The connections between the megatrends and SDGs feel pretty clear once you lay them side by side because they're essentially describing the same pressures from different angles. Technological development maps almost directly to SDGs 9 (innovations), 4 (education), and 8 (decent work), while demographic shifts map onto SDGs 1, 3, and 10. Climate change threads through basically everything. The megatrends feel like the causes, and the SDGs feel like the symptoms, which is maybe why progress on the goals is so slow. We are treating symptoms without addressing what's driving them.
The megatrend I keep coming back to as a computer science student is digitalisation and AI. On a personal level it's impossible to ignore because the field I'm entering is being reshaped in real time. The skills that were considered cutting-edge two years ago already feel dated, and that pace is not slowing down.
Over the next 5-10 years, I think AI integration into everyday software will become totally standard; it will stop being a feature and become infrastructure. In 20 years, the more interesting question would probably be around governance, for example, who controls these systems, and how?
For the EU specifically, this megatrend is critical for competitiveness. The EU is already catching up with the US and China on AI development, and the regulatory-first approach (like the AI Act) is a friction point because, as much as it may protect citizens, it could slow down innovation at a moment when falling behind has real geopolitical consequences.
For computer science as a field, the shift is obvious, but the direction is less clear. It's not that programmers become obsolete; it's more that the job changes fundamentally. Understanding how to work with AI systems and critically evaluating what they produce becomes as important as writing code from scratch.