Thanks to Frank Diana over at Reimagining The Future I am putting on my dreamer’s hat for this post. I really think, or at least pray, that once that despicable person leaves the Oval Office, we will go on to make our future bright indeed. That is what this post is all about.

I know, in my heart, I am an optimist who almost always sees a future as better than the present. Now that I am finishing up my years on this earth, I am convinced that I was born twenty years too early. I had to wait too long for the digital age to come. I spent the first decade of my professional life drudging through an analog world of electrical engineering. It was not until Steve Jobs and Bill Gates brought out personal computers, that I really found my passion. I spent one decade honing my digital skills and finally the third decade doing what I was meant to do. But, like usual that is not the real purpose of this post, so I better change gears here.

Let’s start off with a graphic from Reimagining The Future:

Since I control the traffic on RJsCorner I get to choose which of the above twenty items to talk about here. 😈

5G

For all you non-techie folks out there, I probably need to tell you what 5G is. It is the next generation of cellular traffic and it will be a doozy. It will be a hundred times faster than what most of you have and about a thousand times faster than what I have in a very rural county in Indiana. 5G will literally make everything available to you 24/7. Movies and other forms of entertainment will download in seconds.

Once 5G is fully implemented EVERYTHING will move onto that network. Well, maybe not electricity, but everything else. By the end of this coming decade. Wires will pretty much disappear. Cable TV, DSL, and landline telephony will be ancient history. 5G will change everything that we know today.

Solid State Batteries

Lithium Ion batteries were the batteries of choice during the past decade. They were a jump forward from alkaline of the decade before. When solid state batteries become available all the rest will quickly cease to exist. I won’t bore you with the details other than to say that solid state batteries are not made from computer chips or integrated circuits but instead use two solid, meaning not liquid or gel, components.

The race to the final phase of development of the solid state battery is happening around the world.

Finally, we will have the battery needed for electric cars, solar and wind storage and have cellphones that will stay charge for weeks instead of hours. Life will be very different in 2030 as a result of solid state batteries.

Last Mile Delivery

I think you know what this one means. For the last couple of years the USPS, otherwise known as snail mail, has taken a leadership role in last mile delivery but other technologies will likely usurp that lead dramatically in the coming decade. Even if government manages to throttle down the surge of Amazon, it is unlikely to stem on-line retail from eventually (meaning the 2030s 🤣) replacing brick and mortar sales. Of course that makes last mile delivery progress inevitable.

The result will likely be a form of a couple other items on this list. In urban areas drones will likely become common as a delivery vehicle on our roads today. So will commercial vehicle automation. Who wins the last-mile race is still up in the air (pun unintended) but it is certain that in the next ten years this area will change dramatically.

Closing up, those who are averse to change have even more apprehensions in the coming decade as things will continue to change at an ever-increasing pace during the 2020s.