Ten Good Things That Will Happen This Decade (2021-2030)

Being an optimist, I'm excited about what I'm likely to see over the coming years. Here are some of my predictions:

1. Infrastructure will act as an economic multiplier in many developing economies. India has invested significantly in transport infrastructure, and so has China (at home and in the Global South).

2. The India Stack (especially UPI (Unified Payments Interface)) will act as an economic multiplier, thanks to its improved ease of doing business, as well as its unprecedented social inclusiveness. It is being seriously studied by other countries (e.g., France and Singapore), and could soon become a global norm.

3. India and China are in quiet talks to resolve their border dispute. Their efforts could bear fruit in the next couple of years, and an era of cooperation with significant mutual benefits could soon begin.

4. Hundreds of new metro systems around the world are going to deliver huge savings to society in terms of time and fuel.

5. Australia's Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation is an example of global trends towards formalising the process of empowering data owners and providing informed consent to third parties to use their data. In other words, the OAuth2 technical protocol will obtain global legislative backing. It will ease the development of new services and apps.

6. A cure and/or a vaccine for cancer is going to emerge, not from Western Pharma, but from China and Russia. Although the news has been muted in Western media, it is known that China has made breakthroughs in cancer cure, and Russia has announced a cancer vaccine. People everywhere, including in the West, are going to vote with their feet in favour of these interventions.

7. Energy generation will reach a tipping point with renewable power facilities as well as next-generation nuclear power plants. Energy costs will start to plummet, spurring economic growth worldwide. (Although the topic of climate change has become controversial, this trend is a positive one when viewed from that perspective as well.)

8. Self-driving cars will change traffic patterns and the nature of transport in many respects. Car ownership may reduce drastically, giving way to ride-hailing services, the absolute number of vehicles and traffic volumes could reduce in proportion, prime urban real estate could be reclaimed from roads and parking lots, etc.

9. AI is currently at Gartner's "Peak of Inflated Expectations". In the next couple of years, it may suffer a backlash because of high profile cases of over-reliance that lead to disasters (the "Trough of Disillusionment"). Thereafter, we will see the "Slope of Enlightenment" and then the "Plateau of Productivity". AI will start to deliver great benefits by the end of the decade, once it evolves with feedback, and the world learns how and how not to use it.

10. Space-based technology will start to deliver great benefits. The US now has competition from Russia and China. The cost of space-based services such as GPS and Google Maps will come down drastically thanks to competition from Glonass and BeiDou. Like with India's UPI that the government has mandated to be free, the affordability of space-based services will provide a fertile environment for many new applications to flourish.