Ask HN: What are your 5 year tech trends/predictions? [mine are included] - on_
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redwards510
IoT launches full force, and is an immediate catastrophe. Estimates suggest
over 50% of IoT devices in the home are susceptible to RCE, but vendors still
do not issue patches because no one is forcing them. Underground video
channels exist where you can spy on people through the enormous collection of
cameras embedded on devices like toasters, light bulbs, doorbells, etc.

Cyberwar (ugh, that term) has become white hot after a nuclear reactor
meltdown in Russia where every adversary blames each other and America blames
Russia for a false flag operation. Packets are now blocked from
entering/exiting entire countries unless you have a special permit. Like with
radio/tv in Cold War I, everyone begins suspecting spies and government
malware in their computers. People increasingly huddle for safety in walled
gardens like Facebook, rarely venturing out to unknown sites.

Node/js experiences a huge exodus of maturing developers seeking a more
professional, rigorous language, leaving behind massive codebases of poorly-
written and completely undocumented code and over 3 million node package
libraries with varying dependency issues. Javascript has become so popular
worldwide that Americans barely make mimimum wage coding in it.

Ethereum still struggles to find any devs who can understand how the fuck
their entire platform is supposed to work despite an additional white paper
being published.

Microsoft admits no one wants a windows phone and retreats from the mobile
market, dooming themselves to simply dominating the dismal "legacy" desktop
world only inhabited by developers, people too poor to afford a mobile phone,
enterprise customers, and call support centers. Open Sourcing .Net winds up
causing large amounts of developers to learn Linux, and they develop a taste
for it. C# developers are recognized for their overall brilliance and
steadfastness and paid 500K/yr salaries by all employers. (OK, that's a wish,
not a prediction)

VR has completely polarized the planet between "pukers" and "players".
Thousands die every year from VR-wasting disease brought on by malnutrition
and lack of sleep from being fully immersed for weeks on end.

TechCrunch collapses under the weight of it's hideously poor commenters and a
management sex scandal.

Self-Driving cars get off to a rocky start, as normal drivers everywhere
attempt to run them off the road to "test" their safety.

NoSql replaces Not-NoSql so quickly people begin dropping it from their resume
as a skill.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> People increasingly huddle for safety in walled gardens like Facebook,
> rarely venturing out to unknown sites.

Which doesn't help, because Facebook is used as a vector to install advanced
persistent threats on peoples' computers.

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on_
1\. The Sharing Economy or Protocols, Protocols, Protocols

The sharing economy will be governed by protocols. Decentralization will be
standard. Companies like Ethereum and OpenBazaar as well as the Bitcoin
protocol are already being used/leveraged for this. It will be standard. 1\.
Decentralized authority will be used for most things and will destroy the
power distance between individuals and regulators stripping their power. These
protocols provide privacy, authority and identity by design and the gov’t
can’t do anything about it. 2\. Government won’t matter much This is basically
the affect of trrend one. When decentralized protocols become common place
there will be no way for government to enforce regulations. Some of this is
good and some is bad. On balance it is good. They can still stop people from
doing bad things in the physical world, but not govern and collect your
communications, interlope into network governance and stop being the world’s
sysadmin. Centralized authorities will prosper servicing things like DNS
naming authorities, identity, licensing, communications, financial
transactions, legal transaction, wills deeds etc.

2\. Everyone will realize uber is a logistics company. Uber is building teams
to for autopilot and self-driving tech right now. They have a “Math
Department” to create algorithims and heuristics for prediction. They know
that ridesharing p2p is something that can only last ~10 years. They will be
the first people to do interstate logsitics and transport with self-driving
vehicles. They will be the level 3 or cogent to Amazon’s comcast/verison. By
this I mean that Uber will handle 90% of long distance supply chain hubs and
Amazon will be the last-mile provider.

~~~
on_
3\. Wearables will stil suck because the problem they need to be solving is
Peripherals The reason wearables suck and why glass failed is because they
offer nothing. There is very limited value in a watch that lasts ~12-24 hours
and can only take your pulse and display text messages. Google glass is
awesome, but there was no way to actually use it. You immeadiately let
everyone know you were a google employee or wealthy technologist by wearing
it. The way you communicated with it was by shouting at it. Not very discreet
at all. A company will emerge with a very low profile set of rings or
bracelets that allow you to quickly gesture to your device what you want it to
do. Before peripherals move past a keyboard or voice control there is no hope
for wearables. Also, battery life is a factor. I also think that glass will be
replaced by something like oculus with front facing cameras, intake the
information, process it and deliver it. You won’t need to actually look
through the glasses but see it on a screen. Night vision will just be cached
copies of the previous days imagery processed on a master server using
seadragon or similar software.

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6d0debc071
It is 2020:

\- Speech recognition has acquired acceptable (par with human) accuracy. This
has been a great boon for the digitally excluded. It has also increased the
relative prevalence of text based commands in the operating system, not that
too many people notice.

\- CNC machines that can operate on anything strong now require a license, it
was too easy to make guns with them and on balance governments decided that
was the important thing.

\- VR headsets have failed to gain market share. They were neat, but only if
you stayed in one place. Elite Dangerous and co' weren't able to support a
physical product of that cost by themselves. There are some fantastic
applications of the technology, but you need to find an old headset to play.

\- Linux is still waiting for it's year of the desktop and still looks like a
poor knock-off of Windows.

\- Turing complete systems aren't banned yet, but it looks increasingly likely
as phones and tablets start to dominate the marketplace.

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tmuir
The consumer sector of the Internet of things will still not have a killer
app. Offerings will still be incremental, and will remain hammers looking for
nails.

Driverless cars will still not be available for use by consumers, as the flow
of edge cases which completely confuse the cars is continuous.

------
rayalez
VR becomes huge, more than 20% of people use it.

WebAssembly becomes popular, js finally has alternatives.

Self driving cars are popular.

Google launches some sort of robotic/AI product.

