If you grew up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you likely had the same answers as children when someone asked you, “What do you think happens in ten years?” Responses usually revolved around flying cars, robot servants, and pretty much what they saw on The Jetsons.
Those predictions were colorful, fun, and, you could say, came with a sense of optimism. These days? People are foreseeing a grimmer future a decade from now.
Just take a look at these responses in a recent Reddit thread when someone asked, “What’s something that’s highly likely to happen in the next 10 years that almost nobody is preparing for?”
If you’re easily freaked out, these posts may keep you up for the next three days.
#1
I think many industries will eventually discover that they basically destroyed the pipeline that creates senior experts.
AI will remove a lot of the boring junior work, but that's also the work that actually makes people good at their job.
For example software engineering. You don’t become a skilled SW engineer by reading books. You become one by spending years writing code, debugging weird stuff, doing code reviews, making bad design decisions and figuring out why they were bad, discussing with seniors and peers, teaching juniors, tracing problems through different abstraction layers etc. Over time you gradually build an internal model of how the whole system ACTUALLY works.
I fear we get to a point where people actually knowing what the hell is going on becomes a rarity.
Because economically it makes perfect sense. Why hire 5 juniors when you can have 1 senior + AI doing more work? Where do the new seniors come from?
And I genuinely think we will eventually see deadly system failures because of this. Because something subtle goes wrong and there are simply too few people left who understand the system well enough to realize why its wrong.
AI will remove a lot of the boring junior work, but that's also the work that actually makes people good at their job.
For example software engineering. You don’t become a skilled SW engineer by reading books. You become one by spending years writing code, debugging weird stuff, doing code reviews, making bad design decisions and figuring out why they were bad, discussing with seniors and peers, teaching juniors, tracing problems through different abstraction layers etc. Over time you gradually build an internal model of how the whole system ACTUALLY works.
I fear we get to a point where people actually knowing what the hell is going on becomes a rarity.
Because economically it makes perfect sense. Why hire 5 juniors when you can have 1 senior + AI doing more work? Where do the new seniors come from?
And I genuinely think we will eventually see deadly system failures because of this. Because something subtle goes wrong and there are simply too few people left who understand the system well enough to realize why its wrong.
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51points
#2
The Russification of the US.
America chose to disinvest in itself decades ago, so our infrastructure is crumbling, our education is falling behind, and our institutions are failing. The last 10 years has seen the supercharging of the collapse, though.
I don't think Americans understand what losing our trade and military allies means to Americans. I don't think they understand what the end of the petrodollar means for Americans. I think that a ton of Americans genuinely believe that America is strong because God or whatever, and not because of the massive investments in education, infrastructure, public health, science, and diplomacy. All of the investments are gone. America is failing.
Americans failed America.
America chose to disinvest in itself decades ago, so our infrastructure is crumbling, our education is falling behind, and our institutions are failing. The last 10 years has seen the supercharging of the collapse, though.
I don't think Americans understand what losing our trade and military allies means to Americans. I don't think they understand what the end of the petrodollar means for Americans. I think that a ton of Americans genuinely believe that America is strong because God or whatever, and not because of the massive investments in education, infrastructure, public health, science, and diplomacy. All of the investments are gone. America is failing.
Americans failed America.
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41points
#3
The consequences of devaluing education are going to hit the working world.
Kids right now using ChatGPT for their assignments (if they even do them at all, some districts aren't really allowed to fail kids anymore), with a 7 second attention span. The job market sucks, but what happens when droves of an entire generation are functionally unemployable?
Kids right now using ChatGPT for their assignments (if they even do them at all, some districts aren't really allowed to fail kids anymore), with a 7 second attention span. The job market sucks, but what happens when droves of an entire generation are functionally unemployable?
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33points
#4
Society becoming insanely stupid and ignorant exponentially more than it is now.
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32points
#6
The retirement cliff for people who run critical physical infrastructure.
A staggering percentage of water treatment plant operators, power grid technicians, commercial boiler mechanics, and municipal utility workers are in their late 50s and 60s. These are jobs that rely heavily on years of niche, unwritten institutional knowledge about legacy systems that have been patched together over decades.
Younger generations were steered heavily away from these paths, and public sector pay scales never adjusted to attract new talent. In the next 10 years, a huge portion of the people who literally keep clean water flowing and the local grid stable are going to walk out the door into retirement, and there simply is not a pipeline of trained workers ready to step into those control rooms.
A staggering percentage of water treatment plant operators, power grid technicians, commercial boiler mechanics, and municipal utility workers are in their late 50s and 60s. These are jobs that rely heavily on years of niche, unwritten institutional knowledge about legacy systems that have been patched together over decades.
Younger generations were steered heavily away from these paths, and public sector pay scales never adjusted to attract new talent. In the next 10 years, a huge portion of the people who literally keep clean water flowing and the local grid stable are going to walk out the door into retirement, and there simply is not a pipeline of trained workers ready to step into those control rooms.
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27points
#7
Massive food shortages caused by huge crop failures caused by climate change.
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25points
#8
A massive, silent retirement crisis where tens of millions of people reach their late 60s with under $10,000 in total savings.
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24points
#10
The Great Depression the sequel is right around the corner, might happen on its 100 year anniversary how cute.
22points
#11
Cataclysmic weather events - huge floods; towns being consumed by wildfires; droughts that cause water famine; tornados, earthquakes...
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20points
#12
Mass unemployment from the AI "boom." And it's not us that should be preparing for it, it's our governments; if they actually served the people they claim to represent.
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20points
#13
People becoming so dependent on AI that they slowly stop knowing how to do basic things without it.
Not some dramatic “AI takes over the world” scenario - more like people gradually outsourcing their thinking, decision-making, creativity, and even basic communication to AI.
And we probably won’t realize how much we have lost until we actually need to function without it.
Not some dramatic “AI takes over the world” scenario - more like people gradually outsourcing their thinking, decision-making, creativity, and even basic communication to AI.
And we probably won’t realize how much we have lost until we actually need to function without it.
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20points
#14
The collapse of the USA and its alliances with the traditional West. It has already started.
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19points
#15
Herd immunity failure because of fear of vaccinations. Measles is already making a comeback and polio isn't eradicated globally.
I understand this is just an expected down turn because people would rather be led than force marched, but if we can't address this there could be serious consequences in general human health.
I think a lot of people believe 'what doesn't end you makes you stronger' as far as diseases go, but we don't allow predators to take a certain number of children and the elderly. Why is disease seen differently?
I understand this is just an expected down turn because people would rather be led than force marched, but if we can't address this there could be serious consequences in general human health.
I think a lot of people believe 'what doesn't end you makes you stronger' as far as diseases go, but we don't allow predators to take a certain number of children and the elderly. Why is disease seen differently?
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19points
#16
The near-total breakdown of voice and video as proof of identity.
Right now, almost our entire financial, legal, and personal safety net relies on the phone call as the ultimate fallback for verification. If your account gets locked, you call a representative. If a bank suspects fraud, they call you. If a family member is in trouble, they call.
With real-time voice cloning and video generation getting dirt cheap and near-flawless, the concept of "I know it was you because I heard your voice" is going to evaporate. We are going to need physical tokens, shared offline passphrases, or in-person verification for routine things that currently take a 30-second call, and most institutions have zero infrastructure in place for when that switch has to happen.
Right now, almost our entire financial, legal, and personal safety net relies on the phone call as the ultimate fallback for verification. If your account gets locked, you call a representative. If a bank suspects fraud, they call you. If a family member is in trouble, they call.
With real-time voice cloning and video generation getting dirt cheap and near-flawless, the concept of "I know it was you because I heard your voice" is going to evaporate. We are going to need physical tokens, shared offline passphrases, or in-person verification for routine things that currently take a 30-second call, and most institutions have zero infrastructure in place for when that switch has to happen.
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18points
#17
Another depression. People can barely afford their bills as is.
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16points
#18
A near-global depression caused by oligarchs and their hunt for more all the time. It will coincide with severe food and water shortages, and lots of our established rule of law will be binned. There will be hundreds of millions less people on earth by the end of it. Starvation will be extreme in countries with little crops and soil fertility, and those which have been extremely corrupted.
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16points
