- Firefox hits 20% market share on the desktop, prompted by Chrome's nerfing of extensions in Manifest v3 (e.g. uBlock Origin won't work on Chrome anymore, forcing nerds & privacy-conscious people to switch). Firefox on devices gets a tiny boost as a consequence. ETA: 2021-2022.
- Tesla implodes as soon as a major manufacturer releases a high-performance all-electric car affordable by people on modestly-good salaries that actually ships on time. Shame, because the Cybertruck is badass. ETA: 2023.
- In other EV news: Electric vehicles will dominate in unrestricted motorsports (drift racing and some classes of drag racing come to mind). ETA: Rule changes to allow EVs will come in 2021. A couple of big-name drivers switch that year. Domination is established in 2025.
- We get a real, viable open source Linux-on-phone with all the apps we need. There's that Purism thing already, but that's flagship money; this will be boosted by the Pinephone (and whatever follows) being cheap enough that almost every hacker will buy one (Android and iOS will continue to dominate the mainstream). ETA: 2021.
- Attacks in the Spectre/Meltdown genre (side-channel attacks on CPUs) get frighteningly good, and impossible to defend against. By the end of the decade we may need to either simplify processor design massively (and take the performance hit) or abandon the idea that processes can be effectively separated at all. ETA: new attack at least once every year of the decade. Complete rethink of processor design before 2030.
- A data breach on an unimaginable scale will happen. The Big One will be a tracking or analytics or advertising company. Equifax was bad, but this will be everyone's personal preferences, porn preferences, and (subset of) browsing history, which will easily be linked to identifiable people. ETA: any time now.
- House prices in the United Kingdom collapse. This causes global ripples similar to 2007-2008, in which we find out just how much of the financial system is betting on an asset price to keep going up, forever. Massive social unrest over the attendant bailouts. "That which cannot go on forever, won't". ETA: 2025. (I have hilariously mistimed this one in the past!)
- Tesla implodes as soon as a major manufacturer releases a high-performance all-electric car affordable by people on modestly-good salaries that actually ships on time. Shame, because the Cybertruck is badass. ETA: 2023.
- In other EV news: Electric vehicles will dominate in unrestricted motorsports (drift racing and some classes of drag racing come to mind). ETA: Rule changes to allow EVs will come in 2021. A couple of big-name drivers switch that year. Domination is established in 2025.
- We get a real, viable open source Linux-on-phone with all the apps we need. There's that Purism thing already, but that's flagship money; this will be boosted by the Pinephone (and whatever follows) being cheap enough that almost every hacker will buy one (Android and iOS will continue to dominate the mainstream). ETA: 2021.
- Attacks in the Spectre/Meltdown genre (side-channel attacks on CPUs) get frighteningly good, and impossible to defend against. By the end of the decade we may need to either simplify processor design massively (and take the performance hit) or abandon the idea that processes can be effectively separated at all. ETA: new attack at least once every year of the decade. Complete rethink of processor design before 2030.
- A data breach on an unimaginable scale will happen. The Big One will be a tracking or analytics or advertising company. Equifax was bad, but this will be everyone's personal preferences, porn preferences, and (subset of) browsing history, which will easily be linked to identifiable people. ETA: any time now.
- House prices in the United Kingdom collapse. This causes global ripples similar to 2007-2008, in which we find out just how much of the financial system is betting on an asset price to keep going up, forever. Massive social unrest over the attendant bailouts. "That which cannot go on forever, won't". ETA: 2025. (I have hilariously mistimed this one in the past!)