Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?

I predict human level AI will come about. What comes after I'm not sure but I tend to be optimistic.

Changing attitudes to advertisements and the upcoming generation's obsession with "authenticity" will push all brands and ads further into "lifestyle"-type presentation. Every furniture store and potato chip company will have social accounts for sharing memes.

Brand loyalty will merge deeper into the human experience, and in the 50-100 year timescale few living humans will be able to conceive of brands and products as separate from their personal identity. Boundaries between socio-economic groups will become more strongly reinforced along product lines (I believe this has already begun - see the Chik-fil-A/Hobby Lobby protests and reaction, or the reaction from both sides to Nike's support of Colin Kaepernick, and other recent corporate "woke" behavior).

Much more of the written words we consume in any form (newspaper, online opinion articles, listicles, etc) will be secretly sponsored, written by and for the benefit of a particular product, brand, or interest group. Even seemingly unrelated things, like local news, will be used to manage global brand visibility at scale as ML's ability to write comprehensibly comes into its own and articles are produced algorithmically.

Similar algorithmic information delivery systems will be used to drive even more granular opinion influence for things like state and county elections. Exploitation of outdated laws and regulations, and things like gerrymandering, will become even worse than we could have imagined as the tools to locate and predict vote probabilities at the individual level becomes even more powerful.

I agree on most of the arguments in the book "The Sovereign Individual" on what will most probably happen in the next decades. Summary: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/sovereign-individual

At a global level things are undoubtedly getting much better, in terms of human quality of life. Hundreds of millions of people are rising out of poverty, violence is on the way down, women’s and minority rights are expanding in most of the world, and most of this is happening in developing nations that need it the most.

I worth though that we are doing thus by passing the costs down to future generations. Fur a techie analogy, it’s like looking at the balance sheet if Blackberry in 2008. Profits were on the way up, at a raw financial level they were doing better than ever, but there core business was rotting away.

I think a lot of applications will be built without the need for developers, significantly reducing the number of professional developers needed.

Also, testing will be fully AI automated, other than some initial configuration there won't be the need to write tests manually.

Anything that can be done by robots and AI will be done by robots and AI. Things like driving, house cleaning and cooking (at least for restaurants) will be fully done by robots.