Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 10 years for our daily lives?

One race, indoors-oriented, tribal, authoritarian, amoral, warlike, domineering.

Another race, outdoors-oriented, disorganized, vain, self-obsessed, subjugated.

I bet you will have minimal difficulty envisioning every person you know and which track they're on.

That's more of a 1000-year prediction than a 10-year one.

The Time Machine predicted spinning "history rings" that produced sound (CD's), and Wells' other works were equally prescient considering they came from the 1800's. Morlocks and Eloi were dismissed as simply wrong, but perhaps they were merely further ahead than the critics could see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgrFXN4d1Jc

Its disturbing to say the least.

But to the other comments - the fishing industry is horrifically unsustainable - there is no replenishment to the degree from which we take from the oceans.

Poor measurement of fish populations, and even when the data exists stating that populations are over fished, shady regulatory boards provide licenses to fish what shouldnt be fished.

One thing is that I think you need a pretty wide set of priors--breadth. Stuff like history, anthropology, economics, the history of art. Lots of knowledge about human behavior, politics, culture, stuff like how emotions guide behavior, etc.

When I look at a typical STEM education, we deliberately don't prioritize this stuff. We know lots of things about how electrons behave and which sorts of functions grow the fastest and how cellular mitosis works. Not as much about why empires fall, the role of greed in political revolutions, or the changing role of women over the last 500 years. I think this puts HNers (I think STEM people are probably overrepresented here) at a significant disadvantage at making these kinds of broad predictions.

The thing we do have going for us is our ability to understand the course technology is going to take: what's possible, what will and won't work, and why.

I also wonder whether the people you're around influence your ability to predict what's next. On one hand, it's a well-established fact in social science that many social trends, at least in the US (things like marriage and divorce rates, educational trends, changing attitudes around dating, purchasing behaviors), start in the upper-middle classes, as they have the numbers (population) to make real differences in buying habits, politics, etc., whereas the rich have more money but much smaller population. On the other hand, the lower classes in the US vastly outnumber what I'd consider a typical HN reader. Something like 70% of US adults don't even have a bachelor's degree, and the US median income for an individual is around $40K. Keep that in mind as you think about this stuff.

One guy I'll point out who's studied this topic (predictions) a lot is Philip Tetlock (https://www.sas.upenn.edu/tetlock/). He's spent much of a long, fruitful academic career studying questions like whether it's possible for certain people to consistently do better than random at predicting things, and what sorts of traits make those people better. I won't try to summarize a 30+ year academic career here other than to say he does seem to believe it's possible to beat the odds. Good reading; check it out.