
Ask HN: What will become possible by 2025 in your field of expertise? - vagab0nd
In your field of expertise, what&#x27;s not possible now, but will become possible in 3-5 years? What about 10 years?
======
joeframbach
Looking at a 10 year window. There's a low probability, but non-zero, that
I'll be able to correctly align and distribute DOM elements both horizontally
and vertically. I might accomplish this by dropping support for the Internet
Explorer family of browsers.

~~~
at-fates-hands
> I might accomplish this by dropping support for the Internet Explorer family
> of browsers.

I was just working on some legacy stuff last week. Only worked in IE11, in
compatibility mode. I had to use vanilla JS to get some data out of a huge
form.

Yeah, document.querySelector('#app') doesn't work. I found out, "It only works
on _modern_ browsers" which IE11 doesn't qualify as, which is kind of funny to
me. I ended up using document.getElementById('app') instead though, which did
work.

~~~
stringyham
Is there some joke I'm not getting? querySelector has worked on IE since
version 8.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Except when you're running in compatibility mode.

~~~
stringyham
Compatibility mode would be like coding for IE7. Not IE11's fault :D

~~~
at-fates-hands
Yeaper.

"Legacy software man, it's a helluva drug!"

------
falcor84
In the field of education, I believe we're not that far off from having basic
teachable AI agents.

As the maxim goes, "The best way to learn is to teach". My vision here is that
for any new topic a student learns, they (or the instructor) would be able to
instantiate an AI agent with relevant preliminary knowledge, for the student
to practice on. The student would try to teach the agent facts and/or how to
perform basic tasks, and the agent, with some basic metacognition would be
able to query the student regarding any unclear or conflicting points.

It definitely won't be anywhere near Turing Test level in 5 years, but I
believe that by then we'll have something useful. And beyond that, I think
there's real potential here, both for revolutionising education, and further
down the line in terms of AGI.

This is slightly tangential, but this article from a few days ago strengthened
my belief that we're getting closer -
[https://reiinakano.com/2019/11/12/solving-
probability.html](https://reiinakano.com/2019/11/12/solving-probability.html)

~~~
monk_e_boy
A simple BOT that a student could ask for advice "I don't understand Python
WHILE loops" and it pointed them to a YouTube video coupled with some easy
examples.

I see that is almost possible now.

~~~
dmd
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+don%27t+under...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+don%27t+understand+Python+WHILE+loops)
seems to work just fine.

~~~
monk_e_boy
Couple this with repl.it and some examples to work through. Some hints on how
to debug it, etc.

I'm not asking for anything magic, just the glue that sticks all these bits
together.

~~~
zarify
I’ve been using Thonny with my students which has some basic feedback about
errors and possible solutions, which isn’t bad (as well as variable
inspection, although that gets a bit tedious with larger programs).

------
maxander
In about 10 years, it will be possible to run a cell lysate sample through a
mass spec machine and get what a present-day scientist would call a pretty
good picture of everything going on at the proteomic/metabolomic level, in
perhaps ~5 hours.

But in that time we will have probably discovered several currently-
unappreciated, biologically relevant biochemical mechanisms which we can’t
efficiently probe like this. And also it will be considered next to useless
because it doesn’t work on single-cell samples. :)

~~~
mncharity
Years ago, I was at a biology outreach-to-the-humanities seminar. Someone
asked about the driver of these decades of progress. They were seemingly
fishing for some Kuhnian escape from old oppressively restraining dogmas. And
were visibly unhappy with the answer that it was mostly economics. Rapidly
advancing technology changing the set of questions we can afford to pursue.

------
nsomaru
Enlightenment will be achieved when we develop One True Platform which marries
front end and backend development so that we don’t need to maintain complex
frameworks whose sole reason for existence is to make sure the computers don’t
blow up passing data back and forth.

~~~
adonnjohn
Any projects or murmurs alluding to tangible progress in that space?

~~~
danielheath
ActiveFacts (the hard formalism parts are done and working, but almost none of
the quality of life stuff is implemented yet)

Core idea is to start from a human-authored formal domain model (sample
models: [https://github.com/cjheath/activefacts-
examples/blob/master/...](https://github.com/cjheath/activefacts-
examples/blob/master/cql/Warehousing.cql) ) and generate:

* Database schemas - warehouse, OLAP, and (planned) the ETL script between them. * Application models (for ORM etc) - the rails one is implemented. * Code generation for serialization / deserialization from the shared domain model. * (planned) automatic query extraction from type-safe templates (you write your template in terms of the domain model, and it gets automatically compiled into a set of database queries which supply the data it needs).

It's hard to learn, which is a hefty up-front price to pay, but it neatly
avoids a ton of work 12+ months down the track.

------
alexcnwy
I have no doubt that deepfakes will be impossible to tell apart from real
videos (at least to a human) in 3-5 years.

In 10 years I think we’ll be able to generate entire movies programmatically.

~~~
noodlesUK
I agree with the deep fakes thing wrt video, but I’m still not convinced by
the ability of current (and near future) ML models to generate meaningful
written content like a film script. The GPT-2 stuff I’ve seen has mostly been
sensible English, but I’ve never seen it actually generate a coherent story.
What do you see are the steps between where we are now and where we’ll be in
10 years?

~~~
VLM
"meaningful written content like a film script"

Award winning, agreed, no. Good enough for a special effects blockbuster or
pr0n or stereotypical teen comedy or date night romcom, probably good enough.

Ironically the cheapest part of a movie right now seems to be the script /
storyline, and some kind of Amazon Turk with more flexible morality might
write better than we get now versions of special effects demo reels (aka
action flicks) or pr0n or teen comedies via the magic of extensive A/B testing
and population sampling.

~~~
fbi-director
I'm hereby patenting an idea or company that let's you input a story, a use
some gui to modify the looks of each character, and let the tool this company
provides, create a porn to your liking - per your provided input.

Even if it's in drawing/hentai form and not 'real' people.

Big bucks to be made!

------
mNovak
In the RF / wireless world, in the coming 5-10 years we may finally see
commercial use of large phased arrays. This was supposed to come with mm-wave
5G, but probably will get pushed to 5G++ or 6G. Starlink actually looks on
track to be the first consumer 'killer app'.

Hard to understate how big this will be for maintaining growth in wireless
capacity. I think there's a timeline where we ditch copper coax and even
buried fiber in most infrastructure.

~~~
o-__-o
Fiber will be replaceable upon ubiquitous distribution of ultra wideband (UWB)
technology

------
overgard
We’re going to see ray tracing become dominant I think. Its possible now but
its not good enough yet. Five years though? Id bank on yes.

~~~
appstorelottery
I’m already doing interesting stuff (unimaginable 20 years ago) with Nvidia
RTX - totally agree with you.

~~~
ChuckNorris89
Can you elaborate on what you're working on with RTX?

------
at-fates-hands
I started working in RPA (robotic process automation) and what our team is
working on will end up putting a lot of people out of work. In 3-5 years, I
would expect most data entry jobs to be eliminated by the scripts our team is
writing.

The scary part? I work in the health care industry. This means a lot of the
heavy forms processing that goes on will soon be completely automated by
robots and without any human interaction or decision making. The future is
cold and calculating; without any empathy or consideration for the patient -
only the bottom line for the provider is what matters.

Nearly every day I get the statistics of how many jobs our team's bots are
replacing. In one instance, we had several bots that effectively replaced over
1,000 FTE's and saved the company close to $3 million. We have over 600 bots
right now running which is in the top 1% of all companies in the country and
they're looking to expand that number even more.

Nearly every day I feel the moral weight of what I'm doing and it gives me
pause.

~~~
hanniabu
> bots that effectively replaced over 1,000 FTE's and saved the company close
> to $3 million

This doesn't add up. You're saying each full time employee earns on average
$1k/year?

~~~
kosmos1337
Maybe the first year's savings were offset by the high cost of developing the
automation?

------
rodolphoarruda
I'm a project manager. Putting aside the possible/not possible speculation for
a moment, what I hope to see in the near future is a kind of support system
that could evaluate work in progress, work done and other factors to better
help us with risk management. Schedules are tighter than ever, deadlines are
seen as life or death, penalties for delays are easily surpassing the million
USD marks. So I think we need all the intelligence we can get to understand
what's really going on in project and make the right decisions to
minimize/eliminate risk.

~~~
overgard
I’m not sure of your industry, so deadlines could be really important there,
but almost every programming job i’ve had the deadlines were frequently just
self imposed hysteria. Management would make a big deal, but when you dug into
what the actual consequences of a missed deadline were it was usually minor. I
actually think the culture of tracking everything can make things worse
because when everyone is at full capacity theres zero slack for process
optimization or serendipity or experimentation. Its like the more overly
“busy” everyone is in a company, the more collective intelligence, empathy,
and perspective is lost.

It also is essentially lost on almost all management that coding is almost
always a creative endeavor. After all if the thing you’re building already
exists you could just buy it. Creative works are extremely hard to estimate in
any meaningful way.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
Deadlines are about budgets. Do you know what happens when the company runs
out of money?

~~~
overgard
Do you know what happens to deadlines when the talent evaporates because they
don’t want to deal with management-by-hysteria and they leave for a place that
treats them like adults?

------
rsp1984
Not sure about 3-5 years but within the next 10 years we'll likely have 3D
sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at
megapixel resolutions with 30+ fps. At the price and form factor of an entry-
level DSLR.

In 15 to 20 years every smartphone (or perhaps pair of AR glasses) will have
one of these.

~~~
georgespencer
> In 15 to 20 years every smartphone [...] will have [3D sensors that can see
> 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel
> resolutions with 30+ fps].

I'm a total layperson with cameras and had an abiding sense that there is a
fairly hard limitation on what's possible within a smartphone-type housing
(because the sensor is limited by the amount of light). I'd love to hear more
about how this perceived physical barrier is being overcome!

~~~
mncharity
Not my field, but my impression is optical system design is a very rich high-
dimensional space. And thus that suggestions of hard limitation are often
overlooking possibilities.

For example, resolutions in angle, time, color, and intensity can be traded,
inhomogeneously, and augmented with computation. It's not that simple hard
limits, say Rayleigh's diffraction limit on resolution, are wrong exactly. But
they do seem to get naively misapplied as system limitations. Super-resolution
microscopy techniques, for example, work around it.

~~~
georgespencer
Interesting, thank you!

------
rscho
Gathering actually reliable data from the healthcare system will enable the
rise of true clinical science and the fall of the clinician-researcher star
system.

You said possible. Not actually realized :-)

~~~
ci5er
You show me a clinical environment, outside maybe Intermountain or Atria,
where physicians enter accurate and complete and timely data, then I will show
you a ... well, I don't know. But I believe this "vision" is prohibited by
clinicians that simply don't bother entering in data that aren't relevant to
an encounter-billing thingie. (In the US).

Please tell me that I am wrong. I used to be a lot more optomistic about HCIT
than I seem to be right now...

~~~
jerome-jh
You comment is both funny and to the point. Applies to France as well.

------
harigov
Full self-driving car that can operate using just cameras on a variety of
weather conditions (still limited)

------
hollerith
In 3-5 years if we are lucky, life expectancy in the US will stop going down.

------
fl0under
I think we will start seeing more and more advanced composite 'metamaterials'
being applied in the world outside of research labs.

These are materials with engineered structures at usually the nano or micro
scale that have unique/unusual properties. Things like better antennas,
imaging devices, or even materials that can perform computations.

As the manufacturing processes develop more I think we will start seeing them
more widespread. Defence industries are in particular interested in this at
the moment but the potentials are much bigger.

------
mncharity
I'm looking forward to the consumer release next year of 1080p AR glasses. And
hope one of them has sufficient visual quality and pragmatics to displace a
lot of my laptop screen use.

In 3-5 years? Apple is rumored to intend both headset and glasses. So I hope
for all-day AR, with >1080p resolution, eye tracking, and hand tracking, that
Just Works. Enabling 3D GUIs. At least shallow ones - avoiding vergence-
accommodation conflict in consumer devices may take additional years.

------
johnmorrison
Expect to see the first ever commercial liquid fueled nuclear power plants
under construction by 2025, maybe even operational. China will probably be the
very first.

------
onion2k
I'm a front end web developer. I hope we have better DOM - WebGL integration
to enable some really nice effects and optimizations. Most users have
reasonably powerful GPUs even on cheap smartphones but the only way to utilise
them in a web page is disappointingly separate to the HTML side of things.
Hardware accelerated position updates, lists, etc (more than CSS does already)
would be awesome.

~~~
monk_e_boy
It's crazy that N64 games (e.g. mario) have really interesting menu screens,
with nice animations, an interesting background, menu items that pop and
jiggle... all pretty much impossible in HTML for someone like me.

------
p1esk
In 10 years major chip design houses might start seriously consider using
analog computation for machine learning.

~~~
newyankee
Can you elaborate ?

~~~
0-_-0
Most networks currently are float32. Low accuracy networks are possible, and
the random noise of an analog circuit is basically a regularizer for a neural
network, instead of being unwanted or incorrect. It's a feature, not a bug!

------
ilaksh
Programming for more than thirty years here.

Within five years there should be multiple AIs that specialize in different
types of programming. They will have a combination of a natural language
interface and interactive screens.

Most of these will be based on starting with existing template applications
and tweaking them to handle special cases. They will manage that by training
neural networks on datasets that provide requested tweak descriptions and the
resulting code or schema changes. They will have a fallback to manually edit
formulas or code when necessary. AIs will also be trained to read API
descriptions and write code to access them.

Within 10 years fully general purpose AI will be available that can completely
replace programmers even for difficult or novel problems.

------
dublin
By 2025, it's quite possible that vapor-deposited boron-based icosahedral
superconductor and semiconductor materials will begin to revolutionize many
areas, including quantum computing, slashing power requirements of existing
chips by 90+%, and most importantly, quantum energy devices (think batteries
that never need recharging, powered by the expansion of the universe) that
effectively convert ambient heat to electricity just as PV cells convert
ambient light to electricity. This uses a new quantum thermodynamics that has
no classical analog. FWIW, these materials have already been invented, and the
theory behind them is probably sorted out as well.

------
vbsteven
Not exactly my field as I’m mainly on the backend/infrastructure side of these
projects but I see a lot of recent progress in consumer devices/wearables
inching their way into the medical space and replacing expensive medical
equipment for detection and prevention of certain ailments.

One recent example is using PPG on smartwatches like Fitbit and Apple Watch to
detect atrial fibrillation.

In 3-5 years I see some more use cases like this being released.

------
timwaagh
In 2025 Cobol can into cloud.

~~~
closeparen
Can you really not run Cobol on a regular linux box?

------
dublin
By 2025, the "OS" of choice for at least the remainder of the first half of
the century will become a set of cloud services APIs, but advances in hardware
will allow these services to be pushed back to the edge much as mainframes
were replaced by distributed networks.

------
app4soft
Think, I would use release of _SolveSpace 3.0_ for my CAD experiments, instead
of nightly builds.

[0] [https://github.com/symbian9/solvespace-daily-
engineering](https://github.com/symbian9/solvespace-daily-engineering)

------
joeberon
In about 3 to 5 years, it will be possible to create ultra high-Q mechanical
micro-resonators with extremely low thermal noise coupling. This will allow a
huge number of new quantum optomechanical setups and experiments

~~~
mncharity
Years ago I saw a talk by someone who built mems oscillators. They were
fervent in declaring something like "Brownian motion... it is evil! EVIL!!!".
I've since wondered if you could leverage that for science education. For
every phenomena and property, find someone who _deeply_ emotionally cares
about it, loves or hates it, and create an interview clip. To give topics
emotional weight, and shift them from unfamiliar incoming trivia, into
something that at least someone really cares about.

------
jerome-jh
I think the cost of storage will drop again sharply, after the current
plateau, because there is so much push for it, and we are not quite at the
physical limit yet.

In SW development, automatic code generation will breakthrough.

------
fuzzfactor
I expect to have a lot more secure remote access to the scientific instruments
in my lab than my IT group can provide using the internet.

Working on it now.

Going to call it _Dial-Up_.

------
i_r7al
It will be possible to make the bullet obsolete

~~~
ci5er
How so and why? Are kinetic projectiles expected to be superceded by something
different within 5 years?

------
breck
\- In 5 years you will be able to easily write powerful programs through voice
interfaces like Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and/or Google

\- In 5 years you will be able to start and make 90% of the key design
decisions for a new general or domain specific programming languages in a
couple of days, a process that currently takes many months to years if not
decades

\- In 10 years it will be impossible for most software engineers to keep their
jobs if they refrain from using program synthesis AI's providing "super-
autocomplete"

~~~
georgespencer
I don't believe it'll be possible to write powerful programs through voice
interface, but I do believe it'll be possible to overcome GUI limitations with
significantly more complex voice commands than are available at the moment.
Things like "Hey dingus, schedule a meeting with Rod, Jane, and Freddy on the
final Thursday of every month. We'll defer to Jane's calendar."

------
tomaszs
I am Senior Software Development Consultant programming 20 years.

Based on expertise in multiple international projects i think in 5 years from
now software will start to solve most important humanity problems.

In 10 years from now it will at last have substantial role in solving them.

~~~
tonyarkles
What kind of problems are you imagining here? I feel perpetually jaded
(software is going to get better at sending advertisements to people!) and
would love some uplifting stories!

~~~
tomaszs
Unemployment, health, safety, food, water, climate, conflicts, education.

These are the main problems that software will help solve. And i can observe a
lots of focus on these topics in recent years. Actually since a lots of limits
software faced had dissapeared.

This means software will be less used for whacky stuff like ads but for things
people care about.

------
smkellat
3-5 years?

1\. The IRS primary, secondary, and cold backup tertiary mainframes will have
failed and not have sufficient replacements in place.

2\. Library of Congress Subject Headings will be incomprehesible due to
controversies over how they are not sufficiently "woke" and library subject
cataloguing will have to reach back to revitalize the work of Minnie Earl
Sears to try to maintain order.

3\. There will be an Internet. There will be the FAANG properties. They won't
overlap anymore.

~~~
rajacombinator
More details about IRS mainframes? Sounds interesting. (Dare I say
promising...)

~~~
smkellat
Start here:
[https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2019reports/2019...](https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2019reports/201920083fr.pdf)

