Ask HN: Which technologies will become important in the next 5 years?

The most impactful technologies typically emerge without too much fanfare. There's usually a small group of people who see the potential in a nascent technology and understand that if certain things fell in place, the technology could be a big deal.

Which technologies are a few steps away from becoming important in the next 5 years?

I wrote an article about this exact topic: https://jonpauluritis.com/articles/10-technologies-you-need-...

I for one am amazed that "video game characters" are stuck in video games and don't come out in forms like:

   * an assistant at the drug store that lives on the screen has the image of a body and can make eye contact with you
   * a 3-d graphic performer that does a sketch comedy act with a human performer that is reflected into a mirror like "pepper's ghost"

Technologies that are ready to "break through" (like the internet in 1994) often exist at a mature level somewhere but haven't spread for some reason. For instance, this 1971 book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Their-Impact-Med...

anticipated that cnn.com would exist around 1981; actually you could read news headlines on Compuserve. France had minitel, other countries had videotext, but there wasn't enough centralization in most places for large-scale online services to hit big until the technology had passed the threshold at which it could have worked by an order of magnitude.

Then it went off like a bomb.

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Cuelang :fingers_crossed:

My particular prediction for Machine Learning and Data Science is its going to become less and less Python vs R vs Julia. and more like the situation we have for for web-servers. Where basically every language has a solid quality webserver. And like how now if your focus as a company (etc) is on webstuff you'll use Node or something with a excellent webserver and will hire accordingly, but if you've got a big team that already uses java to make the desktop application, then you are not going to switch to Node (etc) for your new web offering: you will use the also very good TomCat or Jetty. Similar if you focus on complex modelling you'll use Julia/Python for that and you will just use their webserver libraries to expose it.

The other way round will also occur (and definately already has started but i expect it to be more and more the case.) You are a web-company wanting to do some ML on some data you won't even think of having a seperate Python/R/Julia program, you will just use the Node equivs (which I am sure today are good, but I don't know them). Similar for the desktop applications in Java or C# they will just use their own ML / Data Science libraries.

And just like there is indeed a role for specialized web servers like Node, there will still be case where you do want to pull out the big guns and move over to Python/R/Julia. but those will become rarer and rarer.

I guess you could say it is commoditization of ML/Data Science libraries.