International Trends 2020: The Smart Grid
Researchers across the world are revitalizing their interests in power grid technology and solving many electrical engineering problems that otherwise lay dormant for decades. To Cisco certified networking enthusiasts such as myself, one particularly interesting area of smart grid research is power packet routing. To the layman, this essentially combines the internet and electric power distribution, so your devices can be connected to the internet by simply being plugged in. This helps IoT devices quite a bit.
International Trends 2020: Climate Change
Our world does not need to deal with billions of hungry people. Instead humanity needs to ensure every last person on the planet is fully enabled to contribute their maximum potential because we need every one. With optimal contribution of net human potential, overpopulation doesn't burden us. It instead empowers us to reach our full potential.