Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

1. No one on mars

2. Climate change has no significant impact, but whenever there's a hurricane climate change zealots tell everyone to repent because the end is near

3. Nikki Haley is the Republican nominee, but loses to a white male Democrat

4. Quantum Computing still irrelevant

5. Africa has its first major globally dominant tech company, but most of the employees are from India

6. AR is everywhere, but no one calls it AR

7. Veganism loses its appeal as aging vegans look increasingly frail

8. Pitchfork gives BNR and a 8+ rating to a reissue of a Skrillex album it panned in the 2000s.

* There will be a game-changing quantum hack of everyone's social/email/financial account passwords. It will be called, "Pandora's Dox."

From my recent comment [1]:

- VIDEO becomes what people thought VR/AR would be. Reality becomes mediated through video, not 3D graphics.

This is analogous to all the technical components for social networks being there in 1993 (BBSes, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), but Facebook didn't exist until 2004. And in 2010 people and businesses still needed websites -- the web was still growing like crazy 20 years later.

YouTube was acquired in 2006, Twitch was acquired in 2014, and there will be another big acquisition of a video company in the 2020's. (I hesitate to say that a video company will become bigger than Google or Facebook, but maybe.)

(BTW I followed the link to lesswrong, and someone predicted "videoconferencing" as a 2010's technology, and I think that was pretty accurate. I used little videoconferencing from 2000-2010 but used it a lot from 2010-2020.)

(And I hope in 10 years nobody points out that I learned how to clean my toilet on YouTube :) :) ;) 50/50 chance on that YouTube video still being there.)

- People will still wish for decentralization, and most of "FAANG" will still exist and be powerful. As I noted in the update to my comment, there will be "big data and compute" on the edge of the network, i.e. the data plane. But the control plane will still be centralized.

That will become a very common systems architecture. Computation and data won't be as centralized as they are with AWS, but "the cloud" will still be dominant.

- Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.

- Addendum: Even though IoT products are widely mocked now, and for good reason, I think the trend is inevitable. Automation is economically valuable and technologically feasible.

The IoT tech stack improve and many useful new applications will be found. There will still be security concerns and thus some significant holdouts. But overall both industrial and consumer "IoT" will greatly expand in the next decade.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21929342

I know this is like a hindsight 20/20 thing, but it would seem to me the only 'problems' left to solve are just the really hard ones (even on the scale of a decade): fusion, unified field theory, intelligent / extraterrestrial life, becoming multi-planetary species, etc.

My feeling is that biotech or nanotech have the most room for something revolutionary or unforseen to be produced

Predictions:

- Due to more control systems being networked, and processes automated, there will be a bug or hack that results in a disaster scenario where people are seriously hurt and die.

- Similar to other nations in the 2010's, the US will make use of an internet 'kill switch' to stem leaks, dissent or unrest. This might mean turning off access to a particular resource on the internet or web access altogether for a large region.

- Decentralized solutions to cloud-hosted services will be productized and shipped to consumers. Today's edge computing, home automation hubs, etc will combine with a Synology-type product that lets you add storage, modules, etc and run apps for your home and personal network. This will contrast with PCs that are general purpose and still too complex for the average person to put together, and today's Synology products that are typically geared towards data hoarding and require a bit of knowledge to use.

- The mobile operating system options will broaden, and a viable option for open software enthusiasts will open up.

- The glut of capital in the consumer space will dry up as that market holds less and less purchasing power. Most people will look back on the 2010's and their many investor subsidized 'X-as-a-Service' services comparatively fondly to their present economy that has all but abandoned them.

- The problem of "I can't get good internet speeds indoors" won't be solved for another decade, and if it is, a weird point-to-point outdoor antenna solution for buildings will be involved.

- The fact that the US relies on cheap foreign labor will come to a head as underdeveloped countries develop. More companies will be found to have foreign slave labor somewhere in their supply chain, and they will all claim ignorance when it happens.

- The bulk of developers will still be paid to write HTML + CSS + JS and it will still be a bad experience for everyone involved.

- Outside of the major metro areas, local news will be replaced by centralized services that just push out localized paid-to-publish content and ad fluff. Local governments will become much more of the good ol' boy networks that they already are today.

- At least one country will make people get chips implanted, whether they're immigrants, refugees or their own citizens.

- The Rent-a-Center model of renting goods beyond housing and vehicles (though renting of both will increase) will become more popular and not associated with RaC specifically.

- Embryonic gene editing won't catch on except for very specific indications and diseases, and rich people will rely on genetic tests for embryonic selection prior to implantation.