It’s a little less than 50 years away by now, so the schedule is clearly getting tight, and it is also a huge undertaking, so nothing should be taken for granted, but given current technology, it might actually be possible for a human to walk on the surface of the moon by July 20 2069.
Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#22The war on general purpose computing will arrive, finish quickly and be won by the totalitarians.
Normal computers will not be permitted to produce code. All developers will have to submit passport and dna before being allowed to work. Computers capable of producing code will be accounted for centrally, it will be illegal to own one without a licence.
Cash will be done away with by the following means or similar:
https://blogs.imf.org/2019/02/05/cashing-in-how-to-make-nega...
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#23[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#24Sadly, war.
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#25- The Great Dieoff near the equator. Large parts of India and the Middle East become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions die. The countries further from the equator do not let them in. World population will be lower than it is now. Most of the dieoff will be older people. - US loses Miami and New Orleans to sea level rise, but otherwise does OK. - "Machines should think, people should work" - computers will be doing…
> World population will be lower than it is now.
Almost all demographic predictions say this will happen, and that's without any major catastrophe.
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#26Massive unrest due to climate change, leading to waves of mass immigration, humanitarian disasters, atrocities, genocide and a rise in authoritarianism. All because of our greed.
Sadly, I agree.
Let me quote https://collapseos.org/why.html here :
“I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because it depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).”
And a related discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21183805
I might disagree with the given date, but I think some sort of industrial collapse will probably happen in the next century, basically because the earth has finite resources, and we have been consuming them at an unprecedented rate in the human history. Added to the climate change, it will lead to a massive unrest that we are not ready to deal with.
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#27WRT technology, I expect a technological plateau within our lifetime.
In geo-politics, USA will not be the sole superpower anymore:
* China will continue to regain its historical prominence/prestige
* EU will seek more and more independence from the US
* Turkey will look to form its own union of states in the Eastern Mediterranean (kind of a neo-byzantine/neo-ottoman empire)
* Brazil and India will continue to do well
* Russia and Iran's future not so certain
I think the transition will probably be relatively smooth, but we'll have to wait and see.
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#28I 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 restauran…
I’ll take the opposite side of that prediction - driving, cooking, and cleaning will be part of the jobs that people compete to get, as the data entry and middle management jobs get wiped out.
I don’t think anything that involves physical variations (I.e. manual labor in differing environments) will be automated for a long time.
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#29- Demographic projections say that we'll be reaching "peak human" where depopulation starts happening, and the urbanisation of humanity should be just about finished. So that should end real estate as being a valuable investment; it becomes a liability where liveable accommodation goes derelict because there's no-one to live in it.
- If we have fusion power, even if the reactor is the size of a battleship, every country's military will have a space program.
- Transportation continues to become cheaper, faster and more autonomous. There's no point in owning anything any more because you can rent it and have it delivered as quickly as you could get it out of a cupboard. You just pay a flat monthly fee depending on what levels of luxury you want, and that entitles you to whatever you need.
Re: Ask HN: What are your predictions for the next 50 years?
#30Significant dislocations of coastal population will cause shifts in demographics and voting. Some regimes will fall because of it, the UN Charter on refugees will be amended.
Resentment against entrenched industry shills and oligarchy will lead to extra judicial acts of revenge. The actors behind this will not coalesce the way religious fundamentalism has, but will be understood as a common root cause much as luddism was.
A new small C conservatism will replace radically economic reductionism of the Chicago school kind, massive public works and Keynesian intervention will predominate. Low tax regimes will find the cost of corporatism in health and lifestyle terms counter productive, extreme wealth taxes and punishments for evasion will be international.
Literacy will not fall, but writing will be uncommon.
Google will be remembered fondly before dismemberment. Facebook will be regarded as an aberation. Religions will compete on TV. Access to intelligent agents (not aware ai but ubiquitous use of ai derived optimisation and machine learning based systems) will be almost a right, where access to data is a right, albeit only if identified. Use of VPN and data hiding will be a first class felony in itself and linked to some kind of precrime with presumption of innocence lost.