the shift to an automated workforce. Take airline ticket pricing for example — traditionally this was done manually, however now the price is modified thousands of times a day and specifically tailored to the individual consumer (based on past browsing habits, computer in use, location, time zone etc…). Jobs have gone and have never returned in multiple sectors. They have been replaced by AI.

People are already becoming extremely integrated with AI from a very early age — it never ceases to amaze me that my 18-month-old daughter is able to point to “Alexa” or when my eldest daughter at 2 and a half stood up in a restaurant and said “Stop Music Alexa”. They have a symbiotic relationship with machines from a much earlier age than previous generations ever had — this will cause dramatic differences in the way they are treated.

I predict the first real pushbacks will be on driverless cars — close to 9% of the USA are in driving related jobs. If these are removed on-mass in a short period of time the economy will struggle to cope. People will look to blame “someone (or something)”. It’ll be made worse by the reality that people will be killed by driverless cars — at a lower rate than humans — however death is death.

It’s key we go through what is likely to be a short negative spike downwards around the rise of AI and out the other side to the more positive slope as quickly as possible. Without our eyes open and the correct balance of power this will be an increasing difficult transition.

AI Ethics will become ever more important — for the first time there will need to be codification of ethics — which will be a huge change for the field. We’ll need a legion of Data-scientists/AI Experts/Ethics Experts/Programmers/Philosophers/Economists — a very uncommon combination.

We’ll need to understand what we do with the large swaths of newly unemployed people who cannot find work (and their future chances of work are decreasing). How do we manage this as a society?

3) Algorithmic choice will become an important thing

I predict that people will become increasing aware that the algorithmic bubble that they view the world through is more than just a looking glass that merely alters there perception of events. It changes their very being and their behaviour.

We know this is the truth for one simple reason — advertising works. Otherwise through magic of capitalism it would have withered and died (companies which didn’t invest in advertising would have outperformed those that did). Advertising works by shaping your direction into the desired direction of those advertising.

If you think about your view of the world, on most platforms it’s being shaped by a guiding set of algorithms which are optimising for the benefit of the platform (this could be monetary gain, engagement, time spent, sticky-ness etc…). However, the one thing it isn’t optimising for is you. I believe as people realise this, they will increasingly want to have choice and control of the algorithmic choices which sit underneath. This choice itself might be guided by a personal algorithm or AI assistant specially designed and managed by themselves. For example say I wanted to lose weight — I’d inform my algorithm of my plan — it in turn would negotiate with the sites I visit to ensure that my perception bubble was appropriately shaped to try and guide me towards my “own” goals.

There are questions here around what is my “real-self” that chooses the underlying goals (and I’m aware that is also flexible). However if we do not get control of our algorithmically shaped view of the world we cede our very nature to corporate organisations who do not represent our best interests.

People (or governments) will gradually wake up to the risk this holds and the benefit (and economic incentives) that can be had from correctly managing this.

4) Traditional large organisations will die and the rise of the “Portfolio” company

Traditional large organisations will die and as a category they will seems as a remote to people in the future as concept of pre-industrial society seems to us.

This out of all the predictions is probably the easiest. We can already see a massive shift in the layout and structure of companies, looking at the number of new companies that exist in the top of the S&P 500/FTSE there has been a very large shift in what makes companies successful. We can also see the future structure by looking at the cost efficiency (however not always success) of current global battles.

Traditional organisational structure has a large parallel to war (specifically WWII) — where they were made out of Board Members (Generals), Senior Management (Colonel’s), Management (Commanders) and Workers (Troops). This worked very well in a structure which has issues giving control and responsibility out to individual units. At at the top they maintain a state of understanding of the whole battlefield at an abstract to a view of suitable complexity. However due to the complex nature of the modern world (and exacerbated by the constant and increasing speed of change) this no longer works — that central view is too incorrect to have any relevance.

The most effective means of war (in terms of cost vs effect) at the moment by far is the terrorist/guerrilla cell-structure of organisation. Small groups, all highly effective, with loose ties back to a central structure or goal. This was the reason that a small number of people in various geo-political conflicts have managed to cause serious issues for much larger forces.

The same thing will happen in business.

Already we can see more organisations splitting themselves up into smaller groups, giving each one more and more autonomy whilst ensuring these smaller portfolio style companies drive the same direction as the whole and take advantage of the financial benefits and drive from the parent company.

We can see this in Facebook (see Powered By Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Business, Oculus etc…), Alphabet (Google, WayMo, DeepMind etc…), BCG Ventures and a whole host of other organisations almost to many to mention.

Central control in a traditional company is looking increasing like communism — one central group decides how many “shoes” or “grain” needs to be produced — then pushes the resources to teams to deliver — despite not having information if this is the actual requirement for delivery.

Successful companies will consist of multiple sub companies — each one in majority control of their existence, constantly dying and some being born — but each one having responsibility for end-to-end delivery to their customers. Tools and Technology exist to enable this diverse view and reduce the frictional cost that previously existed and prevented this style of organisational design.

It’s going to be interesting and we’re going to need 10,000s of new people to act as CEO’s for their own mini-businesses (either individually owned or within Portfolio organisations).

5) Personalised health

Health is going to be increasingly personalised in every way — both from the amount of data that is constantly collected about yourself from a physical, emotional and biological sense.

The raft of data that you are creating about yourself (once correctly combined and correctly managed) will create real opportunities to improve life in terms of both longevity and quality. By being able to combine information over a broad variety of data points we get a rich view of not just what we “think” we do — but of what we are actually “doing”.

This will enable us to target diagnosis and treatments specifically to us and to fit in with the lifestyle that we live. It will also change the very nature of medical testing — how can we perform the traditional medical efficacy testing when there is no “standard” treatment for us to test? How do we ensure we’re not putting people in danger and treating people as efficiently as possible when there is no longer a standard model? How do we combine all this data (in additional to eventually DNA sequencing each individual)? How do we ensure privacy and stop discrimation due to their inherent DNA layout/lifestyle? And where can we decimate — IE should we be able to reuse health insurance to someone who we know is drinking too much?

All interesting questions that we’ll need to fix.

6) 5G, LEO Satellites and the changing location of computing

5G will be in full swing by 2025 — however signal strength issues will still cause issues. LEO (Low Earth Orbit) Satellite constellations (such as StarLink) will be running through large scale commercial roll out.

LEO connectivity will offer multi-gigabit internet speeds with single digit millisecond latency to every location on the planet within 10 years. This will be one of the largest changes of recent generations.

Rhese two technologies will be much closer together than people realise (5G & LEO). LEO receivers need to be roughly the dimensions of an A4 piece of paper. The major place these will be situated — the roofs of cars and buildings. I predict there will be a massive explosion of micro-cells using LEO networks as the backhaul — to a point that the majority of 5G will be served via them (especially in urban areas).

More interestingly — what are we going to do with this new always-on, high speed, low latency connections? Gaming/video is often pushed as the usage — however I think we’re looking at the whole thing with our view of what we’d do now with it.

The major use will be “Cloud-AI” (or by that time only know as AI), where by the edge locations processing power/neural net/experiences are highly optimised by a two way stream of data into a central location. Imagine a driverless car on one side of the planet the hits into a pedestrian at midnight. Milliseconds after the collision it’s already uploaded all data about the incident to the cloud. Within seconds the reason the collision occurred as been detected. Multiple simulations are being run to look at ways the AI models could be trained to prevent this next time (it bursts out a huge horizontal amount of computing power — this is a serious incident and other processing is put on hold). By 00:01 a new neural net/model is ready that reduces the chance of this happening again significantly. By 00:02 this has been distributed to millions of cars and they have updated their running system to ensure the same issue never happens again.

Now imagine this happening to every connected device you own, for every issue or optimisation made. Combine this with the ability to augment the local processing power to using the Cloud-AI whenever needed and you have an interesting future.

7) Climate Change and why paper straws don’t matter

We have all been lied to repeatedly about Global Warming. Second to AI this is the largest threat that our world faces — eventually it will kill us all if left unchecked.

Our current solutions aren’t working and a lot of this is down to the fact that we don’t really want to change our lifestyles in the way needed to execute actual change to our climate footprint. So far he changes that we’ve been making are ones which we’re able to fit in with our lifestyle and allow us to feel good about ourselves. The reality is they are merely a thin-veneer of change that doesn’t really have any true noticeable positive benefit, effect or change to environment.

We’ve been sold these “solutions” as we want to find something that makes us feel good about ourselves the changes made — and the people selling them what to benefit financially. It also means we keep consuming at the current rate (or higher in some circumstances).

Going forward we’ll need to start getting past this to make any real change. We’ll need to seriously consider how we use the planets natural resources, how we use energy/fuel and how we life our lives.

The changes needed will be so unpalatable I think we’ll consider and start large scale Geo-Engineering (such as spraying salt-water into the upper atmosphere) to fight climate change. All of this will need us to take a much larger perspective on this to see what really helps and makes a difference, as well as changes we can do that make real impact.

8) Governments, Globalisation, Nationalism, the shrinking middle, basic income and the rise of disruption

All of the previous trends combine into what I see as a large-scale disruption in our very social, economic, physical and biological fabric.

There has been a recent trend to a more polarised, nationalist way of doing things, this fundamentally won’t combat any of the challenges in the previous points. We need to get back to thinking as one global family as quickly as possible. It will happen, however the more we can accelerate this swing back to a global view the better.