Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

- Electric cars will take a large share of roads, although traditional combustion engines will still be very common. We will see more electric heavy industry vehicles (construction, mining, heavy ship freight, perhaps even airplanes) replace traditional combustion vehicles.

- Self driving cars will be around more, and work well enough that many drivers will hardly be driving anymore. The new lack of focus on the road will create a new set of safety concerns and legal matters.

- We will see many new weather extremes due to climate change. Record breaking temperatures and intense storms, especially along the equator. The sea levels will rise at an increasing rate.

- World will still be dependent on fossil fuels for its energy source, although coal will share a much smaller percentage of that then today as dirty industries move to natural gas. Renewables and nuclear will continue to increase in the share, but still in the minority compared to fossil fuels.

- US becomes more isolationist in world policy as it increasingly faces the inward challenges of multiple nationwide health epidemics that will cripple the country (drug abuse, rising healthcare costs, aging population, mental/behavior health illnesses, poor healthcare education, obesity, diabetes).

- China will lead the world in wireless technology and data processing infrastructure. Heavy data processing is begins to be offloaded to public infrastructure and seen as a public utility.

- China forcefully takes over the Taiwanese government. The western world scoffs, there are some protests in major urban areas. But for the most part everyone moves on.

- A cheaper form of launching payloads into orbit around the earth will be introduced, likely a combination of new technologies and a more established infrastructure for spaceflight, making spaceflight significantly cheaper.

- Mass surveillance by both government and private industry becomes the norm.

- Controversial legal regulations will be created to address the dangers of the court of public opinion and the engineering of social media.

- AI based virtual companions becomes a new industry to counter balance the rise of loneliness, depression, and other health problems.

- Freezing eggs or sperm cells for the purpose of eventual procreation, especially among aging women, will become a new industry.

- The end of cable TV, but the beginning of "cable streaming."

More people convert to bokononism to learn the ways of their flat earthed, astrological antivaxxer forerunners in how to be happy in an increasingly depressing decade. /s

I think flooding is going to be a bigger problem in the near term, especially since the state isn't really capable of dealing with heavy rain or floods.

1. People welcome always-on video cameras into their homes

2. Self-driving cars actually do take off (but are introduced gradually)

3. AR never becomes more than a gimmick. VR occupies a similar place in the gaming market to gaming consoles and is basically unused outside of gaming.

4. Higher education in many areas begins to die and is replaced with online certification programs.

5. After major breakthroughs in pharmacological(?) treatment of depression/anxiety, humans may now choose how happy they want to be. This threatens to shake society to its core, and many are against it.

6. Robots become a lot more common, but think Roomba, not I,Robot

7. The role of CO2 in human mental health is discovered and legislation begins against high CO2 levels in rooms.

8. The death of truth: photo and video evidence are easily faked, and we have to rely on the source of information to know whether or not to trust it, not the information itself.

9. The incorporation of neural-network specific hardware cards into most personal computers.

10. Personal assistants like Alexa or Siri remain fairly unintelligent and limited in scope.

11. After some horrific example of genetic engineering on human babies gone wrong, laws limit genetic engineering on humans to a few limited things like gender, eye color, etc.

12. Scientists discover that perfect pitch can be reliably acquired through extensive practice, despite 2020 "common knowledge". But there's still not really a point to doing so. It's just one of many new demonstrations of the plasticity of the human mind.

13. Some psychedelics become legal in many countries.

14. Polyamory becomes a thing that most people are at least familiar with.

15. Attempts are made to outlaw the use of blockchain-based communication and video apps.

16. A platform mixing the best parts of Patreon and Youtube becomes popular.

17. Universal basic income is implemented in many countries, but not the US.

18. A cheap technological remedy to global warming is produced, and the issue disappears quietly.

19. Moore's law basically plateaus mid-decade. The impressive stuff in computing is being done by different types of computer architectures altogether, like neural-network chips.

20. Boldest prediction: first convincing (but non-conclusive) evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life.