Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

- Autonomous cars are mixed into regular cab/rideshare traffic, with percent of fleet varying from city to city depending on weather, consistency of markings, construction, and so on. The world is not fundamentally changed, but long cab rides are now cheaper, contributing to a further decline in car ownership.

- Deep learning has two-ish major new advances that keep the AI hype going for a while, but then it peters out. One of these advances is in style transfer and/or ML-assisted rendering, and it's very cool.

- Nothing happens with cryptocurrency or blockchains. At least one blockchain-enthusiast reading this in 2030 thinks I'm wrong because they have a sufficiently incorrect and overly broad idea of what a blockchain is.

- VR doesn't take off, but has consistent enthusiasts and occasional arcade hits (insofar as an arcade game can be a hit). Maybe next time.

- AR doesn't take off.

- Rust is an increasingly important part of drivers, operating systems, shared libraries, and web servers that don't serve HTML. People also use it for applications, games, and web servers that do serve HTML, but in that domain it's more on the level of language with lots of fans like Scala or Haskell than it is a major workhorse language. (Alternatively: somebody embeds a scripting language in Rust macros or something like that and Rust is technically everywhere.)

Biotechnology:

- Gene replacement therapy is routine for certain conditions. Magazine columnists are sure this means eugenics any day now.

- Meat substitutes are mainstream. Major drivers are activism, economic factors due to climate change, the success of Impossible Foods, and somebody figuring out how to market seitan.

Big name tech companies:

- Google's position is increasingly derived from inertia and install-base rather than technical prowess. They have no new major product lines. It's cool to hate Google.

- Facebook the social network is a ghost town. Facebook the company owns four of the five largest social networks. It's cool to hate Facebook, both the company and the network.

- Apple is incapable of introducing substantial innovations, but their public image remains innovative and stylish as they continue to transition to technology as high end fashion brand.

- Amazon has employed violence in a strike-breaking activity.

- Twitter is still growing, slowly, somehow.

Tech culture:

- At least one of the hottest tech companies uses an alternative ownership model, such as a worker owned co-op.

- There's a minor open source renaissance, leading to compelling open source options for phone OS and cloud stacks. This does not affect normal people, but use is widespread among developers.

Geopolitics:

- Global CO2 emissions have halved. Climate change continues.

- Socialist and fascist movements are increasingly common, starting from the equator out.

- A new strain of drug-resistant bacteria becomes a major problem for hospitals. It's not a global pandemic, but it does significantly reduce patient outcomes.

- China is fine (Even if the 2030 thread probably predicts it'll fall apart). As its internal infrastructure matures, China depends less on western countries and more on its investments in Africa.

- The next global recession hits after a major economy passes a large infrastructure/spending bill, improving bonds as an investment. All stock and housing prices drop. The worst hit are precious metals, cryptocurrency, and low-margin VC-backed startups.

Traditional predictions:

- No flying cars.

- You can buy a hovering skateboard, but they're not as good as the wheeled kind. Onewheels or their successors are cheap enough for cool people to buy them, and thus are now cool. Powered rollerblades are available too, where they're not banned.

2/ A low fee payment system will become mainstream, severely undercutting the payment processing networks. (My money would be on centralized, inspired by cryptocurrencies.)

3/ Labeling images for neural nets will become a popular low-skilled job.

4/ Personal email will be slowly forgotten, likely from being so bogged down from corporate communications. It will occupy a similar space that physical mail does today; the occasional really important communication surrounded by garbage that you can't stop.

5/ China will make major technological gains against the US due to their relaxed intellectual property laws and the ability to innovate upon other people's work.

6/ Self driving cars will become common, people will prefer it. It will likely only exist in limited places (i.e. freeways) and be supported by infrastructure changes (machine readable signs, lane makings, and car to car communication).

7/ The ad economy will die down as more end to end encrypted services are adopted. The vision here would be a cell phone company that doesn't sell your location data because you authenticate to the cell tower with a zero knowledge proof. (Ha, implying the telcos could or would replace their infrastructure in the next decade!)

8/ The climate will become a priority in production (e.g. food), with people asking which method is greener rather than which is cheaper. Perhaps incintevized by the government through taxes or subsidies.

9/ A new political party will be created in the US in backlash to corporatism of current two.

See you in 2030!