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OK, seriously this time.

Several weeks ago I offered an end-of-decade list of expert predictions
of all the changes in store for us (“Ten years from now …”). The
surprise ending was that the predictions were all actually from late
1999 and early 2000, and the point was that the future tends to make
fools of those who presume to predict it.

Nevertheless.

My 2020 vision may not be 20/20, but I’m guessing that 10 years from now …

–A young Republican president, the successor to two-term President
Barack Obama, will be running for re-election against a group of
Democrats that includes a top female candidate and a self-financing
mega-millionaire.

–More than 20 states will have legalized gay marriage, more than 40
will have OK’d same-sex civil unions and decent people will be faintly
embarrassed that we used to drum homosexuals out of the military.

– DVDs will be as old school as videocassettes were in 2010.
Blockbuster Video, Netflix and other stand-alone DVD rental outfits
will be out of business, replaced by online, on-demand movies and TV
programs.

–Electric cars will be the emerging vehicle of choice for city driving, having been led into the mainstream by the Chevy Volt.

–Division I college football will have a playoff system.

–The concept of the “land line” telephone will be obsolete. Mobile
phones will be seamlessly integrated into home-phone systems.

–At least one Web-only, full-service media enterprise will rise in
Chicago to compete as an equal with legacy print and broadcast outlets
for advertising dollars, talent, audience and influence.

–Dreamers will still be talking about how great it will be if we could
just build high-speed rail systems between major Midwestern cities.

–The mayor of Chicago will be the successor to the successor of Mayor Richard M. Daley.

–Jan. 1, 2020, will mark the 7,596th day since Illinois last executed a prisoner.

–Entertainment industry observers will agree: The top star of the decade was Taylor Swift.

–Except in rare, advanced cases, a cancer diagnosis will no longer be
a death sentence. Medicine will have made great leaps in battling
Alzheimer’s and autism, but not in battling heart disease, which will
remain our biggest killer.

–Major League Baseball will be using instant replay to adjudicate disputed fair/foul, catch/no-catch and swing/check calls.

– Lisa Madigan will be in her sixth year as governor of Illinois,
where the long-term pension debt will have grown to $200 billion from
$95 billion in 2009.

–Outdoor smoking will be banned in most places as the political strength of the dwindling number of nicotine addicts dwindles.

–Security at theaters, stadiums, shopping malls and train stations
will resemble security at airports in 2009 as America responds to
terrorist attacks from ineradicable Islamic extremists.

–The proliferation of video and the ubiquity of volunteer exhibitionists will have nearly destroyed the pornography industry.

–Virtual reality video games for the home will make the Nintendo Wii
look like Pong. Sports simulation games will feel almost eerily real.

–Technology will have enabled the now budding, preposterously
narcissistic practice of “lifecasting” — nearly nonstop streaming of
video of one’s own everyday doings — to have flowered into a
full-blown media craze. Like reality TV before it, the genre will have
created a stable of superstars.

–Steve Bartman will no longer be a pitiable recluse, as Cub fans will
have forgiven and forgotten on the very day the Cubs clinched a berth
in their first World Series since 1945.

– Sarah Palin will be featured in end-of-decade “whatever happened to …?” stories.

–The Internet will be deemed so basic and essential that the
percentage of homes with access will be similar to today’s percentage
of homes connected to the power grid.

–Fresh water will be the source of more international friction than
oil. Congress will be riven by efforts to expand health care coverage
beyond that which was provided in the now massively popular insurance
reform legislation of 2010.

–Chicago will have a Children’s Museum in Grant Park, but the Spire skyscraper will be off the drawing board.

–Thanks to extremely sophisticated voice recognition programs, we’ll
have very little need for smart-phone keypads and will talk our way
through many e-mail and messaging tasks.

–E-readers, tablet computers, netbooks, game consoles and laptops will
have converged into theft-proof, unified portable devices that will
store large, self-updating multimedia libraries.

–These devices will sync seamlessly with remote backup storage units
as well as combination phone/music player/video camera/GPS devices with
at least 10 times the storage and computing power of the slickest such
gadgets today.

–Newspapers will not have Web sites. Web sites will have newspapers
(as well as robust video and audio channels). Every major media
personality will generate content on all platforms.

–The distinction between books and other printed matter will be vastly
diminished in the wake of a painful digital overhaul of the publishing
industry’s 19th century business model.

–Tens of millions of Americans will be using a social networking site
far more flexible and useful and far less annoying than Facebook today.
It may or may not be a vastly improved version of Facebook itself, but
having a page on it will be as useful and nearly as common as having a
phone.

–Great strides in nonlethal firearm technology will be pointing the
way toward resolution of the handgun debate. But the abortion and Immigration debates will remain as poisonously polarized as ever.

–Cheap, tiny video recorders and tracking devices along with even
cheaper data storage will have radically diminished our meager
expectations of privacy. But day in and day out, we and the things we
own will be much safer than now.

– — –

Change of Subject readers also weighed in with a raft of predictions, a number of which struck me as quite plausible:

Michael S. Messinger: Telecommuting
will finally be the standard for more than 50 percent of the workplace.
Instead of higher salaries, bonuses and vacations, companies will
negotiate how much work-from-home capability is built into your
employment package.

Jim Jones: The
possession of marijuana will be decriminalized in the majority of
states. … A large part of McCormick Place will be converted into a
casino complex, with the Arie Crown Theater used to attract big-name
entertainers, just like in Vegas.

Wendy Clark: The
United States Postal Service will cease to exist. What, if any, snail
mail is left by then will be taken care of by private companies.

James Reyes: People will eat more healthy food as chefs find ways to make it taste better than unhealthy food.

Allen Tipper: Cable TV will move to a completely Internet-based, on-demand style of programming.

Jens Zorn (my
dad): With adaptive public transportation, passengers will submit
requests to go from one specific location to another. The APT center
will aggregate requests, optimize the paths for suitable vehicles
(buses, vans or sedans) and reply with pickup times.

David Brann: There
will still be people who wrongly believe that decades end with years
ending in 9 and that centuries end with years ending in 99.

– — –

One last prediction from me: Seven-day-a-week newspapers will be
history by 2020, but print journalism will have defied predictions of
its death. You will be able to read a column mocking the vanity and
fatuity of most of the above predictions in an ink-on-paper version of
the Chicago Tribune in January 2020.

Indeed, I plan to write that column myself.

Do you agree or disagree with the predictions above? Vote them up or down in this click survey.