Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

My prediction for the next 5 years: Facebook and Google will face antitrust cases and will be regulated

Politics:

- Trump will get reelected, but the next US president will be a democrat.

- In Europe, although the last 10 years were led by the rise of extreme right and conservatives, socialists and ecological parties will take the lead in most countries.

- China will keep being very conservative and totalitarian and most people will just accept it. As the economy keep slowing down there will be more dissents, but there will be no civil war in this decade.

- China won’t be able to fix its global lack of soft power, except in Africa, and the belt and road initiative won’t be a success.

- I’m going to be bold and say that Xi won’t be reelected in 2022, however he will stay close to the power in the shadow and his successor will follow the same tracks.

- Hong-Kong will keep having it’s own system like now. There will be more protests against incoming pro-Beijing bills.

Environment/Energy:

- There will be only few consequences due to global warming in this decade : more forest fires, a few more species will disappear, but no massive sea-level rise, no big population move, no infrastructures or agricultural lands in danger.

- There will be much less skepticism about global warming and climate change, but some people will embrace it and even try to accelerate it, mostly for profit.

- There will still be plenty of oil reserves, but, as the demand lower, and the extraction becomes harder, prices will greatly increase in the end of the decade, accelerating the rise of electric and fuel cells vehicles.

- The public opinion will increasingly support nuclear energy, both fission and fusion

- There will be no breakthrough in fusion in this decade, but major advancements like the completion of ITER

- However, photovoltaic panels will keep becoming more efficient and profitable, greatly increasing their rise.

- The rise of air travel will be mitigated by the rise of rail, especially in China.

- China will keep moving to renewables at a slow/moderate pace in the first half of the decade, but foreign policies like the EU border carbon tax will force them to accelerate.

Technology:

- There will be growing concern about people’s privacy, even in China (where nobody cares now). There will be many software/devices sold to help protect privacy (like some kind of masks or special clothing to avoid facial recognition)

- Supersonic commercial flights will appear again in the second half of the decade, and people will very slowly adopt them as they become cheaper and more convenient.

- US and… Africa will mostly use their phones to pay commodities by the end of the decade, many people in Europe will be reluctant.

- China will launch its own cryptocurrency and it will be greatly adopted, but only in China. Cash won’t disappear anywhere in the world though.

- No human will walk on Mars in this decade.

- Space-ISP like Starlink will be a niche market, eventually failing.

- Gene-editing experiments on humans will keep being publicly blamed and governments won’t encourage them (even China)

- There will be many level 4 autonomous cars on our roads in 2030, but not level 5.

- We won’t have incredible I-Robot kind of AI, but the one existing will be powerful enough to depreciate several human jobs and will require political changes.

Misc:

- Fully remote jobs will keep increasing and more people will prefer living in mid-size cities or in the countryside

- Population in Europe will start decreasing

- These 2 predictions will lead to a decrease of the real estate market in big European cities.

Many things about China, because I’m living there (although I’m french). I tried to not be too safe and kind of specific because I like to play. I hope many of these predictions won’t come true.

Sounds like a Chromebook. However there is Linux App support now inside of a container... So you could run VSCode, Node and Yarn on a Chromebook now or install GIMP.

Here goes my prediction:

1. The environment will go even wilder, creating unbalance across continents. Major migrations will take place into cooler regions. This will probably create internal conflicts in the host country and the rise of extremist parties and conservatives. People will be divided based on their interests and will be globally available while not knowing each other's neighbors.

2. AGI will not happen, but AI will be an integral part of human life, solving problems at speed and precision. More tech stacks will be developed that allows people and business to automate mundane tasks.

3. The world leaders will not work on climate change and the fuel prices will soar up. Alternative energy sources will not be the major player in the industry but rather a flex point for the riches. Amazon will lose up to 20% of its forest area, impacting the environment even further.

4. The economic disparity will create a social conflict across various regions which will ultimately create a huge shift of wealth to the general public. Thus, booming days are coming where people will be able to earn and spend on medical bills, education, and entertainment without going broke.

5. Technological advancement in distributed computing, AI and data science will allow businesses to solve, and create tools across several verticals. Thus there will be huge growth in the agriculture, manufacturing and processing industries.

6. Biotech will be the trending topic. Immersive VR will be a thing, where one can feel the things in the VR.

7. Display technology will change for the first time in later half of the next decade. There will be emersion of mixed display technology. Mobile devices will be the thing of the past, however, people would still be using it.

8. People will be even lonely.

9. Quantum Computing will enter the discovery phase and will be available to local publics too.

10. Web will have a rapid change and will be designed to support AR stack and VR stack.

11. Parallel computing and parallel algorithms will be mainstream and new kind of programming paradigm will emerge.

1) Significant increases in payment/banking technology (ease and speed of transfers, primarily) and the continued erosion of cash in society. There's too much low-hanging fruit for the status quo to continue. Cross-border transfers may continue to be problematic, for political reasons.

2) Continued improvements in VR will result in first-generation serious attempts to replace business flying with virtual meetings, by mid-decade. Serious adoption will start by the end of the deacde, as issues such as eye contact, body tracking, processing power, and sufficient network bandwidth are solved.

3) In the absence of regulator intervention or government initiative, a FAANG will begin to make serious investments in digital provenance / trust. Ultimately the value of network effects is undermined if new connections cannot be trusted. Initial attempts like Login With Google/Facebook/Apple, combined with a stranglehold over messaging, will morph into fuller identity-management products with implications for contracts, reputation checks, and more.

4) Increasing geopolitical instability will have no effect on global markets. Trade will prove to be the new nuclear bomb - MAD will prevent global powers from going to war.

5) Political pressure for economic solutions for the poorest classes will continue, whether for UBI, guaranteed housing, what have you. Aside from isolated experiments, no financial commitments by government will be made and economic desperation will continue. In the United States, cheap "bread and circuses" (food stamps and streaming) will continue to serve as an effective tamper on revolution. The private sector will continue to experiment with remote work, to deal with continually rising cost of living in urban clusters, but dramatic, industry-wide changes won't happen until VR advances materialize.

6) We will see a serious PaaS emerge for Kubernetes that is sufficient for 80% of LoB development, that will continue to bury traditional ops roles for most companies, and do more for NoOps than Lambda and similar FaaS.