Not much different. Foldable phones will be widespread, American cars will be bigger, shaving machines will have more blades, natural disasters will be more common. We will go through one or two more cycles of drought/forest fires and heavy rains/floodings. We will see one or two mass migrations from India, Pakistan and Africa resulting in first climate refuge camps on the borders of EU.
The futuristic world of 2033 will be very different from our current primitive one. Humans will be seven foot tall with thumbs as long as fingers. Mars will have been fully terraformed, whilst there'll be hundreds of vast floating cities on Venus. A Dyson swarm will encircle the solar system just beyond Neptune's orbit. Humanity will communicate telepathically as one with AI. We still won't understand cats.
We will likely have hit 1.5 + degrees of warming in 10 years time so our society may look quite different. It's likely that our supply chains will be disrupted by this and become more localised as rising temperatures / intensifying weather events impact our capacity to grow / distribute as much food as we do now. There may potentially be Pacific Nations that no longer exist due to sea level rise. We will likely also see the beginning of a significant climate refugee crisis that nations in the global north will struggle to respond to.
In the west and culturally, a post-boomer period will have begun. And I think there’ll be continued evaluation of what mistakes that era made especially as climate change looms as an increasingly damaging debt. In a similar vein, the relationship with capitalism and big corps is, I think, going to get messy and more polarised, in part because the mistakes we’ve made will be hard to disentangle for many.
Overall, I suspect that for many paying attention, the downfall of the west will seem more and more plausible and closer and that will create a contentious atmosphere.
We’ve spent the last 300 years essentially looting resources and labor from poorer parts of the world. And when they finally decide that enough is enough, that they want a piece of the pie, they won’t be able to get it.
Climate refugees will be killed at closely guarded border crossings. Fishing boats will be torpedoed. Encampments will be burned.
In “rich” countries, the poor will be gradually cut off. Their labor value will decrease even further, and there won’t be anything left for them. In some places, public housing and healthcare will allow them to limp on, until many are killed by the next pandemic.
The wealthy will enjoy what they have, their lives barely interrupted. The world will not look very different to them.
We're definitely going to see jobs affected by ChatGPT and the like. It's an open question of "Can LLMs do things as well as humans?" across the board, but when have you seen a company turn down a deal like "slightly shittier, but costs pennies on the dollar and doesn't have any pesky 'rights'"?
The same as now but more dilapidated, desperate, and annoying, if you're lucky enough to not have everything changed by climate catastrophe in that time or torn apart by war
Oh, and people won't hang out outside much in most places for much of the year, we'll all collectively shelter indoors, as discomfort from heat becomes common and people start adapting to constant dangerous heatwaves
AI will make immense progress and all jobs that require a computer will be handed over to AI and robots. There will be hardly any middle managers left. People will do manual or personal stuff that robots cannot do.
Depending on who owns the AI, the distribution of wealth decides which jobs are available. I would bet on a small group of people who are going to decide what humanity will do.
The problem is that AI requires energy. At one point, the decision has to be made whether energy is used for bricks or bytes. Bytes will be prefered so most people will live in tiny rooms.
Since there is not much work to be done, and energy is expensive, people will spent most of their time doing something energy-efficient. Cities will be built for walking distances.
It's very hard to tell. Most decades have inertia that carry on 3-4 years in. You didn't see people vaping or people with full beards drinking craft beer until 2013.
It's hard to tell what's seeping into the new decade from the last decade, what's here to stay, and what's new to come. Are NFTs the new thing? Or just a symptom of the boom in crypto the 20-teens.
I feel like we are going to be blindsided by tech development in a field a lot of non-tech people don't expect.
Maybe VR/AR really taking off in the mainstream to a point it effects TV sales for example or high quality chatbots or image generation tools that can be easily run locally on consumer hardware.
We might also see cellphones using a different decentralized network.
Basically the same except we're gonna generally agree that aliens are real and not just somewhere in the abyss of space. Feel free to disagree, but that's where I'm at after the last few months - most specifically with Schumer's UAP Disclosure Act. Won't be mad if I'm wrong, but it sure as hell feels like it's coming and quick.