
Ask HN: Anyone willing to speculate on 'software in 100 years from now'? - andrewstuart
Or is it just so far out that it&#x27;s too ridiculous to even guess? Arthur Clarke made a few good guesses.
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am185
AI writing code and discover millions of new breakthroughs every day for the
good of mankind. While people living in alternate reality satisfying all there
pleasures.

~~~
clamprecht
I predict context-aware spell correction.

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Varkiil
I don't see humanity surviving this long and if it does I think it would be
pretty close to what we have today or even older

~~~
jmnicolas
I beg to differ but slightly : humanity will probably still exist in 100 years
but probably less numerous and less technological than now.

At one point natural resources depletion and the effect of climate change will
reduce human population to a fraction of what it is now. The remaining ones
will have to make do with less technology and more manual work.

I'd encourage every HN reader to read the Archdruid Report, eye opening.

~~~
maxerickson
The historical trajectory is for energy to get cleaner and cheaper/more
available. This is more likely to continue than not (wind, solar and nuclear
power are all abundant and not particularly expensive using _present day_
technology (and I think many opponents of nuclear would still prefer it to not
having magic holes in the wall)).

~~~
contingencies
_The historical trajectory is for energy to get cleaner and cheaper /more
available._

I beg to differ. At least for heating, which is necessary for a lot of
climates, and also often for cooking, wood is actually arguably the cleanest,
easiest to establish, most universally available and most sustainable.[1] The
historical trajectory is that it has been becoming impossible to obtain for
most people because they are being progressively squeezed in to some sort of
megacity of apartment boxes designed for worker drones, cars and mass-
consumption. Some of them have never even seen a forest.

[1] [http://woodheat.org/why-heat-with-wood.html](http://woodheat.org/why-
heat-with-wood.html)

~~~
maxerickson
Wood has some carbon cycle advantages, but it absolutely isn't clean
(especially in the stoves available historically, modern stoves do better),
and it obviously isn't sustainable for human civilization as we know it (prior
to the widespread use of coal, forests were shrinking).

(I say as we know it because some civilization that hasn't existed might tend
to slow growth prior to achieving a high standard of living)

~~~
contingencies
Yes, it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than anything else from virtually
any angle for local heating, at least. Cooking too, in most cases.

Basically, wood is a huge win because it doesn't rely on having a vehicle, a
credit card, a petrochemical distribution system, a bank, electricity and
bureaucracy to manage all that, etc. Once you tally up the pervasive bullshit
(transport, regulation, real state of reserves, enabling technology, overheads
for the above) around most energy sources, you realize they're a hell of a lot
more expensive and less long-term reliable than wood.

One axe, some land, a bit of time: sorted.

~~~
maxerickson
You are romanticizing the axe something powerful.

Have you ever cooked and heated for an extended period of time using wood that
you fell with an axe? I haven't, but the little bit of axe work and wood
splitting I've done is enough to dissuade me from being excited about it.

~~~
contingencies
Heated, yes. Cooked, no. It's not that hard.

Anyway the points I was arguing were 'get cheaper' \- clearly not the case
when discussing a transition from free (grows on trees) to paid (to a private
utility, often a monopoly, and one upon which you are dependent) - and 'get
cleaner', not the case when moving from wood to other-system-plus-
transmission-and-bureaucracy-overheads.

I agree with 'more available', though we've paid dearly for that in
environmental damage.

PS. To thread originator, thanks for thearchdruidreport meme, I was skeptical
but there are some really interesting thoughts there.

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trcollinson
Honestly, this isn't that far out to guess, and it probably won't be nearly as
futuristic as we might imagine.

For example, in 1967 Dennis Ritchie began work on the c programming language,
still highly used today only almost 50 years later. In 1962 the Chinook
helicopter when into service. Almost 35 years ago the US Space Shuttle went
into service, and we still haven't seen a huge amount of new innovation there.
Though maybe it will come.

Anyway, the point is, 100 years brings amazing innovations (before 1967 there
was no c, after all! So it was amazing). But, progress happens a lot more
slowly than I think most realize in our science fiction laden society. We
probably won't have any strong AI Robot Overloads in 100 years. Most likely
we'll still be writing software to solve our day to day challenges while
sitting around and complaining about how poorly other software engineers write
their code.

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ilaksh
At some point in less than 100 years, the contemporary equivalent of today's
software will then be a type of telekinetic programmable matter. But you don't
really program it. Its more like a number of beings work closely together via
wirelessly connected direct neural interfaces to imagine what might be
possible, while AGIs work behind the scenes to implement and integrate these
fantasies. These are then realized by some type of physical particle
arrangement at some resolution.

With enough engineering we could accomplish a crude approximation of this
magic today. To really guess about 100 years from now is impossible. Chimps
couldn't predict the evolution of computers and we can't predict ASI
technologies.

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ccvannorman
Moore's law continued, all of Earth 2015's data could fit on the head of a
pin. However, operating systems continued to get "smarter" with built-in
features and AI that always require more storage and processing power than is
available, causing everything to be slow and buggy, and everything gets more
buggy the longer you use it.

No software is allowed release on the mass market unless it fits Apple's TOS
(Apple is now the world government as well). All apps will be politically
correct and use no porn, swear words, violence, or mention anything hinting at
a competitor to Apple.

AI that can fix bugs and manage its own size will be a mere 10 years away.

~~~
cybrox
> AI would rather use Android phones and takes over the world.

Seriously though, I'd rather speculate on the risk of the super AI a company
has developed until then turning against the company itself. Not from a
'destroy the world' type of scenario but from a 'marketing desaster' scenario.

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onion2k
I don't think it'll look _that_ different as far as technologists are
concerned. There'll be software engineers who write code that interfaces with
hardware and other software APIs. The languages will change, the ideas might
change, but the jobs will still exist.

What will _really_ change is the sophistication of people who interact with
software - the end user. They'll start writing code (within the confines of an
application suite) in a big way. At the moment I imagine only a single digit
percentage of users can write a macro or use a scripting language in an
application, but that will change _immensely_. Everyone will use 'code' to
manipulate data in their job. There will be a fundamental shift towards
understanding things on an abstract 'everything is just data' level. The real
question is whether that's 100 years away or 20 years away. I suspect it's
going to be _much_ closer to 20.

~~~
styts
I have to remind you of Excel. A large fraction of office workers today use it
to 'code', transforming data given the rules they wrote.

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nitinics
Humans try hard to be smarter than their "software" counterparts. Start-ups
emerge with a problem to solve "How to make a normal human smarter than any
machines". Economics would be decentralized, and ultimately survival of the
fittest. If only I could live to see all this.

------
Lancey
100 years from now and still nothing is better than emacs

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bpg_92
Half Life 3 released.

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soneca
I think that won't exist "coders" or "programmers" or "developers" anymore.
From the core, machine will be programmable by natural language. The basic
rules for "talking to machines" will be teach in schools as a subset of the
regular language learning.

As today there are no more monastic scribes, there won't be coders anymore.
"Writing code", ie, talking to machines will be easy enough for universal
reach.

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tcbawo
The commonplace luxuries of tomorrow will be the rich persons luxuries today.
Personalized service will become mainstream. We will have fashion designers,
interior decorators, mentors, tutors, financial advisers, constantly at our
disposal. Cars will do the driving. Nearly the entire world will become
bi(tri)lingual, with deep contextual and instantaneous translation (and
history) for all travel and business dealings.

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mrfusion
I liked Vernor Vinge's idea that a programmer will be called "software
archielogist" and his main job is unearthing existing pieces of code created
over the past hundred years and putting them together. Sometimes it feels like
we're already at that point.

But you'd think with 130 years of software behind us we'd have code for
everything.

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Thiz
Mathematics has evolved since Pythagoras, but still remains the same
foundation.

Language hasn't changed much since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Programming hasn't changed that much in 50 years since Lisp, Fortran, Pascal.
We have more libraries, frameworks, tools, but it's still the same loops,
conditions, functions.

I predict with total confidence things will be the same.

~~~
mindslight
IMHO to get our rising unbounded complexity under control, Turing completeness
will come to be seen as a curse to be avoided. Untyped Lisp will be seen as a
lowest common denominator "failure mode" (ala Greenspun's tenth rule), not as
a language to deliberately program in.

Adopting this philosophy means that it will be a language designer's
responsibility to incorporate as many compatible features as possible ( _not_
as macros!) to avoid the temptation of layering a lisp.

(That is if languages continue to develop, rather than the slop-on-slop
mentality fully taking over).

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tobylane
As you mention Arthur Clarke I'll guess that some forms of modern magic will
be made possible by technology of the future.

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shiggerino
We'll still be stuck running everything on some iteration of Unix.

~~~
Artemis2
From this reddit comment:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/338tx5/vim...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/338tx5/vim/cqiyma2)

> Long after everything else you know has gone to dust, Vim will be there.
> Some version of Vim will be running on whatever computer triggers
> armageddon.

~~~
qbrass
Armageddon gets caused by someone trying to quit Vim.

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ptype
GNU Hurd 2.0 will be released and will be a major success.

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thegreatpeter
We'll be writing software for the new Apple Watch

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panglott
Prediction: There will be software in 100 years.

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contingencies
Neoglyphs, a new meta-symbology unifying mathematics, statistics and a broad
swathe of human language semantics will emerge, drawing heavily from Chinese
and early 21st century international signage: Japanese の will win out on
Chinese 的 (for indicating possession). Grammar will be absent to simplistic,
with a Chinese/Tai-Kadai/Austronesian rather than Indo-Aryan structure (ie.
use of amorphous noun/verb concept ideograms and adjunct tense-particles where
necessary rather than tedious verb conjugation). This new symbology (glyph
library) will be the standard pedagogical language across the world, and the
normal interface language for all software. It will quickly begin to effect
semantics in the few major remnant human languages, the vast majority of which
died out between the early 20th and mid 21st century. Long-form reading will
become even rarer. The lyrics and snapshot-imagerie of the rock and instagram
generations will give way to a resurgence in poetry, lauded for its
vaguearies, which will be widely appreciated in a mix of classical Chinese and
the neoglyphs. This will be automatically set to music by algorithms, in
personal stylistic preference. Interface code itself (windows, scrollers,
presentation systems, graph generators, etc.) will no longer be programmed by
humans, instead they will be generated automatically against semantic and
contextual preferences linked to the user, much as some advanced unix users
enjoy customizing their shell. The challenges of code reuse (portability,
parallelism, etc.) will be solved automatically in almost every case. Most
software will derive from expert systems which translate human wants in to
functional software using simplistic visual metaphor and iterative design in
the lounge-room. Increased availability of pure and micro-dosed drugs of all
current and yet to be discovered genres will play a big part the more creative
outputs from these sessions, which will essentially complete the union of
human/biological abstract thinking and the speed and technical prowess of the
machines. In the 20th century, Frank Zappa said "You can't be a real country
unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a
football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a
beer." At the dawn of the 22nd century, countries will have essentially become
dormant anachronisms, but good drugs and revolutionary thinkers (no longer
titled programmers) will by definition possess their own widely recognized
neoglyphs. Many of the thinkers will be those previously considered disabled
or challenged by society at large; the autistic, the handicapped, the
psychonauts, the other-large-mammals - whose capacity for modes of reasoning
apart from the mainstream will finally become valued. Finally, 0xDEADBEEF will
disappear as a meme, since beef in real life will no longer exist except for
the ultra-rich.

