Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

1. This will be the decade of compact hospital-grade health and bio-Informatics devices being brought into the home and personal life. Think Startrek tricorder capability but in a (likely) larger package.

2. Deep fakes will precipitate the need for digitally signed media. This likely means further reliance on root-of-trust systems like x509 certificates or some new international body designed to issue a new form of lightweight signing mechanism that works at low resolutions/low bandwidth.

3. Continued climate change will result in at-least one major U.S. city losing population due to feasibility/costs of providing either clean water or breathable air.

4. China and Russia will split their version of the internet entirely apart from the traditional internet and will sell products and services to other countries to do the same (I.e. Iran).

5. The era of horizontal drilling and fracking for ultra-cheap gas and oil will slowly wind down and energy costs will increase to 2000’s era costs.

6. Most ominously: this might be the first decade where we see large scale orchestrated micro-drone attacks (death by a thousand paper cuts) and autonomous vehicles being used for delivery of some kind of malicious purpose (I.e. explosive delivery).

7. Massive inflation globally during 2010/early 2020’s will result in stagflation in the U.S. and other countries.

I can see the web being driven into the ground in the next few decades, ever increasing complexity, more extreme hardware requirements for a bit of text on a page, it's already in a silly state, after another decade of this something needs to snap.

Regarding 1., what do you think will be the selling point of this transition? There is very little that hospital monitoring devices can offer to the average person (do you need a daily ECG / EKG?)

OK these are some a very long predictions:

- At least one East Asian country out of {singapore, south korea, japan, china (ROC or PRC)} legalizes Cannabis.

- Microsoft extends the dominance it began in late 2010 decade. C# and F# eclipse Java as enterprise programming solutions.

- Google runs into some major trouble and loses considerable market share; the biggest tumble comes on the heels of an internal, employee-led revolt or schism.

- While we're at it, Kubernetes goes out of style, replaced by something out of Microsoft (that is not on our radar at the moment).

- The US is in the first five nations with population greater than 50M to meet its Paris Accord CO2 targets, despite having left the Paris Accord.

- Early 2020s: Brexit unexpectedly results in the UK narrowly escaping the worst of a major economic collapse in Europe, led by or concurrent with the collapse or bailout of Deutche Bank. Of course this spreads to the rest of the world, but if we say put it in quantitative terms the relative, GDP normalized damage to the UK is less than the damage to each of: Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Denmark.

- Quantum computing goes through an explosive growth in qubits for the early half of the decade, topping out at around 10,000-100,000 qubits, followed by 2-3 year linear phase, and then diminishing-return, sublinear improvements through the close of the decade. Researchers begin talking about a 'QC winter' like which we saw AI go through.

- NASA disqualifies the Boeing Starliner from flying after astronauts refuse to man it.

Aside from one time when I correctly predicted my coworker's house would be under a volcano in 15 years, I am typically very bad at long timescale predictions and much better at short term out-of-the-odds predictions, so we shall see.

I like this idea. Here’s hoping you’re right!