It’s been a decade since the tumultuous events of 2024, when a slew of elections in major economies helped reset the world order. With over 7 billion people connected on smartphones, populist strongmen and political power brokers found themselves in a new age of transparency, forcing them to be accountable, whether they liked it or not. Ideological dogma surrendered to realpolitik, everywhere.

At the same time, emerging technologies like intelligent assistants, AI creatives, and robotic helpers became mainstream in the workplace – and at home. Breakthroughs in nanoprinting and bioengineering accelerated the transformation of the energy, transport, and food sectors, while engineering, construction, and manufacturing experienced a tech-driven renaissance in the years that followed.

All of which played out in a series of boom-bust-boom cycles in the financial markets, giving fiscal and monetary policy makers more headaches than their predecessors had experienced in over one hundred years! When everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, and intelligent agents to aid their decisions, chaos reigns. Which is fantastic for some investors, and disaster for others, often favouring the bold and nimble over the cautious and careful.

As if that wasn’t enough, the space economy took off in a big way, with a return to the Moon, asteroid mining, and missions to Mars already underway. The space economy not only extends global commerce beyond the planet’s atmosphere, but also creates massive new opportunities for innovative businesses on the ground. It takes more than rockets and spaceships to service off-planet communities, and the future horizons are infinite.

And now, as we settle into the ‘Thriving Thirties’ there’s an all-too-predictable backlash against the techcesses of the ‘Roaring Twenties’; people want to reclaim their humanity, act like people and not like machines, and find purpose in culture and society. It’s the end of the world as we knew it – and the start of a new world, again.