Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

I disagree strongly on number 6. Offliners would be as popular as people who still carry flip phones and lecture you about it. You can’t become mainstream without some kind of media. Vegans talk about veganism all the time on social media. That’s why everyone knows about it.

* The demand/supply of customized compute, or specialized compute, will accelerate. Utilizing dirt-cheap technology of bygone eras will allow fabs to spring up and satisfy the niche demands of various industries. GPUs were a bridge for floating-point heavy tasks, FPGAs will begin to satisfy the needs of even more, and eventually will culminate in many industries sponsoring custom chips for their needs.

* We will see level 5 autonomous cars. They will be relegated to rent-seeking behavior. There may be some opposition, but in the end those who can create autonomous cars will turn them into reoccurring revenue.

* Custom manufacturing capacity will increase. Hobbyists will continue to iterate on 3D Printing technology until "The Reliable" solution comes to fruition and "It Just Works," allowing any household to produce any sort of plastic part they need. Further down this path, fully automated factories will start this decade. It will be expensive, at first, but, soon, it will be as easy as submitting a CAD file to get 1,000 custom parts delivered fully autonomously, and for a price cheaper than most other options. We may see the rise of fully custom car culture, and an uproar over safety.

* This decade's AI, or, compute-assisted task completion usage will rise. Custom physical/virtual interfaces will be created to satisfy any task. Jobs will be lost. Nothing will be done, except the occasional per institution protest. Other jobs will be created, but I can't predict what industries will crop as a result of it.

* The Four Horsemen of the Infopocolypse will continue to be referenced against any form of privacy or encryption. No progress will be made on either front, and certain individuals in power will continue to treat any sort of encryption as villain-tier behavior.

* Web and JavaScript (and all related technologies) will continue to grow and dominate. Chromebooks just came out too early. 2020-2030 we will see compelling browser-only experiences.

* Compute could become commoditized or even converted to a utility. Everything between 'local RAM' and 'cloud RAM' will be abstracted away. With the rise of custom chips, we will see even better virtualization technologies rise. Computers will drift towards compute-less terminals.

This should be fun!

1. Gaming consoles are essentially coming to an end. Die-hard gamers still buy dedicated systems but for the most part everything is available to stream.

2. 5G turned out to be a bust. The low latency, fastest version will still have a relatively small amount of coverage compared to the size of the United States

3. Multiple companies will provide internet via low orbit satellites, some of which will have a low enough latency that some phones will use them as a sort of "global phone" or will be their dedicated ISP.

4. Disney buys PlayStation, EA and at least one more, large studio.

5. Microsoft buys Activision

6. A lot of hype around general AIs but most experts still think they're truly far away. Several will exist by 2030 but they won't be true general AI but will be good enough that companies will get away with calling them that.

7. C++ has a working package dependency system that works as well as npm does for JavaScript. Almost every library is available this way. C++ starts to gain market share due to this and further improvements to standard libraries.

8. Native UI solutions that work kinda like React are more widely available. Think C++, Rust and GO with UIs that are as easy to build as they were in JavaScript.

9. Domain names are starting to go away in favor of a sort of distributed search that works well like Google search but isn't under any single company's direct control.

10. Apple will build more macOS like features into iPad so you can do more with it (such as develop software directly on it). They will also, finally, add touch to their Laptop screens.

Thanks for posting 2. I see software as the new legal profession. We will be the next victims of automation we are writing. Already, I bet a solid 75% of enterprise developers could be made redundant with managed services. There is diminishing need for startups. I have never been less optimistic about the field. This is just after waves and waves of CS graduates are entering the market and most indicators are pointing toward recession (cfo surveys, yield curve, gdp / corporate profit growth, pmi).

#2 : I agree on still no AGI - from even 2 decades from now however job looses I disagree with, just like Industrial Age job losses will happen with more and more automation but at the same time new types of jobs will be created (not as many as the ones lost).