Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#771

Post by Horba » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

There will be _the_ data leak.

It's impossible to remotely validate who anyone is regardless of provided name, age, birth location, mothers maiden name, social security, previous address, contacts, fingerprints, retina scan, DNA profile ...

This will end the privacy debate because all personally identifiable data will be public knowledge. All private information (stored in the cloud) will be easily leaked due to _the_ data leak. Blackmail will be rampant.

It'll be common to have credit cards and loans taken out in your name. Companies will be inundated with bots and trolls creating accounts. Fintech and government will scramble to prop up the system of trust with government issued ID, which will then be leaked, collapsing the system completely.

The sheer amount of fraud causes a contraction in the availability of credit with impact on the scale of the credit crunch of 08.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#772

Post by rorykoehler » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

cdoxsey wrote: post #374

Here's some 1. Civil war in China 2. A new, significant non iOS/Android OS in mobile 3. Uber/Lyft will gradually shift to a unionized, national taxi company 4. Nothing significant will be done about Climate Change, and it won't matter. Some new environmental issue will be talked about instead. 5. A third political party will become significant in the US 6. There will be a major Christian missionary movement from the…

6. What led you to this belief?

7. I thought the same until I tried the latest gen htc vive pro. Now I predict that half life will be the breakthrough game that makes 2020 the year vr becomes the mainstream, even de facto, platform.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#773

Post by hilbert42 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

2000 was the millennium for those who could not count.

2001 was the millennium for those of us who could.

2020 is the decade for those who still cannot count.

Therefore, I will wait until next year for the third decade of the 21st Century to come around before I make my predictions.

...And such a simple counting error on Hacker News too. Oh dear, oh dear! What next?

__

EVEN MORE ERRORS:

"2020's version of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681"

...And I would add that "2020's" should not have an apostrophe (it does not need it, its use here shows ignorance and adds nothing but confusion)! [It is no wonder that so much of the world's code is buggy when programmers cannot get the most basic and simplest syntax correct. Right, it's logically incorrect to add an apostrophe here.]

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#774

Post by bracobama » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

My 2030 Predictions:

1. The Non-proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons finally collapses as a mass exodus of non-nuclear weapon states leaves in favour of the TPNW, forcing the hand of the the Nuclear Weapon States and their allies to accede into the legally binding treaty in order to curtail further nuclear proliferation events.

2. Trump gets a second term.

3. 'America first' mentality continues to have repercussions as Sino-American Cold War escalates. Allies under the nuclear umbrella worry about the credibility of US security guarantees as fears and anxieties over a 'Thucydides trap' begin to take hold. U.S. reassures its allies but when push comes to shove, fails to intervene, sending out a signal to those remaining in the alliance that they lack credible commitments.

4. South Korea will finally obtain sovereign nuclear weapons capabilities as the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula falls flat from continued DPRK aggression. Japan, despite a historically strong public opinion against this class of weapon, may eventually do so as well although much of this will depend on how vulnerable it feels.

5. Hybrid warfare will continue to define 21st century military strategy, with attacks on critical infrastructure targets such as power, water, and sewage systems taking major cities offline for weeks at a time. The lack of attribution will make retribution difficult and countries will begin to point fingers at likely adversaries.

6. Government surveillance becomes omnipresent in most developed societies. You don't watch the internet, the internet watches you and does so through a variety of technological mediums you invite into your lives, all in the name of convenience. Of course this is already happening, but in the next decade it will be taken to its logical conclusion and the majority of people will begin to understand the relationship between privacy and consumer-grade technology, namely the fact that the two are mutually exclusive. Which brings me to my next point.

7. Dumb phones will be a lot more popular than they are now. I'm talking 2000-era 3310s. You already see senior intelligence officials carrying around decades old phones for communication. They don't do this just because they like playing snake.

8. Vertical farming of cruciferous vegetables will be commonplace and most major supermarket chains will begin growing their own to sell to consumers.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#775

Post by makaimariano » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

- major military conflict between US and China breaks out, but nuclear weapons are not used

- America’s formal military alliances are significantly disrupted and at least one state outright leaves NATO

- after progress in self driving cars slows, industry shifts focus to low-hanging fruit: fully-autonomous trains and planes

- Jai has greater marketshare than Rust

- JS is the overwhelming language of choice for frontend web development

- no measurable technological unemployment. longterm unemployment increases but is entirely due to political and economic factors

- more people play games on traditional game consoles than VR headsets or cloud streaming

- minor AI breakthrough that does not utilize neural networks

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#776

Post by atarian » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

Browsers will start to hide the URL bar. Essentially, they'll become like app stores where you can only visit trusted apps like Amazon or Gmail. Discovery will only be possible via search; as a result companies like Apple and Amazon will invest in their own search engines to compete with Google.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#777

Post by eutropia » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #767

jb775 wrote: post #482

1.) As quantum computing advances, there will be at least one successful 51% attack on a major cryptocurrency. 2.) Tesla/SpaceX StarLink will become a major competitor in the ISP space. Most transmitted data throughout the world will touch a StarLink satellite. 3.) Financial downturn/semi-recession in mid-late decade primarily caused by excessive corporate stock buybacks artificially inflating stock prices. (Stock bu…

> Tesla/SpaceX StarLink will become a major competitor in the ISP space. Most transmitted data throughout the world will touch a StarLink satellite. What makes you think this? It’s hard to see anyone ever using satellite as backhaul except where strictly necessary; fibre will always win there.

Speed of light in fibre is 40% slower than in a vacuum. SpaceX is planning on funding expansion by selling lower latency connections to London-NYSE traders.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#778

Post by misiti3780 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #112

In no particular order (mine are more US focused because I am an American) - Electric car prices will continue to go down, there will be more electric cars than gas cars in 2030 - Bitcoin and blockchain products will turn out to be basically useless. there will be no huge blockchain successes in the next 10 years. bitcoin mining will need to stop because of climate change - there will be more "brexit" type events in…

just curious, why did i get downvoted? my anti-bitcoin prediction?

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#779

Post by BenoitP » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

1. Hardware: The only way to get more performance will be to adapting it to the workload. We're going to see a lot more special purpose chips. "Managed Language Chips" with hw accelerated garbage collection. The Map operation of BigData's MapReduce will be executed in-place in RAM with vast parallelism. RISC-V will have picked up steam and start chipping away in open-source mode at the Intels and NVIDIAs. Stacked computing will be a thing. There will be a lot of new letters in front of 'PU' (CPU, GPU, TPU, ?PU). New kinds of jobs will be created to help people navigate this jungle. Compiler infrastructures will get messy. It will be a Cambrian explosion of new architectures.

2. Software: All languages alive now will stay that way. PHP still feeds the family now, it will continue to do so. FORTRAN will still exist. Some new languages might come mainstream, but only because driven by external factors (Hyperscaler behind it, or the only language for a specific piece of hardware)

3. Money: Globalization will deepen. It will get better for the very poor and the very rich. It will be getting worse between the 5th an 95th percentiles in developed countries.

4. Quantum computing will still be 10 years away.

5. There will be a 2008-like crash before 2025. It will come from excessive corporate debt; and will lead to massive consolidation and monopolies, as neither US nor EU nor China want to be the first to crack down on their champions.

6. There will be two 2017-like speculation bubbles on Bitcoin.

7. Still no AGI, but increasingly pervasive machine learning presence in every bit of every system. People will understand and interact better with ML models.

8. SpaceX crash-lands something on the Moon (before the first half) and Mars (after the first half).

9. No major blockchain-based success, but some industries will have been helped and transformed by starting to operate with automated contracts defined in publicly available code. (ex: parametric insurance)

10. Large scale video games will appear. 100k users will be able to play closely to each other in realtime fashion (unlike in WoW where they can be at most a few 100s in the same place).

11. Close to 2030, with the help of DNA editing, China will release a deadly virus that targets lactose-tolerant humans, starting WWIII.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

#780

Post by brd » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

callaars wrote: post #748

air7 wrote: post #132

Here are mine: 1. Still no level 4/5 autonomous cars anywhere in sight. The promise of being "just around the corner" fizzles down and people just forget the hype. 2. Same with AI. The panacea hype dies down. No AGI at all. No major job losses due to AI automation. 3. Facebook (the SN) still exists but ages along with it's current user base. i.e it's the "old people's" SN. Facebook (the company) is still going strong…

> 9. Global carbon emissions are not reduced, mostly because of lack of initiative by China and 3rd world countries. Per capita, it's not the "3rd" world countries that are polluting, but the "1st" worlds ( https://cotap.org/per-capita-carbon-co2-emissions-by-country... ). I'm sad to see someone still referring to countries as "1st" and "3rd" world, as that's an incredibly outdated term. Also to refer to China as a "…

China is 2x the emitter that the US is and it's going to get worse. China has more than doubled their per capita emissions in the last 20 years. Many other countries will follow suit.

The US and other more developed economies are plateauing in terms of emissions per capita. While there's ample opportunity to begin to claw back those numbers, it is not where the problem lies moving forward.