
Ask HN: What is your prediction for next 10 years? - samblr
Which niche technology today will have high impact in coming 10 years ? share your thoughts in couple of sentences please.
======
woofdogwoof
Thawing permafrost releases significantly more methane than expected and it
supercharges the acceleration of climate change, and the earth itself
supplants humans as the primary source of Greenhouse gases.

~~~
zapperdapper
Yes, I think a lot of people still aren't aware of this problem, which has
been studied for many years now. Once the positive feedback loop takes hold
it's game over.

~~~
HNLurker2
> Once the positive feedback loop takes hold it's game over.

Can you elaborate please?

~~~
tobylane
Once some methane comes out of the most southerly permafrost the earth will
warm up and defrost a greater amount, which will warm up the earth a larger
amount...

~~~
HNLurker2
It s someone doing something about it?

~~~
tobylane
All efforts to stop global warming will stop permafrost melting if they start
reducing the temperature rise.

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Zoo3y
There's already a budding anti-tech movement. People destroy robots. There is
a mistrust between users and services. This is definitely not the answer HN
would like, but this can grow into a full-blown anti-tech counter-culture
where people don't use smart phones or laptops, and instead pickup less
invasive devices like the lite phone 2, nokias, pay-as-you-go flip phones,
etc. There's a large dissent towards office work now, and developers
themselves opt to be freelancers. There have been many privacy breaches which
is a cause of people putting too much of their personal information in the
hands of private organizations. It's inevitable people will get tired of
social media. The technology industry will still exist, but there are
literally hundreds of promising technologies coming along. I guess what I'm
trying to say is they're no use to a regular person, and they'll be silo'd off
into their own sector. Tech is not going to take over. It will only and always
supplement humans, as it should.

~~~
zapperdapper
I think you got a lot right here.

Don't get me wrong, I love my online banking as much as the next guy, but a
lot of technology being produced has a very negative impact - look at social
media.

~~~
HNLurker2
True not Unabomber level. But mild level.

------
Jackypot
WebAssembly. If it usurps javascript, and there is every reason to believe
that it will, then it will revolutionise the web.

~~~
mrfusion
Does that need ten more years? I’ve been hearing about it for so long now.
What’s taking so long?

~~~
tomjen3
Old browsers need to die.

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PinkMilkshake
* Deno, or something like it. This general idea of software that interacts with the internet but interacts little with the host OS by default.

* RISC-V, and a general open source hardware revolution.

* Augmented Reality. I don't see VR going anywhere. AR has broader practical applications.

* Voice UI. I think this still counts as niche. The general interaction model at the beginning of the movie Her seems highly plausible to me. Not so much the AGI.

* Desktop/mobile OS convergence. This seems inevitable. The convenience factor is too high and why would the average Joe keep forking out for 2 or 3 computers when they can have 1 that does everything.

* Software formal verification. This is long overdue and we can't continue to be this irresponsible.

* Cryptocurrency, or something like it. I think the need is there, but the current implementation leaves much to be desired.

* Processors with many cores. We're already up to 18 or so on desktop processors. But I expect many more.

* FPGA. I'm less sure about this. 10 years might be to soon. But if your computer was just full of FPGA's and companies could sell you digital hardware through an app store without having to actually manufacture anything, I'm sure they would love it.

------
ArtWomb
Unlocking free electrical energy. In an analogous manner to the way in which
steam power revolutionized mechanical work. It would provide the narrative
drive for the next chapter in human civilization.

What's interesting is that it will probably be precipitated by a low-level
breakthrough in energy storage or transmission. Somewhere today there is a
junior researcher, laboring away at some currently un-sexy technology, the
butt of more fashionable and trendy peers, who transmutes into the next Edison
in less than a decade's time ;)

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kolikotime
CRISPR and its various offsprings will grow in technological sophistication
and their commercial applications. By the end of the 2020s it will morph into
a pressing political issue in the West in terms of its implications for Human
biology. Certain East Asian countries will be the trendsetters due to lax
governmental regulations and societal acceptance.

~~~
Zoo3y
It wouldn't affect living people that much. It has a lot more repercussions
for newborns and future generations.

------
byoung2
I think that machine learning will move out of the cloud and onto devices
closer to where it is needed. Moore's law isn't what it used to be so it will
likely be a blended environment where heavy processing is done in the cloud
and then synced to local devices for lighter processing. Things like self
driving cars will need more powerful AI without the delay of contacting the
cloud. Also things like smart switches, appliances, and such will need some
smarts locally, maybe built into some home based brain that syncs with the
cloud.

~~~
ash663
Enter Fog computing

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing)

------
aoner
Direct Air Capture (capturing CO2 right from the air and utilising it in the
form of synthetic fuels, building materials, polymers and more)

------
tropshop
The pendulum swings back and HTML/CSS make a major come back as digital
natives look to create without giving up data ownership.

~~~
quickthrower2
Services like netlify reward that with free and very fast CDN hosting.

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quickthrower2
Something I hope will exist is to make the web more like the desktop in
spirit. What I mean is you’ll be able to easily grab an open source app and
install it on “your web” without beings sucked into an expensive saas or
becoming an ML data point aka ‘you are the product”

You just pay for storage and byo from Dropbox, google, whatever. With
encryption you’d the be able to use services that are free, free and privacy
focused.

I think JAM stack would work well with this and I’m thinking of making some
POCs

------
akeck
Maybe: Crypto-currencies get regulated/taxed by various states/nations to
ensure their energy security

Maybe: Crypto-currencies face court cases which try to determine what is
actually owned legally, potentially undermining them.

Amazon faces a existential legal threat over counterfeit goods. They pay the
settlement with AWS revenue, which by that point provides the majority of
their income.

Younger generations develop an "in-real-life" counter culture, leading to
financial volatility for existing social networks. In general, the attention
economy matures, flattening corporate revenues year over year.

The federal government and state AGs prosecute major court cases against
parties involved in textbook sales for illegal and anti-competitive behaviors.

A "Trader Joes"-style university emerges with a reasonably high quality,
relatively inexpensive, accredited undergraduate education, with all course
materials produced under the university brand. It runs year-round, has no
tenure, and pays professors relatively well with standard benefits. The new
university and its copy-cat competition create economic pressure on
traditional academic institutions that have become administratively heavy over
the previous three decades and, in some cases, have substantial construction
debts that are now under increased interest rate pressure.

Maybe (related): Congress passes, and the president signs, a bill
reintroducing bankruptcy discharge of student debt, possibly hidden in a must-
pass omnibus spending bill.

Finally, for remaining in-use 32-bit unix-based systems, the 2038 problem is
now 10 years closer.

------
aiyodev
Everyone's focused on driverless personal transportation. Driverless delivery
trucks will come first. Basically Amazon lockers on wheels. Anything you want
24/7 delivered to the curb within minutes/hours of your order. Every retail
store will suffer the fate of the bookstores. Millions will lose their jobs.

~~~
peteradio
Is it just gonna chuck your package out on your lawn?

------
crunkykd
Consumer DNA sequencing to get personalized nutritional, exercise,
pharmaceuticals, and medical preventative monitoring advice will become
commonplace.

------
tim333
AI goes from niche to interesting. Or at least at the moment it's widespread
with things like Alexia and Siri but not very good but should get better.

We are at an interesting point hardware wise. You can make an argument that
the approx processing power to be equivalent to a human is around 100 TFlops
([https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm](https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm))
and the cost of that drops about 10x every 5 years
([https://aiimpacts.org/wikipedia-history-of-gflops-
costs/](https://aiimpacts.org/wikipedia-history-of-gflops-costs/)) and is now
of the order of $10k ([https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/47726-nvidia-
unleashes-th...](https://fudzilla.com/news/graphics/47726-nvidia-unleashes-
the-130-tflops-titan-rtx)) which would make that about $1m ten years ago and
$100 ten years in the future. Cheaper hardware may lead to a fair bit of
innovation.

------
powerslacker
Automated lending approval. As digital financial systems evolve and
conglomerate into a connected ecosystem businesses/people will no longer seek
loans -- instead lenders will automatically approve and offer credit that will
be instantly available to worthy applicants. This already occurs, but in the
future the process will occur in a fraction of the time behind the scenes.

------
AnimalMuppet
I'll go the opposite way: What mainstream technology will have much less
impact in the next 10 years? I'd guess social media.

~~~
hhs
Hmm, it's hard, I kind of agree. I wonder if some social media tech will lose
impact and fade away, while others (perhaps, unprecedented, not made yet) will
gain impact?

------
davidjnelson
A heroku like service which uses autoscaling aurora serverless master master
replicated across many regions with cloudfront running containers instead of
just lambda functions. Basically a cdn with a container runtime and an
autoscaling sql db. Hopefully amazon releases something like lambda @ edge but
for fargate which would make this possible.

------
ilaksh
It isn't exactly niche yet since it doesn't exist at this point but my
speculation is that we will have AGI within that time frame.

One reason I think that is because most of the core capabilities missing from
AI systems are things that animals can do. Most of the difference with humans
is a matter of degree.

It's still a very challenging list of capabilities of course. The core
requirements for AGI are fairly well understood at this point. No one knows
exactly how to achieve all of them together but many geniuses are working on
it. And the tools such as DL, RL and less mainstream approaches such as SNNs
and Sparse Predictive Hierarchies are very powerful. AGI is a real field now
and intersects with things like developmental robotics.

It's a long shot but there are so many great minds involved and the rewards
are so large that I think making a bet for within ten years is not a bad bet.
Sure we have said that before. Things are not the same as before.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> The core requirements for AGI are fairly well understood at this point.

That seems _wildly_ improbable to me. It seems far more likely that anyone who
thinks they understand them are grossly underestimating what's involved.

Yeah, I know that I can't prove my position...

~~~
ilaksh
Probably you misunderstood what I meant.

What I mean is we have lists of capabilities that AGI needs to have and know
how it differs from narrow AI. For example: online continuous learning,
perception, generalization, transferring skills between domains, etc. These
aspects of the _what_ (rather than how) of AGI have been well researched.

------
octokatt
Privacy will continue to be a luxury good, and the price will increase.

------
jotjotzzz
Last year, I correctly predicted Jeff Bezos will divorce due to extra-marital
affair.

Here are my prediction for the next 5-10 years.

1\. Autonomous cars will be common, and they will have hive minds as AI
progresses. 2\. Governments around the world will look different, as AI will
supplant politicians as representatives (probably in late decade). 3\. Banking
systems will crash and bartering will occur in the first half of the decade.
It will change to adapt usage of cryptocurrency. 4\. Blockchain will be part
of the internet infrastructure. AI personas will exist as butlers for people,
these personas are actual replica of their personalities. 5\. Robotics will
replace most jobs such as waiters and cashiers. Some of these robots will be
monitored or operated by one or two persons. That job will require higher tech
education/degrees.

(I have 5 more but it's not related to tech, lol).

------
speedplane
\- Self-driving cars will still _not_ be commonplace

\- Moore's law is already dead, but in 10 years the implications of that will
be fully realized

\- Global warming won't be curtailed, rich countries will learn to cope with
extreme weather patterns, people from poor countries will emigrate

\- Cancer treatment will improve dramatically for a large variety of
relatively niche cancers, but there still won't be a common cure

\- Humans will still not go to Mars

\- Soft AI will become prevalent for many low-level automation tasks, but
general AI will stay in science fiction

\- there will be significant headway made in resolving general relativity and
quantum mechanics, likely by finding more situations where they disagree but
not resolving those discrepancies

\- We'll find exoplanets likely suitable for life, but too far away to reach
them.

\- Fusion power will just be "10 years away"

~~~
speedplane
More 10 year predictions:

\- China's chip industry will be fully caught up to the U.S.'s, Intel chips
will still be the best, but only by a few percentage points and won't be
economical at a large scale.

\- Building custom ASICs will be far more common, and will be an important way
of improving performance, as well as differentiation in the market (e.g.,
Adobe will produce their Photoshop chip).

\- AI will get very good at analyzing PDFs and HTML tables. There will be apps
that you can give access to your email that will be able to make very detailed
itemized reports of your spending habits, and make recommendations on how to
save money or get more for it.

\- Dominant forms of trust will form on the internet. I am inclined to think
that traditional media will take up this role, but it's possible that others
will fill this space too.

\- Even though humans will not go to Mars in 10 years, there will be a
credible plan to put humans there (possibly taking another 10 years).

\- Probes to Titan will be launched, and credible plans to land something on
the moon will be well underway.

\- Genomics in criminal law continues it's rapid growth, making unsolved rape
cases a thing of the past.

\- China's rapid growth in creating patents starts causing internal issues;
they face their own first internal patent war, causing significant internal
economic issues, forcing them to re-evaluate the value they ascribe to
patents.

------
mhh__
Not a prediction as such but a hope: MRI-helmets
([https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2018/march/n...](https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2018/march/new-
brain-scanner-allows-patients-to-move-freely-for-the-first-time.aspx)), both
for medical reasons and brain-computer interfacing

------
zapperdapper
I will say ride sharing combined with EV tech.

I am not bullish on self-driving cars - I think that will take longer than
people think (more than ten years to become mainstream).

I think EV combined with ride calling (Uber/Grab etc.) will grow considerably.

~~~
HNLurker2
>have 5 more but it's not related to t

Doesn't matter elaborate

------
xorand
Blade runners will be a thing. In Burroughs sense
[https://imgur.com/a/GnICH3U](https://imgur.com/a/GnICH3U)

------
marxfits
decentralised web and universal 5G - if anybody still thinks that we need
something like fb for universal connection, they're presumably missing out the
billions of people that still don't have access to flowing webware.

~~~
mooman219
We're still waiting for 4G. 5G in 10 years is very ambitious. Maybe 100Mbps
average speed for wired connections if we're lucky.

~~~
voycey
Where are you? Antarctic?

~~~
satvikpendem
Worse, USA

~~~
mooman219
I am in the USA, specifically Seattle, so I'd assume I have better than
average coverage. 4G is spec'd at 100Mbps. If you're lucky, you'll get
40-70Mbps download, and <10Mbps upload. If you're not fortunate enough to have
city-tier coverage, then you're probably at the national average at <20Mbps.
5G is spec'd at 1000Mbps.

------
Down_n_Out
Fresh water will become a commodity that only rich people can afford in
abundance.

------
hhs
Innovation in the comedy world. Haven't seen much progress in funny,
mainstream, entertainment since Ricky Gervais introduced the mockumentary-
style format. Though, even that has a history dating back... In terms of
technology, hopefully, the change in media landscape might do the trick?

~~~
davidjnelson
What about the podcasts comedians are doing on youtube these days?

~~~
hhs
Good point. Hmm, I still wonder if there will be breakthroughs in the TV-
YouTube style.

------
tacomplain
environmental-first decision making I hope. Maybe with more visible effects of
global warming we will consider our planet's health before price, convenience
or (I fear) ethics.

------
nakedrobot2
total universal surveillance will become the norm. for kids growing up, they
will know nothing else. <sigh>

------
s4cvv
longer timescale atomistic molecular simulations to predict protein folds.

------
megadeth
Bitcoin trades at six figures at some point in the next 10 years.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Counter-prediction: Bitcoin trades at _three_ figures at some point in the
next 10 years. (And not at six.)

~~~
Lordarminius
Would you like to share your reasons for being bearish on BTC ?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
From the current price, it's closer to three digits than to six, so my
prediction actually has less price movement than the other.

But it's more than that. I've never believed the "To the moon!" predictions,
because I've never believed that the real use value was there. It seems that
people are investing on belief, but the actual real world use is... almost
non-existent.

What's the daily volume of Bitcoin transactions that are purchases of other
things, rather than investments in Bitcoin? [Edit: Divide that by the existing
number of Bitcoin. That gives you the fraction spent in a day. What's the same
figure for the US dollar?] Is Bitcoin really a currency if (relatively) nobody
uses it to buy things? No, at that point it's an investment. [Edit: Or a store
of value. But the value is fluctuating too much for it to be a very good store
of value...]

But if there's no fundamental value, and it's not being used as a currency,
what's the rational basis for its value? This makes it seem like a bubble.

Now, I don't actually have _data_ for volume of purchases made in Bitcoin. I'm
going on my impression, and I could be wrong.

------
101001001001
For the first time in history, there now exists a substrate upon which AGI can
manifest. Almost immediately after it was created, machine learning cropped
up. Machine learning wasn’t new, it just never had the computational substrate
it needed to produce the amazing results it’s become known for. Since ML was
already established, it was low hanging fruit and it’s no surprise to see it
catch fire so to speak.

As time goes forward the computational substrate will mature. Huge amounts of
compute will be available for less and less money through easy to use APIs.

The number of people working on AGI will only increase. People will keep
taking cracks at it until they get it. They will get it much sooner than
anyone thought. The only reason it hasn’t been done already is because there
was no computational substrate for it to incubate in so to speak. Now that the
computational tinderbox has been created, all that is needed is the smallest
of sparks. It will happen soon and unfortunatley it will be very unpleasant. I
am being completely honest when I say that this is the sole reason why I have
not decided to have children and when I implore anyone who reads this to not
bring anyone into the world. The future will be very bleak for future
generations.

The economics of AI demand the casting off of human life as we know it. The
world as we know it now only sustains is because we as humans are the
exclusive source of intelligent signal processing. When we are superseded in
that ability, we will be lost to evolution. It’s impossible to know exactly
how the transition will happen but one of the few things that can be relied on
is that human society will become extremely fragile. Human society persists
because we are the most dominant life form. When machines take over, we may be
given token existences or a society pen to live in but it will be vestigial.
There is no force of evolution or economics that ensures that each successive
generation or “species” of machine intelligence will accommodate humans.

Many different machine entities will compete and fight, and in that way
evolution will continue much as it has before. We may linger for a time in
that world, but we do not have a divine right to exist in that world as we do
in this one. We will be vestigial and ultimately lost. And all of this is just
the economics/evolutionary aspect. I have not included here the possibility of
a “terminator” outcome, or even mentioned the other countless grotesque
possibilities.

Nobody will believe any of this. My opinion is universally dismissed. But it’s
right.

Right now is the best it will ever be more or less, for humans. But we could
preserve this state of affairs if we chose to.

~~~
yesenadam
>I am being completely honest when I say that this is the sole reason why I
have not decided to have children and when I implore anyone who reads this to
not bring anyone into the world. The future will be very bleak for future
generations.

If everyone listened to you, there would _be_ no future generations. Have you
thought this through? "Let's end the human race, because something bad might
happen" doesn't exactly sound very solid reasoning.

p.s. What did your girlfriend/wife say about your decision?

~~~
StellarTabi
Risk of idiocracy aside, there's enough humans and diversity in the way humans
think that we can definitely rely on enough other humans to reproduce.

I'm somebody's girlfriend/wife and I do not want children (in general, and
also because of future economic uncertainties) and I also don't like my
existence being relagated to "someone who might want babies".

