Ask HN: In the next 5 years which markets will grow the most and why?

I think the nature of these revolutions is that they happen slowly but invisibly until one day all of a sudden everyone is aware of them. I wrote "AI", but it's not just AI, it's a lot of things that are coming of age.

Some "Minimum wage jobs" are disappearing -- a local fast food joint now has about 1/3 of the employees it had a couple of years ago: they have better automated machines in the kitchen, and a smart ordering kiosk that most people use (though there's still a person at the register, for people who are uncomfortable with the kiosk or requests that are not available through it).

Translators, as a job, have almost disappeared (relegated to those needing "an official translation"). That happened in the last 10 years, starting with an awfully funny and weird altavista or google translate that would give you results that could only be meaningful if you had some familiarity with both languages - down to modern translation which, while not perfect, is readable and understandable.

Professional photohgraphers for newspapers used to command a $3,000/day salary just 10 years ago. Now it's closer to $300/day, if they can get it at all - because there's already someone on the scene, with a smart phone camera -- the pictures are horrible, but people are willing to give them for credit, so a photographer is unneeded.

The army of people working for Google/Facebook/Amazon to moderate user content, is being decimated.

It's started to happen to lawyers; It's not prevalent yet, but it is eating the more "mechanical" parts of a lawyer's job - finding relevant historical cases and summarizing them. Computers are now slightly better than the interns that used to be assigned to these jobs. In 5 years, they might be better than the experienced partners at these kinds of jobs.

It's closer than most people think in many, many jobs. Truck drivers will likely not be completely replaced in 5 years, but their jobs might change to "24 hour shifts" in which they are allowed to sleep until the automated truck wakes them up to deal with some condition.

You know, writing down what's in a picture, was almost sci-fi 10 years ago, and right now you have Google, Microsoft and ClariFi offering this as a cheap API.

I'd like to see the opposite of admining your own custom stack on vps or cloud instances. What I want is a really full featured walled guarden where compute storage and bandwidth are all metered and you just pay for what you use. Super cheap if you can live within the constraints. I'm talking mainframe style web app hosting, one giant server, you pay for a slice. No admining or provisioning of instances required.

Wrote a whole long response beginning with "my gut feeling is that markets are driven as much by politics as technology so Hacker News may not be the place to ask." Then said, man, that sucks.

I'm hoping for a market to end all markets, where the product is money. You sign up with a company, it pays you. All anyone wants is cheap, cheaper, free. Getting paid tops that.

So maybe solar panels are just getting competitive, but getting paid to put them on your roof, that's hot.

Turo is hot.

Universal basic income is hot. Maybe politicians don't have the imagination to make it happen, but we do. Secretly every employee in the world yearns to load the part of their job that even a monkey could do into a spreadsheet, go home, and still get paid. Given the permission to automate our own jobs, we’ll do it gladly and in large numbers. The only thing stopping us is really really, ridiculously rich people, and people with no imagination. Somehow we have to find a way to pay them as well, and keep paying them, no matter how much they don’t want to get paid.

That would be IoT.

It's quite smart what Transferwise are doing.

When a transfer is made from country A to country B, the money gets first transferred from the sender in country A to local Transferwise account in country A (avoiding fees and conversions). Then they send the money from local Transferwise account in country B to the recipient in country B (again avoiding fees and conversions).

The magic is how they ensure that the local Transferwise accounts in each country have enough money to do the transfers. They own a bank account in every country they operate in, and the money flows between those bank accounts. They need to move money between their local accounts in each country while minimizing the amounts transferred, but also minimizing the fees and conversions. When they actually move the money is up to them, they just need to ensure they have enough on each account. I guess there's a lot of variables to optimize for, and it would be interesting to know more details of the process.

I've also seen a company called Azimo trying to do a similar thing, but I haven't tried them yet.