In the software engineering world, in 2026 we saw a wave of code assistant products. In 2026, we will see a wave of designing software architecture products, not just on greenfield projects but also brownfield projects.
YouTube will be so inundated by AI cat and dog videos that people stop watching them altogether. People will automatically assume anything labeled "cute" is fake.
I wish, but from what I've seen, most "normies" don't care at all as long as they are entertained. It makes me depressed seeing my friends consuming and sharing all that AI slop while either believing it's true, or not even asking themselves if it is. At least they're having fun while they still can... right?
My mom sends me AI videos of cute cats doing the impossible (flying around the room, washing raccoons, etc). When I told her they were AI, she said “so what, they’re cute”
I am in a hospital ward on a ward floor: everyone, every single person, every age, is scrolling 30s AI 'funny and cute' videos 247. It is quite eye opening as I never saw this close enough to actually see what they are doing. I asked why: they say it is funny, entertaining and if there has been no humans involved, they don't care as it is entertaining and fun: they rather have more different than more original/human.
I saw my neighbour here watching shorts about fat americans abusing all you can eat restaurants, generated by AI, for 7 days in a row now, whenever he is awake. He is 45 years old and wants to show me the funniest ones.
Flock and other government tools for watching and controlling you will expand.
Big companies will expand their regulatory capture, especially in medical care. Fingers will continue to be pointed at health insurance as the problem while the real problem of an artificially limited supply of doctors goes unaddressed.
Government agencies will continue their slow bloat as no mechanism exists for government like bankruptcy in the private sector.
Patent trolls will expand their lawsuits and extort more legitimate businesses.
The far left will assassinate more Republican leaders.
Given most assassinations on US politicians (including attempted) targeted Democrat politicians in 2025, I would have different expectations to your last point.
Physical AI will make subversive discoveries that exceed everyone's expectations - space-time integrated computing, rather than the current three-dimensional spatial computing plus discrete time steps
While 'substantive' would mean major progress within the current framework, I’m predicting a shift that subverts the current foundational assumptions of robotics.
Right now, we treat time as a secondary sequence—an 'add-on' to 3D space. Moving to a unified spacetime architecture isn't just a big improvement; it fundamentally undermines the discrete-frame logic that almost all current CV and RL models are built upon. It’s 'subversive' because it requires us to unlearn the way we’ve been processing motion for the last decade.
Let me explain again why I said "disruptive" rather than "substantial"：the current "embodied artificial intelligence" still uses 19th-century numerical methods (the Adams-Bashforth integration method from 1883 and the Runge method from 1895) to represent time frames + three-dimensional space calculations to approximate four-dimensional spacetime (relativistic covariance has proven that spacetime is an integrated whole, i.e., four-dimensional spacetime). I will release more specific code later - you might wonder, don't the "scientists" at those big companies know about this? The answer is that they do know, and I will also release the reasons later, which will definitely surprise you!
I predict more layoffs as I unfortunately already did in 2024 [0].
But let's just say you have to prepare for 2030. The future of jobs report 2025 by the WEF is also reporting that 40% of employers are planning to reduce their workforce because of AI by 2030. [1]
- EVs will be in the Early Majority group, and 2/3 of them will be Chinese. At least 1 in 4 of new cars purchased will be EVs.
- AI will innovate towards visuals, personality, and tool use. AI tool use will start to innovate past just reading docs, maybe into more things like gaming and robotics.
- Some AI products (not necessarily LLMs) will start competing on latency. Notably on voice/calls, but also things like drones, robotics, etc.
I think EVs will head in the complete opposite direction in that sales will slow down and they will continue to be a minority.
Ford just killed off the F150 lightning and EVs (but also new cars) are still expensive purchases in a time with a lot of economic uncertainty.
While Chinese companies are making affordable options all the markets seem to love putting tariffs on them in order to keep their homegrown automakers alive.
- Major disruptions on the financial markets due to the USD losing value. Commodities go up. Not certain about Bitcoin/Crypto as it is backed mostly by the USD itself.
- US goes on the offensive on tokenization moving bonds, stocks, transfers, etc. to the blockchain. China opens up its eCNY to the grand public.
- AI bubble pops. Companies decide that LLM-coding is not worth it after accounting for the downsides. LLMs for generating photos and videos are still not good enough. OpenAI goes the way of pipedpiper.
- The war in Ukraine remains unresolved. Russia advances but only marginally. Europe still shaking its head about what to do. US lower its involvement.
- The US world cup goes very badly. Like embarrassingly bad. Goes okay in Canada and kinda okay in Mexico though.
Significant economic turmoil. Either from private debt or AI finally deflating. Probably due to enough data center projects that won't materialize due to funding getting cut.
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- 2025: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490343
- 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115
- 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628
- 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236
- 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068
- 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596
- 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859
- 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988
- 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767
- 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
- 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
- 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201
- 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970023
- 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681
- 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416530
I saw my neighbour here watching shorts about fat americans abusing all you can eat restaurants, generated by AI, for 7 days in a row now, whenever he is awake. He is 45 years old and wants to show me the funniest ones.
My 2026 prediction is that people will continue running websites and buiding web apps that need monitoring, more than ever before.
Flock and other government tools for watching and controlling you will expand.
Big companies will expand their regulatory capture, especially in medical care. Fingers will continue to be pointed at health insurance as the problem while the real problem of an artificially limited supply of doctors goes unaddressed.
Government agencies will continue their slow bloat as no mechanism exists for government like bankruptcy in the private sector.
Patent trolls will expand their lawsuits and extort more legitimate businesses.
The far left will assassinate more Republican leaders.
https://www.brightlinewest.com/
While 'substantive' would mean major progress within the current framework, I’m predicting a shift that subverts the current foundational assumptions of robotics.
Right now, we treat time as a secondary sequence—an 'add-on' to 3D space. Moving to a unified spacetime architecture isn't just a big improvement; it fundamentally undermines the discrete-frame logic that almost all current CV and RL models are built upon. It’s 'subversive' because it requires us to unlearn the way we’ve been processing motion for the last decade.
But let's just say you have to prepare for 2030. The future of jobs report 2025 by the WEF is also reporting that 40% of employers are planning to reduce their workforce because of AI by 2030. [1]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490692
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041311
AI bubble will start to pop (even though the adoption continues to improve slowly).
US / Europe separation will accelerate.
EDIT: For the first 2 - it's the 3rd year I'm thinking it will be 'the' year...
They're called bubbles because they don't "start to pop". It's sudden and sharp.
The Supreme Court rules against Trump in several important cases (tariffs and birthright citizenship, and a couple of others).
Trump threatens to arrest at least one big tech executive.
LLMs continue to improve, but the rate becomes slow enough that most people realize that AGI is not just around the corner.
- AI will innovate towards visuals, personality, and tool use. AI tool use will start to innovate past just reading docs, maybe into more things like gaming and robotics.
- Some AI products (not necessarily LLMs) will start competing on latency. Notably on voice/calls, but also things like drones, robotics, etc.
- US goes on the offensive on tokenization moving bonds, stocks, transfers, etc. to the blockchain. China opens up its eCNY to the grand public.
- AI bubble pops. Companies decide that LLM-coding is not worth it after accounting for the downsides. LLMs for generating photos and videos are still not good enough. OpenAI goes the way of pipedpiper.
- The war in Ukraine remains unresolved. Russia advances but only marginally. Europe still shaking its head about what to do. US lower its involvement.
- The US world cup goes very badly. Like embarrassingly bad. Goes okay in Canada and kinda okay in Mexico though.
- China invades Taiwan in the last month of 2026.
Elon Musk gets richer
Europe anti-woke grows
- New major armed conflict starts.
Space
- Artemis II succeeds.
- Starship makes first fully reusable orbital flight.
Other tech
- One of the fusion startups demonstrates net energy.
- AI bubble pops, OpenAI gets acquired by Microsoft.