Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

> -A massive electronic medical records breach due to a security misconfiguration in the cloud gets posted as a torrent and reignites conversations around privacy and flaws in HIPAA regulations.

I can see this. The two big vendors are pushing their own cloud. One slip-up on their end will do it.

This becomes even more plausible now that third-party access is required to be supported. It's becoming easier for these third-parties to slurp up as much patient data as they can. Data from health systems will become much more vulnerable to exploit and the possibility of having all patient data exposed is increased. Likely worse than Equifax and/or Cambridge Analytica.

- Nuclear power is more popular, especially small-scale, and climate change isn't really talked about any more in 2030

- Human genetic editing becomes mainstream; treating genetic diseases will become a cheap standard procedure; genetic enhancement is also becoming popular in China and South Korea and will be a hot political topic

- Human lifespan can be increased by at least 20% with treatment

- Most traditional car manufacturers go bust or lose business significantly; taken by Tesla and Chinese start-ups

- Permanent bases on the moon and Mars; first asteroid mining companies start operating

- Apple's VR glasses will change how we use computers; large desktop displays will start to disappear; remote meetings and working with teams in VR will be common; as a result more people will not live close to a city and won't own a car

- Bitcoin's value will hit $1M; paying with cryptocurrency becomes common

- No flying cars (on Earth, maybe on the moon and Mars)

- Something will come that replaces traditional banks entirely; either banking will be centralized in the hands of large tech companies or there'll be a new global banking startup; bank will be just an app; cryptocurrencies may play a role here

- Starlink provides uncensored Internet globally; remote regions will gain economic boost; terrorism starts to subsidy

- AI assistants become mainstream in the workplace; there'll be assistant for almost any expert job which drives down required skills and cost of employment; education will lose value

Online privacy will be solved with end-to-end encryption across point-to-point communications over IPv6.

* Social media empires will decline some as a result.

* Advertisers will seek new disruptive offline channels to engage users with individually targeted marketing.

Because this is HN :-)

Number 1 is a pretty interesting prediction. The indicator are definitely there, but it would be a huge change to global culture and doesn't seem doable in 10 years.

Regarding 2, I have a couple of questions. First, what would cause the strong positive trend in Software salaries to sharply reverse in a period of a decade? That would be a dramatic collapse, I suspect unlike anything seen in an industry previous. Secondly, what happens in a companies like Google, FB, Netflix, and Hot Unicorns, where senior engineers are making in the region of $300-600K USD? Will Google grads all of a sudden be getting `($40k * 1.30)`?

Regarding 3, GINI Co-efficient is a pretty standard measure of inequality and it has been getting worse for decades in the USA. A number of other studies show Economic/Class mobility has also been getting worse for decades in the USA[1, 2, 3, 4]. So 3 is confused because it seems you think mobility has generally increase in recent decades.

On 4 I basically agree. By eco-terrorism do you mean sabotage of fossil-fuel infra? If so, I'd say Eco-Fascism and military protection of corporate fossil-fuel infra is more likely.

1. https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers/17-2... 2. http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/43/1/139.refs 3. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/11/21/1905094116 4. https://www.nber.org/papers/w23733