Immediate Speculative Anticipations

What is going to happen in the immediate future is of concern to everyone on Earth and also is of particular interest to sf writers and their readers because what can happen and what might happen affect the premises of works of fiction. We used to think that regular interplanetary space travel was in our immediate future. We are still living in the Chaos of Poul Anderson's Technic History although real world events have probably already diverged from that timeline.

Questions raised by Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop whom I visited today:

Is it possible to win any current major war without deploying nukes and would anyone do that?

Will a state of emergency be declared in any major country soon?

He thought that, since we know neither what AI companies are doing nor what AI itself is doing, it is impossible to make any predictions about that.

We are definitely living in an unstable future - from the point of view of our younger selves who used to read fiction set in the early twenty-first century.