It feels like React is pretty well entrenched as the leading front end framework at this point. I really don't know any devs in real life that have used it and disliked the developer experience and are itching to try something new. A new framework would have to provide some fairly significant advantages to get people to switch.
I predict that by 2030, we will be discussing treaties unifying internet rules because each country will have its own version of GDPR and other laws, causing compliance to become a nightmare.
2022 — the last of political opposition to Xi makes its bid for power, it fails with some noise, and we see a compromise establishment for the rest of Xi's life
2022 — the last of political opposition to Xi makes its bid for power, it fails miserably, and Xi secures claim to absolute power, and reigns Brezhnev style to his last breath
EU:
Coming of Trump alike in Germany, or Austria is not unlikely.
If it comes to that, EU may well be under mortal threat
Russia:
Some orchestrated "transition" to some high profile mayor like Sobanin happens, but nothing really changes.
Alternative? Military insurrection by officers being tired of being sent to god forsaken places on whims of mafia boys.
USA:
Really no idea — your country has been defying common sense for 2 decades straight. Understanding America is beyond me.
I predict Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook are only going to get more valuable and bigger. The previous idea that there are limits to growth that have already been reached... don't apply anymore.
Not because they're any smarter than anyone else, but they're able to continuing buying and absorbing any and all competitive threats. And that the "moat" of initial costs to compete with them in existing areas is too high. (E.g. try building your own search engine.)
And regulation and antitrust law isn't going to make a dent because any potential legal principles against it won't be convincing enough to the average citizen, so there won't be any particularly convincing legislative proposals for support in Congress to coalesce around. (It's easy to say "break up Facebook!" It's really, really hard to come up with a reasonable generic law that results in breaking up the "too big" companies without harming the "good" companies, and breaking them up in reasonable ways.)
I don't think they're going to get any more "evil". They're just going to keep expanding into more and more valuable products/markets -- like Apple has with wearables, or Google has with Cloud, or Amazon with TV shows.
(I'm not saying whether this is good or bad -- I just think it's what will happen.)
This has been said about many companies in the past and it is rarely the case. Compared to the infrastructure needed to compete with Standard Oil, the railroads, or telecom, the capital expenditure to create a new tech company is miniscule.
Founders just need to not sell out. Look at the rise of TikTok. Even with search, DuckDuckGo with its privacy focus is starting to encroach on Google.
Let's pay them all $200k/yr. That's $10,000,000m a year. Inflation adjusted, compared to the capital investments of the giants of the roaring 20s, this is pretty small if not irrelevant. Even if you double it to cover payroll tax and other expenses, it's still going to move the needle.
This is just an extrapolation, not a 'prediction.' Like, you know, saying that "in the 20th century horses will be much stronger so that one horse will be able able to draw more than one carriage full of hay."
I am not willing to make this prediction, but I’d be interested in hearing if anyone thinks we will NOT see fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2030. Even in 2010, it seemed just around the corner — but that turned out to be wrong.
Technically, we already have fully autonomous vehicles on the road, they're just not generally allowed to be used as such and have obvious failure modes not shared by human drivers.
However, if by this you mean "autonomous vehicles that are clearly superior to reasonable human drivers under all reasonably frequent scenarios (including inclement weather) in any developed country" then yes, I feel very confident we won't see that in the next decade, probably two. I think the hyperoptimistic HN bubble is extremely far off the mark with respect to autonomous vehicles and always has been.
I thought of this after posting. Technically, there have been vehicles allow to operate fully autonomously on the road, yes. But I mean for non-research purposes, full-featured autonomous driving for consumer-owned vehicles.
I don't think it'll make much economic sense for consumers to actually buy them, but I do expect to see services accessible to the public that let you use an autonomous vehicle in places with effectively ideal conditions before 2030. I also don't regard that as a particularly significant advance in the broader sense of the objective because I think it's easier to get from zero to driving in Phoenix than it is to get from there to handling, say, traffic in Mumbai, both in technological and social terms.
> if anyone thinks we will NOT see fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2030.
I don't think we will in any widespread way. Perhaps we'll see some in very limited deployments, both in terms of the number of vehicles and what roads they'll operate on.
2030 will at least have certain areas that are autonomous vehicles only, like maybe a forward-thinking region implements a fully autonomous truck lane on a highway.
If anything were to get in the way of fully autonomous vehicles by 2030, I would think it will be a government's lack of political will to create the infrastructure or regulation needed for driverless vehicles.
Sure. I predict that there will not be a fully autonomous vehicle widely available for sale to the public and allowed to function in FA mode on all roads, as of Dec 31, 2029.
("widely available for sale to the public": at least as available as a Tesla is right now.)
On the other hand, I predict that lots of cars will have emergency auto-assist features: collision avoidance warnings, lane-keeping assistance, seatbelt tighteners, and perhaps a last-action feature that evaluates whether it's best to slam on the brakes, veer sharply (and in what direction?) or try to accelerate out of danger -- and then applies that action without driver input.
Yep, there's no way they'll be widespread, and for the limited places they are used, they'll have a human ready to grab the wheel. Largest users might be trucking companies. I think the hype will fade this decade without any fanfare as the reality becomes clearer.
my prediction is we will see them in geo-fenced localities that have a much more controlled driving experience, and will not be available in consumer cars beyond Tesla-style "drive assistance", but instead will be fleets managed by companies like Uber.
I.e. self driving Ubers will be geo-fenced to suburban areas away from unpredictable city conditions, and used for local deliveries (think pizza, uber eats) and perhaps long-haul highway trucks (which pretty much drive straight for fifteen hours anyway).
Self driving in every consumer vehicle will be in the 2030s.
It doesn't matter if there are SOME self-driving cars on the road in 2030, or if they're level 4 or level 5. [1]
What matters is if they're economically feasible by 2030, and say have 100M or 1B customers. Is Waymo bigger than what Google search is now, or another self-driving company bigger than Facebook?
My answer is no for consumer applications, e.g. rideshare. I wrote in this thread:
Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.
[1] There are people in this thread arguing that this has already been achieved. I don't agree, but if the threshold is one car demonstrating one thing, then meh I might not argue.
I believe there will be L3 available in the next decade. A consumer-owned car which can take over driver-responsibility in limited settings. What Teslas autopilot promises although it currently is L2.
The interesting question is which company is bold enough to do it first and if it will survive the law suits afterwards. Tesla is the most likely.
L4/5 will realize in limited scenarios (senior communities, hub-to-hub trucks) but not as taxis in dense cities. In other words Waymo will still use safety drivers in ten years or close down.
And how could that "flooding" happen? that still would be produced from the living cells, cell division is slow. If breakthrough happens, such synthetically produced antibodies would not be called monoclonal and instead we'll hear some new marketing name there.
Monoclonal antibodies are just antibodies that are monospecific (ie they bind one target really well). And it looks like there a number of drugs under this category (anything ending in -mab usually) are in stage II/III of clinical trials (meaning they are likely to be approved in the coming years).
What you mention about cell division rates being slow was solved by the hybridoma protocol where you fuse two cells, one of which is a myeloma (cancer that is a rapidly reproducing cell line) and another is a B cell that produces Antibodies that are specific for your intended target. Since then there have been a lot of strides in monoclonal antibody production. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody#Production]
AI proves P != NP. The proof is 20K pages and not comprehensible by humans, who spend the next 30 years deciphering it, by which time the AI has proved the five remaining millennium problems. The AI elects to keep the Clay Prize money each time and donate it all to homeless chia pets, thus proving general-purpose AI is still a ways off.
I wish I could put my finger on it, but there is a huge disconnect between economic reality and the current financial situation across most of the world. It seems to me, perhaps simplistically, that every central bank is simply issuing money to generate growth and this can't be sustainable. Our biggest industry would appear to be buying, renting and selling assets to each other.
My apartment overlooks a city of 1 million people in the UK - I estimate generously that 50,000 of them are economically productive in the sense of producing something of value that can be 'exported' from this city. The other 950,000 must live off that value - it doesn't make sense. All factories are flattened to make way for apartments. Any industrial development is of distribution centres for breaking down pallets of imported tat.
I don't know what this will lead to - perhaps it's the collapse of the Euro, the rise of some stable currency that isn't playing this game, or an opportunity for a new currency (crypto or something that we don't have yet).
Just as the LIBOR scandal revealed that commercial banks were just making up numbers, so I believe that central banks are doing the same with each other and trust will need to be removed from the system.
I’d be interested to know what city you’re talking about. Are you limiting ‘something of value’ to manufacturing? A great deal of the UK economy is service based. I’d be amazed if only 5% of the city’s population were producing goods or services used by those outside the city.
>I estimate generously that 50,000 of them are economically productive in the sense of producing something of value that can be 'exported' from this city.
I'm confused, are you saying that services don't have value? It feels like an artificial distinction to me, for example watching a movie at a theater vs buying/renting a movie both provide me similar value. Also, in a world of increasing automation and globalization # of people is perhaps not a great metric.
I'm not really sure if the economy is in as good of shape as it seems. At least here in the USA we're hitting an unprecedented period of economic growth; the Keynesian in me believes that policy has prevented at least one recession in the 2010s and led to real growth in the economy, but it's very possible we're just in for a bigger fall in the 2020s because of it.
You're ignoring domestic demand. When you buy something at the supermarket the biggest chunk of money goes to the local workers meanwhile farmers only get the wholesale price.
I reckon the percentage of people contributing to true economic production is probably higher than any point in history. Think about how much of human history is subsistence and survival.
- very few desktop applications will exist, they will have moved to web assembly powered browser applications
- way more people will work from home and most "work" software will attempt to support this through real-time collaboration powered by CRDT/MRDTs.
- the dat:// protocol, ipfs, and other attempts at creating a decentralized internet will not take off, but the concepts will have a resurgence in the later decade (or possibly in the 2040s) due to interplanetary or otherwise far-distance space internet.
- way more folks will support nuclear as climate change forces the issue
- quantum computers won't fundamentally change the way normal people think about encryption, but instead some sites/apps will be considered "insecure" in the same way not using https is today.
- private car ownership will be on it's last legs, ride shares via self-driving cars plus revamped public transit will be the way the majority of folks get around. New developments will be built as "car free" without garages and with restricted car usage like many city centers.
- people will eat significantly less meat
- deno + Typescript wins
- Typescript (or a TS variant) will be compiled directly to WASM on the browser
- way more people order food rather than cook for themselves
- Many subscription consumer apps will die as many more folks enter into the field, driving up cost-of-acquisition
- Stripe becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world
Assuming you mean GAI, I think very convincing, powerful AI already exists inside organizations with the resources to build it (google/microsoft), and they're trying to figure out how to commercialize it without doing anything risky. Models have already been publicly demonstrated which can leave some with eerie impressions until you understand how it works, and even if you do, the results are continuing to gain complexity and intricacy.
If Google, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple have GAI, how do you explain the fact that Siri, Cortana, Google assistant and Alexa are all so very, very, very far from that?
I think car ownership might change to subscription service model vs. outright buying a car, but still mostly private vehicle "ownership" in 2030 outside of dense urban areas.
Maybe the avg. car ownership per household will drop dramatically, from ~2 to 1 or less, with the rise of ridesharing/public transit.
I'm skeptical about this. This past year we've seen two major car sharing services take a huge hit. ReachNow was suddenly shut down and Car2Go pulled out of the US. If you end up being right, the car sharing companies will have to go back to the drawing board to create a new business model.
> the car sharing companies will have to go back to the drawing board to create a new business model.
I'll bet on this. Either self-driving cars dramatically lowers the cost of operations. Or startups like Nomad Rides change the business model entirely. Micro-mobility via scooters / bikes might also be a valid reason here.
But the consumer desire for ride-share is there and it's unlikely to go anywhere.
> Micro-mobility via scooters / bikes might also be a valid reason here.
I think this is the winner for dense cities with mild winters.
During rush hour in many cities you're about as fast walking as you are driving. People barely walk though and cycling requires physical effort which makes it inconvenient enough for many people to prefer cars. Scooters fix these problems and get you there really fast, except they suck in winter, except again in a few years winters may not be that bad anymore. The only (practical, non-luxury) reason you might want a car then is transporting a lot of stuff. For those few situations, carsharing might be an acceptable solution.
Re: DAWs .... rendering a physically modelled synthetic orchestra, let's say, 50 players, would probably tax even my current Threadripper system. It has a cooling system the size of ... let's be polite and say two very large coffee mugs.
Remind me again how you're going to do this on something other than "the desktop"?
Oh, and don't think about offloading it to the cloud. It's going to be on the order of 100GB of data when finished.
Oh, and did I mention that in 2020, I'm going to be conducting this thing in realtime (or some ML-based agent will be) ...
My guess is either one of two scenarios, possibly both:
1. WASM develops into a security model that's much closer to native hardware, more like a container that's shipped with a browser. It's probably more accurate to say that your desktop might still be important in this model, but from a user perspective, the app will "live" inside your browser.
2. Apps become more like consoles that stream the output of what you're running rather than the entirety of your data. The computing will happen on cloud-compute, but you could interact with the final product in your browser. Similar to Stadia.
A new tech company will make it big by selling privacy-minded devices (or by pretending to be privacy-minded). More companies will follow and a buzzword will be created for these kind of devices (privtech or something).
Big tech companies will stop using Javascript and go full WASM. Non-tech Companies will still use Javascript, but popular Javascript frameworks won't be as big as Angular and React, they will be jQuery reincarnations.
Some important person is going to be hacked and the consequences will be bigger than you think.
Foldable phones will make a big fuss and then die just like netbooks did 10 years ago.
Google will try to replace Android and fail. Flutter will be discontinued.
Someone will try to dethrone Youtube, making a big fuss, and fail miserably.
My takeaway from reading the top voted 2010 predictions is that people are terrible about predicting what's going to happen 10 years later.
A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.
My fun (and probably wrong) predictions:
* Hacker News will still look mostly the same in 2030 as it does now and did in 2010.
* Most predictions in the parent post will be at most mildly accurate and otherwise completely wrong.
* The Artemis program, if it survives into the next administration, won't land anyone on the moon until the latter part of the decade (2025 or later).
* With the emerging increased commercial lift capacity we've been seeing in the last 5 years we'll possibly see the first commercial space station or at least the plans for one to start launching in the 2030's.
* (Unlikely) Elon will decide he wants his Roadster back. A Starship mission to demonstrate deep space recovery capability will launch to intercept the car and return it to Earth.
1. Trust in journalists and news publications will continue to crater due to their inability to resist clickbait, sloppy ethic controls, and constant hyperboles.
2. China will enter a pronounced recession that is it unable to hide from the world.
3. The EU will lose at-least one more member nation after the United Kingdom leaves.
4. The credibility of scientist and research universities will hit all time lows as the effects of the replication crisis become more pronounced and climate changes predictions prove less accurate than lay people find acceptable. I expect this to result in a large pullback in funding for research that lacks a direct practical application.
5. Negative interest rates in EU will force more global dependency on the US dollar.
6. At-least one more country will adopt or de facto adopt the US dollar as their nation currency (dollarization).
7. The US will adopt a single payer or universal health care system.
Euro, about 10 years ago there were some suggested debate to divide the Eurozone in two: nothern and southern Euro, so that you could pay with strong euro in Germany, France, Netherlands and soft euro in Greece, Portugal, Spain, etc.
That's completely stupid idea but could benefit the south economically.
There were definitely parties in the Netherlands and France that made leaving the EU their major plank. When Brexit turned out to be rather more difficult than its adherents imagined, support for "Frexit" and "Nexit" plummeted like a rock, and hasn't recovered.
Greece is slightly more plausible, but less because Greece wants to leave and more because the rest of the EU decides to kick them out. It's doubtful they'd kick them out of anything more than the Eurozone, though.
I think journalism will find its bearings in the new digital/social media environment and gain trust again, it just won't operate/look like what we think of as journalism today or in the past.
Last week the government had to re-introduce currency controls via a 30% tax, after a 20-year long currency crisis, in which it went to 1-63 from 1-1 parity
> 4. The credibility of scientist and research universities will hit all time lows as the effects of the replication crisis become more pronounced and climate changes predictions prove less accurate than lay people find acceptable.
While I agree the credibility of scientist and research universities has hit all time lows, I don't see a pullback in funding or any major changes
>4. The credibility of scientist and research universities will hit all time lows as the effects of the replication crisis become more pronounced and climate changes predictions prove less accurate than lay people find acceptable. I expect this to result in a large pullback in funding for research that lacks a direct practical application.
Agreed. Can also see, with the death of traditional journalism, the arts majors who are paid to write clickbait for online-only entities latching onto this to brow-beat scientists and turn mass opinion against them. The same creatures producing hysteria with writings akin to "We've 12 years to live because of climate change!" are fickle and as soon as the current narrative shifts a bit there's no telling what other damage they're capable of doing.
One of the contributing factors to why I think we'll see a significant return to religiousness in Western nations in the coming decade.
>"We've 12 years to live because of climate change!" are fickle and as soon as the current narrative shifts a bit there's no telling what other damage they're capable of doing.
One of the contributing factors to why I think we'll see a significant return to religiousness in Western nations in the coming decade.
Those hysterias and groupthinks already are their religions. Meanwhile the tail end of the distribution in the US is increasingly experiencing worse outcomes: homelessness, joblessness, suicide, etc.
China doubles down on censorship and authoritarian government, but in the same time becoming world leader in some technology frontiers, stabilizing its government and leading to further polarization in tech. America no longer maintains its technology edge in silicon over the rest of the world.
Hong Kong becomes just a providence in China not because military intervention but because economic stagnation.
New houses are sold without kitchen and garage. City planning becomes a hot new field.
Wearable tech becomes much more in fashion. Medical devices tracking sleep, diet, or exercises are not only ubiquitous but necessary.
Rust takes off. Programming in Python becomes standard curriculum in high schools. We have less programmers, but more professionals who also programs.
Data Science is no longer a buzzword but just another part of programming. Modeling becomes less important, but the so call "ML OPS" will take off.
Math becomes much more important in programming and a sexy degree for college students.
Pretty concerned about how the EU will evolve. There is little introspection post brexit, and it appears to be just as rigid and clueless as before the vote.
On a positive note, I really really hope electric cars will become more accessible - both for consumers and for manufacturers (i.e.: small companies will get access to batteries and be able to build EVs themselves).
Prediction for the 20s: breakthroughs in s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶r̶n̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ fusion power will mean it'll only be 10-20 years away at the end of the decade
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] thread2022 — the last of political opposition to Xi makes its bid for power, it fails with some noise, and we see a compromise establishment for the rest of Xi's life
2022 — the last of political opposition to Xi makes its bid for power, it fails miserably, and Xi secures claim to absolute power, and reigns Brezhnev style to his last breath
EU:
Coming of Trump alike in Germany, or Austria is not unlikely.
If it comes to that, EU may well be under mortal threat
Russia:
Some orchestrated "transition" to some high profile mayor like Sobanin happens, but nothing really changes.
Alternative? Military insurrection by officers being tired of being sent to god forsaken places on whims of mafia boys.
USA:
Really no idea — your country has been defying common sense for 2 decades straight. Understanding America is beyond me.
Not because they're any smarter than anyone else, but they're able to continuing buying and absorbing any and all competitive threats. And that the "moat" of initial costs to compete with them in existing areas is too high. (E.g. try building your own search engine.)
And regulation and antitrust law isn't going to make a dent because any potential legal principles against it won't be convincing enough to the average citizen, so there won't be any particularly convincing legislative proposals for support in Congress to coalesce around. (It's easy to say "break up Facebook!" It's really, really hard to come up with a reasonable generic law that results in breaking up the "too big" companies without harming the "good" companies, and breaking them up in reasonable ways.)
I don't think they're going to get any more "evil". They're just going to keep expanding into more and more valuable products/markets -- like Apple has with wearables, or Google has with Cloud, or Amazon with TV shows.
(I'm not saying whether this is good or bad -- I just think it's what will happen.)
Founders just need to not sell out. Look at the rise of TikTok. Even with search, DuckDuckGo with its privacy focus is starting to encroach on Google.
Hiring a hundred AI engineers/scientists isn't cheap either.
However, if by this you mean "autonomous vehicles that are clearly superior to reasonable human drivers under all reasonably frequent scenarios (including inclement weather) in any developed country" then yes, I feel very confident we won't see that in the next decade, probably two. I think the hyperoptimistic HN bubble is extremely far off the mark with respect to autonomous vehicles and always has been.
I don't think we will in any widespread way. Perhaps we'll see some in very limited deployments, both in terms of the number of vehicles and what roads they'll operate on.
If anything were to get in the way of fully autonomous vehicles by 2030, I would think it will be a government's lack of political will to create the infrastructure or regulation needed for driverless vehicles.
("widely available for sale to the public": at least as available as a Tesla is right now.)
On the other hand, I predict that lots of cars will have emergency auto-assist features: collision avoidance warnings, lane-keeping assistance, seatbelt tighteners, and perhaps a last-action feature that evaluates whether it's best to slam on the brakes, veer sharply (and in what direction?) or try to accelerate out of danger -- and then applies that action without driver input.
I.e. self driving Ubers will be geo-fenced to suburban areas away from unpredictable city conditions, and used for local deliveries (think pizza, uber eats) and perhaps long-haul highway trucks (which pretty much drive straight for fifteen hours anyway).
Self driving in every consumer vehicle will be in the 2030s.
What matters is if they're economically feasible by 2030, and say have 100M or 1B customers. Is Waymo bigger than what Google search is now, or another self-driving company bigger than Facebook?
My answer is no for consumer applications, e.g. rideshare. I wrote in this thread:
Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942100
[1] There are people in this thread arguing that this has already been achieved. I don't agree, but if the threshold is one car demonstrating one thing, then meh I might not argue.
The interesting question is which company is bold enough to do it first and if it will survive the law suits afterwards. Tesla is the most likely.
L4/5 will realize in limited scenarios (senior communities, hub-to-hub trucks) but not as taxis in dense cities. In other words Waymo will still use safety drivers in ten years or close down.
(80% confidence in my statements)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody
What you mention about cell division rates being slow was solved by the hybridoma protocol where you fuse two cells, one of which is a myeloma (cancer that is a rapidly reproducing cell line) and another is a B cell that produces Antibodies that are specific for your intended target. Since then there have been a lot of strides in monoclonal antibody production. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody#Production]
It's still cell division, nowhere near the speed and cost of chemically produced drugs.
</paranoia>
My apartment overlooks a city of 1 million people in the UK - I estimate generously that 50,000 of them are economically productive in the sense of producing something of value that can be 'exported' from this city. The other 950,000 must live off that value - it doesn't make sense. All factories are flattened to make way for apartments. Any industrial development is of distribution centres for breaking down pallets of imported tat.
I don't know what this will lead to - perhaps it's the collapse of the Euro, the rise of some stable currency that isn't playing this game, or an opportunity for a new currency (crypto or something that we don't have yet).
Just as the LIBOR scandal revealed that commercial banks were just making up numbers, so I believe that central banks are doing the same with each other and trust will need to be removed from the system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Glasgow
I'm confused, are you saying that services don't have value? It feels like an artificial distinction to me, for example watching a movie at a theater vs buying/renting a movie both provide me similar value. Also, in a world of increasing automation and globalization # of people is perhaps not a great metric.
I'm not really sure if the economy is in as good of shape as it seems. At least here in the USA we're hitting an unprecedented period of economic growth; the Keynesian in me believes that policy has prevented at least one recession in the 2010s and led to real growth in the economy, but it's very possible we're just in for a bigger fall in the 2020s because of it.
2. Ownership of data, end-to-end encryption
3. Collaborative wiki news, copyleft drug research
4. The rapid emergence of a third party in the USA that is neither left nor right, but much bigger than Libertarian party
5. Decentralized solar power generation, Decentralized mobile mesh network communication, Nuclear Fusion, Decentralizing government functions
The best way to predict the future is to invent it ;-)
But also:
6. Drones filling the sky and terrorism scares
7. Self driving cars and terrorism scares
8. Insect and bird populations plummeting and many species going extinct
9. Water shortages, droughts, desertification and food shortages as humans cut back on meat, abolition of factory farms
10. The steady emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is averted with phage therapy and other approaches as antibiotics see a slow decline
11. The resurgence of liberal democratic politicians, who nevertheless will have tough border policies because of the increasing influx of refugees
12. The rise of NATO-style forces against China and a new cold war
13. Introduction of UBI funded by Pigovian taxes on Cabon and Plastic pollution, destruction of ecosystems, etc.
14. First biosphere colony on Mars lasts for a while but is a tragic failure
15. Solar storm wipes out power grid, helping build a decentralized power grid
- very few desktop applications will exist, they will have moved to web assembly powered browser applications
- way more people will work from home and most "work" software will attempt to support this through real-time collaboration powered by CRDT/MRDTs.
- the dat:// protocol, ipfs, and other attempts at creating a decentralized internet will not take off, but the concepts will have a resurgence in the later decade (or possibly in the 2040s) due to interplanetary or otherwise far-distance space internet.
- way more folks will support nuclear as climate change forces the issue
- quantum computers won't fundamentally change the way normal people think about encryption, but instead some sites/apps will be considered "insecure" in the same way not using https is today.
- private car ownership will be on it's last legs, ride shares via self-driving cars plus revamped public transit will be the way the majority of folks get around. New developments will be built as "car free" without garages and with restricted car usage like many city centers.
- people will eat significantly less meat
- deno + Typescript wins
- Typescript (or a TS variant) will be compiled directly to WASM on the browser
- way more people order food rather than cook for themselves
- Many subscription consumer apps will die as many more folks enter into the field, driving up cost-of-acquisition
- Stripe becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world
Maybe the avg. car ownership per household will drop dramatically, from ~2 to 1 or less, with the rise of ridesharing/public transit.
This is what I mean. Car ownership will be a hold-over from folks who still own a car from a long while ago.
Most people will just subscribe to a subscription rideshare service.
I'll bet on this. Either self-driving cars dramatically lowers the cost of operations. Or startups like Nomad Rides change the business model entirely. Micro-mobility via scooters / bikes might also be a valid reason here.
But the consumer desire for ride-share is there and it's unlikely to go anywhere.
I think this is the winner for dense cities with mild winters.
During rush hour in many cities you're about as fast walking as you are driving. People barely walk though and cycling requires physical effort which makes it inconvenient enough for many people to prefer cars. Scooters fix these problems and get you there really fast, except they suck in winter, except again in a few years winters may not be that bad anymore. The only (practical, non-luxury) reason you might want a car then is transporting a lot of stuff. For those few situations, carsharing might be an acceptable solution.
Oh, I hope you're wrong about this one. That would render computers largely worthless to me due to a lack of software.
Curious, why?
Just the trivial apps will be moving to the cloud.
Probably true for Windows and Mac. Meanwhile, Linux and BSD people will still be arguing GTK vs. Qt.
100%. I doubt *nix apps will change much. But you DAWs, photoshops, and microsoft words will no longer exist on the desktop.
Remind me again how you're going to do this on something other than "the desktop"?
Oh, and don't think about offloading it to the cloud. It's going to be on the order of 100GB of data when finished.
Oh, and did I mention that in 2020, I'm going to be conducting this thing in realtime (or some ML-based agent will be) ...
1. WASM develops into a security model that's much closer to native hardware, more like a container that's shipped with a browser. It's probably more accurate to say that your desktop might still be important in this model, but from a user perspective, the app will "live" inside your browser.
2. Apps become more like consoles that stream the output of what you're running rather than the entirety of your data. The computing will happen on cloud-compute, but you could interact with the final product in your browser. Similar to Stadia.
Big tech companies will stop using Javascript and go full WASM. Non-tech Companies will still use Javascript, but popular Javascript frameworks won't be as big as Angular and React, they will be jQuery reincarnations.
Some important person is going to be hacked and the consequences will be bigger than you think.
Foldable phones will make a big fuss and then die just like netbooks did 10 years ago.
Google will try to replace Android and fail. Flutter will be discontinued.
Someone will try to dethrone Youtube, making a big fuss, and fail miserably.
A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.
My fun (and probably wrong) predictions:
* Hacker News will still look mostly the same in 2030 as it does now and did in 2010.
* Most predictions in the parent post will be at most mildly accurate and otherwise completely wrong.
* The Artemis program, if it survives into the next administration, won't land anyone on the moon until the latter part of the decade (2025 or later).
* With the emerging increased commercial lift capacity we've been seeing in the last 5 years we'll possibly see the first commercial space station or at least the plans for one to start launching in the 2030's.
* (Unlikely) Elon will decide he wants his Roadster back. A Starship mission to demonstrate deep space recovery capability will launch to intercept the car and return it to Earth.
2. China will enter a pronounced recession that is it unable to hide from the world.
3. The EU will lose at-least one more member nation after the United Kingdom leaves.
4. The credibility of scientist and research universities will hit all time lows as the effects of the replication crisis become more pronounced and climate changes predictions prove less accurate than lay people find acceptable. I expect this to result in a large pullback in funding for research that lacks a direct practical application.
5. Negative interest rates in EU will force more global dependency on the US dollar.
6. At-least one more country will adopt or de facto adopt the US dollar as their nation currency (dollarization).
7. The US will adopt a single payer or universal health care system.
Why?
That's completely stupid idea but could benefit the south economically.
Greece is slightly more plausible, but less because Greece wants to leave and more because the rest of the EU decides to kick them out. It's doubtful they'd kick them out of anything more than the Eurozone, though.
Last week the government had to re-introduce currency controls via a 30% tax, after a 20-year long currency crisis, in which it went to 1-63 from 1-1 parity
While I agree the credibility of scientist and research universities has hit all time lows, I don't see a pullback in funding or any major changes
Agreed. Can also see, with the death of traditional journalism, the arts majors who are paid to write clickbait for online-only entities latching onto this to brow-beat scientists and turn mass opinion against them. The same creatures producing hysteria with writings akin to "We've 12 years to live because of climate change!" are fickle and as soon as the current narrative shifts a bit there's no telling what other damage they're capable of doing.
One of the contributing factors to why I think we'll see a significant return to religiousness in Western nations in the coming decade.
One of the contributing factors to why I think we'll see a significant return to religiousness in Western nations in the coming decade.
Those hysterias and groupthinks already are their religions. Meanwhile the tail end of the distribution in the US is increasingly experiencing worse outcomes: homelessness, joblessness, suicide, etc.
Hong Kong becomes just a providence in China not because military intervention but because economic stagnation.
New houses are sold without kitchen and garage. City planning becomes a hot new field.
Wearable tech becomes much more in fashion. Medical devices tracking sleep, diet, or exercises are not only ubiquitous but necessary.
Rust takes off. Programming in Python becomes standard curriculum in high schools. We have less programmers, but more professionals who also programs.
Data Science is no longer a buzzword but just another part of programming. Modeling becomes less important, but the so call "ML OPS" will take off.
Math becomes much more important in programming and a sexy degree for college students.
On a positive note, I really really hope electric cars will become more accessible - both for consumers and for manufacturers (i.e.: small companies will get access to batteries and be able to build EVs themselves).
2. No progress in identifying dark matter or understanding quantum gravity.
3. At least one of the major social media corporations are overtaken by a new competitor, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.