Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

I.e. self driving Ubers will be geo-fenced to suburban areas away from unpredictable city conditions, and used for local deliveries (think pizza, uber eats) and perhaps long-haul highway trucks (which pretty much drive straight for fifteen hours anyway).

Self driving in every consumer vehicle will be in the 2030s.

Probably true for Windows and Mac. Meanwhile, Linux and BSD people will still be arguing GTK vs. Qt.

Curious, why?

100%. I doubt *nix apps will change much. But you DAWs, photoshops, and microsoft words will no longer exist on the desktop.

-Self driving cars will become a thing, but the technology will never reach level 5 autonomy. It will turn into a level 4 rideshare model, like Waymo's current experiment in AZ. It will be popular but most will still own cars.

-We'll get a least one black swan technological development that will become huge.

-Mores law finally dies. We'll get just a few more turns of the process improvement wheel before it halts and it will be just enough to enable a bit of computing on ambient energy (thermoelectric?). The cost will continue to decrease, becoming a small fraction of the manufacturing cost for many new smart objects. This, plus 5g is going to enable the next phase of IOT, the "smart everything" phase.

-Spacex is going to successfully get it's starship off the ground after a few more failures and embarrassments. It's going to be not quite as awesome as originally promised, but will still set us up for big advances in space exploration in the 2030's. No Mars footprints in the 20's.

-Mobile VR similar to the Oculus quest is going to be the must have consumer tech of the decade. There will be killer social apps and in 2029 I will have a remote meeting with my co-workers in VR that feels nearly as good as an in-person meeting. Business travel purely for meetings is going to start to be viewed as an unnecessary expense.

-Electric cars and green energy are going to continue to grow, but still nowhere near enough to make a dent in fossil fuel use and we will end the decade in even deeper climate trouble than we are now.

-China is going to continue to perfect it's special brand of techno-autocracy and it will be exported to countries around the globe, creating a significant global power block rival to western liberal democracies.

-We're going to discover a kind of systematic information rot on the consumer click-driven internet where by the information quality over time trends towards zero. Truth will be indistinguishable from fiction and all news sources will be equally suspect.

-Our phones are here to stay, but are not going to be much different at the end of the decade than the beginning. The foldables are not going to become mainstream. They might all be port-less though.