1. The biggest issue that we're going to encounter this decade onward is continuation of automation of jobs that real people used to have. As computers and mach

1. The biggest issue that we're going to encounter this decade onward is continuation of automation of jobs that real people used to have. As computers and machines continue to upend more and more of the labour market, we'll increasingly see an ageing population lose their jobs to robits and then just not have any skills that are relevant in the technocratic labour market. Along with that, I'm unconvinced that schools (American public schools, at any rate) are doing enough to prepare today's children for tomorrow's economy. Some big names have come out in support of more techno-centric curricula, specifically stressing the importance of learning to code, but I feel that will not be enough. Instead, we need to be reinvesting in art and creativity (along with more robust rosters of STEM classes) because, as of right now, true and good art cannot really be supplanted by our new machine overlords. I want to live in a future where the artist coming out of university is viewed as a greater boon to society than a CS major, because quite frankly I don't think that making code that can do in a tenth of a second what used to take a flesh'n'bone person ten seconds to do is really super important to humanity. 2. Somewhat related, I think that the gap between the rich and poor is again going to come to a head. Occupy wall street was a bunch of foolish people thinking that being upset would be enough to affect change. I think that the next wave of this sentiment will not be so naive. In my opinion, the way to "fix" this is to start taxing ALL income and capital gains of over $150,000 at 20% scaling up to 35% for when somebody is making more than a half million dollars per annum. That money would be, for real, just given out to the rest of the people, no strings attached. Tying back to my first point: the labour market won't need as many labourers (especially those who can't computer good) but I don't think that we should hold it against the people who were trapped in the wrong time for working. This is, of course, wishful thinking because congress's policies are dictated much more by money than what would be good for the general population. 3. I still don't think that the shit has hit the fan in terms of the Snowden disclosures. I think that the revelation of the shameful acts of US intelligence gathering has irreversibly altered America's place in the world in ways that won't become apparent for a good while yet. I believe that we're starting to get to better grips with what a global communication/data infrastructure means for society as a whole, and a big challenge will be defining, for the global population, what should and should not be done with this technology.