What Happens Next
Welcome to your complete guide to the future of the global economy. These 10 videos produced in collaboration with Retro Report and nearly 50 essays by some of the world’s leading thinkers and creators will provide you with a roadmap for where we’re going—and how we’ll get there.
Retro Report is a nonprofit media organization examining the history and context behind today’s news. To watch more from Retro Report, subscribe to its newsletter or follow it on YouTube.
Stories about the future often follow doomsday narratives or promise fairy-tale endings: robots that take our jobs, digital worlds that ruin our relationships, pills that make us immortal. But for most of us, the reality will be very different.
What Happens Next tells the stories of the communities who will be most affected by these changes and the visionaries building our new reality.
There is not a singular vision of the future, but many versions of it. We’ve therefore asked some of the most forward-thinking leaders—scientists and entrepreneurs, academics and farmers, roboticists and teachers—to share their predictions for what tomorrow will look like, and how to prepare for it.
We hope this project inspires you to consider your own future: What happens next is up to you.
Illustration by Ksusha Itwazcool
More from What Happens Next
Future of Aging
By 2020, people over age 65 will outnumber children under age 5. Humanity faces an urgent question on an unprecedented scale: How do we care for an aging population who can’t work, and harness the contributions of those who can?
Future of College
While the internet has made online learning virtually free, the price of traditional teaching is still soaring. When the job market is transforming more quickly each year, how can we reinvent education to keep up?
Future of Water
The world’s supply of cheap and clean water will likely plummet as the climate warms and populations boom. Can we find ways to conserve, cut waste, and find new sources before it’s too late?
Future of Gaming
With revenues topping $100 billion a year, the video game industry is poised to be this century’s dominant form of entertainment. As games become more addictive and expensive to play, how will they transform our social relationships as well as our leisure time?
Future of Home
Technology is transforming homes all over the world. In some places, cheap devices are powering and connecting homes long left off the grid. In others, newly automated and networked machines are reinventing convenience—but at what cost to privacy and human connection?
Future of Work
If automation continues at its current pace, 400 million workers around the globe will be displaced by 2030. In spite of the vast economic effects these changes will bring, will we seize the opportunity to reconceive the very meaning of work?
Future of Food
As global climate change worsens and the population expands, humanity must produce more food in the next 50 years than it has in the past 10,000. Are lab-made meat and automation the key to farming in the future, or must we tend to the soil we already have?
Future of Cities
By 2050, nearly 10 billion people will share our planet. As mega-cities rise and technology reshapes the urban landscape, how will these changes affect the vast majority of the world’s poor?
Future of Money
Anarchy reigns supreme in the future of finance, decentralizing the power of banks and, in some cases, the state. But will cryptocurrencies and the blockchains that underlie them solve our financial woes, or only worsen existing inequalities?
Future of Fact
Online manipulation and immersive media have begun to eradicate our shared notion of authenticity and trust. How will society change when we can no longer believe what we see, hear, or think?
