Despite all the real estate booms and busts that we will see in major cities around the world over the next three decades, more than $100 trillion dollars will be added in real terms to the total value of global real estate, from $228 trillion in 2017 to 2035, simply because cities are expanding, economies are growing, and numbers of middle-class property owners are rising. And the COVID pandemic did not alter that trend, despite all the media hype.

Globalised travellers will remain near airport hubs. Beyond the impact of COVID in 2020-2021 onwards, all globalised executives will continue to need to be close to a large international airport, however virtual their teams. This ‘hub effect’ will also be true of high-speed trains. There is simply no substitute for "breathing the same air" when it comes to landing new contracts, or managing complex operations in other nations.

Those who are fed up with city life can afford the luxury of bucking the trend, going ‘back to nature’, getting out of cities for a greener life, greater security, lower costs. However, the wealthiest will just live in both, with two, three, ten or twenty homes. An increasing number of super-wealthy will have private helicopters and planes that link their offices, homes, hotels and holidays direct.

Future of the UK property market - 15 reasons for long term investment returns: UK property prices will be linked to the future of London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and other major cities. As I predicted many years ago and more recently real estate has remained a good long-term investment, despite the 2008-9 crash for 15 reasons...

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on transport, aviation, the construction industry, smart cities and the built environment.

Life expectancy by 2050 - how health care innovation will extend lifespan globally using next-generation tech including biotech and AI / Artificial Intelligence. While our world was forced to battle COVID and remains threatened by other potential viral pandemics, future generations will treat ageing as a disease. The life of every reader of this web page has increased by an average of 15 minutes in the last hour – the pattern in many nations of the world over the last two decades, in people with reasonable education and wealth. 

Take London, for example, where average life expectancy increased by a year between 2004–10, both for those at birth, and for those aged 65.  We have seen similar things in Japan and Germany. In many emerging nations, life expectancy is improving even faster. But what about the next 50‒100 years? 

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on health care, AI in Pharma innovation, AI in genetics and biotech.

From Uganda to Congo, India to Vietnam, we will continue to see an almost identical retail experience. Almost all shops in the whole world will continue to be the roughly the size of a single shipping container – never much wider or deeper or higher. One outlet next to another for mile after mile. COVID had no impact on this megatrend despite all the media hype.

Such shops, typically with brick walls and tin roofs, are often living rooms of families who own them, and bedrooms at night. Lit by a single light bulb, such stores have an almost identical range of products as ten or twenty other similar shops within a few hundred metres. We see clusters of clothes shops, clusters of metal working shops, clusters of furniture shops. The most important rule in retail location has always been co-opetition. And this will be as true in the slums of a megacity as on the streets of Paris or New York. Jewellers will continue to cluster, fish sellers will cluster. Retail clustering will dominate physical retail globally for the next 100 years.

Malls will take off in all emerging markets. At the same time, expect growth in top-down mass-retailing in emerging markets, despite e-commerce. Big companies will invade a completely new area where there has never been a single store a fraction of the size before. The first mall in a new area will usually be relatively informal, not air-conditioned, housing smaller shops. And then premium malls will follow, identical in many ways to malls in Europe, Singapore, Beijing and North America.

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on emerging markets including retail trends.

School and college is all about preparing a new generation for their own future, but most teaching is locked into the past.

In many cases, we need to be educating for jobs that have yet to be invented, instead of training for tasks that no longer exist or are about to be eliminated due to tools such as AI / Artificial Intelligence.

The COVID pandemic forced major changes in education, some of which will endure.  Over the next three decades, education will start younger in many nations than today.  Education outside the home for 3-5 year olds increased by 10% to 85% in OECD nations in the last decade.  This will be driven by two-career parents, and by research showing how important early learning is to later success.

Take examinations: how absurd to force young people to scribe indelible symbols onto pieces of paper, and to lock them into rooms without access to their digital brains. Cambridge University is considering allowing students to write exam papers on laptops, partly because examiners can’t read their terrible handwriting. Many other Universities have already started giving permission to write exams answers on computers if people have a disability which means that writing is difficult or impossible.  Yet handwriting in exams will still be the dominant mechanism for proving student knowledge by the year 2030 in almost every part of the world. Work means using keyboards, not pen and ink.

And all that was before the rapid growth of AI.  Artificial Intelligence destroyed the purpose of course work in 2022-2023 because from that point on it was so easy for students to get AI to write the course work for them. So at every level, education in most countries, whether school or university or post-grad, is locked into a last century time warp.

* "How AI Will Change your life - A Futurist's Guide to a Super-Smart World" - Patrick Dixon's latest book on AI is published in September 2024 by Profile Books.  It contains 38 chapters on the impact of AI across different industries, government and our wider world, including future impact of AI on education, schools and colleges.