What is coming in the 2030s

The admirable futures and business writer Art Kleiner has a long post on his Substack outlining what he thinks we already know about the 2030s. He’s not making predictions, exactly. More just pointing out that we can see right now some deep and strong drivers of change that seem unlikely to reverse or deflect their direction in the next decade. In suggesting this, he is drawing on the notion of the “predetermined element”, or “predetermineds”, that were part of the way in which the Shell scenarios analyst Pierre Wack analysed factors of change. The way Wack described these was by analogy to the River Ganges, and indeed, there is an account of this in a chapter on Shell in Kleiner’s excellent book, The Age of Heretics. Kleiner more or less replicates this in his Substack post: If there are heavy monsoon rains over the Himalayan headwaters, you can tell with certainty that there will be a flood five days later at Allahabad, which is 650 miles downstream. Five days after that, he said,…