
Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? - DanielBMarkham
Since everybody is talking about predictions for 2010, I thought I would bump it up a notch. Anybody care to make some predictions about what we'll see in the coming decade (2010-2019)?<p>I'll try a couple.<p>- Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade.<p>- Ubiquitous computing will finally arrive, with smart cards/RFID on our bodies seamlessly interacting with computers in our environment. As you walk up to your refrigerator, for instance, you're logged in and presented with a customized display. Same goes for the car or the entertainment surface at the Dentist's.<p>- Flat panel displays will not drop to rock-bottom. Instead, a new generation of 2160 and 3240p 3-D panels will appear for consumer setting. Rock-bottom 10-20 inch panels will stabilize in the 50-100 range and stay there. Sorry, no panel/OLED wallpaper, at least not cheaply in the coming decade.<p>You guys have any?
======
JulianMorrison
Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer
goods, with close to 100% coverage across the civilized world. A significant
fraction of ordinary consumer goods simply won't work in "dark" zones. The gap
between 1st and 3rd world countries will widen as a result - take a modern
computer into backwoods Africa and it's a paperweight.

Google succeed in forcing the mobile providers to be commodity data pipes.
They scream blue murder, try to cartel up, but Google breaks the cartel and
several big names are forced out of the market.

Ebooks defeat paper books. All high street bookstores go bust. Rampant book
piracy throws the copyright war into overdrive. Despite international treaties
and draconian law, the pirates win.

Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for
gasoline fuel: lower demand, lower profit, vendors go bust, less availability,
monopoly prices, lower desirability. The gasoline economy is brittle because
it has high fixed costs, a complex supply chain, and its power source isn't
fungible. As with film versus digital cameras, the result is an exponential
crash in the desirability of gasoline cars, with mass conversion to battery-
electric and collapse of the oil industry. Government greenhouse warming
policies will continue to be useless, but they'll be eclipsed by events. The
big panic will be the overstraining electricity grid. Residential grids were
not specced to fuel everybody's car at once.

Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the
mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts
to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish
risk-taking, and banned on public roads.

------
DrJokepu
* Still no fusion power.

* Microsoft sells large parts of itself in order to be able to focus on its core competencies (just like IBM did)

* Someone will make an actually usable e-book reader.

* During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.

* Brazil will become a real powerhouse.

* Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela.

* Still no Duke Nukem Forever.

* 'Minimal Techno' will finally die / go out of fashion.

* Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna.

* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.

* Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade).

* Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.

That's what I could come up with off the top of my head. Feel free to disagree
/ rant / do name calling, this is not a serious thread anyway.

~~~
Estragon

      * Someone will make an actually usable e-book reader.
    

What are the drawbacks with the kindle? (I have been considering buying one,
recently.)

~~~
DrJokepu
I seriously think that while the kindle is pretty good, it's like the mp3
players before the iPod or smartphones before the iPhone. It's an electronic
version of an existing business model but doesn't really exploit the
possibilities of such a device. I expect to see someone coming up with a
reader that provides a reading experience like dead tree books do while
combining it with a convenient Spotify-like flat fee / unlimited use service,
like a digital library.

I'm very passionate about reading books and I'd fork out 10-20 dollars a month
(maybe even $30) without hesitation for a service that allowed me to
conveniently read pretty much any book whenever and wherever I want without
having to go to the bookstore / library or having to wait days for Amazon to
deliver it while not feeling being ripped off because of having to pay as much
for an e-book as for a dead tree one. Here's your startup idea.

~~~
Estragon
Thanks for the clarification.

------
motters
Also, this decade sees the beginning of the "pension bomb" - the demographic
bulge of post-war baby boomers crossing the threshold into retirement. It's
fairly easy to predict that there will be pensions scandals, with some
pensions companies going bust or paying out far less to recipients than had
been originally advertised. Also I predict the beginning of large supermarket
scale retirement homes/complexes/compounds, where economies of scale can
reduce costs of elder care.

~~~
arcadeparade
Why was the state capable of taking care of these people from the ages of
0-20, but cant take care of the same group in their old age?

~~~
timdorr
Because a brand new body is easier to maintain than a broken-down old one.

To provide a frank example, look at a car.

~~~
arcadeparade
I think it's a lot more complex than that:
<http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20050601.htm>

------
timcederman
_Ubiquitous computing will finally arrive, with smart cards/RFID on our bodies
seamlessly interacting with computers in our environment. As you walk up to
your refrigerator, for instance, you're logged in and presented with a
customized display. Same goes for the car or the entertainment surface at the
Dentist's._

I wrote my PhD on ubiquitous computing, and I can tell you that I heard "this
is the year" for ubicomp every single year I spent writing it. I finished it
last year, and stuff I wrote back in 2002 was still relevant. It's an
incremental design that will slowly, slowly come, but nothing dramatic anytime
soon, even across a decade. I'm hopeful there'll be decent advances though.

------
adw
Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.

That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start
being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.

~~~
kngspook
Hopefully network analysis/data mining laws/politics will be handled with a
little less FUD, a little less grandstanding, and a little more efficiency
than we're seeing with climate change politics...

------
rms
A habitable (to some life, not necessarily to human life) extra-solar Earth
like planet is discovered by 2020.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I wish I could upvote you ten times.

This is the one thing I really want to see in my lifetime. Habitable
extrasolar planets discovered. The more the merrier. I'd like to see hundreds
of them within a 100 light-year radius or so. Enough that it hopefully awakens
some kind of long-sleeping drive for mankind to explore.

Contact with some sort of intelligent alien life is the stretch goal :)

~~~
jacquesm
re. the 'stretch' goal:

It all boils down to one question only: how common are the conditions that
lead to life? The statistics of that are that we _think_ that if it is
possible it will happen. But that doesn't mean that there will be an
evolutionary path leading to intelligent life.

Intelligence is not some kind of 'goal' that evolution works towards.

Alien intelligent life could be as alien as Dolphins are, we really can't seem
to do much with that other than prove that they are sentient by some arbitrary
measure.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I don't agree, but I don't disagree. It may be something evolution works
towards, but only in highly-competitive environments?

I think that's one of the things that would be so profound about contacting
some intelligent life. It would start giving us empirical data on all of these
questions we currently have: Does life necessarily evolve towards
intelligence, what similarities all intelligent life has, does all intelligent
life continue evolving towards some sort of machine intelligence, how
commonplace is intelligent life, does intelligent life in the universe mimic
any of our previous social structures, like liege-serf system, are we
currently being isolated on purpose, if so why etc.

So let's say we find a bunch of planets with carbon-burning industrial
societies, but no FTL travel, and nothing beyond that. Is there some sort of
limit in place?

I'm not looking for ET contact to answer any questions, but to begin the
asking of a whole lot more interesting questions.

------
jsz0
-I think this is finally going to be the post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool.

-We're going to have some major Internet growth pains. We haven't prepared for the bandwidth on-slaught of IP video and we haven't moved fast enough on IPV6. In the US at least our broadband infrastructure is held hostage by corporations looking to maximize profit with little regard for quality of service and tons of conflict of interest as a content provider.

------
jacquesm
Googles turnover exeeds Microsofts by 2015, if not earlier.

As for the displays the 30" screens already do 2560x1600, they're still a good
bit of money but they'll be affordable within 2 to 3 years (and some people
already think they're affordable).

The decade that parallel processing became commonplace

the end of 32 bit computing.

Some unknown manufacturer will make a tablet-phone-musicplayer hybrid and
score.

~~~
davidw
> the end of 32 bit computing.

I'd qualify that one, as the "embedded" world tends to hang on to older stuff
for a long time. I don't see, for instance, mobile phones going to 64 bit just
yet...

~~~
jacquesm
Ok, as requested: the end of 32 bit computing for consumer pcs and server
platforms.

So all mainstream machines not being mobile or embedded devices will be 64
bits by the end of the decade (and plenty of those will be too, but you are
right, not all of them).

I thought that it was fairly obvious that that is what I meant, after all, we
are today also able to buy 16 and even 12 or 8 bit cpus for embedding. But
even most mobile phones and pdas are already on a 32 bit platform these days.

------
ericb
-Unauthenticated free wifi becomes nearly extinct after a major hacking incident is traced to Panera Bread (or similar) and a court rules that companies are liable for the actions of those on their free wifi networks. Realizing this, companies force authentication on everyone or turn off their wifi all together.

-Technology continues to move toward extending our proprioception as we invent solutions that give us continual awareness of our loved ones, their location, and emotional state as if they are a part of us.

-Tracking your children electronically becomes a social norm to the extent that _not_ tracking them is considered somewhat negligent.

-By the end of the decade, the phone _is_ the personal computer.

-External brain-computer interfaces make progress, and typing begins to be replaced by the end of the decade.

-BPA and pthalates are finally banned from the food and personal grooming categories.

-In the later half of the decade, Steve Jobs realizes he is in spitting distance of toppling the Microsoft business near-monopoly and by hook or by crook, puts out the business apps, email servers, etc needed to finish the job. In spite of this, the transition takes years.

-People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.

-A company makes a practice of hiring experienced older workers that other companies won't touch at sub-standard pay rates and the strategy works so well they are celebrated in a Fortune article.

Edit:

-The technology that will eventually 'cure' cancer is invented--essentially a find and kill tool for a genetic signature. Signature creation is built for more and more cancers and becomes more dynamic with added logic over time.

~~~
shaddi
Though I don't agree with you for most of those, upvoted for the child
tracking point, as much as I hate to see it. Looking at the trends of my
brother's middle school, 6th grade is the year you get a cell phone -- and
this is by no means the wealthiest middle school in our area.

------
edw519

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~~~
Anon84

         8. Mark Zuckerman buys Portugal (worldnews.com)
              51 points by larryz 14 hours ago | 16 comments
    
    

NO WAY! Portugal has been for sale for _centuries_ without any takers. I can't
believe that will change in a mere 10 years!

(FYI, I am portuguese)

~~~
silvajoao
Recently I compared Portugal's GDP with the revenue of a couple of companies.
A workforce of 5.52 million from a population of 10.71 million produces around
$244.64 billion; Microsoft, Apple and Google combined employ around 148
_thousand_ people and have $112.71 billion revenue.

So the point is perhaps that Facebook will make Zuckerberg (where does
Zuckerman come from?) wealthy enough to be able to afford a developed yet
relatively poor country, some time in the future.

That the example happened to pick Portugal is a funny coincidence (I'm
portuguese too). For those who don't know, mocking the country's politics and
economy is the all-time favourite national sport here.

(BTW: the source for the numbers was Wikipedia)

~~~
Anon84
You can't really compare the output of a tech company with that of a country.
For instance, according to your example:

    
    
          Microsoft, Apple and Google combined employ around 148    
          thousand people and have $112.71 billion revenue.
     

That boils down to about 750k per employee, much, much higher than the GDP per
capita of any country in the world. Even the US, with a labour force of 155
Million and a GDP of 14.441 Trillion, or about 93k per worker (or 44k per
capita), still about 8x (17x) less than the MAG trio.

~~~
herdrick
Sounds about right.

------
mojuba
I predict (and hope for) a major turn back to simplicity in technologies.
Multimillion-line software will go extinct like dinosaurs. Existing
programming languages and platforms will gradually be replaced with ones so
simple and elegant that one software component will be written and maintained
by one to three developers and art designers and not a whole software company
packed with managers and other unnecessary staff. Oh, and managers along with
poeple who "understand" "software business" but not software will hopefully go
extinct too.

~~~
JimmyL
You think that three developers and an art designer can singlehandedly write
the software that runs a nuclear power plant, let alone Android or Apache? I
think you're right in that we will see a continued rise in the prominence and
impact of small software shops making single-purpose tools/programs, but large
organizations aren't going anywhere, and they shouldn't.

As for getting rid of managers, that won't happen - and nor should it. In a
lot of places there is management when there shouldn't be, but when you're
working as part of a larger organization - say, more than ten people and/or
three "departments" - good management (by someone dedicated to that role) is
essential for success.

~~~
mojuba
_You think that three developers and an art designer can singlehandedly write
the software that runs a nuclear power plant..._

Yes I do and I know a case with a document management system created by one
developer and one analyst, which is now used by the Government of one country,
including ministries and the PM's office. The competing offers for the same
Govt were from a few superhuge and well known software corporations, but they
all lost it to that application.

 _but when you're working as part of a larger organization - say, more than
ten people and/or three "departments" - good management (by someone dedicated
to that role) is essential for success_

Actually no. Producing self-contained, self-sufficient software component has,
in principle, very little to do with the size of the organization that creates
such components. Small departments can be under the same financial roof, but
functionally such small groups will become more and more independent in the
future I think.

~~~
ratsbane
Agreed. Although the successful one developer and one analyst almost certainly
are wise enough to stand on the shoulders of giants - using an image-
processing library here, an html parser there. Functional programming at the
organization level: if you have to coordinate a lot of global variables
nothing ever works right.

------
tlrobinson
I predict lots of people will make predictions, but we'll never go back to
check and see if they were right.

Was there a 2009 prediction thread we can look at?

Fun website idea: a site where you register your predictions and a date you
expect it to happen by, then when that date occurs people can confirm/deny
your prediction. And perhaps you could make it a game by assigning points to
predictions.

~~~
sdrinf
Ask HN: Predictions for 2009 -> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416530>

Evaluating the results of that set concludes the following predictions:

-All predictions in the form of "X is going to die" have a >~90% probability of being false. The market tends towards diversification, fellows!

-~90% percent of "X is going to increase / decrease" are non-quantifiable (esp. technologies, and tool usage), and thus have a predictive power of exactly 0.

-Interestingly, there were a single quantifiable stock prediction ("I predict Apple stock goes up a lot."), and it also had merit (a 100% growth in 1 year, how's that fellows?); alas 1 datapoint does not make a trend. (while we're at it, anyone else noticing the 200% growth G produced over 2009?! )

-The rest of the predictions are either non-quantifiable, or have a massively sub-optimal prediction result.

In conclusion, strictly from a predictive perspective, these threads have
exactly 0 merit. Have fun synchronizing your agendas :)

------
artagnon
1\. The death of x86, as we know it- x86 emulation for historical reasons. One
of CPU/ GPU will have to beat the other.

2\. The rise of mainstream functional programming.

3\. By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer
becomes insignificant.

4\. PS4 gets something to thrash Project Natal. The death of the PC as a
gaming platform.

5\. The death of GCC. LLVM/ Clang will replace it.

6\. Microsoft tries harder to be the be-all and end-all of all software/
services, and eventually starts losing market share in several weak sectors.

~~~
borism
_The death of the PC as a gaming platform._

what are you smoking?

------
erikstarck
Facebook will be the Google of the decade.

Google will be the Microsoft of the decade.

Microsoft will be the IBM of the decade.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Google will be the Microsoft.

Microsoft will be the IBM.

Facebook will be gone in 5 years, just like MySpace. Half a dozen companies
will rise and fall in replacing it. The web will churn even faster than it did
before. Computing power is reaching a tipping point and I think we haven't
even seen the tip of the iceberg yet in terms of the volatility of the
industry.

Imagine 10 years from now where the computer power of facebook, twitter, or
hulu today is the equivalent of a $20/mo. Linode account. Imagine a 1U pizza-
box server with a terabyte of RAM, a petabyte of redundant SSD storage, and
hundreds of processor cores. That sort of technology is coming, and as it
arrives it's going to transform the industry.

Imagine a world where it's possible to scale out to not just millions but
_billions_ of customers practically overnight and at low cost. It might be
possible to have a million transaction per hour service used by half the
population of Earth run by a single-person startup that is only just barely
ramen profitable. These levels of technology are coming, and they will
absolutely be game changers. Web service companies will be able to grow at
tremendous rates, become dominant overnight in newly created markets and then
be eclipsed the next month by some yet smarter company.

Twitter and Facebook rose faster than Google, Google rose faster than Apple,
and Apple rose faster than anyone thought possible. Not only will the next
companies rise even faster than Twitter/Facebook but the cycle will be
shorter, and the next companies after that will rise even faster in an even
shorter cycle, etc, etc.

Anyone who thinks they can predict what the state of computing or the state of
the web will be in 2020 is just fooling themselves. It will be different than
today, that's about as much as we can know for sure.

~~~
IsaacL
Probably the best prediction I've read on this thread.

------
JulianMorrison
Oh and another thing - quantum computing will start to surge around the third
quarter of the decade. It won't be a general tool and it won't be used for
cracking crypto - it will be doing things like data mining, bioinformatics,
and solving variations on the travelling salesman problem.

------
rms
In 2020, AMD's 3rd generation holodeck isn't quite like Star Trek, but the
future video games and videoconferencing/telepresence systems make today's
tech look like something out of the stone age.

Reference: AMD's product roadmap is for the first generation, holodeck in
2016. <http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3635>

_"Carrell believes it'll take seven years to be able to deliver a 180 degree
hemispherical display (you're not completely surrounded by displays but at
least your forward and peripheral vision is) with positionally accurate and
phase accurate sound (both calculated by the GPU in real time). The GPU will
also be used to recognize speech, track gestures and track eye
movement/position."_

------
wallflower
At least one HN long-time contributor and non YC will launch a company that
does stupendously well and he/she will reference HN as a vital
resource/support in their formative days.

Videogames continue to evolve into real-time collaborative tools.

The 1st edition of The Primer (a magical in the Arthur C. Clarke sense AI
device).

"A book that is powered by a computer so advanced it’s almost magical, and it
teaches children everything. It does this through a fully interactive story.
It teaches you how to read, how to do maths, it teaches you morals, ethics,
even self-defence."

[http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-
prime...](http://mssv.net/2006/05/01/the-young-ladys-illustrated-primer/)

------
rms
Also see thread on Lesswrong:
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/1la/new_years_predictions_thread/>

------
Scott_MacGregor
Here are my predictions (the lucky 7) for the next decade:

1\. Our vision for our company will be in place, our startup won’t be a
_startup_ anymore, it will be a full fledged powerhouse that will change the
way certain things are done (that’s still under wraps) for a lot of people.
Our company will be an important part of people’s lives and over this decade
we will flex and grow to meet their demands and expectations. Some of you in
this forum will be working for us. You will be well paid and you like it.

2\. The media as we know it now will fade away from people’s lives like the
Oldsmobile and the Pontiac. Perfectly viable businesses, self-destructed, not
important enough to qualify for taxpayer bailouts just gone from the scene
like the horse and buggy. They had a good run but now it’s over.

3\. WIFI will be free for everyone in all major metropolitan areas and it will
be 100% taxpayer supported.

4\. The governments (with the exception of China and Australia) will cease
trying to regulate and criminalize the internet %100, and will allow it to
exist and grow according to the will of those who use it and build it.

5\. Taxes in California will be the lowest in the nation. Arnold
Schwarzenegger will admit he has read HN on a daily basis for years to keep
his spirits up about the economy but has never made a single post.

6\. Politically, Generation-X will be in power--look out.

7\. No more airline travel hassles in the USA, people will be able to board
and fly without government restrictions or searches.

------
10ren
\- Spherical displays (" _you_ inside")

\- Multi-core, with identical cores, is abandoned in favour of highly
specialized cores (like organs in the body, or firms in the economy, due to
the same pressures: "transaction costs" -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase#The_Nature_of_the_Firm))

\- The first real AI is created, but isn't taken seriously until it comes up
with a revolutionary way of promoting soap powder, which advertising
executives describe as "blindingly obvious" in hindsight. However, its success
is tragically short-lived, as advertising is mmediately redefined as not
requiring genuine intelligence. The search for _real_ AI continues....

\- a formal theory of the "good life", that maximizes human happiness - joy,
contentment and satisfaction - is proposed. To almost universal chagrin, it is
experimentally tested... and verified. A virtual reality game is created,
based on the theory. Massive hoards of users are anticipated, but no one plays
it. A competitor then creates a version with the suffering and pain removed.
It's a runaway hit.

------
Slashed
Death of traditional news industry.

~~~
motters
If traditional news means printed onto paper and sold daily, probably yes. By
2019 newspapers may still exist, but will be a niche and relatively expensive
retro media format for fashionistas.

~~~
neilk
Yeah. I can totally see that being a retro trend. Printpunk kids with twirly
mustaches and top hats, hand-cranking broadsheets, and newsie girls with pink
hair yelling "EXTRA! EXTRA!" on street corners.

Probably we could be there by 2014 though. People always underestimate this
sort of thing.

------
wheels
Ah, such a nerd. Years aren't zero indexed. Technically next year is the start
of a new decade. ;-)

~~~
pohl
Only if by "technically" you mean "equally arbitrary". (Unless you have a good
reason why we should take Gregory XII's 1582 papal fiat that gave us our
baroque calendaring system to be less arbitrary than demarcating decades by
years that end in zero.) While your at it, I'm curious why we should consider
the years 2 through 1581 to be more "real" than the year 0: that is, if he
could retroactively name them by decree, why can't we just establish a
convention that the year 0 === 1 B.C? It's not like doing so would destroy any
elegance the system might have.

~~~
sp332
>While your at it,

That's "you're" not "your" :-P

~~~
mrbad101
sp332 please have a seat right over here at digg.com

~~~
sp332
It's an arbitrary and nit-picky thread. It doesn't happen often around here
but I'm going to enjoy it.

------
jacquesm
This one is meta, but I think it will happen:

HN will split.

~~~
chaosprophet
In addition I'd say most of the hacker crowd would migrate to the other non-yc
site, which promises a more hacker oriented diet while banishing everything
else with an iron fist.

~~~
zackattack
which site?

~~~
trafficlight
<http://hardcorenews.ycombinator.com>

News for Hardcore Hackers.

~~~
jacquesm
link does not work for me

~~~
mixmax
It will go live around 2015 :-)

------
brfox
No biomedical predictions yet...

1\. Everyone will have their full genome sequenced if they need some sort of
medical treatment.

2\. Healthcare will start to become cheaper due to personalized medicine and
more data based decision-making.

3\. Traditional drug discovery will be begin to be replaced by something:
complex drug combinations, nanotech, ??

4\. Some gene-therapy will be more commonplace.

5\. End of cancer? infections? probably not

~~~
iamwil
People will be able to search their genomic sequence, and build a social
network with similar people to them. Or a dating service based on your genetic
sequence, designing a 'match' for most fit children.

~~~
borism
sorry, mostly already implemented by 23andMe in 2009 and prior

~~~
iamwil
I don't see a dating site with genome sequence. What, pray tell, is the url?

~~~
borism
dating service with genome sequence? like ratemygenome.com or what?

23andme does allow two partners to predict what features their child might
have though.

------
varjag
America will pull out from Afghanistan, and the central government will fall
before the decade ends.

~~~
seldo
This implies there is currently some functioning central government, which is
mostly a polite fiction. One of Afghanistan's fiefdoms is centered on Kabul,
and we pretend that one is the government.

~~~
varjag
It's not really native to Kabul area, but loosely representative of former
Northern Alliance (read: Tajik). And Pushtu tribes (southeast of the country,
Taliban demographics) are not happy about that and never going to accept it.

Maybe it could be better to really split Afghanistan by ethnic boundaries,
then there could be hope of building some form of society in one of them. Of
course, not going to happen.

------
IsaacL
\- Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some
time in the next two years.

\- Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be
less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.

\- Microsoft will not have gone anywhere, though it will have shrunk and may
have evolved into a consultancy company on the lines of IBM. Many businesses
on the Mircosoft stack will remain on it. Although the desktop market will
shrink, perhaps considerably between 2015 and 2020, desktops will still be
sold to hardcore PC gamers and in the third world, and Windows will remain the
OS of choice. Laptops will become the standard computer, and Windows will also
retain the majority market share, though OS X, Linux and Chrome OS will all
gain here.

\- Internet Explorer will shrink, but won't go away. IE6 will hang around for
a few years, but may die very rapidly in workplaces when some killer
enterprise web application stops supporting it. It will remain widespread in
East Asia, at least as far as 2015. Now that Google is advertising Chrome on
billboards here in the UK, all that can be safely predicted about the browser
market is that it'll be extremely competitive.

\- Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow
extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market
segments. It will be most successful in places like cities that grant free
municipial wifi access.

\- Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst
the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in
developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal
juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be
caused by mobiles.

\- For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching
that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more
than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.

\- In addition, at least one of the 'big' startups of the second half of the
decade will have been possible with 2009 technology. By this I mean that
people will still be discovering new potential for browser-based web
applications built with current client-side technologies, which will remain
ubiquitous, although new alternatives will appear.

\- It will be an even better time to start a startup in 2020 than it is now.
One of the key drivers of ease-of-starting-up-ness will not be new technology,
but new platforms - like Facebook and viral marketing, but better; or that
solve other problems like micropayments, customer development, retention, and
so on.

\- Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though
well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".

\- As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby
are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even
more programmer time for CPU time.

\- Having said that, Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether
in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm.
Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and
nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.

\- An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will
be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching
enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of
the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally
recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the
various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part
of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin
to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused
by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will
provoke more of a push for action.

\- Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large
shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to
home delivery.

\- China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction.
However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will
increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and
will still be rationalized by porn.

\- Despite multiple new fads that purport to make software development ten
times faster and error-free, it will remain a hard problem.

\- You still won't be able to talk to your fridge, and gesture-based HCI will
remain a fun gimmick.

\- Virtual worlds like Second Life will remain niche, but World of Warcraft
will pass 20 million users and a Facebook game or similar will pass 200
million users.

\- The next big thing will be something totally unknown and unpredictable now,
as user-generated content and social networking were in 1999. However, when it
does appear, various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us
all about it. It will still be really cool, though.

I am actually going to save a copy of this; although they all seem perfectly
reasonable to me, from an objective standpoint I'm probably laughably wrong on
at least 2/3 of them, and it'll be interesting to look back to see which ones
they were.

------
paraschopra
Ebook readers will become ubiquitous in developed countries by 2012-2013 and
then developing countries by 2020

(Of course all my predictions have +/- a couple of years of margin for error)

[EDIT: changed 2010 to 2020, guess I am still in 2009 mode]

~~~
tlrobinson
I assume you meant developing countries by 2020?

~~~
paraschopra
Yup, edited in the post..

------
icefox
A new OS for the desktop is introduced and gains a significant following. And
I am not talking about the next Microsoft/OS X/KDE incremental release.
Probably based on a Linux kernel it would have a different security system,
different application deployment and upgrade system. Pretty much taking all we
have learned with desktops the past fifteen years and applying them without
having to live with the existing legacy applications.

------
DaniFong
Both solar and wind power will be produced at a lower cost than power from
coal and natural gas plants, and sold to customers when they want it, how they
want it.

~~~
rms
Here's hoping. I was also glad to see this prediction in response to my
question:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ai988/my_dad_is_a_theo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ai988/my_dad_is_a_theoretical_nuclear_physicist_and_a/c0hpzux)

------
antirez
Internet will become for most people in developed countries as important as it
used to be for "early adopters" in the past.

------
samuel
IPv4 address space will be exhausted(I know, I know, a cheap shot).

~~~
jodrellblank
Being more specific, do you think it will be impossible to buy a public IP
address _for any price_?

If not, then in what sense _will_ it be exhausted?

~~~
samuel
My definition for ipv4 adresses exhaustion is: IANA and RIR's have no more
unallocated blocks, so everything is left to the free market. If its
consequences will be catastrophic or imperceptible is something I can't
imagine. I would love to see Google's and Facebook's risk models for the next
years, since they are those who could be more severely hit by this.

------
motters
Two main predictions:

Telerobots become commonplace. These will be not much more than a wheeled or
tracked base with a pole and holder for a mobile phone. It allows you to visit
people in their homes, visit companies or customers, provide some kinds of
medical service and carry out inspections of remote sites.

Augmented reality becomes a major entertainment system. You wear something
like an EyeTap device and 3D content is projected into your field of view. The
device also contains a accelerometers (same as the Wii controllers) to monitor
head pose. Highly compelling 3D content, including games, business charts,
street directions, ads, and even "adult content" can be interacted with at any
location using the headset, which is wirelessly linked to something like a
mobile phone or laptop.

~~~
jacquesm
[http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2008/02/turn-
old...](http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2008/02/turn-old-
cellphone-into-robots-brain.html)

The second part of your post is actually the central thesis of William Gibsons
'Spook Country', he calls it 'locative art'.

~~~
motters
We're already very much on the augmented reality trajectory if you look at the
Johnny Chung Lee stuff, Google Goggles, Wii, etc. Once the original EyeTap
patents lapse I think there will be a rush of consumer electronics companies
implementing something very similar.

~~~
bioweek
What's the big deal about the eyetap patents?

------
zacharypinter
I predict that the various phone (land/cell) and television services will
become commoditized into internet providers. There will be no need for service
providers to setup a phone number or voicemail. You'll simply have devices
that connect to wired or wireless internet service and use whatever
application is preferred for text, voice, and video communication. I think
something like a skype username will become the defacto way of identifying
people, instead of remembering or storing phone numbers.

I'm sure the existing companies (verizon, AT&T, sprint) will fight this change
(who wants their business to become a commodity?), but they'll only delay the
inevitable.

------
slvrspoon
i see: \- some significant progress against cancer in the tenties and that
being a big thing. \- growth of a chinese middle class with a voice and some
balls and independence \- continued problems with islam, terrorists, and the
first terrorist small nuclear detonation. \- possible but not probably
achievements in nanotech or energy on the tech front \- wifi data collection
on everything as the main tech change in this coming decade. internet and
software basically a sideways moving bore and snore \- privacy as an issue for
the common user

------
jeromec
_> \- Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current
trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade._

I feel bad for the situation in Iran. I also predict tumult, but with no real
change for any amount of violence and bloodshed. This is because the people
still want a theocracy, which will inherently be totalitarian. You can't have
it both ways; demanding freedom along with a theocracy is paradoxical.

~~~
philwelch
I disagree. I think the Iran could easily turn into the functional equivalent
of a constitutional monarchy. Britain is still, on paper, ruled by the head of
the Church of England after all.

~~~
jeromec
Hmm, that's an interesting and good point. I think it's still a bit more messy
for Iran, though. Their religious doctrine is much less tolerant of
liberalism. That means citizens will have to choose between being pro govt. or
pro "evil" liberalism. That's why it's hard for me to see change. Btw, I
wonder how Britain handles issues of religious freedom if there is no official
separation of church and state.

~~~
philwelch
That's not the sense I got out of Iran during the summer uprisings. These are
the same people who overthrew the Shah in 1979 because their religious
doctrine is intolerant of tyranny. The justification for the uprising--and the
sense that many people are turning against even the Ayotollahs--is that no
man, not even an Ayotollah, is immune from the duty to govern justly. I'm not
saying Iran is going to legalize gay marriage anytime soon, but they're
liberal enough to get outraged over a stolen election or a peaceful protestor
shot dead in the streets.

~~~
jeromec
When you talk about the Shah being overthrown in 1979, yet 30 years later we
still see a tyrannical govt. in Iran, it's exactly the point I'm making.
Religious rules inherently will be interpreted by man, which is the danger of
a theocracy. Who leads if Iran's most prominent opposition leader, Mousavi,
with his more liberal views dies? Worse yet, what happens if Mousavi succeeds
in becoming president only to be replaced years later by an Ayatollah under
the reasoning he is straying too far from the religious path? All of the
bloodshed would have only bought a few years of this brand of "freedom". Said
another way, how can one truly be free if that freedom is subject to be
conditioned or revoked on the whim of just a few men?

------
tommorris
Widespread adoption of GNU/Linux on the desktop. (Prompted by...)

Widespread adoption of LISP by developers. (Both of which cause...)

The Singularity! (But, sadly, Ray Kurzweil dies a few days before the
Singularity happens.)

Okay, okay, prediction is a mugs game.

Democracy in Iran would be nice. I'm not sure why I need a customised personal
display on my refrigerator. Cheaper displays and other computing devices would
be nice - as would a stable, clean energy supply to power them with.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Reasonable timeline estimates I've heard for singularity precipitating events
(human uploading, human level AI) are in the 15-30 year range weighted early,
and these aren't handwaves meaning "we don't know", but, respectively,
predictions from the microscopy/neuroscience/compute-power needed to scan and
emulate a brain, and from the neuroscience/compute-power needed to figure out
the brain's abstract algorithms and copy them.

Still outside the range of one decade. Call this one "prelude to singularity".

~~~
jacquesm
You'll have to link brain emulation to an _increase_ in intelligence though.
For all you know a simulated brain is going to end up being retarded or anti-
social or pathological.

Neither of those would have any measurable effect on how we live, the
'superhuman intelligence' is actually the least likely outcome, at least in
the beginning of this.

It _might_ happen, but I don't think it is very likely.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Brain emulations don't have to be smarter than humans to be superhuman, they
can be merely more numerous and/or quicker.

The time frame for proper AI _not_ via emulation is actually shorter, cf Shane
Legg's peak probability estimate of 18 years. This is because the mechanisms
of learning and processing in the brain are well under way to being
understood, and they will lead to copycat software using similar conventional
"narrow AI" algorithms. These also have a greater potential than neural
snapshots to be scaled up fast.

Unfortunately none of the above helps towards making "friendly" AI (that is,
avoiding creating a superintelligence whose value system is inimical to ours).
This ought to be a serious worry.

~~~
randallsquared
In order to worry about Friendliness, you have to be first (otherwise it was
pointless, as whether the first mover's AI was Friendly is what matters). So,
you have to be relatively confident that you're already going to be first in
order to spend much time researching Friendliness. I only know of one group
that appears to be confident in that way (SIAI), and I have no reason to think
that their confidence is less misplaced than all the other people who've been
convinced they'd figured it out.

~~~
JulianMorrison
From the outside, SIAI seems torn along a Goertzel-Yudkowsky axis, with BG
saying "whee, this is fun, lets build it", and EY too busy saving the world to
panic. But the man himself reads Hacker News, so I'll shut up.

------
bioweek
What about the emergence of ubiquitous free internet? I'm thinking it will
take of the form of everyones' mobile phones forming a global, giagantic mesh
network? (Is that the right term?)

How likely is that? It seems like the next step in the evolution of the
internet, turning into something that no one can possibly control.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
How will the signal cross oceans? Deserts? Yellowstone National Park?

~~~
bioweek
Well at least for reasonably populated areas, how's that?

------
lallysingh
Really the best part I'm looking forward to is Doctor Who. I'm pretty
apprehensive about the new Doctor, but there's a full season and frankly, the
bits from "The End of Time" p1 are pretty exciting.

Predictions: we'll see a good-sized shift in our political base representing
the un/under-skilled and unemployed.

------
teeja
Citizens of the US will begin to publicly insist on being told what to think.

------
andrewcooke
gpu/cpu unification has to happen some time in the next 10 years (in the 2010
thread i argue against it being next year, but it's inevitable at some point).
the next amd architecture is a step in that direction.

edit: also, please, please, ultralight laptops with e-ink screens.

edit2: to clarify the above, cpus are currently tending towards more cores,
while gpus are tending towards larger caches. both are trying to extend their
area of application into tasks performed by the other, in the hope of more
speed over a wider range of applications.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Think that will lead to real-time high performance ray-tracing in applications
and games? Because that seems to me like the next logical step for the
marriage. It's a problem domain where programmers are already struggling and
it lends itself well to highly-parallel processing.

~~~
andrewcooke
i'm not sure what it will lead to, to be honest. my best guess is that there's
some new kind of interface (3d?) that will exploit the extra power.

------
zitterbewegung
PMC's will become much more prevalent and popular.

~~~
tdoggette
Pan-Mass Challenge? PubMeb Central?

~~~
zitterbewegung
Private military companies.

------
borism
\- web will cease to be the delivery platform of choice for applications

\- internet will be heavily controlled by governments/corporations worldwide

------
DannoHung
Things will actually be even more awesome than they are today, but because
governments have no idea how to manage all the awesome, things will actually
seem crappier.

I mean, I'm thinking like, silver jumpsuit awesome here.

