Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

- Technology further consolidates. Regulations designed to keep us "safe" make it impossible or impractical for the garage-based startup of yesteryear.

- Apple remains big but gradually loses its influence.

- As many people here are saying "offline" will be a thing. But in contrast, there will also be more people who will 100% buy into plugging-in to the Matrix in any way possible. The MSM will find ways to portray offliners as kooks because offliners don't contribute to the voluntary surveillance apparatus. We already see this treatment of people who are self-reliant(i.e. if you prepare or live off the grid then you're a nutcase who is obsessed with doomsday and is possibly dangerous)

- The tech bubble will pop and lots of developer jobs will go away. We only need so many CRUD apps.

- Population continues to decline because there are too many good alternatives to risky activities like sex and having families.

- As more boomers and early X-ers retire or die off, more white-collar jobs will become fully or mostly remote.

- "Side hustles" will become a greater thing than it currently is. More people will want out of wage slavery and find ways to make money on their own or start their own businesses. But establishment goverments love employment because it's a reliable tax stream and keeps people dependent on the supply chain. Just like with offliners, we will start to hear a narrative that trying to make your own success is somehow unsavory.

- The field of psychology will see some reform and we will see significant advances in the ways that we treat neurological disorders.

- Hardware will become even more closed and impossible to repair or modify. Fewer hardware will be cross-compatible. If you want everything to be connected to your smart home, then you'll have to exclusively buy Google devices, or Samsung, or Amazon.

- Universities face decline and a reform by the end of the decade. Because most of a university's overhead can be done away with using technology and the internet, there will be very little reason to gatekeep people out of top institutions.

- Soda industry declines because enough people will wise up to the sugar menace. Today's nutritionists will be gradually replaced with ones that actually understand that a calorie isn't simply a calorie.

- Humankind will have not landed on Mars.

- The internet will become more fractured, with different nations deciding to wall themselves off.

- China's social credit system will be emulated in the United States. Don't worry, it will keep us saaaaaaffffe.

- Companies like Google expand to a point where they begin to resemble proto-governments.

- LinkedIn becomes less relevant and a challenger approaches.

- JavaScript will still be around in 2030 but have optional type-annotations.

- People continue to back away from atheism and nihilism, and will find ways to go back to religion or find spirituality. Science will be even more cherry-picked than it is now.

- The distal effects of negative interest rates and the bursting of the corporate debt bubble will trigger an economic adjustment. This will create an opportunity for industries to replace more jobs with automation, and this economy will create civil unrest. Those in the top 5% will be mostly unaffected.

- Most big Linux distros will still use X.org.

- Hollywood becomes more bland because the global market will matter far more than those in United States and Europe, meaning that movies will be pure spectacle with no nuance or themes that will rock the boat.

- Basic healthcare becomes revolutionized and streamlined. Imagine CVS Minute-Clinics, but far more ubiquitous and advanced, with nurses who use computers with AI to diagnose symptoms and consult with doctors remotely.

Predictions

1. Dark silicon will push us even further into heterogeneous computing. Major cloud providers will build their own silicon and proprietary software stacks for things like databases and other common computing tasks.

2. Nationalists focusing on Making their own country great will keep doing nothing about climate change. This will in turn create the inevitable need for people from poorer countries to become climate refugees. This will in turn create even more nationalism and fortresses build around rich countries.

3. The push towards sustainability will come from the economics of clean energy actually becoming cheaper than dirty energy. It is still too late to limit us to 2 degrees.

4. Speciality vehicles will reach level 4 and go driverless. Ie trucks in mines will be totally driverless. Long distance trucks will be driverless on highways and run to depots outside cities where drivers will jump in and take the wheel.

5. Most embedded control systems where correctness is more important than latency and computation/watt will move to Linux from microcontrollers and get a standard software stack. Probably built first by a cloud vendor for IoT devices. Thus making embedded systems will be far less work (and less interesting engineering problem).

6. There (finally!) will be a remote work solution which makes it economical to have most teams remote most of the time. Economical as in the the decrease in productivity for complex (see Cynefin model for definition) problems in remote work will be less than the increase in productivity given by removing commuting and the ability to get the best people no matter where they live. This in turn (past 2030) be the thing that starts to decrease traffic around cities, maybe even start people moving to smaller cities or villages closer to nature.

7. Mainstream microwaves will go solid state and stop making that annoying sound!

8. A standard to electrify roads (highways) will be set.

9. 6G will be released. Will allow sending and receiving on the same frequencies simultaneously.

10. AR/VR glasses will not become a thing for the general public.

11. Remote surgery (with VR glasses and robots) will become a thing where specialists in a few major hospitals will serve smaller local hospitals for specialist surgery. (Past 2030 for it to become the norm)

12. Same with Air control. Smaller local airports will be controlled by air controllers in a few hubs by standard.

13. Tech for the care of the elderly will spawn a unicorn.

14. Meatless meat will overtake meat in a few European countries.

I agree, the prediction is basically; "the status quo will continue"...

1. I believe people will get tired of the daily Twitter war over politics and social issues. I don't think we will solve many or any of these issues, but just the temperature will lower a little bit. Can't wait to laugh ruefully at this one in 10 years.

2. Displaced people, possibly due to climate, will be a major problem and we will be judged by future generations on our response.

3. We are approaching a period where we will start creating new institutions rather than reforming old ones, similar to the wave of land grant colleges or the "alphabet soup" of the Great Depression in the US.

4. I think self-driving cars will be dependent on new infrastructure, and primarily used for freight/mass transportation if they become widely adopted. China, Japan, Korea, and the EU will be leaders on this. I don't believe my car will drive itself down the dirt road to the cabin I visited last summer.

5. I am not convinced the software development profession will go away or fundamentally change (though surface level changes will be endless). Problem solving with code is still going to be a path to a middle class lifestyle.

6. Blockchain/crypto will be a niche thing, but will be interesting in that niche.

I wish all of you good health and happiness over the coming decade! There really is a chance to make it a good one.

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