Ask HN: What are the New Computing Ideas for the next 50 years?

The decline and halt(?) of the gains of Moore's law, and the resulting paradigm shifts for many in the programming trade as we move into truly parallel, distributed, elastic computation at the chip level.

The rise of bioinformatics and of the computer as a progenitor of a new age of medicine.

A sea change in trading and economics as HFT wreaks havoc and competes with human trading.

Maybe these aren't as wild and crazy as you hope, but I think they are some of the most exciting and likely to happen.

My take on it:

1. Optical brain computer interfaces will make accessing the internet at the speed of thought. Internet will truly be integrated as another mind that we all share. Some people will even rent their subconscious neural networks for the global brain.

2. Polymorphic hardware that will change its architecture to speed up applications.

3. Programming languages with NLP and AI help developers with rapid prototyping.

4. Long term computing: Computers that can run for millions of years without much intervention in space.

AGI. The Intelligence Explosion.

http://intelligenceexplosion.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion#Intelli...

Not all that crazy, but realtime raytracing (or more usefully, path tracing) WILL eventually get here.

That's going to have a major impact on 3D game engines, because it massively drops the amount of code required to produce extremely physically-accurate images. All the other components of game engines will still be needed, of course, but a cutting-edge renderer will go from being a massive, multi-month project to something that a skilled coder can assemble in 99 lines or so.

(No kidding. Here's a 99-line path tracer: http://www.kevinbeason.com/smallpt/ )