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Ask HN: What upcoming technological development interests you the most?
19 points by lunchbox on April 19, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments
What (prospective) technological development are you most looking forward to over the next few years? Your answer could be anything from an improvement in an existing technology (e.g. better web apps, cell phones), to mass adoption/commercialization of an emerging technology.

Just curious what other people on HN are most excited about.



E-ink. Sunlight-readable displays that consume no power could open up a whole bunch of new markets. The Kindle is just the beginning - could you imagine replacing road signs with E-ink? They could change to reflect traffic conditions, automatically routing traffic around jams without requiring that drivers glance down at their cell phones. If only they were available in color...

If someone ever invents a worthwhile holographic display, that would be huge as well. The limiting factors on most portable electronic devices are the display and keyboard: if you could have a full-sized, immersive 3D display and an accelerometer-based pointer, you could do so much more with your phone.


Lots of things interest me so it's hard to pick just one. So I am going to list a few.

* WebKit - decidedly the web brick that should help with introducing new developments faster in order to keep things open and modern;

* IronRuby - might take a while, but eventually it should make programming for the .net world much more pleasurable and help folks with bridging different worlds with the same interface, thing that's quite difficult to plan out;

* Google JavaScript Engine, v8 - it's quite a beast of technology that deserves to take off outside of the browser as well. If Ruby is going to get its ass kicked, I hope it will be by Javascript that's quite dynamic and has closures and so on;

* Canvas on the browser - graphics, widgets and games, all fully printable by the browser, all starting instantaneously;

* Javascript on the browser - programming the dynamic way without having to compile, recompile, deploy, to test things... no, just a small change and a refresh and you get to develop the feature!

* Misc: YUI 3, Bazaar VCS, Ubuntu, computer hardware, broadband, Google Chrome, Ruby implementations, Flash (I just tried to see some videos on Microsoft using Moonlight the Silverlight clone and it made me feel little sympathy for Microsoft and their technologies again)...

* Wishful thinking: Microsoft coming to terms and creating their Windows on top of a Unix-like infrastructure; ;-)


Re: point 5, you might be interested in Mozilla Ubiquity - you don't even need to compile ;).


It's also slated to be built in to Firefox(https://wiki.mozilla.org/Taskfox) soon, so picking up on it now would be a good idea.


Robot cars.

Car accidents cost over a million lives worldwide every year - 45,000 in the USA - and injure about 40 times that number. They are the leading cause of death for people aged 18-34. In the USA, the total cost of accidents is about $230 billion (1.7% of American GDP according to my calculations).

Robot cars will reduce car accidents, probably by a lot (human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents; 80% of accidents are due to human inattention). They'll make parking vastly more efficient (the car can drop you off and go and park in some optimal place). 50 billion person-hours are spent driving every year. In productive hours, that's worth a trillion dollars. Even if the hours aren't productive (watching TV or whatever), it's still worth a lot. Congestion would be reduced because robot cars don't need the follow space between cars that human reflexes require. It's like quadrupling the capacity of existing roads for free. Since the crash rate might be so low, cars might be ultralight rather than made of armor, so they'll use less energy and less metal.

I first became excited about robot cars from reading this essay: http://ideas.4brad.com/robocars-are-future


Not even slightly excited about robot cars. Driving is fun, for a start!

human errors make up 93% of the causes of car accidents

What kind of human errors? Running out into the road in front of cars? Driving while too tired? Arguments with passengers? Not looking when changing lanes? Too busy looking for road signs to see a stopped car ahead? Driving horribly to try and go back for a missed turn?

Technology could help with a lot of these problems without replacing cars altogether. Current Volvos can have a blind-spot warning system, they can ready the brakes for you as you get close to a car in front so they will react quicker, they can silence incoming phone calls when the car detects too much activity (e.g. sharp cornering) so it wont distract you.

I look forward to the day when all road signs are gone and replaced with informational broadcasts that my car will interpret, and on the dashboard I get a neat summary of the current speed limit, the GPS navigation route to where I'm going, and that's about it.

You also aren't clear which figures you mention are worldwide and which are USA only. Worldwide, there are countries which don't require regular car maintenance, and people drive around with tree branches instead of steering wheels, for instance. Is that kind of thing 'human error'?


Driving is fun, to be sure, but there are enough of us that would love to be done with it. I currently commute an hour and a half each way in DC traffic. I LOVE driving, but due to other people, all the fun is taken out of getting to work. If I could hit a button and just 'get there' via auto-pilot while I finished work, that would be ideal (for me).

I could turn off auto-pilot, but then there wouldn't be any point. I think that the magic in getting auto-pilot to work in cars is in enforcing that enough other cars on the road are using it too. I truly believe that so long as there are any cars on the same road as you not on auto-pilot, that it will negate most of the benefits for everybody.

Regarding human error, I think that most of what you listed would count. The car is a human operated machine, which means that most of the time, wrecks are our fault. Unless the wheel falls off unexpectedly, or the brakes fail, you could pretty much always attribute a failure to the operator -- or the operator of the other car where applicable.

I would also not like to be rid of driving as a pastime, but until you do, I'm also not sure that there's any point in automating the driving experience. So while I am sympathetic to your point, the pain of my daily commute is sympathetic to the other.


Don't worry, I don't want to pry the steering wheel from your cold, dead hands. Brad Templeton (the writer of the essays I linked to) predicts that robocars should be able to co-exist with human drivers (though there would be some advantages if all cars had autonomous capability, such as increasing road capacity by reducing follow distance, and optimizing the design of parking garages).

My interest is primarily on reducing deaths. I'm fortunate enough that I've never lost a close friend in a car accident, but two friends of mine have been injured (one moderately, one seriously), a close friend of mine lost his best friend, and the 21-year-old receptionist at my previous employment was killed in a head-on collision. I expect most people have stories like these or worse.

The 93% figure comes from Wikipedia, and the citation is a report that doesn't define human error. Templeton thinks that robocars could eliminate almost all of the million car accident deaths per year. But even if it's only 50%, that would prevent so much avoidable loss.

Templeton: "The creators will need to make an urban test track and fill it with swarms of the robots, and demonstrate that they can walk out into the swarm with no danger. Indeed, like a school of fish, it should be close to impossible to touch one even if you try. Likewise, skeptics should be able to get onto bicycles, motorcycles, cars and hummers and drive right through the schools of robots, unable to hit one if they try. After doing that for half an hour and getting tired, doubters will be ready to accept them on the roads."

If that can be achieved, robocars will drastically reduce deaths.


People who enjoy driving will have to do is in such way as to not endanger regular commuters - e.g. on the racetracks or private roads. 45,000 deaths per year is a lot of dead people. Unlike smoking victims who brought it upon themselves a good half of driving accident victims did not and could not see it coming.


People who enjoy driving will have to do is in such way as to not endanger regular commuters

As if the two groups don't overlap! As if the regular commuters are completely innocent and the people who enjoy driving both have and cause all the accidents! As if robocars could not and would not have any accidents! As if people who commute to work by car are forced into it and have no choice about being road users!

I disagree with all four implied statements.

a good half of driving accident victims did not and could not see it coming.

Then why do so many other countries have fewer road deaths per hundred thousand people and also fewer road deaths per miles travelled?

http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/statistics/s...

See how the USA is way down in 40th position - more dense countries, countries with more dangerous driving weather, other big sparse countries, other rich countries, much poorer countries are all above the USA. Switch the table to deaths per vehicle miles travelled and the USA is still barely in the top 10.

Just luck? Or better driver training so their drivers can see potential accidents coming and avoid them?

I know, arguing not hacker news. But someone is wrong on the internet. It might even be me!


I expect "no human drivers permitted on public roads" to be the law because human drivers are fallible. Robots are also fallible, but they tend to accumulate their lessons across entire robot population (at least within one manufacturing company) whereas each new human driver needs to be taught anew. Even well-taught, humans are still prone to errors and it's only a matter of time before standard robot is 10 times safer than 95th percentile of drivers.

The only problem with robots is systemic risk - some sort of common bug (e.g. Y2K) that would take out many machines at once or another thing that fails in a non-graceful manner. Car companies are not strangers to designing proper failure modes so I think it will pan out ok in the end, but software engineers aren't as good at it yet so we do have that risk for a while.


I think the implication was that having any human drivers on the roads negates a lot of the potential benefits and safety provided by robotic cars. The drivers don't have to be bad to be worse than a robot. Driving a car yourself might go the way of riding a horse for transportation. You can still do it, and have lots of fun, just not down most city streets! Robocars would still have accidents, but hopefully more on the frequency of planes :)


Well, in some ways we already have robot cars. Audi and VW and others already have a lot of driver assistance features like blind spot checking, rear camera, etc. Some cars even steer autonomously to assist with parallel parking. However, if you're hoping to see fully autonomous driving in consumer casr you're going to be waiting a while. There are a lot of regulatory and comfort/psychological issues with such systems.

Disclaimer: I spent last quarter working on a driver assistance system on Junior for changing lanes on the highway.


What is your prediction for how long we will have to wait for autonomous driving?


The technology could be there within 10 years easily if people were working on it (which, AFAIK, no one is for consumers), but because of the psychological issues involved I'm not sure people will be investing the time. But if you look at the DARPA Urban Challenge you'll see that many (not all) technical hurdles have already been overcome.


Stem-cell grown teeth.

Imagine your future dentist visit: a really big dude punches you in the teeth the moment you walk into the dentist office, then you spit out your old teeth and they plant you a new set. In 6 month you have perfect teeth - good for next 10 years of abuse.

I can hardly wait.


Super Capacitors: instantly chargeable batteries would be really handy in about a million things, electric cars being most notable

Augmented Reality: If we get it right, it will obsolete/improve a whole bunch of stuff (laptops, books, phones, movie theaters come to mind)

Cloud computing: I don't mean avoiding the pain of buying servers, I mean the final ultimate realization of dumb terminal and central processing hub (combined with augmented reality and you've got an always-on computational extension of self with zero bulky hardware)

growing things with algae: Oil, steak, ears (likely in that order)

3D printers: I just want to have an infinite cheap supply of standard rectangular Lego blocks.

Further out:

Fusion, hopefully cold: water in, power out (and I suppose whatever elements we're short on at the moment) my physics gets a little shaky here but I think fusion up to Fe is energy positive so an unlimited supply of iron could turn into some interesting things.

Hole diggers: Bullet train from New York to Paris that falls to its destination (and of course climbs to decelerate the second half of the trip)


Augmented Reality

Yeah! There was a recent press release from Nokia about their prototype service where you can take a picture of a poster, and it recognises the event and finds the details for you, and local showings if it's a film, etc. There's a recent video link on HN of an android/G1 app which pulls location-aware data from the web and allows you to hold your G1 up with the camera looking at the horizon, and it annotates the video feed with information about the main things you can see. Shazzam has been able to recognise currently playing music for ages, and snaptell can recognise a photo of almost any common CD, book or DVD and pull up more data. Android/the G1 has a change-behaviour-based-on-GPS-location feature.

Augmented reality is here if you look for it and want it.

I hope it's not too long before I can take a picture of a sign in a foreign country, and have it OCR'd and the text run through Google Translate.


Followup: This http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=492789

(How did that pass by with no votes and no replies?)


- LED and OLED lighting. When prices fall enough, classic bulbs, fluorescent bulbs, CFLs will be out the window. Lighting, and therefore atmosphere, will completely change. Can you imagine an office without strip lighting? With varying warm, friendly colours and intensities of low power OLED panels dotted around? Computer controlled lighting features will become common because they will be cheap and easy. Homes without a kilowatt of halogen uplighters?

- The next iPhone. Even after owning one for a year, which was a year old when I got it so it was being designed three years ago or more, I still turn it over and marvel at it, at what it does, how well it does it and how good it looks and feels while doing so. It's the biggest consumer success of HCI in a long time, and that's really pleasing. They're addressing the lag when opening the SMS app, adding MMS, adding better bluetooth support, an autofocus camera, enabling and encouraging an accessory market, and twisting the arms of the mobile carriers like other handset makers haven't been. It's exciting.

- Small, LED driven, no-moving-part "pocket" projectors. See: Microsoft surface and Epson's coffee table and similar. One day they wont be driven by a big expensive noisy projector hidden a few feet beneath or behind. It need not be a massive screen itself, but an improvement of today's pocket projectors - when they can do 1280x1024 at better brightness, look out basic office CRTs and LCDs.


Brain-computer interface. Once we get that, everything else (except power generation) is irrelevant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity


I'm really surprised more people aren't with us on this one. BCI isn't that far off, and it's pretty much the holy grail of future tech/sci-fi.


It isn't really far off? Basic BCI is here already - the kind which is 'think of nothing to move the cursor left, focus on something to move the cursor right', but that's mostly picking up electrical activity in brain regions. It's a million miles off picking up what you want and making it happen.

Impressive BCI has been done, e.g. William Dobelle's work on brain-linked-cameras for blind people, but that involves major surgery and, if I may say so without meaning any insult to his work, is still on the easy side - feeding signals into the visual cortex and let the brain learn what to do with them without needing to understand how the brain does so.

To interpret anything like "send an email to John Hancock" and other general instructions, but not non-instructions, lifted from your thoughts ...


Robotics - There's a ton of work happening on robotics (e.g Anybots) and robots with greater and greater degree of autonomy are being deployed. Robots in warfare is a topic of particular interest to me. think warfare is going to get an order of magnitude more horrendous (hard as it may be to imagine that)


In a matrix-related vein powered exoskeleton technology is becoming good/cheap. A reasonable way to prevent brain injuries from getting rattled around by an IED is to make yourself REALLY heavy and then power it so you don't get really tired walking around on patrol (i.e. powered armored exoskeleton)

Speaking of horrendous there's also those supposedly non-lethal ray guns they are testing on journalists holding mattresses.


GPGPU Processing - I find it amazing that you can essentially build yourself a personal supercomputer with cheap hardware that you can pick up at a Best Buy. This has the potential to do for research what the Web did for software startups.

+1 for Robotics and Augmented Reality. Met a prof last month that researches in AR, showed us some things he did with ARToolkit; it completely blew my mind.


I think if we ever get widespread, flat rate mobile data connections, that there will be lots of innovation in that space.


Affordable, reliable, universal wireless Internet access. The iPhone is a great start, but it's still far from truly universal Internet access being the status quo. Of course, this has a lot more to do with infrastructure and business interests than it does with pure technological advancement.

And I still want to have my own 3D printer.


E-Readers. Improved resolution, better usability, a sleek design, and an SDK could make it the iPod for text. Combine this with an iTunes-like model for newspaper articles, PDFs, feeds, and books of independent authors and you may even have a business model.


Health nanorobots.

I can't wait until we can inject single-purpose nanorobots to heal and augment our bodies. Imagine a injection that would completely eradicate cancer from your body. Or improve your eyesight.

It may be a long way off, but it will be amazing when science reaches that point


Google Native Client. So many programmers are wasting their time trying to make web apps that will work on all browsers...


Simulating physics and chemistry to overcome limits of the Von Neumann architecture.

Specifically, using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate neurons and synapses.

"Performance measurements show good scaling behavior on the Blue Gene/L supercomputer up to 8,192 processors. Several key phenomena seen in the living brain appear as emergent phenomena in the simulations.": http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1375994

Also, "Massively parallel simulation of brain-scale neuronal network models": http://www.bgconsortium.org/Past%20Results/kth%20bgwreport06...


technologies for construction , and technologies for energy. while the cost of most other things is going down (at least in the long term), the cost(and technology of) housing and energy are basicly the same. also housing and energy are probably the biggest expenses per family , so any technological improvement there would have huge effects.


The lifelog.

Short explanation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6287126.stm

Long explanation: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...


[deleted]


Here's a good one:

http://www.technologyreview.com/

For instance, they had a feature called "10 Emerging Technologies of 2009": http://www.technologyreview.com/specialreports/specialreport...


I will add my vote to OLED and e-ink.

Additionally, transformation of everyday electronic devices into low-power consuming devices, and for this, I think nanotechnology will help us get there.


Whatever happened to last next big thing, the memristor?


the next metasystem transformation.

uploading & sharing myself on the internet, having my multiple identities living a complete life, chat with myselves and learn from them.

cloning me in into the digital, no life expansion but more parallel lives


Head-up-display eye gear. WANT!


clojure


A 100% clean source of energy cheaper than coal. Period.




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