Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

Major climate disasters. Fisheries collapse, crops and livestock devastated by disease, heat, drought. (~25% of the pigs in the world died last year.) Famines. Mass migrations. Unilateral geoengineering.

> "People always raid before they starve."

https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...

AI tools will destroy the job market for programmers. Most necessary software is already written, it just needs to be selected and configured.

Governments of all kinds will use technology to lock down their subjects and this will be welcomed.

Organ regeneration (-or- organ theft becomes more common.) "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

Fusion finally. "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" (arxiv.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539103

- - - -

So what about unrealistic-but-possible crazy stuff?

The "Electric Universe" crackpottery turns out to be true and artificial gravity starts a huge exo-planet-bound exodus. "Cities in Flight" eh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight

Levin's lab's work leads to scientific acceptance of the personhood of Gaia. Communications are formally initiated and together we regenerate the Earth almost overnight. Humanity is welcomed (back) into galactic civilized society.

Neurolinguistic Programming et. al. reaches critical mass and reprogramming yourself becomes commonplace. Reason and capability conspire to engender a mass movement to "Be excellent to each other." Humanity is welcomed (back) into galactic civilized society.

2. Microsoft will open source Windows (indirectly by using a linux kernel) and throw in the towel on the OS game.

3. "Offline" becomes hip.

4. New person-addressable federated message transport protocol gains popularity, probably on the back of SMTP/email systems. Someone will try to call it "server-less" apps.

5. Common federated identity and login system protocols gain popularity, probably also on the back of SMTP/email systems.

6. Privacy is still an issue, an attempt at making data-as-an-executable to trace its use is fraught with issues but gets steam in the healthcare market.

7. More and more JS will become a standard, until most programming languages outside of C/C++/golang/rust just use JS runtimes and compile to (dynamically or statically) WASM.

8. Someone remakes Game of Thrones ending entirely using deep fakes.

9. 3D printing at a nano scale "is just around the corner" but being used in select factories.

10. AI/ML and driving cars aren't a thing, but not because it's an impossible problem, but because it's not as valuable as people thought it was.

11. Drones will become highly regulated, require licenses to fly or must be purchased with a permit in most countries. Most likely due to a string of terrorist incidents. Large drones won't be used for deliveries or any other non-sense as they're simply way too loud.

12. More and more companies will attempt to operate in "growth" stages by buying back stock and artificially inflating their prices until an unfortunate pair of events causes a few mega-companies to collapse due to it. Afterwards debt in corporation as a factor becomes a key indicator for stock prices and a 3 to 4 year recession in most economies.

I laughed!

> 9. Global carbon emissions are not reduced, mostly because of lack of initiative by China and 3rd world countries.

I cried.

> 10. Still no hoverboards.

:( I wanted to believe.

1 - About Global Warming, Solar capacity will increase until our nominal production capacity is larger than our consumption. Yet, a lot of it is wasted, so we are still dependent on fossil fuels.

2 - Self driving + remote controlled freight becomes a reality. It doesn't go everywhere, it doesn't run all the time, but it is still the first important labor class to be quickly replaced by machines... causing...

3 - Civil turmoil all over the world. Rich countries governments have a bad financial situation, while poor countries have grave social problems. One or two rich governments may fail, but I wouldn't bet on it; either way, most will make through.

4 - Moore's law is dead, so we get more electronic diversity. We'll end the decade with way more CPU architectures than we started it, we'll have CPUs designed for MIMD and MISD parallelism, search (map and reduce) activities, communication tasks, and all kinds of things.

5 - VR won't be widespread, AR will have a few niche widespread uses.

6 - China won't take over the world. There is a small chance of them breaking out at this decade, but the most likely option is that they are a bit richer than now, with a heated internal climate, but still holding toguether.

7 - The poor vs. rich countries disparity does not close down. Instead, it increases a bit more. That is despite widespread structural reforms on the poor countries that should make them richer - it's just that a decade is not enough.

8 - Information security (including privacy enforced at the endpoints) becomes a wanted feature of many niche applications. Mainstream ones adapt because it is so widespread.

9 - Private space exploration will go beyond the inflection point of its logistic curve. Thus exponential growth will give way to sublinear one.

10 - Oh, and editing, we'll see the first trial of a rejuvenation treatment. It will fail.