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

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

#731

Post by pasabagi »

colechristensen wrote: post #704
blinkingled wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing to me how little talk there is about reduce and recycle - with remote work, better city and public transport planning etc if we could completely eliminate the use of cars for the vast majority of the populace we would not need to mine more for batteries, wonder where and how our electricity is going to come from and how we are going to offset carbon. We literally have no vision for optimization, we just…

You can have my car over my dead body. I live in a very walkable neighborhood near lots of public transit. Yesterday someone was shot in the head two floors up. A month ago I watched a racially charged conflict that only didn't end with a stabbing because a dude couldn't find anything appropriate in the unoccupied security desk. A week ago I witnessed a charged situation with a couple of dozen people at a bus stop. S…

I guess one social worker costs about the same as maintaining five cars? What you're describing is not normal, and has little to do with the presence or absence of police. The US has about middle-of-the-pack police-per-capita, for instance, but because it lacks all the supporting infrastructure (social workers, psychiatric clinics, etc), it has really bad violent crime stats.

Shutting yourself off from society is a fragile and imperfect solution - if you look at South Africa, where elites have essentially tried to use razor wire and walled communities to insulate themselves, people's lives are still dominated by the threat and reality of the society they've tried to shut out.

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

#732

Post by pasabagi »

emehex wrote: post #347

I'm not sure enough people are talking about Demographics and population decline, especially with respect to China. Some experts [1] predict that China's population in 2050 will be HALF of what it is today! [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...

I don't know if this will have a huge effect. First, China tends to try and keep people employed even if they're economically unproductive, in places like state enterprises. That means there's a lot of slack, a lot of jobs that could get cut without causing any adverse effects. Second, the trend towards roboticization of production lines is accelerating, is wiping out whole categories of jobs, and the robots themselves are often 'Made In China'. If you go on AliExpress and look at anything from pneumatics, to hydraulics, to electronics, to complete machines for doing stuff like packaging, you'll see it's all available domestically at a bargain basement price. All of these things increase worker productivity. If Chinese factories hit the level of automation you get in US factories, then it won't matter that the workforce is tiny and it's supporting a ton of old people.

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

#733

Post by nprateem »

abrichr wrote: post #5

Conscious realism and the cosmological polytope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813 According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions. The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fund…

> The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.

> from neuroscience to philosophy

> It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.

The Buddha, and every other enlightened person since, only beat him by ~5000 years

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

#734

Post by astrange »

colinmhayes wrote: post #251
ChadNauseam wrote: post #247

Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like. This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes,…

Rich people already have children that are more attractive than average. Being attractive is the biggest signal for generational wealth which reinforces the need for trophy spouses which reinforces the signal and so on.

How is "more attractive than average" determined? "Attractive" to rich people is mostly a status game, which is why the official type of woman that's most "attractive" is a tall bony supermodel, even though that look actually only appeals to fashion designers because they work as human coathangers.

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

#735

Post by astrange »

mr_toad wrote: post #689
GTP wrote: 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…

> I don't think there is any genetic basis for intelligence Clearly there is, or we’d see more Chimpanzees commenting on Hacker News.

It's likely that this is true, but you can't actually prove it because you can't separate genetics from other things that happen before and during the time you're a zygote. Maybe it's having a human mother that makes you intelligent.

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

#736

Post by astrange »

trgn wrote: post #387

I'll propose a more utopian future. The end of modernism and a return to humanism. A realization in the West that fetishizing technology has turned people into widgets. A genuine bottom-up counter movement that already exists today, but will be the mainstream. Man will yet again be measure of all things, rather than adapt to the measure. In practice; things like the triumph of the walkable city; more home schooling;…

We already ended modernism. It ended when GenX grew up and didn't join the hippie counterculture.

If anything, the problem is new generations will be pre-modern again.

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

#737

Post by astrange »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #159
656565656565 wrote: post #135

Population control? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning We will have no choice eventually.

I agree that population control mostly solves our environmental issues. But I don't trust humans to make such collective sacrifices willingly. We're just too lazy, stupid, and selfish. I think the more likely outcome is that reality will control our population for us, via drought, famine, war, and epidemic.

Degrowth is false. If we lost population, the environment would get worse - as we wouldn't be able to maintain modern technology, we'd go back to the real bad stuff like coal and wood burning.

The US's total CO2 emissions have been going down for a decade or two now, even after population growth. And no, it's not because we outsourced them.

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

#738

Post by russellbeattie »

Mid-level AI Knowledge Worker Apocalypse.

There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin.

Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs.

These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago.

It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.

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

#739

Post by bawolff »

avel wrote: post #321
b20000 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don’t want to realtime collab. i want to concentrate and get my shit done. slack is a nightmare for example. there is always a fool constantly interrupting your flow.

You might be missing the point. Some examples of realtime collaboration in the world of remote work can be: google docs / sheets, project boards (trello, miro), whiteboarding (jamboard, zoom), design/drawing, or even coding (VS code sharing).

> even coding (VS code sharing).

Damn that sounds terrible. I'll give points for google docs, but i am unconvinced by the rest.

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

#740

Post by sterlind »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #247

Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like. This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes,…

So Gattaca, basically. I don't want to live in Gattaca! Society would start pressing people to conform at the genetic level, like a micro-targeted kind of racism - not (just) directed at cosmetic traits like melanin or epicanthal folds, but weeding out traits like ADHD, autism, or even non-conformity in general (as much as you can genetically, at least.)

Though, scientists haven't yet found the gene(s) responsible for my genetic disorder, which seems a lot simpler than predicting "intelligence."

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