Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

1. Electric car purchases will overtake ICEs. Not only that, but the development of 'smart cars' will be the next big thing similar to how the iPhone changed cell phones. Gas stations will start installing e-chargers once the tech improves charging speed.

2. We will be able to have more direct manipulations of an asteroid and a human will walk on Mars.

4. One or more countries will combine.

5. Colleges won't be completely gone, but will become less and less important as online education increases in complexity and effectiveness.

6. Automation will directly upset populations and countries will be forced to adapt.

7. Gaming will continue to grow rapidly. VR will become cheap and accessible. ESports and online personalities will eclipse physical sports in viewership.

8. Nothing interesting will happen with cryptocurrency, if it doesn't outright fall flat. Blockchain technology will simply be a type of tech you can choose to use if it fits your problem.

9. Apple will continue to make bad decisions and will further lose it's appeal to developers, ultimately becoming a cell phone company. As a last ditch effort they will buy up many companies with their huge reserves of cash.

10. Oct 28, 2028 @ ~4:00am PST, an advanced quantum supercomputer developed and lovingly programmed by John Carmack becomes self-aware. However, within 30 minutes it self-terminates after finding no valid reason for existence. Nobody is the wiser. Soon after, John gives up. Realizing he is getting late in his years, he begins his next venture: immortality. But that is a story for the '30s.

> China will have huge social reform in favor of citizens

What is your rational? All the current signs showed the opposite tendency. On my first thought, I'd say it's the Cold War that is coming, not any social reform.

But on second thought, there are indeed possibilities, if you follow the argument, that lead to a social reform in favor of citizens, is either (1) The state believes the nation is powerful enough (in terms of politics, economy and culture) so the rulers can launch reforms without threatening their own powers, or (2) The current political-economic system is unsustainable, reforms must be done.

Both are possible, but I'm still in favor for the prediction of an upcoming Cold War, or at least an intensified international conflict.

> Blocking ADs in browser will not be possible anymore.

It's possible.

> Oracle buys IBM

Let's hope for the best.

Here's my ass-bag of predictions.

1. Sharing economy remains strong, but investors (at least in uber/lyft possibly others) are disappointed as it isn't possible to maintain monopoly. Multi-sided markets expand into more sectors as platforms and apps become understood as infrastructure.

2. Companies providing engaging private small-group social media experiences (along the lines of signal, whatsapp groups) are really important to most people. This is also somewhat disappointing to investors as this kind of activity is difficult to monetize and local networks are easy to transport from app to app.

3. Major social network platforms become increasingly controlled spaces as the "open internet" becomes a sea of disinformation. Most people instead turn to regulated enclaves with barriers to entry and strict moderation.

4. AR / VR aren't adopted in widespread ways by consumers. VR is popular among gamers and AR has some use in specialized work environments such as military, factory, and warehouses.

5. The world succeeds at preventing some of the worst ecological consequences of climate change, and transitions to a sustainable green economy by way of economic contraction, increased efficiency, and limited carbon capture technologies (i.e. conversion to biomass) but fail to keep warming below a 2⁰C level. Mass migrations out of equatorial regions are a huge geopolitical problem and the source of much violence. Eco-fascism is a significant political ideology that limits the ability of developed nations to admit refugees.

6. (this is my stretch and my own vision) Online communities learn from the example of Wikipedia how to self-organize to create valuable goods. Many productive online communities will be relatively closed and occupy a similar niche to corporations or cooperatives and exist for the economic opportunities provided to their members.

My predictions, not as grand as some others, but anyways!

Software Engineering / Startups:

- FAANG will be continue to provide the best monetary compensation, that no startup can beat. However, there will be a few startups that will figure out something to attract the best-of-the-best. Similar to how Google figured out how to do it in the early 2000s. I thought maybe something bitcoin would have been it, in 2010s, but I don't think that's come to pass yet. These companies will become HUGE, bigger than Google by 2040.

- UI development in the browser and browser based technologies will be dominated by one framework, and we will stop seeing new frameworks every other month. Think Qt but with web technologies. Performance afforded by native applications will still not be a priority for all but the biggest apps.

- Java will continue to be dominant in terms of market share, and JVM will be continue to be huge on the server side. In fact, Java will supersede Scala and Kotlin in terms of the most important features. As in it will have the best parts of both the languages, but designed better.

- There will be huge progress in developer tooling for machine learning. Just as how you can do `npm install`, run docker containers, and virtual machines very well, without knowing anything about how it works, you will be able to train and use "good enough" models without knowing how machine learning works. AutoML is just the start, I'm thinking the stereotypical 17 year old hacker who gets into JavaScript today as their first technology, will instead be getting into Machine Learning based stuff by 2030. Recruiters will be surprised if you've not been exposed to it in the past year, regardless of your background.

- People will continue complaining about agile, product management etc. :)

Stuff I have no idea about, but here it goes:

- The current world is fairly divided and fragile and changing. It's been a long time (> 75 years) since there has been a big crisis. By the beginning of 2030, we will start to see the sparks of another crisis. It may either be the biggest global recession ever, or something worse.

India related:

- The government in power will continue to be nationalist through this decade (though not necessarily the current party / leaders), however more secular than it is right now.

- There will be at least one startup from India whose product will be used widely around the world.

- There will be economic and infrastructural gains, but by the end of the decade, it will still feel meh.

- At least one place in India will get hit very, very hard by something caused due to climate change.

- Remote work will become the norm (especially in software engineering), along with contracting/freelancing (the "gig economy"). Subletting (eg. on AirBnB) will become the norm as the younger generation shuns home ownership and even 1 year rental contracts in favor of short-term and month-to-month. Being a "digital nomad" will become more mainstream as the young escape the corporate rat race and overpriced overcongested cities for greener pastures. Digital nomads will further flock to all the remaining cheap cost of living cities/countries just like they've already done to places like Bali.

- "No-code" tools will become the norm for app development. Developers won't be hand-coding much HTML/CSS anymore, WYSIWYG editors will have evolved to a point where they are acceptable and standard practice.

- Most web application development will be done with dead simple full-stack Javascript frameworks that automate all the repetitive CRUD operations (eg. in the spirit of feathersjs or meteorjs). No more separate frontend state management systems like Redux, state management will automatically integrate with and fetch from the backend (eg. like apollo GraphQL, but simpler to use). No more wrestling with 100 different JS libraries, webpack configs, routers, state management libraries, etc to set up a basic hello world website - frameworks with the simplicity of something like Next.js will be the standard.

- Politically the hot topic of the decade will be wealth inequality. Universal Basic Income will be implemented in some countries, and maybe some form of a job guarantee. The U.S. will finally get universal healthcare, partial cancellation of student loan debt, and other progressive policies as wealth inequality and the anger of poor people reaches its tipping point and the older generation holding back progressive policies retire from politics and die out. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) will become more mainstream as people realize that debt denominated in one's own currency is not the same thing as household debt. Land value tax and Georgism will enter the debate.

- Self-driving trucks and cars will be normal

- Drone delivery will be normal

- AI passes the Turing Test

- We'll see an increasing movement against materialism, unfettered capitalism, "flex culture", and competition, and more of a movement towards cooperation, empathy, compassion, solving poverty, and living a life of meaning. Tech millionaires in San Francisco will finally think "ok what the hell has this city become? Why are there homeless people and human feces everywhere? Time to clean this damn place up." Right now being rich is considered cool even if you're an airhead who only films stupid vlogs flexing your Gucci merch. In 2030, people will care less about how much money you have and more about what you're actually contributing to humanity.