Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

- Climate change will dominate all facets of our lives with politics and science being the main one - Solar energy will become more successful - Tesla will dominate the car industry - SpaceX will land to Mars first an unmanned and then a manned Starship - A new major scandal will come out of Facebook and people will ask for it to shut down - Web frameworks will become even more complicated and a new breed of web developers will be needed - Streaming will present itself as the complete replacement of TV as we know it - Property market will continue to rise - Crypto will have a couple of spike years and then disappear in its current form - We will go back to the dark years of AI - Mexico will want to build a wall

1. Almost all property in every major city owned by Chinese funds. 2. Student loan bomb explodes and universities close. 3. Renewable energy generation becomes the new 'Software Development' for people trying to get rich out of innovation.

1.) Piracy effectively kills independent movies and books. -- Outside of showstopper Marvel, Star Wars, Avenger-esque media, most movies lose money or are rolled up into subscription services. -- However other showstopper type franchises arise as people tire of the same old Marvel universe crap.

2.) Most magazines go out of business.

3.) Because of 1-2 maybe we actually start to do something about piracy and enforce laws?

4.) Autonomous cars only work on the freeway and use mostly commodity parts (cheap LIDAR, cameras). Level 5 driving is abandoned.

5.) AMZN and MSFT grow. GOOG shrinks or stays the same.

6.) FB shrinks by 50%. SNAP, TikTok, FutureSocialNetwork all grow, however a large set of young people abandon social media all together.

7.) Related to 6: AAPL releases iMessage for Android, puts some security settings in there, adds bitmoji, face filters, etc, and kills 50% of all social networks overnight. Twitter is still the go to place to listen to celebrities.

8.) VR is abandoned or is a niche product.

9.) Tech bubble bursts. 300k programmer salaries are gone. Lots of unemployed coders out there. People with generic CS degrees are a dime a dozen.

10.) Hard sciences rule. People with Masters+ in Material Science, Biomedicine, Aeronautics, Mechatronics/Robotics are king.

11.) People that know how to setup data processing pipelines to facilitate #10 are still valuable. As are those who know how to build the systems that robots rely to navigate and manage their work. Specialize or die.

12.) Recession. Reduction in prices of housing, but consolidation of the housing market into the hands of the elites who no longer want anything to do with VC.

13.) Many IT, agricultural, warehousing, retail, grocery, and trucking jobs are lost. IT takes the biggest hit.

14.) Machine Learning is tapped out. No AGI. Insights from Big Data aren't what they are cracked up to be. ML helps discover patterns for drug discovery, helps robots to orient in space and see surroundings, but the logic is still driven by humans.

15.) Crypto goes to 0.

16.) Species loss and human sprawl continues.

17.) "Peak software startup" reached in 2018. Next startups are in medicine, energy, space, environmentalism. This is good. Bad for coders though.

More positive thoughts:

18.) Incredible advances in medical diagnostics. Routine screening (for wealthy people) includes full body MRIs and ML detection of cancer. A Theranos style blood test is invented. Many cancers, if caught early, and maybe alzheimers are manageable medically.

19.) Crispr is still immature and not widely used.

20.) Plastics are slowly being phased out.

1. I gotta say I couldn't disagree more. Sure, there might be some bias in my opinion but the landscape, the technology and the direction the industry is going has changed so much over the past decade I'm not really sure where to start.

Also, have you tried Stadia? If you have a good enough connection it's quite incredible.

7. Not expecting standardization but I'd argue C++ has zero of those. Vcpkg is _not bad_ but _no where near as easy_ as npm. Conan is better, IMO, but again it's so far off from being as simple as npm is for JavaScript.

Modules were approved. I'm convinced someone will be able to take modules, once they're implemented in a consistent manner across compilers, and implement an npm like service. Until then I think a general solution is just not practical.

1. Next economic crisis will break down world financial order because interest rates cannot be lowered and QE is no longer effective.

2. Total meltdown of social & political order in middle east and latin america. EU and US face larger refugee floods like never seen before.

3. European Union dissolves.

4. Internet sovereignty becomes a common claim and at least one of FANNG will pull out of Europe and India