Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

Perhaps not very optimistic but:

1. Climate change is ignored by the US and China (who combined make up half of emissions). It snowballs until it becomes irreversible and catastrophic.

2. Countries lurch from natural disaster to natural disaster, incapable of focusing on more than short-term aid for its panicked citizens.

3. Large groups of people become climate refugees as their towns/cities become uninhabitable from flooding, fires, disease, etc. Some desperately try to get entry into 1st world countries.

4. Amongst xenophobia and desperation to do something about seemingly endless natural disasters, we see a rise of countries lead by strong dictator-types, who promise that they will fix our problems where others have failed.

5. Hard clamp down on immigration. Human rights violations, genocide, world war.

6. Still no level 4/5 autonomous vehicles.

My long list of predictions! Writing this was fun, I'm going to have to remember to look at this comment in 10 years!

Politics:

US political situation will be significantly less stable/more autocratic than today. People will lose most of their faith that the government is fair. Mainstream news will be completely non-trustworthy. In general, companies will consolidate. No meaningful anti-trust action will be taken. The biggest companies will become pseudo-government entities. Facebook (surveillance) and Disney (media/propaganda) will the most notable new entrants. A socialist candidate with a lot of momentum in the US will get buried in an obviously corrupt/illegal way. Nothing will be done. Situation in North Korea will be the same.

Economy:

Areas of the southeastern US will be uninsurable and hit by extreme hurricanes yearly, causing a slow internal migration as people move away and are not replaced. The poor will be left behind, and we'll have multiple Katrina-like natural disasters. Trade between countries will decrease. Especially trade between US/China. No progress on an international climate change agreement. Little progress on emissions -- most progress will come bottom-up from ICE cars being phased out. Latter '20s will see a new robust pro-nuclear movement. New nuke plants will be planned (not completed) by 2030. A minor resurgence of manufacturing in the US.

Tech:

ML/AI:

No self driving cars, even by 2030. Freeway lanekeeping will be robust, though, and an option on economy cars by 2026. ML will hit the wall. It'll turn out that even a boatload of data will not help solve most big problems that are being attempted now. Research will pivot to hybrid methods. By extension, people will completely stop talking about "AI." It'll be somewhat embarrassing to talk about the singularity, or general purpose AI.

Transportation:

SpaceX will succeed, launching things into space will be 1/10/kg the current cost to LEO. Battery tech will be better (not revolutionary, just a bit better). We'll have autonomous last-mile drone delivery in large urban areas by ~2026. The drones will be electric and resemble a plane/helicopter hybrid. Planes for people will still need dino jet fuel, though. Drone delivery will make delivered food yet cheaper. Some new developments in hip big cities will do away with full kitchens. More electric than ICE cars will be sold by 2025. Gas stations won't be dead yet, but there'll be talk of how to phase out ICE cars in 2030.

FAANG:

Amazon will stagnate, multiple meaningful competitors will pop up in the online retail space. Ride share companies (uber/lyft) will go bust in the mid '20s. They'll restructure with a small fraction of the valuation they have now. Google will stagnate. Facebook will compete far more with Google than they do now, and they will largely win, with facebook ads not on facebook. Microsoft will have significant success in VR, web services, and consumer hardware. Facebook will continue to be relevant. Any new competitor in the social media space (there will be a few) will be acquired/crushed. People will talk about FB having too much power, but nothing will be done because they'll have such strong ties to government.

Apple:

The iPhone will still be a big money-maker, but Apple will see tremendous success in the '20s from the health space. Its market cap will 1.5x or 2x from selling health-related devices and services -- mostly the apple watch, but some more wearable health devices, too. I'll be wild and say Apple will launch a hospital + health insurance operation. It'll be expensive but the service will be impeccable and it'll sync with all your apps and devices. Wearing an apple watch will be mandatory to keep a subscription.

Health:

Alzheimer's will not be cured, nor will we get close. The big medical advance will be wearable/sensor technology. Innovation will come from medical device startups, not incumbents, who will play fast and loose with medical device rules. The FDA will struggle to keep up, and regulations on medical devices will be loosened. Type 1 Diabetes will be functionally cured, via insulin pump and glucose monitoring. Tiny, accurate, implantable (subcutaneous) glucose sensors will last for months/years, charged wirelessly. Fast acting insulin will be cheap, $40-$60 for a month's supply, instead of the $300 that it is now... (alright, this is wishful thinking)

Misc:

A Bitcoin will be <$100 by 2030. Oil will reach $200/barrel by the late '20s. Skeumorphic design will be THE hot thing. The big fashion of the later '20s will be earth-toned & naturalistic -- like the 70s. It'll be embarassing to be a fan of Kanye West, although he'll continue making music. HN will be exactly the same. Same design, same commenter snark. ;)

1. Right wing will continue to rise along with radicals across the globe and will peak in 2nd half of the decade (hopefully without a holocaust or WW).

2. Facebook, MS, Google, Apple will stay dominant. Though EU, Russia and India will put more checks in place.

3. Fake News and Deepfakes will continue to rise with (1), causing an arms race with detectors.

4. Even more consolidation across consumer content web.

5. Electron/RN/* tech will merge web/mobile/desktop apps development into one.

6. New development in battery will make electric cars dominant. Nuclear will have a strong resurgence and China/India will be driver of clean fuel requirements.

7. Autonomous cars will be limited to particular community/use cases. Though Automated Trucks on highway will be popular.

5. This is already true and was one of the motivations behind languages like Go and Rust.

- SpaceX will land a human on Mars and create some super great marketing material. This will strongly galvanize interest in space. Many ambitious people will be interested in space projects or startups

- deep learning will continue to amaze people in being able to solve problems considered not well suited to it. Some of these applications will seem crazy in retrospect

- folks at OpenAI or Google will get something crazy to happen with a huge amount of compute. It won't feel like AGI but it'll make AGI seem way less insane

- theorem proving with deep learning will start to work

- material science using lots of compute and deep learning will start to work

- deep learning will be applied to fuzzing (finding vulnerabilities in software) and this will be a big thing by the end of the decade

- there will be some large scale multiagent AI projects aiming to learn intelligence through just big simulations of civilization but they will not have interesting results. Definitely happens at OpenAI and possibly elsewhere. They really expect this to work but it won't

- Apple releases an AR headset. Oculus turns into an AR effort instead of VR. The VR wars turn into the AR wars. Lots of money pumped into it. Unclear if it actually becomes the next mass platform, but there's a small chance

- crypto people will find success approaching incentive design problems in more traditional avenues like large organizations and charter cities. Most crypto projects will be dead in the water, including Ethereum, but there will be diehard enthusiasts who stick to it. The money will dry up, forcing others out. Cryptocurrency, like BTC, will still be a big thing on the internet

- teleop robots. Globalization of physical labor starts to happen. It will seem like an emerging trend by the end of the decade

- self driving cars will be seen to be largely a fad, with lots of wasted money

- there's a chance the olivine beach climate change project gets a huge amount of traction

- student loans and for profit colleges in the United States have some kind of reckoning. People stop believing in college: more people all over the world think like Lambda School and the software industry

- senior software engineer salaries in the Bay Area continue to climb

- Silicon Valley stops being so obsessed with China. It's more obvious that Chinese innovation is heavily lagging behind

- defense technology starts to capture the attention of more of Silicon Valley and the innovative class. Anti-defense stance stops being the default. Tech bro patriotism: more people think like Anduril. This leads to some really crazy defense capabilities of the US. E.g, auto targeting killer drones

- Social media usage per person goes down, for high income people

- YC is no longer cool at the end of the decade, but hacker news still is.

- lifestyle software businesses continue to be seen a lot more positively in the industry: more software engineers think like patio11/csallen/levelsio. Starting a small software business becomes more of a viable career path and seen as more responsible and mature than the VC unicorn path.

- meat alternatives grow faster than anyone expected them to

- Tesla is the most valuable car company but still hasn't figured out full self driving

- sci-fi reading and blog post style writing will be a major status symbol in the tech industry

- Bay Area will be less dominant in interesting tech startups than it is today, because of immigration and housing. The next place will be the internet or somewhere open to outsiders like Estonia, not China

- Donald Trump will do something too shocking and it will actually end his career. Society will learn an antibody to his populism, but it might be a long time after he's president. Will happen by the end of the decade though

- deep learning is a very centralizing technology. Even bigger tech companies will be started where the value they create is their machine learning network effect. They might not be as big as 1T by the end of the decade but they'll get there in another 10 years

- more power shifts from government to private enterprise

- tech companies remain underrated and continue to grow and have way bigger market caps

- VR porn ends up driving adoption of the current set of VR hardware. Funny but FB executives won't be happy about this and that'll make them look to AR.

- Facebook social VR with strangers doesn't work. But FB social VR with your real life friends might work and be really popular. This would be the main application of VR, if any : then it'll morph into AR

- religion continues its decline. New internet ideologies continue to proliferate. Some of them will be pretty weird yet have a lot of impact, like the alt-right did this decade

- the penny is abolished in the United States

- US inflation is a lot higher than it has been in the past; US treasury bonds not seen as super safe anymore

- if there's a recession, it won't affect the economy as uniformly as historical recessions (overall hit may still be really big, but higher percentage of people will end up well off). More variety in the economy and people's lives where it's not as correlated

- tech companies funding more and more media/content (like Netflix/Amazon, but also upstarts). Traditional media gets eaten by tech-enabled companies

- everyone worldwide has a lot less sex

- marijuana and psylicobin legalized federally in the US; stigma against drugs on the decline globally (related to decline in religion + rise of internet ideologies)

- more local manufacturing. Specialized manufacturing countries/cities stop making as much sense. Let going to China to make your hardware thing; you'll just do it wherever.

- the US will be more obsessed with Africa than China (may take 25y instead of 10y; caused by population dynamics)

- 10-30% more happens in 2020s than 2010s; accelerating progress but it's not very noticeable yet

- Stripe becomes a gigantic company Because of that, the SaaS economy goes global: microSaaS is the new doctor/lawyer/engineer, especially in India and Africa