Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
I'll try a couple.
- Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade.
- Ubiquitous computing will finally arrive, with smart cards/RFID on our bodies seamlessly interacting with computers in our environment. As you walk up to your refrigerator, for instance, you're logged in and presented with a customized display. Same goes for the car or the entertainment surface at the Dentist's.
- Flat panel displays will not drop to rock-bottom. Instead, a new generation of 2160 and 3240p 3-D panels will appear for consumer setting. Rock-bottom 10-20 inch panels will stabilize in the 50-100 range and stay there. Sorry, no panel/OLED wallpaper, at least not cheaply in the coming decade.
You guys have any?
190 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadAs for the displays the 30" screens already do 2560x1600, they're still a good bit of money but they'll be affordable within 2 to 3 years (and some people already think they're affordable).
The decade that parallel processing became commonplace
the end of 32 bit computing.
Some unknown manufacturer will make a tablet-phone-musicplayer hybrid and score.
I'd qualify that one, as the "embedded" world tends to hang on to older stuff for a long time. I don't see, for instance, mobile phones going to 64 bit just yet...
So all mainstream machines not being mobile or embedded devices will be 64 bits by the end of the decade (and plenty of those will be too, but you are right, not all of them).
I thought that it was fairly obvious that that is what I meant, after all, we are today also able to buy 16 and even 12 or 8 bit cpus for embedding. But even most mobile phones and pdas are already on a 32 bit platform these days.
I wonder how long it will be before 128 bit is the new 64 bit?
8080 1974, 8 bits, 2 MHz
8086 1978, 16 bits, 5 MHz
80386 1985, 32 bits, 12 MHz
AMDK8 2003, 64 bits, 1 GHz
Only 'x86' parts, if you look at other architectures (for instance 68k) then the dates will be quite different.
The interesting part about that list is that if the clock frequencies had continue to increase I'm fairly sure that the 32 bit model would have been taken a lot further up before going for 64 bits.
So it seems as though the widening of the datapath is to some extent used to offset the limit on CPU frequency.
It's a trade off between performance and storage, and I think we'll probably settle on 32bit for the next 10 years in consumer devices anyway.
Just my 2c
The Windows and Mac OS ecosystems (particularly drivers) need to catch up with 64bit support, currently this is still spotty which is inhibiting adoption. Linux support driver support for 64bit is excellent due to most drivers being open source - but most people are not using Linux.
Also consumer versions of 32bit Windows don't support PAE so only see 4GB of memory (actually 3.5GB after memory mapping of hardware devices) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx
Everybody and their brother celebrated the turn of the century in the year 2000, and everybody agrees on this being a new decade except for the nerds. ;)
I forgot to include that Directed Edge will have a turnover bigger than Google by 2011, sorry :)
(And for the record, I posted that out of humor, not pedantry.)
That's "you're" not "your" :-P
They would have been if Mr Kernighan and Mr Ritchie had been running that project!
Probably we could be there by 2014 though. People always underestimate this sort of thing.
Traditional media won't sit back and watch their businesses succumb to bankruptcy. In its current state social media seems to be overly reliant on traditional media to first do the grunt work. Websites like Newsvine have attempted to create citizen journalism alongside its traditional counterpart and in some special circumstances it has worked, but for 99.999% of stories there's no difference between news and blogging. If traditional media ever feels threatened it will react against social media and without the references to stories that the traditional media brings both will lose out.
Until someone comes along and provides real news and journalism outside of the traditional media newspapers and news broadcasters will continue to make money. In the same way that people still want to listen to the radio when they have televisions I'll still want to read a newspaper on the bus or during my lunch break.
I'd love someone to poke some holes in my reasoning, but I cannot see any way for traditional media to lose out to the Internet.
Big newspapers, for example, don't seem willing to succumb to the idea that regurgitating AP wire reports, the weather, national sports news, craigslist printouts, and Marmaduke strips need not be a part of their identity. All of those things are part of the glorious edifice of newspaperdom. And thus most newspapers will almost certainly hold on to that sense of identity until the bitter end, hoping that one of the many tiny little adjustments they keep making here and there will finally be their financial salvation.
Ultimately I think the vast majority of traditional media groups are just too wedded to their outdated identities to be able to shed their skin and become something utterly different.
Traditional media may still be doing a lot of the "grunt work" today in reporting, but that's already changing incredibly rapidly. And at the rate that independent reporters are sprouting up it may not be long until people stop peddling the line that blogs are just lazy consumers of the news that the traditional media creates (already that is not 100% true).
The thing that a lot of people don't realize is that a perfect replacement for the existent news media does not have to exist in order to "allow" traditional news media to fail. It is quite possible, and likely, that there will be a relative vacuum that will be filled in after the fact, not before.
That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
As for getting rid of managers, that won't happen - and nor should it. In a lot of places there is management when there shouldn't be, but when you're working as part of a larger organization - say, more than ten people and/or three "departments" - good management (by someone dedicated to that role) is essential for success.
Yes I do and I know a case with a document management system created by one developer and one analyst, which is now used by the Government of one country, including ministries and the PM's office. The competing offers for the same Govt were from a few superhuge and well known software corporations, but they all lost it to that application.
but when you're working as part of a larger organization - say, more than ten people and/or three "departments" - good management (by someone dedicated to that role) is essential for success
Actually no. Producing self-contained, self-sufficient software component has, in principle, very little to do with the size of the organization that creates such components. Small departments can be under the same financial roof, but functionally such small groups will become more and more independent in the future I think.
What we think of programming will evolve into using incredible high level scripting languages and frameworks. Programs will be very short.
HN will split.
News for Hardcore Hackers.
edit: also, please, please, ultralight laptops with e-ink screens.
edit2: to clarify the above, cpus are currently tending towards more cores, while gpus are tending towards larger caches. both are trying to extend their area of application into tasks performed by the other, in the hope of more speed over a wider range of applications.
CPU makers getting in to the GPU arena:
AMD bought ATI, intel has announced a CPU/GPU combo
NVidia is going in the direction of more and more general computation capability with their offerings (see the gt 300).
Sooner or later those trends will meet somewhere in the middle.
I predict this will happen as soon as NVIDIA offers a product that has enough general compute capability to run a linux port.
Remember the Weitek and the 387 ?
In the end it's a cost-savings issue, as cpus get more cores they become more and more like GPUS, as GPUS acquire more general purpose instructions they become more like CPUs. Those lines will meet, once they're on one die the 'budget' can be used more efficiently by looking for ways to integrate them more tightly.
There is nothing inherently different about general purpose computations vs the kind of vector processing that a GPU is good at, at the end of the day it is all calculations, and more and more in parallel.
I fully expect that at some point even DRAM will be part of the CPU.
Once you have 'enough' FPU you have not enough memory bandwidth, so you go wider / faster on the memory bus (this is already happening, we are now well over 1GHz on the memory bus), or you place the memory closer to the CPU (also happening, increased cache size).
Then as soon as that is done you now no longer have 'enough FPU', so you go parallel.
GPUs now have almost 250 cores and yet there are plenty of people that use more than one in a single machine (I've seen up to 4 of those, with two dies each for almost 2000 cores). Clearly some people don't have 'enough FPU' yet, and plenty of games would want more effects to add to their engines (which seems to be the biggest driver of this kind of development outside of hard core number crunching).
Increased resolution displays are another driver for more FPU power because once you start shading every pixel becomes the end point of a long pipeline of mathematical operations.
I don't foresee anybody complaining of 'too much FPU' in the next decade or longer, in fact I suspect that once this kind of FPU capacity becomes mainstream that we'll see whole new breed of applications to take advantage of it.
(Of course all my predictions have +/- a couple of years of margin for error)
[EDIT: changed 2010 to 2020, guess I am still in 2009 mode]
Telerobots become commonplace. These will be not much more than a wheeled or tracked base with a pole and holder for a mobile phone. It allows you to visit people in their homes, visit companies or customers, provide some kinds of medical service and carry out inspections of remote sites.
Augmented reality becomes a major entertainment system. You wear something like an EyeTap device and 3D content is projected into your field of view. The device also contains a accelerometers (same as the Wii controllers) to monitor head pose. Highly compelling 3D content, including games, business charts, street directions, ads, and even "adult content" can be interacted with at any location using the headset, which is wirelessly linked to something like a mobile phone or laptop.
The second part of your post is actually the central thesis of William Gibsons 'Spook Country', he calls it 'locative art'.
Maybe it could be better to really split Afghanistan by ethnic boundaries, then there could be hope of building some form of society in one of them. Of course, not going to happen.
I mean, I'm thinking like, silver jumpsuit awesome here.
Was there a 2009 prediction thread we can look at?
Fun website idea: a site where you register your predictions and a date you expect it to happen by, then when that date occurs people can confirm/deny your prediction. And perhaps you could make it a game by assigning points to predictions.
Evaluating the results of that set concludes the following predictions:
-All predictions in the form of "X is going to die" have a >~90% probability of being false. The market tends towards diversification, fellows!
-~90% percent of "X is going to increase / decrease" are non-quantifiable (esp. technologies, and tool usage), and thus have a predictive power of exactly 0.
-Interestingly, there were a single quantifiable stock prediction ("I predict Apple stock goes up a lot."), and it also had merit (a 100% growth in 1 year, how's that fellows?); alas 1 datapoint does not make a trend. (while we're at it, anyone else noticing the 200% growth G produced over 2009?! )
-The rest of the predictions are either non-quantifiable, or have a massively sub-optimal prediction result.
In conclusion, strictly from a predictive perspective, these threads have exactly 0 merit. Have fun synchronizing your agendas :)
This is the one thing I really want to see in my lifetime. Habitable extrasolar planets discovered. The more the merrier. I'd like to see hundreds of them within a 100 light-year radius or so. Enough that it hopefully awakens some kind of long-sleeping drive for mankind to explore.
Contact with some sort of intelligent alien life is the stretch goal :)
It all boils down to one question only: how common are the conditions that lead to life? The statistics of that are that we think that if it is possible it will happen. But that doesn't mean that there will be an evolutionary path leading to intelligent life.
Intelligence is not some kind of 'goal' that evolution works towards.
Alien intelligent life could be as alien as Dolphins are, we really can't seem to do much with that other than prove that they are sentient by some arbitrary measure.
I think that's one of the things that would be so profound about contacting some intelligent life. It would start giving us empirical data on all of these questions we currently have: Does life necessarily evolve towards intelligence, what similarities all intelligent life has, does all intelligent life continue evolving towards some sort of machine intelligence, how commonplace is intelligent life, does intelligent life in the universe mimic any of our previous social structures, like liege-serf system, are we currently being isolated on purpose, if so why etc.
So let's say we find a bunch of planets with carbon-burning industrial societies, but no FTL travel, and nothing beyond that. Is there some sort of limit in place?
I'm not looking for ET contact to answer any questions, but to begin the asking of a whole lot more interesting questions.
My timeline is that Kepler has discovered hundreds of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their suns by 2013. This sets off the public imagination and NASA and friends have the funding to design and launch Kepler Mark II around 2017 though with enough funding it could be faster. Maybe 2023 or 2024 is a more realistic timeline for confirming a planet's habitability to >95%.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1014934... refers briefly to a potential type of oxygen, CO2, water, and methane detecting telescope.
As for the stretch goal, maybe Alpha Centauri does have life. If it does have a potentially habitable planet, we are definitely going to know within five years. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_long_shot/
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/robert_ballard_on_explorin...
It has not been confirmed to have water, but the temperature is right for it and it's otherwise in the "habitable zone." I'd go along with your prediction but amend it to mean habitable by humans - that would be incredible news!
* Microsoft sells large parts of itself in order to be able to focus on its core competencies (just like IBM did)
* Someone will make an actually usable e-book reader.
* During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
* Brazil will become a real powerhouse.
* Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.
* Still no Duke Nukem Forever.
* 'Minimal Techno' will finally die / go out of fashion.
* Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.
* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.
* Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).
* Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
That's what I could come up with off the top of my head. Feel free to disagree / rant / do name calling, this is not a serious thread anyway.
I'm very passionate about reading books and I'd fork out 10-20 dollars a month (maybe even $30) without hesitation for a service that allowed me to conveniently read pretty much any book whenever and wherever I want without having to go to the bookstore / library or having to wait days for Amazon to deliver it while not feeling being ripped off because of having to pay as much for an e-book as for a dead tree one. Here's your startup idea.
I agree. As a result, Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce, the world falls into war, inclusive of even the most pacifist, post-military states. On the upside, a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter moves anthropogenic global warming to the back burner and spawns a generation of Mad Max-style entrepreneurs among the ten-million or so human survivors. Surviving software engineers relish the opportunity to rebuild lost infrastructure "the right way this time"---including a transactional, secure, well-formed, rule-based, semantic world-wide-web---while the less-gifted turn to secondary issues like clean water, shelter, food, energy, medicine, and transportation.
Internecine fighting erupts amongst the software clans over whether certain symbols are separating or terminating and whether or not the name of the god of modification is spelled with two letters or five. The dehumanized masses turn on the dithering software clans and their IT crowd supporters, demanding to have their souls restored from failed exchange, facebook, gmail, and twitter servers. A small nomadic clan clad in denim and mock turtlenecks seeks the legendary Cupertino Stone in the wasteland of New Gorgoroth (mostly between the 85 and the 280), but finds only the unpublished "Objectivist-C Manifesto" and shiny discs inscribed "Dylan DR1".
Also, either Megan Fox or Jessica Biel is nominated for best supporting actress.
Widespread adoption of LISP by developers. (Both of which cause...)
The Singularity! (But, sadly, Ray Kurzweil dies a few days before the Singularity happens.)
Okay, okay, prediction is a mugs game.
Democracy in Iran would be nice. I'm not sure why I need a customised personal display on my refrigerator. Cheaper displays and other computing devices would be nice - as would a stable, clean energy supply to power them with.
Still outside the range of one decade. Call this one "prelude to singularity".
Neither of those would have any measurable effect on how we live, the 'superhuman intelligence' is actually the least likely outcome, at least in the beginning of this.
It might happen, but I don't think it is very likely.
The time frame for proper AI not via emulation is actually shorter, cf Shane Legg's peak probability estimate of 18 years. This is because the mechanisms of learning and processing in the brain are well under way to being understood, and they will lead to copycat software using similar conventional "narrow AI" algorithms. These also have a greater potential than neural snapshots to be scaled up fast.
Unfortunately none of the above helps towards making "friendly" AI (that is, avoiding creating a superintelligence whose value system is inimical to ours). This ought to be a serious worry.
re: singularity: a friend and sometimes colleague who is one of the most far thinking and creative AI people I know is likely to move to China because of their willingness to fund long term AI research. I have a gut feeling that Roger Penrose may be correct that conventional computers may be incapable of consciousness but, quantum computing may take care of that.
Reference: AMD's product roadmap is for the first generation, holodeck in 2016. http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3635
"Carrell believes it'll take seven years to be able to deliver a 180 degree hemispherical display (you're not completely surrounded by displays but at least your forward and peripheral vision is) with positionally accurate and phase accurate sound (both calculated by the GPU in real time). The GPU will also be used to recognize speech, track gestures and track eye movement/position."
Predictions: we'll see a good-sized shift in our political base representing the un/under-skilled and unemployed.
-Technology continues to move toward extending our proprioception as we invent solutions that give us continual awareness of our loved ones, their location, and emotional state as if they are a part of us.
-Tracking your children electronically becomes a social norm to the extent that not tracking them is considered somewhat negligent.
-By the end of the decade, the phone is the personal computer.
-External brain-computer interfaces make progress, and typing begins to be replaced by the end of the decade.
-BPA and pthalates are finally banned from the food and personal grooming categories.
-In the later half of the decade, Steve Jobs realizes he is in spitting distance of toppling the Microsoft business near-monopoly and by hook or by crook, puts out the business apps, email servers, etc needed to finish the job. In spite of this, the transition takes years.
-People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.
-A company makes a practice of hiring experienced older workers that other companies won't touch at sub-standard pay rates and the strategy works so well they are celebrated in a Fortune article.
Edit:
-The technology that will eventually 'cure' cancer is invented--essentially a find and kill tool for a genetic signature. Signature creation is built for more and more cancers and becomes more dynamic with added logic over time.
2. The rise of mainstream functional programming.
3. By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant.
4. PS4 gets something to thrash Project Natal. The death of the PC as a gaming platform.
5. The death of GCC. LLVM/ Clang will replace it.
6. Microsoft tries harder to be the be-all and end-all of all software/ services, and eventually starts losing market share in several weak sectors.
what are you smoking?
So, what did you think of doing ? Now do that!
That was really nice of you.
> Ask HN: What was Microsoft Office?
We can only wish...
19 and 4 are mutually exclusive for a single universe.
Edit: if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
That was really nice of you.
I was going to say: So in 2019, the Pulitzer's continued its devaluation?
Also: A chuckle for "Mark Zuckerman".
(FYI, I am portuguese)
So the point is perhaps that Facebook will make Zuckerberg (where does Zuckerman come from?) wealthy enough to be able to afford a developed yet relatively poor country, some time in the future.
That the example happened to pick Portugal is a funny coincidence (I'm portuguese too). For those who don't know, mocking the country's politics and economy is the all-time favourite national sport here.
(BTW: the source for the numbers was Wikipedia)
And it is a HN-influenced commentary on the habit of predictions themselves. Would that they all be consciously humorous rather than inadvertently humorous.
Google succeed in forcing the mobile providers to be commodity data pipes. They scream blue murder, try to cartel up, but Google breaks the cartel and several big names are forced out of the market.
Ebooks defeat paper books. All high street bookstores go bust. Rampant book piracy throws the copyright war into overdrive. Despite international treaties and draconian law, the pirates win.
Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability, monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential crash in the desirability of gasoline cars, with mass conversion to battery-electric and collapse of the oil industry. Government greenhouse warming policies will continue to be useless, but they'll be eclipsed by events. The big panic will be the overstraining electricity grid. Residential grids were not specced to fuel everybody's car at once.
Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads.
To provide a frank example, look at a car.
It wasn't and didn't?