Drone tech is going to get tiny. It’ll have microphones and cameras and it’ll probably be untraceable. It’ll spy on you arbitrarily and the equivalent of 4chan will have access to it in abundance. You will never again have any form of privacy unless you buy expensive countermeasures for your home and office. Fortunately deepfakes will be so good you can blame it all on that.
Yes, I watched some drone light-show/fireworks displays recently, and thought, 'wait till the drones are the size of flies, these shows will be happening in restaurants, bars, in your living room'. Imagine walking into a room full of fireflies that move around you as you walk, etc.
Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this hard to believe? Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason. In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.
One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail. Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free. Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well…
Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.
Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#1231. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is probably not the one you're referring to, but Pat Brown, co-founder of Impossible, also has quite a strong opinion on cultured meat. If somebody figures out how to grow animal parts artifically and reliably, there are much more interesting applications than to eat it. Such as medicinal applications. I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, t…
So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough? Not much to see here. I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information. > I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test. Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway…
I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible. And don't forget that making a steak is also much harder with cultured meat, that's why they're also starting with burger patties and chicken nuggets.
From a higher-level view, most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks. It's in the form of ground meat. If enough people switch to plant-based meats for let's say 80% of their meat needs, animal-based meat won't be able to compete anymore with the price of plant-based meats. So, for Impossible to reach their goal of getting rid of the animal based food system, they don't even need to be able to make steaks. Sure, there will always be meat, but it will be an expensive luxury and rarity that we will frown upon as society (e.g. like wearing fur coats today or hunting dolphins and whales).
> So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough?
Fair point. But also consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one? He had the experience, expertise and funds to do either.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#125I believe the next big thing will be the productization of building a home anywhere, without requiring municipal infrastructure. There is still a ways to go in terms of technology to make it all happen and make it affordable. But at some point, it will really reconfigure where and how we all live.
Including water and sewer? I can envision local electricity generation and wireless communication. But not every home can support a well and septic system.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#126Forget general humanish AI and VR, self-programming systems will put a lot of low skilled coders out of work. FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#127The likely shutdown of all Russian gas to Germany this winter, resulting in a) 5-10X rise in home heating costs, and b) complete shutdown of many industries, resulting in a c) depression in the German (and thus European) economy
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frightening indeed. Care to share any more insights?
see also "new world water" by Mos Def
I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall.
Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier.
Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater.
Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#129Climate migration. What happens Europe now/since 2015 is nothing that will come in the next couple of years. And the individual countries and so as the EU is pretty much unprepared. I'd even say that will be one of the cause of downfall of the union.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
What am I missing here?