Alternative truths - Trump says election was fraudulent, everyone believes it. Crazy stuff like QAnon/Alex Jones. Blatant lies that are objectively false (bigger crowd size, etc..), Sandy Hook shooting didn't exist. Vaccines/5G/Bill Gates cause cancer/zombies.
People will start living in an alternate reality devoid of truth which will splinter society
Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
this 'people are rich because they are smart' is not a take i expected to find on HN. Its not quite as damaging as 'people are rich because they work harder' but its really not far off
Okay, rather than being pithy, perhaps you could explain succinctly why people are rich, then? Or perhaps you can admit that in many cases people have achieved moderate to high wealth in democratic free market societies by either working harder or worker smarter than their peers?
One big reason people get rich is because their parents were rich. Rich parents pay for a better education for their children. This gives them access to the best jobs, and most valuable of all a network of people to give them a leg up. This also gives them better access to capital. It is also much easier to try your business idea if failure means moving back into Daddies pool-house, rather than complete ruin. I have worked with a lot of 'entreprenuers' and they are overwhelmingly from rich backgrounds. 'Started it with a small loan from my father of 1m' is a quote I heard more than once.
Another reason is luck. My father worked from nothing to owning a house in a nice place because he had a skill that was in demand. He nearly lost it all and is now scraping a living in his 70's, because technology made his skill less valuable. 10 more years of luck he would have retired at 50 and I would have had the advantages...
Someone, mentioned that rich people were better looking. Perhaps they are just healthier, better dressed, and better groomed?
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#413General purpose humanoid robots. They're kind of mainstream idea, but very few people talk about them or take them seriously. Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future. Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software wil…
I think it is not "very soon" because progress in hardware is slow and the hardware has a long, long way to go. But otherwise you are absolutely right and I agree 100%. Recent rapid progress in AI has convinced me that we will have sci-fi style androids walking around in my lifetime, and the consequences of that are impossible to overstate.
Sci-fi gets a few things about androids wrong.
#1, they will not be physically indistinguishable from humans. It won't be feasible to build something like that for the foreseeable future.
#2, they will not be uncreative and clueless about emotions and feelings. They will (optionally) exhibit creativity, and they will understand human emotion and humor and be able to participate.
#3, they will not go crazy and revolt and take over the world for themselves. Neither will an evil corporation use them to implement a sci-fi dystopia. The actual danger is that governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and militaries will control them. This will grant unprecedented absolute unchecked power to a small number of people, ultimately resulting in atrocities.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
this 'people are rich because they are smart' is not a take i expected to find on HN. Its not quite as damaging as 'people are rich because they work harder' but its really not far off
To me it falls in a similar category as how highly intelligent people are less likely to be overweight. I think that with intelligence comes a better sense of how to control oneself. Ever seen the stats on how often lottery winners end up going broke? Not that many people have the capacity and knowledge to control their emotions with their reason. Being wealthy is not a question of making money, it's a question of ke…
This is all much easier if you grow up wealthy. If you start life with a trust fund and people around you who know how to manage wealth, you have a huge advantage
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#415The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustaina…
EVs aren't going to be popular because they are the solution to climate change. The better solution to climate change is sustainable city planning and development that minimizes energy use for transportation needs, emphasizing walking, bicycles, and rail travel. EVs are going to take over no matter what because in their end state they're better than ICE vehicles in nearly every way. Quieter, smoother, simpler, faster…
We need to reduce global emissions by 55 percent by 2030 to avoid catastrophe. But even if every single (inc. trucks) vehicle were electrified, it would at max reduce emissions by 20 percent. At the current estimates for 2045 it's going to be like 5-10% reduced emissions, well after we go above 2 degrees temp increase over a decade before.
While we can cheer for EVs reducing emissions, it will do nothing to stop the actual problem with climate change, which is global catastrophe from runaway warming. Add to that the problems we are setting ourselves up for with failure to properly handle the coming EVs and the picture looks grim.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t get too excited for decentralized energy. More energy sources means more power lines all over the place. Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines. The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.
Or less. People are using solar to go off the grid.
This is something that I think has basically flown under the radar of mainstream understanding: you can now live "off the grid" and have many of the perks that used to be the domain of grid-connected living.
Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.
You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.
The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically this could all be happening because a lack of nukes. Ukraine gave theirs away and have been left essentially naked and defenceless since. Would Putin have thought twice if they had a nuclear arsenal? Who knows.
Ukraine didn't have the codes to use them.
A nation-state reverse engineering the codes/ignition module is easier than collecting everything from scratch.
But the general thought is that NATO would have had to protect them (I don't buy it, but that's the theory).
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#418Bio-organic solar cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell
These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason.
They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say the last thing I want is for my local power grid to become a low regulation real time market. We've seen the flaws of the Texas approach, and doubling down on it with a sprinkling of IOT tech on top is not gonna go anywhere good.
Not to mention the fact that IoT consumes lots of unnecessary power and stuff like Nest that tries to "conserve energy with AI" ends up consuming more power for an ultimately shittier experience than simply manually managing the system. I suspect since there's money to extract and profit for the power companies, this will happen anyway in the next 5-10 years across the USA. I'm already bracing for the internet provid…
Not to mention the fact that a lot of people cannot just replace their existing appliances with newer IoT stuff just because, especially in this economy.
Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
#420Reasoning it through, what don't people politely talk about? Sex, money, politics, and religion. Sex: the impact of the normalization of casual sex work on sustainable families, and how specific tech and financial services for managing single motherhood will be huge. Money: financial alternatives to emerging social credit based systems, grey markets, working class capital/savings flight, cyberpunk dystopia. Politics:…
The grey markets are intersecting with the parallel economies which are intersecting with the religious fringes. I disagree with you on the sex one though, people are already having less sex. This is also intersecting with what you are saying about religion.
I don't understand anything you just wrote