Technology

I. Where we start

Today the world is already mobile, cloudy, and unequal. The smartphone is most people's computer. 5G exists without having transformed life. The cloud concentrates power in a few American companies and, in China, in a few Chinese companies. Semiconductors are geopolitics. Batteries, solar, and GPUs are the most strategic industrial objects after oil. Virtual reality disappointed as a mass platform. The watch and the earbud won; the glasses have not yet.

II. The decade in between

Over the decade the gadget cycle finally breaks. The rectangle of glass remains, but it stops being the place you work: you speak, glance, or gesture, and a persistent agent executes across every account you ever logged into. Lightweight glasses become common in rich cities — not a second world, a heads-up layer. Earbuds translate in both directions well enough that a shared language is optional in shops and hospitals. Behind the charm sits the least virtual boom imaginable: substations, data halls, cooling, fibre, and debt. The grid is part of the user interface. When the neighbourhood brownout hits, the agent goes mute.

III. Ten years from now

The infrastructure ten years from now:

• Chips — the United States, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and the Netherlands remain the Western core of advanced lithography. China closes part of the gap in mature nodes and in packaging, and builds a "good enough" domestic stack for autonomy. Nobody uninvents interdependence; everybody tries.
• Cloud and edge — training enormous models still happens in giant data centres, now limited by energy and water as much as by silicon. Inference migrates to the device and to regional data centres. Countries treat the data centre like a power plant: licence, grid, security, tax.
• Networks — 5G-A/6G in rich pockets; 4G still dominant across much of the world. Low orbit (successors of Starlink and Chinese rivals) covers sea, countryside, disaster, and army. The internet becomes one more geopolitical utility.
• Sensors — camera, microphone, cheap lidar, commercial satellite, industrial IoT. The physical world becomes more legible to whoever has the stack. Personal privacy retreats in practice, even when it advances on paper.
• Interface — voice, glance, and a thin optical overlay win for action; the big screen survives for long reading and shared rooms. You do not open apps. You state an outcome. Brain–machine interfaces leave the clinic: first as medical restorations (speech, sight, tremor), then as a thin professional caste — traders, pilots, surgeons, soldiers — who pay in surgery and stigma for a faster loop. They are not in the middle-class pocket. They are no longer science-fair.

The connected home becomes ordinary infrastructure. Standard interfaces join meters, batteries, ventilation, and replaceable service modules. Residents can export records, change suppliers, and open a door without a cloud account. Maintenance logs travel with the component rather than imprisoning the buyer inside a brand. Cheap housing loses its point if the only compatible heat pump carries a monopoly subscription. The new technical status symbol is a building that stays useful after its software vendor disappears.

Technology ten years from now is delegation as the default human posture: you authorise, you audit, you sleep. Surveillance and logistics expand until the street is a readable surface. Whoever controls energy, chips, data, and standards controls the rest. The rest of society negotiates the terms — or learns to live on the commodity stack.

IV. Uncertainties

Hype that does not pan out in this scenario: the metaverse as a second home for the majority; quantum computing on the kitchen table; cheap commercial fusion as a solved utility; the flying car as the school run. Hype that pans out harder than the last draft allowed: simultaneous translation as infrastructure; agents, not copilots, as the professional interface; computer vision as the city's nervous system; batteries that remake the car and the neighbourhood grid, still not enough to make compute free.

The open tensions are interoperability, surveillance, and longevity of support. A vulnerability in one widely repeated controller can affect whole neighbourhoods. Local controls, segmented networks, and long-lived security updates become procurement conditions. Places without reliable electricity or recognised identity still receive a weaker digital bargain; abundance of devices is not equal authority to use them.