>5/ A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc. The emergence of decentralized consumer applications will be slow to take hold and a killer decentralized consumer app will not emerge until the latter part of the decade.
The pendulum of history suggests this will occur (at some point), and I hope it happens sooner than later in many respects, but it is also seems like one in which we won't know the triggers/causes/sparks until after the fact, partially because it seems it will take complex combinations of causes?
Anyone seeing possible sparks which perhaps the rest of us aren't yet identifying?
ipfs, dat, zeronet I think are good examples of the sparks you are looking for.
These are outside of the blockchain world of compute/storage as a service attempts that got started suring the ico goldrush and seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
i might categorize protocols (or even combining ipfs and dat as the basis of interesting solutions) as fuel. not sure they are the spark that lights the fire.
maybe that sounds like semantics, so to propose a rough taxonomy of different types of actors:
a. nation state level superpowers
b. nation state level challengers
c. large business / incumbents / leaders
d. small business / startups / challengers
e. individuals / consumers / social groups
f. possibly horizontal groups across combinations of the above
it would seem at least one of those groups would need to believe they can reap move-the-needle level benefits from decentralized internet in order to spark progress?
I agree. They are just modernized torrents with higher usability. The real problem (consensus) still only has one solution: blockchain with proof of work.
Maybe there will be a need for massive computing in remote areas: Antartica, or space. They need a lot of local storage and compute. And they have low bandwidth.
It's kind of like GPUs are in cars right now. You can't drive a Tesla with dumb sensors over the Internet -- you need smart local compute.
So I guess IoT and doing heavy local computation is a technical reason you would need decentralization. I can see that happening for many use cases. I'm not sure if it will happen for the consumer web because centralization is more efficient and the current network effects are so ingrained. Similar to how Windows is still dominant on the desktop, but iOS/Android are perhaps more important platforms.
---
I think major changes in behavior are driven by new hardware -- phones in the 00's, PC's in the 80's, Internet in the 90's, etc.
People have been trying to push VR, but to me VIDEO is the real VR -- more stuff happens there and more people use it. I was chatting with a friend yesterday and observed that YouTube is basically what "SecondLife" was supposed to be. People are exchanging all kinds of valuable information and entertainment on YouTube.
So if you need to process a lot of video locally for some reason, that could be a killer app for decentralization. Just like a self-driving car, although I'm bearish on self-driving impacting the average consumer in the next 10 years. I think it will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates.
Yeah it's probably because I've been watching a lot of YouTube lately, but it feels like there's just a lot more real interaction going on there than on other platforms. It sounds like Twitch is the same way.
One example: I learned how to clean my toilet from this video.
The comments are hilarious... Tons of people having the same "AHA" moment. (Basically you paper mache your toilet with vinegar and wait a couple hours. Old mineral stains come off like butter!)
Compare a google search for "clean toilet" and it feels like a bunch of SEO-infested crap.
YouTube is more like the "old web" where you can get a real opinion on something.
-----
I have friends who cook and that's a whole other subculture of YouTube. I've been watching a good MMA show. And there are programming streams, and pretty much every programming conference has an archive, which is a rich archive of free information (e.g. PyCon, CppCon, etc.)
I don't know what's going on in Second Life now but to me it feels like it's probably not "real life". I guess people want "life" and not "second life", and video is becoming an increasingly large aspect of the former.
Rebutting my own comment: even if you need heavy computation and storage locally, that still doesn't motivate a decentralized network.
I would think of it as control plane vs. data plane. The data plane can be massively distributed in space, but the control plane can still be centralized.
And of course that's how Tesla works, and how software-defined networking works.
The "powers that be" just need to control software updates and the network's control plane (routing). They can remotely manage distributed resources.
So yeah unfortunately I'm not seeing a big motivator for decentralized networks (which can be very, very slow). You would have to have some need for a lot of local video processing but also a whole way to distribute code and software updates.
And right now that's more centralized than it's ever been. I'm not a fan of the "silent, frequent, and huge updates and pop up new TOS" model but that's the status quo.
There will be another factorial increase in, for a lack of a better term, email attachment sizes.
It's still hard to share files that are 500MB in size, and I don't see why. I think it has to do with media companies like Google not wanting individuals to share files, unless it is through them. But the damn will break soon, much like Megaupload changed the scene in 2005.
The spark is already here. I work in a rapidly emerging domain where the trends clearly indicate that traditional concepts of centralized infrastructure cannot serve the required workloads: operational sensor/geospatial data models. Basically, machinery measuring and reasoning about the physical world at scale, often in real-time. Several aspects of these data models (technical, economic, regulatory) strongly indicate a globally federated implementation that allows for fast, decentralized, ad hoc cooperation of storage-dense compute elements at the edge. The aggregate data velocity is so high that the physics of data model centralization is untenable, so there is a certain near-term inevitability about it even though you can make a centralized solution work today.
There is active research into the theoretical and practical design of systems and protocols that will make this plausible. It has no precedent in literature and it is a very non-trivial problem but the sense is that a practical workable design is achievable in the not too distant future.
It is worth noting that effectively managing climate change requires implementing the same kind of data model with similar theoretical constraints. Building data models of physical reality at scale breaks just about every part of classic data infrastructure architecture.
I think we should be asking: What problem does it solve? why is that problem important? and why would someone use that new solution rather than what they're already using.
>9/ We will finally move on from the Baby Boomers dominating the conversation in the US and around the world and Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions by the end of the decade.
And as typical in such pieces, GenX gets forgotten...
GenX is tiny and has failed to progress forward precisely because it is so small compared to the Boomers and Millennials. Also by the end of the decade parts of GenX will be approaching 60.
Gen X did just fine. They created most of what we know of as the internet. You probably don't hear much about them because we've (Gen X -- I'm one) been focused on building new things and not complaining about old things. It's a model other generations should look at and emulate quite frankly.
What you’re perceiving as aging is merely an illusion created in your mind when you look in the mirror. You think you must be aging because most people do, in fact, age.
What you need to realize is that Gen X is stuck in a crack in time that halts the aging process for them. All of them. A side effect of this is that while they can interact with the world and almost be perceived, they actually have been forgotten by the rest of the world.
On occasion a regular aging schmuck will notice a wild Gen Xer and be able to interact with them whilst the Xer is within their field of perception, however these interactions are invariably fleeting and almost immediately forgotten for it leaves the regular person’s body and mind in a strangely exhausted state. Interacting with a forgotten person stresses the body, and so while someone may not exactly know why they wish to flee from this person that seems like another person, at some point the brain sends the neurological equivalent of a kill -9 to end the conversation. It is estimated that about 200,000 Gen Xers are killed a year in this way, but nobody has been convicted since 1. nobody has been able to find the bodies again and 2. Even if they were, it would probably be ruled as self-defense and 3. All memory of the events that transpired invariably slips away from the living.
"Failed to progress forward" - what are you talking about?
The United States - and really the world as a whole - has enjoyed its most prosperous time in all of human history during Gen-X's window of contribution.
Yes. But that prosperity came with a massive balloon payment in the form of climate change. What's label prosperity today will be "Grand ma, WTF were y'all thinking?"
Long to short, the jury is still out on the actual success of Gen-X.
The climate has changed and will change. Some of that change (although I think its a small part) will be influenced by human activity. The Earth will adjust. Humanity will adjust. And humanity will continue to flourish.
A high percentage of the world's population lives on or near the coast. Why the climate is changing doesn't change the effect on these people and the places they live. Dismissing this fact as alarmist isn't going to help anyone.
p.s. Humanity will continue to flourish? Your prediction is based on what, past performance? When Mother Nature's bounty was harvested mindlesssly and shameleessly? That's going to continue forever? Infinitely? Can you share some links supporting such projections?
Really? Honestly I hate generation-based generalizations. Each group is the result of different circumstances and faces different generational challenges.
That said, if anything, a cursory glance at my Facebook feed reveals the boomers yelling the loudest.
I'm not sure if you realize this, but as time passes people get older, and they usually gain experience. Soon, Gen X-ers will be the ones with the optimal experience/dementia ratio.
Also, yelling the loudest is problem the predates human history.
> 4/ Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies, led by China who moves first and benefits the most from this move. The US will be hamstrung by regulatory restraints and will be slow to move, allowing other countries and regions to lead the crypto sector. Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies, will become the dominant capital markets for all types of financial instruments.
People will not start trusting the Chinese government in the next 10 years. If there is a use for crypto here it will be for rich Chinese to evade their government when moving money outside the country as they typically do.
Trust is not binary in the world of finance. It is a measurable quantity and it’s equal to the premium investors are willing to pay. If the market is attractive enough people will invest in the hell.
If there is a use for crypto here it will be for rich Chinese to evade their government when moving money outside the country as they typically do.
That's the real use of Bitcoin. It's why Bitcoin mining is such a big thing in China. It's "exporting". Made in China, sold outside China - that's exporting, and not only legal, but encouraged and subsidized. Buy a share in a Bitcoin mine in yuan, watch your EUR or USD balance build up in Hong Kong or Switzerland.
It also messes up the Bitcoin mining economics for the rest of the world. If you see mining bitcoin as a way to convert CNY -> equipment and electricity -> bitcoin -> foreign currency, you’re willing to operate at a loss. Kind of like how when people launder money they accept they’ll only get 50% or something of their dirty money converted into clean, except in reverse.
> 2/ Automation will continue to take costs out of operating many of the services and systems that we rely on to live and be productive. The fight for who should have access to this massive consumer surplus will define the politics of the 2020s. We will see capitalism come under increasing scrutiny and experiments to reallocate wealth and income more equitably will produce a new generation of world leaders who ride this wave to popularity.
1. China will fall to internal strife of some kind. Still may maintain power, but famine and mass executions / disappearances will occur.
2. we will have further centralization of the internet
3. Solar will only account for 10k Gw
4. Agree that nuclear will make a massive resurgence
5. Gas will still be the dominate power source for mobile transportation, but less so. This is because gas prices will fall.
6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
7. California housing market will collapse due to high electricity prices, lack of electricity and wildfires
10. Meat will be nearly as prevalent today, but wild caught fish will be virtually no more
11. Self driving vehicles will operate in many of the non-heavily effected weather states. Laws will be passed to regulate and exclude some states after fatalities
12. Marijuana will be legal federally
13. Government will start accessing Alexa, Google, Siri recordings and public will be made aware
14. China will start using / building power projection in states it can. Specifically to protect food
I'd bet the farm, all the farms, that your list turns out more correct than the one at the link.
The item on your list I have the biggest issue with is 10. We'll still be catching plenty of fish in the wild (but some places that fish are plentiful today won't be that way) in another 10 years.
Even if over fishing is under control there is still an issue with climate change and everything that comes with it, including ocean acidification, ocean current disruptions, migrations of pervasive alien species, collapse of important local populations (due to the above).
So even if over fishing is not a threat any more, our ocean food source is still at huge risk.
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction. The ways in which modern states can maintain power and suppress their people is overwhelming. China can and has built perhaps the most oppressive totalitarian state ever to have existed. Saudi is diversifying its absurd wealth to resist downturns in oil, and the "first world" is still hapelly grovelling and kissing the rings of that disgusting despot, selling them weapons and propping them up diplomatically. All in all, I don't have my hopes up.
Yep, and the thing is that most Chinese don't even mind the high level of control for the time being. I don't see any significant large scale instability as long as the material quality of life continues to improve for the average Chinese.
This is probably pretty normal historically. People start rebelling not just because of restrictions on freedom, but usually because their quality of life sucks. See what's happening in Hong Kong: they don't like the increasing Chinese oppression, sure, but they also have some serious quality-of-life complaints too, namely with housing prices.
When people are fat and comfortable, they tend not to rock the boat too much for vague ideals.
>China will fall
>Saudi will have a violent revolution
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction.
The truly troublesome part is that predictions about social phenomenon can be self-fulfilling prophesy.
If you basically want to see a bloody revolution instead of a better solution, that actively increases the odds of it happening.
The best the world can hope for Saudi Arabia is the status quo. As authoritarian and barbaric as they are, the problem is, Saudi's internal opposition isn't some liberal freedom lovers – it's much more radical religious fanatics that would turn the country in (in essence) ISIS, but with oil and wealth.
The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.
>The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.
I doubt it. Saud family were interested in fighting the Ottomans, as were the British in WW1, and their interests aligned then. And during WW2, once it was found to provide access to oil, it only made sense for the west to make sure a stable regime was established. The US/Brits support the Sauds in whatever they want to do, and the Sauds provide oil and purchase weapons. Keeps the region nice and unstable for future weapons orders and to prevent a situation like Norway where the oil wealth is distributed to everyone and no longer able to be controlled by a handful of people.
For further proof, the more modern socially liberal Iran was destabilized in favor of a fundamentalist leader by the US for their refusal to play ball:
Who knows what proportion of it is distributed. Money isn’t the only wealth. A high trust society with an open and accountable government is far more “wealth” for the average citizen than getting a check every month.
And if the Saudi king decides to stop the payments or kill you for speaking out against them (see Kashoggi assassination), what good is a few thousand in oil money while the royalty splits the billions with the US.
The PRC's working population peaks somewhere between right now and the next 5 years. By 2050, over 1/3 of their population is over 65 years old. They've been under replenishment birth rates for a long time. Their population pyramid is really, truly scary.
Their highly leveraged economy will not survive at "6%" growth over the next decade. It is not clear that they will escape the Middle Income Trap [1]. They are struggling with zombie companies and transitioning from manufacturing to a services-based economy. Their manufacturing is also being slowly eaten away by countries like Vietnam.
As the PRC maintains its legitimacy through the economic growth that has happened under its existence, a recession could trigger political upheaval or force the CCP to distract the populace, e.g. they might try to annex the ROC (Taiwan and its other holdings) by force. A military conflict in which a large number of one child families lose their sole child would have disastrous ramifications as far as government stability, too.
Given their focus on technology and modernization and massive investment in R&D and STEM education, it is likely that China will grow further still. China’s R&D investment is now at the top of the world about on par with the US. There are also a very high number of capable engineers in China as suggested by PISA results.
A key difference with middle income countries that only earn export income as manufacturing base is that there are quite a few Chinese companies that possess its own technology and brands. DJI, Oppo, Xiaomi are some examples. Many of these brands are not well known in the US but have become increasingly competitive with global brands, at least in some respect, in Asia and perhaps elsewhere.
It might make sense to compare them to Korean brands a while back, with an additional advantage of massive domestic market.
Their forward-looking focus on major industries of tomorrow like AI, EV, and biotech does not hurt either.
It’s all about trade. The USSR was brought down because they had no nations to trade with and refused to play ball with them and excluded them from the world diminishing their growth and power. The key difference this time around is Europe seems pretty complacent to let China keep doing its thing.
>1. China will fall to internal strife of some kind. Still may maintain power, but famine and mass executions / disappearances will occur.
>6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
why do people make these kinds of predictions. they're so uninformed it's beyond the pale.
china and SA are two of the most authoritarian and simultaneously well-funded (effective and efficient) governments on the planets -- we're not talking libya here (let alone syria, venezuela which still stand in their pre-upheavel form). how do you practically imagine either of these things happening? like a superhero comes down and leads the charge?
do you know what it actually takes to organize on such a massive scale as to bring down a state? here in america we can't get enough grass-roots organization for free health-care and tertiary education. and you think somewhere in china is a political mind so brilliant that they'll be able to organize some portion of 3x the population to violent revolution (since they don't have elections)?
Because they’ve never been to China but simultaneously think they knew a lot about China because the news they were fed. Particularly that Chinese people want democracy like Iraqis under Saddam (note: both are untrue).
True for the Uyghurs, but less true for Tibetans. The Tibetan public is largely happy with what has happened under China - it's the deposed nobility who are less excited about it.
The Han Chinese are, by far, the majority. Uyghurs are a small and unliked minority. What makes you think they're going to destabilize that nation? Did the poor treatment of black people in the US cause it to collapse? It did lead to a civil war at one point, and to some turbulent times a century later, but that's only because people in the US actually cared about human rights. I don't see any evidence that most of China's population is too concerned with the treatment of Uyghurs, unfortunately.
Many were alive when the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain fell. That makes such large upheavals believable. The weakness of authoritarian regimes is that by their nature dissention is hidden. Those in charge aren't really aware of how far they're overshooting until it's too late to release some of the pressure. I don't understand Chinese culture or their current situation enough to say whether or not they're in danger but Saudi Arabia certainly seems to have many parallels with other authoritarian regimes that fell to revolution.
If anyone predicted in 1985 that a mere 7 years later the Soviet Union would no longer exist and Germany would be reunited, and it would all happen with essentially no violence, people would have derided them mercilessly.
Monumental changes can happen, and shockingly quickly.
Well, Soviet Union (hence the Iron Curtain itself) were not really _well funded_ anymore when they fell. The system they had in place was completely failing.
Not to me. Soviet Union's fall was a very unique set of events, some unique to the time and sweep of history, some just plain unique. It was a combination of the right leaders, Chernobyl, fallout from WW2 divisions such as the Baltic States Molotov Pact protests, and Solidarity and Lech Walesa in Poland, then the right chain of events over a decade.
Many of those Soviet Republics were very reluctant participants, forcibly occupied with underlying resentment going back centuries in a couple of cases, to WW2 in others.
There seem very few parallels with Saudi or China.
Yeah, when China breaks down again, it will be for very unique reasons, singular for their time and place, and dependent on a few very good or bad political decisions.
The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries were in many ways the opposite of modern China. They were not efficient at all, and their economies were absolutely terrible. China has its problems, but a moribund economy is not one of them.
Fascist states don't need a revolution to collapse, though; they just need to run out of anger and people to oppress. Consider China's attempts to oppress Hong Kong; like with all prior oppression attempts, China must succeed if they want to continue expanding. Given how precarious their position is in HK, it's not a stretch to imagine that they might not be able to reconquer the South China Sea soon enough to ensure continued growth. China's out of places to expand in the west and south, and so it's South China Sea or bust for them. I don't know how they'll collapse, just that they will.
The Saudis are much more comfortable in their position. MBS can and will dangle individual rights for women, one by one, like red meat for the laity. He will garner applause throughout the next two decades for his progressive attitude towards women, even as he is a bloodthirsty despot.
Probably because there is no such thing. The people who vote against them realize that you’re still paying for them via taxes and that you’ll be destroying the entire market.
Destroying the market with the best healthcare research and the market with much of the best academic research shouldn’t be taken lightly.
And in your effort to repeat dogma, you’ve missed mine. Support for a vague notion of nationalizing healthcare. In that article you linked it’s only 42 percent strongly supporting it. The rest is “somewhat” or worse.
Someone who “somewhat” supports Medicare for all doesn’t really like the actual proposed implementation. With less than a majority strongly supporting it, are you really surprised?
It's funny how you can predict this person (even if he doesn't think so) is a conservative that buys in right wing media propaganda. And OP is the opposite but somehow more grounded in reality.
See how he believes 2 lies? 1. The trade war is working. 2. The US government isn't a puppet of the Saudi Arabia. Okay...
I think it’s more likely that the west will collapse than that China will, to be honest. Nobody in the west believes in their institutions any more and the uk and us folded like a house of cards with just the lightest push from Russia in 2015-2016. The economy of the west is still strong for now, but if we continue blindly following this nationalist path we’re going to end up the way we ended after our last dalliance with nationalism, except this time with nuclear weapons.
Time to get off the hype train lad. Whether or institutions are believed in or not they're functioning. The idea that because people and propositions you don't like were elected/passed in 2016 that it must be because of the all powerful Russia is the greatest hype hoax of the last 6 decades (only topped by McCarthyism). We are not on a truly nationalist path in the traditional sense, more a populist path. Nationalists don't tend to value other countries more than their own (Trump & Israel). Nuclear weapons didn't fire during the insanity of the 60s so they'll never fire.
> 7. California housing market will collapse due to high electricity prices, lack of electricity and wildfires
Hope you're right about the CA housing market coming down, but I think more likely is just that Gavin Newsom and ilk get booted out for their failures to reign in PG&E and housing prices aren't particularly effected one way or the other.
Wildfires are generally not in the densely populated areas, so I don't think they'll move the needle much.
It already is decentralized. No single authority controls the routing of packets.
led initially by decentralized
infrastructure services like
storage, bandwidth, compute, etc.
Seems like what he means is that more decentralized services will be built on top of the internet. Services, where you don't know who will provide the service you are buying. And where anybody can jump in to provide that service.
A bit like AirBnB, Uber etc. But probably he means that the rules of those new services will be enforced by protocols, rather then by companies. So I guess Bitcoin is the most prominent example of such a service that is already in existence.
> We will see nuclear power make a resurgence around the world, particularly smaller reactors that are easier to build and safer to operate.
Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.
By the numbers nuclear is very safe but it does have asymmetric risk and most importantly a bad reputation. Next gen nuclear should be a marketing rebrand in addition to new tech. So Yang is right to focus on thorium.
Wish these billionaires with good intentions would invest in marketing to revamp public nuclear sentiment. There’s clearly the possibility of progress given how effective other political campaigns are.
If they really cared they would invest into getting rid of the source of the anti nuclear sentiment: shut down obsolete power plants with unsafe designs. Fukushima and Chernobyl happened because everyone ignored this simple advice. Nuclear power plants are so capital intensive that operators keep plants with known design defects or gross mismanagement running.
Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though? The Banquiao Dam failure killed something like an order of magnitude more people than Chernobyl. And there was the recent Oroville Dam incident which didn't kill anyone but it came pretty close to failing catastrophically.
> Is the asymmetric risk really any worse than hydro-electric, though?
Yes.
You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.
Is there an accepted methodology for calculating risk estimations in these situations? I mean, it's essentially speculation afaict, so how do you put a number on it?
>a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time
That's only with modern risk-avoiding-at-all-costs safety standards. The initial plans for handling Chernobyl, the worst fallout nuclear incident, was to cleanup - which they did - and resettle soon afterward the cleaned up area - which they did not. And now we have that useless extended exclusion zone - a monument to giving in to our fears.
Those plans were made before the incident by medical physicists. They were then modified by the party to suit political realities on the ground. Even the authoritarian URSS knew how far it could push people.
I support nuclear power, however I doubt we will ever see many more reactors built in most countries. The growth of photovoltaic solar power combined with coming cheaper grid scale battery storage is going to wreck the economics for nuclear (including fusion if it ever works).
Check the rate of nuclear power plants being built. It's fallen off a cliff. The people who finance nuclear reactors already think that nuclear power will be uneconomic in the lifetime of any new plants.
We will need at least 3x of that amount (assuming 70% renewables). Even if you can somehow build 50 nuclear plants per year it will still take 21 years to build the next 1050.
There are a lot being decommissioned at the moment too. I'm not sure if that's more or less than the 50 that the World Nuclear Association page claims are being constructed.
It's incredibly unfortunate nuclear has such a bad PR problem, as we need it to get to large scale clean energy. If we had properly invested in nuclear earlier, we'd probably be in a much better position today. Now we need to play catchup.
It was a smart move by Yang to bring up new technologies, which most don't seem to be aware of yet, and provides a way forward through the PR problem.
> Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.
Just out of curiosity, is the latter part of a generation that will begin to die off in the 2020s?
1) Maybe. Or maybe we fuck it up and we are the penultimate generation of pre-Anthropocene human life. Hard to say for sure. So far, the rich and powerful seem to have little trouble selling their property.
2) Automation will not lead to some sort of wakefulness and critique of capitalism, but just more technocracy. The future is Google being too busy to offer you customer service.
3) China will collapse after their attempts to monopolize the South China Sea fall through.
4) Cryptocurrencies as a technology will collapse after several showstopping protocol-level issues are found. Most notably, a team will crack Satoshi's key and steal their BTC hoard, crashing almost all cryptocurrency prices, while as a runner-up effort, another team will successfully demonstrate forgery of high-difficulty blocks with ironic complexity analysis.
5) The various decentralized mesh networks around the globe will each grow to blanket their metropoloi, and some areas will see their mesh networks merge to create massive clouds of ambient connectivity. Disks will still be expensive, though. In fact, I'll predict another disk supply crash due to a natural disaster, akin to the tsunami from last decade.
6) Most folks around the world do not eat that much meat, and no numbers are listed, so I'll instead say that people will continue to not eat much meat. Perhaps meat consumption in USA, China, etc. will diminish, but probably not.
7) India and China step up their national space programs over the next decade, while ESA and NASA continue operating. Elon Musk is still around because of sheer willpower, but nobody else is really privatizing.
8) Already happened. It will continue to happen. The author's really showing off their bubble with this one.
9) Yes, many Boomers are near the end of their mortal coils. Don't be so morbid about it. I'm not sure if this prediction's at all interesting, since any actuary could make the same prediction without a single cup of coffee.
10) Gene therapy will still be sputtering and straining at the end of the next decade. CRISPR with Cas9 will have been long obsoleted, and nothing will have replaced it. There may be a field of genetic programming, though, where people specialize in writing code using DNA; there will certainly be a field of epigenetics which is distinct from traditional genetics.
>7/[...] The early years of this decade will produce a wave of hype and investment in the space business but returns will be slow to come and we will be in a trough of disillusionment on the space business as the decade comes to an end.
I guess this depends on SpaceX's success with the Starship - if a rocket that is made outside a cleanroom and with cheap rolled steel frame proves to be usable means that going to space becomes very very accessible.
Yeah, but space needs to be profitable, not just accessible, for private companies to take over investments. Even as SpaceX fanboy, I have a hard time imagining this any time soon.
Space based internet constellations have a huge resurgence right now, but that's unlikely what the author meant.
(Asteroid) Mining? Even if we already had the tech, such a mission would take decades. Who would accept the uncertainty risk of investing over such long time-spans? That is, if there is anything worthy enough to mine in space in the first place, will that still be the case many years later?
Tourism might be a thing, but enough to bootstrap an entire space economy?
Countries/politicians/billionaires wanting to project power or memorialize themselves still seems like the safest bet to me.
China is not going to provide a crypto version of its currency. The Chinese government is all about centralisation and control. It will go for electronic transactions via a few tightly-controlled banks combined with the elimination of physical cash.
In my view being optimistic about the future is in conflict with believing that China will become the dominant power. There are many concerning signals from China, not least the situation of Muslims and also the surveillance state. There is much we don't know about the true situation of debt, public and private, in China.
>There are many concerning signals from China, not least the situation of Muslims and also the surveillance state.
Why is the situation with Muslims concerning for China? For Muslims and for anyone who cares about human rights, sure, it's concerning, but it does not follow at all that this is bad for China. The US became the dominant power despite having slavery longer than any western nation, and then having Jim Crow laws for a full century afterwards, including during the post-WWII economic boom.
I would argue that, unfortunately, there is no evidence that treating your minorities well is necessary for economic success. In fact, it may be the opposite. Ancient Rome did quite well while having slavery, after all.
As for the surveillance state, here we don't really have a lot of historical precedent. Obviously it didn't work out too well for the Warsaw Pact nations, particularly East Germany, but what they're doing in China really isn't like that.
6 is a big NO. The most part of diseases of this decade are caused by plant based diets. Humans need meat, without it we get sick. B12 can't be found in plants, there are plenty studies that shows how sick we get if we eat ONLY plants.
This is just not true. You're probably thinking of vegans who aren't allowed to have cheese, milk, and eggs. Vegetarians can easily get B12 in their diets.
Vegetarians get B12 from the animal products created from animals which supplemented B12. Everyone is supplementing B12 regardless of their diet, it's just a matter of how many steps removed from the supplement that people seem to think makes a difference (it doesn't).
Vegetarians can eat animal products like milk and cheese, which do contain vitamin B12. "Meat" refers to muscle and other foods derived from animal death, but does not refer to animal products like milk, cheese, and eggs.
In case you are serious, vitamin B12 is produced by single celled organisms. It is found in algal (seaweed) and fermented foods, too, not just animal based foods.
Almost every study about responsible plant based diets shows it has healthier than average outcomes. I say "almost" just as a hedge, I don't know of any.
By all means, eat whatever diet you want and don't feel bad about it, but do it for factual reasons and don't invent facts to justify your preferences.
There are indeed people who have medical conditions that make their life dangerous with a plant-based diet. For people without such conditions (the majority of people), science on negative effects of plant-based diet seems to focus on certain deficiencies (such as deficiency of zinc and iron, or omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acids). These deficiencies can be avoided by consuming specific plant-based sources, such as certain seaweeds for EPA and DHA.
For most people plant-based diet is probably completely safe and when debating this issue, the bottom argument of opposition to plant-based diets usually boils down to one thing: the god-given right or even necessity for man to eat other animals (be it because of it being natural to eat other beings in nature, because "plants have feelings too", or because of traditions or humans dying if they don't eat meat). This rests on ignorance of science, self-centered attitude and violence. Industrial-scale animal production for food is an abhorrent machine by any humane moral standards and most people use these counter-arguments because they like how meat or cheese tastes and they want to close their eyes.
Hunting or fishing or growing your own meat is much less evil than the animals-for-food industry but the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption. Also it has to be understood that in developing countries masses of people cannot afford to be fancy about what to eat and what not. In developed countries however... I think we should not consider ourselves "developed" if we kill 10x our own human populations amounts of animals each year for food based mostly on the fact that we are used to it and that meat tastes good. As more and more people realize this, the demand for plant-based diets goes up.
Nice discussion folks..
BUT, there is an argument that never makes sense to me "the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption", so how can nature sustain amounts of PLANT consumption IF we all change it to plant-based diets?
This does not make sense since for 1 piece of meat we need to eat dozen of different plants; plants as food have a huge impact in nature too.
The animals eat a lot more plants for a pound of meat they gain than humans would need if we only ate the plants. We are in the first day of this year and already over 120 million animals have been killed in the US for food. Approximations on amount of animals killed each year for food in the USA vary, but it is in tens of billions. Can you imagine the strain natural ecosystem would need to sustain to support tens of billions of new animals every year? We are already on the edge when feeding those animals with industrial crops.
Humans are not ruminants. We can not survive on hay. We can survive on the high-nutrition parts of plants, but creating these parts is resource-intensive. In some cases the whole plant is simply difficult to grow (pests, fertilizer, etc.) and in other cases we don't get very much food from each plant.
There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.
Goats and sheep are happy to eat the weeds on a rocky hill, and cattle do almost as well.
Other food animals are happy to eat disgusting waste. Pigs, chickens, and catfish are especially willing.
It is a technical problem, not a law of nature. B12 and other nutrients will be produced by plants, insects or bacteria in sufficient supply by the end of the decade, given the amount of interest vegetarian diets receive. Some investment will come from space companies, which need to shorten the food chain.
I'm not sure how you reconcile this with the existence of healthy individuals who have eaten nothing but plants for decades. I myself have not eaten meat in about 5 years, and I just had a health check-up with full blood work. My doctor said "whatever you're doing, keep doing. You're healthy and I don't recommend changing a thing."
I bet you live in San Francisco :D /jokes a side; for you to be healthy without eating meat you need to eat a large variation of plants, it's not only one, it's not only one meal by day. It's not easy and have a great impact in nature too, meat have all we need and is simpler. Also, humans that are fed only with meat are able to eat once a week (or less).
Again, please share the studies to back up your claims. You're either trolling or just very poorly informed and spreading misinformation without checking it.
And how do you reconcile the fact that animal agriculture is a large contributor to ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the result of a 5 year Oxford Uni study that recommends adopting a more plant-based diet to reduce your personal carbon footprint[0]
> The most part of diseases of this decade are caused by plant based diets.
I'm not sure if you are being serious. Approximately 3% of the US population claim to be 100% plant-based, and you are saying that this 3% is responsible for most part of diseases?
RE: The most part of diseases of this decade are caused by plant based diets
Do you have any studies that back up your claim that humans need meat to live a healthy life?
Several governmental bodies worldwide state[1] that one can live healthy using a plant based diet and The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine[0] even recommend a plant based diet for good health and disease prevention.
Did you know B12 is produced by bacteria and that some meat eaters are low in B12 and need to supplement. Animals in factory farms are being fed B12 supplements[2].
You might want to research this further so you're better informed next time you state information as fact. Or watch this documentary - https://gamechangersmovie.com/- it's on Netflix.
PLEASE, don't do this to yourself dude. Industry are shitting all over you. Just see a picture of James Cameron now, the guy looks a zombie!!
ALSO, if you want real evidence, read the articles YOU pointed. You'll see there IS NO CONCLUSION THAT PLANTS ARE HEALTHIER. PERIOD.
Actually, you need to eat a LOT OF DIFFERENT PLANTS to get a little oz of a meat, go look for yourself. Check the result, how skinny and easy to get sick these people are (IF YOU DON'T EAT THE CORRECT AMONT OF A LOT OF PLANTS + SUPPLEMENTS, EVERY F* HOUR).
I know, meat diet will not be here forever because of resources (thanks for some comments here I made more researches), but at the moment is THE HEALTHIER DIET POSSIBLE. No arguments against that, just check evidences and peoples (nowadays are a lot of they).
Sorry, I get very angry when I see someone trying to be scientific and tell me to watch gamerchangers.
Thanks. But none of those articles say that a plant based diet is not good for your health and that you need to eat meat instead. Your last link about mental disorders for example even says there is no evidence that a plant based diet causes mental disorders and it even states "vegetarians are in good physical health".
I would recommend to read these articles properly next time and not make generalised statements like you've done.
You can live a healthy live without meat or dairy products.
We can't feed the whole world using a meat heavy diet as it's just too resource intensive and destructive to the environment. A shift to a more plant based diet is inevitable - that's why I'm thankful to people like Ethan Brown and his team working on meat alternatives that are as good or better than animal meat - to make this transition easier for people who just can't give up animal meat.
This is one isolated case of parents who were probably quite dogmatic and ill informed and they were fruitarians - mainly eating raw food, so probably not living on a well-balanced diet.
The article even states that a vegan or vegetarian diet is fine for kids[0]. So again please read articles properly next time and don't make generalised statements based one some headlines you read.
[0] "Babies and young children on a vegetarian or vegan diet can get the energy and most of the nutrients they need to grow and develop from a well-planned varied and balanced diet."
Any prediction of decentralisation of the Internet, or anything built on it, needs to explain how this will overcome the economies of scale (1 big data centre is cheaper than 1000 little ones) and the network effects (everyone buys and sells through Amazon because thats where you find the most buyers and sellers).
1 big data centre is cheaper
than 1000 little ones
There are billions of computers out there that are idle most of the time. Utilizing them might very well be cheaper then building and maintaining a new datacenter.
everyone buys and sells through
Amazon because thats where you
find the most buyers and sellers
Not everyone. Not even the majority. Even in the USA which is Amazons biggest market, their market share is less then 50%. Individual onlineshops are also moving billions. Even the small ones built with Shopify are moving billions when you combine their revenue. And then there is Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Alibaba, Rakuten, Zalando ... all moving billions worth of goods.
Funny you mention that, since we've seen cryptocurrency processing concentrated in big data centers... for all the same reasons everything else is located in big data centers - energy and bandwidth are cheaper.
That's up to whoever is supplying the services. While many may be outsourcing this to data centers, I'm sure it's not the case for everyone and there are people operating their own hardware.
Re: unused computers: I don't see technology on the horizon that would tackle usage of unused systems in any way that could compete with the low-friction of something like AWS. I'm not saying it's impossible, only that it doesn't seem like a problem that is getting much attention.
Re: Amazon: Most of the other venues you mention are secondary markets for the exact same sellers. People have their own Shopify, Etsy, Ebay, etc., storefront but then also sell on Amazon because that's where so much of the market is. As far as I can tell it's an increasing trend in that direction.
> There are billions of computers out there that are idle most of the time. Utilizing them
That used to be popular (for instance, distributed.net) back when the processors used the same power whether they were idle or not. Nowadays, there is a huge difference in power usage and heat output between an idle or mostly idle processor, and a fully loaded one.
(My first desktop had a processor without a fan or even a heat spreader, and came with an operating system which had a busy loop as its idle loop.)
And most of these computers are running on batteries. Even on my desktop I'd have to get a decent return to share my CPU/GPU/storage. The computer cost me about $700 to build so I certainly wouldn't share it for pennies.
The people operating them if you have the proper incentives in place such as is done with cryptocurrencies. They pay the upfront operational cost and then are paid for usage by those using the network.
Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage.
I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services.
And that's effectively free because I already have it.
It's $X per month though right, because of the electricity? I'm thinking about setting up an always on computer and I definitely will make sure to compare up front costs and operating costs if I do it.
I guess that having had a computer since age 10 or so I just considered it a fairly standard thing for nerds to do.
Yes, strictly. A 20W average laptop would cost approx 3-4GBP per month to leave on all the time in the UK, a modest desktop perhaps 10-15GBP.
It's been a measurement error in my power budget as far back as I can remember. Sure, you can go and compare it to EC2 or whatever if you like, but that's just silliness. It's a big mac meal.
My Threadripper box with a shitton of HDD's and RAM etc moves the needle because it has high idle consumption. I'll probably be getting rid of that soon; but it's still a low cost relative to purchase price.
The gradual return of symmetric connectivity, which is underway today, as well as edge adoption of IPv6, could/should usher in a revitalized era of peer-to-peer and other decentralized computing models.
Peer-to-peer models last thrived when connectivity was predominantly symmetric (e.g., the early days of DSL) and faded quickly as asymmetric connectivity became mainstream. I think the decline of decentralization and the rise of asymmetric connectivity are intertwined; neither necessarily caused the other, but they are correlated. One could argue asymmetric connectivity became popular because users only wanted to consume rather than share/serve. But similarly, people stopped sharing and serving because their connectivity discouraged that use case.
Today, symmetric connectivity is returning, such as in the form of 1G/1G fiber connections to the home. Combine this with infinite static IP addresses, and ever rising edge compute capacity, and I think decentralization is inevitable. I won't predict the magnitude, but as a fan of decentralization, I personally hope it is at least significant.
I assumed that was covered by #8 ("The biggest consumer technology successes of this decade will be in the area of privacy"), somewhat by #9 ("Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions"), and mostly the second half of #5 ("a killer decentralized consumer app").
Network effects of centralization explain why current big companies prefer to build centralized services -- but the next big idea never comes from existing big companies, anyway.
My 30,000' view of computing history is that big companies, as a rule, don't create big ideas that survive. They pick up small ideas that work and scale them up (Gall's Law). Git and HTTP and Python didn't come from Microsoft or Google or Amazon, but those companies took them once they were already popular and made them scale -- in large part by making them work well in a centralized architecture.
The software that comes next won't win because FAANG like it better for building centralized architectures. It'll win because everybody and their dog will be using it at home. Then companies like FAANG will see that and pick it up and try to centralize it. Then the cycle will repeat.
We've already got a billion tiny data centers -- the powerful computers and smartphones in our houses and pockets. All we need is the right software, and the desire to not have every service delivered free-with-ads-over-the-web from big corporations.
Maybe this is the decade that web developers will finally stop using dynamic databases for static content.
I'll predict the opposite. Web stacks will get even more unnecessarily complex and buggy. Investment sizes, late-stage development cycles, and page size, will continue to grow toward infinity while startup success rates drop closer to zero. Page load times on the best available connection and hardware will remain constant as it always has.
Didn't mention distributed/remote work. Not sure if that's because it's so obvious a trend as to be boring?
I think he's early on the plant-based diet prediction, but correct in 20-30 years. Actually a lot of these seem like trends that might take more than 10 years, but have a high chance of being correct eventually.
Distributed work will continue to be a minor thing prevalent mainly in tech circles. Human nature doesn’t change on 10 year timescales. We’re tribal beings who organize around work and family.
Best Buy’s pullback from it for their office staff is instructive.
Yeah I've been doing remote 95% of the last couple years and it takes a toll not being able to be around people at all. Even as a mostly introverted person who needs quiet alone time for solving harder problems and general flow state. There's something about social interaction that helps with motivation that I find hard to get over chat and video. This is assuming the people are not toxic somehow.
See my post above: there are reasons to be optimistic remote social presence and shared spatial awareness for many contexts will be solved this decade.
Time is running out: please help the Internet Archive today. The average donation is $45. If everyone chips in $5, we can keep our website independent, strong and ad-free. That's right, all we need is the price of a paperback book to sustain a non-profit library the whole world depends on. We have only 150 staff but run one of the world’s top websites. We’re dedicated to reader privacy so we never track you. We never accept ads. But we still need to pay for servers and staff. If the Wayback Machine disappeared tomorrow, where would you go to find the websites of the past? We stand with Wikipedians, librarians and creators to make sure there is enduring access to the world’s most trustworthy knowledge. I know we could charge money, but then we couldn’t achieve our mission: building a special place where you can access the world’s best information forever. The Internet Archive is a bargain, but we need your help. If you find our site useful, we ask you humbly, please chip in. Help us reach our goal today! Thank you.
Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.
> Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.
What do users of the archive gain by it being independent of advertising?
And why can't it be a non profit and also offset expenses by selling advertising?
Look at it this way.
There are plenty of non profits that can only make money by donations. They can't easily make money off of advertising. Internet Archive can. So in theory any money that someone sends to them would not go to an organization that might have a greater need. Make sense?
Now of course you are saying 'give them $5 instead of upvoting'. So that is a small enough amount that you would say 'you still have $5 to give to someone else'. But I say when people (en masse) behave like that a portion will feel that they have done their 'good person' duty and not make another donation to another cause (that once again can't sell advertising).
By the way 'service to humanity'???
Edit: One other thing. I'd be glad to pay IA for 'service'. That is if I need to get a page taken down or I need to get something scraped more or less I'd gladly pay for being able to discuss with a real person and get something done. This idea that free means 'you take what you get and you don't get upset' to me is just nonsense at the core. Maybe have a free no ad service but then charge for things to raise revenue not just 'donate donate donate'.
It's more about being "independent of advertisers" than whether advertisements are practically hosted on the site. An archive should be a third-party, neutral source, and advertising jeopardises this.
It's not a newspaper (as only one example) where they hold editorial control over the content and are therefore (in theory) beholden to the people who pay the bills (the advertisers). Forgetting for a second whether it would have any major impact (I say it would not I mean they scrape web pages in a very clear fashion) it's hard to believe it could go the route of say YELP in their mission. Or that a minor impact to what they do would not be offset by not having to beg for money. (With PBS it was called a begathon when they had to raise money).
And even with donations they could in theory be 'corrupted' just the same. A rich person could give them a large sum of money (as a donation) and then would have some defacto say in how things were done.
Take as another example ball parks (to even counter my point). They sell naming rights. That does not mean that the entity who purchased the naming rights gets to decide who plays on the team or who coaches the team although you could argue that that could happen (and I would say it does not offset the benefit of not having that 'independence'.
If you buy a lot from Amazon, you can also choose Internet Archive as your supported charity.
(I was also going to suggest nominating Internet Archive as a charity for Humble Bundle purchases as well, but it seems like they no longer support choosing your own charities.)
This is a good idea. On AmazonSmile I currently support National Park Foundation but can think of supporting this one too in the future (maybe rotating basis quarterly). I am curious which other similar nonprofits HNers think are available on AmazonSmile to think of donating to?
I found a couple of old scanned mathematics books on the archive, which I could not find elsewhere. Many times a web.archive.org link cut short a journey to an old blog post, that might have been lost in the ether.
"Non-interactive site" wtf, do you even know the trickery you have to do in JavaScript files to remotely work outside their intended domains? Or how hard was to create a working playable copy of hundreds of old games? Or how much people you need to handle an ever-growing data storage (e.g everyday bigger than the day before) while making it available over internet?
While the code needs maintenance to adapt to edge cases, it's build once and maintain feature. It's not user registering site that needs support for customers and no need to introduce new features to keep going.
Data storage is also single purpose job. While it needs technical capability to store huge amount of data, I still don't see how 150 people are needed to maintain the archive.
You say as if 150 is a small team but how are they used?
Given this is the top comment, I assumed this was down a moment ago due to traffic.
So here is a prediction for 2030, self hosting blog post are still too lazy for CDN in 2030. If there is anything I will not bet against it will be people's laziness.
Nothing wrong with Laziness really, after that is what product should be about, set and forget about it. Hopefully all blog software would have Cloudflare or CDN by default in 2030.
I predict the 2020's will turn out to be the most difficult-to-predict decade yet. The predictions of the OP in my mind fail to account for several yet-to-mature disruptive technologies that will potentially transform our society to the degree the Internet and web have. The only prediction I'll make is in the domain where I work:
By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing device (glasses, contacts, perhaps neurological etc) all day which allow software to proxy most aspects of their visual and audio perception, perhaps more.
Among the many results of this change, the most profound will be the loss of physical co-presence as a factor for interacting with other people. People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
The technical miracle aside, this will cause a fundamental shift in the way we think about what it means to "be" with other people -- the dependence upon physical co-locality will be no longer something we place highly in our mental model for spending time with others, other than children.
This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
I suspect, perhaps hope, that the dominating result will be that, in combination with new forms of media based upon these new technological marvels, we will be able to greatly reduce or eliminate the tribalist tendencies we have for one another when those 'others' are out-of-reach for us to talk with, hug, dance with, and learn from.
In 2030, you'll be able to hug anyone on Earth instantly, and that's something to be optimistic about.
What are your thoughts considering that VR was supposed to be the next big thing in the 90s already (at least from what I remember hearing...) and what are your thoughts regarding human chemistry?
The tech track towards full perceptual override in this current generation of VR is fairly well understood and has been on track, though slightly delayed, for approx 7 years now, with the current Oculus Quest device being the best available, and something many of us in the industry felt was almost a dream possibility a few short years ago. So I'm fairly optimistic that the tech will mature to a point where it is effortless to have fully convincing perceptual software proxying all day in 10 years.
I think the bigger unknown questions are around the impact of this technology. It seems hard to understate how much of a change it will be, particularly if there is a path towards young people being able to use it at a young age.
The problem with all these predictions about VR taking over, is they seem to pretend that visual sense is the Holy Grail of VR immersion we've all been waiting for. But that's a far cry from what was imagined in The Lawnmower Man or The Matrix. In reality we have 4 other senses to take care of first.
In the mean time you just have a display that obstructs your view and which can't be tolerated for more than a couple of hours.
Think farther. In ten years incident photons and sound pressures to your senses will likely be possible to fully software modulate. The other senses I agree are harder to speculate about, but on a ten year horizon imagining the existing status quo of form factor and method (headsets) is the wrong way to think about it. Likely these things will be effectively invisible or weightless. At the ten year point I’m imagining these to be lightweight over-eye lenses/goggles or even contact form factor. The analog would be legacy, large headphones vs modern earbuds.
Beaming in might be popular for some use cases, however physical presence will still be the gold standard. VR/AR will always represent a big drop in information density compared to reality. In human conversation even a 75ms lag would be noticeable compared to real-time. I highly doubt looking at a vr projections eyes can match the same intensity as looking at a real person’s. Also, VR completely removes items such as touch and smell.
How much data does a human 6 feet away from you project to you? How much of that data enters your conscious? How much enters your subconscious? With Moore’s law dying we can’t hope to match that amount of information, much less accurately record and transport it in real time. Lossy capture and output mechanisms will still be present in a decade.
I think framing face-to-face vs remote copresence as a hierarchy is a poor mental model. Existing remote communication media can be equally effective as face to face in very narrow, specific contexts. My argument isn’t so much that remote embodied communication will be a panacea, but that it will radically shift the constraints around copresence for a wide variety of contexts. Ultimately, face to face will be vastly superior for some contexts, but I would not underestimate how far that set will drop proportionally over the next decade. And it certainly seems possible that new forms of communication may become only possible in a virtual context, much like the very one we are participating in right now.
> This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the 90's. Turns out it's true, to a degree, but also unleased all the misinformation we see today. I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I had a coworker that worked on the fraud team at Second Life. He said the engineers ran the place and would work on stuff that was technically interesting to them, rather than working on stuff that users wanted or needed. That probably didn't help.
> I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I'd argue that this is the situation humanity has been in forever, to varying degrees, mainly for the former (the news), but also the latter.
What I hope to see is a greater realization of this, and willingness to consider the degree to which this affects disagreement and polarization (ie: perhaps the situation isn't that our ideological opponents are idiots, but rather the situation is more complex than we perceive).
The internet is already a huge step up in communication from 20 years ago. Turns out people use that to find ideologically likeminded people meaning tribalist movements everywhere are stronger now than before internet came along. 90's were full of optimism about how tribalism could be overcome that is completely vanished now.
From the same technological situation you describe I can only think of how people would use that only to further isolate themselves. At least today, physical location sometimes dictate you have to interact with people outside of your own social class and background. What you describe could reduce that, making every one retreat even further into their echo chamber.
People already live in close proximity to millions in cities. They generally don't hug each other; more fixated on rushing past each other, avoiding eye contact.
Humans just aren't made for having 7 billion friends...
The Internet had temperately killed technical clubs like HAM radio, wood working shops etc., as people got into coding and could collaborate remotely. Around 2008 lots of Makerspaces started to open, but not nearly enough, the maker movement has stalled though.
We need to rethink the ways schools operate, from 8am-3pm they can be for kids. After 4pm they can be adult learning hubs, maker spaces, DIY bicycle repair shops etc.
I think libraries are a better fit than public schools, and some already have maker spaces, seed banks or gardens, and opportunities for continuing education. With funding provided by a dedicated library district (which is increasingly common) in addition to private foundation support, these institutions can have a significant positive impact in the communities they serve.
School are normally significantly larger and mostly unused outside of their normal operating hours. Realistically it shouldn't be an either or thing but rather both.
Ham Radio is far from dead, and it isn't a "technical club". It is an activity with many varied subinterests from public service to exploration of extremely efficient low-power communication modes to bouncing signals off the moon. There are 750,000 licensed amateur radio opeators in the United States.
Yet in these same cities people meet in places, and have the positive experiences we often define as being human. Consider how many of these are currently possible to have through the Internet, and how likely that is to change if social presence and shared spatial awareness are deliverable remotely.
The greatest institutions, large and small (schools, libraries, churches, etc) all orbit the constraints of physical coproximity. If even a modest set of these experiences can have a true digital analog that replicated it decoupled from physical copresence, the opportunity for these kinds of institutions to form at a whole higher level, across great tribal boundaries, seems high.
It’s hard or impossible to make specific, concrete predictions on a ten year timeline. But my view is that the 20’s will see a radical departure from physical copresence mitigating human activity, and we will all agree that this change happened in 2030. I hope that people capitalizing on it build good social systems to bring out the best in people and replicate what we have learned from our best institutions and examples of positive human gathering.
I guess what I'm saying is that many people had that exact same hope, for the same reason, 20 years ago -- and that hope ended up being extremely wrong; the exact opposite of what actually happened.
Of course we cannot extrapolate. Noone can know. But are there any specific reasons why the ongoing tide of political, ideological, social polarization would suddenly turn around?
You say "across great tribal boundaries". To me, physical proximity seems to be the main thing left now that still counteracts tribal boundaries.
Can you provide examples/scenarios perhaps?
As my counter-example, I just moved out to the country-side. As a result, I start to now see different opinions in my Facebook feed from when I lived in a city, simply due to Facebook-friending new people due to physical proximity. Due to this influx of "random" impulses in my Facebook feed, I think am likely to have less polarized views politically (I can see different friends arguing both sides of a topic) than if physical proximity didn't play a role in who I friended.
A coworker and I were discussing this trend as it relates to the physical workspace. We imagined a psuedo-virtual cubical which you can “decorate” in any theme you’d like - jungle, sci-fi, steampunk, tropical beach, etc. - which would be rendered by your coworkers’ AR wearables/implants.
My favorite concept of that discussion was virtual guardians to protect your flow - look, you can interrupt that developer but you’re gonna have to defeat his virtual dragon first.
I, for one, make my physical workspace disappear from my view as much as possible. When I'm at my desk, 99% of what I see is my screen, 1% goes for the occasional look at the tea cup.
What's the deal with this videogamey bullshit you're proposing? Why would anyone want to participate in this?
First thing I'm doing is installing an adblocker/augblocker to byoass this sort of thing.
Dude, it’s to prevent people from interrupting you when you’re trying to work. It would literally be designed to keep shitty coworkers like you away from my desk.
I don't want to annoy people/be annoyed, either: if you want to be left alone, put up a sign. But you can't force people to participate in a virtual fantasy dragon battle- they'll just refuse and look at you weird!
While its correct that telecommunication will become much important at work, i dont see why people will be stuck in VR outside work. If all work is remote, why would anyone choose to live away from loved ones?
This is a good point — the elimination of physical co presence as a requirement for most forms of interaction other than intimate ones may lead to a world where people physically return to be nearest their kin, and interact with all other institutions they are in remotely (not just work, but for school, entertainment, worship, etc)
Steam achievement unlocked: <insert whatever is in your imagination here lol>
Indie games are gonna get a lot weirder... pray for our overloaded dopamine receptors and shriveled serotonin ones. Pornhub will probably roll out their own game store steam clone lol
> People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
This made me laugh. We haven't even figured out how to do telephone conferences reliably. I'm still waiting for a telco that does not have the obligatory "You're breaking up" or "I cannot see the screenshare" or "Oh sorry, my microphone was still on mute" or whatever somewhere in between.
Teleconferencing has issues not due to technical issues typically. Though that was common up to relatively recent history, modern audio and video teleconferencing software seems reliable and robust. The main deficiency, which can not be mitigated through technology, is the low bandwidth for human communication it has, which yields a lot of the dynamics you mention. Simple things like turn taking and taking awareness of the emotional states of others is largely impossible to do well vs in person using these tools.
This is a well researched area, and embodied communication through VR/AR stands poised to solve many of these deficiencies by allowing the expression of non verbal cues, body language, spatial referencing, etc.
The climate crisis will be exacerbated by the increasing centralization of large cities. Humans are tending towards centralized population hubs, and away from rural areas.
This will be the main catalyst for adopting greener infrastructure. Fear of permanent climate change will not be the catalyst, as that is a long term repercussion of not solving the pollution problem, and humans have never been good about preparing for things in advance.
I'm not following your logic. Yes, humans are leaving rural communities for cities, but I'm not sure how that exacerbates climate problems...unless they're all moving to New Orleans.
I’ve seen at least one article suggesting the end of centralization into cities. I suspect LEO based internet services will further help people move back to the country. All that’s needed is work out there.
A friend lived outside a city of 20,000 in rural Colorado. He dropped $10-20k to get fiber run out. It seems like a lot, but If that's literally the only thing keeping you from moving from the Bay Area to a small town, you just haven't done your research.
I thought it was the other way around? Don't people in cities have a lower carbon footprint because of public transportation, smaller homes, and other things that can be shared?
Yes it seems people were confused by my first sentence. I should have said "the perception of the climate crisis will increase, leading to faster adoption of green policies".
There's a reason why people in rural areas are less aware of climate change due to human pollution. The effects of pollution are much less apparent in rural areas due to the far lower human density. Rural areas are "clean" to the human eye, so we have large swaths of the population that simply don't care about long term effects of pollution, because to them, even the short-term effects are almost indiscernible.
People are moving to cities at a faster rate despite the proliferation of the internet. As such, we'll eventually reach a critical mass of the population that eventually leads us to adopting greener policies. All because people are moving into cities from rural areas. I get that it sounds counterintuitive.
Asia (China) would not have an incentive politically to run with it, as it would remove traceability and control of money flow. Not to mention online currencies pitfalls.
691 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 347 ms ] threadThe pendulum of history suggests this will occur (at some point), and I hope it happens sooner than later in many respects, but it is also seems like one in which we won't know the triggers/causes/sparks until after the fact, partially because it seems it will take complex combinations of causes?
Anyone seeing possible sparks which perhaps the rest of us aren't yet identifying?
These are outside of the blockchain world of compute/storage as a service attempts that got started suring the ico goldrush and seem to be doing quite well for themselves.
maybe that sounds like semantics, so to propose a rough taxonomy of different types of actors:
a. nation state level superpowers
b. nation state level challengers
c. large business / incumbents / leaders
d. small business / startups / challengers
e. individuals / consumers / social groups
f. possibly horizontal groups across combinations of the above
it would seem at least one of those groups would need to believe they can reap move-the-needle level benefits from decentralized internet in order to spark progress?
All of these things are failures?
What nonsense has infected the blockchain space that people believe these things??
It's kind of like GPUs are in cars right now. You can't drive a Tesla with dumb sensors over the Internet -- you need smart local compute.
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-self-driving-car-computer-...
So I guess IoT and doing heavy local computation is a technical reason you would need decentralization. I can see that happening for many use cases. I'm not sure if it will happen for the consumer web because centralization is more efficient and the current network effects are so ingrained. Similar to how Windows is still dominant on the desktop, but iOS/Android are perhaps more important platforms.
---
I think major changes in behavior are driven by new hardware -- phones in the 00's, PC's in the 80's, Internet in the 90's, etc.
People have been trying to push VR, but to me VIDEO is the real VR -- more stuff happens there and more people use it. I was chatting with a friend yesterday and observed that YouTube is basically what "SecondLife" was supposed to be. People are exchanging all kinds of valuable information and entertainment on YouTube.
So if you need to process a lot of video locally for some reason, that could be a killer app for decentralization. Just like a self-driving car, although I'm bearish on self-driving impacting the average consumer in the next 10 years. I think it will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates.
A keen observation!
One example: I learned how to clean my toilet from this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd6pV5lyvG8&t=1s
The comments are hilarious... Tons of people having the same "AHA" moment. (Basically you paper mache your toilet with vinegar and wait a couple hours. Old mineral stains come off like butter!)
Compare a google search for "clean toilet" and it feels like a bunch of SEO-infested crap.
YouTube is more like the "old web" where you can get a real opinion on something.
-----
I have friends who cook and that's a whole other subculture of YouTube. I've been watching a good MMA show. And there are programming streams, and pretty much every programming conference has an archive, which is a rich archive of free information (e.g. PyCon, CppCon, etc.)
I don't know what's going on in Second Life now but to me it feels like it's probably not "real life". I guess people want "life" and not "second life", and video is becoming an increasingly large aspect of the former.
I would think of it as control plane vs. data plane. The data plane can be massively distributed in space, but the control plane can still be centralized.
And of course that's how Tesla works, and how software-defined networking works.
The "powers that be" just need to control software updates and the network's control plane (routing). They can remotely manage distributed resources.
So yeah unfortunately I'm not seeing a big motivator for decentralized networks (which can be very, very slow). You would have to have some need for a lot of local video processing but also a whole way to distribute code and software updates.
And right now that's more centralized than it's ever been. I'm not a fan of the "silent, frequent, and huge updates and pop up new TOS" model but that's the status quo.
It's still hard to share files that are 500MB in size, and I don't see why. I think it has to do with media companies like Google not wanting individuals to share files, unless it is through them. But the damn will break soon, much like Megaupload changed the scene in 2005.
There is active research into the theoretical and practical design of systems and protocols that will make this plausible. It has no precedent in literature and it is a very non-trivial problem but the sense is that a practical workable design is achievable in the not too distant future.
It is worth noting that effectively managing climate change requires implementing the same kind of data model with similar theoretical constraints. Building data models of physical reality at scale breaks just about every part of classic data infrastructure architecture.
And as typical in such pieces, GenX gets forgotten...
Did I stop aging at some point and not notice?
What you need to realize is that Gen X is stuck in a crack in time that halts the aging process for them. All of them. A side effect of this is that while they can interact with the world and almost be perceived, they actually have been forgotten by the rest of the world.
On occasion a regular aging schmuck will notice a wild Gen Xer and be able to interact with them whilst the Xer is within their field of perception, however these interactions are invariably fleeting and almost immediately forgotten for it leaves the regular person’s body and mind in a strangely exhausted state. Interacting with a forgotten person stresses the body, and so while someone may not exactly know why they wish to flee from this person that seems like another person, at some point the brain sends the neurological equivalent of a kill -9 to end the conversation. It is estimated that about 200,000 Gen Xers are killed a year in this way, but nobody has been convicted since 1. nobody has been able to find the bodies again and 2. Even if they were, it would probably be ruled as self-defense and 3. All memory of the events that transpired invariably slips away from the living.
The United States - and really the world as a whole - has enjoyed its most prosperous time in all of human history during Gen-X's window of contribution.
Long to short, the jury is still out on the actual success of Gen-X.
The climate has changed and will change. Some of that change (although I think its a small part) will be influenced by human activity. The Earth will adjust. Humanity will adjust. And humanity will continue to flourish.
p.s. Humanity will continue to flourish? Your prediction is based on what, past performance? When Mother Nature's bounty was harvested mindlesssly and shameleessly? That's going to continue forever? Infinitely? Can you share some links supporting such projections?
That said, if anything, a cursory glance at my Facebook feed reveals the boomers yelling the loudest.
Also, yelling the loudest is problem the predates human history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Looks like we're going back to the 00's
People will not start trusting the Chinese government in the next 10 years. If there is a use for crypto here it will be for rich Chinese to evade their government when moving money outside the country as they typically do.
That's the real use of Bitcoin. It's why Bitcoin mining is such a big thing in China. It's "exporting". Made in China, sold outside China - that's exporting, and not only legal, but encouraged and subsidized. Buy a share in a Bitcoin mine in yuan, watch your EUR or USD balance build up in Hong Kong or Switzerland.
1. China will fall to internal strife of some kind. Still may maintain power, but famine and mass executions / disappearances will occur.
2. we will have further centralization of the internet
3. Solar will only account for 10k Gw
4. Agree that nuclear will make a massive resurgence
5. Gas will still be the dominate power source for mobile transportation, but less so. This is because gas prices will fall.
6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
7. California housing market will collapse due to high electricity prices, lack of electricity and wildfires
10. Meat will be nearly as prevalent today, but wild caught fish will be virtually no more
11. Self driving vehicles will operate in many of the non-heavily effected weather states. Laws will be passed to regulate and exclude some states after fatalities
12. Marijuana will be legal federally
13. Government will start accessing Alexa, Google, Siri recordings and public will be made aware
14. China will start using / building power projection in states it can. Specifically to protect food
The item on your list I have the biggest issue with is 10. We'll still be catching plenty of fish in the wild (but some places that fish are plentiful today won't be that way) in another 10 years.
So even if over fishing is not a threat any more, our ocean food source is still at huge risk.
>Saudi will have a violent revolution
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction. The ways in which modern states can maintain power and suppress their people is overwhelming. China can and has built perhaps the most oppressive totalitarian state ever to have existed. Saudi is diversifying its absurd wealth to resist downturns in oil, and the "first world" is still hapelly grovelling and kissing the rings of that disgusting despot, selling them weapons and propping them up diplomatically. All in all, I don't have my hopes up.
It's all rather depressing.
When people are fat and comfortable, they tend not to rock the boat too much for vague ideals.
Very very unfortunately, this sounds more like wishful thinking than a reasonable prediction.
The truly troublesome part is that predictions about social phenomenon can be self-fulfilling prophesy. If you basically want to see a bloody revolution instead of a better solution, that actively increases the odds of it happening.
The reason modern western leaders support house of Saud isn't that they're the good guys. They're just the best of what all realistic possibilities in the region, unfortunately.
I doubt it. Saud family were interested in fighting the Ottomans, as were the British in WW1, and their interests aligned then. And during WW2, once it was found to provide access to oil, it only made sense for the west to make sure a stable regime was established. The US/Brits support the Sauds in whatever they want to do, and the Sauds provide oil and purchase weapons. Keeps the region nice and unstable for future weapons orders and to prevent a situation like Norway where the oil wealth is distributed to everyone and no longer able to be controlled by a handful of people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Saud#Origins_and_earl...
For further proof, the more modern socially liberal Iran was destabilized in favor of a fundamentalist leader by the US for their refusal to play ball:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhollah_Khomeini#Khomeini's_c...
It's just business, it's easier to deal with a small country's king than a democracy.
This is a good book about the circumstances that result in the modern situation:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64594.A_History_of_the_M...
Isn't the wealth distributed to the saudis to keep them happy and inline?
And if the Saudi king decides to stop the payments or kill you for speaking out against them (see Kashoggi assassination), what good is a few thousand in oil money while the royalty splits the billions with the US.
Their highly leveraged economy will not survive at "6%" growth over the next decade. It is not clear that they will escape the Middle Income Trap [1]. They are struggling with zombie companies and transitioning from manufacturing to a services-based economy. Their manufacturing is also being slowly eaten away by countries like Vietnam.
As the PRC maintains its legitimacy through the economic growth that has happened under its existence, a recession could trigger political upheaval or force the CCP to distract the populace, e.g. they might try to annex the ROC (Taiwan and its other holdings) by force. A military conflict in which a large number of one child families lose their sole child would have disastrous ramifications as far as government stability, too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap
(No opinion on Saudi as I only follow the economy/demographics of the PRC and Eurozone countries)
A key difference with middle income countries that only earn export income as manufacturing base is that there are quite a few Chinese companies that possess its own technology and brands. DJI, Oppo, Xiaomi are some examples. Many of these brands are not well known in the US but have become increasingly competitive with global brands, at least in some respect, in Asia and perhaps elsewhere.
It might make sense to compare them to Korean brands a while back, with an additional advantage of massive domestic market.
Their forward-looking focus on major industries of tomorrow like AI, EV, and biotech does not hurt either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21868570
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692002
Since there are many areas in China that could be further developed, the service sector will also likely grow.
My point is that the US ought not get complacent and believe in wishful thinking that competition from China will simply go away in time.
>6. Saudi Arabia will have a violent revolution
why do people make these kinds of predictions. they're so uninformed it's beyond the pale.
china and SA are two of the most authoritarian and simultaneously well-funded (effective and efficient) governments on the planets -- we're not talking libya here (let alone syria, venezuela which still stand in their pre-upheavel form). how do you practically imagine either of these things happening? like a superhero comes down and leads the charge?
do you know what it actually takes to organize on such a massive scale as to bring down a state? here in america we can't get enough grass-roots organization for free health-care and tertiary education. and you think somewhere in china is a political mind so brilliant that they'll be able to organize some portion of 3x the population to violent revolution (since they don't have elections)?
SA has the 12th highest purchasing power parity in the world. what parallels do you see exactly with the soviet union?
Monumental changes can happen, and shockingly quickly.
Edit: or maybe I'm wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Unio...
Many of those Soviet Republics were very reluctant participants, forcibly occupied with underlying resentment going back centuries in a couple of cases, to WW2 in others.
There seem very few parallels with Saudi or China.
When has social change ever not been unique?
It's always easier to explain collapse with hindsight. :)
The Saudis are much more comfortable in their position. MBS can and will dangle individual rights for women, one by one, like red meat for the laity. He will garner applause throughout the next two decades for his progressive attitude towards women, even as he is a bloodthirsty despot.
Probably because there is no such thing. The people who vote against them realize that you’re still paying for them via taxes and that you’ll be destroying the entire market.
Destroying the market with the best healthcare research and the market with much of the best academic research shouldn’t be taken lightly.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/412545-70-...
and yet we can't get organized enough to pass it.
Someone who “somewhat” supports Medicare for all doesn’t really like the actual proposed implementation. With less than a majority strongly supporting it, are you really surprised?
See how he believes 2 lies? 1. The trade war is working. 2. The US government isn't a puppet of the Saudi Arabia. Okay...
Hope you're right about the CA housing market coming down, but I think more likely is just that Gavin Newsom and ilk get booted out for their failures to reign in PG&E and housing prices aren't particularly effected one way or the other.
Wildfires are generally not in the densely populated areas, so I don't think they'll move the needle much.
A bit like AirBnB, Uber etc. But probably he means that the rules of those new services will be enforced by protocols, rather then by companies. So I guess Bitcoin is the most prominent example of such a service that is already in existence.
Funny, I was digging into this issue just this morning. One family member supports Andrew Yang, but another won't support anyone who advocates for nuclear power.
Despite Thorium not being fully proven yet, I lean toward agreement with Yang: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...
Charity often does good, but often does not have the intended or apparent result. See William Easterly on the subject.
Yes.
You are only looking at the immediate damage. After the dust settles, with a worst-case nuclear accident you have a heavily contaminated area which cannot be resettled for a long time; after a worst-case hydroelectric accident, you have mostly only water and mud, and can start rebuilding almost immediately.
That's only with modern risk-avoiding-at-all-costs safety standards. The initial plans for handling Chernobyl, the worst fallout nuclear incident, was to cleanup - which they did - and resettle soon afterward the cleaned up area - which they did not. And now we have that useless extended exclusion zone - a monument to giving in to our fears.
Those plans were made before the incident by medical physicists. They were then modified by the party to suit political realities on the ground. Even the authoritarian URSS knew how far it could push people.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/png/10-12.png
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2019/07/29/california-gas-plant-...
It was a smart move by Yang to bring up new technologies, which most don't seem to be aware of yet, and provides a way forward through the PR problem.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/inside-terrapower-nuclear-lab/
"Nuclear" probably needs a better name -- modern designs have come a long way since Fukushima was built.
Just out of curiosity, is the latter part of a generation that will begin to die off in the 2020s?
1) Maybe. Or maybe we fuck it up and we are the penultimate generation of pre-Anthropocene human life. Hard to say for sure. So far, the rich and powerful seem to have little trouble selling their property.
2) Automation will not lead to some sort of wakefulness and critique of capitalism, but just more technocracy. The future is Google being too busy to offer you customer service.
3) China will collapse after their attempts to monopolize the South China Sea fall through.
4) Cryptocurrencies as a technology will collapse after several showstopping protocol-level issues are found. Most notably, a team will crack Satoshi's key and steal their BTC hoard, crashing almost all cryptocurrency prices, while as a runner-up effort, another team will successfully demonstrate forgery of high-difficulty blocks with ironic complexity analysis.
5) The various decentralized mesh networks around the globe will each grow to blanket their metropoloi, and some areas will see their mesh networks merge to create massive clouds of ambient connectivity. Disks will still be expensive, though. In fact, I'll predict another disk supply crash due to a natural disaster, akin to the tsunami from last decade.
6) Most folks around the world do not eat that much meat, and no numbers are listed, so I'll instead say that people will continue to not eat much meat. Perhaps meat consumption in USA, China, etc. will diminish, but probably not.
7) India and China step up their national space programs over the next decade, while ESA and NASA continue operating. Elon Musk is still around because of sheer willpower, but nobody else is really privatizing.
8) Already happened. It will continue to happen. The author's really showing off their bubble with this one.
9) Yes, many Boomers are near the end of their mortal coils. Don't be so morbid about it. I'm not sure if this prediction's at all interesting, since any actuary could make the same prediction without a single cup of coffee.
10) Gene therapy will still be sputtering and straining at the end of the next decade. CRISPR with Cas9 will have been long obsoleted, and nothing will have replaced it. There may be a field of genetic programming, though, where people specialize in writing code using DNA; there will certainly be a field of epigenetics which is distinct from traditional genetics.
https://futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2020-2029.htm
Most of the 'predictions' have links explaining why they think this may occur in that timeframe, e.g., this one about exascale computers: https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2021.htm#exascale
I guess this depends on SpaceX's success with the Starship - if a rocket that is made outside a cleanroom and with cheap rolled steel frame proves to be usable means that going to space becomes very very accessible.
Space based internet constellations have a huge resurgence right now, but that's unlikely what the author meant.
(Asteroid) Mining? Even if we already had the tech, such a mission would take decades. Who would accept the uncertainty risk of investing over such long time-spans? That is, if there is anything worthy enough to mine in space in the first place, will that still be the case many years later?
Tourism might be a thing, but enough to bootstrap an entire space economy?
Countries/politicians/billionaires wanting to project power or memorialize themselves still seems like the safest bet to me.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/china-s-p...
So not what you are expecting from a crypto currency?
Why is the situation with Muslims concerning for China? For Muslims and for anyone who cares about human rights, sure, it's concerning, but it does not follow at all that this is bad for China. The US became the dominant power despite having slavery longer than any western nation, and then having Jim Crow laws for a full century afterwards, including during the post-WWII economic boom.
I would argue that, unfortunately, there is no evidence that treating your minorities well is necessary for economic success. In fact, it may be the opposite. Ancient Rome did quite well while having slavery, after all.
As for the surveillance state, here we don't really have a lot of historical precedent. Obviously it didn't work out too well for the Warsaw Pact nations, particularly East Germany, but what they're doing in China really isn't like that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1331544/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26493452/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/90/4/943/4597049
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15072869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30061399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466124/
I'm not a huge fan of nutrition, so that's why I take too long post these, anyway don't believe me or in any article, test on yourself and tell me.
Plant-based diet might be good for environment, but for sure are not good for your health.
Almost every study about responsible plant based diets shows it has healthier than average outcomes. I say "almost" just as a hedge, I don't know of any.
By all means, eat whatever diet you want and don't feel bad about it, but do it for factual reasons and don't invent facts to justify your preferences.
For most people plant-based diet is probably completely safe and when debating this issue, the bottom argument of opposition to plant-based diets usually boils down to one thing: the god-given right or even necessity for man to eat other animals (be it because of it being natural to eat other beings in nature, because "plants have feelings too", or because of traditions or humans dying if they don't eat meat). This rests on ignorance of science, self-centered attitude and violence. Industrial-scale animal production for food is an abhorrent machine by any humane moral standards and most people use these counter-arguments because they like how meat or cheese tastes and they want to close their eyes.
Hunting or fishing or growing your own meat is much less evil than the animals-for-food industry but the nature ecosystem could never sustain current amounts of meat consumption. Also it has to be understood that in developing countries masses of people cannot afford to be fancy about what to eat and what not. In developed countries however... I think we should not consider ourselves "developed" if we kill 10x our own human populations amounts of animals each year for food based mostly on the fact that we are used to it and that meat tastes good. As more and more people realize this, the demand for plant-based diets goes up.
There is a whole lot of tree attached to a cashew.
Goats and sheep are happy to eat the weeds on a rocky hill, and cattle do almost as well.
Other food animals are happy to eat disgusting waste. Pigs, chickens, and catfish are especially willing.
There is also a whole lot of cashew attached to that tree, and the same tree produces more, year after year.
In fact, the creation of meat is a wasteful process, requiring up to 25kg of grain and 15,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of steak. [1]
1: http://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Report-48-WaterFoo...
And how do you reconcile the fact that animal agriculture is a large contributor to ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions. Here is the result of a 5 year Oxford Uni study that recommends adopting a more plant-based diet to reduce your personal carbon footprint[0]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1331544/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26493452/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/90/4/943/4597049
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15072869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30061399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466124/
I'm not a huge fan of nutrition, so that's why I take too long post these, anyway don't believe me or in any article, test on yourself and tell me.
Plant-based diet might be good for environment, but for sure are not good for your health.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I'm not sure if you are being serious. Approximately 3% of the US population claim to be 100% plant-based, and you are saying that this 3% is responsible for most part of diseases?
Do you have any studies that back up your claim that humans need meat to live a healthy life?
Several governmental bodies worldwide state[1] that one can live healthy using a plant based diet and The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine[0] even recommend a plant based diet for good health and disease prevention.
Did you know B12 is produced by bacteria and that some meat eaters are low in B12 and need to supplement. Animals in factory farms are being fed B12 supplements[2].
You might want to research this further so you're better informed next time you state information as fact. Or watch this documentary - https://gamechangersmovie.com/- it's on Netflix.
[0] https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition
[1] https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-vegan-diet/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK396513/
[2] https://baltimorepostexaminer.com/carnivores-need-vitamin-b1...
Sorry, I get very angry when I see someone trying to be scientific and tell me to watch gamerchangers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1331544/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26493452/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00223...
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/90/4/943/4597049
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15072869/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30061399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466124/
I'm not a huge fan of nutrition, so that's why I take too long post these, anyway don't believe me or in any article, test on yourself and tell me.
Plant-based diet might be good for environment, but for sure are not good for your health.
I would recommend to read these articles properly next time and not make generalised statements like you've done.
You can live a healthy live without meat or dairy products.
We can't feed the whole world using a meat heavy diet as it's just too resource intensive and destructive to the environment. A shift to a more plant based diet is inevitable - that's why I'm thankful to people like Ethan Brown and his team working on meat alternatives that are as good or better than animal meat - to make this transition easier for people who just can't give up animal meat.
The article even states that a vegan or vegetarian diet is fine for kids[0]. So again please read articles properly next time and don't make generalised statements based one some headlines you read.
[0] "Babies and young children on a vegetarian or vegan diet can get the energy and most of the nutrients they need to grow and develop from a well-planned varied and balanced diet."
They will remain idle unltil untethered energy and bandwidth become free.
I won't let you use my phone's spare cycles and murder my battery while we're still using lipo cells that degrade after 2 years with regular use.
unless you tie it to an incentive, and thus you arrive at cryptocurrencies
Re: Amazon: Most of the other venues you mention are secondary markets for the exact same sellers. People have their own Shopify, Etsy, Ebay, etc., storefront but then also sell on Amazon because that's where so much of the market is. As far as I can tell it's an increasing trend in that direction.
That used to be popular (for instance, distributed.net) back when the processors used the same power whether they were idle or not. Nowadays, there is a huge difference in power usage and heat output between an idle or mostly idle processor, and a fully loaded one.
(My first desktop had a processor without a fan or even a heat spreader, and came with an operating system which had a busy loop as its idle loop.)
Regarding economies of scale - it's all so cheap that it doesn't matter for most cases that don't involve utterly tremendous amounts of resource usage.
I mean, the primary thing holding this back is consumer level ISP's being arsey about servers. A 10 year old machine hooked up to my 35mbit home connection is more than enough to run most internet services.
And that's effectively free because I already have it.
Yes, strictly. A 20W average laptop would cost approx 3-4GBP per month to leave on all the time in the UK, a modest desktop perhaps 10-15GBP.
It's been a measurement error in my power budget as far back as I can remember. Sure, you can go and compare it to EC2 or whatever if you like, but that's just silliness. It's a big mac meal.
My Threadripper box with a shitton of HDD's and RAM etc moves the needle because it has high idle consumption. I'll probably be getting rid of that soon; but it's still a low cost relative to purchase price.
Peer-to-peer models last thrived when connectivity was predominantly symmetric (e.g., the early days of DSL) and faded quickly as asymmetric connectivity became mainstream. I think the decline of decentralization and the rise of asymmetric connectivity are intertwined; neither necessarily caused the other, but they are correlated. One could argue asymmetric connectivity became popular because users only wanted to consume rather than share/serve. But similarly, people stopped sharing and serving because their connectivity discouraged that use case.
Today, symmetric connectivity is returning, such as in the form of 1G/1G fiber connections to the home. Combine this with infinite static IP addresses, and ever rising edge compute capacity, and I think decentralization is inevitable. I won't predict the magnitude, but as a fan of decentralization, I personally hope it is at least significant.
Network effects of centralization explain why current big companies prefer to build centralized services -- but the next big idea never comes from existing big companies, anyway.
My 30,000' view of computing history is that big companies, as a rule, don't create big ideas that survive. They pick up small ideas that work and scale them up (Gall's Law). Git and HTTP and Python didn't come from Microsoft or Google or Amazon, but those companies took them once they were already popular and made them scale -- in large part by making them work well in a centralized architecture.
The software that comes next won't win because FAANG like it better for building centralized architectures. It'll win because everybody and their dog will be using it at home. Then companies like FAANG will see that and pick it up and try to centralize it. Then the cycle will repeat.
We've already got a billion tiny data centers -- the powerful computers and smartphones in our houses and pockets. All we need is the right software, and the desire to not have every service delivered free-with-ads-over-the-web from big corporations.
Who authors and maintains this software? And what is their incentive?
With asymmetric up/download speeds.
Yep, sounds about right.
I'll predict the opposite. Web stacks will get even more unnecessarily complex and buggy. Investment sizes, late-stage development cycles, and page size, will continue to grow toward infinity while startup success rates drop closer to zero. Page load times on the best available connection and hardware will remain constant as it always has.
Wikipedia will decay and become increasingly difficult to use. It will be supplanted by something built on top of Urbit.
Marvel will take over the reigns of the Star Wars franchise.
Elizabeth Warren will be President.
Didn't mention distributed/remote work. Not sure if that's because it's so obvious a trend as to be boring?
I think he's early on the plant-based diet prediction, but correct in 20-30 years. Actually a lot of these seem like trends that might take more than 10 years, but have a high chance of being correct eventually.
Best Buy’s pullback from it for their office staff is instructive.
Please consider this. They are a real bargain and provide a real service to humanity. Instead of upvoting this comment, please give them $5 instead if you can.
What do users of the archive gain by it being independent of advertising?
And why can't it be a non profit and also offset expenses by selling advertising?
Look at it this way.
There are plenty of non profits that can only make money by donations. They can't easily make money off of advertising. Internet Archive can. So in theory any money that someone sends to them would not go to an organization that might have a greater need. Make sense?
Now of course you are saying 'give them $5 instead of upvoting'. So that is a small enough amount that you would say 'you still have $5 to give to someone else'. But I say when people (en masse) behave like that a portion will feel that they have done their 'good person' duty and not make another donation to another cause (that once again can't sell advertising).
By the way 'service to humanity'???
Edit: One other thing. I'd be glad to pay IA for 'service'. That is if I need to get a page taken down or I need to get something scraped more or less I'd gladly pay for being able to discuss with a real person and get something done. This idea that free means 'you take what you get and you don't get upset' to me is just nonsense at the core. Maybe have a free no ad service but then charge for things to raise revenue not just 'donate donate donate'.
And even with donations they could in theory be 'corrupted' just the same. A rich person could give them a large sum of money (as a donation) and then would have some defacto say in how things were done.
Take as another example ball parks (to even counter my point). They sell naming rights. That does not mean that the entity who purchased the naming rights gets to decide who plays on the team or who coaches the team although you could argue that that could happen (and I would say it does not offset the benefit of not having that 'independence'.
(I was also going to suggest nominating Internet Archive as a charity for Humble Bundle purchases as well, but it seems like they no longer support choosing your own charities.)
Thanks archive, I'm glad I can support you a bit.
I'm not against anything about them but if they want donations, their way of expense should be clearer.
Data storage is also single purpose job. While it needs technical capability to store huge amount of data, I still don't see how 150 people are needed to maintain the archive.
You say as if 150 is a small team but how are they used?
Please forgive my pithy comment, but the size of the task goes someway to explaining the size of the workforce in my mind.
So here is a prediction for 2030, self hosting blog post are still too lazy for CDN in 2030. If there is anything I will not bet against it will be people's laziness.
Nothing wrong with Laziness really, after that is what product should be about, set and forget about it. Hopefully all blog software would have Cloudflare or CDN by default in 2030.
By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing device (glasses, contacts, perhaps neurological etc) all day which allow software to proxy most aspects of their visual and audio perception, perhaps more.
Among the many results of this change, the most profound will be the loss of physical co-presence as a factor for interacting with other people. People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
The technical miracle aside, this will cause a fundamental shift in the way we think about what it means to "be" with other people -- the dependence upon physical co-locality will be no longer something we place highly in our mental model for spending time with others, other than children.
This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
I suspect, perhaps hope, that the dominating result will be that, in combination with new forms of media based upon these new technological marvels, we will be able to greatly reduce or eliminate the tribalist tendencies we have for one another when those 'others' are out-of-reach for us to talk with, hug, dance with, and learn from.
In 2030, you'll be able to hug anyone on Earth instantly, and that's something to be optimistic about.
I think the bigger unknown questions are around the impact of this technology. It seems hard to understate how much of a change it will be, particularly if there is a path towards young people being able to use it at a young age.
In the mean time you just have a display that obstructs your view and which can't be tolerated for more than a couple of hours.
How much data does a human 6 feet away from you project to you? How much of that data enters your conscious? How much enters your subconscious? With Moore’s law dying we can’t hope to match that amount of information, much less accurately record and transport it in real time. Lossy capture and output mechanisms will still be present in a decade.
Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the 90's. Turns out it's true, to a degree, but also unleased all the misinformation we see today. I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I remember the early hype, but then read a few interviews with users/losers who were just escaping reality.
Too slow (latency is inevitable), too limiting, too hard to do or show anything non-trivial.
You could do interesting things if you put it a lot of time. But few have the time to spend on unclear benefits.
I'd argue that this is the situation humanity has been in forever, to varying degrees, mainly for the former (the news), but also the latter.
What I hope to see is a greater realization of this, and willingness to consider the degree to which this affects disagreement and polarization (ie: perhaps the situation isn't that our ideological opponents are idiots, but rather the situation is more complex than we perceive).
Or instantly punch anyone on earth in the face. Based on how the last decade went, I’m not optimistic.
From the same technological situation you describe I can only think of how people would use that only to further isolate themselves. At least today, physical location sometimes dictate you have to interact with people outside of your own social class and background. What you describe could reduce that, making every one retreat even further into their echo chamber.
People already live in close proximity to millions in cities. They generally don't hug each other; more fixated on rushing past each other, avoiding eye contact.
Humans just aren't made for having 7 billion friends...
We need to rethink the ways schools operate, from 8am-3pm they can be for kids. After 4pm they can be adult learning hubs, maker spaces, DIY bicycle repair shops etc.
The greatest institutions, large and small (schools, libraries, churches, etc) all orbit the constraints of physical coproximity. If even a modest set of these experiences can have a true digital analog that replicated it decoupled from physical copresence, the opportunity for these kinds of institutions to form at a whole higher level, across great tribal boundaries, seems high.
It’s hard or impossible to make specific, concrete predictions on a ten year timeline. But my view is that the 20’s will see a radical departure from physical copresence mitigating human activity, and we will all agree that this change happened in 2030. I hope that people capitalizing on it build good social systems to bring out the best in people and replicate what we have learned from our best institutions and examples of positive human gathering.
Of course we cannot extrapolate. Noone can know. But are there any specific reasons why the ongoing tide of political, ideological, social polarization would suddenly turn around?
You say "across great tribal boundaries". To me, physical proximity seems to be the main thing left now that still counteracts tribal boundaries.
Can you provide examples/scenarios perhaps?
As my counter-example, I just moved out to the country-side. As a result, I start to now see different opinions in my Facebook feed from when I lived in a city, simply due to Facebook-friending new people due to physical proximity. Due to this influx of "random" impulses in my Facebook feed, I think am likely to have less polarized views politically (I can see different friends arguing both sides of a topic) than if physical proximity didn't play a role in who I friended.
My favorite concept of that discussion was virtual guardians to protect your flow - look, you can interrupt that developer but you’re gonna have to defeat his virtual dragon first.
No room, or need, for decorations and fluff.
Perhaps your coworkers would be required to execute a perfect Japanese tea ceremony before interrupting you.
This sounds sad and absurd. Hugging someone in person is a much more visceral experience than via AR/VR.
Indie games are gonna get a lot weirder... pray for our overloaded dopamine receptors and shriveled serotonin ones. Pornhub will probably roll out their own game store steam clone lol
This made me laugh. We haven't even figured out how to do telephone conferences reliably. I'm still waiting for a telco that does not have the obligatory "You're breaking up" or "I cannot see the screenshare" or "Oh sorry, my microphone was still on mute" or whatever somewhere in between.
This is a well researched area, and embodied communication through VR/AR stands poised to solve many of these deficiencies by allowing the expression of non verbal cues, body language, spatial referencing, etc.
And for those few we really care to hug, we most often care enough for to be around anyway.
This will be the main catalyst for adopting greener infrastructure. Fear of permanent climate change will not be the catalyst, as that is a long term repercussion of not solving the pollution problem, and humans have never been good about preparing for things in advance.
There's a reason why people in rural areas are less aware of climate change due to human pollution. The effects of pollution are much less apparent in rural areas due to the far lower human density. Rural areas are "clean" to the human eye, so we have large swaths of the population that simply don't care about long term effects of pollution, because to them, even the short-term effects are almost indiscernible.
People are moving to cities at a faster rate despite the proliferation of the internet. As such, we'll eventually reach a critical mass of the population that eventually leads us to adopting greener policies. All because people are moving into cities from rural areas. I get that it sounds counterintuitive.
Asia (China) would not have an incentive politically to run with it, as it would remove traceability and control of money flow. Not to mention online currencies pitfalls.