janelane wrote:
Global commerce is linked to government structure by more than just federal changes in the U.S. I am thinking more about the interactions between countries of varying structures. E.g. U.S. companies have to jump through a lot of hoops to do business in China. Maybe I'm having trouble qualify this aspect?

Companies will be able to pick and choose suitable societies for business and national governments will compete for them as local governments do today. Trade between China and US will be quite open (more trade will be liberalized in general) and Chinese society will seem more capitalist then it does today. China will be in the process of trying to change the lifestyle of millions of small farmers. China will be building super cities. Either the UN will adapt their proceedural structure or you might see a federation of democratic states that replaces some of it's legal functions. All of this stuff is going on now and I expect it to continue. The only thing that could have a major impact on the trend of international relations would be a sudden gas shortage which results in war or a bad split on anti-terror issues.

I was thinking in terms of language as interactions among people whether via translation software, coding languages, or open source projects. I want to step back from the spoken word to its contribution to culture and technology.

If you are looking for significant improvements in human speech recognition or translation technologies I think you'll be disappointed. Its not a straightforward matter of cost and processing power. The problem is really really complex. You'll see voice recognition in more consumer products over the next 15 years but thats about it I think... I think programming will still be Cish tools and Perlish tools. I don't know if Java is going to live for 15 more years except as a legacy product.

Good jobs in the US will be less and less knowledge based and more and more service based, focusing on proximity to clients.

I could not disagree more.

I don't really understand what you are objecting to.

We're already transition from a mindset of "the customer is always right" to "the customer doesn't know what they want, much less how they want it."

Where?

My professor thinks that the U.S. will transition from manufacturing and commodities to services such as sustainability consulting. A service economy in a newer sense. Streamlining processes will be in high demand. But, I don't think it can happen by 2020 without a much more progressive administration.

Perhaps, but my point was more about the services as opposed to manufacturing thing, of which sustainability consulting is only one example. The transition from manufacturing to services is well underway and is politically agnostic.

RE: The Year 2020