We can’t help but be curious about what the new year will bring, so the verge of 2022 is a time for speculations and predictions. We will do that at this blog and I invite your participation. Tomorrow we will look back at our predictions for 2021, and on Friday we will make new predictions for 2022.
In the meantime, here are some predictions from a professional “futurist,” Marian Salzman, who is said to have a good track record. You can read a story about what she has to say in the UK article Leading futurologist predicts top trends for 2022 – including growing fear of technology. Here is the list given in the article:
TOP 22 TRENDS FOR ’22:
- Reigning chaos
- Angst as the new normal
- Mental health moves out in the open
- Office work shake-ups
- Upskilling and reskilling in education and employment
- Death of the idolisation of America
- Greener cities
- Rising hyper-localism (again)
- The villainisation of big tech
- Roarin’ 2020s: muted hedonism
- Workplace “cohesion cultivators”
- Hybrid everything
- Rethinking schools
- Admiration for – and fear of – science
- Geek speak in the Metaverse
- Virtual value
- Confronting inequity
- Water woes
- Spotlight on front line workers
- Infrastructure gets sexy
- Fightback of the “missing middle”
- War of words
You can read what Salzman means by each of these in her full downloadable report, 22 for 2022.Basically, she predicts the increasing role of technology, coupled by a reaction against it. Resentments over the way technology is destroying our jobs–necessitating constant “upskilling”–and our privacy and in other ways taking over our lives, is bringing on “the villainisation of big tech.”She predicts more polarization and “chaos,” but also sees a backlash of the “middle,” people unconcerned with cancel culture and preferred pronouns.
She sees “the death of the idolisation of America,” with the tarnishing of our national brand in the eyes of the broader world. Although she is a native New Yorker, she is writing from a British perspective. And yet, despite what she says about the decline of American influence, nearly every one of her mini-essays on these 22 trends brings in America or Americans in some way.
Salzman is, of course, predicting broad “trends,” so her predictions are generalized, long-term, and harder to falsify. What we will look for on this blog tomorrow and the next day are concrete predictions of things that will happen. The ones that will earn the biggest accolades are happenings that the rest of us never saw coming.
So put on your futurist hat, start speculating about the year ahead, and enter your prognostications in the comments section on Friday. The winners will be announced on the verge of 2023, just as the 2021 winners will be announced tomorrow.
Photo by form PxHere , CC0, Public Domain
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