My Groundhog Day Prognostications for 2026
A triumphant return?
Many of you will be thinking: Who is this and did I really subscribe to this newsletter? You did and until the late summer I wrote quite regularly. A few reasons for the break, which I am calling a sabbatical, that I will elaborate in another article, but lets get right into my “predictions”
I’m being a little loose with the definition of predictions. During the course of writing this newsletter I realize that tiny events, jumped on trends and passing fads are not really that important in the broader scheme of things. After all I named this newsletter after what I am focused on: Techtonic Shifts - especially in culture, norms, and human behaviours - caused by digital technologies.
Recapping Last Year
Let’s first take a look back at my predictions for 2025 - article is here for a refresher / first read)
So quite a credible set of predictions. I was more than pleased with the progress medical researchers made on a number of fronts regarding Alzheimer’s disease, completely upsetting my pessimistic prediction. I underestimated just how weak Congress would quickly become and the TikTok deal, as it were, became a complete travesty of justice and fair-minded commerce.
Which leads me to a completely irreverent and technologically irrelevant prediction:
“America’s” dictator / bully state “socialism” will have decades long structural changes to the USA, other developed Western nations, China and the rest of the world. I’m not sure that Americans, whom I interact with almost daily, have any real understanding of the damage that has been done. Starting from the arrogant position “that we are the greatest nation in the history of the world and likely in the entire universe” doesn’t lead to sober introspection or probing insight into reality. The underlying forces of global change, slow indeed, were already in play. Trumpian behaviours and actions simply accelerated this change. Non-linearly. Things will not spring back into place like an elastic band.
My Baker’s Dozen of 2026’s Prognostications
Small Real Change in Digital Habits. Many analysts have pointed out, often using dubious cherry picked data or graphs, that people are now spending less time on social media, and their screens in general. This purported change in digital habits is severely bifurcated. A small edge group of people are eschewing social / screen and starting to develop more effective digital habits. However, the much large social group continue the slide into digital muck. Look at the habits of South Korea as a true harbinger of the future.
Growing Legal Restrictions on Social Media Access for Children and Youth. More countries will adopt Australia’s sensible and successful legal social limitations for children and teenagers. This will be especially true in Europe. This movement will not gain traction though in Canada or the USA
Major AI alignment will speed up. Although the digerati will distractedly continue to overly praise or overly fear general purpose LLMs in hyperbolic terms, real and substantive changes to AI soon will be evident. The start of a major long term realignment in AI from one gigantic LLM size-fits-all to very specific use cases and targeted AI special purpose applications will appear. Research into non-LLM approaches will flourish and we will start to see true hybrid models appearing over the next 5 to 10 years. This will cause a multiyear ripple through corporate AI providers. To me there are a wide variety of things that will happen to OpenAI but it will not survive in its current form.
Podcasts will go berserk. Podcasts (which are really vidcasts on Youtube / TikTok / Reels now, another debasement of nomenclature caused by our digital society) will continue to grow unabatedly. The future is where nearly everyone under a certain age will be producing their own videos in one form or another which are viewed by small and ever diminishing number of people. Viewing numbers will report better due to the growing number of bots and digital agents.
Space: the new constellations. More and more (and more stuff) will be shot up into space to enhance things like communications and space-based Internet connection, not withstanding stations acting as jumping off points for moon and Mar’s expeditions / mining. The new generation, like my 5 year old granddaughter, will look up in the sky – on the rare occasions we they can actually find some dark sky spaces - and learn to identify various important satellites and space stations, instead of exploring the constellations like I did at her age. Shooting stars will not be comets and meteors but falling space detritus.
Cybercrime explodes and just becomes part of life’s background. In addition to major cyberattacks, sophisticated phishing, ransomware, and other attacks will become ubiquitously slop (I get to use the word of the year). Except they won’t be sloppy and more people will be bilked. Getting scammed will be a dubious badge of honour like being mugged in NYC in the 1970s & 1980s. Cybercrime suites are just a click away. With names like WormGPT, FraudGPT, and DarkGPT, these tools can be easily used to create malware and phishing campaigns; some even offer hacking tutorials. This is my first example demonstrating my prediction that specialist value added AI applications are where the money is.
Relationships will start to flourish. At both ends of the human age spectrum – the young and the old – relationships will explode over the next few years. They just won’t be with other people. The pettification and synthetic robot modification of our relationships coupled with generative AI means that no one will know how to talk to another person IRL anymore.
I’ll bet you gambling keeps expanding. The institutionalization of gambling in our digital hearths will continue unabated. I expect it to grow past prediction markets and sports betting to literally everyday activities. Other forecasters do simple linear extrapolations of what we’ve already seen. I’m wagering that creative people everywhere will find genius ways of embedding gambling into many more platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Generative AI, etcetera. Talk about great user engagement, true gamefication on Duolingo!
Many governments will waste billions on AI. Foolish governments around the world will use “industrial policy” to invest in the one of the worst parts of the AI value chain: data centres. The trite policy wonk tropes say that these are the new roads and bridges of last century. They aren’t. Data centres have always been digital iron, which is a commodity by the way. A very few will craft policies to invest in specialized and leading edge research & development plus frameworks to encourage entrepreneurs of all sorts to develop value added special purpose applications.
Vibe coding will get a cold shower. This is my biggest bug bear. Inexperienced analysts on Fantasy Island continue trumpeting the dawn of vibe coding: “Just a few though very intelligent prompts and presto you have a fully functioning application”. Rubbish. Many of the applications that power the back offices of most business organizations have literally decades of intellectual property in them. Getting things exactly right for payroll, warehousing, manufacturing planning, and so on is very tricky indeed. Vibe coding is great for rough prototypes and simple web facing apps. Period. It is remarkable that some “futurists” think that soon all businesses will be coding up major transaction and operations systems vibing on gummies. The depth of ignorance is enormous. But it might take a couple more years for the shower to arrive.
The Alphabet will get larger. Google search’s downturn and criticism ignores what is probably the best positioned and diversified tech giant in the short, medium and long term. Their other bets are paying off. YouTube is preeminent across multiple uses and age groups. Alphabet’s investment and depth of product offerings in the AI value chain are the best, whose user base will increase. This is a company that also knows how to monetize. Their autonomous vehicle project is much more than an experiment and has such an huge head start it cannot be caught.
GenAI will become quicksand. The direction of the ignorant, the naive, and the over enthusiastic will continue unabated in the Gen AI sector. It will lead to untold numbers of small and large mistakes adding on top of themselves in unknown ways across all and sundry parts of society. The focus on convenience and quickness will dominate so completely that meaning, effectiveness, and humanness will be greatly diminished.
Return of true customer service. Forward thinking companies will start to use the advantages gained through AI to better focus on customer service, which has languished for decades. Real people will be more accessible to help customers through any part of their purchasing and usage journey. My little joke. 🤣 Two whole generations that have been raised with horrible customer encounters, convoluted digital conversations and forced self service across a spectrum of functions. that bad customer service is a permanent way of life.
I am planning on getting back to complete my look at the implications of the changes caused by the last 50 years of digitization. The more I think about them the deeper my understanding becomes. As someone once said writing is a way of educating yourself. Joan Didion was firm in her belief that she wrote to know what she was thinking. Both aphorisms are true for me.
Thanks as always to my (very patient) readers. Comments, shares and likes are all appreciated.
The vibe coding cold shower prediction is going to make a lot of people very angry and they will all be people who have never tried to fix someone else's payroll system at 11pm on a Friday before a friggin bank holiday. Some of us have been waiting for this reality check for two years.
Welcome back David :)
Welcome back. Bleak prognosis for humanity. Joke aside, I've long thought #13 would be a way for companies to distinguish themselves. Part of the joy of dining out is the often-fun interaction with the waitstaff (a mild version of your #7).