
Ask HN: What's NH's opinion of the next big thing in tech? - anonymous5133
What does everyone think the next big innovation that will be widely adopted be? Be sure to put your time horizon into the discussion so we can tell when you think it will occur.
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goatherders
It's still the early days of the internet when it comes to small business.
Fully 40% lack a Facebook page or website and 60% lack having both. The vast
majority of brick and mortar businesses to not allow online sales nor have
even a mechanism for people to view actual inventory on a digital medium of
some kind.

If you're looking for the next big tech opportunity it's in helping businesses
with fewer than 50 employees expand their reach outside of the 10 mile radius
around their physical locations.

~~~
m3mpp
Are those real stats or guess?

~~~
goatherders
Real. I ran enterprise sales for a very very large web host and these are
figures we commissioned. Lots of other data in there too, like how 6,000,000
people on earth received money in 2015 for providing a digital service or some
kind. A number expected to grow to 20 million by 2020.

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mothsonasloth
Tech detox, I increasingly see people lamenting the invasiveness of tech in
their lives and wanting an escape from some of it

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DrNuke
The IOTA project [http://www.iota.org](http://www.iota.org) is a dystopian
mess at the moment but ternary computing, the internet of everything, the
tangle paradigm instead of blockchain and fee-less transactions are what many
are dreaming of and possibly at hand even before quantum computing (therefore
sooner than later).

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Jugurtha
I don't know about the next big innovations that will be widely adopted, but I
think I know that if the following innovations happen, they will probably be
widely adopted...

\- Applications that aren't slow: "In a world where an app opens right when
you click on it".

\- Fast websites: type in the url, hit enter, and you're in. You click on a
link, and voilà..

\- Split second boots.

\- Chrome not killing my computer when opening too many tabs (I used to open
120+ I think with Firefox).

\- Make sbt not download the whole internet (yes, cache and all).

\- Printers that actually print when I want to. Also make printing in black
not require other colors.

\- Automatic transmission cars that don't do a jerk motion when they stop.

\- Universal cartridge format.

\- Time tracking app that magically monitors what you do during the day
without your intervention and can show you a treemap. Over the years, you can
learn something.

\- A huge dataset on every company and human that was ever formed and its life
through success or failure. Maybe we can learn from that.

\- A way to encode and distill the whole human knowledge. A graph of
"knowledge" of sorts.

\- Peer review that works.

\- Time management, cognition, meta-cognition, deliberate practice, empathy,
cognitive biases, and how memory works lessons in primary school.

\- Voice calls on (Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger) that sound like a phone
call.

\- A way to simulate your life with varying parameters and find a path to a
desirable outcome.

\- Natural computation: A billion objects falling don't require nature to spin
up more VMs to handle all their trajectories and write a Medium post about how
it did it. Physics seems to handle great loads, concurrent events, several
processes mutating the same object simultaneously, out of the box. A computer
that does _that_.

~~~
framebit
On the topic of SBT:
[https://www.lihaoyi.com/mill/](https://www.lihaoyi.com/mill/), a response to
[http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html](http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html)

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muzani
Honestly I feel our political and economic structure need to change to reflect
new tech. Democratic republic and capitalism as we know it.

The age of information seems to have become a breeding ground for
misinformation. I don't really mean "fake news", but deceptive, plausible,
half true news. This had made democracy a little... weird lately, especially
in an era you can deliver different news to someone based on their location.

Our economic system has been based on supply and demand. But what if we
basically have unlimited supply, as is the case with software? AI is going to
hit hard here, with it being smart enough to replace all minimum wage foreign
labor. A lot of governments are experimenting with basic income in their own
way.

We've also had this weird effect where a small company can raise millions in
investment and seriously threaten well-established companies within a decade.

These changes will take a while to hit, at least a decade. But I think the
moves will have an impact on what kind of tech emerges.

~~~
artemisyna
Ditto this one, though perhaps from a slightly different angle.

Consider when most of our economic and political systems were first founded.
Information was sparse. Game theory wasn't even a thing yet. None of the
founding fathers (of our nation or any other) could have possibly fathomed the
sort of interactions happening today.

At some point, we're going to have to face the fact that, over the years, the
underlying rules of how things works has shifted but that the laws on the
books haven't matched.

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anoncoward111
Please tech gods, make personal jetpacks a thing. I would pay $50,000.

They're currently about $275,000 and I only know of one on this Earth. Also
jet fuel is expensive.

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quickthrower2
Boring answer, but for me I'd bet on self-driving cars that you can hail via
Uber type platforms.

~~~
anonymous5133
Not a boring answer in the slightest. I can definitely see self-driving cars
going mainstream at some point. I think self-driving trucks doing long-haul
transport will go mainstream but the driver will still be required due to
driving laws most likely.

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ericintheloft2
5G and next generation GPS.

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jxub
*HN's (sorry for the nitpick)

