What's Next? It’s 2039 and just about everything’s changed —

What the World Will Look Like in 20 Years: 8 Predictions
Articles by Max Read and David Wallace-Wells

Image: Geralt/Pixabay

This month, writers of the Intelligencer tentatively dipped their toes into the New Year, wondering what horrors and highlights might await us in 2019 — the year that served as a setting, you may remember, for Blade Runner, Akira, and Running Man, three of the most iconic future-casting movies ever made and now divergent choose-your-own-dystopia visions of the years ahead (perhaps some more plausible than others).

They are also reminders that, though Americans today may have a hard time imagining a future all that different from the present — we dream less about flying cars and space travel than about somewhat improved health care and slightly more immersive video games — it was not all that long ago that we believed (sort of) those very wild futures were possible just a decade or two down the road. Which is part of what inspired us, this fall, to ask a panel of visionaries from the worlds of tech, sex, the law, and international affairs to make some pretty radical propositions about what the world could look like in 20 years. 
 The result was an eight-episode podcast called 2038.

Some predictions were cheekier than others, some scarier; on the occasion of the New Year, and the optimism and future panic it invariably brings. It’s 2039 and just about everything’s changed. The Intelligencer excerpted those predictions here: