Revealed: these are the top 22 tech trends for 2022

Increasing fear around cutting-edge technologies such as gene editing, robot workers and total immersion in virtual reality are set to be among the top trends of 2022

Battle lines drawn against tech titans, waning tolerance of inequities and a gradual move to re-establish the centre also feature in the top 22 predictions for 2022.

Offices and schools face dramatic shifts, and humanity will be gripped by record levels of angst in the face of the world’s spiralling chaos and complexity, a leading futurologist has predicted.

In a report titled “22 for 2022: Measuring Up What We Thought We Knew” pioneering global trends forecaster Marian Salzman, a New York native and senior vice president of global communications for Philip Morris International, lays out a chilling blueprint of how new technologies and rising rage over inequality may deepen the divides among the planet’s Covid-ravaged masses.

Salzman – best known for popularizing the term metrosexual in 2003 and whose past predictions have come uncannily close to reality in the last three decades – said about her latest publication: “One thing that’s certain – and has definitively put its stamp on all these trends – is uncertainty. People are feeling anxious.

“They sense that the world has become so complex so fast that the changes are beyond anybody’s purview.

"This acceleration of complexity – i.e., chaos – is now a phenomenon on steroids, a mega-trend that permeates all the others.”

Months before the world even suspected what was to come with the Covid pandemic, Salzman had predicted in her trendsightings for 2020 the rise of a “bunker mentality” and people’s need to hunker down and prepare for potential existential threats.

Salzman’s warnings for 2022 include rising suspicion and fear of the rapid achievements of science, juxtaposed with the admiration and hope these same advances invoke.

She predicts that one of the biggest fears of our age will be around gene intervention: “Among the many fears is that CRISPR (genetic “scissors”) and other gene-editing techniques will be used eugenically – intervening in embryos to edit out conditions considered unfit or inferior and edit in desirable traits such as height, physical prowess, and intelligence.

“This has prompted alarm even among leading scientists such as the late Stephen Hawking, who feared that wealthy people would be able to buy even more advantages and create a genetically enhanced elite.”

Social inequalities, rough weather and digital lives

The increasing sensitivity to glaring societal inequities is another dominant theme of the futurologist’s 22 for 2022 study.

She added about the “middling” masses being forgotten in a world dominated by polarization, rage, and extremism: “Most people are probably ‘middling’ in many ways, but they’re not the ones setting agendas or driving news cycles.”

Salzman said “the missing middle” barely care about cancel culture and the rise of woke terminology to describe genders.

But she predicted 2022 will, like this year, be dominated by the culture-war campaigners with the “loudest voices”.

Salzman said about a battle on the horizon against inequities: “After decades of just accepting, the public is getting increasingly more sensitized to inequities and less willing to tolerate them.

This is going to shape political, social, and even corporate developments.”