Small developments will come quickly and en masse. And the collective impact will be a transformation of civilization, improving our individual lives in countless ways, but also concentrating economic power in fewer hands and doing to many knowledge workers what the loom did to weavers.
The threat of war
The United States has enjoyed a false sense of military security since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, which has been reinforced in recent years by the coincidence of two events: the strength of the collective Western response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. February 2022 and China’s growing economic problems. This year will be no less worrying.
The West’s willingness to support Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy will continue to weaken and may well collapse completely if Trump reclaims the White House.
The West will continue to be rattled by Chinese advances in important technologies, such as facial recognition software, space lasers, drone swarms and hypersonic missiles. (China has hypersonic missiles capable of traveling five times the speed of sound while avoiding air defenses, technology that has eluded the West.)
The debate over America’s ability to counter China’s rise will intensify both inside and outside the Pentagon. The defense agency will come under increasing pressure, first to explain why it is spending so much with so little effect and, second, to open up many of its processes to outside companies and venture capitalists.
This will create a once-in-a-half-century opportunity for entrepreneurs to wrest contracts from dinosaurs like Raytheon Co. and for smart innovators to get a share of the Pentagon’s gigantic innovation budget.
