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Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

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621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#621
post #517

Deglobalization -- In the US, we're about to be forced to rebuild all the manufacturing we outsourced since the 1970s. It's not going to go well for thos countries dependent on imported food or energy. It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them) Energy Blindness -- We'…

"Next year or two" is extremely unlikely. The US is absolutely no going to switch back to a manufacturing base. It's only attempting to gain leverage against adversaries when it comes to critical supply chain components. China is all but guaranteed to see slowing growth compared to the past 40 years simply because there aren't enough farmers left to exploit for cheap labor and living standards are already so much hig…

But critical supply chain components are more frequent than people would like to think. In a period where sea freight becomes less stable, it's not a question of 'what goods can we not live without' but 'what goods can we not live without if delivery isn't stable and regular'?

The U.S. is already losing sea hegemony. This was a key piece that enabled globalization to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#622
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any genetic basis for intelligence: if there was, then you would expect that the offspring of the geniuses we had in the past to have an higher chance at being extremely intelligent than other people. But this doesn't seem to be the case, as you usually never hear about the sons or daughters of such geniuses, as they seem to be like other "normal" people in most cases. I admit I'm not bringing…

There certainly is a genetic basis for intelligence. It's not even something that's up for debate academically, there's a mountain of evidence for it. We even have identified specific genes that play roles in intelligence. Almost every human trait is partially heritable, and it would be very surprising if intelligence were an exception (considering there's considerable variation in intelligence and it's very importan…

From the Wikipedia page that you linked: "There has been significant controversy in the academic community about the heritability of IQ since research on the issue began in the late nineteenth century" "explaining the similarity in IQ of closely related persons requires careful study because environmental factors may be correlated with genetic factors." "The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood. However, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease are known to have lifelong deleterious effects" "Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[10][11][12][13] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups" And it continues in a similar way, so there is some genetic basis, but at the same time epigenetic factors seem to matter a lot.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend is to de-scale it, most probably airplane tickets will get even more expensive (I'm talking about things here in Europe), not to mention accommodation. It will suck for countries like Greece or Spain, which depend a lot on tourism money, but there's not much that they can do about it.

That's not really solving it, that's just adjusting the point on the pricing curve. That means an increasing amount of unmet demand right?

And that demand will just get met at the next cheapest destination. If they can't afford to fly to dubrovnik they will probably just vacation somewhere else they can afford to versus not go anywhere at all.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only a problem is there's a clear mapping from detectable genetic feature to an expressed macro-feature like intelligence. My (admittedly limited) understanding is that each detectable genetic feature has a whole panoply of effects, some of which wont' be apparent at birth. Selecting for intelligence through specific genes is like to also be selecting for weak bones, reduced longevity, or other unpredictable…

This has been out of the box already for a while. You can literally have your embryo commercially screened for intelligence, height, and other complex traits today

Has it been out of the box long enough to validate that the adult versions of the embryos exhibit the traits that they're supposed to? Is it a noticeable intelligence boost? For example, a standard deviation higher IQ as measured by Raven's Progressive Matrices, compared to siblings from un-screened embryos? I read enough about biotech and biohacking that I feel like I would have already come across reports if this really works, but maybe it's very recent.

I read Gwern's "Embryo Selection for Intelligence" a few years ago:

https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection

Near future possibilities seemed pretty limited based on that review, unless the reasoning was incorrect:

As median embryo count in IVF hovers around 5, the total gain from selection is small, and much of the gain is wasted by losses in the IVF process (the best embryo doesn’t survive storage, the second-best fails to implant, and so on). One of the key problems is that polygenic scores are the sum of many individual small genes’ effects and form a normal distribution, which is tightly clustered around a mean. A polygenic score is attempting to predict the net effect of thousands of genes which almost all cancel out, so even accurate identification of many relevant genes still yields an apparently unimpressive predictive power. The fact that traits are normally distributed also creates difficulties for selection: the further into the tail one wants to go, the larger the sample required to reach the next step—to put it another way, if you have 10 samples, it’s easy (a 1 in 10 probability) that your next random sample will be the largest sample yet, but if you have 100 samples, now the probability of an improvement is the much harder 1 in 100, and if you have 1000, it’s only 1 in 1000; and worse, if you luck out and there’s an improvement, the improvement is ever tinier. After taking into account existing PGSes, previously reported IVF process losses, costs, and so on, the implication that it is moderately profitable and can increase traits perhaps 0.1SD, rising somewhat over the next decade as PGSes continue to improve, but never exceeding, say, 0.5SD.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#625

Possibly nuclear fusion. Everybody's still conditioned to respond with the "30 years away" meme, but it's getting serious venture funding because all sorts of enabling technologies have made it a lot more feasible. Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026. Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all…

Great piece from Bloomberg on funding of modern fusion tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp6W7g9no0w

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#626
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any genetic basis for intelligence: if there was, then you would expect that the offspring of the geniuses we had in the past to have an higher chance at being extremely intelligent than other people. But this doesn't seem to be the case, as you usually never hear about the sons or daughters of such geniuses, as they seem to be like other "normal" people in most cases. I admit I'm not bringing…

There certainly is a genetic basis for intelligence. It's not even something that's up for debate academically, there's a mountain of evidence for it. We even have identified specific genes that play roles in intelligence. Almost every human trait is partially heritable, and it would be very surprising if intelligence were an exception (considering there's considerable variation in intelligence and it's very importan…

Heritability is much more complicated than message board debates make it out to be. Here's a pretty famous Ned Block essay about it:

https://bostonreview.net/articles/ned-block-race-genes-and-i...

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#627

Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric. First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reaso…

“Halving” vehicles has been possible for long time, also seen it mentioned numerous times over the years. Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society.

As for the RV, you still need parking and most people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most cities are already strict on RV living, especially long term local RV living; if it became even more popular, they would become even more strict. RV also are impossible to insulate, as a result, frequently follow the weather; majority of people don’t want to be constantly driving around to find and adjust to a new location.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#628
post #284

General 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…

You could probably get some naive people to invest in such a thing, simply because people want to believe in it. In this way, it may be the next big VC scam.

Never going to happen though. It's much more economically viable and simpler to have the servant class perform the kind of labor any general purpose robot could do.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#629

I don't know about "big" in terms of a viral hit, but in terms of what will change in our day-to-day experience... Here are some wild guesses, mostly along the theme of a societal conversation about and re-thinking of "sustainability" on nearly all levels. * Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bik…

Robotic carts following you around with your cargo are already here honestly. Go to a golf course these days.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#630
post #214
post #191

Lab-Grown Meat. Potentially revolutionary impact on reduction of animal suffering and climate change.

I think before lab meat, we're going to see an explosion in both volume and diversity of plant-based meats. Discount chains in Europe and NA are jumping on the bandwagon and creating all sorts of plant-based products and bringing the price way down - already cheaper than meat sometimes. Plant-based raw materials are the cheapest, we just need to improve processes and scale up. And unless governments increase meat sub…

Plant based raw materials are often cheapest, but unfortunately the plant based meats are often far from being raw material and are highly processed. Expensive too.
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