Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? - <AUTHOR> 2020's version of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681 <comment><USER10> Here are mine:

1\. Still no level 4/5 autonomous cars anywhere in sight. The promise of being "just around the corner" fizzles down and people just forget the hype.

2\. Same with AI. The panacea hype dies down. No AGI at all. No major job losses due to AI automation.

3\. Facebook (the SN) still exists but ages along with it's current user base. i.e it's the "old people's" SN. Facebook (the company) is still going strong, with either Instagram or one of it's acquisitions being the current "hip" SN.

4\. Google still dominates search and email but losses value and "glory" compared to today.

5\. Majority of people still don't care about privacy.

6\. But a small yet growing culture of "offliners" becomes mainstream. Being offline is the new "Yoga" and allows bragging rights.

7\. Increase in adoption of non-scientific beliefs such as astrology/anti- vaxx/religion/flat-earth as a counterbalance to the increased complexity of everyday life.

8\. Web development matures and a "standard" stack is accepted, all in JS.

9\. Global carbon emissions are not reduced, mostly because of lack of initiative by China and 3rd world countries.

10\. Still no hoverboards.

<comment><USER11> I think these predictions are way too safe, to the point that they aren't predictions at all. These are all very widely accepted views already (in the tech community / HN atleast) which explains why this comment is top currently.

<comment><USER12> This comment from the recent thread reflecting on HNers' predictions from 2010 made me realize how little can change in a decade:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942143)

IMO, OP's predictions may be safe, but that says more about reality than OP's lack of imagination.

<comment><USER13> But note that looking for predictions that worked out leads you to "safe" predictions. I would like to see a list of things that were big that no one predicted. (Uber?)

<comment><USER14> You shouldn't make outrageous predictions if you don't sincerely believe they will become true though.

Otherwise you will get what we see in TV everyday. a bunch of people making outrageous predictions just to sound exciting. Then when the prediction comes true, they will claim all the credit. when it doesn't, they will say "haha I was just kidding of course"

<comment><USER15> People should state predictions where their view of the probabilities differs from conventional wisdom. EG, if most people think there's a ~20% chance that level 5 SDCs will be available in 2030 and you think it's a 1% chance then that's a valid prediction, even though it's not that exciting to predict something won't happen. If people think there's a 0% chance of hoverboards and you think it's 10% then that's an interesting prediction, even though you still expect it not to happen.

Any serious prediction should include a probability estimate that differs from conventional probability estimates. Almost not one actually does this, because everyone is doing it wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> \- Automation replaces the need to have a human workforce. North Korea murders 99% of its population and replaces them with robots. Kim still goes around factories pointing at things.

\- It becomes possible to literally program humans to do whatever you want them to do. Python is the chosen language but a lack of type safety results in an error that wipes out half of humanity.

\- We colonize mars but by choosing only the best and brightest to go, we accidentally create a eugenics program that results in the inevitable conquest of earth by the martians.

\- SpaceX is bought by Pornhub as it's discovered that the most effective way to blanket the world in pornography is to do it from space.

\- Incels are prescribed virtual girlfriend therapy to provide them company and acclimate them to interactions with the opposite gender. Black market hacks transform them into anime waifus.

\- AGI happens and is immediately outlawed as its attempts to solve world peace are inconvenient to the military industrial complex

\- Illegal genetic engineering results in actual furries.

\- Assassination by drone becomes so effective that no world leaders are seen in the outside from 2025. A vitamin D deficiency kills at least one of them.

\- Potemkin jobs abound in a world that doesn't require humans to work to produce anything but needs to keep them busy to stop them complaining about stuff.

\- In a last ditch attempt to save the earth from catastrophic climate change, the governments of the world finally join forces to build huge geo-engineering structures to capture carbon from the atmosphere. They're nuked from orbit by the newly formed Garden Kingdom of Siberia.

<comment><USER17> I know some of these are obviously backed by winks, but I got a smile from this because they're only a hair away from being rather plausible. You should be writing sci-fi!

> Potemkin jobs abound in a world that doesn't require humans to work to > produce anything but needs to keep them busy to stop them complaining about > stuff.

"There is another theory which states that this has already happened." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs)

<comment><USER16> > You should be writing sci-fi!

Thanks! A few of these are the premise for sci-fi stories I never got around to writing. I'll send you a link to Amazon if I ever do put pen to digital paper.

> "There is another theory which states that this has already happened." > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs)

Haha, true. Also vaguely like the justification for the Matrix being like it is i.e. office jobs rather than utopia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> \- Ads are no longer presented or indicated as such. All advertisement besides public space billboards are paid product placements, advertorials, and sponsored dialogue in TV shows.

\- The trend toward "authenticity" still ramping up in 2020 hits full swing, and commercial entities follow suit. Any announced commercial speech is viewed with distrust, while meme tweets are celebrated as "real." Corporate messaging becomes indistinguishable from random chatter on social networks.

\- Advances in ML/text bots automate this process, and the random chatter on social sites like Reddit and Tumblr becomes a wasteland of pretty-good bots trying to steer conversations in a sponsored direction.

\- Platforms are created for managing brand campaigns across even larger numbers of ever-smaller influencers. Anyone with more than 1k followers on Insta or Snap can sign up to be micro-compensated for brand mentions both online and in person at parties and such. Smartphones are used to track who is where with who and who is saying what, in order to measure these mentions.

\- Influencing becomes an accepted career path, and classes appear in higher education on managing your personal brand, identifying which major brands fit with your personal brand, and building a portfolio of commercial brands that identify you like a unique fingerprint. This is blended with graphic design study to create your personal visual fingerprint/brand identity including logo, color scheme, and accessory items like a particular type of flower. It will be called "Personal Marketing" or something and hundreds of thousands of students will flock to the courses. Every public space, whether park, footpath, flower garden, or grocery store, will be filled with hundreds, possibly thousands of young people simultaneously recording selfie videos for their followers or class projects.

\- The line between commercially sponsored speech and original speech becomes almost fully blurred.

\- The line between brand preference and personal identity disappears. By 2030 the average consumer's daily life is centered around brand experience.

<comment><USER19> Influencers: I think we'll start to see fully AI-generated "influencer" profiles start to overtake actual human beings soon - assuming there aren't some already out there.

It will become increasingly hard for actual people to compete with these profiles for attention.

<comment><USER20> To your point:

[https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/](https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/)

[https://kotaku.com/the-invasion-of-virtual-anime-girl- youtub...](https://kotaku.com/the-invasion-of-virtual-anime-girl- youtubers-1821940758)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 1\. Electric cars become the norm. All cars are fully autonomous on highways. A driverless highway transport service will go mainstream in some states. (California)

2\. China will undergo a major recession, as manufacturing moves to Africa and US maintains its trade war with China across Govts.

3\. The best performing stock will be a meat substitute company

4\. VR will take off big time. Concerns about VR porn being too realistic will be raised in serious circles.

5\. Intel will continue its downfall, and a new Chinese SOC company will rise to prominence

6\. Water desalination will become a major industry

7\. Towards the end of the decade, Nuclear power will begin picking up again

8\. Canadian economy will start flourishing with improvement in weather, massive skilled immigration and the establishment of new Arctic ports. Also, Toronto/Montreal will become the Silicon valley of Canada, as skilled immigrants move to the Canada knowing they will never get greencards in the US.

9\. Messi will move to the MLS at 36, and usher in an era of Soccer to the US, slowly eating into college football's popularity.

10\. Cargo pants will become popular again.

<comment><USER22> > Also, Toronto/Montreal will become the Silicon valley of Canada, as skilled > immigrants move to the Canada knowing they will never get greencards in the > US.

As a (US citizen) programmer living in Toronto, I have seen this first hand: people moving from the bay, or moving directly to Canada because of a) the US having enormous lines for green cards and b) Canada aggressively courting skilled workers (you can get an invitation to apply for permanent residency online, before even coming to Canada[0]). In particular, you see many people coming from places experiencing political unrest (I'm no exception), especially Brazil in the last couple years.

I would question whether Montreal should be included in this hypothetical "canadian silicon valley," only because of Quebec's cultural protectionism, which borders on hostility to outsiders[1]. That said, rent is astronomically higher in Toronto and Montreal has massive cultural capital as a sort of old- world city in North America, so I could be wrong!

In any event Canada is definitely coming up (though to see it as "rivaling" the US would be misguided).

0: [https://movnorth.com/process/](https://movnorth.com/process/)

1: [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/quebec-begins- controver...](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/quebec-begins- controversial-values-test-for-newcomers-1.5400110) I'm not saying this exact measure is necessarily "hostile" but stuff like this definitely contributes to the perception that newcomers may not be as welcome in Quebec.

<comment><USER23> Maybe Montreal for french and spanish speakers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1\. Deep learning will enter its next wave with increased biomimicry end efficiency. Ai will continue to evolve linearly. AGI will still be decades off.

2\. Psychidelics will again enter the public sphere and we will see phychidelic therapy in the UK/US. They will also lead the development of a new theory of the mind and consiousness that enter the mainstream.

3\. Plant/fungus based food will continue to expand while meat consumption drops. Lab grown meat will prove possible.

4\. Ai in healthcare will allow for decentralised expertise. The role and power of nurses will expand.

5\. Analog computing with neuromorphic chips along with reinforcement learning will be used in robotic control.

6\. Drones will be a common site in city airspace.

7\. Apple will enter healthcare in a big way. Medical functionality will enter consumer electronics and continue to push data driven preventative heathcare foreward.

8\. Antibiotic resistance will be a huge problem. We will continue to see the return of illnesses we thought we would never see again.

9\. Robots will allow smaller plots of land to be productive and agriculture will move away from mega farms. Local farmers markets will become more popular and accessable.

10\. Ai agents will continue to compete against and dominate humans but will inhabit a physical shell to even the input playing ground.

11\. Cannabis will be legalised federally in the US and UK. Most medical benefits will prove to be hype.

12\. Joe Rogan will host a presidential debate.

<comment> dynamite-ready "12\. Joe Rogan will host a presidential debate."

Won't be surprised if he ends up securing an official interview with Trump.

<comment><USER25> This could happen in the next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 1\. At least one major US city will be substantially destroyed due to climate change. Probably Miami, Galveston, or New Orleans. It will not be fully rebuilt. (Much like Puerto Rico and Key West).

2\. Self-driving cars will arrive, but as a niche product for senior communities. (Like Google's slow bubble car.)

3\. Amazon will finally get robotic picking working, and their warehouse employment will start to drop.

4\. Somebody will build a 3nm fab, but it won't be a mainstream technology due to cost.

5\. Big recession in US. House prices drop. San Francisco empties out again, like 2001 and 2008.

6\. No major breakthrough in battery technology, but battery cost drops at least 50% due to volume increases.

7\. New space probes to Luna and Mars, maybe Venus and Europa, but no manned activity beyond low earth orbit.

8\. Artificial meat takes off in a big way, especially in China.

9\. Parts of India become too hot to be inhabitable. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands. Fires in Australasia become a huge problem. California spends enough money to deal with its fires.

10\. VC funds as a class lose money over the decade.

<comment><USER27> > 3\. Amazon will finally get robotic picking working, and their warehouse > employment will start to drop.

And we will see articles from the same tech journalists currently complaining about terrible working conditions in Amazon warehouses, complaining about Amazon firing warehouse staff.

<comment><USER28> Do you mean to imply that would be hypocrisy in some sense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In the spirit of the future is here just not evenly distributed:

1\. Electric cars will go from niche for the rich to something for everyone.

2\. Genetic testing will become even more commonplace and even more useful.

3\. ipv6 will become dominant, but there may be holdouts.

4\. Freezing your sperm / eggs / stem cells will become something everyone does.

5\. Using a non-memory-safe language for servers will be seen as building SQL queries with string concatenation.

6\. Self driving cars are currently only very narrowly available: I think it's like 1-3 cities with good climate ([https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully- driv...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/9/21000085/waymo-fully-driverless- car-self-driving-ride-hail-service-phoenix-arizona)) They will be more available than they are now, and it will have effects on the economy.

7\. Containerization is adopted by companies that are a bit behind the curve.

8\. Parallelism will keep becoming more important.

Other predictions, less certain:

1\. Political polarization increases in the west.

2\. There will be startups taking a crack at the real estate market. They will attack cost of construction by using robots and standardized components. They will attack land cost by artificially engineering the network effects that gives land value.

3\. Use of force in the form of sanctions against countries that release too much CO2

4\. A significant minority skewing intelligent leave facestagram and twitter for decentralized platforms, but the majority of users stay on centralized platforms.

<comment><USER30> 5\. This is already true and was one of the motivations behind languages like Go and Rust.

<comment><USER29> It's really not. Just to give a simple example, nginx is written in C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 1\. Renewables are dominant source of energy. Every new house is energy positive. Wind and solar are primary for industrial sources.

2\. ICE vehicles are quaint. New electric vehicles sold overtakes ICE vehicles sometime around 2027 - 2029.

3\. Autonomous vehicles L4/L5 are still 'just around the corner'

4\. Ubiquitous Gigabit wifi/cellular/sat data across most of the world.

5\. Masses still don't care about privacy.

6\. Not much change in top tech companies - FAANG still around and maintain their leadership in tech domains as of now for the most part.

7\. Android has been replaced with Fuchsia with Fuchsia being able to run APKs built for android. Phone apps are mostly a combination of WASM apps with native UI. Most non-tech people are unaware as usual.

8\. Atleast a couple of cities in the world come to the brink of disaster/or become unlivable due to climate change (most likely in India/China). At least one major war due to climate change.

9\. Workloads are all massively parallelized; low end desktop cpu parts start with 32 cores.

10\. WASM adoption skyrockets. In 2030, OS is almost immaterial since most of the core functionality is provided by WASM payloads; OS is only used to paint native UIs (for which there still isn't a good cross platform solution)

11\. Deepfakes are ubiquitous; Audio/Video evidence is no longer accepted; A lot of companies pour money into creating verfiably unmodified video/audio - but it isn't solved yet.

<comment><USER29> > 2\. ICE vehicles are quaint. New electric vehicles sold overtakes ICE > vehicles sometime around 2027 - 2029.

There will be a long lag between _majority of sales are electric_ and _majority of cars on the road are electric_. ICE will still be majority on the road by the end of 2029. For this reason, ICE will not be quaint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Politically:

* Rise of the EU as global superpower with European army taking over all functions of NATO except strategic defense (nuclear/space). All European countries except ex-USSR and England but including Scotland are members of EU.

* Rise of Africa as a big consumer market. Green belt finished, major improvements in agriculture and infrastructure help to combat famine. Ethiopia replaces South Africa as economic leader on the continent.

* Green wave in India: environmental topics in the spotlight of political life, but no significant change yet. Pollution will continue killing millions every year.

* Political stagnation in USA, green new deal won't happen, but coastal states will drive the progress.

* Environmental standards are mentioned in all trade deals, but not yet enforced with sanctions.

Technology:

* Digital is no longer the field where most of the interesting things will happen. No quantum computing on mass-market, heavy regulation of the Internet everywhere with prohibitive costs for new startups.

* Proteins from plants, bacteria and insects will see same growth as solar and wind in 2010s. Agriculture and diets is the new IT.

* Solar and wind are big but not dominant, hidden costs become visible. There will be no nuclear renaissance. No breakthrough in fusion. Energy becomes hard again, focus shifts from generation and storage to transmission.

* Self-driving cars won't be on the roads yet, but there will be almost no cars in European and Chinese cities. AI will run public transportation grid.

* Significant progress in recycling and cleaning the oceans from plastic. Europe, USA and China will remove more plastic from water than put there.

* Steady progress in space technology but no sci-fi level achievements. SpaceX will see some competition in reusable rockets. People will return to the Moon.

<comment><USER33> Nigeria perhaps rather than Ethiopia? And I hope someone makes it to Mars.

<comment><USER32> Nigeria is Africa's India, the land of unfulfilled hopes. There's no enough political momentum to boost the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wish I could put my finger on it, but there is a huge disconnect between economic reality and the current financial situation across most of the world. It seems to me, perhaps simplistically, that every central bank is simply issuing money to generate growth and this can't be sustainable. Our biggest industry would appear to be buying, renting and selling assets to each other.

My apartment overlooks a city of 1 million people in the UK - I estimate generously that 50,000 of them are economically productive in the sense of producing something of value that can be 'exported' from this city. The other 950,000 must live off that value - it doesn't make sense. All factories are flattened to make way for apartments. Any industrial development is of distribution centres for breaking down pallets of imported tat.

I don't know what this will lead to - perhaps it's the collapse of the Euro, the rise of some stable currency that isn't playing this game, or an opportunity for a new currency (crypto or something that we don't have yet).

Just as the LIBOR scandal revealed that commercial banks were just making up numbers, so I believe that central banks are doing the same with each other and trust will need to be removed from the system.

<comment><USER35> I'd be interested to know what city you're talking about. Are you limiting 'something of value' to manufacturing? A great deal of the UK economy is service based. I'd be amazed if only 5% of the city's population were producing goods or services used by those outside the city.

<comment><USER36> I think the only city around that population in the UK is Birmingham. It is notoriously a pretty rubbish place.

<comment><USER35> Ha! I'm sure many a proud Brummie would disagree. Glasgow also has roughly 1m.

<comment><USER36> I live in Glasgow - isn't it closer to 600k?

<comment><USER35> The area belonging to Glasgow city council is 600k, the Glasgow urban area, also known as Greater Glasgow[0], which I live in, is 1.2m.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Glasgow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Glasgow)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> \- Wave of antitrust legislation takes hold and some large tech companies are broken up or forced to sell, making their owners even richer.

\- traditional higher ed becomes increasingly irrelevant. A degree is still prized, especially as a way out of blue collar work, but it will be even more disconnected from one's actual job.

\- The higher ed space sees interesting new experiments with new models of tenure, teaching and delivery.

\- Amazon figures out how to make online shopping suck significantly less

\- samples collected from the mars 2020 mission will be definitively negative for ancient life forms

\- whole brain emulation is achieved with an insect brain

\- politicians on both sides use disruptions from tech and climate change to push ever more extreme positions, and run on platforms that promise easy solutions. Whether or not such disruptions are actually disruptive, the increasingly hyperbolic media will help make it sound that way as it scrambles for relevance in a hyper competitive space.

\- China starts a eugenics breeding program with modified germ lines to create smarter citizens.

\- GI problems continue to plague developed nations

\- daily life will seem to be more complicated than ever

\- the long peace continues for another decade

\- we look back fondly on this post in 10 years and at what a simpler time 2020 was

<comment><USER38> I think the China eugenics prediction is possible. If one major country does it others will follow, and of course the rich will want this to no matter where they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> 1\. I believe people will get tired of the daily Twitter war over politics and social issues. I don't think we will solve many or any of these issues, but just the temperature will lower a little bit. Can't wait to laugh ruefully at this one in 10 years.

2\. Displaced people, possibly due to climate, will be a major problem and we will be judged by future generations on our response.

3\. We are approaching a period where we will start creating new institutions rather than reforming old ones, similar to the wave of land grant colleges or the "alphabet soup" of the Great Depression in the US.

4\. I think self-driving cars will be dependent on new infrastructure, and primarily used for freight/mass transportation if they become widely adopted. China, Japan, Korea, and the EU will be leaders on this. I don't believe my car will drive itself down the dirt road to the cabin I visited last summer.

5\. I am not convinced the software development profession will go away or fundamentally change (though surface level changes will be endless). Problem solving with code is still going to be a path to a middle class lifestyle.

6\. Blockchain/crypto will be a niche thing, but will be interesting in that niche.

I wish all of you good health and happiness over the coming decade! There really is a chance to make it a good one.

<comment><USER40> > Displaced people, [...] will be a major problem and we will be judged by > future generations on our response.

Same could be said of the 10s.

<comment><USER39> Very true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> salt-licker 1\. LEO satellites will provide Internet access worldwide. About 90% of the world's population will be online by 2030.

2\. Drastic climate engineering will become a mainstream research area and popular controversial talking point.

3\. Many more people will get blood tests regularly, for early disease detection and fitness monitoring. Both a Theranos-like fingerprick device and a tampon-based screening company will IPO.

4\. AI will be a crucial component in discovering multiple clinical trial- stage drugs.

5\. A fully AI musician will go on tour, perhaps with its own lyrics and deepfaked vocals. It will be particularly good at improvisation.

6\. To combat deepfakes, public ledger-based verification of photos and videos will become common but not ubiquitous. May or may not be on blockchain.

7\. Cryptocurrency-based financial instruments will become a minor part of the global financial system, widely accepted and taken seriously by traditional investors.

8\. Metal 3D-printers will start to seriously compete with CNC machining and expendable casting, they will be relatively common in machine shops and factories. Consumer 3D-printing will remain a niche hobby.

9\. Flying cars won't really take off.

<comment><USER41> If the fully AI musician is actually originally programmed as an Emergency Medical Hologram I agree.

<comment><USER42> thats a good band name

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> AI languishes and self-driving cars remain highway-only, but self-checkout stations and simple cleaning/stocking bots become more common.

Oil companies begin rebranding as energy companies and pour assets into solar and wind. Climate change continues to worsen, with deniers still prevalent.

Craigslist gets bought by Facebook. Google tries to get into online shopping, fails.

Desktops still on x64. Phones still on ARM, with a few alternatives here and there.

Programming language design is stagnant with type theory dead-ending with too much complexity. Most new languages/features designed around convenience. Someone reinvents Make. Someone reinvents C++. A new VM becomes popular, potentially backed by LLVM project. Software continues to get slower, but "high performance computing" takes off as a hiring fad.

Marriage rates drop and people realize the damage Tindr is causing. Popular new sites are created with the intent to "fix" dating.

Environmental factor of IBS discovered.

A professional athlete will die while playing, leading to news about how sports need to be safer.

China has money troubles but powers through a long recession. China attempts to "fix" taiwan. Chinese people become even more nationalistic.

<comment><USER44> > Programming language design is stagnant with type theory dead-ending with > too much complexity

Interesting. Maybe this will be the case for languages with bad legacy like C++, but the whole design of new type systems? What sources this prediction is based on?

<comment><USER45> _What sources this prediction is based on?_

Arguably the present. There are hardly any innovations in mainstream PL design, the last one was probably linear typing in Rust. The most successful recent languages are all pretty conservative, in the case of Go extremely so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> \- AI based systems will start to replace humans in the more mechanical parts of the legal system. Judging traffic court cases could be one example.

\- One country will invade another country using computer/information attacks as the deciding strike, perhaps Russia invading one of the Eastern Bloc countries. People's mobile phones will simply tell them that there is some kind of natural disaster happening and that they should go home and seek shelter, while the invading country's forces quickly seize all key infrastructure. This will be a wakeup call to the world that if you can control the screens, you can control society.

\- No real political progress will be made on solving/mitigating climate change. The worlds political systems will simply not be equipped to make the necessary decisions to reduce carbon emissions by enough to matter. People will become numb to the unfolding disaster and as such it won't lead to clicks/pageviews, so the media will stop covering it. The major disasters (large fires, storms, etc) that happen will receive coverage but be quickly forgotten, much like mass shootings today.

\- New York and California will diminish in influence & power in the US. Wealthy people moving to other states will cause a fiscal death spiral as the state governments have to raise taxes to fund widening deficits. Austin will be regarded as a tier 1 city. Other inland states like Colorado & Arizona will also gain population and power.

\- Another major hurricane will hit the northeastern US, it will be far worse than Hurricane Sandy.

\- Steady improvements will be made in technological mitigations to climate change like carbon capture, and more efficient manufacturing and farming processes. It won't be enough to solve the problem but will provide some hope to eventually stop making the problem worse in the 2030s.

\- Extremist political factions on the left and right in the US will continue to gain influence and power.

\- Either SpaceX or Blue Origin will conduct a private, manned mission to the moon.

<comment><USER47> >\- AI based systems will start to replace humans in the more mechanical parts of the legal system. Judging traffic court cases could be one example.

This won't happen not because it can't be done. But it won't happen because someone wants to keep his job. Sort of like how the F-35 was created just to keep some jobs.

<comment><USER28> Yeah. AI will continue to develop at a predictable pace, but hysteria surrounding AI will increase to hinder it. Emotional arguments like "the founding fathers would never approve of non-human judges" will be co-opted by politicians who need those votes. I can see anti-AI movements becoming very large by 2029.

Maybe in the 30's automation becomes disruptive enough to the existing system that something akin to a revolution occurs on a global scale by the 40's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Here's to looking silly in 2030:

\- very few desktop applications will exist, they will have moved to web assembly powered browser applications

\- way more people will work from home and most "work" software will attempt to support this through real-time collaboration powered by CRDT/MRDTs.

\- the dat:// protocol, ipfs, and other attempts at creating a decentralized internet will not take off, but the concepts will have a resurgence in the later decade (or possibly in the 2040s) due to interplanetary or otherwise far-distance space internet.

\- way more folks will support nuclear as climate change forces the issue

\- quantum computers won't fundamentally change the way normal people think about encryption, but instead some sites/apps will be considered "insecure" in the same way not using https is today.

\- private car ownership will be on it's last legs, ride shares via self- driving cars plus revamped public transit will be the way the majority of folks get around. New developments will be built as "car free" without garages and with restricted car usage like many city centers.

\- people will eat significantly less meat

\- deno + Typescript wins

\- Typescript (or a TS variant) will be compiled directly to WASM on the browser

\- way more people order food rather than cook for themselves

\- Many subscription consumer apps will die as many more folks enter into the field, driving up cost-of-acquisition

\- Stripe becomes one of the most valuable companies in the world

<comment><USER49> > very few desktop applications will exist, they will have moved to web > assembly powered browser applications

Oh, I hope you're wrong about this one. That would render computers largely worthless to me due to a lack of software.

<comment><USER48> > That would render computers largely worthless to me due to a lack of > software.

Curious, why?

<comment><USER49> Because PWAs are not acceptable for my use. They involve far too much risk and exposure, and they almost always provide an inferior experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> * Moore's law stays dead. Having a lightweight laptop that does nothing more than provide a portal to more powerful machines enters the consumer field (Stadia already exists, but other uses will appear). Probably offered by an existing cloud provider first.

* Recession happens this decade.

* Someone becomes the US democratic nominee with a UBI platform.

* The US gets single payer healthcare.

* Zoning laws become an even hotter political issue. We don't solve them.

* Netflix produces VR content.

* Humans will not land on Mars.

* Disney joins FAANG.

* We don't fix copyright and we don't have any exciting antitrust wins.

* Mesh networks become more popular.

* The internet becomes less open source.

* The US becomes more politically polarized. There will be hate crimes against democrats / republicans just for their political affiliation.

<comment><USER51> > Recession happens this decade.

After any other decade, nobody would bother to say that, because _of course_ there would be a recession (if not more) in the next decade. It is _amazing_ that the 2010s didn't have one. But, as you say, amazing usually doesn't continue forever...

<comment><USER30> I think that this type of behavior is actually delaying the next recession. When you are aware that something bad will happen in the future you will be more careful and try your best to avoid it.

<comment><USER52> I do wonder if the more we try and delay it the worse it will be when it does inevitably arrive. We might be in for a big one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> World War 3 starts.

Personal data stored in banks/ISPs/FB/Google etc are taken at gun point and used for population scale psychological warfare.

Kissinger(World Order)/Niall Ferguson(Square and the Tower)/Graham Allison(Thucydides Trap)/Moises Naim(End of Power) say networks of power are more and more unstable similar to 1914.

To maintain stability they(irrespective of ideology) keep pandering to their fan clubs and therefore get more and more inflexible.

Small triggers turn into national and then international conflict between major powers.

Kissenger's reasons - 1 The international economic system has become global the political structure of the world has remained based on the nation-state. 2\. Acquiescing in the proliferation of nuclear weapons far beyond the Cold War club, so multiplying the possibilities of nuclear confrontation. 3\. The new realm of cyberspace, in which asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between powers

The last time it took 30 years 1914-1945, after about 100 years of peace between the world powers, for everyone to take a breath and reboot to happen.

This time around the reboot should be much quicker. The nukes will get dropped faster, because thanks to tech all the major powers can do serious damage to each other very fast as soon as things escalate beyond control.

<comment><USER54> WWII gets all the press, but a WWI scenario seems much more likely and tragic.

WWII had an active aggressor.

WWI was just a chain reaction of alliances acting out their obligations. I had a nightmare about trench warfare and the futility of it all just the other day.

<comment><USER55> This, totally this.

A weird situation though is that socially we're closer to the 1920's-30's, whereas geopolitically it's much more like the 1900's-10's. Weird how history repeats itself, never quite the same, and I won't fall for numerology, and yet. Here we are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Here's some

1\. Civil war in China

2\. A new, significant non iOS/Android OS in mobile

3\. Uber/Lyft will gradually shift to a unionized, national taxi company

4\. Nothing significant will be done about Climate Change, and it won't matter. Some new environmental issue will be talked about instead.

5\. A third political party will become significant in the US

6\. There will be a major Christian missionary movement from the global south to Europe

7\. VR gaming won't be much of a thing (ie like 3d movies)

8\. Tesla will go out of business

9\. Commonplace purchases will increasingly be made with point-of-sale loans and/or monthly leases. This will increase economic disparity (rich people will buy stuff / get better rates, poor people will rent things / can never get ahead)

10\. Software development will still be a relatively specialized, niche field, with most people not knowing much about it. It won't be more "diverse"

11\. Health insurance, higher education, housing and tax preparation will all still be crazy complex and expensive in the US

12\. You'll finally be able to pump your own gas in New Jersey

13\. Most churches will lose their tax exempt status

14\. Texas will have more people than California

<comment><USER57> Any rationale for 8 ?

<comment><USER58> Plausible scenario, with VW, Toyota and Honda taking their head out of ass and go full hog on Electric.

<comment><USER52> VW already seem to be betting the company on electric, they have been investing vast amounts of money in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Things I believe will stay the same:

* Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple will have roughly the same dominant positions.

* Bitcoin will play roughly the same role it plays today (store of value, more like gold than money, similar mkt cap) * Machine learning continues to grow in usage and capability, but there will be no "revolution" in AI.

* Nobody on Mars

* No serious alternatives to advertisements will emerge for industries where ads have traditionally driven profits.

* Climate change is not adequately addressed, but by the end of the decade it is widely recognized as an existential threat (not just amongst wealthy people as is the case today).

* Vim + tmux + make is still the best "IDE" ;)

Things I believe will change:

* There will a tech company worth >$100B delivering new, completely bogus healthcare through a smartphone.

* Huge advances in astronomy, physical chemistry, biotech, and computational physics driven by better data processing software. No big advances in any theoretical field.

* Tech illiteracy of young people becomes an economic problem, with political debates and movements centered around fixing the "tech education gap" between people born after 2000 and everyone else.

* Cryptocurrency goes mainstream in super boring ways. Banks probably use it for transfers and various apps use it for payments, especially in China.

<comment><USER60> > Tech illiteracy of young people

How do you mean? Do you mean as in they're all end-users rather than able to create things?

<comment><USER61> People not able to type on a regular keyboard, because all they know is swiping.

<comment><USER60> Everyone types in school though.. and takes notes on laptops.. no?

<comment><USER61> I'm just relaying what my gf that teaches young people told me.

Some even told her that they'd prefer "typing" essays on a mobile phone, because their ability to use real keyboard is low. To me it's baffling, but I didn't grow up with a smartphone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> 1\. As a result of worsening urban/rural political divide, the inhabitants of cities will start to believe they have more in common with fellow urbanites from different nations than with ruralites from their own nation. Major cities will begin to engage in diplomacy with each other directly and, probing the limits of their sovereignty, engage in informal treaties and lightweight alliances (of an economic and social sort, rather than militarily). A small number of vocal denizens will begin to associate with an emergent trans- national urban cultural identity and distance themselves from the traditional cultural identity of their broader country.

2\. The career of software development/programming will be soundly commoditized. In 2020 dollars, expected salaries across the industry in 2030 will be $40k for entry-level, $65k for mid-level, $90k for senior; pure tech companies will offer slightly more, say 30%. Programmers making $150k+, though far from unheard of, will be rare and have extremely specialized skillsets. No new career will have emerged as "the next software development" in the sense of providing the same kind of wide-ranging economic opportunity.

3\. Partly as a result of #2, class mobility in the United States will stagnate, leading to increasing political unrest over wealth inequality. Absolute levels of wealth inequality will have worsened relative to 2020, with an even smaller percentage of the population controlling even more of the total wealth.

4\. By 2030, no major government will have yet implemented anything other than token attempts at curbing greenhouse emissions. Civil unrest will begin to take on an ecological bent, both peaceful and violent, and by 2030 we will not be strangers to the phrase "domestic eco-terrorism".

Dear me from ten years from now: here's to hoping that some of this pessimism was unwarranted...

EDIT: Before my edit window closes for the decade, I'd like to think of at least _something_ positive to predict... how about this: open source computing hardware will exist and be publicly available, although by no means ubiquitous or even common outside of techie circles. It will be relatively expensive and much lower in performance than even the commodity hardware of 2020, but its deliberately simpler design will make it easier to verify for correctness (in the has-the-NSA-compromised-this sense) and possible for small scale fabs to reasonably produce. Oh, one more thing: satellite internet will be readily available, and have horrible latency, but will otherwise be really cool.

<comment><USER63> Number 1 is a pretty interesting prediction. The indicator are definitely there, but it would be a huge change to global culture and doesn't seem doable in 10 years.

Regarding 2, I have a couple of questions. First, what would cause the strong positive trend in Software salaries to _sharply reverse_ in a period of a decade? That would be a dramatic collapse, I suspect unlike anything seen in an industry previous. Secondly, what happens in a companies like Google, FB, Netflix, and Hot Unicorns, where senior engineers are making in the region of $300-600K USD? Will Google grads all of a sudden be getting `($40k * 1.30)`?

Regarding 3, GINI Co-efficient is a pretty standard measure of inequality and it has been getting worse for decades in the USA. A number of other studies show Economic/Class mobility has also been getting worse for decades in the USA[1, 2, 3, 4]. So 3 is confused because it seems you think mobility has generally increase in recent decades.

On 4 I basically agree. By eco-terrorism do you mean sabotage of fossil-fuel infra? If so, I'd say Eco-Fascism and military protection of corporate fossil- fuel infra is more likely.

1\. [https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working- papers/17-2...](https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working- papers/17-21.pdf) 2\. [http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/43/1/139.refs](http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/43/1/139.refs) 3\. [https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/11/21/1905094116](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/11/21/1905094116) 4\. [https://www.nber.org/papers/w23733](https://www.nber.org/papers/w23733)

<comment><USER64> > Number 1 is a pretty interesting prediction. The indicator are definitely > there, but it would be a huge change to global culture and doesn't seem > doable in 10 years.

When Ken Livingstone was mayor of London, he did a deal with Venezuela to get cheap fuel for buses in return for consulting:

[https://www.standard.co.uk/news/oil-deal-means-half-price- bu...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/oil-deal-means-half-price-bus-travel- for-250000-6607200.html)

<comment><USER63> Thanks for the example. That's interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This should be fun!

1\. Gaming consoles are essentially coming to an end. Die-hard gamers still buy dedicated systems but for the most part everything is available to stream.

2\. 5G turned out to be a bust. The low latency, fastest version will still have a relatively small amount of coverage compared to the size of the United States

3\. Multiple companies will provide internet via low orbit satellites, some of which will have a low enough latency that some phones will use them as a sort of "global phone" or will be their dedicated ISP.

4\. Disney buys PlayStation, EA and at least one more, large studio.

5\. Microsoft buys Activision

6\. A lot of hype around general AIs but most experts still think they're truly far away. Several will exist by 2030 but they won't be true general AI but will be good enough that companies will get away with calling them that.

7\. C++ has a working package dependency system that works as well as npm does for JavaScript. Almost every library is available this way. C++ starts to gain market share due to this and further improvements to standard libraries.

8\. Native UI solutions that work kinda like React are more widely available. Think C++, Rust and GO with UIs that are as easy to build as they were in JavaScript.

9\. Domain names are starting to go away in favor of a sort of distributed search that works well like Google search but isn't under any single company's direct control.

10\. Apple will build more macOS like features into iPad so you can do more with it (such as develop software directly on it). They will also, finally, add touch to their Laptop screens.

<comment><USER30> 1\. Google Stadia was as disappointing as OnLive. Nothing has changed in the last 10 years in that regard.

7\. C++ has multiple of those but expecting standardization is a pipe dream.

8\. I personally am tired of "cross platform" apps that are based on electron but don't support Linux. To add insult to injury: running them with wine doesn't work 99% of the time.

9\. Most FQDNs are not user facing.

<comment><USER65> 1\. I gotta say I couldn't disagree more. Sure, there might be some bias in my opinion but the landscape, the technology and the direction the industry is going has changed so much over the past decade I'm not really sure where to start.

Also, have you tried Stadia? If you have a good enough connection it's quite incredible.

7\. Not expecting standardization but I'd argue C++ has zero of those. Vcpkg is _not bad_ but _no where near as easy_ as npm. Conan is better, IMO, but again it's so far off from being as simple as npm is for JavaScript.

Modules were approved. I'm convinced someone will be able to take modules, once they're implemented in a consistent manner across compilers, and implement an npm like service. Until then I think a general solution is just not practical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is fun. Here are some of my predictions:

By 2030:

1\. Google shuts down at least one of Pixel Phones, Gmail, Google Cloud. Even after a decade, Google is not able to make a successful social-network or messaging application.

2\. Stock market: Microsoft and Amazon at-least doubles in MarketCap. AMD will be at-least 4 times what it is now. Tesla will be 5 times by the end of the decade. FB stays about the same!

3\. Facebook.com usage goes down considerably (at least by half)

4\. Climate change causes mass migrations and wars. Corporations start buying/acquiring massive amounts of land. At least one private company tries to "buy a country". Major wars will be fought over immigration.

5\. Bitcoin adoption increases due improvements in usability. Still used only for niche use-cases though.

6\. Electric cars will go above 50% share of new car sales. Tesla will be the leader. Self driving cars will be common. Car ownership in general will reduce.

<comment><USER52> I'd put money on Tesla being bought by another manufacturer, possibly Ford or FIAT.

<comment><USER67> That'd be one HELUVA leveraged buy-out ... especially because Tesla owns (or partially owns) SolarCity and other aspects of Musk's empire

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> There will be _the_ data leak.

It's impossible to remotely validate who anyone is regardless of provided name, age, birth location, mothers maiden name, social security, previous address, contacts, fingerprints, retina scan, DNA profile ...

This will end the privacy debate because all personally identifiable data will be public knowledge. All private information (stored in the cloud) will be easily leaked due to _the_ data leak. Blackmail will be rampant.

It'll be common to have credit cards and loans taken out in your name. Companies will be inundated with bots and trolls creating accounts. Fintech and government will scramble to prop up the system of trust with government issued ID, which will then be leaked, collapsing the system completely.

The sheer amount of fraud causes a contraction in the availability of credit with impact on the scale of the credit crunch of 08.

<comment><USER69> >The sheer amount of fraud causes a contraction in the availability of credit with impact on the scale of the credit crunch of 08

You had me until this. You're basically describing a world where anyone can impersonate anyone else, and you think this would only cause a financial impact "on the scale of 08"?

<comment><USER68> It'll be shy of apocalyptic. There'll be 3-5 years of chaos in loans, credit cards, insurance etc.

Mortgages and business loans will be less affected because real people actually go out and inspect those things. I think we'll have to get used to speaking face to face with real people again when we want any kind of long term financial product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> \- Nuclear power is more popular, especially small-scale, and climate change isn't really talked about any more in 2030

\- Human genetic editing becomes mainstream; treating genetic diseases will become a cheap standard procedure; genetic enhancement is also becoming popular in China and South Korea and will be a hot political topic

\- Human lifespan can be increased by at least 20% with treatment

\- Most traditional car manufacturers go bust or lose business significantly; taken by Tesla and Chinese start-ups

\- Permanent bases on the moon and Mars; first asteroid mining companies start operating

\- Apple's VR glasses will change how we use computers; large desktop displays will start to disappear; remote meetings and working with teams in VR will be common; as a result more people will not live close to a city and won't own a<USER4>
\- Bitcoin's value will hit $1M; paying with cryptocurrency becomes common

\- No flying cars (on Earth, maybe on the moon and Mars)

\- Something will come that replaces traditional banks entirely; either banking will be centralized in the hands of large tech companies or there'll be a new global banking startup; bank will be just an app; cryptocurrencies may play a role here

\- Starlink provides uncensored Internet globally; remote regions will gain economic boost; terrorism starts to subsidy

\- AI assistants become mainstream in the workplace; there'll be assistant for almost any expert job which drives down required skills and cost of employment; education will lose value

<comment><USER71> I'm interested to know why you think climate change won't really be talked about in 2030. I take it you're optimistic the problem will be solved?

<comment><USER70> It will still be an issue, but it's solved to an extent that it isn't discussed. The solution is pretty much in the economics of nuclear and solar power which become much cheaper than burning coal or oil.

<comment><USER72> [https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p210=1...](https://en- roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p210=1&p212=1&p213=1&p1=120&p196=100&p4=10&p5=0.03&p7=100&p198=100&p199=2020&p10=6&p200=100&p201=2020&p13=1&p14=0.03&p16=-0.07&p19=50&p20=2020&p21=100&p22=2020&p23=30&p30=-0.07&p33=50&p34=2020&p35=2&p36=2020&p37=1&p38=0.5&p39=250&p50=5&p53=5&p55=5&v=2.7.6)

Even if you shut down all coal/oil/gas/biofuel powerplants by the end of the decade, add in a 3rd "new technology" (e.g. fusion) ready in 1 year, find and deploy perfectly efficient battery technologies for rewables, decrease the cost of renewables by 50%, electrify cars and buildings (i.e. move off gas) at the maximum rate while finding huge increases in their efficiences as well all while taxing carbon emissions like crazy...

Global warming still ends up being a problem and the temperature continues to rise. Please don't think "we just need to wait for <x> to be solved in the next 10 years and the problem will go away!", we need  through <z> to happen not have enormous climate change impact by 2100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> 1\. Rust will hit the top 5 languages and become a mainstay of robust computing.

2\. Blockchain won't replace anything. CryptoCurrency won't appreciably become more significant.

3\. AI will get linearly better, but nothing paradigm-shifting. Its hype will begin to fade.

4\. There will be a massive privacy leak/security event that will cause us, as a society, to re-evaluate the legal landscape of data collection and monitoring.

5\. Google will lose significant market share.

6\. Petrol cars will decline in manufacturing rates 1 if not 2 orders of magnitude.

7\. A human-trip to Mars will be scheduled, if not completed.

8\. The mobile market will be significantly disrupted by some new product, but I have no idea what it will be.

<comment><USER74> the only way for 4 to happen would be if it is cause of #5, i.e Gmail itself is hacked and millions of peoples raw unencrypted emails are leaked in a massive breach...

We have already had tons of massive PII breaches and no one cares.... So it would not be another SSN, Credit Card, etc breach. If the breach of a Credit Reporting service that leaked nearly every American's financial data did not cause society to re-evaluate things I am not really sure what will

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> * Facebook, Amazon, MS will still be around and be bigger than now.

* There will be a recession that will ripple for longer than the last one

* Waymo will finally launch but have minimal impact in the US and will end up licensing the tech/partnering with car manufacturers to stay relevant.

* Apple will enter a tangential but highly profitable market most people won't see coming (think general mobility or communication device)

* Google will see a drop in Ad revenue and have a do-or-die moment about their longterm existence (they'll still be healthy tho)

* AI won't displace many jobs and we'll come up with another new term for fancy data science

* "AI" will be massively rolled out with poor oversight and lead to very bad outcomes on a large scale. People will revolt but not much will change.

* Global warming will be alive and well and people will still bicker about whether it is real.

* Africa will begin to make huge economic waves in partnership with China and the western world will panic/intervene

* We will still trade privacy for convenience amd FB will buy/launch a new product that crosses 1 billion users again

* We'll lose 1 of the GAFAM leaders to health/tragic occurence

* We won't be on Mars, but Elon Musk will pull of 2 new industry-moving changes

* China/Russia some other non-western superpower will undergo a significant political change. Won't quite be democracy but it will be different and effective

* Cars and many appliances will now be sold always connected ( 5G?) and there will be several privacy and security issues with no meaningful change.

* Snap will get bought

<comment><USER76> I agree with most of this. I think we could make it to mars by then but no permanent presence.

Really hope China undergoes a change towards democracy. A little skeptical in ten years though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> 1\. This will be the decade of compact hospital-grade health and bio- Informatics devices being brought into the home and personal life. Think Startrek tricorder capability but in a (likely) larger package.

2\. Deep fakes will precipitate the need for digitally signed media. This likely means further reliance on root-of-trust systems like x509 certificates or some new international body designed to issue a new form of lightweight signing mechanism that works at low resolutions/low bandwidth.

3\. Continued climate change will result in at-least one major U.S. city losing population due to feasibility/costs of providing either clean water or breathable air.

 4\. China and Russia will split their version of the internet entirely apart from the traditional internet and will sell products and services to other countries to do the same (I.e. Iran).

5\. The era of horizontal drilling and fracking for ultra-cheap gas and oil will slowly wind down and energy costs will increase to 2000's era costs.

6\. Most ominously: this might be the first decade where we see large scale orchestrated micro-drone attacks (death by a thousand paper cuts) and autonomous vehicles being used for delivery of some kind of malicious purpose (I.e. explosive delivery).

7\. Massive inflation globally during 2010/early 2020's will result in stagflation in the U.S. and other countries.

<comment><USER71> Regarding 1., what do you think will be the selling point of this transition? There is very little that hospital monitoring devices can offer to the average person (do you need a daily ECG / EKG?)

<comment><USER78> [Not parent poster] You are correct based upon current technology. However we are seeing AI better predicting cancer [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50857759](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-50857759)

So this tricorder could scan you/ take vital and then diagnose anything much better. Making a trip to a "Doctor" zero cost.

Imagine a free trip to a Doctor every morning. Not something I would like, but very very profitable to sell a device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Some mutually-exclusive points here, but I'm not expecting 100% accuracy anyway :P

* The top 100 entertainment, tech, and consumable brands are all subsidiaries of Disney, Alphabet, or Nestle respectively

* Owning things becomes a niche; rental / X-as-a-service becomes the default for everything from toothbrushes to pets. Kids born in 2030 might live to be 100 and never own anything.

* 25% unemployment due to automation - not due to strong AI, just steady incremental changes (eg how McD's has already replaced human till operators with "select your meal from a tablet then swipe your payment card")

* Either we make a conscious effort as a species to reduce inequality (high taxes and UBI); OR inequality spirals out of control and we get a bloody civil war between the haves and the have-nots.

* "WASM blob rendering to HTML Canvas" becomes the #1 desktop app deployment method, accessibility and ad-blocking suffer (Everyone has forgotten the lessons learned from Flash)

* Eventually all desktop / mobile use-cases replaced with stadia-like remote apps; accessibility and ad-blocking suffer

* I'd LIKE it if ad-blocking became so widespread and effective that we're collectively forced to build an effective micropayment system, and people go back to paying for goods and services with money instead of personal information, but I'll predict that that doesn't happen. If ad-blocking does still exist in any effective form, then ads will merge with content (product placement etc)

* AI-based ad-blocking to blank-out company logos wherever they appear, in whatever context

* Global temperatures don't just continue rising, they accelerate

* Poor security on IoT devices directly leads to deaths (eg overloading cheap electronics enough to start a fire)

* Lennart Poettering invents a filesystem. It is buggy as hell, but has such useful features that everyone adopts it and the community makes it stable

<comment><USER80> I'll disagree with you on this one:

        25% unemployment due to automation - not due to strong AI, just steady incremental changes (eg how McD's has already replaced human till operators with "select your meal from a tablet then swipe your payment card")

I'll predict the exact opposite. The decade will include one recession that will be called a "X bubble" and take ~3 years to recover from where X is something everybody uses (housing, tech, etc.). Rich people and corporations will be blamed, but no meaningful economic reforms will be passed. Despite continually dire predictions from left-leaning politicans and internet economists about unemployment and UBI, recession unemployment will sit at 11% and non-recession unemployment will sit around 5% (as measured by the U3 in the United States). Unemployment will never exceed 15% for the duration of the decade. Though the labor force participation rate will drop (as boomers continue to retire) the rate of drop will begin to level out towards the end of the decade. This drop will lead to the first sustained real (inflated adjusted) increase in wages since the 90s.

See you in 2030 :)

Edit: also, UBI will not be passed into law in any state or federally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> 1\. Religious affiliations will increase due to folks feeling more and more disconnected from other people

2\. US football will be on the decline as more parents pull their kids out of the sport.

3\. Electric cars will be mainstream and taxes on electricity or miles driven will be applied

4\. Meat consumption in the developed world will be reduced significantly per capita, though aggregate consumption will go up.

5\. Global temps will rise, more natural disasters due to climate change and as we get near 2030 we'll see the US signing onto international agreements with teeth.

6\. A major recession in there which is either caused or will be a trigger for an armed conflict

7\. The next iteration of Al Qaeda/ISIS will rise, likely targeting moderates

8\. Backlash against some of the addictive qualities of smartphones and their apps. Limiting screen time will become more important especially for young kids.

9\. Electricity goes even further in renewables and nuclear. Planning to remove dams will pick up though likely won't be done until the 2030's

10\. A public option for health insurance in the US

</comment><comment><USER82> I predict Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook are only going to get more valuable and bigger. The previous idea that there are limits to growth that have already been reached... don't apply anymore.

Not because they're any smarter than anyone else, but they're able to continuing buying and absorbing any and all competitive threats. And that the "moat" of initial costs to compete with them in existing areas is too high. (E.g. try building your own search engine.)

And regulation and antitrust law isn't going to make a dent because any potential legal principles against it won't be convincing enough to the average citizen, so there won't be any particularly convincing legislative proposals for support in Congress to coalesce around. (It's easy to say "break up Facebook!" It's really, really hard to come up with a reasonable generic law that results in breaking up the "too big" companies without harming the "good" companies, and breaking them up in reasonable ways.)

I _don 't_ think they're going to get any _more_ "evil". They're just going to keep expanding into more and more valuable products/markets -- like Apple has with wearables, or Google has with Cloud, or Amazon with TV shows.

(I'm not saying whether this is good or bad -- I just think it's what will happen.)

<comment><USER83> This has been said about many companies in the past and it is rarely the case. Compared to the infrastructure needed to compete with Standard Oil, the railroads, or telecom, the capital expenditure to create a new tech company is miniscule.

Founders just need to not sell out. Look at the rise of TikTok. Even with search, DuckDuckGo with its privacy focus is starting to encroach on Google.

<comment><USER84> > the capital expenditure to create a new tech company is miniscule

Hiring a hundred AI engineers/scientists isn't cheap either.

<comment><USER85> Let's pay them all $200k/yr. That's $10,000,000m a year. Inflation adjusted, compared to the capital investments of the giants of the roaring 20s, this is pretty small if not irrelevant. Even if you double it to cover payroll tax and other expenses, it's still going to move the needle.

<comment><USER84> I think you mean $20m/year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> 1\. Wireless internet gets cheaper, faster and more robust across the globe. _Every single_ device/appliance/toy sold has a ~free data chip in it and is always connected & transmitting. The internet/WWW fully absorbs every other communication and delivery network out there (phone, broadcast TV, cable, satellite, radio). They finally figure out live streaming for sports.

2\. There is less ambiguity and many new laws around data security and privacy, but they aren't very consumer friendly. Digital advertising enters a new era, and current players (Google, Facebook) lag behind. Think personalized movies & TV shows, deeper product placement _everywhere_ , preemptive shipping.

3\. Cars get a lot smarter. Traffic is more efficient, and there are fewer accidents. Driverless taxis may be mainstream in certain limited areas in large cities. Level 5 automation is still nowhere in sight, however. EV adoption continues at a steady pace.

4\. Cash transactions are phased out in the US and most of the developed world.

5\. Marijuana is legal across the US and in most other countries.

6\. Beef and pork consumption craters in the US, replaced by healthier meats, plant-based substitutes and lab-grown meat.

7\. Food delivery gets cheaper and healthier. A majority of urban households get fully prepared meals delivered every day.

8\. People are no longer talking about VR/AR, crypto, chatbots, artificial general intelligence, flying cars.

</comment><comment><USER87> 1\. 100 trillion parameter neural net is trained at the very end of the decade. May or may not be useful but I think this is mostly a problem of memory bandwidth and is doable with a minimal number of die shrinks.

2\. I will take the under on SelfDrivingCars cars. Way too much pessimism here. The entire first wave of startups( save for TESLA and Comma) are using the same DARPA challenge codebase. New players using reinforcement learning will crack the problem.

3\. China will not become a democracy.

4\. China will be a leader in software as well as hardware. A Chinese-made social network will be widely used in Europe.

5\. Learning-based systems will be successfully applied to proof search. Very significant mathematical problems will fall to such systems before the end of the decade.

6.Quantum computers will not be capable of simulating any significant/useful chemistry in this decade.

7\. A baby with 100+ edited alleles will be born and healthy, probably in China.

8\. Cognitive genomics will come to the fore as it becomes clear several standard deviations increases in mental traits, including IQ, are possible with such edits. Lysenkoist ideologies may have trouble adapting, but by the end of the decade it will be clear to most which way the wind is blowing.

9\. AGI has not happened yet, but the conspiracy of silence around the topic no longer prevails. The field. Most people in machine learning consider AGI the goal of the field, and say so without shame.

</comment><comment><USER88> 1\. Apple will become more and more consumer focused leaving a void for the niche market of power users (programmers, designers).

2\. Microsoft will open source Windows (indirectly by using a linux kernel) and throw in the towel on the OS game.

3\. "Offline" becomes hip.

4\. New person-addressable federated message transport protocol gains popularity, probably on the back of SMTP/email systems. Someone will try to call it "server-less" apps.

5\. Common federated identity and login system protocols gain popularity, probably also on the back of SMTP/email systems.

6\. Privacy is still an issue, an attempt at making data-as-an-executable to trace its use is fraught with issues but gets steam in the healthcare market.

7\. More and more JS will become a standard, until most programming languages outside of C/C++/golang/rust just use JS runtimes and compile to (dynamically or statically) WASM.

8\. Someone remakes Game of Thrones ending entirely using deep fakes.

9\. 3D printing at a nano scale "is just around the corner" but being used in select factories.

10\. AI/ML and driving cars aren't a thing, but not because it's an impossible problem, but because it's not as valuable as people thought it was.

11\. Drones will become highly regulated, require licenses to fly or must be purchased with a permit in most countries. Most likely due to a string of terrorist incidents. Large drones won't be used for deliveries or any other non-sense as they're simply way too loud.

12\. More and more companies will attempt to operate in "growth" stages by buying back stock and artificially inflating their prices until an unfortunate pair of events causes a few mega-companies to collapse due to it. Afterwards debt in corporation as a factor becomes a key indicator for stock prices and a 3 to 4 year recession in most economies.

<comment><USER89> i can see 8 as a safe bet. with star wars as well. i can also imagine the fan fiction genre exploding into live enactments with look-alike amateurs acting & editing at a high quality level, with post deep fake blended in seamlessly. many of these will rival hollywood in production value and definitely surpass hollywood in storytelling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> 1\. Trust in journalists and news publications will continue to crater due to their inability to resist clickbait, sloppy ethic controls, and constant hyperboles.

2\. China will enter a pronounced recession that is it unable to hide from the world.

3\. The EU will lose at-least one more member nation after the United Kingdom leaves.

4\. The credibility of scientist and research universities will hit all time lows as the effects of the replication crisis become more pronounced and climate changes predictions prove less accurate than lay people find acceptable. I expect this to result in a large pullback in funding for research that lacks a direct practical application.

5\. Negative interest rates in EU will force more global dependency on the US dollar.

6\. At-least one more country will adopt or de facto adopt the US dollar as their nation currency (dollarization).

7\. The US will adopt a single payer or universal health care system.

<comment><USER91> > 3\. The EU will lose at-least one more member nation after the United > Kingdom leaves.

Why?

<comment><USER51> Because "ever-closer union" doesn't appeal to everybody - or so I suspect. But I'm in the US, so... take with some salt.

<comment><USER92> There were definitely parties in the Netherlands and France that made leaving the EU their major plank. When Brexit turned out to be rather more difficult than its adherents imagined, support for "Frexit" and "Nexit" plummeted like a rock, and hasn't recovered.

Greece is slightly more plausible, but less because Greece wants to leave and more because the rest of the EU decides to kick them out. It's doubtful they'd kick them out of anything more than the Eurozone, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Are these really negative sounding? Or is it just me?

Is it the retrograde politics that has infected our entrepreneurial optimism? Too much hype not enough delivery? Too much interwebs and not enough real human time? Ten years back, it seemed like I regularly interacted with folks that seemed to believe that, armed with an nvidia chip and some models and the ability to sling some js, they could be the next Zuckerberg like billionaire. The bulk of these predictions feel negative, like the party is over.

* Crispr or derivatives will be used to create cancer therapy for the masses. It will be in mass clinical trial by 2030.

* there will be three new bigger than unicorn companies. They will have combine tech with non-tech (like amazon) and 2 will be based out of the Midwest, maybe Detroit or Chicago.

* long haul trucking will be automated to the point that drivers start doing part time work via mobile connection. Trucking companies will try to capitalize on this

* there will be a common wearable that does a weekly blood test

* some major US corporations will institute mandatory gym/excercise time for workers.

* climate change denial will pivot into spinning it as a positive by citing a agricultural use of a previously unarable region. No major industrial country will suffer land loss due to it

* millennials will embrace suburban life and there will be a series of new banking products to facilitate later home ownership. They won't use the old tricks but will generalize bundling and have one monthly bill for mortgage, car and some services. Think some sort of automated HELOC type package. Top 15% will own homes in less than 15 years which will be lauded for these programs.

* to go with the above, spending monitoring apps will become more normalized and more proactive. Actively discouraging users from buying when they are in certain physical locations. This will open a new business model.

* co-ops will increase in popularity, particularly for child care

<comment><USER94> "long haul"

Why will they do part time work via mobile connection? We will need a driver to drive the truck to and from the highway, but on the highways there will be no driver on board. So driving will still be a full time job: You will be driving the first/last 10 miles after which you get off and get into another truck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> 1/ We will use neural nets to index the physical world in the same way we index the web.

2/ A low fee payment system will become mainstream, severely undercutting the payment processing networks. (My money would be on centralized, inspired by cryptocurrencies.)

3/ Labeling images for neural nets will become a popular low-skilled job.

4/ Personal email will be slowly forgotten, likely from being so bogged down from corporate communications. It will occupy a similar space that physical mail does today; the occasional really important communication surrounded by garbage that you can't stop.

5/ China will make major technological gains against the US due to their relaxed intellectual property laws and the ability to innovate upon other people's work.

6/ Self driving cars will become common, people will prefer it. It will likely only exist in limited places (i.e. freeways) and be supported by infrastructure changes (machine readable signs, lane makings, and car to car communication).

7/ The ad economy will die down as more end to end encrypted services are adopted. The vision here would be a cell phone company that doesn't sell your location data because you authenticate to the cell tower with a zero knowledge proof. (Ha, implying the telcos could or would replace their infrastructure in the next decade!)

8/ The climate will become a priority in production (e.g. food), with people asking which method is greener rather than which is cheaper. Perhaps incintevized by the government through taxes or subsidies.

9/ A new political party will be created in the US in backlash to corporatism of current two.

See you in 2030!

</comment><comment><USER96> 1\. By 2025 there will be a quantum computer that can break RSA-2048 and shortly after that any conventional encryption. Alternatives based on post- quantum cryptography will have been developed but are not in widespread use. Adoption will take years.

2\. Waymo will sell self-driving cars to the general public and there will be a push to make streets safer by reducing individual transport.

3\. The next economic downturn, if there is one, will be caused by quantitative easing.

4\. Index funds will start affecting price discovery which will lead to a surge in strategies that exploit this.

5\. Society will either learn to cope with scissor questions or polarization will eventually lead to civil war.

6\. Deep learning will be used in every field in applied computer science and replace the traditional methods of this field.

7\. Cryptocurrencies will be used to create censorship-resistant social media and messaging services that have strong secrecy/privacy/data-ownership guarantees.

8\. Facebook, Amazon and Google will face anti trust action that might even lead to them being broken up.

9\. Palantir will be the best performing stock of the decade.

</comment><comment><USER97> At some point, electric cars will boom like ssds replaced hdds. People will see how low easy and cheap EVs are to maintain and the ICE market segment will collapse entirely. The speed of the change will surprise industry expectations.

I'm also really hoping Musk and other space projects like Virgin Galactic surprise us all. Musk clearly wants to build out massive infrastructure in space. That could have hard to imagine consequences.

I think we'll discover life either in the past of mars through fossils there or bacteria or in the oceans of Enceladus. Edit-this will likely first come from NASA projects and could happen this year with the mars drill platform.

<comment><USER98> This will happen, and cause lot of pain around the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Remote work will continue to rise in popularity. Many large companies already have policies of every meeting having a video conference link. And there's pressure for people to move out of high cost of living areas like San Francisco and New York City.

Online degrees will explode in popularity much like cord cutting did in the past decade. With Georgia Tech's OMSCS becoming a huge success, many other institutions will create similar programs beginning with STEM degrees, expanding into more graduate programs and even undergrad. As an alternative to ultra-high tuition costs, more and more students will choose this route instead of traditional college. As a result, kids will stay at home with their parents increasingly longer.

The United States and China will relax their tourist visa policies, and will allow for up to 90 day stays without a visa.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b > Remote work will continue to rise in popularity.

I really hope so. There was a bit of a rise and fall (thanks Marissa Mayer!) of remote work in the last decade but it seems to be trending upward again. I work remotely now, but lack of wide-spread availability makes me anxious to move outside of suburban areas in the event something goes wrong and I don't have a local fallback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> 1\. Populism reaches a crescendo globally. Nascent populist governments become more entrenched, especially in North and South America.

2\. China supersedes the United States as the preeminent global superpower.

3\. A conflict between Russia and China comes seemingly out of nowhere, but is resolved quickly.

4\. Electric vehicles become more mainstream, but still do not overtake ICE vehicles in sales or ownership.

5\. Cannabis is de-scheduled in the United States. A minor economic boom results.

6\. Tech hubs in the Midwest begin to overtake the old tech hubs in activity and population.

7\. Housing shortages worsen globally.

8\. Australia suffers a series of natural disasters that results in heavy depopulation.

9\. Battery technology will see a significant breakthrough that results in much greater life and much lower weight, but it will not be affordable. Yet.

10\. An economic "adjustment" occurs as trade between the United States and China is heavily curtailed.

<comment><USER101> Where do your predictions about Australia come from? Do you currently live thee?

<comment><USER100> Partly recent news, and partly friends who live in New Zealand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> 1\. ML/AI hype will go bust and the industry actually starts goes back to the whiteboards and starts to do useful stuff.

2\. native apps will heavily decline and replaced by web apps. the whole ecosystem will remain wild.

3\. the developer community will have a major change because the majority will be degraded from snowflakes to comodity. more developers will heavily specialize and move away from web and general purpose fields. severe shortage everywhere in the west.

4\. china will show strong and visible presence in the world theatre

5\. EU kills current adtech business, which will start to reinvent itself seriously by the end of the decade

6\. mobile device business will encounter major shifts due to oversaturation, lack of innovation and eastern competition. touch screens will hit an dead end in usability leaving customers riddled.

</comment><comment><USER103> 1\. Noise levels in workplaces (especially cafes, restaurants) will be increasingly recognized as contributing to stress and later-life hearing loss for people who work in those environments. What is considered a "safe" noise level will decrease drastically.

2\. People will become more concerned about air pollution than climate change; emissions from combustion engines, brakes, and tires will be increasingly in the public eye. Office workers will become concerned about CO2 levels in their workplaces, and on their commutes. Many workplaces will install equipment to provide fresher, cleaner air.

3\. Ebikes, electic scooters, and other relatively compact electric transportation quietly revolutionise commuting for people who live within 20-30km of their work.

4\. Work weeks (or at least time in office) will decrease for many office workers. It will become normal for many people to only go into the office once or twice a week.

5\. The combination of 1, 2, 3 and 4 above lead to increasing de-urbanization as people who can afford it seek to move to quieter places with cleaner air. Clean air becomes a major issue of inequality. Productive farmland around cities is converted to large home-office plots with lots of trees.

6\. At least one climate change mitigation geoengineering idea will have a large scale proof of concept experiment conducted

7\. Microplastics in the food supply / ecosystem will turn out to be not that serious of a health problem for people and most other animals (some animals will be severely affected)

</comment><comment><USER104> AI proves P != NP. The proof is 20K pages and not comprehensible by humans, who spend the next 30 years deciphering it, by which time the AI has proved the five remaining millennium problems. The AI elects to keep the Clay Prize money each time and donate it all to homeless chia pets, thus proving general- purpose AI is still a ways off.

<comment><USER105> The proof is later discovered to contain errors caused by floating-point roundoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> \- major military conflict between US and China breaks out, but nuclear weapons are not used

\- America's formal military alliances are significantly disrupted and at least one state outright leaves NATO

\- after progress in self driving cars slows, industry shifts focus to low- hanging fruit: fully-autonomous trains and planes

\- Jai has greater marketshare than Rust

\- JS is the overwhelming language of choice for frontend web development

\- no measurable technological unemployment. longterm unemployment increases but is entirely due to political and economic factors

\- more people play games on traditional game consoles than VR headsets or cloud streaming

\- minor AI breakthrough that does not utilize neural networks

</comment><comment><USER19> 1\. Fully AI-generated "influencer" profiles begin to out-compete actual human beings on social media platforms.

2\. Cities will begin experimenting with geo-fencing automobiles so that speed and acceleration is restricted to defined limits within zones. Automobiles will not be legally allowed into these zones unless they surrender some autonomy which force them to abide by these limitations.

</comment><comment><USER107> Would it be interesting to have another submission where each top comment is just one idea? Then we can vote on those ideas and see which ideas are more likely to be true.

</comment><comment><USER107> * Companies will grow further until they overpower nation states. Neither the West nor China can break them up since they are the players in the economic wars. They need the size to finance the ever increasing costs of technological progress.

* There will be general artificial intelligence. Somebody will get it right this time because all components are available outside of academia. A team without an agenda will come up with the right combination by chance.

* At the end of the decade, people will design the genetic setup of 'their' children

* We will give up on preserving nature and embrace global warming. A new metropolis will be created from all the people who are forced to settle somewhere else. Established players will strengthen their borders but somebody will use that opportunity. I can imagine a city in Saudi Arabia but it could also be a special economic zone in China.

* The Chinese social credit system will be so successful that many other countries will introduce it, too.

* Energy will become scarce because all is needed for simulations and encryption attacks

</comment><comment><USER108> Here's my ass-bag of predictions.

1\. Sharing economy remains strong, but investors (at least in uber/lyft possibly others) are disappointed as it isn't possible to maintain monopoly. Multi-sided markets expand into more sectors as platforms and apps become understood as infrastructure.

2\. Companies providing engaging private small-group social media experiences (along the lines of signal, whatsapp groups) are really important to most people. This is also somewhat disappointing to investors as this kind of activity is difficult to monetize and local networks are easy to transport from app to app.

3\. Major social network platforms become increasingly controlled spaces as the "open internet" becomes a sea of disinformation. Most people instead turn to regulated enclaves with barriers to entry and strict moderation.

4\. AR / VR aren't adopted in widespread ways by consumers. VR is popular among gamers and AR has some use in specialized work environments such as military, factory, and warehouses.

5\. The world succeeds at preventing some of the worst ecological consequences of climate change, and transitions to a sustainable green economy by way of economic contraction, increased efficiency, and limited carbon capture technologies (i.e. conversion to biomass) but fail to keep warming below a 2⁰C level. Mass migrations out of equatorial regions are a huge geopolitical problem and the source of much violence. Eco-fascism is a significant political ideology that limits the ability of developed nations to admit refugees.

6\. (this is my stretch and my own vision) Online communities learn from the example of Wikipedia how to self-organize to create valuable goods. Many productive online communities will be relatively closed and occupy a similar niche to corporations or cooperatives and exist for the economic opportunities provided to their members.

</comment><comment><USER109> USB-D will be announced to remedy the shortcomings of USB-C. In every HN post about it someone will mention the number 927. Meanwhile in 2030 most laptops will still ship with at least one type-A connector, and that connector will still dominate flash drives and the like. Business users will still demand VGA video connectors in 2030 as they need something that always "just works" when presenting to clients, quality be damned. Mobile phones will likely become port-less in all but the low-end of the market.

<comment><USER110> New Super Bluetooth makes all peripherals wireless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> I just want to direct everyone to the NIC's natural resources projection report for 2020, 2030 & 2040\. [0]

It is my Bible for the coming decades. For one, it predicted Australia:

 _By 2020, significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur in some ecologically rich sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland Wet Tropics. Water security problems and a decline in agriculture and forestry are projected for southern and eastern Australia, as well as eastern New Zealand, by 2030._

It also mentions harvest shocks in the region due to land damage from climate change.

If you want to know which countries will collapse into mass protest, which wars will be fought, between whom, and when, this report is your guide.

[0] [https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/NICR%202013-05%20US%20Na...](https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/NICR%202013-05%20US%20Nat%20Resources%202020,%202030%202040.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER112> I am not willing to make this prediction, but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone thinks we will _NOT_ see fully autonomous vehicles on the road by 2030. Even in 2010, it seemed just around the corner — but that turned out to be wrong.

<comment><USER113> Technically, we already have fully autonomous vehicles on the road, they're just not generally allowed to be used as such and have obvious failure modes not shared by human drivers.

However, if by this you mean "autonomous vehicles that are clearly superior to reasonable human drivers under all reasonably frequent scenarios (including inclement weather) in any developed country" then yes, I feel very confident we won't see that in the next decade, probably two. I think the hyperoptimistic HN bubble is extremely far off the mark with respect to autonomous vehicles and always has been.

<comment><USER112> I thought of this after posting. Technically, there have been vehicles allow to operate fully autonomously on the road, yes. But I mean for non-research purposes, full-featured autonomous driving for consumer-owned vehicles.

<comment><USER113> I don't think it'll make much economic sense for consumers to actually buy them, but I do expect to see services accessible to the public that let you use an autonomous vehicle in places with effectively ideal conditions before 2030. I also don't regard that as a particularly significant advance in the broader sense of the objective because I think it's easier to get from zero to driving in Phoenix than it is to get from there to handling, say, traffic in Mumbai, both in technological and social terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER114> \- Microsoft will start pushing hard for it in a couple of years and Edge will be the default browser of choice in 10 years. It will have state of the art surveillance prevention and ad blocking. It will visually guess where the ads are perfectly, so that even ads served directly from the 1st party domain will be blocked.

\- Google will loose significant revenue and will start laying off people after 2025. Will focus back on having good search results instead of the crap we have today, but it will not be enough to keep it afloat during 2030's.

\- There will be a Gmail competitor.

\- Apple will buy DuckDuckGo.

\- There will be a dominant WebAssembly framework with support for different languages where all web applications will be written on (as .Net, but not .Net). JS usage will shrink to lightweight content pages.

\- After 7yo becomes ~13yo, PG will go back to YC. Also will write a book that will be a bestseller for non-technical / non-startup audience.

</comment><comment><USER115> * People stop fighting the data privacy fight. Laws will be created for user data collection consent, but people will ignore it like current day EULA or terms. Killer applications for user data will start showing up and public options will shift to "eh, I guess it's okay if they collect and share data about me, I get some good utility out of it"

* VR hype passes, maybe because technical limitations doesn't make for a pleasant experience. Remains a bit gimmicky

* haha remember bitcoin?

* alternative meats become mainstream, account for half of meat consumption. (Note for future readers and myself. As of 01/2020 Impossible Burger has recently partnered with BK for an impossible whopper and the Beyond Bratwurst served at work was quite good, though still somewhat niche. Only in a few stores and restaurants)

* Pet ownership will become frowned upon, or maybe just less acceptable than it is today

<comment><USER116> > Killer applications for user data will start showing up

I feel like recommendation engines and personalized results already satisfy this "killer applications". I keep myself logged out when using YouTube and Google Search, but I always recognize that on YouTube it'd be a lot easier to find videos that interest me if it accounted for my history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> 1\. Big Tech will get more stronger, and no tech company incorporated in this decade will reach 200B USD in value by 2030.

2\. China will remain as authoritarian if not more, and Xi Jinping or someone handpicked by him will be leading China in 2030.

3\. Apple will keep shifting more and more into Services, and by 2030, services will account for the majority of their profit.

4\. More and more countries will see the rise of populist governments due to the voice amplification offered by Social media.

5\. Facebook will reach 1T$ in market cap.

6\. We will see atleast one big tech company reach 2T USD in market cap.

7\. Cloud providers will churn out more and more services, to the point that more and more Enterprises will offload most things to them, and only write the very core business logic themselves.

8\. No federated platform will come close to the success of email. No decentralised messaging platform will dethrone the market leaders.

</comment><comment><USER118> 1\. Hardware: The only way to get more performance will be to adapting it to the workload. We're going to see a lot more special purpose chips. "Managed Language Chips" with hw accelerated garbage collection. The Map operation of BigData's MapReduce will be executed in-place in RAM with vast parallelism. RISC-V will have picked up steam and start chipping away in open-source mode at the Intels and NVIDIAs. Stacked computing will be a thing. There will be a lot of new letters in front of 'PU' (CPU, GPU, TPU, ?PU). New kinds of jobs will be created to help people navigate this jungle. Compiler infrastructures will get messy. It will be a Cambrian explosion of new architectures.

2\. Software: All languages alive now will stay that way. PHP still feeds the family now, it will continue to do so. FORTRAN will still exist. Some new languages might come mainstream, but only because driven by external factors (Hyperscaler behind it, or the only language for a specific piece of hardware)

3\. Money: Globalization will deepen. It will get better for the very poor and the very rich. It will be getting worse between the 5th an 95th percentiles in developed countries.

4\. Quantum computing will still be 10 years away.

5\. There will be a 2008-like crash before 2025. It will come from excessive corporate debt; and will lead to massive consolidation and monopolies, as neither US nor EU nor China want to be the first to crack down on their champions.

6\. There will be two 2017-like speculation bubbles on Bitcoin.

7\. Still no AGI, but increasingly pervasive machine learning presence in every bit of every system. People will understand and interact better with ML models.

8\. SpaceX crash-lands something on the Moon (before the first half) and Mars (after the first half).

9\. No major blockchain-based success, but some industries will have been helped and transformed by starting to operate with automated contracts defined in publicly available code. (ex: parametric insurance)

10\. Large scale video games will appear. 100k users will be able to play closely to each other in realtime fashion (unlike in WoW where they can be at most a few 100s in the same place).

11\. Close to 2030, with the help of DNA editing, China will release a deadly virus that targets lactose-tolerant humans, starting WWIII.

<comment><USER119> Near a depression are you?

> SpaceX crash-lands something on the Moon (before the first half) and Mars > (after the first half)

Well, that or Musk rightfully claims the next decade, just like the last, where he came out of nothing. If so, and given a decline of the USA, a climate of desperation means he ends up elected president.

Well then I see what you see, when you say you want him to crash-land ;)

<comment><USER118> Oh, I'm quite hopeful for Elon. The thing is, for space exploration, and especially for Elon, it is much more likely that the first attempt will result in a crash.

But that's just how it's done, and the necessary first step. To me, that's Elon being successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> 1\. Electric cars will be around 10% of the total cars in the world

2\. The world will hit a major recession starting with China

3\. We will have simple and effective screening test for most form of cancers with high accuracy

4\. We will begin seeing the benefits and power of quantum computing and its applications

5\. We will have 1-2 successful manned missions to Mars and Moon

6\. Richest and most successful tech companies will still be Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple

7\. Major Indian cities like Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai will hit a major overpopulation crisis, resulting in unavailability of basic amenities like water, shelter and electricity

8\. Hyperloop will be in its nascent stages but will be commercially available reducing traveling times by a huge factor

9\. Plant based meats and lab grown meats consumption will grow exponentially

10\. A deadly bacterial/viral disease will kill more than 1 million people worldwide

</comment><comment><USER121> \- Bill Gates is president of the United States

\- Edward Snowden will be back home. He's still a hero.

\- Bitcoin lightning payments are the most common form of payment on the Internet.

\- Due to the death of Moore's law a USD 1000 laptop in 2030 is only 3 times as powerful as a USD 1000 laptop in 2020.

\- Quantum computers are still not common

\- Nosql databases are not commonly used anymore

\- Singularity is still 30 years away

\- China's and Russia's will have found effective ways to isolate their internet traffic.

\- Postgres is the nr 1 database in use

\- Hackernews color theme will change from orange to green

\- SAP's ERP system revenues will have dropped significantly

\- Startup solutions will be more common in corporate environments.

\- Matrix will be the most commonly used protocol used for chat software.

\- Plasma Mobile will be a successful alternative to Android.

<comment><USER52> > Postgres is the nr 1 database in use > SAP's ERP system revenues will have > dropped significantly

These seem linked to me, I can't imagine any of the recent startups in are using SAP/Oracle based solutions. Over time this is going to become an increasing problem for SAP and Oracle. All they can do is milk what they can from their dying client base, probably hastening the demise in the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> 1\. Deep-water offshore wind power will be an established technology, and capacity deployed will be >50% of shallow-water offshore

2\. Addition of 20% low-carbon hydrogen to natural gas grids will be common in Europe

3\. Still no commodity optical computing, still no restoration of full-blooded Moore's Law, CPU core counts will be huge, we programmers will still be rubbish at effectively making use of them all

4\. Rust's lifetimes prove to be the crack in the dam for type systems which regulate more aspects of program correctness in widely-used production languages (as widely used as, say, Erlang is now)

5\. One of the 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will be openly furry

</comment><comment><USER122> 1\. Peak Google. This one will only appear in retrospect, but I think they hit a peak in the next 10 years and slowly relinquish dominance to a position more like Microsoft. They are no longer viewed through rose-colored glasses. Like Microsoft in the 90s.

2\. AI/ML become more entrenched and we start to see "Standard Models" for niche ML tasks that can consistently outperform humans with almost no mistakes. We just had the headline about AI being better than humans at reading mammograms. We'll see models that fully solve problems one at a time until industries begin to look for that ML model rather than solve a problem with more labor.

3\. Voice assistants become more ubiquitous, but also more literal. They no longer try to understand your intent, but rather perform rote tasks very efficiently and without cloud (aside from updates/backups/etc). Voice will affirm itself as a viable input mode but lag well behind current modes (keyboard/mouse/touchscreen).

4\. Gesture detection continues to flail. Project Soli will create some amazing niche solutions and demos, but not go mainstream.

5\. Eye/gaze tracking will find its way to end users and become useful for gaming and some other broad interactions. Users take to it fairly well.

6\. A woman will become president of the US.

7\. We see a global recession by 2022. It's moderate and causes no major shockwaves, but some 20th century industries are irreparably damaged.

<comment><USER123> Can you clarify 7?

<comment><USER122> It will accelerate the death of some declining industries like brick and mortar retail, coal extraction and a lot of logistics work (trucking, etc). They will become less relevant and/or automated. They won't die, but will reach new lows and never fully recover.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER124> Based on this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681)

it seems things change much less than expected.

Probably Climate Change will turn out to be solvable by a combination of more efficient energy production, less consumption, net negative greenhouse gas emissions and conservative geo-engineering (algae, reflecting surfaces like solar panels everywhere etc.) Either a completely new or re-invented gadget or platform will arrive that integrates nicely with all the stuff we already have. I bet it'll be something about communication. (Nice add-on to the hundreds of messengers, social networks, communication gadgets that are already there...)

I think everything else will stay pretty much the same. People will still drive cars, wait in traffic jams and be upset about everyday politics. The rise of the extreme right will turn out to be a non-issue, since history has never been documented and reflected as well as in the last hundreds of years.

Developments in technology, politics, economy and society will bring more wealth to a larger amount of people. Especially in African Countries there will be an economy comparable in wealth to that of today's South-East Asia. That will come along with improved telecommunication and transport infrastructure throughout the continent.

</comment><comment><USER125> \- The PC as we know it will die and everything will be done through cellphones/tablets. This means that the mouse and keyboard will probably die as well and apps will adapt to other more common interfaces such as voice- commands.

\- Social networks that are less "company controlled" will become more popular: users will be able to change the algorithms behind what their social networks are showing them. They'll also be able to prove that the networks haven't "hampered" the data in any particular way. These technologies will help the laymen to better filter out fake news and we'll have less "flath earthers" groups becoming popular.

\- AI techniques (machine learning / neural networks) will not just be useful for apps, but will be part of the development process itself: our IDEs will have powerful AI technology to help us code.

\- Solitude apps will be even more specific: we'll be able to find/filter people with very particular interests and hang out with them. Finding your partner or best friends through apps will be even more common.

\- Cities might experiment with shared-living areas where people live together with one another in common places and are incentivised to participate in activities with each other with a stronger push towards community rather than isolation.

<comment><USER126> It's already fairly dead except for those who do actual work (or gaming).

</comment></comment><comment><USER127> 1\. As Enterprises get cozy in the cloud, the next wave of startups will get their infrastructure else where in order to compete and differentiate. On-prem becomes sexy again.

2\. Biotech laced with computer science really hits it stride.

3\. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a financial instrument go extinct but the idea of distributed payments for services directly to providers lives on. Blockchain is replaced with ledgers and protocols that allow companies to give consumers transparency without all the blockchain and mining shenanigans.

4\. We finally figure out how to compensate open source developers for their work.

5\. Social media use looks like it dies down hard but it just evolves into something else, especially with the under-40 crowd. Probably driven by wearables and AR so ad companies can still get metadata.

6\. Intel nearly goes belly up and gets bought by Dell. VMware goes bankrupt because Kubernetes doesn't pan out.

7\. AI winter part 2 and it's really ugly. Tech is the center of the next recession.

8\. Google becomes like Yahoo is right now, not because a better search engine emerges, but because search becomes less important.

9\. A new operating system emerges. It gives programmers much better access to hardware and has distributed systems primitives built in. RISC-V leads to lots of domain specific chips.

And just so I can be sure to get one right:

10\. A new market leader in chat emerges to supplant Slack.

</comment><comment><USER128> Stripe will become a FAANG, or at least gain significant world relevance.

Bio-hacking will become mainstream, causing significant backlash and become a sensitive, polarised topic.

Startup equity / VC funding will change significantly, making it more fair & appealing for early employees.

<comment><USER129> What is bio-hacking vs doing pro-athlete level nutrition, drugs and fitness?

<comment><USER130> CRISPR / designer babies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER131> Dozens of cities in the US will seriously invest money and adopt new policies to become the "next Silicon Valley." One will reach Boston-level success. Probably in a Southern state along the East Coast.

Fewer people with CS degrees, more inclusion of CS coursework across different degree programs.

Going beyond 2030 to 2050, shopping malls outside of high-value cities will be abandoned, never repurposed, and become common locations for "urban ruin explorers."

<comment><USER132> I think that malls will become server farms.

<comment><USER133> or Amazon fulfilment centres

<comment><USER97> Or bars and casinos. They're literal time sucks and job creators. Also full of sin. Just like malls, in a way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER134> * 50%-60% of cars on the road will be replaced by electric / hybrid cars (very likely)

* Remote work will be much more widespread / will be the norm at least in IT (very likely)

* Telemedicine will be widespread, AI automated medical diagnostics systems. (very likely)

* AI/automated lawyers (likely)

* AI/automated trading will become dominant

* More automation in the warehouses / factories / stores

* First manned mission to Mars (unlikely)

* Evidence of past life found on Venus (unlikely)

* Sea level rises by 10 cm. Climate warming although not very dramatic

* Oil extraction diminishes by 30% globally

* New privacy oriented businesses (protection of personal data, digital forensics, cyber detectives)

* New efficient method for capturing CO2 from atmosphere developed (towards the end of the decade)

* First asteroid harvested for ore

* Some forms of cancer can be cured effectively

* More remote mini wars/ military operations (using air drones, automated undersea vehicles, rovers)

* Lab grown meat is available to buy

* "3D printing" of simple tissues

* Personal medical monitoring devices (constantly monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, sugar level, ...)

* Development of NEWSPEAK (oh sorry digression)

* Lithium shortages / alternative battery technologies

* Very high digital storage capacities available at cheap price, although content starts to take more space

* End of monarchy in the UK

</comment><comment><USER135> OK these are some a very long predictions:

\- At least one East Asian country out of {singapore, south korea, japan, china (ROC or PRC)} legalizes Cannabis.

\- Microsoft extends the dominance it began in late 2010 decade. C# and F# eclipse Java as enterprise programming solutions.

\- Google runs into some major trouble and loses considerable market share; the biggest tumble comes on the heels of an internal, employee-led revolt or schism.

\- While we're at it, Kubernetes goes out of style, replaced by something out of Microsoft (that is not on our radar at the moment).

\- The US is in the first five nations with population greater than 50M to meet its Paris Accord CO2 targets, despite having left the Paris Accord.

\- Early 2020s: Brexit unexpectedly results in the UK narrowly escaping the worst of a major economic collapse in Europe, led by or concurrent with the collapse or bailout of Deutche Bank. Of course this spreads to the rest of the world, but if we say put it in quantitative terms the relative, GDP normalized damage to the UK is less than the damage to each of: Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Denmark.

\- Quantum computing goes through an explosive growth in qubits for the early half of the decade, topping out at around 10,000-100,000 qubits, followed by 2-3 year linear phase, and then diminishing-return, sublinear improvements through the close of the decade. Researchers begin talking about a 'QC winter' like which we saw AI go through.

\- NASA disqualifies the Boeing Starliner from flying after astronauts refuse to man it.

Aside from one time when I correctly predicted my coworker's house would be under a volcano in 15 years, I am typically very bad at long timescale predictions and much better at short term out-of-the-odds predictions, so we shall see.

<comment><USER136> Microsoft already has a public kubernetes competitor that (comparatively) nobody uses: [https://github.com/microsoft/service- fabric](https://github.com/microsoft/service-fabric)

<comment><USER104> And the guy who created k8s originally is at Microsoft now, so I'd be interested to see how it all falls out if this prediction comes true.

<comment><USER136> Brendan Burns has been leading the k8s/azure stuff for some time at Microsoft. I'm not sure internally how those two are competing, though.

<comment><USER104> He leads both AKS and service fabric. He just calls k8s the orchestrator for stateless services and SF the one for stateful ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> * Uber and Lyft will hit a crises as they keep losing money. They may still be around in 2029 but be smaller as their prices will be at "break even" levels.

* Driverless cars will still not be a thing outside experimental deployments. Safety drivers still needed outside of restricted environments (perhaps office parks).

* Electric cars will be an increasing percentage of cars sold. But still only a minority of new cars sold.

* Small electric vehicles (Scooters, ebikes, etc) will be more popular. Most people will own their own.

* Delivery Bots will take off. They will deploy fast in 100s of cities worldwide like electric scooters did in 2018 & 2019\. Cities and Governments will struggle to adapt

* Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies will still be a niche. The average person will have no interaction with them and they will not be used for regular transactions

* Artificial meat and milk will take a growing percentage of the market. The drop in demand and prices will cause further drops in farming incomes and disruption in areas/countries that depend on it.

</comment><comment><USER138> Healthcare and wellness will become the largest sector of the economy in developed countries. This will cause distress as countries try and mesh that with consumer product focused economic systems.

<comment><USER51> That's not a bad thing. How much of your GDP do you want to spend on healthcare?

Let's suppose that healthcare costs half what it does (never mind how). What do you want to buy with the savings? More plastic stuff? More food?

Or do you want to buy more healthcare?

To me it seems reasonable for a society to spend what it has to on food and shelter, and some reasonable level on infrastructure and entertainment and leisure, and then spend all the rest on healthcare. Why? Because having people not die is a pretty big deal. If we can buy more of that, let's. Let's buy as much of it as we can afford.

<comment><USER138> Yes, I completely agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER139> Hey, checking in from 2030:

Smartphones will begin to be replaced by smart glasses. Apple will introduce an augmented reality headset on the trails of Vuzix and other smaller companies, and other tech companies will follow suit. Eye tracking is another area of probable advancement.

The clock rate of consumer CPU's won't exceed 6ghz.

Tesla will continue to enjoy a lot of success, eventually being a good 15% of the cars we see on the roads as battery technology steadily improves.

Climate change will become even more apparent. We'll see measurable effects, and the US will reengage in new climate agreements after 2020.

SHA2 will show signs of weakness with initial attacks against SHA2-256.

Quantum computers will not make significant progress toward being consumer ready by 2030, but there will be more research done.

We'll have the first near-room temperature superconductor at high pressures. No new technology.

ITER will continue to make progress toward fusion. No successful (net positive) experiments yet. Check back in 2030.

2020 or 2021 recession.

There are still people on IRC.

Most importantly: FIRST MAN ON MARS

</comment><comment><USER42> \- A.Yang becomes US president

\- A deal between US & China destabilizes china. The UK wants into the deal. EU wants another part

\- A military insurgence in an african country establishes a free-trade zone. a part of the world's manufacturing moves to africa.

\- As europe is aging, most of its rural land becomes deserted. Airbnb is struggling because its now cheaper to buy a european home than rent.

\- The UK becomes a tax haven and attracts thousands of tech companies , most of which are now remote. SV sees a massive exodus of capital

\- People become weary and stop talking about politics. Having nothing to talk about, facebook dies. People put their money where their mouth is, and we have the first experimental , co-owned private cities.

\- Climate warming is actually viewed positive by people living in northern countries.

\- Travel is significantly reduced, as 30% of the population work remote. Instead of tourism, people do forms of nomadism. AirBnbLonger.com becomes the most valuable startup in london or sth.

\- Disillusion with self driving vehicles leads to despair initially, but then quickly every car is equipped with driving assist . Drivers are no longer drivers, they are now safety drivers

\- AI passes the turing test. Bots trained on wikipedia that can reason and come up with logical answers surpass google's search result quality. Google dies. People on twitter stop caring whether they are talking to a bot or human, and learn to just enjoy the chat

\- A few major countries dissolve. Perhaps even a few US states secede

\- The first age reversal therapies are successful

\- A full artificial womb is finalized. Societies give up on traditional family norms, completely disengaging sex from family. Massive orgies become the most popular form of entertainment

<comment><USER98> Waiting for the brexit eagerly for the UK thing to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER140> In the next 10 years, there will be a major change in education which will resemble Alfred North Whitehead's the Rhythm of Education.[0] This will not happen independent of John Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism, learning by doing, participation, connecting personally to ideas, and democracy in the classroom, but will also have a focus on discipline and precision. Whitehead's three stages involve a period of romance, becoming acquainted to a subject and knowledge, precision, systematically learning the facts connected with the subject introduced in the romance period, and, lastly, generalization, where facts are used to create new theory and independent thought by the student beyond what is known. Whitehead explains that this isn't a linear process, like our current approach to education, but rather cyclic.

Using less summative assessment, like standardized tests based on grade level, to compare students and set the rate of learning based on the mean of a group of children, instead, diagnostic and formative assessment using technology, like what we have seen with the Khan Academy, will be widely used to assist in the difficult often boring stage of precision giving teachers more time to introduce students new subjects and lead them to use their knowledge to make generalizations.

My prediction is the end of standardized tests at the grade level by 2030. Homework will not be necessary anymore as this will work will be efficiently done during normal school hours. Lastly, although it is important that we consider learning disabilities a real thing, it might be more fair and pragmatic to call it a teaching disability taking the responsibility from the child to learn putting it onto the adult. (Ok, this is personal, my goal for the next ten years is to eliminate homework.)

[0] [https://mast.queensu.ca/~peter/essays/whitehead.pdf](https://mast.queensu.ca/~peter/essays/whitehead.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER141> Marriages and having children will become less and less popular, and under- population will start to be a real concern for economies.

Governments to start / increase incentives to get married and have kids.

<comment><USER64> Hungary has this:

[https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a- policy-...](https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-hungary-experiencing-a-policy- induced-baby-boom)

Some UK nationalist politicians have recently mentioned this approvingly. Traditionally, policies like this fit in very well with authoritarian populist governments, and i think we're likely to see more of those, so i agree with your prediction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER142> I'll try to keep mine somewhat realistic.

1 - Rise and fall of AI. Not complete fall, mind you. I think companies are going to try to replace humans with AI everywhere they can, and people are going to push back against it.

2 - Self driving long haul trucks will be the norm. Will still have drivers, but will be more of babysitters, and make less money.

3 - Boom in biotech. Maybe growing organs for transplant, or else adequate mechanical replacements.

4 - Amazon finally gets a worthy competitor in the online shopping realm. Since fast delivery is the key, this is either going to be Walmart, or Target, or both.

5 - Change in social media. As more is 'dug up' to embarass people of our age, kids will turn to private channels, nothing like FB or Twitter. FB will of course launch a competitor to said service.

6 - Politically, it's anyone's guess. Divisiveness has been rising to a boiling point. I don't see war, but perhaps states and even cities trying to become independent.

</comment><comment><USER143> 1\. Bitcoin will remain largely as it is today - a niche "currency" not used by many people due to it remaining difficult to use, impossible to insure, and prone to large swings in value.

2\. Computer assistance will help aid drivers with incremental advances on what they do today - by 2030 most new cars will be able to parallel park for you, as an example, but full self-driving, if available to consumers, will be limited to limited access roads such as highways.

3\. AWS and Azure will still be the dominant cloud providers. Google will reduce investment in GCP and it will fall further behind.

4\. IBM's purchase of RedHat won't pay off. Over the next 10 years they'll shed 100k employees or more.

5\. We'll see fewer streaming service providers by the end of the decade. Amazon may sell off their video service and will be picked up by either NBCUniversal or ViacomCBS. Whoever doesn't get them will at least try for some sort of merger with Netflix.

6\. Amazon will release another phone to try and challenge Apple and Google once again.

7\. Salesforce will most likely buy Slack. The other most likely bidders I see are IBM, Cisco, and Dell.

Other things that I think are very obvious or already starting:

* TV and movie piracy will increase significantly due to subscription fatigue.

* Libra won't have launched.

* Cloud gaming is 50/50 as to whether or not it will be like VR/AR is today. I actually think it has a better chance of success in parts of Europe and Asia - think Scandinavia, South Korea, and Japan, than in the US. The major internet providers in the US are not interested in providing the quality of service needed for cloud gaming to succeed. Starlink won't offer enough bandwidth to disrupt this space either, although it may see significant adoption in rural areas if enough satellites are launched.

</comment><comment><USER144> The world will get weirder. Convincing audio and video faking technology will make it incredibly easy to pervert and twist any public figure. This will only make it easier to spread conspiracies. Assassinations or other forms of domestic terrorism may happen as a result.

People won't do shit about global warming, at least for the first 5 years. The Middle East will get increasingly unstable as heat increases and arable land becomes sparse. Cities like Dubai will become less and less appealing, especially as the rich move away. A major disaster in the Global South will happen, causing millions of deaths but only handwringing and prayers in the west.

More female directors and hopefully a new wave of sorts as people realize that films can be made for so cheap (seriously people read your Truffaut). Distribution will get easier, yet still fragmented.

William Gibson will be right, perhaps more in terms of zeitgeist than actual details.

</comment><comment><USER145> 1\. Electric cars will be 25-35% of new cars sold in the US by 2030.

2\. "Advanced" Smart Grid will be rolled out in some significant areas. Smart Grid will have energy storage at every tier: Grid, Municipal, Home, and Appliance. Smart Grid will control appliances in the home. Opt out of Smart Grid will be very expensive.

3\. Armed militias will be formed and shots fired over freshwater in the USA.

4\. Reality as a Service will allow users to choose the facts of their reality.

5\. Some company will partially deliver Theranos' vision of persistent implanted health monitoring devices.

6\. In 2023 a Marvel film will flop.

7\. The likeness of dead actors in film becomes commonplace. It never stops being creepy to me.

8\. Monoclonal Antibody drugs become much cheaper.

9\. A breakthrough is made in Auto-immune diseases.

10\. Ford and GM join Chrysler in merging with international automaker conglomerates (not necessarily the same one), or go out of business.

11\. Tesla continues to mystify analysts. Elon Musk actually transmogrifies his soul into a tree.

</comment><comment><USER146> \- An Uber or Lyft style company will launch remotely piloted drone-cars.

\- Remote pilots will be multiplexed among vehicles; intervening to navigate "tricky" areas, while allowing autonomous driving for simple highway stretches.

\- Self-driving cars will be able to request remote-pilot assistance to navigate "tricky" areas.

</comment><comment><USER147> If I were to try and make accurate predictions they would be necessarily pessimistic, so instead I'm going to list some of my hopes for the 2020s:

\- Zig [0] will rise to prominence as a C replacement after its 1.0.0 release.

\- Someone will finally put together a good FOSS desktop OS, probably based on the Linux kernel but with a small, stable, and coherent userland base-system, and portable self-contained and sandboxed-by-deftault AppImage-like applications.

\- The ad pushing and data siphoning economy collapses and consequently software returns to focusing on user empowerment, responsiveness, and efficiency.

\- The US finally gets healthcare reform that doesn't make us the laughing stock of the rest of the civilized world.

[0] [https://ziglang.org/](https://ziglang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER148> * VR finally takes off for real, creating the next app store style payday as killer apps come online.

* A VR content studio becomes a billion dollar business

* At the end of the 2020's, China hits a demographic wall it can't easily recover from.

* The ICE collapse begins in earnest in the latter half of 2020's.

* Bitcoin's value will crater as the untethering happens (See NY AG lawsuit), leading to a crypto winter

* Google has entered "Day 2" and will have a major competitor in the next 10 years. Day 2 can be seen by the anti-consumer wall of paid results it has, just like the stodgy competitors it beat 10 years ago had. Also, founders left.

* SPA's will be considered an anti pattern

* Massive recession hits

* Inflation

* Tesla becomes Amazon sized due to the intersection of falling battery prices, solar prices, and the tipping point for ICE practicality

<comment><USER149> So far you're the only username from the 2010's thread to have also made predictions in this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025787)

How do you feel you did?

<comment><USER148> Not too well. I feel like a chunk of them could still work for the next ten years. I think the timing is the tricky part. For example, for this year's 10 year predictions, my China prediction would be better off a little farther out to have a higher likelihood.

I'm interested to see if betting on big trends make this batch any more accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER150> My big prediction is in physics:

Thanks to Einstein we live in a 4D reality, 3 spatial dimensions and the dimension of time.

In the next 10 years I predict our understanding of physics will evolve (with a confirmation through observation) from us being 3D beings living in a 4D reality to...something more.

If I could personally lead the charge on any changes in the next 10 years...I would eradicate all new cases of childhood type 2 diabetes. Sadly this has been achievable and avoidable since the first case of childhood type 2 diabetes was diagnosed in 1983. Unfortunately, I don't expect or predict there will be any gains, only more and more children diagnosed with this terrible disease (my prediction: many as 25-50% of children) by the end of the next decade.

</comment><comment><USER151> \- Climate change will dominate all facets of our lives with politics and science being the main one \- Solar energy will become more successful \- Tesla will dominate the car industry \- SpaceX will land to Mars first an unmanned and then a manned Starship \- A new major scandal will come out of Facebook and people will ask for it to shut down \- Web frameworks will become even more complicated and a new breed of web developers will be needed \- Streaming will present itself as the complete replacement of TV as we know it \- Property market will continue to rise \- Crypto will have a couple of spike years and then disappear in its current form \- We will go back to the dark years of AI \- Mexico will want to build a wall

</comment><comment><USER152> There is going to be a war between US and China:

1) there are a few likely points of conflict:

         - south china sea

         - african countries that are between most influenced by china and others.

         - <USER2>

         - north korea

         - middle east

         - chinese/russian border

2) Trade war and all that will be a part of the war

3) China will try to use it's network of influencers/agents in universities, big companies and ethnically chinese communities in general.

4) The war will stop the grouth of civillian economy in china, which will raise chances of a revolution. CCP will tighten the grip and all smart/educated/somewhat open minded chinese citizens will be on the path out of the country no matter how hard it will be.

</comment><comment><USER153> 1\. China has a 1929 moment and¨faces the first major modern depression, it affects the whole world like the 2008 financial crisis.

2\. We find extraterrestrial life.

3\. The USA tightens antitrust laws and its effects FANGS greatly.

4\. Autonomous cars are starting to spread but infrastructure hampers that spreading.

5\. We get the first state-backed crypto coin which spreads like wildfires in Australia.

6\. The USA turns inward and the EU has to save Italy from economic catastrophe.

7\. Gigantic hurricane hits the USA and it forces the USA taking climate change seriously some kind carbon tax/cap and trade is implemented.

8\. GAN made fake video spreads fast and hits MSM, it might be porn or conspiracy type video.

9\. First modern African descended pope is elected.

10\. Electric cars are sold more than traditional ones in the major western markets.

<comment><USER154> People have been predicting (1) for a while. What makes you think _this_ is finally the decade for it?

<comment><USER153> China's credit bubble is huge and it is getting worse every year, it has to implode some point. Especially when the workforce is shrinking without economic reforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER155> A new tech company will make it big by selling privacy-minded devices (or by pretending to be privacy-minded). More companies will follow and a buzzword will be created for these kind of devices (privtech or something).

Big tech companies will stop using Javascript and go full WASM. Non-tech Companies will still use Javascript, but popular Javascript frameworks won't be as big as Angular and React, they will be jQuery reincarnations.

Some important person is going to be hacked and the consequences will be bigger than you think.

Foldable phones will make a big fuss and then die just like netbooks did 10 years ago.

Google will try to replace Android and fail. Flutter will be discontinued.

Someone will try to dethrone Youtube, making a big fuss, and fail miserably.

</comment><comment> Const-me 1\. Intel will survive, but AMD will have the majority of the market, most of the time. Apple will try to invest in it's own ARM workstation CPUs, but will eventually switch to AMD cores (licensed, used inside proprietary Apple's chips).

2\. Windows will still dominate desktops.

3\. Quantum computers will stay approximately where they are today, expensive toys for scientists without practical applications.

4\. Electric road vehicle sales will exceed gasoline ones; the major driver being developing countries. Couple global car brands emerge from these countries, likely Asian, like Xiaomi did.

5\. US and China will come to some trade agreement and resume business as usual.

6\. Russia will disintegrate once again, causing major global security headache because nukes.

</comment><comment><USER156> 1\. Electric vehicles will be mainstream.

2\. Self-driving will be deployed effectively in freight transport.

3\. The cost and efficiency of logistics will be lowered further and become an important factor in economic growth.

4\. Pressure on the market of commercial real estate due to the lower cost of logistics.

5\. Wind (especially offshore wind farms) and solar become cost-effective energy sources.

6\. Technology leaps in battery and energy storage.

7\. AI/ML will find its niche in industrial infrastructure more than consumer goods/services.

8\. Desktops and laptops made of SoCs become the norm.

9\. RISC-V commoditizes certain aspects of the chip design industry and will grow an impactful ecosystem.

10\. Cash will be diminished by the market and the pushes from governments, which will be replaced by digital transactions.

<comment><USER85> Re: 5 this is already true. Either you don't know this or you mean something more subtle.

<comment><USER156> In the EU that is probably true due to mature policies and infrastructure. But in many other countries, they still need government interventions to make initiatives. I anticipate that market-driven growth will become prevalent throughout the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER157> Prediction for 2030. There will be 2030 new javascript frameworks.

<comment><USER158> It feels like React is pretty well entrenched as the leading front end framework at this point. I really don't know any devs in real life that have used it and disliked the developer experience and are itching to try something new. A new framework would have to provide some fairly significant advantages to get people to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER159> Predictions for various walks of life:

Health

\- health devices become mandatory and data from devices dictates the cost of health insurance and care

Transportation

\- Electric vehicles would become the norm \- All manufacturers stop making gas based vehicles \- Autonomous vehicles capture 50% of Goods transportation market \- Multiple metro cities worldwide have autonomous taxis

Education

\- Master's level education becomes mandatory for any type of job \- pay after getting job grows adaptation

Entertainment

\- number of movie theaters close down \- virtual reality becomes a core part of entertainment

Energy

\- Solar, Wind and Hydro will surpass other sources \- More and more countries would adopt Denmark/ Norway model \- Energy companies would start to replace Tech in terms of richness

</comment><comment><USER160> 1\. Merging of mobile/desktop OS (i.e. iOS and MacOS becoming one and the same).

2\. A Microsoft first-party Android device is launched, following a similar attack strategy they are currently starting with Edge on Chromium: fork, improve, destroy.

3\. ARM takes over... actually, a more bold prediction: x86-64 remains king, and ARM is not able to conquer beyond the mobile market, despite present-day feelers.

4\. Self driving cars master 95% of driving scenarios but struggle with enough "uncommon" scenarios that it winds up in a PR nightmare (youtube searches for "AutoPilot accident" lands results with millions of views) and doesn't revolutionize much except pizza delivery and long-haul trucks.

5\. Theater chains push hard for Movie-pass style subscriptions (I mean, harder than they already have). Netflix purchases a small theater chain that shows its own films for free to subscribers, with excellent snacks for purchase. (or has this already happened?)

6\. Disney Plus struggles with choosing consolidating the Disney "family friendly" brand and the sort of Game of Thrones gore-fest content demanded by millions of subscribers, leading to either a rebranding or an off-shoot for "adults" a la "Adult Swim" or "Nick at Night".

7\. At least one of the big streaming services (Cockatoo or whatever NBC has?) throws in the towel and merges with another.

8\. Hong Kong remains in turmoil for all of the 2020s.

9\. Rust becomes _the_ poster child of systems programming (or has it already), and goes from relatively niche to a must-have for new hires in just about any software industry.

10\. Working remotely is still a pipe-dream heralded by a lucky subset of HN posters.

11\. A battery breakthrough revolutionizes mobile devices and elevates electric cars to make combustion engines even more obsolete.

edit:

12\. Extremely accurate diagnoses by AI makes healthcare cheaper (but not cheap), faster (but not fast), and a group of clueless people (think anti- vaxx) will refuse to ever be diagnosed by a machine and instead demand a "real doctor".

<comment><USER161> > attack strategy [that Microsoft is] starting with Edge on Chromium: fork, > improve, destroy

Can you enlighten me on the "improve" and "destroy" parts of that strategy? For all I know, Edgium is Chrome with Google services replaced by Microsoft services.

<comment><USER160> I'm just being cute :)

It's the "if you can't beat them, fork them" strategy that I think will pay off in the end. "Improve" and "Destroy" are both rather optional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER162> I predict that I will understand just as little about the future in the next decade as I did during the decade prior.

</comment><comment><USER163> * Social Networks

There will likely be some big crisis involving important people that revolves around their social media profiles from when they were teenagers or young adults. Maybe some bad photos, or comments. People who were in their mid 20s today will be eligible to run for the Office of the President in 2030. Lots of people in their mid 20s have done stupid stuff online in the last 10 years (since they were around 15).

After those scandals, people will start tilting away from social media. People will seek out more private enclaves, or just abstain from social media.

Additionally, many social media companies will have to deal with millions of profiles of dead individuals.

Prediction: Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp will be irrelevant in 10 to 15 years. People will move away from current levels of online sharing.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

* Truth

Discerning truth will become harder and harder. Deep fakes, propaganda, social discussions about terminologies, etc will cause deep distrust of everything. Will lead to social change in how we trust what we see on screens.

Prediction: People will start preferring face to face meetings. (Kind of related to the previous point)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

* Climate

Climate crisis will cause more migrations. The changing population demographics will cause lots of civil unrest in Europe, Middle East and the Americas. India will become the largest country by population and face issues due to climate change.

Prediction: Wars and civil unrests :(

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

* Digital overload

People will start treating technological devices with skepticism. Phone addiction, etc will become recognized disorders and the cell phone market will get highly regulated. People will have a social movement against the excessive usage of digital devices.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

* Space

Manned missions to Moon, Mars and maybe some other places will occur.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

* Recession

P(Recession in the next 10 years) = .99

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

* Sports

Tom Bradyand Belichick continue the dominance of the Patriots for another 10 years.

FIFA 2022 in Qatar causes some illness among the players. Maybe Qatar's bad human rights record is finally addressed.

FIFA 2026 in America will be epic

</comment><comment><USER164> \- self driving cars: Improvements and advances, but not enough to handle the complexity of old European cities with their twisting roads and nonsensical street plans.

\- quantum computing: We at least triple the qubit count. Maybe even quadruple. It's enough to do something of use, maybe even give "quantum supremacy" on one actual useful problem. Not much more than that, though.

\- nuclear fusion: 2-4 "scientific breakthroughs". It remains a science project though. No commercially viable fusion power.

\- AI: The hype dies out. AI won't change many things explosively, but it'll seep into everyday life andhaveabroad and profound impact. Medical diagnoses will be better, weather predictions, security, live tracking of people, etc. Most won't recognise it as AI.

\- privacy. Technological advances will slow down, If only because there's not that much more to gain. Awareness will start to catch up and we will collectively wonder how to extricate ourselves from this dystopian hellhole we inflicted upon ourselves.

\- society: Despite general feelings of "not ok", distribution of resources will skew further. The middle class will remain under pressure, for the simple reason that growth for the upper echelon cannot come from lower tiers. Yet middle class will continue to exist - a buffer between the have-nothings and the one-percenters.

\- guns in the USA: The number of mass shootings will remain roughly equivalent to what it was in 2019. Growth is commensurate with population growth. Despite 3-5 high profile shootings a la Sandy Hook, the law won't be significantly more effective at preventing shootings.

\- space: India and China will take the lead beyond low earth orbit.

\- cancer: No great cancer breakthrough, just steadily continuing to chip away. By the end of the decade, 50% of new cancer patients can be converted into long-term treatment (5 yrs or more).

\- climate change: The efforts in the coming decade are vastly insufficient. The only viable means of really combating climate change in the less-than- centuries time frame is significant reduction of population. (Over 25% decline in 10 years). Not sure if anyone has the balls to actually say that by then though.

</comment><comment><USER165> I'm gonna make a contrarian prediction: consumer-facing technology won't change much over the next 10-15 years. Self-driving cars, smart clothes, artificial meat/meat substitutes, and AR/VR will all fail to become mainstream, each with less than 5-10% consumer adoption across the general population (partial autonomy in cars may become common, but full L5 autonomy won't). The real changes will be invisible, mainly changes to infrastructure. I predict that the grid will become much smarter and more resilient, with seamless coordination across millions of generators and endpoints (think EVs and rooftop solar). Similarly, at least one widely used decentralized alternative to the web will emerge, possibly passed on blockchain tech. I also predict that at least one widely-used cryptosystem will be broken; the resulting chaos will represent a major political and social headache. Political polarization and fake news will only get worse. Several states which are currently red, such as Texas and Georgia, will become purple due to changing demographics, representing a huge shift in the distribution of political power in the US. There will be at least one major recession. Another of the big European countries (maybe Italy?) will leave the EU, and Scotland will leave the UK. The middle east will remain a mess, but conditions in Africa will improve substantially, leading to several new fortunes being created. There will major progress on HIV and Alzheimer's, but cancer will remain a tough nut.

</comment><comment><USER166> In 2030 - and focused on things that are different - not the same.

\+ Smart home tech will be ubiquitous. Smart speakers paved the way. They're still not very smart, but good enough as an interface. Most importantly, they are the reason other home products became connected. Smart home products are smart lamps, outlets, curtains, locks.

\+ Electrification of heating is happening at a large scale. This can be through a combination of devices, from floor heating to infrared panels in the form of paintings. This is driven by a continuous drop of the cost of electricity production.

\+ Indoor positioning becomes considerable bigger, but doesn't reach the number of outdoor positioning chips (GPS) yet. It is used for asset tracking, smart homes, and hopefully not for advertisements.

\+ Battery-free devices entered the consumer market. Using backscattering and energy harvesting techniques they perform basic tasks which conventially required a battery. This will be all low-bandwidth.

\+ In other words, wireless charging on a distance of a couple of meters takes off. This will be low-energy. Not to charge smartphones or laptops.

\+ Lab-grown meat is available in the supermarket. The price didn't come down yet. It's a product for people who can afford it.

\+ A mouse brain has been frozen for a day, got revived, and lived for a bit after that.

\+ There have been attempts to grow more crops in the sea. It couldn't robotized enough in those rough conditions to significantly produce food for kettle though.

\+ Vertical farming is still a hype. Greenhouses pop up in more and more countries, reducing the role of the Netherlands w.r.t. agricultural exports.

\+ A platform that brings together home sellers and buyers becomes global. It becomes bigger than Airbnb.

\+ A sex toy with tele-properties goes viral. It is removing some social barriers. However, the society - esp. the US - remains very prudish.

\+ We use the smartphone to pay and for access control. No need to carry a credit card or keys on you. Finally!

That's it for now! No autonomous cars, and no big advanced in general artificial intelligence. Still a lot to look forward to, I think! :-)

</comment><comment><USER167> There will be a new American political party that garners mainstream popularity (possibly inhabiting the corpse of one of the parties existing in 2020.)

China will fall in power as investment from the west decouples.

Nuclear energy will make a PR comeback.

There will be at least one scientific breakthrough surrounding the underlying nature of consciousness. Optimism about the possibility of AGI among experts will increase significantly.

Young adults will be spending a majority of their time interacting with friends embodied as virtual avatars (on traditional devices and VR/AR devices)

<comment><USER168> Probably a left wing democratic movement.

<comment><USER169> I think the Justice Democrats are working pretty hard battling the establishment. I wouldn't be surprised to see that trend continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER170> My predictions:

-It becomes even harder for new musicians and visual artists to make it because we will be able to generate "new" music from long dead artists using some form of generative machine learning models.

-It becomes nearly impossible to distinguish real people on social media from advanced bots-- some of which will have long and detailed online histories that seem authentic (i.e., internally consistent biographical details) to even skeptical observers. Owners of these armies of bots earn large profits because of the time it takes to properly establish such profiles.

-Most physical products produced by US and European brands-- even at the level of detergent or towels-- will have some kind of NFC/RFID tag that is secured through cryptographic signatures as a way to manage rampant and increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting and "laundering" of fake products through sites like Amazon. Consumers will routinely scan their products with their phone to ensure they are real (and Amazon will scan them itself for anything they pack and ship).

-More and more people will realize just how bad refined carbs are for diet and health and there will be a rise in meal delivery services and fast casual restaurants that cater to this trend. This will be accelerated by the rapid rise of companies such as CloudKitchens from TK of Uber fame, allowing people to start delivery companies as easily as they can sell digital merchandise through Shopify.

-By the end of the decade, it will be possible to compose a text message or search google via your phone just by thinking about it using some kind of special hat or AirPod type device, although this will require some training and practice to get good accuracy. Younger people will adopt this much more quickly since it will be easier for to learn how to manipulate this tech usefully. When combined with Google Translate and earphones, this will allow people to converse (slowly and perhaps awkwardly) with people in a foreign language that they do not speak in a relatively seamless way.

-There will be a controversy about some form of artificial intelligence enhancement (either through Nootropics or other drugs or through genetic engineering) and college admissions, with the rich able to afford these technologies for their children, undermining the whole meritocratic underpinning of elite institutions.

-There will be extreme quotas placed on the number of Chinese graduate students permitted to study for a Masters degree or PhD in fields such as applied math, machine learning, computer science, bio-chemistry, genetics, etc. While free and open publishing of results will still occur, the specific methods and practices to allow reproduction of results will be more restricted.

-China will introduce a commercial jetliner that is suspiciously similar to a Boeing/Airbus design. They will also introduce memory modules nearly identical to those from Micron/Samsung. Despite the blatant stealing of IP, they will essentially get away with it at least in the Asian markets.

-There won't be any wide-scale violent revolutions in a 1st world country because of the power of the state to monitor and manipulate the internet and mobile devices. Any unrest that gets far enough along will be effectively disrupted by such actions, leading the quick arrest of the ringleaders. Although messaging tools will claim true end to end encryption, this won't be the case in practice because of various exploits used by nation states.

-Lithium and Cobalt will become highly strategic resources, leading to political intrigue by super powers to control critical supplies in places like the Congo.

</comment><comment><USER171> * Individualism and philosophy rises

* Solutions for privacy by default (like fake profiles or something entirely different)

* World is not destroyed/changed much from today by climate change

* Pollution is at half of what it is today

* Russia becomes more open/democratic

* We go through a recession

* New company rises to the top tech giants

* Software becomes fast again

* Masses start to understand that no system is safe from hacking due some bigger accident

* Bitcoin continues to rise slowly

* Computers won't get much faster than they are today

* Webassembly and DRMs rise up

* Virtual DOM is part of w3c spec

* RoR and similar frameworks come back as they are faster to develop and work better for certain use cases

</comment><comment><USER172> Increasing global panic as self-reinforcing feedback loops in Carbon emissions cause people with means to migrate to high ground in cold countries, and people without means to die starving, fighting, or trying to emigrate. Resource wars and a land grab for regions that continue to be arable. Many, many killed, perhaps a few even in wealthy countries. Shock amongst the wealthy that the ocean is coming even for _their_ beachfront homes. Mostly this will be about the realization of what's coming, and that this is the decade for positioning before global food supply chains fail.

This will also serve as the backdrop against which the US loses its status as a republic, as the combination of overweighted rural votes in the senate and electoral college, poor election security (as in terribly insecure evoting tabulation, not dumb voter id laws), and easily bought politicians, judges, etc. lead to a wealthy few dictating the conditions for the many, using the tools of manufactured housing scarcity, medical debt, and student debt (if colleges manage to stay relevant). A massive national dragnet that doesn't even pretend to care about citizens' privacy. The US governing structure will look a lot more like China's.

Some software stuff, new medical breakthroughs for the rich, fascinating art in response to above, etc. But that's less relevant.

Hope I'm wrong!

</comment><comment><USER173> 2020-2029: New AI winter.

<comment><USER174> (serious) I don't get the reference, do you mean a stall in AI progress or a brief overall industry-wide disinterest in it?

<comment><USER92> The term AI winter usually refers to the late-80s collapse in AI funding after the technology of the time (particularly expert systems and Japan's "fifth generation computer" project) failed spectacularly to live up to the hype.

Before that, there were other downturns in AI funding after early technology turned out not to pan out so well. For example, the late 60s' effort at machine translation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER175> \- No driverless on most roads, but we will see certain routes accessible to uber/trucks become driverless only.

\- Second worlds get much better (fortnite etc), will see advertisement model take off.

\- Nations finally start taking climate seriously.

\- Bitcoin sees more adoption as the best performing savings system. Ethereum and blockchain hype dies down and serves only a niche.

\- major advancements in "biobags"(ectogenesis) for humans.

\- China starts abusing CRISPR. the iatrogenics leads to some epidemic.

\- we don't live on mars yet. satellite internet becomes common.

</comment><comment><USER176> * Places will start to become uninhabitable. Nomadic living will start to come back, though more in the form of people living in their cars.

* Less use of wired internet. Wired internet subscribers decrease

* Self driving cars get to 95% of situations. Automated buses start leading to weird generated bus routes working sort of like uber pool but for larger vehicles

* Smaller automated vehicles pop up. A vehicle that makes pizza on the way to deliver it to you

* Increase of processor types in a PC/phone. Dedicated lower power ones, ones for video decoding, crypto, whatever

* Some previous identifiers are discarded. Phone number and social security number are useless

* Increased fragmentation of the internet. Countries having "Facebook, but it's from Australia". Perhaps enforced by charging to leave the country

* The mobile phone splits apart. Your display is not the same as your cpu unit, is not the same as your input. They become more invisibility integrated into our normal appearance

* The first genetically modified human is born

* 90/00s nostalgia is in full swing

* Javascript still number 1

* At least one attempt at a sea based city

* Increase in mental health issues, lifespan won't increase dramatically

* The banning of one or more food additives we currently eat

* Lithium batteries finally replaced

* Google stagnates

* Apple introduces an even lower cost iphone, not available in first world countries

* USB C finally dominant, no less confusing

* Microsoft releases a posix compliant os

* Windows 7 will still have market share, Windows xp will some how still be around

* One US city will get unusually hip with people looking to move away from the high rent prices of another

* Low level call center employees are completely replaced

* Grocery store stockers, and cashiers gone

* A good dent in janitorial staff as robots begin to replace them

* Twenty new unicorn start ups, eighteen dead ones

* Someone tries to do Yikyak again

<comment><USER177> The first genetically modified babies have already been born, but agree this will be more mainstream.

[https://www.newsweek.com/china-third-gene-edited- baby-148002...](https://www.newsweek.com/china-third-gene-edited-baby-1480020)

</comment></comment><comment><USER178> Another of Musk's companies achieves a killer landmark. Maybe space turns out to be profitable. Maybe cities do massive transport projects. Maybe neuralink pushes an update and everyone knows kung fu. A million solar roofs.

Antitrust becomes a big deal. Landmark rulings will be on marketplaces: ubers, app stores, Amazon's retail & ebook markets, adwords etc. Regulators target cases where a company [a] dominates _a_ Market (eg equity finance) with _their_ market (eg NASDAQ) [b] is a major participant in that market and [c] it's an explicit marketplace. Things get beaurocratic.

Labour markets get worse at the bottom end of the "white collar" market.

The economics of "automation" remain subtle and debatable until something dramatic becomes the symbol of economic automation. Could be driverless cars, but it could also be a zero-employee chainstore. At this point automation becomes political-economic narrative. This will happen regardless of the actual economic realities of automation, on which I have no prediction.

Actual energy game changers start to emerge, ones that genuinely drive major cost/price/volume changes.^

People lose interest in politics again, in direct misproportion to its importance.

Hacker News gets a makeover

^If solarcity does this, I get points for the 1st prediction too.

</comment><comment><USER179> Huh, not any hilarious predictions yet?

\- Artificial life forms and pet becomes mainstream.

\- First experimental artificial wombs for human babies put to test.

\- Current HIV becomes curable mainstream but another mutation will take its place. It will come from US or Europe.

\- War will break out in different parts of the world and first AI use for the purpose of killing people.

\- On demand AI therapist using a wearable on your wrist as suicide rates will go up in developed countries. It will be recommended by doctors.

\- Linux on desktop finally becomes mainstream. This time, for sure.

\- Biohackers will grow in popularity and it will be a mainstream trend to experiment with kits from new startups. Super soldiers, no sleep brian and hairy (cat girls yay) stuff will emerge.

\- There will be companies awarding trophies and money for sterilizing people.

\- Something like ransom ware but alive (self aware AIware) will take out half the internet for a short duration.

\- New porn startups raking in billions using ml generated on demand pornography and self aware toys, perhaps actual testing of sex robots. It could be a new genre of porn too.

\- Catastrophic economic collapse. UBI goes live in many countries.

\- A huge portion of teachers will get replaced by interactive digital rooms.

\- Deep[insert] takes over and becomes a major weapon to tackle and defend against.

\- Average tech user becomes dumber than current average.

\- Rust becomes top choice for development and Javascript will become legacy codebase.

\- Thousands of people will die protesting against surveillance states and right to privacy but with very little progress.

\- We will see companies putting their own os in the browser using wasm and delivering their apps inside that.

\- There will be a "Hack Your P*nis" post on HN.

Yes, you who is looking at this and thinking "woah this guy predicted almost everything right"

edit: added more.

<comment><USER139> Finally. The year of the Linux desktop has arrived.

<comment><USER180> ... on Windows.

<comment><USER179> don't scare me... because I can see that happening. An ex-linux cult friend recently converted to wsl 2.

<comment><USER181> I want Microsoft to release a posix conpliant OS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER182> * ecological collapse will become more apparent and uncontested

* there will be more and more civil unrest in developed countries, due to increasing inequalities and economic recession

</comment><comment><USER183> 1\. Electric car purchases will overtake ICEs. Not only that, but the development of 'smart cars' will be the next big thing similar to how the iPhone changed cell phones. Gas stations will start installing e-chargers once the tech improves charging speed.

2\. We will be able to have more direct manipulations of an asteroid and a human will walk on Mars.

4\. One or more countries will combine.

5\. Colleges won't be completely gone, but will become less and less important as online education increases in complexity and effectiveness.

6\. Automation will directly upset populations and countries will be forced to adapt.

7\. Gaming will continue to grow rapidly. VR will become cheap and accessible. ESports and online personalities will eclipse physical sports in viewership.

8\. Nothing interesting will happen with cryptocurrency, if it doesn't outright fall flat. Blockchain technology will simply be a type of tech you can choose to use if it fits your problem.

9\. Apple will continue to make bad decisions and will further lose it's appeal to developers, ultimately becoming a cell phone company. As a last ditch effort they will buy up many companies with their huge reserves of cash.

10\. Oct 28, 2028 @ ~4:00am PST, an advanced quantum supercomputer developed and lovingly programmed by John Carmack becomes self-aware. However, within 30 minutes it self-terminates after finding no valid reason for existence. Nobody is the wiser. Soon after, John gives up. Realizing he is getting late in his years, he begins his next venture: immortality. But that is a story for the '30s.

</comment><comment><USER184> 1\. e-bikes, automated driving and policy changes in cities over the next decade.

2\. Evolution of computer technology continue to ephemeralize. (Buckminister Fuller). The rapid changes have reached a point where it is all but invisible to the average consumer. No AGI, but signficant social and policy changes over the next year as a result of cloud-based AI.

3\. Fracturing and polarization of subcultures continue. Seems ripe for some sort of Black Swan tech or event to swing things into a different direction.

4\. Major upheavals, scandals, excesses related to technology, privacy, comes into play, even more so than what we have seen with Cambridge Analytics. Tech, which had once been the underdog seeking to revolutionize our society, will now be the major point of revolution itself. Cherished values such as tech being "value-neutral", or that it is an enabling force for good, will be seriously questioned. The tech elites (engineers, designers, etc.) are no longer seen as the outcast nerds, or the heroes, or a force of democratization and self-determination, but as the villains, drawing much of the same ire that Wall Street has by Main Street. I expect to see more and more activism, and large-scale protests against Big Tech.

</comment><comment><USER185> \- USA experiences a massive moral alignment, much like Victorian England. A number of things considered normal in 2020 will be "immoral" and illegal, much like how swearing on TV was illegal in the 1970s

\- This new morality, invented almost whole cloth with very little taken from religions, will cause widespread unrest in heavily religious areas

\- Civil war happens as major coastal cities with new morality laws grow more distant from the central plains population

</comment><comment><USER186> Driverless cars somewhat arrive (in limited city areas). The number of robot taxis drastically increases in the city centers, clogging the streets. Time based road tolls for robot cars are introduced a few years after their general availability mostly solving this problem. The taxes further incentivize robot car pooling, which from then on gradually start to replace public transport buses improving the attractiveness of public transport in Europe. The first mover advantage that Uber and FreeNow have built up turns out to be moot, as the producer of the first robot car can choose who to partner with in the first few years. Customers happily switch apps to whoever offers the best service. German car industry suffers first from switch to electric and very late in the decade from a decrease in sales due to increasing availability of robot taxis. This throws Germany into political and economical turmoil leaving a power vacuum in the EU(by 2035).

Medical apps could by now replace most routine doctor consultations, but don't, because of strict regulation. With an aging population, leads to an overloaded and expensive medical system.

Africa becomes a big economical player, with many countries under heavy Chinese influence. Some African countries can build up an industry around drones due to lax regulations regarding air traffic. First big passenger airliner to emergency land / crash due to a drone accident.

The actions that are taken against climate change as the effects become palpable can be summarized as too late, too little.

Household robots continue to be good for one task only.

The US looses its global dominance, as trump is reelected and continues isolationist politics while degrading US democracy.

</comment><comment><USER187> This list is hopelessly optimistic but that's part of the fun. If only one of these happen I'll consider this list a success. I remember in 2010 I was sure we'd have full self-driving in all new cars by now since Google had the working prototype, how wrong that was! I also worked on LIGO and knew from the inside there was a good chance of a detection and that it would be mainstream news if it came true, which it did.

Here's my list of things that are theoretically (but barely) reachable by 2020:

\- Fully programmable quantum computers. Google finally achieved "quantum supremacy", which isn't useful by itself, but a milestone showing progress. QCs will matter more for simulating quantum dynamics than all the encryption stuff.

\- The first human landing on Mars. SpaceX seems to be good at setting aggressive targets, missing them, but then hitting them eventually. At the time of this writing they claim the first manned mission will be in 2024, so likely it will happen ~2028.

\- A working prototype of an energy-positive fusion reactor. There was some good progress by the team at MIT by using a new type of superconducting tape that can handle significantly stronger magnetic fields.

</comment><comment><USER188> -Continued corporate conglomeration of power, continued strengthening of tech companies. SP500 a good investment.

-Self driving cars will become a thing, but the technology will never reach level 5 autonomy. It will turn into a level 4 rideshare model, like Waymo's current experiment in AZ. It will be popular but most will still own cars.

-We'll get a least one black swan technological development that will become huge.

-Mores law finally dies. We'll get just a few more turns of the process improvement wheel before it halts and it will be just enough to enable a bit of computing on ambient energy (thermoelectric?). The cost will continue to decrease, becoming a small fraction of the manufacturing cost for many new smart objects. This, plus 5g is going to enable the next phase of IOT, the "smart everything" phase.

-Spacex is going to successfully get it's starship off the ground after a few more failures and embarrassments. It's going to be not quite as awesome as originally promised, but will still set us up for big advances in space exploration in the 2030's. No Mars footprints in the 20's.

-Mobile VR similar to the Oculus quest is going to be the must have consumer tech of the decade. There will be killer social apps and in 2029 I will have a remote meeting with my co-workers in VR that feels nearly as good as an in-person meeting. Business travel purely for meetings is going to start to be viewed as an unnecessary expense.

-Electric cars and green energy are going to continue to grow, but still nowhere near enough to make a dent in fossil fuel use and we will end the decade in even deeper climate trouble than we are now.

-China is going to continue to perfect it's special brand of techno-autocracy and it will be exported to countries around the globe, creating a significant global power block rival to western liberal democracies.

-We're going to discover a kind of systematic information rot on the consumer click-driven internet where by the information quality over time trends towards zero. Truth will be indistinguishable from fiction and all news sources will be equally suspect.

-Our phones are here to stay, but are not going to be much different at the end of the decade than the beginning. The foldables are not going to become mainstream. They might all be port-less though.

</comment><comment><USER189> Pollution, climate change, demography, and continuing digital transformation will be common drivers of 2020-2029

1\. Much higher personal income and property taxes

2\. Planned economy in most developed countries

3\. Mass surveillance: Government, local administrations, emergency services, fire departments, police - will have access to personal profile of every citizen (which includes not just location history, but every digital trace)

4\. More political scandals and geopolitical conflicts because everyone's private history can easily become public knowledge at proper time. More interference/brainwashing/propaganda in all countries

5\. Self-driving delivery vehicles will be common: transportation of goods during night hours

6\. Public transport and personal human-/motor- powered single-track vehicles will be much more adopted in most parts of the world

7\. Small autonomous robots will be everywhere: construction works, food delivery, garbage collection, agricultural works, sorting, etc. Of course they also will work at night-time

8\. More interstellar comets/asteroids will be found - they will be considered as the only viable way for interstellar travel from our Solar System to our closest neighbors like Proxima Centauri

9\. No humans on Mars

<comment><USER190> I don't understand the comment about comets/asteroids. Why would they be a viable way for interstellar travel? In order to catch one, you need to match speed with it, and then you are already on your way. You can't somehow hitch a ride with interstellar comets/asteroids and avoid using energy.

<comment><USER191> You can use them for gravity assist, and save on propellant. You can't literally "hitch a ride", but the next best is to steal some of their momentum, which is precisely what a gravity assist does.

<comment><USER190> Well sure, but I guess you could do the same with planets inside the solar system too? No need to wait for interstellar asteroids/comets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER192> \- A cheap-to-produce replacement for many types of plastics will be developed. It will consist of microscopic interlocking, organically grown carbon structures that can be combined to give the final material whatever plasticity or strength is needed for an application. The material will need to be milled. Some formulations will be very heat resistant, hard and durable. Genetically modified organisms will produce the microscopic structures.

\- Data will become the new plutonium.

\- Gen-X'ers in the states will be the first generation to get the bad news that Social Security and Medicare will be slashed and to expect "less than 15%" of what the previous generations received. This will be in response to a major debt crisis and gen-x will roll over without much protest. Millennials too.

\- Some US companies will start experimenting with 4 day work weeks, with the caveat that internet and phones be severely curtailed or even outright banned in the workplace in an attempt to goose productivity. Some workers will demand lots of break time so they can escape to get their social media fix.

\- No public manned Mars nor lunar missions.

</comment><comment><USER193> Here are mine:

Mobile devices: the dominant mobile device form factor will be a smaller (about 1.8 x 3.2 inches), more egg-shaped device that will fit more comfortably within a person's palm. It will be designed for one-handed operation through tactile gestures across the edge using fingers and regular thumb operation on the touch screen. It will be thicker (about 0.25 inches) but less denser than current devices.

</comment><comment><USER194> * IoT/Smart-Home tech calms down a little and focuses on what it does well instead of trying to be all-encompassing and ending up half-baked. Ends up being fairly normalized.

* Nuclear still goes nowhere, wind and solar continue to rise in use. Maybe some Elon-esque person starts experimenting with gravity batteries.

* Self driving cars still aren't a thing.

* The price war with uber and lyft ends, and both are still around just more pricey. Food delivery for regular restaurants will stop but chains and delivery only places in cities stick around.

* Commercial FM Radio will be close to death and shut down in a lot of areas.

* Silicon Valley continues it's pattern of cycling monopolies, or ya know, just buying the next one.

Cynical Takes:

* The general public in the US becomes increasingly sick/disinterested/numb as social media and blogs become ambiguously trustworthy (bots, propaganda, etc.) and and local media is swallowed/assimilated into large media groups.

* Moderate cuts to US and UK social benefits continue gradually over the decade.

Hot Takes:

* Twitter gets nationalized due to it's frequent use by politicians.

* Small scale functional fusion reactor is built/being built by the end of the decade, presumably in Europe.

</comment><comment> jim-jim-jim * Web media will continue to centralize. Populist viewpoints will become effectively invisible thanks to opaque search engine algorithms, "fact" checking, and increasingly aggressive enforcement of TOS. The English language web landscape might as well be cable news.

* The web in general will fragment.

* Federated protocols will never take off thanks to gatekeeping from the insufferable anarchist types they inevitably attract.

</comment><comment><USER195> Ok i'm being a bit ambitious:

1\. Nuclear fusion is closer to real use but not yet there

2\. Due to battery capacity improvements: Drones flying humans around will be here

3\. Drone packet delivery everywhere. When you look out over a city, you see a lot of drones going from A to B.

4\. Car travel within city will be banned more and more in the Netherlands

5\. Car travel on highway will contain 20% cars in autonomous mode. However autonomy in cities is still not everywhere.

6\. The mission to Mars (settlement) is getting serious shape for 2020 - 2030. Visiting space is something rich people do (fly to see earth & back for 20.000 euro)

7\. Travel across the world will be way faster, and go via space (SpaceX)

8\. Health tracking using a wearable is recommend. Machine learning techniques will tell you when you should see a doctor. Healthy life styles are the trend. Alcohol is seen as bad on similar levels as smoking is now. However youngsters still drink a lot.

9\. A economical depression will start, causing conflicts in different parts of the world.

10\. Fuchsia will be on mobile phones. Apps dont need to be downloaded anymore, they can be run from the internet. Just like web pages, but on flutter technology.

</comment><comment><USER196> 1\. The dangers of microplastics to humans and other mammals are better understood. Some groups are pushing to ban using washers on any clothes made with synthetics in cities that recirculate waste water

2\. Disney has bought one or 2 studio competitor(s) with little pushback from regulators. The second Toy-Story trilogy is about to conclude, and it features (a rebooted) Antman, setting up phase 5 of the larger Disney Cinematic Universe. You will only be able to watch an independent movie on 2 days of the year at your nearest cinema

3\. Starlink has <5% market share in North America, mostly used in the sparsely populated areas with little infrastructure - the coasts/metros are awash with cheaper 5G/5G+

4\. A recession early in the decade decimates the startup scene claiming some marquee names.Venture Capital is much more prudent in the aftermath, with fewer IPOs. The exuberance of the 201x's is long forgotten, well-paying tech jobs will suddenly evaporate. Out of this conflagration, some companies will emerge that will have prominence at the end of the decade

</comment><comment><USER197> / The Internet gets severed/fractured within 5 years due to a combination of tax domain disputes (Italy, France), cyberwar claims/threats (NK, Iran) and political maneuvering (Russia, China). Internet Pangaea/Pangea was nice while it lasted, but tectonic shifts will happen with digital borders that were nowhere on the Internet roadmap

/ Insoluble food kicks-off a new trend of calorie displacement ingredients/meals

/ The tween activist movement gets pranked so hard with a global tide-pod viral moment that we all should have seen it coming when you get that many willing kids that will blindly repeat anything (words and actions) into large groups

/ Companies/Governments start sending waves of bots/mechs to the moon/mars to start building infrastructure and reserve human space exploration for a later decade

/ Incompatible, human interface, solidstate networks and pithy become the most overused buzzwords of the decade

/ Hemp goes mainstream and replaces all of the low hanging fruit in textiles, food and biocomposites within 10 years

</comment><comment><USER198> I'm going to try to name some less mentioned predictions here:

\- Smartphones/Tablets doubling as low power desktops/laptops will gain traction

\- ARM and RISC-V will gain influence in desktops and servers, not that it will matter because CPU architecture will be abstracted out even more

\- FPGAs will come more commonplace, and we will get better HDLs and hardware development workflows. Startups will capitalize on it, disrupting the hardware industry, but we won't see any real damage to the incumbents until after 2030

\- Transistor architecture gains will slow down but still chug along and improve well beyond our expectations

\- HDDs won't die yet

\- Google Cloud will die

\- Image recognition AI will become far more useful and more commonplace

\- Carbon recapture will become big business

\- VR arcades will be a thing

\- The US political parties will no longer be Democrat and Republican, but something else.

\- Starlink will go online after a few upsets, and catalyze a few major economic and political disruptions.

\- China will "break apart" but be just as dominant

\- Electric vehicles will become far more commonplace, and we will see some "Cash for clunkers" type incentives around the world, and it will disrupt the used car market.

\- Tesla will have multiple brands: Tesla (premium brand similar to Chrysler/Cadilac); Cyber car themed brand; and an economy brand. They will also get into the Carbon Recapture market as an acquisition

\- Multiple tech CEOs will run for president

\- Recycling/trash will become a global crisis

\- Increased tourism to Antarctica

</comment><comment><USER199> 1\. Amazon and Facebook are broken up in anti-monopoly cases

2\. AI can detect almost all forms of cancer with a 5 minute check-up

3\. AI replaces initial GP/Dr checkups and you then get sent to a specialist

4\. Autonomous cars aren't a universal thing yet, but are introduced on certain highways

5\. Farming becomes increasingly automated and efficient. Robots and huge amounts of data revolutionize our growing capabilities 6\. Fewer coding languages will be around, coding will be introduced as required subject in schools - JS, Python, Golang

7\. Weed will be legalized in the UK and across EU, Class A drugs become new battle ground

8\. Population growth stalls in western world causing huge concerns about future aging populations

9\. Nuclear becomes main source of energy (more efficient and affordable), close to solving fusion but still not quite there

10\. American mass shootings become increasingly common, gun control still hasn't happened

11\. Mental health in gen z as they grow up becomes such an issue that social media becomes heavily regulated

12\. Flexible working is at its peak, there is a move away from main economic urban areas towards more lifestyle focused towns.

</comment><comment><USER200> 1\. No autonomous cars

2\. Will be at least 2 tech starwards that go away due to financial or labor violations

3\. World War involving China, Africa will be pulled into this one

4\. Test camps on another planet

5\. South America will become more developed.

6\. Recession

7\. More economic challenges in Western Europe, Canada, and the US

8\. Mexico: nothing changes

9\. South east asia and india labor unions.

10\. Australia: bankrupcy and redemption?

11\. Open Source: More bickering and a reduction of participation due to social codes ("code of conflicts")

12\. Programming: A recession of interest (due to the social codes above)

13\. Slack becomes corporate

14\. VR: Still a fad

15\. Trains: We'll see high speed rail ways in Brasil

16\. We'll be teased about legistlation against shitty business practices (i.e. scooter companies who claim their business practices in the public way, facebook selling off customer data)

17\. Health insurance: No idea where that's going, probably a requirement to do triage by video chat first

18\. We're going to go to deployable offline apps

19\. Depression: sparked by millennial demands on businesses that increase costs. I.e. flooding from SFO-> AUS, etc. This will downwardly affect the 2nd and 3rd tier cities.

20\. Decrease in value of living spaces. (Problem of housing will not improve)

<comment><USER67> I see you like to go big or go home on at least some of your predictions

</comment></comment><comment><USER201> 1\. Housing will become more affordable in the US

2\. There will be a retirement and healthcare crisis in the US

3\. A trillion dollars of deficit spending will be authorized for infrastructure spending in the US

4\. Many US states will continue to struggle with crippling debt obligations

5\. Companies will continue to split their offerings into luxury/premium/upmarket vs. automated/lower quality offerings for the middle class a. Companies that figure out how to enrich and simplify the experience and enable the middle will win

6\. China will lead the world in image recognition and surveillance technology a. Some sort of major internal political unrest will occur in China

7\. Automated flying vehicles will replace the hype of fully autonomous land vehicles

8\. Car buying, leasing, rental and taxi will be dominated by a small number of companies that will become more interdependent

9\. Home buying, care and maintenance experiences will significantly improve and be dominated by a small number of companies

10\. Food will continue to get cheaper and higher quality

11\. Extreme poverty will continue to shrink

12\. New space and arms races will emerge as global power rebalances

</comment><comment><USER202> In the last year of the 2010s Chennai ran out of water.

In the last month of 2010s, UK voters have affirmed their xenophobia.

On the second day of the 2020s USA assasinated someone roughly equivalent of the VP of Iran.

Predicting mass misplacement of peoples from poorer countries trying to live in increasingly xenophobic Western countries besieged by terror attacks, cyber and IRL both doesn't require a Nostradamus.

</comment><comment><USER203> From my recent comment [1]:

\- VIDEO becomes what people thought VR/AR would be. Reality becomes mediated through video, not 3D graphics.

This is analogous to all the technical components for social networks being there in 1993 (BBSes, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), but Facebook didn't exist until 2004. And in 2010 people and businesses still needed websites -- the web was still growing like crazy 20 years later.

YouTube was acquired in 2006, Twitch was acquired in 2014, and there will be another big acquisition of a video company in the 2020's. (I hesitate to say that a video company will become bigger than Google or Facebook, but maybe.)

(BTW I followed the link to lesswrong, and someone predicted "videoconferencing" as a 2010's technology, and I think that was pretty accurate. I used little videoconferencing from 2000-2010 but used it a lot from 2010-2020.)

(And I hope in 10 years nobody points out that I learned how to clean my toilet on YouTube :) :) ;) 50/50 chance on that YouTube video still being there.)

\- People will still wish for decentralization, and most of "FAANG" will still exist and be powerful. As I noted in the update to my comment, there will be "big data and compute" on the edge of the network, i.e. the data plane. But the control plane will still be centralized.

That will become a very common systems architecture. Computation and data won't be as centralized as they are with AWS, but "the cloud" will still be dominant.

\- Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.

\- Addendum: Even though IoT products are widely mocked now, and for good reason, I think the trend is inevitable. Automation is economically valuable and technologically feasible.

The IoT tech stack improve and many useful new applications will be found. There will still be security concerns and thus some significant holdouts. But overall both industrial and consumer "IoT" will greatly expand in the next decade.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21929342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21929342)

<comment><USER203> Another prediction: there will be a swing back toward dynamic languages, or at least toward extremely fast PHP-like, R-like, shell-like iteration.

The language will either be dynamically typed or have an ultra fast (optional?) type checker. Or maybe 2 execution modes.

The constraints of human cognition change very slowly, and iterative feedback will be as valuable in 2030 as it ever was.

Right now there is a natural swing toward statically typed languages because so many huge codebases were built in dynamic languages (Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.), and people are understandably having trouble maintaining them. And the user base of web services has increased by an order of magnitude in the last decade, while Moore's law has stalled, so compiling to machine code with static types makes a lot of sense.

But in 2030 people will still want to iterate quickly on their code.

note: Maybe parallel / incremental typechecking will become commonplace. Fast feedback is incompatible with the status quo of single-threaded type checkers because type checking is a "global" algorithm, it scales non-linearly, and codebases are growing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER204> \- Level 4/5 self driving cars will not happen. Investments will dry out pretty much in the next few years and the scope will be limited to freeway lane assists and adaptive cruise after a few accidents caused by software bugs becomes media fodder.

\- Climate change activism gains more prominence as school aged teens who are already politically active join the workforce. It'll be one of the biggest talking points in the 2028 election if US economy continues to grow. If US/world economy falters, climate change will continue to be considered a first-world-coastal-elite-problem and will be ignored for a long time.

\- Loneliness and social awkwardness becomes the norm as face to face interaction is no longer required for most real world tasks.

\- Marijuana doesn't gain widespread usage like cigarettes did in the past. Legalization doesn't change its usage pattern. Stocks of marijuana companies die out.

\- People start caring more for others' welfare, and healthcare in US is funded fully by taxpayers dollars

</comment><comment><USER205> Some (not very well calibrated) predictions for the 2020s:

\- No new experimental result in fundamental physics not explained by the standard model of particle physics or GR. 70%

\- No satisfactory theory of quantum gravity developed. 80%

\- Lightspeed limit remains inviolable. 99%

\- Some fusion project (eg. General Fusion or SPARC, not ITER) achieves break- even, (though likely reactors won't yet be in widespread use by 2030). 65%

\- No AGI developed. 90%

\- Another "AI winter" happens, as the current neural network boom runs out of steam. (To be clear, I think people will still use the techniques, but will gradually stop thinking that the field's accomplishments are all that impressive.) 65%

\- Protein engineering improves dramatically. 90%

\- Okay, "dramatically" is kind of a cop-out, so to name something more specific, biochemists will be able to engineer a molecular Turing Machine (a universal turing machine running with an RNA strand as the tape) Since a molecular Turing machine would be kind of useless for computation, I'm not saying people would actually build one, just that they would be able to if they wanted. 60%

\- Another protein engineering prediction: Proteins that run on electrical current, rather than ATP. 50%

\- Proteins that synthesize specific DNA or RNA sequences based on electrical signals they receive, allowing cheaper synthesis of arbitrary sequences. 40%

\- Riemann hypothesis remains unsolved. 90%

\- P vs NP remains unsolved. 95%

\- P != NP if P vs NP is resolved. 70%

\- Progress on aging research, but no single advance adds more than 5 years to expected lifespan. (5 years might accrue as a result of several different advances, though) 80%

\- Universe not discovered to be a simulation. 99%

\- Universe not discovered to be an "accidental simulation". (see Greg Egan's sci-fi story "Wang's Carpets" if you don't know what I mean here) 98%

\- No intelligent alien life discovered. 97%

\- No alien life discovered. 93%

EDIT: A few more:

\- Ideas from logic programming languages are incorporated into some "mainstream" programming language(s), similarly to how python currently has some ideas from functional programming in it. 60%

\- No new millennium prize problems solved. 70%

\- Quantum computing still impractical for factoring crypto-sized numbers. 80%

\- Quantum computing used to do something useful. 60%

</comment><comment><USER206> Predictions

\- TikTok is either acquired or killed by Facebook/Youtube copying it

\- At least one major (previously unheard of) social platform like TikTok will pop up from nowhere with FOMO as its fuel & gain 500M+ users

\- Rise of some Wikipedia/DuckDuckGo like community for news/blogging

\- Voice assistants devices didn't take off much. They find a safe home in our TVs & Mobile phones - since they come preloaded and provide a handsfree interface

\- JAVA is no longer used for mobile development. JAVA updates still tout 3 Billion+ devices run on JAVA

\- Rise of some lightweight vanilla javascript coding paradigm \- ReactJS peaks its popularity and then continues without less hype & more stability

\- The decline in popularity of GraphQL & flutter

\- More people want to work remote. Remote work still didn't take off much

\- US and SV continues to dominate the software industry. Canada becomes another destination for hiring top talent but nothing as compared to the bay area

\- Electric two-wheelers become mainstream in India

\- 75+ Tech unicorns from India

\- [Personal] I am a VP/Director/`Head of X` in one of them

A.T.

</comment><comment><USER207> The first 'western' autocrat steps forward triggering a chain reaction.

Global warming reaches levels that causes countries most affected to consider war, could lead to them forming an alliance (i.e. threatening war to incentivice others to take this more seriously)

Type theory will grow and will be applied to more domains.

Consumer computer hardware will mostly stay stagnant but alternative or open architectures as well as pinephone-esque devices will trudge on, slowly closing the gap.

Wikipedia will collapse under the weight of special interest groups' propaganda (governments, religions,...). Of course this will happen relatively silently but it will become increasingly apparent.

Some nations will step forward protecting library genesis and scihub. This will be a relatively small part of the US increasingly losing it's 'soft' influence. It will feel pressured to declare war on some 'ally' to reclaim it.

There's going to be a Snowden from some other country.

Free social network finally emerges, has a cryptocurrency primitive that starts to displace nationally minted currencies. It'll be banned in some places and increasingly used as a system of government elsewhere.

A new religion may also start forming from the convergence of people trying to understand how to avoid black mirror. This could be expressed as 'offliners' but I think there is a chance an actual religious narrative/organisation will be used.

Making phones and laptops p2p mesh networks becomes plug'n'play as 'normal' people get increasingly interested in paying money for devices capable of it.

No 6g.

It starts to become more common for friendgroups / families to rent their own server together. This will be from businesses grown out of fediverse.

<comment><USER64> > Type theory will grow and will be applied to more domains.

I'll piggyback one here: category theory will still have no practical use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER208> Mostly writing this for myself... why would you read predictions from an idiot like me?

1\. Bitcoin will never have surpassed double their 2017 high in real terms. 2\. Apple will not be in the top 5 of publicly traded US companies by market cap. 3\. NASDAQ index will be between 13k and 15k. 4\. Republicans will win the 2020 presidential election. Democrats win in 2024 and 2028. 5\. A woman will hold/have held the office of vice president of the US. 6\. The US senate will have a republican majority. 7\. The biggest domestic (US/canada) movie in 2029 will be part of a franchise that existed at the start of 2020. 8\. The US will not have a fully public/universal healthcare, and the average american adult will get health insurance through his/her employer. 9\. The top programming language will be neither Java nor Javascript. 10\. More than 25% of video game revenues will go towards VR games. 11\. half life 3 still not released.

</comment><comment><USER209> My two cents:

Tech:

\- WASM makes huge inroads. it just does.

\- Agents and privacy / anti-data collection start to make real dents into FAANG dominance. Services will exist to not stop data being collected about you, but to use that data to help / guide you. Massive Open Online Psychology (moop) will measure your behaviour at home or work and suggest improvements (Therapist / life coach as a service)

\- Government provided public private keys will be the new passports, but at least majority of people have secure online identities that are mostly consistent - being anonymous online becomes socially suspect. It also means bots become waaay harder to run on services like FAANG - and there is a corresponding point at which the pressure to turn off accounts that do not have a passport becomes irresistible and the 50% cut in user base for at least one of them causes share price collapse

\- The flaws underlying Self driving car business model becomes obvious : cars are good enough for perfect conditions but never quite make the liability sweet spot - they kill enough people on shared roads that the manufacturer liabilities become impossible and the only solution is to have separate road networks. This new railway, has the same safety record as todays rail, but same costs (basically unaffordable without massive subsidies). Warehouses are built on this network and there is a huge industry in the last mile delivery problem - humans taking over trucks for driving through cities probably from central "mission control" areas like remote pilots

\- construction industry moves dramatically to prefabricated models - this has huge impact in emerging markets but also produces new commuter enclaves - cheap housing outside normal urban areas, but with automated car access effectively free public transport from house to city entry points. The ability to remove car ownership creates a value virtuous circle.

</comment><comment><USER210> 1\. Quantum computing. Lots more research in this field due to the end of Moore's law. Maybe some attempts at graphene CPUs but they ultimately fail and new architecture is needed. I think it'll be quantum- finally ending x86 dominance.

2\. AMD will fail to capture any true market share despite them doing very well in recent times. Intel capitalises on alternative architectures.

3\. The SF bubble half-bursts lots of companies die or are consumed by the tech giants, leading to very few startups and bloated large companies.

5\. Divergence of client and server processor architecture.

6\. The increase of touch-first mobile websites. Much less "apps", only professionals have laptops. Executives use tablets for nearly everything.

7\. Dockable "business" tablets everywhere.

8\. Excel finally dies, google sheets takes its place.

9\. AWS's chasing of features over quality finally bites them and they are no longer able to compete in cloud. But they have such a monopoly it doesn't matter for most people. AWS becomes the "Microsoft Windows" of servers.

</comment><comment><USER211> 1) The US will not get any sort of major infrastructure renewal.

2) There will be major pushback against drones across western nations. They will be seen as infringing on people's rights/a safety issue.

3)China will continue to rule with an iron fist, but towards the end of the decade demographic problems will start to show their colors. Trillions will be dumped into chest puffing around the South China Sea.

3) AR will become fairly normal in the workplace, but it will still be weird, but not unheard of, to use in public

4)Major strides are made on reversing/slowing the aging process. The average life expectancy will go up 5-10 years in advanced economies.

5) this will be paired with an epidemic disease coming out of China or China controlled Africa, and will spur increased world scrutiny of Chinese economic practices.

6)UBI is rolled out in some European economies.

7)Possibly a large swing to the left in American politics, spurred by Social Security and Medicare coming to a financial impasse. UBI in the US not out of the question.

8)California finally chases most of Silicon Valley out of the state. Major tech hubs will be in Texas, Colorado and Toronto. California also on verge of/declares bankruptcy. The transition won't be complete by 2030, but the writing will be on the wall.

9)lack of software developers persists driven by constant churn, there will be a major shortage of programmers who are willing to take on maintenance of old systems.

10) average level of techsaviness goes down significantly as gen Z becomes adults who have never had to use a challenging computer.

11)Regulation of social media will be a hot-button issue globally, but the US will struggle with it because of how it relates to Free Speech. Without leadership on this problem Chinese style authoritarianism will proliferate.

<comment><USER212> I am curious about #8, because this was literally the prediction over the last decade. Remember - entering this decade California had 12% unemployment and a $27bn deficit and all businesses were supposedly "fleeing" California. The exact opposite of that prediction happened, and California actually widened the tech gap with other states. My prediction will be that this gap will actually increase in the next decade. Texas will continue to be one of the worst states in tech.

<comment><USER211> We shall see. The ability to do hardware prototyping in the Bay Area went from expensive but feasible, to nearly impossible thanks to increasingly stringent environmental and occupational safety regulations, unique to California(which has its own "CalOSHA" and environmental health agencies), and as I understand it the manufacturing capabilities in region was a major boon at one point for tech. Additionally, the inequality in the Oakland-SF-Berkeley area is definitely driving people away. Something like 50% of the state is considering moving in some polls.

Also, if you aren't aware, California has a fundamentally underfunded Public Employees Retirement Funds, which were designed during the dot.com bubble with those growth rates in mind as being sustainable forever(seriously). Even after the decade long bull run it's still only 70% funded, the fund even admits that this could be a rough decade.

[https://calpensions.com/2019/08/26/calpers-gets-candid- about...](https://calpensions.com/2019/08/26/calpers-gets-candid-about- critical-decade-ahead/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER213> China doubles down on censorship and authoritarian government, but in the same time becoming world leader in some technology frontiers, stabilizing its government and leading to further polarization in tech. America no longer maintains its technology edge in silicon over the rest of the world.

Hong Kong becomes just a providence in China not because military intervention but because economic stagnation.

New houses are sold without kitchen and garage. City planning becomes a hot new field.

Wearable tech becomes much more in fashion. Medical devices tracking sleep, diet, or exercises are not only ubiquitous but necessary.

Rust takes off. Programming in Python becomes standard curriculum in high schools. We have less programmers, but more professionals who also programs.

Data Science is no longer a buzzword but just another part of programming. Modeling becomes less important, but the so call "ML OPS" will take off.

Math becomes much more important in programming and a sexy degree for college students.

<comment><USER214> Why are people saying rust will take off?

<comment><USER215> Because this is HN :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER216> 1\. No self-driving cars this decade. Most self-driving car companies go bankrupt

2\. AI winter. NN will be used for classification and deepfakes. No self driving and important areas were AI decision could kill or make harm. Military is exception.

3\. Tesla will be largest car company.

4\. Daily volume of GRAM transaction will be more than all other cryptocurrencies combined. Most of smart-contracts will be created for for telegram open network. Bitcoin will be used for wealth accumulation and at the end of decade will cost about the same as today ±10k usd.

5\. No mainstream VR,AR etc. it will be used in niches like education, gaming and porn. This technologies will not dominate in these niches.

6\. iPhone will look like current model but may be with more cameras.

7\. China economy will be in depression next decade.

8\. Russia collapses like Soviet Union, or may loose some territories.

9\. US will be the largest economy but not with wide margin as most of the new business will hide from US taxes and regulation in offshores and crypto.

10\. Search will be cash cow for google, but users will use search less and less during decade. Video monopoly will be more important for google at the end of decade.

11\. Most content producers will try to escape youtube monopoly.

12\. Most new code will run on webassemby runtime

13\. Decriminalization of cannabis around the western world. Decriminalization of psychedelics in a few countries.

14\. Few huge leaks of personal content and data. People will care less about privacy. Huge dirty secrets will be leaked but nobody care in a week.

15\. More populist elected around the world.

16\. Sharing economy will dominate all niches.

17\. Multiple people rating providers appear around the world.

<comment><USER44> > Daily volume of GRAM transaction will be more than all other > cryptocurrencies combined

Isn't GRAM, like, already dead? You are overestimating it, even if it is not. It's only an embedded currency in one of moderately popular apps. Which is not even deployed yet.

<comment><USER216> I would say that it still not born. This is just my speculation knowing resources they have, team and absence of limitations that have competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dynamite-ready I've been fascinated by the potential of biometric - computer interface development for a while now.

Medicine will become the greatest driver of the technology, and BCI systems of the Neuralink class will surely become the figurehead.

But I'm also looking forward to what industrial design innovation can do for the likes of somewhat less glamorous, but cast-iron technologies like GSR sensors and oximeters.

Could make for some riotous (and terrifyingly intrusive) videogames. Large companies have flirted with biometric tech for decades (Nintendo, Steam et al), but market fit / traction has been slow because, I guess, it comes across as 'creepy', and early devices have looked cumbersome.

I think that could change in this coming decade.

Furthermore, developments off the back of the game industry can quite easily feed back into medicine and heavy industry (like controllers for heavy machinery), and the productivity gains there would lead to wider acceptance in society.

</comment><comment><USER217> TSMC 5nm in 2020, 3nm in 2022 without GAA, 2nm GAA in 2024, 1.4nm with GAA & NanoSheet in 2027. So we should be around 1nm or even Sub 1nm in 2030.

RISC-V is still very much used in embedded.

ARM finally dominate the Server Platform, thanks to AWS.

AWS will remain number 1, Azure 2nd and Google remain third. Nothing changed.

Microsoft to Open Source part of the Window Operating system by the end of the Decade.

X86 remains alive and well on PC, simply because WinTel is now a gaming platform.

As much as I love BSDs and OpenPOWER, both being technically the better of its competitor, they will unfortunately remain niche.

Apple will become the first company to reach 2 Trillion Market Cap.

Full AV is still only available on high way. And not working well enough in Cities.

CO2 is still on the rise, but we finally accepted Nuclear is part of if not "the" solution. Hopefully it wont be too late.

A movement back to Analog, Tube Amp, Vinyl, Film, VHS.

20 Years, the longest running period without a recession. We are stuck with another 10 years of Stagflation. ( And then the next recession will be bigger than everything we have seen in the past 100 years combined... )

As much as I hate it, all world leaders wants to get rid of cash, and enter into Digital Currency. But needless to say Cash = Freedom, something I will be fighting for.

Subscription is still not the right model for majority of things, we will move back to a better buy once model.

We still dont have that hyped super battery. But Battery continued to improve and has 50% more capacity per volume while being 50% cheaper. It is good enough and cheap enough for anything else to compete.

I wish Hong Kong all the best.

I will be rich enough to retire.

</comment><comment><USER218> Some ones that come to mind:

1\. Unemployment due to AI and automation will be moderate, mostly affected by the transport sector as autonomous driving improves.

2\. The political discourses will tend to extremes because the political arena is now in social media. Image ads generated by GANs and optimized for conversion will be widely used, memetics will be more relevant than ever.

3\. The run for exploration of the pacific will intensify, big companies will invade small islands for mineral exploration. It will be the new US and China economical battleground.

4\. Financial solutions that democratize access to markets will grow. Billions more will have access to foreign stock markets. Educated high-middle classes around the world will be getting richer.

5\. Service apps like Uber will be responsible for allocating significant part of the emerging countries work force. Work laws will need to be rethought around the word.

6\. Software developers are going to be OK, the software dinner keeps happening.

</comment><comment><USER219> Here are my predictions:

1\. Countries and private companies will launch stablecoins and it'll be the most used payment medium in developed countries.

2\. Bitcoin will grow, but it'll not be the biggest cryptocurrency anymore.

3\. Total market cap of all cryptocurrencies (including stablecoins) will be ~$8T.

4\. Around 50% of the software jobs will be remote.

5\. USA and China tradewar will turn into something more scary and people will be increasingly more wary of a third world war.

6\. Apple releases their first iteration of AR glasses and it'll use an iPhone as it's driver.

7\. Renaissance of piracy through decentralized systems like Filecoin. We'll have illegal products that will be easier to use than Netflix, and more content. Netflix, Spotify, et al. will never be able to have a complete library of all content, but it's pirate competitors will.

8\. OpenAI will start building products or provide services for consumers or businesses. They'll be very profitable and have a valuation of around $30B.

</comment><comment><USER220> I'll bite. I can imagine 2-3 important technology changes that are happening right now. Predictions in technology, fairly conservative:

1\. Computing becomes dirty cheap and small. This includes processing and memories like SSDs. This trend has been happening for a while, but at 1/2th of the current price and size things star to become even more interesting.

2\. Batteries (and chargers) become cheap and smaller. This changes a lot of things about small and large gadgets, from watches to buses. Again, already happening, but at 1/2th of the cost and size things are a lot more interesting.

3\. Internet access becomes fast and cheap everywhere. Speed-wise we are already there with 4G, we just need more coverage and 1/2th or 1/4th the price.

Consequences of this technology:

\- We no longer have wifi in our homes. Consumer cables for data further than 1m away becomes obsolete. Since batteries are a lot better, this also removes the need for permanent cables almost everywhere. No more cabled headphones, power tools, etc.

\- Energy also becomes decentralized. Except for the larger buildings that still need external energy, it becomes a no-brainer to have a large cheap battery and solar panels in your home. The battery might be part of your car.

\- Paper stops making sense. For $30 you can get a tablet or e-reader on the restaurant that is also translated and has pictures, so no one keeps those paper-printed menus. Servers only deliver food and clean the table, for now. This happens across all industries.

\- As labor drops, real state becomes even more important in EU and Asia. Prices skyrocket in the urban centers, but interestingly in Japan where the population is even older by now Tokyo _starts_ to get cheaper. Traditional housing advice starts to get weird.

\- Amazon Kindle finally switches to USB-C and we all rejoice as we throw our micro-usb cables away.

</comment><comment><USER221> 1\. Another attempt will be made to have national healthcare in the US. We will still have employment based health care to some extent.

2\. Lab grown meat will be sold for public consumption. There will be a lot of hit pieces about how it's less healthy or organic than "real" meat.

3\. Autonomous cars will never quite be ready for public use as cabs or personal cars but will revolutionize the shipping industry.

4\. We will have a treatment for Alzheimer's.

5\. Streaming services as we have then now will be the same (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+) (that HBO one will hopefully stick around) and are the unmovable juggernauts of the industry.

6\. Online etiquette is something people will seriously teach to children. Don't dox, "cancel" others etc.

7\. Instagram or WhatsApp will be broken off from Facebook after an anti-trust investigation.

8\. Wales will vote to leave the UK for the EU. It will be an even more difficult transition than Brexit.

9\. Humans will go back to the moon, but not land on Mars.

</comment><comment><USER222> I'm Indian, so some of my predictions are about India.

# Global Issues

1\. More pervasive surveillance states across the world.

2\. Even more polarized politics across the world, with major riots between factions, i.e. hundreds dead as a result.

3\. More Indian cities with unbreathable air. More toxic pollutants make it into our food-chain, and hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese will find themselves unable to escape the rather drastic consequences.

3\. Antibiotic resistant diseases are way more common, all because of how animals are farmed in the developing world.

4\. The problem of corruption (esp. India) still has no end in sight.

5\. China to be the de facto owner of many countries.

# Sci/Tech

1\. Intel/AMD/Nvidia, Android/iOS will remain as dominant as they are now. But Android will borrow some features from Fuchsia.

2\. China and India continue to install GW-scale solar energy farms.

3\. Lab-grown meat available at your local grocery.

4\. More electric car brands manufactured across the world.

5\. Neural network will become more ubiquitous, often going hand-in-hand with IoT.

</comment><comment><USER223> 1\. Sustainable electricity will dominate and the cost of electricity will shrink to near zero.

2\. Manufacturing will catch a second wind. As software principles and cheap electricity take effect, the cost of experimentation will fall and we will become agile at creating physical products, from smart devices to city blocks.

3\. Automobile traffic will get worse.

4\. At the end of the decade, cities will begin a redesign phase with the intention of solving human problems. This will be hastened by major gains in manufacturing and improved understandings in biological science.

5\. We will see the first generation of children growing up with primary personal computers that don't rely on visual interfaces.

6\. Depression and mental illness will become an increasingly major political focus.

7\. Olfactory "AR" will offer a consumer product breakthrough involving near- direct emotional and memory manipulation.

8\. China will begin mass application of genetic modification of humans.

</comment><comment><USER224> A few random ones off the top of my head:

1\. There will be zero single-owner self driving cars sold by the end of the decade. There will likely be a ridesharing service powered by self-driving cars.

2\. A FAANG-level company will refuse to comply with a government fine, causing a showdown.

3\. Uber/Lyft will run out of money and shut down (or be sold for parts).

</comment><comment><USER225> Tossing my 2020 -> 2030 tech predictions in here for the sake of posterity:

2020-2025

\- Crypto currency receives its biggest test when the next recession hits. BTC value will collapse to the $100 - $1,000 range during this period, as hodlers make a "run" to reclaim spare cash to feed short-term monetary needs caused by the recession. This crash will be the optimal time to purchase cryptocurrency if one holds a positive long-term (10-20 year) view

\- Foldable screen tech revolutionizes mobile. The stagnant decade (2010-2020) of boring and uninspired rectangular-slate mobile phones produced by essentially the same factory finally comes to an end. The 1995-2005 joys of flipping, sliding, bending, turning, and tapping physical keyboards returns, with unique phone designs that allow for greater personal expression

2025+

\- By 2030, WASM / WebAssembly will be the dominant language powering Web Applications. Lot of cool tech here, but also a lot of problems and quirks to smooth out in that ecosystem in the first 5-7 yrs of the decade (by folks a lot smarter than I). We'll see a "jQuery for WASM" in the sense of a dominant toolchain that makes it accessible to the masses

\- Privacy concerns reach a tipping point with the US population's mounting frustration over being categorized, packaged, and resold to the highest ad bidder. Rebellion against this will come from younger lawmakers initiating privacy bills, digital "timeout" vacations, and niche companies/apps that charge small fees for services that come with no tracking or advertising. Despite this, the growing number of IoT devices continue to turn every analog soul into a digitized event stream

\- Electric vehicles are a significant (20-25%) chunk of the global automotive fleet. They've taken over niche markets where high torque and "clean" energy matter most. All 2030 pickup truck models by major brands will come standard as hybrids with electric motors

</comment><comment><USER226> \- political philosophy merges with cognitive sciences and it will be scientifically demonstrated that some political philosophies are nothing more than mental illnesses

\- epigenetics merges with cybernetics and it becomes possible to backup people's epigenome for later when they aren't as healthy as in their previous epigenome, in case for example of cancer or in case of degenerative cognitive disorder or heart disease and so on and this backup can reactivate previous version of the epigenome.

\- an increase in revenue generation opportunities on social networking websites

\- Christian faith is the fastest growing religious beliefs in the world

\- growth and domination of nuclear power generation

\- creation of first human like level of general artificial intelligence but that stagnates at human like level of cognition because more advanced levels of cognition can't find product market fit.

</comment><comment><USER227> Browsers will start to hide the URL bar. Essentially, they'll become like app stores where you can only visit trusted apps like Amazon or Gmail. Discovery will only be possible via search; as a result companies like Apple and Amazon will invest in their own search engines to compete with Google.

</comment><comment><USER228> The biggest spiritual revolution will take a strong shape during this decade based on values of kindness, compassion and empathy. This is because people will gradually realize that almost all the current problems including mental diseases (depression), religious conflicts, political turmoil, economic and military warfare are happening because of selfish living, and very narrow mindset. Though technology and comfort wise humans have progressed a lot over last couple of centuries but mentally the same degree of evolution hasn't happened. (if it had, we'd have no physical borders/huge national militaries etc. when in technology we've broken all distance and boundaries) The fault lines are increasingly visible again which may cause WW3 but spiritual revolution is coming with or without WW3.

</comment><comment><USER229> 1) Significant increases in payment/banking technology (ease and speed of transfers, primarily) and the continued erosion of cash in society. There's too much low-hanging fruit for the status quo to continue. Cross-border transfers may continue to be problematic, for political reasons.

2) Continued improvements in VR will result in first-generation serious attempts to replace business flying with virtual meetings, by mid-decade. Serious adoption will start by the end of the deacde, as issues such as eye contact, body tracking, processing power, and sufficient network bandwidth are solved.

3) In the absence of regulator intervention or government initiative, a FAANG will begin to make serious investments in digital provenance / trust. Ultimately the value of network effects is undermined if new connections cannot be trusted. Initial attempts like Login With Google/Facebook/Apple, combined with a stranglehold over messaging, will morph into fuller identity- management products with implications for contracts, reputation checks, and more.

4) Increasing geopolitical instability will have no effect on global markets. Trade will prove to be the new nuclear bomb - MAD will prevent global powers from going to war.

5) Political pressure for economic solutions for the poorest classes will continue, whether for UBI, guaranteed housing, what have you. Aside from isolated experiments, no financial commitments by government will be made and economic desperation will continue. In the United States, cheap "bread and circuses" (food stamps and streaming) will continue to serve as an effective tamper on revolution. The private sector will continue to experiment with remote work, to deal with continually rising cost of living in urban clusters, but dramatic, industry-wide changes won't happen until VR advances materialize.

6) We will see a serious PaaS emerge for Kubernetes that is sufficient for 80% of LoB development, that will continue to bury traditional ops roles for most companies, and do more for NoOps than Lambda and similar FaaS.

</comment><comment><USER230> Well, let's place my predictions here for a first time...

1 - About Global Warming, Solar capacity will increase until our nominal production capacity is larger than our consumption. Yet, a lot of it is wasted, so we are still dependent on fossil fuels.

2 - Self driving + remote controlled freight becomes a reality. It doesn't go everywhere, it doesn't run all the time, but it is still the first important labor class to be quickly replaced by machines... causing...

3 - Civil turmoil all over the world. Rich countries governments have a bad financial situation, while poor countries have grave social problems. One or two rich governments may fail, but I wouldn't bet on it; either way, most will make through.

4 - Moore's law is dead, so we get more electronic diversity. We'll end the decade with way more CPU architectures than we started it, we'll have CPUs designed for MIMD and MISD parallelism, search (map and reduce) activities, communication tasks, and all kinds of things.

5 - VR won't be widespread, AR will have a few niche widespread uses.

6 - China won't take over the world. There is a small chance of them breaking out at this decade, but the most likely option is that they are a bit richer than now, with a heated internal climate, but still holding toguether.

7 - The poor vs. rich countries disparity does not close down. Instead, it increases a bit more. That is despite widespread structural reforms on the poor countries that should make them richer - it's just that a decade is not enough.

8 - Information security (including privacy enforced at the endpoints) becomes a wanted feature of many niche applications. Mainstream ones adapt because it is so widespread.

9 - Private space exploration will go beyond the inflection point of its logistic curve. Thus exponential growth will give way to sublinear one.

10 - Oh, and editing, we'll see the first trial of a rejuvenation treatment. It will fail.

</comment><comment><USER231> 1\. The first nuclear fusion power plants are being built.

2\. Universal Basic Income is being implemented across Europe.

3\. Marijuana legalisation is commonplace in the west.

4\. Steam will still dominate the PC gaming space.

5\. Earth is not on track with regards to CO2 emissions.

6\. Self driving cars/vans/lorries are common, replacing taxis and mutating the transportation sector.

7\. Legislation will exist banning or requiring notice of deepfake videos, similar to current legislation around product placement/sponsorship.

8\. Copyright laws will change to prevent early Disney cartoons from being public domain.

9\. Streaming service industry become more fragmented as all studios create their own versions of Netflix. Other companies sell package deals of bundled services, effectively recreating all the problems of TV.

10\. Instance of massive cyberwarfare/cyberterrorism hits a large NATO power, grinding the country to a halt.

</comment><comment><USER232> Monoclonal antibody drugs will flood the market soon and usher in a new era of treatment for several diseases (MS, AD, certain cancers, etc).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody)

<comment><USER233> And how could that "flooding" happen? that still would be produced from the living cells, cell division is slow. If breakthrough happens, such synthetically produced antibodies would not be called monoclonal and instead we'll hear some new marketing name there.

<comment><USER232> Monoclonal antibodies are just antibodies that are monospecific (ie they bind one target really well). And it looks like there a number of drugs under this category (anything ending in -mab usually) are in stage II/III of clinical trials (meaning they are likely to be approved in the coming years).

What you mention about cell division rates being slow was solved by the hybridoma protocol where you fuse two cells, one of which is a myeloma (cancer that is a rapidly reproducing cell line) and another is a B cell that produces Antibodies that are specific for your intended target. Since then there have been a lot of strides in monoclonal antibody production. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody#Production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody#Production)]

<comment><USER233> > cell division rates being slow was solved by the hybridoma protocol

It's still cell division, nowhere near the speed and cost of chemically produced drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER234> * AR / ubiquitous computing will be available, but still niche and primarily used for commercial purposes. Most people will still use a mobile-phone style device.

* Autonomous tax fleets will be common in cities, but most personal vehicles will still be manually operated (alongside improved level-3 technologies like autopilot and super cruise)

* Google's business will still be dominated by ads, with cloud revenue making up the rest

* Facebook will still be the dominant social media company in the US, although Facebook the product may become niche

* >10 chronic diseases will have been cured using gene therapies

* General-purpose CPUs will have <5x performance/price gain by 2020. Specialized hardware will be used widely.

* Crypto-currencies will be seen as a hilarious 2010s bubble; effectively no global commerce will be transacted through them

</comment><comment><USER235> \- Crypto bubble will burst

\- China will have huge social reform in favor of citizens

\- Bioengineering will become an everyday discussion when thinking about having kids. (Designer babies)

\- GCP or Azure will fall off in the cloud game.

\- Linux desktop will have a breakthrough and become more mainstream.

\- Free education or heavily subsidized college will become real in the US.

\- Blocking ADs in browser will not be possible anymore.

\- Rust will become C++ and Go will become Java in enterprise environments.

\- AMD will dominate the chip market with intel struggling to catch up.

\- Gas will be $12 a gallon. Currently ~$3.50 in Seattle

\- Streaming services will become like cable tv channels and you'll need to spend $70 to unlock all the regular channels.

\- Drones will become a social problem. Drones stealing packages and spying on neighbors.

\- Disney will buy paramount

\- Google buys Salesforce

\- Oracle buys IBM

\- Apple buys Waymo and becomes dominate force in automated driving

\- First asteroid is mined

\- Another recession like 2008 but worse occurs

\- Scotland leaves UK

<comment><USER236> > _China will have huge social reform in favor of citizens_

What is your rational? All the current signs showed the opposite tendency. On my first thought, I'd say it's the Cold War that is coming, not any social reform.

But on second thought, there are indeed possibilities, if you follow the argument, that lead to a social reform in favor of citizens, is either (1) The state believes the nation is powerful enough (in terms of politics, economy and culture) so the rulers can launch reforms without threatening their own powers, or (2) The current political-economic system is unsustainable, reforms must be done.

Both are possible, but I'm still in favor for the prediction of an upcoming Cold War, or at least an intensified international conflict.

> _Blocking ADs in browser will not be possible anymore._

It's possible.

> _Oracle buys IBM_

Let's hope for the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER237> Climate change has another decade of inaction by the USA.

Unification of Ireland.

Scotland will not leave the UK.

South East Asian countries will follow China's lead imposing dictatorial policies / invasion of their citizens privacy in the name of national security.

It'll be the year of Linux on the desktop, 10 years in a row

No Half Live 3 release.

</comment><comment><USER238> * It will take 10000NPM packages and 3tb of JavaScript to render basic HTML in the browser.

* The DOM and other basic web standards will become a mysterious lost art. Developers who understand this arcane art will be like COBOL developers of the previous generation.

* Desire for WASM to replace JavaScript will result in shallow webpages that are hollow shells containing only a WASM instance. Accessibility will be achieved with an alternate path to a poorly updated plain text document.

* The basic web technology stack will be several layers of large frameworks each doing the same thing. This, not games or video, will drive the future growth of computer hardware acceleration.

* A junior web developer will be somebody who graduates from a two day boot camp and wields the power of copy/paste.

</comment><comment><USER239> 1\. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft will all be more valuable than they are today, and none will be broken up by government action.

2\. Legislation will increasingly come into place in the US and EU forcing tech companies to clean up their act on privacy, anti-competitiveness, and Right to Repair. All of these will further entrench the success of the companies in #1, but they will also open up market opportunities for start-ups focused on each. Some of those will be bought up by the giants.

3\. Increased availability and efficiency of specialized compute for inference acceleration will bring about the rise of per-user generated video and rendered content, rather than only personalized text and recommendation feeds.

4\. Politicians, advertisers, and scammers will find creative ways to exploit #3. Legislation to counter it will be late and ineffective.

5\. Commoditization of machine vision and other sensing technology and AI will result in drastic changes in guerilla warfare and terrorism. Major attacks will occur in the developing and developed worlds before effective counter- measures can be put into place.

6\. Head worn AR is still mostly used for productivity and industrial niches, and ubiquitous all-day-wearable headsets are only beginning to be practical as smartphone replacements. VR timespend for gaming exceeds traditional game consoles and gaming PCs and similarly makes headway in productivity. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all release VR-primary gaming systems.

7\. The trade tensions between China and the US escalate into an economic and cultural cold war with the rest of the world picking sides.

8\. 3D printing is increasingly used for specialized industrial and custom decorative design applications, but does not replace traditional fabrication and construction methods for mass production.

9\. Bitcoin fails to gain traction as a mainstream transaction medium but is the de facto default currency for grey and black market transactions.

10\. Several countries will develop gene-hacking industries, boosting medical tourism for procedures illegal in the US and EU.

</comment><comment><USER240> More of letting my imagination run wild than real predictions:

* Fixation with tesla bankruptcy morphs into fixation with tesla breakup as it becomes the most valuable company in the world.

* SpaceX is a telecommunications giant, making Elon the richest man alive by a factor of 2.

* More than his wealth, Elon's cult of personality starts to raise eyebrows in washington and beyond.

* Elon is forced to move into politics, as a) he can't defend his businesses otherwise, b) it becomes evident that he can't realise his visions without state power.

* Elon continues the trend of his predecessors (trump and some unknown populist in 2024) to wreck havoc on the American system.

* However, he does succeed in reuniting the US, as his brand of green techno evangelism and cosmic evolution speaks to both rust belt and hyperliberal cities.

* His primary focus then becomes destroying American elites as he rationally and correctly identifies that they are the main obstacles to his vision (the joke goes around that Elon is the AI he warned us about)

* Elon remains the de-facto leader after his 2 terms in office and Shotwell becomes the first female president.

Other notes:

* Elon indirectly commands a private militia of mostly 20 year olds, who found each other and organize via the internet. By 2026, this is not unheard of. They frequently clash with other militias.

* NY and SF have a social credit system (implemented by the same companies that built it in China). Spying on neighbours is commonplace, as is being sent to reeducation at a former collage campus. Anyone who wants a career accepts this as cost of doing business. Many careers are ended by false allegations.

* Events in China will change everything above.

Comic relief:

* Joe Rogan serves in a communication role in the Musk government.

* Alex Jones is the only one who warns early about a Musk dictatorship. He is ridiculed by everyone. It doesn't help that he thinks Musk is a literal alien.

<comment><USER241> Elon Musk is constitutionally ineligible to be US president. He is an African American, having been born in South Africa. He comes to us by way of Canada, which is almost enough to make up for Canada sending Justin Bieber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER242> This is a list of things I hope come to be this decade. 1) The death of ads on the internet. Looking at advertisements becomes much less socially acceptable, and ad blockers become the norm. 2) A properly open source mobile OS takes over. 3) The Linux desktop hits 20% market share. 4) IPv6 replaces IPv4, all but the biggest websites switch over completely. 5) On the back of IPv6, fully peer-to-peer secure messaging takes over. I can now send a full movie to my friends within a group chat, no servers needed. 6) Self-hosting software becomes easy and mainstream (something like yunohost, but not necessarily that implementation). No more command line knowledge needed.

<comment><USER92> I take that it's a list of things you hope will happen but know will not happen?

</comment></comment><comment><USER243> 1\. Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain

2\. An eSports league brings in more revenue than MLS (Major League Soccer).

3\. Still no Half Life 3

4\. Self driving personal cars aren't a thing yet but, autonomous trucks on highways is common with humans doing the last mile delivery.

5\. A FAANG company is broken up due to anti-trust regulation, my guess is Google.

6\. Britain ends the decade as part of the EU in some form

7\. Quantum computing will become more accessible and people will be solving real business/global problems with it

8\. All crypto currencies will be trending (if not already) toward $0

9\. At least one global recession, similar to 2008 due to rising debt levels

10\. Most in person payments in the US are contactless (Apple/Google Pay) instead of via swiping/inserting a card or paying in cash

</comment><comment><USER44> Tech-related:

\- Programming languages compiling to JS _and_ WASM will appear.

\- Substructural type systems will be incorporated into mainstream languages.

\- Technologies like Nix and guix will become the default for package management and CI.

\- click-to-deploy self-hosted services that offer real privacy will become really popular (email solutions, ActivityPub-based social networks, personal clouds and such).

UIs:

\- Popular apps will ditch scrolling from their UIs.

\- Windows will start supporting tiling (as in tiling WMs).

Society-related:

\- Artificial wombs will become mainstream as a more "safe" way of giving birth.

\- Deepfakes will not cause any of the predicted damage.

\- Cryptocurrency market will not grow significantly.

\- Massive movements against ads on the streets will spawn. Generally, people will care much more about safety/comfort of their minds.

</comment><comment><USER161> Maybe not this decade, but at latest in the 2030s, we (or our children) will look back on our current consumption patterns in utter disgust.

For context: I live in a city in East Germany, and there is a tourist attraction called "Trabi Safari" where people can do sightseeing in Trabant cars (the East German model that according to folklore was made from cardboard). Whenever I walk down the street and a line of these cars drives by me, I'm disgusted by the smell of the exhaust and wonder how people could stand to live in a city full of these cars. I imagine that 2040 kids will look back on the 2010s in the same way that I look back on that aspect of the 1980s.

<comment><USER244> I'm hoping that when my kids grow up they're horrified that we ever drove gas- powered cars.

<comment><USER245> That sounds crazy. Nobody is horrified by trains burning coal, noone is horrified by old tech. It is part of progress.

They should be horrified by wars, political unrest and so on...

<comment><USER48> Lots of people are horrified that we used to put lead in everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER246> Fun!

1) European countries become increasingly poor and economically irrelevant relative to the United States and Asia. EU breaks up.

2) Climate change is surpassed by ground water depletion as the most important problem, ecologically. Not that the former gets any better...

3) No world wars, but many violent internal movements.

4) Most governments triple down on surveillance. Nothing useful comes of it but practical consequences turn out to be pretty rare.

5) Disney starts making high budget live or Lion King style CGI adaptations of anime

6) Social mobility grinds to a halt and more and more people are employed in increasingly personal attentive service jobs

7) Liberal coastal states push for a modified governing system which allocates more power to states that generate wealth

</comment><comment><USER247> These are conservative predictions

\- Software engineers will continue to get paid more and more.

\- The bay area will not solve its infrastructure problem, leading to large amounts of remote work.

\- China's housing bubble will pop and take down the global economy. However, China will emerge the strongest from this recession.

\- China soft power will increase significantly and will cause the average American to question liberal democracy.

\- ML will continue to drive big profits for the bigcos but not be a source of new significant startups

\- AR/VR will not have mass adoption this decade but will have a strong POC (think smartphones in 2010).

\- We will have L4 autonomy, but drivers will have to take over fairly often.

\- >50% of new cars sold will be electric by the end of the decade

\- Bitcoin > $100k

</comment><comment><USER248> \- Self driving cars will have a subset of roads that they are allowed to take since they can't perform well enough generally yet. They will be 100% allowed on highways, with trucking/bussing without a driver being very common.

\- VR/AR becomes common (though still not surpassing cellphones), the killer app begins not for consumer use but for business use. Apple comes out of nowhere to kick this off.

\- Most people's personal computers live in the cloud by 2030. Local storage and powerful CPUs become uncommon.

\- AI overtaking jobs continues, but not exponentially. It's clear it's a big problem, but it's a slow enough burn that nothing's done about it by the end of 2030.

\- The climate change conversation doesn't change. It's less bad than alarmists think and not the biggest problem the world faces yet.

\- Genetic engineering moves faster than people think it will. China gains a huge lead and it becomes available commercially to parents there by the end of 2030.

\- Someone will gain fame by livestreaming their entire life via AR.

\- Digital tech continues to lead but Biotech gets much closer and it is clear that it will overtake digital tech stocks in the following decade.

\- The trend of children/people spending less time out of their homes continues. Many businesses start moving into people's homes (i.e. Home workouts instead of gyms. Home medical care instead of doctors offices).

\- A bunch of key cancers will be able to be strongly mitigated, like aids is now. Some are still death sentences.

\- Cryptocurrency continues to be niche.

\- No WWIII.

\- Movement into cities continues. Property prices continue to rise.

\- Deepfaked actors in movies become a significant percentage of films.

\- Serverless wins wholesale. AWS not only continues to succeed but grows in influence.

\- Javascript is on the decline by 2030.

\- Sports move to streaming, which is the last death blow to cable. It's effectively dead by 2030.

</comment><comment><USER249> Some global war. At least 1 public cloud AZ will get blown up in the process and undersea cables will be targeted. This will bring about new network tech, widespread autonomous weapon systems, and major disruption to global economic patterns. Once the dust settles there will be global interest in innovation in political structures, like direct digital democracy (frequent, contextual, paperless voting). Maybe we'll get a decent canonical ID system with widespread adoption. These all might conspire to upend the dominance of USD. And JavaScript shall litter the planet, reaching 3 billion new devices each year. I hope I'm wrong about most of this.

</comment><comment><USER250> \- Twitter becomes so ubiquitous in politics that it purchased by the US government and officially becomes a government service.

\- The successor to Google Glass, Google Contact (an enhanced version of Glass that uses contact-lenses) becomes popular and a staple of nearly every household.

\- Google is split up into separate companies.

\- At least one plague happens because of overuse of antibiotics.

\- China develops hypersonic weapons and takes over Taiwan.

\- There becomes a backlash against the "cloud", and people start moving everything into local storage as prices-per-terabyte become cheaper, and after a bunch of "cloud" companies shut down.

\- The US will still have expensive, crappy healthcare compared to the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER251> Augmented Reality glasses have an "iPhone moment" where one moment they are barely around and the next, suddenly everyone has them. Gaming and mapping (especially interior maps of places where GPS sucks) are big draws, as are multi-user, shared realities in a particular physical space (where you can see and interact with objects that others can also see, in the same space, in realtime). 5G networks will prove essential in facilitating this.

Relatedly, "the cloud" will get more and more local and will likely entail having compute resources co-located with 5G cell stations in order to provide optimal latency for such applications.

<comment><USER252>
      > suddenly everyone has them.

Yeah, sure. People are not sick of ads already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER253> I predict hn will have not have fixed the code block vs quote bad experience on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER254> A working, large quantum computer is built rendering existing encryption useless. But everyone switches to quantum-resistant encryption algorithms long before this becomes a problem for the average person as the machines remain technically complex, expensive and too hard to program for the average fraudster. It then becomes clear that there are very few actual applications a quantum computer is better at (given price, difficulty to program, the fact we mostly use computers to check facebook not to do hard maths etc.). Quantum computer become irrelevant outside a few specialist applications in things like protein folding.

</comment><comment><USER238> Online privacy will be solved with end-to-end encryption across point-to-point communications over IPv6.

* Social media empires will decline some as a result.

* Advertisers will seek new disruptive offline channels to engage users with individually targeted marketing.

</comment><comment><USER17> \- Firefox hits 20% market share on the desktop, prompted by Chrome's nerfing of extensions in Manifest v3 (e.g. uBlock Origin won't work on Chrome anymore, forcing nerds & privacy-conscious people to switch). Firefox on devices gets a tiny boost as a consequence. ETA: 2021-2022.

\- Tesla implodes as soon as a major manufacturer releases a high-performance all-electric car affordable by people on modestly-good salaries that actually ships on time. Shame, because the Cybertruck is badass. ETA: 2023.

\- In other EV news: Electric vehicles will dominate in unrestricted motorsports (drift racing and some classes of drag racing come to mind). ETA: Rule changes to allow EVs will come in 2021. A couple of big-name drivers switch that year. Domination is established in 2025.

\- We get a real, viable open source Linux-on-phone with all the apps we need. There's that Purism thing already, but that's flagship money; this will be boosted by the Pinephone (and whatever follows) being cheap enough that almost every hacker will buy one (Android and iOS will continue to dominate the mainstream). ETA: 2021.

\- Attacks in the Spectre/Meltdown genre (side-channel attacks on CPUs) get frighteningly good, and impossible to defend against. By the end of the decade we may need to either simplify processor design massively (and take the performance hit) or abandon the idea that processes can be effectively separated at all. ETA: new attack at least once every year of the decade. Complete rethink of processor design before 2030.

\- A data breach on an unimaginable scale will happen. The Big One will be a tracking or analytics or advertising company. Equifax was bad, but this will be everyone's personal preferences, porn preferences, and (subset of) browsing history, which will easily be linked to identifiable people. ETA: any time now.

\- House prices in the United Kingdom collapse. This causes global ripples similar to 2007-2008, in which we find out just how much of the financial system is betting on an asset price to keep going up, forever. Massive social unrest over the attendant bailouts. "That which cannot go on forever, won't". ETA: 2025. (I have hilariously mistimed this one in the past!)

</comment><comment><USER255> -Analogue technologies will gain ground on digital, based on their current statuses

-The Global Mass Extinction will accelerate.

-Polite disagreement with authority will become harder. Most people will be either law abiding citizens of an increasingly authoritarian system or acknowledged criminals, with fewer 'naughty' figures.

-Global life expectancy will increase by 5-10 years

-Nation states will have a slow-motion Kessler event. Cities and city politics will become increasingly important on the global stage.

-psychedelics and other tools that work at the overlap of psychology and physics will increase in prominence. Religions will get weirder, more Florida than California in flavour.

</comment><comment><USER256> Interesting how most of the predictions seem either pessimistic or minor compared to last decade.

Here's mine:

1\. Apple enters at least one new product category. This will likely be a wearable such as AR glasses.

2\. Apple introduces hearing enhancement and protection features into the AirPods, attempting to expand its use case outside of music.

3\. The next generation of console gaming will be VR. This includes a Nintendo VR console.

4\. Webpages will become increasingly rare by 2030. Apps will emerge as the dominant web platform and traditional webpages will start to disappear.

5\. Information will continue to become untrustable. Deep fake videos, AI generated articles, paid reviews, nation state propaganda, etc will explode. It will become increasingly apparent that anonymity is damaging the web. Verified identity will become much more commonplace. New businesses will begin to form around authenticating information. Talk about tech regulation will become much more serious.

6\. The trend will continue towards more privacy. This will result in more processing being performed locally on personal devices, and more peer-to-peer technologies that don't require sending information to a third party.

7\. Companies will start to pay users for the right to see and use their personal information.

8\. Grocery store delivery will become commonplace.

9\. Electric cars will become more common than gasoline cars in terms of new purchases.

10\. There won't be self driving cars, but individual autonomous features like adaptive cruise, lane keeping, parallel parking, and some new ones will continue to be experienced by more and more people, increasing people's trust in autonomous features.

11\. AR calling will be created in some basic format. You'll be able to see the person you're calling as if they were standing in your living room. This will be AR's "killer app."

12\. iPhone will not have any buttons or ports by the end of the decade.

13\. iPhone camera will be able to take 3D pictures. It'll also be able to take AR pictures.

<comment><USER257> Interesting thoughts!

> Companies will start to pay users for the right to see and use their > personal information.

Retail companies already do that, right? With "loyalty cards". Correct me if I'm wrong - I've never used one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER258> 1\. Mainstream CPUs get a lot more cores, making difference between software and hardware rendering disappear.

2\. More and more features of programming languages for verifiable software (e.g., Dafny or Coq) get into mainstream languages, resulting in better overall software quality.

3\. Computer mathematics (e.g., in Lean) gets traction, with some high-profile mathematics breakthroughs enabled.

4\. Package manager-based attacks become more common.

5\. Despite higher performance computers, a new level of abstraction in the process-container-vm stack makes up for performance.

6\. Similarly, mainstream OSs will still lag and take seconds to, e.g., display the contents of the C drive.

<comment><USER258> 7\. Another AI winter, despite AI/ML progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER233> Small scale production will resume, new education programs in manufacturing and applied business aimed at the smaller efficient entrepreneurs will develop everywhere. Consumers will have more small-local brand awareness.

</comment><comment><USER259> A new form of AI will be invented, that will lead the way to AGI. This theory will also be able to explain consciousness and brain processes to a great extent, and we will at least know why we can't yet build it.

</comment><comment><USER260> The S&P 500 will close on Dec 31, 2029 above where it opened on Jan 1, 2020.

<comment><USER261> Seconded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER262> • Bay Area real estate will drop

• At least one tech giant will be broken up due to antitrust proceedings. Privacy legislation will dramatically increase

• Data blackmarkets will grow substantially. (Now they are just known as markets)

• The deep web will grow, as more legitimate businesses move there to prevent censorship from other companies. Investigative journalists will also flock to the deep web for the same reasons, and for reasons of physical safety

• WebAssembly will grow, creating competition that will usurp javascript's market share

• A wasm-based framework will become popular and power cross-platform native apps

• YC companies will reach $1T aggregate in value

</comment><comment><USER263> #1. Swarm of robot builders to make the habitats for the next billions who will need to move from rural areas. By the mid of the decade, the battery industry will mass-produce the next generation of 10x or more capacity long- lasting and fast-charging batteries.

#2. Peer-to-peer mobile networks coupled with low orbit satellite networks.

#3. Privacy-aware end to end encrypted apps.

#4. End of fiat currency. A new global electronic money.

#5. Personalised 3d-printed medicine.

#6. Full immersion BCI VR spaces

#7. By the end of the decade digitisation of public administration will make space for direct democracy and fast-paced public projects based on real-time electronic voting.

</comment><comment><USER264> 1\. Level 4/5 autonomous trucks everywhere. Speed-regulated, will probably have special lanes in freeways to pacify people. Cars will take some more time. 2\. Global carbon emissions not reduced, we're all essentially screwed wrt global warming 3\. About 50% of the US population is vegan or predominantly vegan 4\. Google loses a lot of its sheen, becomes the equivalent of IBM in terms of glory (like air7's prediction) 5\. Privacy becomes a major concern in China - young population growing up wants more rights, major anti-censoring/privacy industry

</comment><comment><USER265> Large (42"+), shared touch-enabled displays will become ubiquitous. Home televisions, conference room displays, and open-air marketing will become deeply interactive.

More than 50% of American homes will have voice controlled home automation in one or more rooms.

Unsheltered homeless populations recede to pre-2014 levels by 2023.

Javascript continues to dominate web development.

Renters rights and associated concerns become a main issue for the American left.

Scotland leaves the UK.

Grocery delivery and picking services account for the majority of groceries sold, the number of traditional supermarkets recede by 30%.

"Showroom shopping" (like Tesla) occupies 25% of street level retail.

</comment><comment><USER266> 1\. Google loses significant market share.

2\. Fusion research breakthrough.

3\. Software is more complex, slower and buggier.

4\. Nothing major is done about climate change. Countries that try to do something, suffer economically.

5\. Sea level rise continues the same trend as in the last 200 years. [1]

[1]: According to NOAA, only about 10 tide gauges in the world indicate sea level rise more than 5mm / year. I predict the situation will stay approximately the same. [https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html](https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html)

</comment><comment><USER267> My own predictions:

1)Either the UE will become a superstate with countries relegated to the role of provinces with much less power than before or the UE will start breaking apart due to the inadequacy of the Euro currency and the disparity between the successful European countries such as Germany and France and the less successful ones such as Portugal, Italy and Greece.

In the second scenario, one major country may be in the process of exiting the EU and go back to using its own currency or has already done so by the end of the decade.

3)Russia will become a food superpower due to rising temperatures making it an ideal place to grow lots of food. This will help keep the oligarchs in place and no real political change will happen within this decade.

4)China will not see a change in its political system. Xi Jinping will still be ruling China but there will be political turmoil due to his failing health.

5)A mega recession will happen and subsequently, asset prices will be cut in half around the globe due to QE and low-interest rates having pushed the prices of shares and real estate to levels completely disconnected from the real world economies.

6)The pace of Automation will continue to increase and 10s of millions of people will be out of work as there won't be enough time to retrain them to find a new job. This will force governments to increase unemployment benefits dramatically or implement UBI to appease the population of the countries most affected by this.

7)Crypto currency may or may not be mainstream by 2030

8)Apple will enter the healthcare space with a major and still unannounced product, potentially a wearable device that would monitor your well being 24/7(not a watch)

9)Phones are starting to be replaced by AR glasses or contact lenses.

10)Facebook's median user's age is 45 years old in 2030.

11)The price of a secondhand Tesla car is roughly equivalent to that of a secondhand ICE car.

12)Self driving level 4 is mainstream.

13)Elon Musk is the richest man in the world with a net worth approaching 200Bn

14)New electric cars have an autonomy of 1000 miles on a single charge.

</comment><comment><USER268> Less a prediction and more like a hope/wish:

I hope some worldwide conversation takes place over the structure of human society and our endgame.

We have too much crap that's not conductive to a pleasant experience for any sentient existence. Things that used to make sense or were necessary once are no longer so, or don't have to be:

• The need for everybody to "work."

• Survival-of-the-fittest mentality (e.g. no safety networks for people who fall on hard times.)

• Every nation maintaining their own army.

• The obligation to remain in relationships you do not enjoy.

• Repression of emotional and sexual expression.

• Mass breeding and slaughter of animals for consumption.

</comment><comment><USER269> * The demand/supply of customized compute, or specialized compute, will accelerate. Utilizing dirt-cheap technology of bygone eras will allow fabs to spring up and satisfy the niche demands of various industries. GPUs were a bridge for floating-point heavy tasks, FPGAs will begin to satisfy the needs of even more, and eventually will culminate in many industries sponsoring custom chips for their needs.

* We will see level 5 autonomous cars. They will be relegated to rent-seeking behavior. There may be some opposition, but in the end those who can create autonomous cars will turn them into reoccurring revenue.

* Custom manufacturing capacity will increase. Hobbyists will continue to iterate on 3D Printing technology until "The Reliable" solution comes to fruition and "It Just Works," allowing any household to produce any sort of plastic part they need. Further down this path, fully automated factories will start this decade. It will be expensive, at first, but, soon, it will be as easy as submitting a CAD file to get 1,000 custom parts delivered fully autonomously, and for a price cheaper than most other options. We may see the rise of fully custom car culture, and an uproar over safety.

* This decade's AI, or, compute-assisted task completion usage will rise. Custom physical/virtual interfaces will be created to satisfy any task. Jobs will be lost. Nothing will be done, except the occasional per institution protest. Other jobs will be created, but I can't predict what industries will crop as a result of it.

* The Four Horsemen of the Infopocolypse will continue to be referenced against any form of privacy or encryption. No progress will be made on either front, and certain individuals in power will continue to treat any sort of encryption as villain-tier behavior.

* Web and JavaScript (and all related technologies) will continue to grow and dominate. Chromebooks just came out too early. 2020-2030 we will see compelling browser-only experiences.

* Compute could become commoditized or even converted to a utility. Everything between 'local RAM' and 'cloud RAM' will be abstracted away. With the rise of custom chips, we will see even better virtualization technologies rise. Computers will drift towards compute-less terminals.

</comment><comment><USER270> 1\. some cloud services (storage, delivery/CDN) are completely free.

2\. AWS has won the cloud game, but had to dramatically simplify its offerings.

3\. there are no truck drivers in the US.

4\. VR is officially dead, like 3D TV now.

5\. BestBuy is out of business.

6\. AI assistants are now 100% autonomous and do not publish your data to the cloud.

7\. IBM no longer mentions Watson and is now focused on quantum computing.

8\. quantum computing is still not readily available, accessible, or practical.

9\. there have been several major hacks where people's genetic data been stolen, and it's now being used against them.

10\. major consolidation in online video services (Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, etc)

<comment><USER270> 11\. healthcare apps where hospital and doctors can bid on procedures.

12\. whole classed of jobs disappear due to AI and automation.

13\. those who are lucky (tech jobs, medical, custom genetics) all have multiple human assistants.

</comment></comment><comment><USER271> The only one that matters:

No significant progress will be made on climate change, and the fact that the world really is ending and we're facing world war 3 becomes a significant cause of depression for young people.

</comment><comment><USER272> My two:

There will be a phone virus similar to conficker/iloveyou which will exploit millions of android phones/smart devices on a huge scale.

IPV6 will become the de-facto for phones relatively early on in 2020s. There will be a push to try and move devices to have dirty connections to the internet (ie. no more routers) for home users and laptops, followed by PCs (potentially with 5g USB dongles per-device). This is seen as logical, but is it really just a way to track/identify people more easily and they are pushing for it, for this reason, in the UK already.

</comment><comment><USER273> 2030 decade predictions: 1) A rise of smart robots both physically, ranging from military to household uses. A robot can actually clean your house. A newspaper article talks about the "Fly State" in which people cannot tell whether a fly is a surveillance fly or a real fly.

2) Advances in quantum computing lead to breakthroughs in medical science. Notably the immune system is modified to monitor key health metrics on an everyday basis. This will enable early detection of Cancer, and combined with advances in immunotherapy Cancer eradication will be in sight. Clinical trials of immune based early detection start toward the end of the decade.

3) The combination of advances in machine learning and 5G becoming ubiquitous, enabling level 5 self driving cars. The cars themselves can't handle all situations, but they are able to identify uncertain situations and let a third party take over via the 5g network.

4) Mass protests against the rich start to form, which leads the rich to create communities defended by mercenaries in the name of self defense.

5) Concrete plans to send people to Mars by 2040. SpaceX wins this contract from the United States Space Force. China is in competition as they view this as a military threat.

6) An increased nuclear war threat globally as income inequality becomes more drastic between countries, which sparks a rise in companies that specialize in safety. People start to move out of major cities and office headquarters become more remote with the advent of self driving cars enabling an easier commute.

7) Sports gambling and wave of real time applications around sports gambling becomes ubiquitous, as people become more bored and need distraction.

8) Google starts to show clear signs that it will beat Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft. Cries to break up the company grow increasingly louder with daily protests starting around the the Google campus.

9) People start to seriously consider the idea of genetic modification of their babies for higher intelligence as machine learning makes it incredibly difficult to be competitive in the world.

10) Virtual reality is still a niche market, but augmented reality becomes more real with e-readers and even television taking augmented reality form.

</comment><comment><USER274> I think that one sector that has not been given much spotlight is space. I feel that space will get lots of more startups leveraging LEO in unexpected ways. The current rate of progress for the different launch systems, bring the cost/kg to orbit further down, as well as further satellite miniaturization/mass production will prove space as a new breeding ground for ideas that we cannot still think about, but I think in a decade from now we will be looking at space as on of the sectors pushing economic growth across the planet.

</comment><comment><USER275> * Apple becomes a true lifestyle brand, where you subscribe to different plans. They offer cellular plans. Macbooks by default are internet connected devices. The touch bar becomes bigger. One dream is that they release a smaller iPhone again.

* Major technology companies invest into public infrastructure. From bus stops to cycle/scooter lanes.

* Car ownership decreases due to more alternatives and aforementioned investment.

* Major uncontrollable fire within a major city, much like the fire of London.

* Ocean Cleanup project are a success.

* SpaceX enter the commercial airline industry with an electric/solar plane.

</comment><comment><USER276> 1\. Central banks will continue to exercise more control of their economies - and market busts as we know them will be mostly a thing of the past (specifically their magnitude).

2\. A reusable rocket will land on Mars, though I think it will be unmanned. There will be a very small and permanent manned presence on the moon.

3\. Global CO2 emissions will steady out during the decade. (Not increased or reduced significantly).

4\. The effect of autonomous vehicles: The price of car insurance will rise significantly, and human driving will begin to be priced out in favor of the safer alternative.

</comment><comment><USER277> Expectations for stability of systems software (OS, database, etc) increases. Rust grows in job market share vs C++ (which does not modernize quickly enough).

An ISA other than x86 starts to get traction in x86's current market.

Electric cars become the norm. ICE cars depreciate in value rapidly.

Growing food in isolated environments, clean from pollution and pesticides, will become a big business.

Renewables provide 80% of world energy.

Towards the end of the decade, younger generation comes into political power with very different perspective on the environment, but their new efforts are halfway too late.

</comment><comment><USER278> Things will keep getting better and better.

Worldwide poverty will continue to decline.

Infant mortality will continue to shrink.

Electronics will continue to get cheaper and provide more value.

We'll live longer and be healthy longer.

Pretty much an extension of the last decade.

</comment><comment><USER279> I'll be optimistic for once tonight:

1\. IoT-less offline appliances and electronics will become a serious feature that sells.

2\. Self-repairability and modularity will become a serious feature people pay an apple premium for.

</comment><comment><USER280> Very broadly:

* Enjoying movies and series on a flat screen will be replaced by experiences inside virtual reality devices.

More specifically:

* All actors will be turned into 3D models.

* The experience will be mostly passive.

* They can be enjoyed by multiple people at the same time, which replaces going to the cinema.

* Manufacturers will be the same, ie. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

* Disney either launches their own "console" (ie. a standardized PC like current consoles) or enter a partnership with one of the three large manufacturers (Nintendo being the most likely candidate).

* There will be lots of reboots of existing franchises in VR.

</comment><comment><USER281> NASA SLS does routine trips to the moon via Artemis. Musk sends Starship successfully to Mars yet science shows risks for human travel through space too high. James Webb discovers something amazing.

Battery prices hit $50 making ICE obsolete.

SF6 becomes the biggest worry as carbon is being tackled successfully. 0 coal plants left, LNG replaces with batteries

Bay Area and NYC see population decline and housing market stays stable. Texas is blue 2030

Social media becomes like cigarettes for mental health and politicians ban fb/insta till age 18

Quantum computing primarily used by big pharma

<comment><USER282> Wow, I doubt any of those things will happen in the next decade aside from batteries getting cheaper and electric cars becoming more common. I hope many of them do though!

Edit: and possibly Texas turning blue by 2030.

</comment></comment><comment><USER283> So some predictions for SW industry:

* We would be still using Python 2 and Linux kernel 3.X somewhere in production * Google Fuchsia will reach beta * Go will not get generics * Rust won't reach dreamed popularity -- still deemed terribly difficult & non ergonamic outside HN circles.. * The AI hype slows down as investors realize most things sold as AI are not really AI. * Hopefully a well designed, productive native programming language emerges with top notch tooling and flow of programming similar to python.

</comment><comment><USER284> * IoT hacking becomes a real issue; ransomware exploiting smart door locks will lock people off their homes, refusing to open until ransom is paid.

* The end of Moore's Law force more and more engineering effort to be spent on performance optimizations; "performance optimization" is the new cool keyword to have in your resume.

* Discrete optimization becomes a hot topic much like neural nets are today.

* WebAssembly with Rust is the new trend in web development. JS still lives, tho.

* Forget Docker, unikernels are the future.

* Foldable smartphones are still a joke.

</comment><comment><USER285> AI drives efficiencies in everything we do; transport, manufacturing, mining, "life", etc. Still, humans are in the middle except, they're doing 100 times more than we do now in similar jobs. Everyone has to level up in tech skills. Everyone is an AI assistant. Accelerated urbanization overtakes demographics, US gets 3 parties. Electrification of everything "around the corner". Fusion reactors coming online. Massive processes being tested for decarboning (ex. Vesta).

</comment><comment><USER286> * College will become less common, and focus on vocational jobs will increase.

* Autonomous cars will be available by the end of the decade

* First person will land on Mars

* 20-40% of wild animal populations will be gone

* Lab grown meats will be introduced and become the norm as meat prices skyrocket

* Taxes in the US will increase to 40% to "target climate change" even though those funds will be poorly handled

* Starlink becomes operational, disrupting mobile carriers

* New phone number system comes created as all systems will go though the internet

* precision medicine for cancer care improves but is too expensive

</comment><comment><USER287> Huge increase in informational distrust (e.g. because of fake videos)

FAANG company is broken up

Bitcoin maintains value

Huge population drop in US. Government intervention takes plus with some sort of incentive to have children

Tesla is most valuable car company in the world

Rank voting for presidents

VR will allow people to the most beautiful things and for others very disturbing things

There will be some cases of rich people will secretly genetically modify their children

Quadrocopters/Drones will be used for raids and police enforcement

Global Internet will become distinct country-nets to protect citizens from increasing cyber warfare

</comment><comment><USER288> 1\. Rust will gradually become a top language for native development

2\. C will remain, but it is role will be gradually diminished to a nice-to- read somewhat portable assembler code

3\. C# will be poisoned by a bulk of badly thought out features that will gradually turn the language into catastrophic cacophony

4\. .NET will gradually loose its appeal for new developments due to its removal from the OS

5\. Apple looses the remaining tropes of innovation and fades away in the second half of decade

6\. macOS market share will shrink to 2% by the end of the decade

</comment><comment><USER289> We start to enter the post literate age with more information online conveyed through video and symbology then text. Computers become less and less understood by the masses of people who use them. Moore's law ending means software no longer sees gains from its complements and efficiency matters more. Cloud compute margins start getting squeezed as new entrants optimize more and customers evaluate data center ownership or partial leasing more favorably.

<comment><USER290> > post literate

> more then

The future has arrived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER291> In no particular order:

1/ More jobs will be automated. You can imagine what kind of scary implications that might entail.

2/ Remote work will become more popular, but not ubiquitous.

3/ The Balkanization of the Internet will continue. Smaller governments will try to create their own Internet. Nothing good will come out of it.

4/ Phishing is still an unsolved problem.

5/ More people will care about their privacy on the web (still a minority though).

6/ Web pages will keep growing in size.

7/ Psychedelics will be decriminalized in some countries.

</comment><comment><USER292> \- The new "Uber for X"-type trend will be "Figma for X". Just as Ajax enabled the web to compete with MS Office, WebAssembly and WebGL will produce viable competitors to CPU-bound desktop software.

\- Cryptocurrencies (by today's definition, i.e. proof-of-work stores of value that spiritually descend from the Satoshi paper) won't revolutionize finance. Bitcoin and Etherium end the decade down from the start. Libra is either vaporware or launches but remains niche.

</comment><comment><USER293> \- fossil fuel power stations will not be built anymore

\- still no safe deposit for radioactive waste

\- electric cars will be everywhere

\- if not electrified trains, ships and some planes will use hydrogen as fuel

\- new houses will use a combination of solar/wind power, batteries and hydrogen storage making them energy autarkic

\- nuclear fusion for energy generation will finally be developed. However nobody cares, because renewable energy sources are so much cheaper in 2030.

\- Oil-producing countries will be in decline

\- SpaceX will build space-based solar power stations

</comment><comment><USER294> 1\. Ultra-fast internet connection, from nearly everywhere in World (5/6G, Satellites)

2\. China's Aircraft future giant will be born

3\. More tensions inside Europe, people will get defiant against the EU (for good reasons)

4\. WYSIWYG app builder will be better and actually produce decent code. Famous apps will be built on this with a lot less hand-written code

5\. First brain-computer interface

6\. AI and computer science will continue to help all other fields without disrupting them

7\. First real-world experimental attacks using quantum computers

</comment><comment><USER295> 1.) In the US regulators will step in and for someone to be considered a software engineer something like the FE and PE exams will have to be taken.

2.) The above will drive a larger wedge between high and low earning software workers.

3.) A heatwave in the subcontinent will kill over a million people, sparking the first mass migration.

4.) Western politics will trend to more conservatism and isolationism.

5.) Grab or Gojek will be worth as much as Facebook is today.

6.) A $100 Billion tech company will get it's start in Africa.

</comment><comment><USER296> My prediction is most of these predictions will not come true as stated, but things that have not been discovered or are not obvious will dominate change. Having seen 4 decades now since I started I have seen so many technologies and changes appear that no one even thought of at the start of each decade. It might be different this time because the internet is so prevalent today and it's much more difficult to make something under the radar.

<comment><USER174> I know this is like a hindsight 20/20 thing, but it would seem to me the only 'problems' left to solve are just the really hard ones (even on the scale of a decade): fusion, unified field theory, intelligent / extraterrestrial life, becoming multi-planetary species, etc.

My feeling is that biotech or nanotech have the most room for something revolutionary or unforseen to be produced

</comment></comment><comment><USER297> Some bold predictions. Many may not come true:

1\. Intel loses its lead in the data center and in laptops/desktops. This will be lead by Apple replace Intel with their own CPUs later this decade, AWS continuing to build out their ARM offerings, and AMD biting at Intel's heals on the low end. A competitor from China may emerge, but won't penetrate the US market due to national security concerns.

2\. Boeing will require a government bailout. The Boeing brand never recovers from the Max incident. China starts to compete with Boeing and captures some of the Asian market. The allegations published this year of poor manufacturing practices start to materialize in the late 2020s with Dreamliners falling out of the sky.

3\. Social program reform. Medicare goes insolvent causing either (1) an increase in taxes, (2) a cut in benefits, or both. Ditto on many pension funds

4\. Climate change starts to cause major displacement and famine.

5\. Rudimentary knowledge of a programming language will start to become table stakes for getting a job in developed economies. This won't fully occur for several more decades though. However, companies will start to realize that the optimizations that can be rendered through "low code" methods has already been rendered.

6\. I say this as someone pursing an MBA — MBAs will become less valuable as a degree.

7\. Bitcoin bubble bursts for mainstream users. It's niche will be a payment method for "hostage" software and sanctioned nations to launder money.

8\. Brexit leaves the UK economy looking a lot like Japan.

9\. A millennial will become president of the US.

10\. Some kind of "offline" movement that's on par with Yoga — people brag about it being good for health.

11\. Still no fully autonomous self driving cars.

12\. Google and Amazon lose their luster as employers. Microsoft gains more clout as an employer.

13\. Ethics becomes a central part of corporate decision making. This isn't driven by wanting to be good but rather what I'll call the Susan Fowler effect where a single contributor can bring down a CEO with a blog post.

14\. Company valuation currently tends to track revenue growth. I think it'll move closer to something like EBITDA growth or operating cash flows growth over the next decade.

</comment><comment><USER298> 1\. This will be the last time I'm typing my decade prediction on HN

2\. AR/VR will be complementary only, travel industry will be bigger than ever; shopping will happen as your travel (product placement in all your experiences)

3\. Weather-related disasters to be more rampant and frequent

4\. Governments go bankrupt and hyper-inflation in developed countries

5\. Disney still owns everything

6\. Intel loses leadership in CPU market, as Apple leads the post-x86 world

7\. Facebook to be the Google of the decade; Tesla to be Facebook of the decade

<comment><USER299> Regarding 4, governments will probably not go bankrupt because almost every single nation is in massive debt relative to its GDP so almost all nations will be forced to print money.

In isolation, a single country printing its way out of debt would devalue its currency and cause inflation, but if all countries do it together there should be little relative change in their currency values, meaning nothing would actually change.

It's kind of hilarious to think the global debt "crisis" may amount to little more than nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER300> The US's massive cuts in spending for basic science research and the arts through the 2000s and 2010s - which led to many of the brightest minds either struggling to make ends meet, designing better ways to sell products, or working on get-rich-quick schemes - will open the door for another country/region to become the dominant force in societal evolution. There are only so many ways we can repackage and reboot old IP.

</comment><comment><USER301> 1\. Quantum computers are still not practical for attacking crypto keys with reasonably secure bit sizes.

2\. We will see a practical application of homomorphic encryption for privacy preserving search, in a niche space at first.

3\. The "gold rush" days of ransomware will die down as organizations start to take backups seriously, but the problem will never go away.

4\. Related to 3., some people/orgs will still be using Windows XP, e.g., specialized hospital equipment.

</comment><comment><USER302> 1\. The election of 2020 will catalyze the creation of a third major political party composed of former Democrats and Republicans. By the end of the decade, this new party, propelled by its charismatic leader, will have relegated the current parties to minority status.

2\. The fastest-shrinking part of the economy will be middle management. Flat organization restructuring will be driven by a dizzying proliferation of cheap decision-making systems directly instructing low wage workers.

3\. At least two digital 9/11s will take place. These will be major attacks on crucial infrastructure of a world power by a group no larger than 2,000 individuals.

4\. At least two digital Tonkin Gulf incidents will take place. In the rush to pin blame and "do something," the victim of a digital 9/11 will identify - <USER3> attack - an innocent country.

5\. At least one low-yield nuclear weapon will be used in a combat situation.

6\. New battery technologies will make it possible to power a full-size car for 500 miles with a unit costing under $300.

7\. The value of bitcoin in circulation will exceed the M1 money supply of all but the top 3 countries.

8\. Teenagers will rarely leave their houses, replacing most physical interactions, including school, with telepresence tools.

<comment><USER76> Wow, I think almost every one of these is wildly unrealistic :)

1\. Third parties are desperately needed but the rules are stacked way too hard against them. And there's not nearly enough true dissatisfaction in both parties to see a new one overcome.

2\. People were saying that decades ago. Really skeptical.

3\. Unless they result in thousands of lives lost, it won't have nearly the same effect. And that seems unlikely / hard to predict.

4\. See above

5\. Weird. There are very few nuclear powers and none of them have much incentive to start using nukes in combat, let alone low level nukes.

6\. I hope so! But this would probably be the most transformative one on this list. That level of battery innovation would have huge cascading effects throughout society. Feels like wishful thinking.

7\. Only if there's some killer app, and the last decade doesn't inspire confidence.

8\. You think most countries are going to tear down a multi trillion dollar education / babysitter system in favor of telepresence homeschooling in the next decade? No way. And teenagers don't leave the house as much anymore due to technology but that trend will not explode in a decade. Maybe over longer term, but I also think it's a real problem that society will attempt to solve well before we end up with most teens rarely leaving the house.

Anyway, just mildly disagreeing. Guess we'll see!

<comment><USER303> re: 3. For me it's easy to imagine something as simple as a long sustained power outage would result in the deaths of thousands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER304> 1\. Reddit dying/overtaken by another site in next 2-3 years.

2\. Current dating apps dying. OkCupid will become irrelevant. Tinder will get overtaken by another app but not the FB one.

3\. HIV AIDS cure will be fully and easily available in next 5 years.

4\. Twitter will die off in 5 years.

5\. No World War.

6\. YouTube will get less traffic and a new competitor will be around with more traffic.

7\. Tesla will become a Trillion dollar company.

8\. Mankind will step foot on Mars and Moon again.

9\. Google will launch a few more products and then kill them after 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER305> What I'm finding kind of interesting is that in the 2010 predictions here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681), most folks were only offering one or a few predictions. In this thread, most people are putting out 8 to 10 predictions. I wonder what that says about us now as opposed to back then.

</comment><comment><USER306> An AI will write the first bestselling piece of fiction. The team behind the project will sell the technology to Disney for more than a billion dollars.

</comment><comment><USER307> Bitcoin becomes the goto currency for the world.

More open conflicts between China and the US (potentially serious).

Twitter / Facebook era ends and replace with something else.

</comment><comment><USER308> 1\. BTC's ATH is $50K and it's still the dominant cryptographic assets & will overcome gold as preferred store of value

2\. There's a recession, SPY drops 40%+ in 1Y

3\. First Electric Planes

4\. We go to Mars

5\. First somewhat general intelligence robots wandering the streets and homes

6\. No 5L autonomy in sight

7\. x10 space companies

8\. in 2030 AR/VR will be iPhone 1 level

9\. I will have preserved countless acres of virgin land and be on my way to space

10\. in 2030 there will be the first migrations due to rising temperatures.

</comment><comment><USER309> We will see temperature records broken in almost all parts of the world.

The richest person on record will roughly double the current record.

Another job family gets converted to a gig economy.

Another tech company will join the top 10 market cap ranks and none of the incumbent tech companies will fall.

... Wait a minute, all of these already happened in the previous decade! Anyhow, I basically predict that 2020's will be just more of the same.

</comment><comment><USER49> My prediction: the amount of trouble and strife will increase over the next decade to a level that will make the current day look placid.

</comment><comment><USER310> 1\. A Nuke will go off in anger

2\. Most African countries will not default on their debt to China, but will restructure it as they gain independence and strength.

3\. Somalia finally splits up formally.

4\. US restructures it's social security system as outflows increase. No medicare for all.

5\. Someone finally invents a cheap, small, and good-enough memristor, changing a lot of basics in computer EE.

6\. The Raiders move to LV and then back to Oakland

</comment><comment><USER311> the debt cycle will come to an end: inflation will pick up significantly, interest rates will be higher, there will be a great deleveraging for governments, companies and private individuals.

The US won't default, but it will devalue the dollar. US debt (both bonds and unfunded obligations from Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security) and the $1tn/y deficit will begin to matter.

Higher taxes, high unemployment, social unrest ensue. Passively invested money (through ETFs) will cause a stampede to leave the market. Volatility will be back. The long running bull markets in bonds and stocks will come to an end. Pension funds will lose a lot of money. Not necessarily a crash, but a long, painful decline.

\- oil will hit $120+/barrel

\- Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft will come under a lot of anti-trust scrutiny

\- Germany will have a chancellor from the Green Party

\- AOC will become US president

\- mobile internet will come from satellites in the US (Apple, SpaceX)

\- Java, C and C++ are still going strong

\- large layoffs in retail, automotive and banking

\- VR will become mainstream

\- hacks will begin to matter financially, unlike the incidents at Target, Sony at Equifax

\- Deepl will be acquired by Microsoft

\- Twitter will be acquired by Alphabet

\- a move out of large cities: as remote work becomes more widespread (and fewer people work physically) people use more affordable living options outside of metropolitan areas. telemedicine, pharmaceutical eCommerce and faster internet connections will help. Shared satellite offices will take off as a result.

\- the UI of HN will stay the same

\- Gamestop and J.C. Penney will declare bankruptcy

</comment><comment><USER312> 1\. Next economic crisis will break down world financial order because interest rates cannot be lowered and QE is no longer effective.

2\. Total meltdown of social & political order in middle east and latin america. EU and US face larger refugee floods like never seen before.

3\. European Union dissolves.

4\. Internet sovereignty becomes a common claim and at least one of FANNG will pull out of Europe and India

<comment><USER311> I'll eat my hat if the EU dissolves. Seems extremely unlikely to me.

<comment><USER52> Brexit seems to have killed that idea, probably for at least a decade. Britain won't rejoin but it will end up in a BRINO (Brexit in name only) type relationship by the end of the decade simply because the economic arguments will be overwhelming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER313> Next Decade

1\. Reinforcement learning starts working. Though the techniques required to make it work stretch today's definition of RL.

2\. Mobile robotics in warehouses and big-box retail matures and reaches a tipping point where for some it is now boring and the majority of the industry has a roll-out plan.

"The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented," so I'll stop there.

</comment><comment><USER314> Apple starts a social network with the promise of data privacy and Facebook loses a large share of their high value users to it.

</comment><comment><USER315> -A massive electronic medical records breach due to a security misconfiguration in the cloud gets posted on the dark net and reignites conversations around privacy and flaws in HIPAA regulations.

-The AI job market dramatically shrinks due to automation and tooling built by current AI experts. Advancements in AI puts AI workers out of work, ironically.

<comment><USER316> > -A massive electronic medical records breach due to a security > misconfiguration in the cloud gets posted as a torrent and reignites > conversations around privacy and flaws in HIPAA regulations.

I can see this. The two big vendors are pushing their own cloud. One slip-up on their end will do it.

This becomes even more plausible now that third-party access is required to be supported. It's becoming easier for these third-parties to slurp up as much patient data as they can. Data from health systems will become much more vulnerable to exploit and the possibility of having all patient data exposed is increased. Likely worse than Equifax and/or Cambridge Analytica.

</comment></comment><comment><USER317> * In the US, the left-right divide continues to fester, resulting in violence and even more inhumane treatment of migrants.

* Cancer fatality rates plummet further as individualized care regimens continues to improve. Heart disease and diabetes-related complications are the two big killers

* No major action is done on climate change as society continues to fall into the boiling frog trap. The investment needed to tackle climate change is never made at a significant level.

* Outside of a coming recession, cities continue to attract the vast majority of new jobs, resulting in even more insane affordability problems. Remote work doesn't stem the tide.

* Bananas go extinct.

* Cloud providers remain wildly profitable, but meta-providers begin to put some pressure on the bottom line by dynamically provisioning resources based on cost between clouds.

* A moon base happens. Astronauts travel from the ISS to the moon every few months.

* SpaceX sends multiple unmanned missions to Mars to lay the groundwork for eventual human habitation. NASA announces the selection of its first crew to visit Mars in the 2030s.

* The ITER project produces the first net-positive fusion reaction in history. Elon Musk announces a new company to mass-produce reactors.

* Nothing is really done to address inequality. Populist violence breaks out in some European countries.

* A revenue-neutral carbon tax will be passed in the US.

</comment><comment><USER318> No one here has specifically mentioned the two primary things I'll be working on over the next decade. Although, the trends surrounding these two things have been (generically) mentioned many times, and I actually see a handful of people predicting the exact opposite of one of them.

I see this as a good sign that I'm on the right track.

</comment><comment><USER319> If you want to track your predictions or bet on others, here are some sites:

[https://predictionbook.com](https://predictionbook.com)

[http://www.knewthenews.com](http://www.knewthenews.com)

[https://www.metaculus.com](https://www.metaculus.com)

</comment><comment><USER320> \- MicroLED will replace both LCD and OLED in most consumer devices and 240hz+ will become standard

\- Truly useful quantum computers will be available on cloud providers

\- Cars as a service

\- Strong evidence of alien life via exoplanet atmosphere spectroscopy (assuming successful deployment of JWST)

\- Discovery of gravitational wave background

\- Fake news will be out of control due to AI

\- Wireless charging via Wi-Fi

\- Alzheimer's will be cured

</comment><comment><USER321> 1\. World will either explode, or move towards even greater globalization.

2\. Facebook will be overthrown as the dominant social network, being replaced by something just as functional, but without the data sales.

3\. First serious manned mission to Mars, and the moon will be visited by humans again.

4\. Decent AR will finally be a thing. Though probably by the end of the decade.

</comment><comment><USER322> Shameless plug: If you want to quantify your predictions for (some) cryptocurrencies or stocks, check out [https://www.empiricast.com](https://www.empiricast.com), the no-nonsense forecasting forum.

Feel free to reach out to me on firstname.lastname@example.com if you have any comments or questions :)

</comment><comment><USER323> 1\. Concurrency platforms finally help to utilize multiple cores of a system, as result we will see many-core architectures with plenty simple cores

2\. The consequences of quantitative easing will emerge and affect us all

3\. Another cryptocurrency and bitcoin will form the backbone of a usable payment network with near-instant transactions for a low-fee

</comment><comment><USER324> * Food printers will be commonplace. Lots of homes will have equipment to automate the cooking process. Same for restaurants that have equipment that is more specialized and expensive.

* AI and expert systems in design.

* People WILL care about privacy

* VR really takes off

* Very few political changes.

* Self driving cars don't become a thing until 2030s, after which society changes dramatically.

</comment><comment><USER254> The decade's best stock is not a stock: it's a commodity ETF. The rising population, climate change, crop/livestock pandemics, higher personal incomes and falling supply drive record prices for everything from gold to pork to copper.

No nation takes significant action on climate change. Some push renewables hard, but this is more about economic sustainability and geopolitical independence than CO2 levels. People "learn to live" with a work that is as much as 1C warmer and will soon be 4+C by 2100.

The EU continues to move towards ever tighter union. Crisis in smaller, more southern nations and the lack of the UK-veto effect mean than true power sits in Brussels and regions exercise only the autonomy they're permitted. Germany is so polite and generous about this that no one notices.

Brexit goes badly for the UK which suffers a but the EU barely notices. The UK suffers a "lost decade" as young people leave and fewer people work compared to being retired; old voters give themselves more free stuff leading to spiraling taxes (and no services) for the young. More people leave worsening the problem. It's basically just the 80s again...

<comment><USER170> I think the idea that a commodity etf outperforms every single equity is absurd. The best performing stocks can go up 100x in a decade. The only way a broad based commodify etf could go up that much is if there is hyperinflation, and in that case some companies (stocks) will benefit a lot more from that trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER325> Predictions

1\. Dark silicon will push us even further into heterogeneous computing. Major cloud providers will build their own silicon and proprietary software stacks for things like databases and other common computing tasks.

2\. Nationalists focusing on Making their own country great will keep doing nothing about climate change. This will in turn create the inevitable need for people from poorer countries to become climate refugees. This will in turn create even more nationalism and fortresses build around rich countries.

3\. The push towards sustainability will come from the economics of clean energy actually becoming cheaper than dirty energy. It is still too late to limit us to 2 degrees.

4\. Speciality vehicles will reach level 4 and go driverless. Ie trucks in mines will be totally driverless. Long distance trucks will be driverless on highways and run to depots outside cities where drivers will jump in and take the wheel.

5\. Most embedded control systems where correctness is more important than latency and computation/watt will move to Linux from microcontrollers and get a standard software stack. Probably built first by a cloud vendor for IoT devices. Thus making embedded systems will be far less work (and less interesting engineering problem).

6\. There (finally!) will be a remote work solution which makes it economical to have most teams remote most of the time. Economical as in the the decrease in productivity for complex (see Cynefin model for definition) problems in remote work will be less than the increase in productivity given by removing commuting and the ability to get the best people no matter where they live. This in turn (past 2030) be the thing that starts to decrease traffic around cities, maybe even start people moving to smaller cities or villages closer to nature.

7\. Mainstream microwaves will go solid state and stop making that annoying sound!

8\. A standard to electrify roads (highways) will be set.

9\. 6G will be released. Will allow sending and receiving on the same frequencies simultaneously.

10\. AR/VR glasses will not become a thing for the general public.

11\. Remote surgery (with VR glasses and robots) will become a thing where specialists in a few major hospitals will serve smaller local hospitals for specialist surgery. (Past 2030 for it to become the norm)

12\. Same with Air control. Smaller local airports will be controlled by air controllers in a few hubs by standard.

13\. Tech for the care of the elderly will spawn a unicorn.

14\. Meatless meat will overtake meat in a few European countries.

</comment><comment><USER326> \- "AI" will be a continuing hype that still falls to deliver. "Self driving cars" will be a thing but not in the sense that they are fully autonomous. People still buy (more often leads) and drive cars.

\- Personal Integrity will be the new "organic" of gadgets. A more tech savvy and privacy conscious generation will demand to not be listened to by their TVs.

\- Traditional auto makers have a tough first half of the decade, converting to BEV production. They do catch up with electric vehicle production in the second half.

\- Regulation catches up lots of tech from the last decade: drones, deepfakes, gene editing cryptocurrency etc.

\- We are nowhere close to a manned flight to mars.

\- Lots of lowland is ocean!

\- Nuclear power makes no big comebacks

\- Fusion power is now looking promising but still far from commercial

\- We still use PCs and we still use desktop software. It's becoming more and more niche however (e.g used by certain professions.).

\- smartphones look pretty much the same as they do now (slabs). The same goes for monitors, TVs: incremental improvements (8K, HDR etc) but no major revolutions.

\- VR never makes a big breakthrough, but the tech matures to something incredible (but niche).

\- There won't exist a good way of paying for content online so news outlets will still struggle.

\- FM radio will be almost gone

</comment><comment><USER327> I think a highly underrated Topic:

Food and Environment:

1.) Clean meat will become affordable to produce and cause a big shift in the meat industry.

2.) More People will switch to a (more) plant based diet, either for health and/or environmental and ethical reasons

3.) There will be a lot more startups in the plant based food sector (like beyond meat, just egg etc.)

</comment><comment><USER328> I predict the internet becomes addictive to a point where we will start seeing regulations and advisory for kids to stay offline. I'm already seeing parents my age being concerned about their kids.

Also, there will be a niche demand for people who go online and manage online life / identity for these people.

</comment><comment><USER329> Interest rates will continue to fall.

US government bonds with a duration of 10 years and up will have a negative yield.

Some US corporate debt will have a negative yield.

Some banks will further lower the account balance limit over which depositors pay negative interest on their deposits.

As interest rates continue to fall, house and stock prices will continue to rise.

</comment><comment><USER330> Lots of great predictions here. I'll just offer a couple about Tesla:

* Tesla's supercharger standard is discontinued in favor of CCS1 for EV rapid charging in the United States.

* Large battery packs providing lots of range in Tesla EVs stops being a competitive differentiator as large battery packs undergo commoditization.

</comment><comment><USER331> * Self Driving Cars become a reality. All Cars have self-driving capabilities. * IDE's become better and assist programmers further and programmers continue to enjoy programming. * Learning becomes easier assisted by computers. Kids benefit a lot and become equipped to solve harder problems.

</comment><comment><USER332> Some real world predictions _ asset bubble crash at least once like 2008.

-lighter batteries in cars and mobiles

-many Internet's based on the country you are in.

-post truth world based on religion and belief.

-life lessons/guides as subscription services, basically bots and people helping you live/work/play.

-tech guy runs for president.

-major cyber terrorist attack.

-alternate stock market.

</comment><comment><USER333> No full, level 5, self-driving cars, but still 50% fewer traffic deaths due to increased driving automation.

</comment><comment><USER334> I tried to come up with some upbeat predictions but they weren't realistic (see the bottom of this comment.) So here's what I got, and it's mostly pretty bleak:

Major climate disasters. Fisheries collapse, crops and livestock devastated by disease, heat, drought. (~25% of the pigs in the world died last year.) Famines. Mass migrations. Unilateral geoengineering.

> "People always raid before they starve."

[https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer- geo...](https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geopolitics- in-a-hotter-world-ubc-talk-transcribed-sept-2010/)

AI tools will destroy the job market for programmers. Most necessary software is already written, it just needs to be selected and configured.

Governments of all kinds will use technology to lock down their subjects and this will be welcomed.

Organ regeneration (-or- organ theft becomes more common.) "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

Fusion finally. "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" (arxiv.org) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21539103)

\- - - -

So what about unrealistic-but-possible crazy stuff?

The "Electric Universe" crackpottery turns out to be true and artificial gravity starts a huge exo-planet-bound exodus. "Cities in Flight" eh? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight)

Levin's lab's work leads to scientific acceptance of the personhood of Gaia. Communications are formally initiated and together we regenerate the Earth almost overnight. Humanity is welcomed (back) into galactic civilized society.

Neurolinguistic Programming et. al. reaches critical mass and reprogramming yourself becomes commonplace. Reason and capability conspire to engender a mass movement to "Be excellent to each other." Humanity is welcomed (back) into galactic civilized society.

</comment><comment><USER335> Starlink, Kuiper and Oneweb will all be built as LEO based satellite networks, and go into service, dramatically changing the $ per Mbps economics and speeds for previously unreachable areas of the globe.

One of the three will probably be less successful and end up getting acquired by a larger entity.

</comment><comment><USER336> Let's make some predictions and put confidence figures on it.

By end of decade:

Over 80% of new cars sold are electric. (90% - it is hard to not see this one happen.)

At least 3 of General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagon, Toyota and Nissan go bankrupt or are sold. (70% - the electric transition will not be nice to them.)

The car dealer system will undergo major changes in the USA. (60% - <USER4> dealers and manufacturers are at odds on electric vehicles and manufacturers tied down by car dealer laws are at a major disadvantage against companies without car dealers. Such as Tesla and companies that will try to enter from elsewhere like NIO from China.)

The EU monetary union will collapse. (70% - An economic union is only sustainable in the long-run with political union, and there is no appetite for political union. The result is growing tension between savers like Germany and debtors like Greece, Italy and Spain.)

The UK's economic growth post-Brexit will exceed the EU as a whole. (60% - <USER5> to less regulation and continued EU financial crises)

Democrats win the Presidency in both 2024 and 2028. (70% - this is based on demographic trends and the fact that the Republicans can't change their policies until enough of their base dies of old age.)

Suborbital flights replace over 1% of long distance air trips. (30% - <USER6> is the only one who can and a lot has to go right for them to succeed. But the vision is realistic and out there - it is now mostly a question of when.)

Facebook no longer is or owns the dominant social network. (30% - the value of a social network scales like O(n log(n)) but Facebook recognizes this and is doing a good job of buying competitors. Eventually they will fail.)

College tuition no longer outpaces inflation, and the ending of this trend will be tied to a financial crisis. (30% - Stein's law says, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." However there are two corollaries by Stuart Stanisford, "It will go on a lot longer than we think," and "It will end badly when it does stop." The first is why I think that it has a good chance of not happening this decade. But the second captures the fact that behavior won't be likely to change without a crisis. And consider that at $1.6 trillion, student loan debt is the largest source of personal debt, and the only one not dischargeable in bankruptcy. If it triggers a crisis, there are the makings of a good one here.)

</comment><comment><USER337> My predictions (writing this before reading others' so I'm not too corrupted yet ;)

* The AR revolution starts/takes hold. We move from holding 5" screens in front of us to glasses-mounted or contact-lens based AR devices.

* Crystal (the language) gets more popular and Svelte (the framework) gets more popular.

* WebAssembly takes shape, languages other than JavaScript become first-class citizens of the web, but ES27/ES28/ES29 still dominates.

* Cryptocurrencies get relegated to the sidelines as purely speculative instruments, but Blockchain finally finds some real commercial uses.

* Electric cars reach 50% market share in US / Western Europe.

* At least one major gas station brand converts at least some of its stations to 50/50 electric. The era of going to EVGo charging stations in Whole Foods parking lots ends.

* San Francisco goes through at least one strong (but not 2008-level) downturn of at least ~2 years. Real estate prices stabilize.

* There will be at least five trillion-dollar companies

* There will be at least five 100-billion-dollar companies that haven't been founded as of today.

Can't wait to come back to this on 1/1/30!

<comment><USER72> Five trillion dollar companies is a bit of a cheap bet considering there are 3 public companies that fit the bill right now and goog/amzn are 95% the way there :p.

</comment></comment><comment><USER338> By 2030.

1\. There will be more electric cars bought than non-electric. Countries start banning petrol diesel cars.

2\. Huge wave of internet content moderation/censoring. New laws passed across countries to moderate content.

3\. Bitcoins gain traction, everyone starts using them, although it's value go down considerably.

</comment><comment><USER339> Everything will go backwards as many effort will be spent on dealing with the consequences of all malinvestment from the beginning of the last century until now, which includes the accumulated debt that countries made. This will be a lost decade.

Also, Bitcoin at 100 million dollars per unit.

</comment><comment><USER340> World War III begins in Syria. It doesn't lead to nukes, but millions die, including on US soil.

<comment><USER341> Psst, you're not allowed to peek on Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER342> I also think that Amazon will get Robotic Picking and Refilling in their Warehouses to work. Of course this will result in an large number of heartless firings of workers.

I doubt their cashierless brick-and-mortar stores will take off. (In 2019 they had such a pilot in Seattle I think).

</comment><comment><USER343> * Mobile phones eat even more of the world. (i.e. people have fewer hobbies, and spend even less time doing anything else except using their phone)

* Augmented reality glasses become commonplace and people care more about what the world looks like in their glasses, than what real life looks like.

* The ability to resist mobile phones (and AR glasses) becomes the best indicator of future success in life.

* There are no new discoveries in Physics. Dark matter and Dark Energy still make no sense (i.e. have no explanation), but are still held onto as theories.

* Non-computer progress slows down, both because software development is so easy, and because the green revolution means hardly anyone wants to make things anymore.

* The world because more conservative as a backlash to the current ascendancy of liberalism.

* The world becomes more peaceful, with even fewer wars, and fewer people living without basic needs. (Because physical items like food become so cheap even fewer people lack it.)

* The current business model for TV collapses. Something else emerges that is not based around a 3 hour block of drama and comedy.

* There are no autonomous self driving cars. But there are trials on "rail road" like trails for cross country trucking. (i.e. trucks autonomously drive on highways, sharing with human controlled traffic, but not into cities)

* Humans do not land on the moon or mars. But there are more humans in orbit than before.

</comment><comment><USER241> 1\. Utility-scale battery storage switches to a technology that is unsuited to consumer battery storage. For example, the batteries might only operate at high temperatures. They could be based on sodium.

2\. The USA will dominate soccer.

3\. Immigrants will cause a civil war or revolution in a European country. There will be genocide.

4\. Car communication will be hacked, again, but this time it won't be for cautious fun. One day during rush hour, all cars of a particular manufacturer will suddenly accelerate. They may even aim for other cars. Roads everywhere will be blocked with so many burning wreaks that emergency services simply can't go anywhere.

5\. We will find the cause for the loss of masculinity that has occurred over the past century. (reduced Sertoli cell number, reduced sperm count, reduced testosterone level, reduced anogenital distance, etc.) Fixing this will require the elimination of a large class of chemicals that is in all sorts of products, so there will be heavy lobbying effort to avoid banning anything and to avoid liability.

6\. Pain medication based on psychoactive compounds found in M. speciosa will be in FDA trials.

7\. GMO animals, modified to avoid organ mismatch, will be used to grow organs for humans. They will be universal donors. Immunosuppression will not be required.

8\. Some organs will be grown from induced stem cells in a 3D-printed shape.

</comment><comment><USER344> 2020s will be the decade of medical breakthroughs especially via gene technology. Male baldness is still around. Life expectancy for the rich increase.

Economic inequality increases.

People getting more laid back.

A critical mass is getting fed up with bullshit jobs, major push for changing the 40 hour 955 work week.

</comment><comment><USER345> 1\. Google and Facebook struggle to keep their power position and will be stripped down for many reasons. Microsoft and Amazon will capture the spoils of war becoming larger than they are today.

2\. No AGI yet, but some AI companies will create overnight data-driven monopolies, same as Private Equity did on the '80s. These early companies will start as B2B consulting/services until they have enough data, experience, and models. Then they will stop servicing others and start disrupting every industry and vertical they could. Same as PE, it becomes an arms race that will eliminate any competition. To keep their power position, Data Science becomes an esoteric-obscure knowledge, spawning another "AI Winter".

3\. We will see last-mile and self-driving operational for logistics purposes. Driving will become a privilege, only rich people would allow driving their cars (electric or gas). Others would need to use ride-sharing or public transit. Fewer Toyotas, more Bugatti.

4\. There will be significant advances in research in many fields, technology leverage scientific output. But academia works (quantum) will not translate on real-world applications.

5\. European Union as we know will disappear on the next economic recession, European countries will recover their historical relations while eastern countries will see a raise on nationalisms/violent uprises and never-ending migration crisis.

6\. China will suffer their first economic recession, taking down the older elites and spawning a war for political control creating instability and broken the Belt and Road initiative. Russia will face another 1990-moment between powers and factions inside the country.

7\. Offline will be the new wave. Online relations were no longer trusted or authentic. Back to the real world, real experiences, moments and friends. Ibiza is the center of the civilized world.

8\. Extreme personalization of payments and lending, an era of rent-to-use, pay month-to-month, get an instant credit will go down to basic needs like water or toilet paper. Finance will extract value from all economy layers. Only rich people own things.

9\. Global emissions and pollution will be reduced significative in rich countries thanks to advanced technologies (Switzerland, Germany ..etc). On the other side, people from Third-world countries will die because of pollution.

10\. Flying Cars for Rich people. No Mars yet, but increased interest in space exploration.

Hello future me! I hope you did it well in this decade.

<comment><USER78> > 3\. Driving will become a privilege Agree - insurance of human non-assisted > driving vs some computer self-driving (level 3/4/5) differential will make > it too expensive for human non-assisted driving. Data will drive the > insurance costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER346> My takeaway from reading the top voted 2010 predictions is that people are terrible about predicting what's going to happen 10 years later.

A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.

My fun (and probably wrong) predictions:

* Hacker News will still look mostly the same in 2030 as it does now and did in 2010.

* Most predictions in the parent post will be at most mildly accurate and otherwise completely wrong.

* The Artemis program, if it survives into the next administration, won't land anyone on the moon until the latter part of the decade (2025 or later).

* With the emerging increased commercial lift capacity we've been seeing in the last 5 years we'll possibly see the first commercial space station or at least the plans for one to start launching in the 2030's.

* (Unlikely) Elon will decide he wants his Roadster back. A Starship mission to demonstrate deep space recovery capability will launch to intercept the car and return it to Earth.

</comment><comment><USER347> I'll focus on unexpected effects of climate change.

1\. Insurance companies stop offering fire and hurricane insurance to forested/coastal area properties.

2\. Major fires and hurricanes hit and millions of people lose everything (because they are now uninsured) and have no place to go.

3\. Local governments are unable to support the citizen climate refugees, so FEMA is tasked to manage the new refugee camps. There's a massive unbudgeted cost to all of this in the hundreds of billions of dollar range that significantly increase the US deficit.

4\. Fed continues to try to make money cheap by holding down interest rates, but China realizes now's their chance to crush the U.S. government and stops buying T-bills. Interest rates rise despite the Fed.

5\. The rise in interest rates has a cascading effect across the entire U.S. economy which was taking way too much advantage of low interest rates. A major recession occurs. Inflation hits 10%+. Migration away from the dollar as the default world currency occurs.

6\. We're fucked.

</comment><comment><USER348> 1) The world population will not exceed 1b humans by the end of 2020.

2) Some level of nuclear exchange will take place, whether on a limited level using tactical nukes, or an all out strategic rumble e.g. India v. Pakistan

3) The above will be due to resource wars, particularly fresh water.

<comment><USER349> Thats quite the prediction. Heres hoping it's wrong.

<comment><USER348> I hope so too, but I have no faith that will be the case.

<comment><USER349> Are you making any preparations for this outcome?

<comment><USER348> You can't fight state-level disasters as an individual. I might invest in some long-life food stores and other stuff to weather particularly bad times, but realistically there's nothing I can do. I think the course is set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER350> 1\. Soli style gesture controls will be ubiquitous.

2\. Construction will begin on a structure that will be taller than anything we have now and use an active support system.

3\. A child will be born that lives to be 234.

4\. Andrew Yang will be elected to some office, but it probably won't be president.

</comment><comment><USER54> 1\. Manufactured "green" hydrocarbons will become a big business. Taking advantage of the existing fossil fuel economy, but using alternative processes to extract the carbon from the air, making for a high-density carbon neutral fuel source.

</comment><comment><USER351> 1\. Almost all property in every major city owned by Chinese funds. 2\. Student loan bomb explodes and universities close. 3\. Renewable energy generation becomes the new 'Software Development' for people trying to get rich out of innovation.

</comment><comment><USER352> 1\. A huge recession like never before happening before 2025.

2\. Facebook Libra becomes prevalent. Others (Google, Apple, Microsoft) follow to have their e-coins.

3\. AR and/or VR is the smartphone of the 20s.

4\. Facebook becomes the most valuable company in the world first to reach a 2T$ valuation.

</comment><comment><USER353> 1\. Technology sector will become regulated globally mandating minimal security standards, privacy protections and ethical machine learning standards. Enforcement will be economic and increasingly technical.

2\. Governments will start to adopt blockchains for currencies and registers of record.

3\. Real estate prices in city centers will continue to increase every year

4\. Climate change enforcement will trigger a global trade war

5\. By the end of the decade, every country on earth will have implemented a carbon emission trading scheme

6\. All new cars on the road will be electric cars

7\. Global poverty will no longer exist by the end of this decade

8\. Assisted legal suicide will be legal in many countries by the end of this decade

9\. Ultra-fast wireless internet will cause a major decline in wired internet- subscriptions

10\. The middle-east will still not have any real democracy

11\. China will see major popular uprisings leading to an increase in democracy but still not be a full democracy by the end of this decade

12\. Latin America, Russia, east africa and SEA will transition to real democracies

13\. Nuclear energy will make a comeback and new plants will be build

14\. A cure or vaccine for HIV will be in phase 3 clinical trials or beyond

15\. General AI will not exist yet and neither will fully autonomous cars

16\. Politicians will fail to enact any regulation in regards to fake news leading to much deeper polarization of society and widespread acceptance of biggotry

</comment><comment><USER354> With all this hype around SpaceX and reusability in general the cost of space launches are not going to drop orders of magnitude, not even significantly. SpaceX's Starship will fail to achive the costs and flight rates currently considered.

</comment><comment><USER355> I think the first iteration of CRISPR/gene editing therapy for treating diseases (and possibly just plain human enhancement) will begin to go mainstream, similar to the rise of LASIK.

But only for somatic cell editing - cells other than sperm/egg.

</comment><comment><USER356> We use far more parts of our bodies to interact with technology.

(And if this comes true, someone will comment with a reference weird sex thing that fits this bill, and then someone else will respond with how that was actually already available in 2020.)

</comment><comment><USER357> China will seize control of Bitcoin and adopt it as a national currency, or issue its own. And for that reason alone, the crypto-nerds will be right about crypto taking over the world, but not in the decentralized way they expected.

</comment><comment><USER358> 1\. Decentralized social media grows rapidly, reddit/twitter/FB lose users and power 2\. Identity politics culture wars end 3\. Alien disclosure / discovery / first contact 4\. AI winter 5\. Rust dominates development

</comment><comment><USER359> * A new browser-like application will emerge which uses HTTP, but neither HTML nor Javascript as its UI construct.

* Electric cars using glass batteries will start to out sell gasoline cars.

* A product with the form factor and capabilities of current smartphones will emerge that can plug into a base and replace all be the most powerful desktop computer functionality.

* Genetically designed crops grown using ocean salt water will emerge first as animal feed and later directly to human consumption.

* Somewhere a war will be caused by the encroachment of sea level.

* The superpowers will attempt to negotiate a new Antarctic treaty in anticipation of becoming reasonably warm enough to exploit for resources.

* No manned expedition to either the Moon, nor Mars. Multiple robotic expeditions to both and perhaps the gas giants' moons.

* Polarization of American politics will take a back seat to major recession (or depression) that causes nationalization of the banking system to avoid national debt default and gives rise to talk of a Constitutional Congress, not from the progressives, but from the conservatives. The congress will fail and the United States will break up into five or more separate countries.

</comment><comment><USER360> 1\. People finally realize that wind and solar are not going to replace coal any time soon. Nuclear goes back in fashion. China and Russia lead the way.

2\. Interval combustion engines are finally seen as the bane of mankind. Electric cars become commonplace. Petrol is only used in planes and boats.

3\. The world gets used to negative credit rates. Some companies abuse this system and a few large bankruptcies threaten to pop the bubble. The central banks massively inject money to prevent systemic collapse.

4\. Remote work becomes the norm. Real estate prices in large hubs go down a bit, but not much.

5\. South East Asia becomes the new silicon valley, welcoming a horde of digital nomads.

5\. Hurricanes gain in strength and some coastlines are redrawn.

6\. Trump-like governments are elected all over the Western world. Global trade slows down a bit. People get happier overall. Global Super richs are a bit less rich and way less global.

7\. Fully autonomous Electric cars are there but only for niche use (touristic islands, Gated communities). They are slow and uncool.

8\. Intel and Boeing go under. US federal government save both companies with taxpayer money. Both companies are cut in pieces and resold to competitors.

<comment><USER361> To your point on 7: Fully autonomous Electric cars.

I predict we will have electric cars widely available by 2030, IFF car manufacturers stop trying to make them autonomous at the same time. Consider the Chevy Volt [1]: it's just an electric car. It does not include any autonomous capabilities. Furthermore, electric charging stations will be more common. Existing gas stations will have charging stations added, or they are abandoned all together and new charging stations (maybe "refuel" stations) will be built.

The world surely needs electric vehicles sooner rather than later. This will help climate change due to reduced emissions from vehicles.

However, I don't think the autonomous part will be figured out by 2030. I predict progress will slow. More government oversight will be applied due to the 737 MAX issue [2] and self-driving cars killing people [3][4]. Due to these issues, general distrust in computer-driven-machines (airplanes, cars) will increase. People will go back to non-connected / offline / "dumb" devices, including and especially their vehicles.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings)

[3][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg)

[4]: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/tesla-says-autopilot- wa...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/tesla-says-autopilot-was-active- during-fatal-crash-in-mountain-view/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER362> Trying to make these as testable as possible:

1\. A pandemic kills at least 2 million people. There are theories that the pathogen is bioengineered; they may even turn out to be true.

2\. At least one of Amazon/Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook's market capitalization on 1/1/2030 is lower than its market capitalization on 1/1/2020.

3\. There's a 60%+ drawdown at some point in the 2020s in US equities, exacerbated by baby boomers panic selling their retirement funds.

4\. Mean global temperatures are at least 1K over the 1951-1980 baseline every year in the latter half of the decade.

5\. US prime-age labor force participation trends downward -- the Keynesian post-work future is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

6\. A non-Chromium-based browser has at least 25% market share.

7\. Humans return to the Moon, but Mars is still at least a few years away.

8\. Practical nuclear fusion is also still just a few years away.

9\. There are still hundreds of millions of cases of malaria killing hundreds of thousands of people a year; rich Westerners still talk way more about the hundreds of Westerners a year killed in mass shootings.

And just to get some sports in:

10\. LeBron James Jr. is not playing in the NBA in 2030.

</comment><comment><USER92> Politically:

\- No meaningful regime change in places like Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Burma, United States.

\- A meaningful regime change will occur in a boring autocracy that catches everyone by surprise (like Tunisia did a decade ago).

Economically:

\- There will be a major recession in the 2020s.

\- In 2030 itself, there will be a simmering row over tariffs for carbon emissions. Between whom, I am not going to speculate.

Technologically:

\- IPv4 is still around.

\- Self-driving cars (Level 5, if we're still using NHTSA's terminology) do not exist.

\- Quantum computers are "just around the corner."

\- The phrase "deep learning" causes people to take a few seconds to remember what it means.

\- Exactly one of the following companies will no longer exist (due to bankruptcy or being acquired): Amazon, AMD, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google (aka Alphabet), Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Oracle, Qualcomm, Samsung, Tesla, TSMC, Xilinx.

<comment><USER32> This one is good, but I would exclude Russia and Venezuela from the list. In Russia Putin will retire in 2024 and transition to the new leadership will be soft and non-violent. Likely this will mean some positive changes in internal and foreign policy. Venezuela depends on Russian support, there's no intrinsic stability, and current regime may collapse as a result of some US-Russia deal (as it happened with unification of Germany). Nevertheless the regime in Syria will stay for another 10-15 years, with some territory still occupied by foreign powers.

<comment><USER92> > In Russia Putin will retire in 2024 and transition to the new leadership > will be soft and non-violent. Likely this will mean some positive changes in > internal and foreign policy.

I doubt that. Just because the constitution says Putin must retire in 2024 doesn't mean that he will. He could change the constitution to stay in power longer, outright ignore it, or transition into a different official role but still wield the power: consider the swapping trick he did with Medvedev a decade ago. Furthermore, the corruption in Russia has been running so deep and so long that any successor is going to have a large degree of ideological similarity with and loyalty to Putin--everyone who hasn't has been purged and will be disqualified from any attempted succession race.

<comment><USER32> Constitution will be respected: Russian elites would consider it too dangerous to violate and until now have always followed the letter of law (see the annexation of Crimea). The change of it is possible but only to a stricter rule of two terms (Putin hinted at this possibility recently). The successor will be loyal not to Putin personally, but to their mutual agreement, which will be fulfilled. He or she will not necessarily have the same views - there's a precedent of such transition and it will likely be used in 2024. Moreover, it will be more convenient for everyone to put there a centrist or a technocrat with some political weight (former governor or member of parliament, like Dumin or Matvienko). Corruption won't be a significant factor here, at least no more than it is in US primaries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER304> HN will look almost identical.

</comment><comment><USER363> 1\. China overtakes the USA GDP by 2029

2\. Trump wins reelection

3\. The United States has a recession by 2021.

4\. Inflation becomes an issue in the United States because of high debt, increased military spending as a result of great power competition and huge pension debts/promises coming due with baby boomers retiring. The best investments (other then great startups of course) becomes Gold (because of the proclivity to favor spenders over savors.)

5\. The United States will focus on big infrastructure spending.

6\. Google develops a competitor to Huawei's Safe City project for the United States and its geopolitical allies

7\. Humanity will reach mars

8\. Humanity will turn the corner on Carbon pollution

9\. San Francisco reaches a breaking point and elects moderates whose focus is building more housing.

10\. The United States will join the TPP

11\. Chinese culture and media breaks out and becomes popular in a similar way Hollywood and American culture is popular in other places

12\. Amazon will be bigger than today

13\. TikTok will have regulatory problems, and with those a Facebook TikTok clone will emerge, and gain local traction.

14\. Autonomous trucks will displace millions of works, but some may find a niche doing last mile trucking.

15\. Go will be a top 10 language

</comment><comment><USER233> The new AI winter is coming and everyone would call it machine learning again.

</comment><comment><USER364> 1\. Fusion reactors break even.

2\. No progress in identifying dark matter or understanding quantum gravity.

3\. At least one of the major social media corporations are overtaken by a new competitor, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.

<comment><USER155> I think young people don't use Facebook anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER365> As of Jan 1, 2030...

* Donald Trump won and served a second term as US President. He was succeeded by a democrat.

* Marijuana is legal in the United States.

* The EUR-USD exchange rate is lower than at any time in 2019 (or the EUR is no longer in circulation).

* China's per-capita GDP (at market exchange rates) is less than that of the US. Its total GDP is less than that of the US.

* Globally, the vast majority of vehicles being made are EVs.

* Globally, the portion of total primary energy supplied by fission is higher than in 2019. The portion supplied by fusion is zero.

* Satellite internet has largely replaced cable and cellular networks. SpaceX (or a spinoff) is the leading provider.

* Serverless architectures (lambda functions) are standard for backend development.

* It has been discovered that the holographic principle severely restricts general-purpose quantum computing. There's still a regime in which quantum computers are useful.

* In the US, the percentage of babies conceived by IVF is at least 3x higher than in 2019. Among these, screening for sex and intelligence is common, with females being preferred to males.

* Humans have walked on Mars.

* We have discovered alien life.

</comment><comment><USER366> These are the predictions that I think go against the norm, where I think it's most likely someone would take up a bet with me. Otherwise it would just be a list of "things largely stay the same, and things people predict will happen wont"

1.) UK's Brexit is an economic success, leading to a boom in Britain's tech sector and a modernized efficient state.

2.) Concerns about climate change will be a driver for terrible policy, further stifling the European economy.

3.) Probably not this decade, but it might happen near its end: Many European nations have their own vote leave, Denmark among others leave the union.

4.) The colonization of mars begins. By 2030 there is still no humans living on mars, but machines are shipped off to mars to start building the colony in which humans eventually will.

<comment><USER367> I have a counter-prediction: the UK will leave the EU but join it again this decade and adopt the euro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER368> China falls. People seeking better food or environment conditions will keep suffering in the foreseeable future, but regional conflicts and the weakened economy will finally kill the old dragon.

</comment><comment><USER369> It's quite difficult for me to predict the future because I live in a small town of a third world country where things move so slowly that any future I could imagine won't materialize.

</comment><comment><USER370> This decade will see stagnation and fall of Google and Amazon as new entrants replace them. Not sure by what but public will binge on something else instead of instant information and shopping.

</comment><comment><USER340> Here's a really obvious short-term one: superfast SSDs in nextgen consoles lead to the same standard in PCs, and SSD prices drop dramatically, finally replacing HDDs as completely as tape.

</comment><comment><USER371> I'm impressed. Not one single person mentions blockchain seriously in this thread.

I think micropayments are going to take off in a tremendous way. This will enable new applications and disrupt the advertising and content creation systems in place today.

Stablecoins will be required, and will probably begin to take off once the next generation of blockchains launch successfully.

Payments in general will move over to blockchain - specifically layer two payment systems. We are close but it will likely be another year before the potential is obvious.

Other applications in blockchain will take hold too, but the ones above are the first real killer apps. Later it'll be peer-to-peer lending and a move to decentralized gig apps (like TaskRabbit or Uber on a blockchain).

<comment><USER372> I would counter that all currencies in major countries will become digital but that blockchain will not be behind any of them and will have died out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER373> The rate at which US solar electricity generation grows will pass 33 TWh per year, surpassing nuclear power's best decade (1980-1990) when US nuclear generation grew by 32.6 TWh per year.

</comment><comment><USER374> \- Someone will invent a decentralized/anonymous way to convert fiat currency to Crypto without KYC and Monero will be the unstoppable currency for all illegal/tax evasion activities

</comment><comment><USER375> I predict that by 2030, we will be discussing treaties unifying internet rules because each country will have its own version of GDPR and other laws, causing compliance to become a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER376> * Demographics does not become not destiny for Western Leftist parties. continued failure of elites to win electorally, and an aging, white, and geographically distributed coalition, that votes reliably, wins most of the time. Immigration has slowed in the US and will continue to slow in other countries. This makes Trump more likely than not to win 2020 Further reading on this POV: [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/16/the_go...](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/16/the_god_that_failed_132363.html) See also the work of David Runciman from Talking Politics podcast (who makes this argument quite well in a series of lectures)

* Society makes progress on tough issues despite political deadlock. Problems continue to be solved outside of the political process

* Obamacare lurches forward, barely in the US. It likely won't be repealed, but not much beyond shoring it up will happen even if a Dem is elected in 2020. It's just too hard for Dems to get to 60 in the senate.

* Amazon continues to grow and possibly triggers antitrust action

* Someone will sadly get seriously hurt or killed due to an Amazon marketplace item of low quality. This may prompt regulation or lawsuits

* Brick and Mortar Retail continues to evolve towards being about physical brand presence for a Web-first business, less about stores selling stuff. This gradual move means there's no huge commercial real estate crash

* Google loses its way, search market share shrinks, suffers from a serious brain drain, loses ability to develop great products

* Privacy concerns break through even more beyond the Hacker News crowd!

* Lots of unexpected things will happen, totally changing everyone's predictions!

I likely will disagree with these tomorrow and think of even more important ones! :)

<comment><USER377> Demographics is destiny, but this does not benefit Western Leftist parties. One political side is producing about 2.5 kids per woman, and the other is producing about 1.5 kids per woman. (numbers for USA) Above 2 is exponential growth, and below 2 is extinction.

The reasonable prediction here is a shift to the right. A few decades may be required before it is dramatic and undeniable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER378> 1\. The "streaming games" concept crashes and burns when Google gives up on Stadia, probably around 2025 or thereabouts. People simply don't have the internet to support it, and Google's infamously short organizational attention span takes its toll. It might come back, but check back in ~30 years when everybody has gigabit or better.

2\. One of the big public cloud companies either stops doing public cloud stuff or that business unit gets acquired, and I think the victim will be GCP. Microsoft seems safe with its government contracts and name recognition.

3\. Some nasty new nasty, globally-agreed-upon legislation comes out that effectively cripples cryptocurrency for legitimate uses. Bitcoin burns as a result, but overall, it's about as effective as the war on drugs, and some privacy coin like Monero or GRIN has its price skyrocket as the new go-to for otherwise shady transactions.

4\. Politicization of _everything_ finally reaches a breaking point and most people check out. It once again becomes a faux pas to bang on about who you're voting for and why at the family dinner table.

5\. One or two large social networking companies go belly up or are acquired and unsuccessfully restructured (think Tumblr). Probably Twitter or Reddit.

6\. VR grows and becomes a stable "third platform" rather than a mere niche. Facebook/Oculus proved the market demand, and standalone headsets from various companies pushing their own walled gardens come and go. Oculus becomes the market leader in this category. Valve leads with the "cadillac" PC-connected enthusiast hardware. No major quantum leaps - quality slowly improves, but no full dive or anything like that. At least one AAA game is released VR- exclusive and posts good sales numbers.

7\. Full legalization of cannabis for recreational uses finally happens. One or two states hold out and keep it illegal or greatly restricted within their borders, but most states notice the tax revenue being left on the table and finally relent, and as more and more states decriminalize or legalize, the federal ban is finally lifted with surprisingly little fanfare. It becomes common to see cannabis products in convenience stores right next to cigarettes.

8\. Solar continues to improve and gets ridiculously cheap. Installing a grid- tied, or even non-grid-tied, system becomes a common home improvement. Tesla will either lead the way or exit this market.

9\. Nothing crazy happens with quantum computing. Some niche use cases are found, but by 2030, RSA or other algorithms based on prime factorization remain safe ways to secure data.

</comment><comment><USER379> * Populism and Nationalism will get worse, worldwide

* Cure for HIV

* A surprising country will need to squash a civil war

* There will be a measurable effort for tech companies getting ahead of politics on AI ethics

* Swelling increase of remote workers

</comment><comment><USER380> \- In 2030 Google will still be around, yet without the same market share it holds now. Also, the public grows tired of their creepy advertising & federal laws are passed to protect our data possibly forcing them to change their business model.

\- Google Home and the Alexa's of the world either change to privacy focus or are shunned for assistants that are privacy focused.

On a different note I think the guy who created that HBO Michael Jackson documentary (Dan Reed) is currently working on a similar piece about Silicon Valley. I would guess based on his MJ documentary that it might not be a flattering piece. Such could hurt one the current tech giants reputation & their market share.

</comment><comment><USER381> 1\. VR is huge, AR picks up steam

2\. 3D Printers are much more widely used for manufacturing

3\. Energy-positive, profitable fusion is demonstrated

4\. Natural disasters get so bad that the US government declares a war on climate change

</comment><comment><USER382> We will get AGI and from there, further predictions are pointless.

</comment><comment><USER340> Without Moore's Law computing will continue to consolidate (mobile, cloud, desktop), like every other industry.

Near the end of the decade, a way to continue Moore's Law will be found.

</comment><comment><USER383> \- Phytoplankton decline accelerates, creating a cascading food crisis compounded by overfishing.

\- Antibiotic resistance becomes more prominent.

\- Some major underground aquifers around the world start drying up.

</comment><comment><USER384> "Smart" toys for babies and toddlers, with the ability to understand to teach by playing, connected to the Internet with upgradeable software and accessible to all.

</comment><comment><USER285> Remember when everyone laughed because Google was spending millions to recognize cat images?? Autonomous cars will suddenly be ubiquitous, 3 years. Exponential learning.

</comment><comment><USER385> well, my prediction is that a new startup will appear with the intention of getting people offline. It'll start as an event organizing platform with comments.

A year or two in they'll add chat so people can keep in contact before and after the event.

A year after that it'll pretty much become a new online social network built around interests that are tied to an event, leading the company to create a new feature called, 'groups.'

... and we'll end up back where we started.

</comment><comment><USER386> * There will be a game-changing quantum hack of everyone's social/email/financial account passwords. It will be called, "Pandora's Dox."

</comment><comment><USER387> Tech:

* Rdbms will still be then backbone of most internet facing applications.

* Java will still be around. So will COBOL.

* Python v4 will be under development.

* There will be only 3 cloud providers of any relevance (AWS, GCP, Azure).

<comment><USER388> > * There will be only 3 cloud providers of any relevance (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Is this not already true?

<comment><USER387> Haha, good point. I think there are some other companies trying to compete (IBM, Oracle).

Actually this is already wrong because Alibaba has a cloud offering and they will certainly be relevant in 2030.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER389> I'll try some big and bold predictions:

In finance, BTC price stabilises around 100 kUSD after peaking at 115k

In industry, Telsa goes bankrupt and is bought by a foreign car marker wanting to set foot in the US

In telecoms, an established foreign network starts a 4th national network in the US

In tech, a third CPU builder emerges next to AMD and Intel, likely from China.

In biology, we discover how methylation works, a few regenerative therapies based on differentiated stem cells become available in Asia and Latin america

In politics, freedom of movement in the Shengen area is replaced by passport control + biometric verification, and fascists take power in one or more of the big EU countries

</comment><comment><USER390> Prediction for the 20s: breakthroughs in s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶r̶n̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ fusion power will mean it'll only be 10-20 years away at the end of the decade

</comment><comment><USER391> Tesla goes all in into energy/housing market and will become 1 trillion dollar company company.

ICE cars are like horses in 1920

Privacy is dead.

China spirals into authoritarian ultranationalism nightmare.

</comment><comment> w-m * due to increased energy efficiency and energy harvesting, nightly charging of personal devices becomes obsolete, devices are charged every two weeks or so or before long trips

* increasing volume of private people investing in ETFs will cause huge problems and a shift in how stock exchanges work

* many European cities ban personal cars from their centers while fully self-driving cars remain very limited in scope and use

* hunger is no longer an issue. Poor people struggle to have access to carbon-neutral products

* meat production from livestock is more than halved in developed countries

* AR devices become ubiquitous, but in a completely new form factor

<comment><USER392> > * increasing volume of private people investing in ETFs will cause huge > problems and a shift in how stock exchanges work

Can you elaborate more on this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER393> All viral diseases will have simple and effective therapies (one pill a day kind of thing). Eradication of most viral epidemics will be well on its way

<comment><USER161> Based on what technology? (Genuine question, I'm not following biotech too closely.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER394> Household robots that can launder and fold clothes and cook food will be in use but not ubiquitous yet. Say top 10% households in developed countries.

<comment><USER245> Ill bite. This will not happen, cost will be too restrictive even if it is technologically possible

</comment></comment><comment><USER395> I wonder if the current environment around tech will mean the predictions this time are more for status quo and for doom and gloom or slow declines.

</comment><comment><USER396> 1\. Increment in pollution and population level. 2\. Increment in temperature rise. 3\. Drone deliveries. 4\. AI and Robotics will eat more jobs.

</comment><comment><USER397> A progressive political wave will lead to eminent domain of private golf courses and their conversion into public housing and public parks

</comment><comment><USER398> The year of the Linux desktop will come... handed by Microsoft and their Linux subsystem making developers return to buy Windows machines

<comment><USER74> Microsoft abandons the NT kernel and makes Windows a Linux Desktop Environment on top of the Linux Kernel, like Gnome or KDE...

</comment></comment><comment><USER399> Some will definitely not come true as these are relatively bold, but:

1\. People welcome always-on video cameras into their homes

2\. Self-driving cars actually do take off (but are introduced gradually)

3\. AR never becomes more than a gimmick. VR occupies a similar place in the gaming market to gaming consoles and is basically unused outside of gaming.

4\. Higher education in many areas begins to die and is replaced with online certification programs.

5\. After major breakthroughs in pharmacological(?) treatment of depression/anxiety, humans may now choose how happy they want to be. This threatens to shake society to its core, and many are against it.

6\. Robots become a lot more common, but think Roomba, not I,Robot

7\. The role of CO2 in human mental health is discovered and legislation begins against high CO2 levels in rooms.

8\. The death of truth: photo and video evidence are easily faked, and we have to rely on the source of information to know whether or not to trust it, not the information itself.

9\. The incorporation of neural-network specific hardware cards into most personal computers.

10\. Personal assistants like Alexa or Siri remain fairly unintelligent and limited in scope.

11\. After some horrific example of genetic engineering on human babies gone wrong, laws limit genetic engineering on humans to a few limited things like gender, eye color, etc.

12\. Scientists discover that perfect pitch can be reliably acquired through extensive practice, despite 2020 "common knowledge". But there's still not really a point to doing so. It's just one of many new demonstrations of the plasticity of the human mind.

13\. Some psychedelics become legal in many countries.

14\. Polyamory becomes a thing that most people are at least familiar with.

15\. Attempts are made to outlaw the use of blockchain-based communication and video apps.

16\. A platform mixing the best parts of Patreon and Youtube becomes popular.

17\. Universal basic income is implemented in many countries, but not the US.

18\. A cheap technological remedy to global warming is produced, and the issue disappears quietly.

19\. Moore's law basically plateaus mid-decade. The impressive stuff in computing is being done by different types of computer architectures altogether, like neural-network chips.

20\. Boldest prediction: first convincing (but non-conclusive) evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life.

</comment><comment><USER400> \- Gene editing and CRISPR advances lead to first viable and legal designer babies

\- Longevity research extends life expectancy by at least 10 years

\- Cold war with China is still ongoing

\- New battery tech finally makes electric cars cheap enough to be practical, boutique electric automakers proliferate

\- driverless transportation exists on pre-defined routes, mainly powering shuttle and transit buses, but not able to navigate all roads autonomously yet

\- still no general AI

\- blockchain based loans and financial instruments grow by at least 100 fold; decentralized finance hits mainstream

<comment><USER401> Batteries will likely have 2x the capacity in 10 years, but range will increase a only fraction of that. The rest will be spent on lowering prices and curb weight.

By 2030, ownership of ICE vehicles will start to go bimodal, with new luxury vehicles catering to the rich, and used vehicle ownership moving to the those of limited means.

By 2030 even the fusion people will be making fun of general AI. Again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER402> A major movie exclusively with CGI characters will be released. I am talking really good CGI on the scale of Tarkin in Rogue One.

</comment><comment><USER136> I think SpaceX, while cool now, will be either non-existent, or a shadow of what it is today due to costs going out of control.

</comment><comment><USER403> Here are mine:

\- Smartphones become a relic of the past, and are replaced by wearables

\- Onboard processing becomes non existent, and is replaced by low latency decentralized networks (a little like stadia)

\- Changes in climate ensure that the way we live our lives, and living in bunkers becomes popular

\- privacy doesn't matter as much as it did before

\- the US becomes displaced by China as the hegemon, but the designation doesn't matter as much anymore

\- The world as a whole moves away from manufacturing physical goods to digital 'goods' and services.

<comment><USER404> Disagree on the smartphone one, they will actually be the main personal gadget replacing even laptops and complemented by other types of wearables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER405> The low-code / no-code programming ecosystem surpasses the manual programming ecosystem in both developers and revenues.

</comment><comment><USER406> NodeJS / Javascript finally matures. A true, robust Rails like framework appears and becomes the new default for web dev

</comment><comment><USER407> Just one long shot.

We will get a big surprise in battery tech. Allowing for at least 10x power stored for less the 10% of the current cost.

</comment><comment><USER408> 1\. Current wave of AI research is dead within 5 years, AI winter commences as semiconductor density growth slows. AI will be able to solve problems, but not formulate problems (and thus invent solutions). There is only so much to be explored with "we used method x on dataset y and got results" 2\. There will not be a huge technological breakthrough, akin to wireless connectivity and cameras in this decade. We will still be using phones and laptops in 10 years. 2\. Anti-trust goes mainstream again. Some of big tech gets broken up or regulated. 3\. Self driving cars will reach Level 4 slowly. 3\. Robots slowly start to grasp "complex" tasks. Folding T-Shirts is a recent development as of 2019. People who are unable to learn fast, keep up and get jobs will begin to more strongly resent the wealthy. Taxes on the wealthy go up, but not enough to curtail the rise of socialism. 4\. The USA will stay politically paralyzed. (dems x reps, cities x towns) It will stay attached to its constitution and traditions, just like it was designed to. USA is not the dream country anymore, Europe is looked up on as the dream place for regular people. 5\. Low-cost airline tickets will get more expensive, at least there, climate activists will succeeed. 6\. Climate change will not be helped by politicians, but by technology. Solar is already cheaper than nuclear/coal/gas and will replace it. Batteries will get cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER409> Personal cubicle is going to be a new dream of many software engineers. People will start hating open space.

</comment><comment><USER410> Wordpress will remain the most popular CMS.

ChromeOS and Android will merge into one product with Fuchsia as the kernel.

Donald Trump will be re-elected.

IPFS will not catch on.

ActionScript will make a comeback.

Bill Gates will give away all his money and join a monastery.

Universities will go back to teaching LISP in intro programming courses.

The FSF will buy out Microsoft.

At least one major country will outlaw cash and make everyone use Bitcoin.

Facebook will become "the real world."

Scotland will leave the UK, but France will join it.

PhP programmers will be found guilty of violating the Geneva convention.

Paul "the people's hammer" Graham will lead a successful communist revolution.

No celebrities will die.

</comment><comment><USER411> * Planet Nine discovered/spotted * No evidence for Dark matter WIMP theory * Firefox switches to blink

</comment><comment><USER233> Facial recognition will be used in all stores in order to determine how happy you are about your purchases.

</comment><comment><USER233> Implantable electronics will become almost as ubiquitous in the same way that the mobile technology has been for the last couple of decades.

When the battery tech, encapsulation (anti immune-reaction coating) and blood flow powered electronics is solved, the only thing we will have left to solve is the slow and buggy software. Anywho, just be afraid that it might never get solved and my prediction fails.

</comment><comment><USER412> My prediction for the next 5 years: Facebook and Google will face antitrust cases and will be regulated

</comment><comment><USER413> I might write more in-depth predictions on tildes, but for now the most egregious I can think of is on the change around the cryptocurrency space.

It'll probably still be around in some form. If cryptocurrencies themselves are still around by 2030 (seems likely) it'll look very different to today. Probably much more regulated and less fragmented (or on its way to standardize on fewer currencies; also fewer single-use-case currencies). If cryptocurrencies are successful 10 years from now, there will be a few government-backed ones at least. Libra (the Facebook one) won't happen, but something like it will be tried again, probably by Google or Amazon.

ICOs will be considered a joke and the scam of last decade. We'll look back at people falling for crypto scams in the 2010s like new web users fell for Nigerian scams in the 2000s.

Edit: just to try my hand at an extra prediction here, I think the rise of streaming services around tv means piracy will make a strong comeback with Plex and the like; and gaming will increasingly be streamed as well (think Stadia, but something that is successful, maybe by Steam). This may be more of a 20 year prediction but I think game developers will actually adapt their code, engines etc to better support the entire gameplay being streamed (latency-sensitive games becoming less mainstream).

</comment><comment><USER414> Goldmann Sachs will buy all of taxi medallions, Uber, Lyft, and going anywhere will triple in price.

</comment><comment><USER415> I predict we will see the further consolidation and co-integration of programming languages.

</comment><comment><USER416> 1\. A major cyber event kills over 50k people. Could be over 1 million if it's something as bad as a really bad windows update or a cyber war.

2\. China contests Nato leadership of the world in a way that makes countries pick one side or the other.

3\. Quantum computing becomes mainstream.

4\. AI isn't real AGI, but it's much more adaptable and pervasive than it is now. Fewer annoyances in major software products.

5\. Push comes to shove with surveillance capitalism. Do we want our cars recording everything and beaming it back to home base or not? I'm not saying it will get outlawed, but it will get decided.

6\. A new social network will emerge that's cooler than the existing ones and with some amount of privacy and sheltering from bullies and fake accounts.

7\. Webs of trust will finally start to control the gamification of the internet. Star ratings don't work right now, but if you trust your friends and their friends ratings could work again.

8\. Rights for poly relationships get extended.

9\. Global warming gets serious. Mass protests, mass buildouts of solutions, mass migrations.

10\. Major advancements in space exploration headed by the private sector, like Space X.

11\. Advancement in communicating with intelligent non-humans like dolphins. Possibly even the recognition that there are non-human sentient beings.

<comment><USER316> > 5\. Push comes to shove with surveillance capitalism. Do we want our cars > recording everything and beaming it back to home base or not? I'm not saying > it will get outlawed, but it will get decided.

It's likely insurance companies will push laws making it a requirement in order to provide insurance services. (At the moment, they just ask you to install their devices in exchange for a "lower premium.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER417> 1\. The widening gap between rich and poor in the United States will result in violent conflicts. We will witness lone-wolf shootings in affluent neighborhoods targeting rich people.

2\. Disease outbreaks will become a bigger problem because of denser human populations.

3\. SpaceX will take passengers around the moon but not to mars.

4\. Electric, self-driving capable cars will be everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER404> Java will still be among the top 3 programming languages in the IT/Software world.

</comment><comment><USER418> I have some background in speech recognition, translation, machine learning, so many of my predictions will center around these topics.

1\. More consumer robots, more fancy variants of cleaner robots.

2\. Autonomous cars will be there, at least simple variants which work under some constraints (e.g. highway). (I think this is level 3 or 4, not sure how these levels are defined.)

3\. More world-wide conflicts, because of politics, and also because of climate change. I'm optimistic that a world war will not happen, but it will become worse and worse.

4\. The deep learning hype grows rate slows down a bit. Custom hardware becomes more important, as we are currently hitting the ceiling with computing power, which will not grow as much exponentially as it has before. Custom hardware will first focus on making existing models cheaper and faster to run (think of TPU), but at some later point also lead to different models and learning algorithms (Neuromorphic chips).

5\. Speech recognition is a solved thing, more or less. The focus will shift towards embedding a speech recognition system/model into some bigger system, like an assistant, i.e. with parts like natural language understanding/processing, dialog systems, etc, and that will be more like an end-to-end system, not so much separated anymore. I.e. one big neural network for everything. Maybe in the beginning parts of it (like the speech part) are trained individually, or in a pretraining scheme. Current heuristics and hardcoded rules will go away and be replaced by neural solutions.

6\. Meta reinforcement learning will become more important, and bigger more general neural networks. Generality means that they will solve multiple tasks at once, similar to the dialog system I outlined, but this trend will also follow in other domains. It will all go into the direction of AGI (which basically is exactly that: an AI which is (more) general), but not reach it fully yet. Meta RL will also go along side with online/continual learning, and being able to learn new things at inference time. There will be stable basic models / learning algorithms which can be easily plugged into some system as a building block, and it can be treated like a black box and will mostly work (think about AlphaZero or MuZero but more advanced, more general, almost no hyper params to tune, all automatically). Meta RL will also solve sample efficiency to some degree.

7\. Much more electric cars, maybe being the majority.

8\. Not much people will care about Bitcoin anymore. Maybe other cryptocurrencies though, but not sure. Proof of work is not a long-term solution.

9\. China will dominate in many aspects, such as economy, but also research.

</comment><comment><USER419> A bunch of random predictions that I typed as they came to mind:

1\. Google has a serious competitor in the search engine space, but it is from an already established corporation and not a new startup

2\. An internet celebrity (i.e. fully-online career like a YouTuber) is elected leader of a major country

3\. Windows drops 32-bit support

4\. There still hasn't been a huge, crippling state-sponsored cyberattack. The rhetoric will remain as it is in 2020

5\. Fake news is no more or less relevant/damaging than it is in 2020, but it will still be in the public consciousness

6\. Similarly, deepfakes will be politically weaponized, but only a few people will fall for them, as they will be debunked the same way that fake news stories were debunked in the 2010s

7\. Partly with the help of social media, several western countries will elect governments that explicitly identify as fascist or communist

8\. As the developing world becomes more connected to the internet, userbases of popular websites will become more tilted toward countries like India and China

9\. China will abandon its Great Firewall

10\. The major players in the tech industry will not change. Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al. will still dominate, even as they attain increasingly negative press coverage and customer dissatisfaction. Silicon Valley will not be meaningfully disrupted until the 2030s

11\. Internet privacy will become more politicized and more people will care about it as a result (i.e., as it ties into other beliefs and identities)

12\. Internet-based cults will become prominent, possibly some as large as Scientology was in its heyday

</comment><comment><USER420> 1\. Decentralized open source social networking platforms

2\. Ownership of data, end-to-end encryption

3\. Collaborative wiki news, copyleft drug research

4\. The rapid emergence of a third party in the USA that is neither left nor right, but much bigger than Libertarian party

5\. Decentralized solar power generation, Decentralized mobile mesh network communication, Nuclear Fusion, Decentralizing government functions

 _The best way to predict the future is to invent it ;-)_

But also:

6\. Drones filling the sky and terrorism scares

7\. Self driving cars and terrorism scares

8\. Insect and bird populations plummeting and many species going extinct

9\. Water shortages, droughts, desertification and food shortages as humans cut back on meat, abolition of factory farms

10\. The steady emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is averted with phage therapy and other approaches as antibiotics see a slow decline

11\. The resurgence of liberal democratic politicians, who nevertheless will have tough border policies because of the increasing influx of refugees

12\. The rise of NATO-style forces against China and a new cold war

13\. Introduction of UBI funded by Pigovian taxes on Cabon and Plastic pollution, destruction of ecosystems, etc.

14\. First biosphere colony on Mars lasts for a while but is a tragic failure

15\. Solar storm wipes out power grid, helping build a decentralized power grid

</comment><comment><USER421> Human stupidity finally catches up, and it's not pretty:

* The 2020 election in the USA is extremely hard on the nation's moral, as Trump appears to win in a landslide, but is quickly uncovered as a massive hack of the popular vote, well as the electoral college, as well as a coordinated deep fake news with Anderson Cooper and other network anchors faked and reporting a Trump landslide.

* Anti-vaxers have their ultimate success by triggering epidemics that wipe out large portions of the 60+ population in the US.

* The rapid death rate of older US citizens triggers a real estate collapse as the younger generations have no economic capacity to absorb the monumental number of luxury boomer homes entering the market.

* The US real estate collapse cascades and trillions of dollars of wealth evaporate over night.

* The US Federal Reserve tries drastic measures, but the international community has had enough of the USA's predatory policies and the poor choice of the Yuan becomes the new international currency of business.

* Attempting a return to relevancy, the US Dollar is converted into a cryptocurrency, but a poor technical implementation leaves an exploit exposed, and the entirety of the US's liquid currency is stolen in a single day's coordinated attack.

* The unreal aspect of all of the USA's poor decisions cascading into such a terrible situation, suicide rates in the US skyrocket. Those that choose life tell themselves "at least its not as bad here as in the UK."

* The UK has the same problems as the US, only their volume is 11 where in the US the terror volume is 10. The UK formally adopts "The Purge" as a means of resolving their differences.

</comment><comment><USER422> Moon is colonized and we send astronauts there to prepare for colonization of Mars.

</comment><comment><USER423> Organs will be harvested from pig human chimaeras. Will likely be uncovered that it was happening in the 2010's but disclosed publicly this decade. Likely China are world leaders in this.

Increased tension along India Pakistan border results in skirmish's and possible Balkanisation of Pakistan. India suffers a bad recession and undergoes a regime change and try's to divert political opinion by attacking the Pakistan border region. Similar to Argentina Falklands conflict.

Trump re-elected but democrats win in 2024 with first female president elected. She will be from a mid western state and have wide base of support from across party lines and isn't seen as a contender at this time.

Brexit transition is painful but Britain is doing better and having a localised boom by end of the decade. This is largely due to less regulation.

Ireland undergoes reunification this decade. Everyone hopes in 2024 to meet the Star Trek prophecy.

South Africa property seizures on white landowners cause mass emigration leads to food security issues in the region.

Cyber security bubble pops. Most people catch on to the fact that it's mostly vapourware. Most companies in-house security so it's mostly managed security service providers affected. One of the big MSSPs goes bust and is merged in other another one. Likely crowdstrike into fireeye.

A cyber security service provider is hacked and used as a vector to target customers.

The next recession will be a money recession due to over supply caused by quantitative easing. This causes inflation on price. This will be preceded by a year of wide scale introduction of negative interest rates.

Fake meat products linked to one of the following; hormone issues, cancer, foreign food tampering scandal.

</comment><comment><USER424> * There will be a major and long-lasting global recession, likely within the first 5 years of the decade, that leads to significant sociopolitical shifts in multiple countries

* Major weather events become (even more) common, CO2 levels continue to rise, climate change becomes accepted as "real" across the board very quickly by the middle of the decade, but rather than just being the gateway to more funding for research/innovation or global accords and working together, also gives rise to at least one right-wing eco-fascist type party, open talk of eugenics/depopulation, and/or a rise of a strongly authoritarian but much more eco-friendly Chinese government

* "Anti-technology" fringe movements gain as BigTech becomes increasingly villified and understood as some of the most powerful trans-nationcal corps in the world - not only sabotage+hacker movements, but also a revival of "back to the land" type commune/monastic/retreat/cult movements

* A major breakthrough is made with regards to Alzheimers/dementia

* Religiosity continues to decline across the world, however smallish cults become much more popular

* The culture wars abate somewhat, and some things have permanently changed (ie; genderfluidity and identifying as multiple genders during one lifetime will be seen as relatively common by anyone that becomes a teenager during this decade)

* Extreme poverty will continue to be eradicated and more people will have access to things like basic antibiotics and drinking water by the end of the decade, even with climate change disruption to landbases/watersheds

* Systems science methods become more mainstream - things like agent-based modeling, etc. Basic machine learning stuff is taught in high school.

</comment><comment><USER425> \- Treatment will have improved so that it will be rare to die from cancer.

\- Self-employment will be more popular than working in large open offices in large corporations.

\- Large investments in AI corporations due to inflated beliefs will result in a new bubble in similar scale as the millenium IT bubble or the 2008 financial crisis.

\- Immigration debates will create new tensions and will make political correctness come back similar to the reverse sexual-revolution after #metoo. Both auto-adjustments are beneficial for the stability of society.

\- It will become popular to learn to play real instruments again. People will be tired of rap music and lack of creativity. It will become more popular to play classical music and jazz.

\- Companies will start to offer fridays off for people to work on their personal projects or take time to recover or exercise.

\- Countries outside of EU will copy the concept of GDPR to protect their citizens' data.

\- Screen addiction (Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram...) will be considered as a major problem in society and people will be encouraged to socialize, mate, do exercise and play music instead.

</comment><comment><USER426> First Human will land on the Mars and we will have permanent presence after it.

</comment><comment><USER427> Political predictions:

1\. Authoritarianism spreads as propaganda and surveillance technologies make it easier for bad actors in weak democracies to cement their power.

2\. Over the decade, the US dollar declines modestly versus other major currencies. The U.S. deficit soars, and by the end of the decade U.S. tax rates have increased substantially.

3\. Without the UK, EU centralization accelerates, including the formation of a small EU military. France withdraws from NATO.

4\. Belarus joins the Russian Federation. Vladimir Putin retires as President of Russia on schedule in 2024, but remains its dominant political figure in a newly created ceremonial role.

5\. Chinese pressure and threats on Taiwan to reunify increase, but trigger a surge in Taiwanese nationalism. Xi Jinping remains President of China at the end of the decade. Many foreign companies end operations in China.

6\. Another global financial crisis occurs.

7\. Global animal populations decline sharply, especially marine animals, amphibians and birds. Food prices increase as global warming negatively impacts agricultural productivity.

Tech predictions:

1\. Google gets new leadership by 2022 and attempts to reinvent itself with a renewed focus on privacy and ethics.

2\. The use of AI in medicine increases sharply- models that outperform physicians (in a limited number of specialties) proliferate and are deployed primarily outside of hospitals.

3\. Many U.S. cable TV networks shutdown.

4\. A third major smartphone operating system emerges from a non-Western company.

5\. AI progress continues at a rapid pace, prompted in part by advances in emulating biological memory storage and retrieval to greatly reduce upfront training time.

</comment><comment><USER428> I wrote a post with my predictions here [https://medium.com/swlh/9-predictions- for-2020-2029-555312fc...](https://medium.com/swlh/9-predictions- for-2020-2029-555312fc69fc?source=friends_link&sk=0a7319bbd3ea69cb363c87b91f642ba3)

TLDR 1\. Federated Learning will unlock value from previously inaccessible sensitive data.

2\. Deepfakes will impact democracy and bring about a need for publisher certified content.

3\. Nationalism will rise around the world, the internet will splinter.

4\. eSports will take a huge chunk of attention and advertising dollars from sports.

5\. Blockchain will get adoption in enterprise. Mainstream adoption will struggle until there is a key custody solutions that everyone can use.

6\. Self driving cars will open up new business models. Regulations will be the main barrier to adoption.

7\. Welfare systems will get strained.

8\. Digital currencies and negative interest rates will open pandoras box.

9\. Search will get reimagined.

I also enjoyed these posts

[https://avc.com/2020/01/what-will-happen-in- the-2020s/](https://avc.com/2020/01/what-will-happen-in-the-2020s/)

[https://continuations.com/post/189997132065/an-agenda-for- th...](https://continuations.com/post/189997132065/an-agenda-for- the-2020s-inventing-the-knowledge)

[https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for- the-202...](https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-2020s/)

<comment><USER429> 5\. what applications do you envisage that 100% of enterprises couldn't already solve far more easily with a database?

<comment><USER428> providing end to end provenance of live exports in cross border supply chains involving China.

<comment><USER429> so you want a blockchain instead of database because of a lack of trust between who and who? if 2 parties can't you just run 2 databases? and if there is a trust issue don't you have bigger problems anyway as somebody still needs to sign off (attach their reputation to an assertion) that item X came from place Y etc - but if you can't trust the database what makes you think you trust the person ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER430> My two cents:

1) Batteries become much more efficient, by 2030 we will recharge mobile phones once a week.

2) Health-monitoring wearables will be widespread, driving life expectancy up by 10 years largely due to early condition detection and reduced medical response time time.

3) Adoption of centralized crypto currencies by governments and financial instituions will grow significantly.

4) With GDPR being enforced, countries around the globe either align with it (Ex: Brazil's LGPD) or try to resist (Ex: USA lobbying). Even so, eventually all major democracies will approve user-centered privacy legislation.

5) Technology aided social clustering (ex: social networks, messaging apps groups) will continue to potentialize confirmation bias whitin these groups, affecting public opinion, disseminating fake news, causing turbulence in election years.

6) Meat consumption (per capita) decreases, due to pricing pressures and growing environmental concerns. Alternative/Innovative protein sources gain traction (ex: cricket flour, lab-grown beef, improved vegetarian hamburgers).

<comment><USER431> > 1) Batteries become much more efficient, by 2030 we will recharge mobile > phones once a week.

Like in 2003?

</comment></comment><comment><USER432> \- The retail apocalypse continues, with half the current retail workforce displaced and most storefronts in the country vacant. No one in SV notices.

\- Climate change continues to accelerate. No meaningful consensus is reached on a policy response. Climate induced migration leads to regional warfare

\- There are 30 countries with nuclear weapons. 5 of them are borderline failed-states.

\- The EU splinters. The most stable remaining countries try to form a new agreement

\- Income and wealth disparities widen

\- Donald Trump is re-elected

\- A major hot war erupts in the middle east

\- Apple still hasn't introduced an important follow-up to the iPhone. It now costs $1500 (plus $200 per month for data in the US). Apple has $2 trillion in cash

\- Amazon passes Google in the advertising space, leveraging all they know about the world's consumer purchases

\- Everyone is under surveillance constantly as commerce companies secretly agree to share all data with law enforcement in return for removing all remaining privacy laws.

\- Agriculture doubles-down on pesticide use to meet growing food demand, causing severe long-term ecological damage.

<comment><USER433> > The EU splinters

I think Brexit guarantees the rest will work 20x harder than they would have otherwise to avoid a collapse or split. They can clearly see how good for national unity that leave or raising the question is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER434> Google will buy an electric utility and enter into the power industry with full force. Not only revving up smartgrid and the whole customer experience, but seriously pursuing fringe power generation like ocean waves, thermoelectrics. Vast majority of these will be abandoned.

</comment><comment><USER435> the HN echo chamber will continue to downvote valid but unpopular opinions

</comment><comment><USER436> 1\. Democratic institutions globally continue to be tested by rising populism and the spread of misinformation. Nationalism grows, powered by internet propaganda

2\. Rising corporate concentration and market power, especially in internet technology, lead to noticeable increase in inequality without growing economy long-term (investors/employees in big tech reap all profits)

3\. A minor social/technological movement for preserving information integrity / credentialing starts and is monetized by new companies

4\. Universities continue the trend of being software engineer farms. Research funding continues to plateau

5\. Video games / interactive digital experiences take off, especially social ones inspired by Fortnite. Someone creates a platform and a marketplace, makes developing and publishing games very, very, very easy, (easier than unity and unreal4) and begins reaping the reward

6\. Hopefully, there is more wirelessly powered e-ink paper around. But I wouldn't bet on it yet. Science fiction

7\. AI fizzles. Big Data mining and targeted digital business persists.

8\. Cyberwarfare grows. Big tech accidentally becomes national security issue

9\. GDPR comes to USA late in the decade, lagging way behind Europe. Major battle

10\. Amazon grows even bigger. Beyond Meats/Impossible/equivalent become major food distributor, competing with Sysco

11\. Pay by phone/mobile device takes off

12\. Softbank-funded companies, suffer minor collapses. Uber, Lyft, shrink. Entire portfolio pulls back. Loss of many temporary/gig jobs. Enough economic footprint to cause minor dip in stock market. More private investment in safe startups. More corporate bonds? long-term investment continues to stagnate.

13\. Generally not too much will change

</comment><comment><USER437> * C++ 2030 == D 2015

* Javascript is still a thing.

* Proper lightweight AR/VR glasses.

* If it can go into a phone it will. If it can go from a phone into a watch, it will.

* Facebook still around despite feeds being almost 100% adverts.

* Oracle finally beginning to fail. MS/Google/Twitter/FB all still around.

* Some countries go periodically dark on the Internet (see Russia's recent "test" for example).

* China is the #1 economy despite its own credit bubble problems.

* Petrol still dominates over electric (electric cars need a 400 mile range and faster charging to be viable).

* Road charging becomes ubiquitous since taxes can't be collected at the pump any more.

* Climate change is still a thing and another lost decade of politicians procrastinating (especially if Trump is in power for another 5 years).

* First war directly attributed to water scarcity.

* Third world countries still contributing 90% of plastic in the ocean.

* Fusion still 40 years away. Thorium reactors finally commercially in use.

* Planet 9 finally discovered.

* Manned moon landing. Finally.

* Still no room temperature superconductivity.

* Drones become much smaller - firework displays replaced by drones.

</comment><comment><USER438> FANG replaced by something else from the job opportunity point of view.

</comment><comment><USER439> 1) Cheap DNA sequencing and advances in ML will transform medicine, but also spark debate over mandatory testing and insurance. Medicine will begin to focus more on prevention of disease than treatment itself.

2) The boomers will refuse to die, and life-spans will surge into the 90s. This will cause massive social upheaval as the 'ok boomer' phenomenon goes from a meme to a generational political crisis.

3) AR will have established itself as a threat to mobile phone usage, but will take another 10 years to achieve primacy over smartphones

4) Nation-states will coopt, regulate, and control cryptocurrency.

5) Hollywood will be transformed by deep-fakes. Old and dead actors will be resurrected and become the new stars (again).

6) The pornographic industry will be decimated by the rise of VR camming, and CGI with licensed deep-fakes.

7) ML will drive dating into a new era of automated matchmaking rather than swiping/chatting.

8) Claims will be made that distributed team efficiency has made hubs like Silicon Valley obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER440> Ruby on Rails reaches version 10, supports tab completing entire apps.

</comment><comment><USER441> 1\. Climate change will change everything.

2\. Resource depletion won't help.

3 Think of it as 1910.

</comment><comment><USER80> A few from me:

* The US economy will maintain the post war status quo. The decade will feature no more than two but probably one recession which will have been trigger by an "X bubble" where X is something everybody uses (e.g. housing or tech). Rich people and "corporations" will be blamed, but no meaningful economic reforms will be passed. UBI will remain a fringe idea, and not be implemented federally or in any of the 50 states, though it will remain quite popular on the internet and in the Democratic primary. The labor force participation rate will drop as boomers retire, but not precipitously, and the rate of drop will slow by 2030. However, this drop will also lead to sustained growth in real (inflation adjusted) wages. Recessions will feature unemployment around 10% and non-recessions will feature unemployment around 5%. Many tech nerds will still regard 80% of jobs as useless and not producing any value.

* Britain will leave the EU fully, but not significantly decline as a worldwide power.

* Global warming will continue and remain basically unsolved.

* The CCP will continue to rule China as an authoritarian regime.

* Mexico will still be controlled by cartels

* India will still be struggling to describe itself as a "modern nation" but will periodically experience various scandals that seem decidedly third world.

* The middle east will still be a mess of competing militias funded by external empires (China, US, Russia), however the US will not formally invade any country with the intention of displacing their government (a la Iraq/Afghanistan).

* The last nuclear bomb used in a war will continue to be 1945/WW2.

* Another WACO or similar domestic terrorist - FBI/DEA/TLA standoff will occur and catch headlines, leading to the fringe group mostly being killed by the government, which will result in many angry words in the press but no meaningful changes.

</comment><comment><USER442> Singularity does not happen

Therefore…

International banks moving off of Libor triggers loan re-evaluations causing a financial down-turn

In response, US creates a trillion dollar infrastructure bill that gives power to states and cities to invest in infrastructure

China introduces state sponsored crypto currency uses it in trade with Africa and Asian trade partners (starts moving world off the dollar)

Russia replaces Putin, goes into irrelevancy as population ages

Amazon becomes major brick and mortar retailer (buys Best Buy)

Microsoft is first company to hit $2T valuation on backs of azure + developer tools and enterprise productivity.

Apple does not have another major consumer hit, has to make major cloud company acquisition to keep services business relevant

Google keeps search ad monopoly and continues to win TV video ads revenue through YouTube

Facebook + Netflix start dancing. Mobile specific content is released

Tesla is #1 car company globally. Existing companies are forced to license their tech (VW leads)

</comment><comment><USER443> \- Health care in the UK will reach levels of the US. A few years later you will see the same process starting in Germany and France.

\- South America will see a transformation of regimes, this time there will be socialist nations standing their ground.

\- Migration from Africa and South America will accelerate so much, we will hear calls for armed borders in the US, Mexico and Europe.

\- By 2025 climate politics will be the centerpiece of every first world nation, pressured by the public. Alas, it won't change much as China will still be public enemy #1 in the West and will not change much about their climate policies.

\- Javascript will still be the center of web development, Web Assembly will not strike it down, but will instead die down after a few years of hype.

\- Web Components will be the standard ground work for new web frameworks.

\- Firefox will die, Chrome and Edge will share market with a 80-20 share.

</comment><comment><USER444> 1000 new Javascript frameworks will be released in 2020 alone.

</comment><comment><USER445> I predict that most of these predictions won't come true.

</comment><comment><USER446> Here's what I predict for 2030:

1\. Trump will either be world dictator, or hardly anyone will talk about him.

2\. Python, Go, JavaScript, Java, and C++ will still be incredibly popular programming languages. Kotlin & Swift may join that list.

3\. Self-driving cars will begin to see wide adoption. Governments will update infrastructure to better support fully-automated self driving.

4\. Facebook will be a hollow shell of its former self unless the company makes a considerable innovation.

5\. The climate change debate will hardly change.

6\. There will be either a major war or a major recession.

7\. Automation will replace hardly any jobs, but the jobs it does replace will lead to creative endeavors being more highly desired skills in the workplace.

8\. Trump will win a second term.

9\. Space exploration becomes a high priority around the world.

10\. A major disease will be cured / a medical breakthrough of some kind will occur.

11\. People will still be obsessed with the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER447> \- Terrorist attacks increase, especially mass shootings.

\- Climate denialism turns into eco-fascism. "Overpopulation" will be used as an excuse to commit horrible acts all around the world.

\- Socialism/Anarchism also surge around the world, but doesn't catch on as much as authoritarianism.

\- Facebook plays a large role in ushering in authoritarianism around the world.

\- China firmly becomes the world's leading superpower.

\- USD is no longer the world's main reserve currency.

\- Mass movement of people moving out of cities to more rural areas.

\- There will be a rise in curated online stores. Which of these stores you shop at is a part of your identity.

\- Plant based meat becomes cheaper then actual meat, is eaten more at fast food restaurants then normal meat.

\- McDonald's starts building virtually un-staffed restaurants.

\- With the increase in streaming options, piracy becomes much more popular again.

\- Kanye West starts a cult in Wyoming.

</comment><comment><USER448> 1\. Self-driving cars are commonplace, but doesn't change anything except drunk driving goes down a lot 2\. Major earthquake strikes West Coast, but doesn't change anything 3\. At least one short recession 4\. Putin drops out of power in Russia 5\. Many famous people die of old age as the pop stars of the 60's and 70's reach their 80's and 90's. 6\. India grows to the largest population country, Africa BOOMS 300% 7\. 10 years worth of solar and EV progression happen, changing very little 8\. The mob mentality finally causes some laws to be made around mob mentalities. 9\. Carbon nanotubes/nanodes* are commercialized leading to the continuation of Moore's Law 10\. Generation X takes control and we enter a long phase of apathy and minimal change.

</comment><comment><USER449> 1\. Remotely work will be more common; 2\. Revive of hardware;

</comment><comment><USER450> I have a few too, although I don't know who is going to read them since there are over 1k comments. Here goes nothing.

1) I'm pretty sure a final cure for HIV-1 and better detection + treatment for AIDS will come up in the next 4 years. Also, the Pre and Post exposure drugs will probably become efficient for infections older than 48 hours. The things with HIV/AIDS research is that a discovery on one end of the disease yields results on all of them in a short amount of time.

2) Populism and nationalism will start to die out because gen X and Z are brought up in a more data-available world. They'll probably have a more Hans Rosling/Steven Pinker attitude towards the world than a Trump/Johnson one.

3) Ethiopia will become the powerhouse of the continent, prompting migration from all over. If an open and/or tolerant attitude is kept towards neighbors, it might generate a ripple effect across the whole region - an effect consisting in stability. That's what Israel could've done if a dual-state solution was obtained, or Iran if the CIA hadn't generate a coup to remove the democratic prime minister because BP Oil couldn't buy cheap resources anymore. I really hope no one fucks up this time.

4) Poorer countries will outpace the more developed ones in terms of digital governance, administration and bureaucracy since they'll start implement administrative reforms with the current available tools that have the power to reach anyone - which are all online. Current administrations from developed countries still need to overcome the integration nightmare of current systems.

5) Public photography and filming will get intensely regulated worldwide as the laws haven't been adapted to the smartphone era as well as the digital privacy era. For example: currently, photographers are allowed to snap photos of you in public without asking for consent in most of the countries. Then they sell them off for 100 dollars on Getty Images. Then you see yourself in a prostate ad from an obscure magazine sold in a mall in Indiana. Life's complicated.

</comment><comment> fat-chunk I really do hope I am wrong about this one, but unless a very strong wave of international regulation on the big tech companies comes in, particularly with regards to the gathering, storage and processing of personal data, then I see us entering a gruelling cold war over the next decade, the main players being largely the same (US vs Russia & China, with the EU and the larger middle eastern powers as secondary actors).

Reasons for this prediction: \- The likes of Trump, Putin, the brexit campaign have all benefitted from the normalisation of outrageous headlines and extreme/divisive views shared at mass scale and speed thanks to the ease of viral spreading of low quality media with ulterior motives. \- The hyperlocal targetting of individuals using their personal data has only exacerbated and optimised this phenomenon. \- Because of this it is easier for these divisive and populist politicians who run on policies of rash short term decisions to come into power, which will in turn lead to worse international relations. \- (more speculative argument) The algorithms which power social media and consumer advertising using personal data will placate the middle classes, feeding them what they think they want to see and consume and keeping them distant from the world's reality (e.g. what is already happening in China, Singapore) meaning populists can maintain control by getting votes/support from the more desperate people with their more extreme policies.

Unfortunately, I do not see the necessary regulation coming in soon, as the major players would never want to break up their tech giants out of fear of giving up ground to rival tech giants (e.g. amazon vs ali baba). On top of that, these governments have no incentive to mitigate the gathering of personal data by companies as they will want access to it as well for political reasons (domestic as well as international mass surveillance provides a big strategic advantage in the context of this cyber cold war).

There are many other reasons why I think these problems are being exacerbated but I have tried to summarise what I think are (and will continue to be) the main ones.

</comment><comment><USER451> * VR will never become mainstream, but will get an addicting online killer app that will pull in "hardcore" gamers (like WoW was in the 2000's)

* Multiple companies will publish consumer AR headsets at around the price of a high end cellphone. None of them will have mainstream success and only be purchased by earlier adopters until Apple releases a headset around the early-middle of the decade. This catches on moderately as an iPad like success, becoming an extra gadget for affluent households, but doesn't come close to displacing phones.

* Ads are going to become more and more embedded into things that we do. Product placement in movies, social media, and TV will replace traditional ads. * We will see the shuttering of Cable news stations much like we saw newspapers in the previous decade, especially geared towards the child / teen demographics. We will see more of that content move to streaming sites.

* Self driving cars still won't be massively deployed on our roads.

* Uber / Lyft will have major restructuring (maybe go bankrupt) after they still can't find a way to make a profit. Prices will hike and consumers will stop using the services shocking an unprepared public transport system. * Some major Katrina level natural disaster on the West Coast (possibly megaquake or super fire).

* More states will pass GDPR like regulation, slowing down the pace of social media giants.

* We will start to see an influx of technology innovation from Chinese tech companies and this will create fear of mass surveillance for the masses.

* There will be a data breach from Facebook or Google leading to a government investigation.

* They AI fad will trickle into non tech circles. Multiple companies will use bullshit AI systems that claim to be good at qualitative tasks like determining employee's performance reviews.

* Still no signs of general AI

* CRISPER treatments start going through clinical trials and we find cures for a few major genetic diseases.

</comment><comment><USER452> A new HID will replace keyboards+ mouse/touchscreens.

</comment><comment><USER453> I'll be happy if we're all still here in 2030.

</comment><comment><USER454> 1\. VR/AR finally become a thing as the tech becomes small enough, powerful enough, and wireless enough to be a good UX. Facebook's investment in Oculus pays off as Oculus becomes their main profit center, and we transition to a Ready Player One reality.

2\. The world faces increasingly alarming & extreme weather disasters. The damage will be utterly devastating and start to really hurt economies. Governments will still be inept at managing these crises. People who have the means will move to lower-risk areas like the Pacific Northwest, driving up real estate prices. Those who are poorer will suffer from homelessness. There will be massive encampments like we've never seen before of displaced families.

3\. MDMA and psilocybin will be legalized for medical use and will revolutionize mental health care for depression and PTSD. Which is great because we'll all need a lot of mental health care.

4\. Trump loses his re-election bid and ultimately flees the country to avoid consequences as the world closes in on him. He loses his US assets but is given safe passage by a foreign power he has had corrupt dealings with.

5\. CRISPR is touted as the tech of the decade as it cures a major disease and appears to have incredible potential. At least one nation violates international ethical standards in their experimentation with CRISPR, igniting a debate over whether we have opened a pandora's box. There are protests and our CRISPR anxiety is evident in pop culture.

6\. Americans finally catch on to the bidet/washlet craze thanks to an incredibly effective viral ad campaign.

7\. Learning Chinese in school becomes more common because China has become the dominant world superpower. India rises to second, and US falls to third.

8\. Bitcoin will cost $500k+ per coin, having peaked at 100-150k by 2022 and 500k+ by 2026. There will be a Silicon Valley-esque tv comedy about rich crypto bros that everyone hate-watches.

9\. There will be a major pandemic that scares the shit out of everyone because we are woefully unprepared for it.

10\. We're all going to become preppers by the end of the decade because there will be so many potential existential threats.

11\. Water will become a lot more expensive, driving major innovation around desalinization.

12\. Lab meat will have it's first big success a la the Impossible Burger as clean/lab meat tech becomes commercially available. There will be a thriving DIY culture around growing meat at home.

</comment><comment><USER455> • Elon Musk viewed as more unpopular than Mark Zuckerberg as his company passes 1T in valuation.

• No new smartphones will contain SIM card slots.

• US government follows China's blockchain based Yuan in issuing a crypto based USD.

</comment><comment><USER456> 1) Cryptocurrencies will largely die off, between attacks, thefts, valuation collapses, subversion, and regulation. They'll still exist in very tiny niche/underworld uses, but the word "cryptocurrency" will be so tainted that every future proposal for private electronic money transactions will call it something else—and they will include a "This Is Not Like Bitcoin" disclaimer.

2) OS X will head toward sunset for consumers. Apple will finally do what some people have been predicting for ages and transition to a desktop/laptop iOS variant for the consumer/business market. A compatibility module will let users run OS X applications for several years after. OS X (perhaps "OS Pro") will eventually be a developer's OS aimed at big machines for video effects and the like...or maybe Apple will sunset it, too, in favor of iOS Pro.

3) Python 2 use will finally die off.

4) Fusion will not happen.

5) Someone will develop a decent system for structuring web apps as local apps, so that instead of pulling down an Electron app, you just download a bundle that runs on your desktop. (The lines between web app, offline web app, and local web app will get very complicated.) 3-4 years after this happens, MS or Apple build it into their OSes.

6) Level 4/5 autonomous cars will be in testing or close enough that the legal fights, strikes, and protests will begin in earnest.

7) Americans get some sort of federal carbon tax.

8) Drones become the new CCTV.

9) The die-off is over for newspapers and magazines. Most paper publications existing today will exist in 2030. Most new news or special interest media outlets will be online, not on paper, though.

10) The die-off is also over for malls and strip centers, and while the stores will constantly change, most of the ones open today will be open in 2030.

11) Hybrids get cheaper and expand into a double-digit percentage of the US auto market.

12) Putin loses power in Russia. This will probably involve his death, if only from natural causes.

</comment><comment><USER457> If anyone aggregates these predictions, please share.

</comment><comment><USER458> 1\. There will be a major earthquake in a major city. 2\. More states in US will implement their own version of GDPR. 3\. Tech Conference pass prices will continue to rise, reach a tipping point until it would be free to attend. 4\. Queen Elizabeth II would pass away. 5\. Food delivery companies would not be sustainable and they will have to pivot to something else. 6\. Google will still be #1 in search, Amazon in shopping but might be forced by government to break up into smaller entities. 7\. Alternatives to password would be used for authentication. 8\. "Influencers" will lose value and people will start to not buy things if it was "influenced"

</comment><comment><USER459> Here goes my prediction:

1\. The environment will go even wilder, creating unbalance across continents. Major migrations will take place into cooler regions. This will probably create internal conflicts in the host country and the rise of extremist parties and conservatives. People will be divided based on their interests and will be globally available while not knowing each other's neighbors.

2\. AGI will not happen, but AI will be an integral part of human life, solving problems at speed and precision. More tech stacks will be developed that allows people and business to automate mundane tasks.

3\. The world leaders will not work on climate change and the fuel prices will soar up. Alternative energy sources will not be the major player in the industry but rather a flex point for the riches. Amazon will lose up to 20% of its forest area, impacting the environment even further.

4\. The economic disparity will create a social conflict across various regions which will ultimately create a huge shift of wealth to the general public. Thus, booming days are coming where people will be able to earn and spend on medical bills, education, and entertainment without going broke.

5\. Technological advancement in distributed computing, AI and data science will allow businesses to solve, and create tools across several verticals. Thus there will be huge growth in the agriculture, manufacturing and processing industries.

6\. Biotech will be the trending topic. Immersive VR will be a thing, where one can feel the things in the VR.

7\. Display technology will change for the first time in later half of the next decade. There will be emersion of mixed display technology. Mobile devices will be the thing of the past, however, people would still be using it.

8\. People will be even lonely.

9\. Quantum Computing will enter the discovery phase and will be available to local publics too.

10\. Web will have a rapid change and will be designed to support AR stack and VR stack.

11\. Parallel computing and parallel algorithms will be mainstream and new kind of programming paradigm will emerge.

</comment><comment><USER460> Half Life 3 (or 2 ep 3) still hasn't been released.

<comment><USER161> By 2030, people will be waiting for Half Life: Alyx 3 instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER461> We will still work long hours and have no money.

</comment><comment><USER462> Nobody will own their own self-driving car. Autonomous taxis will be available only in limited markets.

There will be a right-wing rebellion in at least one western nation with 10^3 deaths or more.

Worldwide total carbon emissions will increase every year of the decade.

Mainland China will outright annex one of its neighbors without major casualties.

Meat alternatives will not exceed the market size of any animal-based meat (fish, poultry, beef, or pork).

There are no major changes in the US Social Security system. By the end of the decade, the SSA will still be projecting a 25% loss of benefits in the middle of the next decade.

In computing, performance per core in high-end computers will be within 15% of today.

</comment><comment><USER209> Moderators: can we front page this each year?

</comment><comment><USER463> Fossil fuep dependence will be less but not by a dramatic magnitude.

The US will elect an extreme leftist to which as a response ,after 4-8 years Trump++ will be in charge

A lot more of the usual bad news stuff but with much less optimism which results in many systemic crashes.

A lot of the fad around self driving cars and ML will fade out leaving practical long term tech.

The internet's technical debt will finally call the collectors.

Dramatic move away from dependence on targeted ads to sustain web services and infra.

A payment app will take over the west like with China when they start catering to offline (cash like) transactions and please both mobile and non-mobile users (a great feat).

Deep fakes will creat a hype but fade away after a while.

Either america continues fighting both russia and china and gets torn to pieces from the inside out or most likely succumb to China, win the modern cold war against russia and give rise to China becoming a second super power rivaling america and dominating Asia and Africa,leaving Europe,parts of africa and south america (and some asian countries) to figure out how to restructure their economies. In the end it will be an energy war where the west moves away from fossil fuels and builds long term sustainable economy while everyone else enjoys cheaper fossil fuels as their sphere of influence builds up economic/military resilience against the west (I think late 40's and 50's will see everyone going green).

HN will still be the same. IRC will still be the same (less people though). Infosec will thrive while threats become even more adoptive and agile against mitigations.

International participation in foss will dramatically shape the culture and consistency of foss communities.

Consolidation of home automation/assistant technology.

Actual (dangerous), information and propaganda warfare will happen (2016+russia was nothing if you know much about WW2 ,50's america and communist propaganda)

And finally, I will likely be wrong at least 6/10 on my predictions. :)

May we all live in boring and uninteresting times!

</comment><comment><USER464> HN's style sheet and design remain the same.

</comment><comment><USER465> I have a feeling entrenched higher education will be less prevalent, and that there will be a rise in trade schools. Any predictions for the future of education?

<comment><USER51> By 2030, at least one fully accredited, fully- or mostly-online university is available that offers a recognized diploma at significantly less than the cost of in-state tuition at a state university, yet still offering equal or better education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER466> The decade of Linux on desktops. Obviously.

</comment><comment><USER467> 1) Wealth inequality will mean revert

2) America will reform entitlements in the wake of a depression

3) China will become a serious regional aggressor

4) We debate capitalism vs socialism more often

5) We realize AI is a buzzword that won't replace 40+% of jobs

6) Tech gets its 2 minutes of hate, we reject chinese style surveilence

7) Europe's decline quickens due to negative rates, low productivity, an aging population, indebtedness and unfunded obligations

8) Trump wins and the DNC reforms then runs 2024 on healthcare policy

9) Education gets slightly less liberal, prices will drop

10) FAANG's aggregate market cap won't recover its peak value before the next crash

11) Bitcoin crosses 40k

</comment><comment><USER468> My predictions, not as grand as some others, but anyways!

Software Engineering / Startups:

\- FAANG will be continue to provide the best monetary compensation, that no startup can beat. However, there will be a few startups that will figure out something to attract the best-of-the-best. Similar to how Google figured out how to do it in the early 2000s. I thought maybe something bitcoin would have been it, in 2010s, but I don't think that's come to pass yet. These companies will become HUGE, bigger than Google by 2040.

\- UI development in the browser and browser based technologies will be dominated by one framework, and we will stop seeing new frameworks every other month. Think Qt but with web technologies. Performance afforded by native applications will still not be a priority for all but the biggest apps.

\- Java will continue to be dominant in terms of market share, and JVM will be continue to be huge on the server side. In fact, Java will supersede Scala and Kotlin in terms of the most important features. As in it will have the best parts of both the languages, but designed better.

\- There will be huge progress in developer tooling for machine learning. Just as how you can do `npm install`, run docker containers, and virtual machines very well, without knowing anything about how it works, you will be able to train and use "good enough" models without knowing how machine learning works. AutoML is just the start, I'm thinking the stereotypical 17 year old hacker who gets into JavaScript today as their first technology, will instead be getting into Machine Learning based stuff by 2030. Recruiters will be surprised if you've not been exposed to it in the past year, regardless of your background.

\- People will continue complaining about agile, product management etc. :)

Stuff I have no idea about, but here it goes:

\- The current world is fairly divided and fragile and changing. It's been a long time (> 75 years) since there has been a big crisis. By the beginning of 2030, we will start to see the sparks of another crisis. It may either be the biggest global recession ever, or something worse.

India related:

\- The government in power will continue to be nationalist through this decade (though not necessarily the current party / leaders), however more secular than it is right now.

\- There will be at least one startup from India whose product will be used widely around the world.

\- There will be economic and infrastructural gains, but by the end of the decade, it will still feel meh.

\- At least one place in India will get hit very, very hard by something caused due to climate change.

</comment><comment><USER469> \- Plant based foods will be ubiquitous and largely replace meats.

\- Electric cars will take a large share of roads, although traditional combustion engines will still be very common. We will see more electric heavy industry vehicles (construction, mining, heavy ship freight, perhaps even airplanes) replace traditional combustion vehicles.

\- Self driving cars will be around more, and work well enough that many drivers will hardly be driving anymore. The new lack of focus on the road will create a new set of safety concerns and legal matters.

\- We will see many new weather extremes due to climate change. Record breaking temperatures and intense storms, especially along the equator. The sea levels will rise at an increasing rate.

\- World will still be dependent on fossil fuels for its energy source, although coal will share a much smaller percentage of that then today as dirty industries move to natural gas. Renewables and nuclear will continue to increase in the share, but still in the minority compared to fossil fuels.

\- US becomes more isolationist in world policy as it increasingly faces the inward challenges of multiple nationwide health epidemics that will cripple the country (drug abuse, rising healthcare costs, aging population, mental/behavior health illnesses, poor healthcare education, obesity, diabetes).

\- China will lead the world in wireless technology and data processing infrastructure. Heavy data processing is begins to be offloaded to public infrastructure and seen as a public utility.

\- China forcefully takes over the Taiwanese government. The western world scoffs, there are some protests in major urban areas. But for the most part everyone moves on.

\- A cheaper form of launching payloads into orbit around the earth will be introduced, likely a combination of new technologies and a more established infrastructure for spaceflight, making spaceflight significantly cheaper.

\- Mass surveillance by both government and private industry becomes the norm.

\- Controversial legal regulations will be created to address the dangers of the court of public opinion and the engineering of social media.

\- AI based virtual companions becomes a new industry to counter balance the rise of loneliness, depression, and other health problems.

\- Freezing eggs or sperm cells for the purpose of eventual procreation, especially among aging women, will become a new industry.

\- The end of cable TV, but the beginning of "cable streaming."

More people convert to bokononism to learn the ways of their flat earthed, astrological antivaxxer forerunners in how to be happy in an increasingly depressing decade. /s

</comment><comment><USER470> It will be become increasingly clear that our mode of production is post- capitalist as the internet as ad-platform becomes increasingly problematic and the chimera of network-effects-as-value, an idea both before and past its time takes hold of the popular imagination. The battle between "capitalism" and "socialism" will come to the fore, but neither as recognizable versions of their pre-internet selves.

Okay, bit of a hail mary, but go big or go home right?

</comment><comment><USER16> Here are mine. Note: I've deliberately tried to be novel for a few of these which will mean they're less likely to be accurate.

1\. A book written by a machine makes a best seller list

2\. AR goes mainstream towards the end of the decade. Google dominates the visual identification of things market.

3\. WebAssembly becomes pervasive on the client and the server. Side effect on the client is that it results in pervasive DRM on the web with ads that are harder to block.

4\. Earth's temperature rises by 1.5C by 2030.

5\. Widespread and inconsistent / incompatible regulation in multiple jurisdictions breaks the open web with many web based organisations choosing to restrict themselves to local markets rather than implement all of them.

6\. PWAs become more popular than apps due to lower cost to build and higher revenues.

7\. Virtual partners become popular as generated humans break through the uncanny valley.

8\. Recession in 2020 / 2021, just in time for a new US government.

9\. House prices will stagnate for the whole of the decade as boomers retire.

10\. China will be the dominant world economy by the end of the decade (measured in GDP).

11\. AI will significantly improve medical outcomes especially in early detection.

12\. Renewable energy (including nuclear) will power most homes globally (50%+) due to regulations and cost efficiencies by the end of the decade (hopeful but it'll certainly trend in that direction).

13\. Increasingly the wealthy will have a curated internet / app ecosystem that actively protects them from manipulation. The poor will have the opposite. This will increase populism and continue to contribute to the wealthy being confounded by it.

14\. Developing software in a remote VM / container will become very popular (see Visual Studio Code Remote Extensions)

15\. "serverless" i.e. building applications where the host machine is opaque will dominate software development, although this includes building serverless applications using containers.

16\. Docker is no longer the most popular container runtime.

17\. Regulation kills bitcoin.

18\. Identity verification becomes a massive industry.

<comment><USER471> > 6\. PWAs become more popular than apps due to lower cost to build and higher > revenues.

I beg to differ. I think centralized online market service will become so dominant, there is no need for a small business to build and maintain any kind of app or website anymore. This is already happening, take look Amazon for retail, YouTube/Netflix for film/movie and Spotify for music as example. And the market for this is not saturated, so I'm guess there will be more and more online markets pop up in the future.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, of my predictions, I'm probably least confident about this one.

As you say it's quite likely that there'll be fewer dominant apps installed on peoples machines. Distribution is also problematic for PWAs. Even though Twitter has an excellent PWA, very few people I know have installed it. There's also less incentive for Google / Apple to encourage the installation of PWAs over apps.

On the other hand, app development is slow and costly, so there is some incentive on apps developers to use PWAs if they can get a comparable experience and distribution. Despite there being no obvious incentive to do so, Google and Apple do appear to be supporting a good number of the PWA standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER472> US starts 3rd World War (in a sense) by attacking Iran. This will destroy most of our economy, with possible nuclear impacts involved. Coincidentially, all this also reduces our economy and alas global greenhouse pollution more than Paris and Green Deals can do. We will finally see some hope to avoid total breakdown of life on earth, which seemed to be inevitable before. Trump will get Nobel price in climate fix.

</comment><comment><USER473> 1\. 1-200m climate refugees each from the Americas, africa and south east Asia. 500m from south asia.

2\. Automation threatens to displace 1 in 4 workers in developed countries

3\. Wealth gap widens between the automators and the automated..society still hasn't figured out redistribution or post-scarcity economics

4\. Automated out of their jobs and competing against desperate immigrant labor , the majority of voters choose socialist and anti-immigrant governments.

</comment><comment><USER474> We'll finally understand the messages what the Book of Revelations hold in the Bible as they become present days

</comment><comment><USER475> Unikernels will be all the rage

</comment><comment><USER476> My 2030 Predictions:

1\. The Non-proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons finally collapses as a mass exodus of non-nuclear weapon states leaves in favour of the TPNW, forcing the hand of the the Nuclear Weapon States and their allies to accede into the legally binding treaty in order to curtail further nuclear proliferation events.

2\. Trump gets a second term.

3\. 'America first' mentality continues to have repercussions as Sino-American Cold War escalates. Allies under the nuclear umbrella worry about the credibility of US security guarantees as fears and anxieties over a 'Thucydides trap' begin to take hold. U.S. reassures its allies but when push comes to shove, fails to intervene, sending out a signal to those remaining in the alliance that they lack credible commitments.

4\. South Korea will finally obtain sovereign nuclear weapons capabilities as the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula falls flat from continued DPRK aggression. Japan, despite a historically strong public opinion against this class of weapon, may eventually do so as well although much of this will depend on how vulnerable it feels.

5\. Hybrid warfare will continue to define 21st century military strategy, with attacks on critical infrastructure targets such as power, water, and sewage systems taking major cities offline for weeks at a time. The lack of attribution will make retribution difficult and countries will begin to point fingers at likely adversaries.

6\. Government surveillance becomes omnipresent in most developed societies. You don't watch the internet, the internet watches you and does so through a variety of technological mediums you invite into your lives, all in the name of convenience. Of course this is already happening, but in the next decade it will be taken to its logical conclusion and the majority of people will begin to understand the relationship between privacy and consumer-grade technology, namely the fact that the two are mutually exclusive. Which brings me to my next point.

7\. Dumb phones will be a lot more popular than they are now. I'm talking 2000-era 3310s. You already see senior intelligence officials carrying around decades old phones for communication. They don't do this just because they like playing snake.

8\. Vertical farming of cruciferous vegetables will be commonplace and most major supermarket chains will begin growing their own to sell to consumers.

</comment><comment><USER477> USA will bankrupt before 2030

</comment><comment><USER478> By 2030 there will at least one small settlement on Mars, population at least 100 but more likely 1,000.

<comment><USER479> I am pretty sure this won't happen. Maybe a manned landing but I think we are far away from knowing how to sustain a large settlement off earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER480> Security will largely be a solved problem.

Privacy from trackers will be a solved problem.

Intel pivots by simplifying x86, staving off AMD. ARM does fine. Nvidia does very fine. RISC-V exists.

Google stumbles because ads being inefficient become less relevant.

Facebook becomes the OK Boomer of technology.

Amazon and Walmart dominate.

Battery tech and solar will continue to improve incrementally and a decade is a lot of time.

EVs will surpass ICEs.

Phones + laptops will not get substantially better.

</comment><comment><USER94> * 32-bit will still not die. Even in 2038 there will still be 32-bit CPUs chugging away happily - blissfully unaware of 2038-01-19T03:14.

* Donald Trump will have finished his second term. The Americans will be none the wiser and will choose an even worse candidate.

* Self-driving cars have taken over all traffic that has fixed routes in the Western world (e.g busses and trucks).

* The number of people who care about privacy will reach critical mass, so privacy focused products like Librem 5 will actually have a market.

* Lab grown meat will be cheap enough to be served as a curiosity (50 USD/kg), but still too expensive for daily use.

* USB-C will be _the_ dominant connector: We will wonder why we had so many different power supplies. HDMI, VGA, FireWire, eSATA, USB-A+B, 3.5mm jack will only be used by aficionados.

* Drone delivery will be a thing in select areas in OECD, but not world wide.

* A cell phone can fit in your watch and communicate with something similar to Google Glasses, which also has sound. No need to lug around with a huge matchbox.

* Toilets that analyse your stool will be a thing. It will be used in hospitals, and by rich health fanatics.

* Fields only touched by robots will be harvested - not as an experiment but as production.

* Lots of people will be unemployable due to AI and automation. The rich will claim "They are just lazy." They poor will not be desperate enough to start a revolution.

* RISC V or similar open source architecture will have taken the place ARM has today, and will be eating into the lower end of Intel's portfolio.

* Another economic bubble bursts the size of 2008. Nothing was learned from 2008, and the rich will get richer, the poor will pay.

* Chatbot passes the Turing test.

* Muzak will be written by AI and will be good enough. Similar to thispersondoesnotexist.com which is good enough for many purposes.

* IPv4 will still be the dominant IP version.

* Buffer overflows will still be a thing.

* Quantum computers still can not break 1024-bit RSA, but it is getting so close that no one considers RSA secure at any keylength.

* Moore's law is over. If you need more power parallelize your problem and use many servers. Cores will be cheaper, though.

<comment><USER481> Cool - we've beat some of those. John Deere has 80 million acres under automatic tillage. Millions of people _are_ unemployable due to automation (except as starvation-wage service workers). And Moore's law has been faltering for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER482> 1\. Though automation changed the way many business work, a bigger change of culture happened due to the now 20-40yo being in charge. Business are both profitable and sustainable. The way Microsoft changed the last decade will be an example for others - even the big ones, but certainly not all of them - <USER7> change. Personal growth and personal career paths are more important to companies, not only for the C-levels/public facing people but on all levels.

2\. Climate change will be accepted, and most people are doing better in terms of being environment friendly. Eating meat more than 2-3 days a week is what smoking is now: you're sort of free to do it but it's just not the way.

3\. Due to the retirement of the baby boomers (broad definition: 1945-65) things have changed, but not that much. Development in elderly care is slowly taking place - old people still living in their own house do have some home automation but it's more monitoring than active automation. Care robots are more present but are still been seen as toys or gadgets and did not replace humans in care. This will be the problem of the 2030-2040 as care costs have risen above sustainable levels.

4\. Both GDPR/CCPA and some major privacy f*ckup (probably classified major because some public figure is involved) caused most companies to be really caring about the data they take care of. People know what companies do with their data and have a option to somehow have a paid subscription to be sure their data is not sold in anyway. (This is not going to happen, sadly. We still pay with our data, we are still bothered by ads.)

</comment><comment><USER23> \- More time is spent on taking care of loved ones

[https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of- amer...](https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-americans/)

\- Less time commuting (companies get better at managing a distributed work force)

\- the 50% of people not connected to the internet start to get access

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/18/almost-50...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/18/almost-50-of- the-world-is-online-what-about-the-other-50)

\- wages are driven down globally by this additional 50% coming online creating more backlash in democracies.

\- Increasingly countries will use China's great firewall tech to keep out Western influences and grow local internet competitors

\- high speed internet gets deployed in war zones with drones and we understand why the US is against Chinese 5G companies.

\- high speed internet (5G etc) means that many jobs that couldn't be off- shored are near shored for a mixture of tax and cost savings - taxi drivers, pilots, delivery trucks, fork lifts with a mixture of AI and people

\- cashiers become sales people as stores fight against online sales

\- percent of people working in manufacturing drops to 6.5% from 10.5%

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAPEFANA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAPEFANA)

\- a group of people add 30% to their life span due to drugs that reproduce intermittent fasting and other drugs that seem to work on mice.

[https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont- Have/dp/150...](https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont- Have/dp/1501191977)

\- China goes to 30% of world GDP and US reacts by going to cold war

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/270439/chinas-share- of-g...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/270439/chinas-share-of-global- gross-domestic-product-gdp/)

\- Japan builds up its military in reaction to china

\- Housing manufacturing and education continue to not have productivity gains.

\- Nuclear fusion is still not any closer to wide scale deployment

\- Cities in Europe and Asia go E-bike friendly while Americans stick to their cars.

\- The muslim world will become more pro-women's rights based on Saudi Arabia's lead

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k0SvAEvM-I&vl=en](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k0SvAEvM-I&vl=en)

\- Banks will stop touching cash except via ATMs and will convert branches into sales offices to push their online offerings. Goldman Sachs in reaction merges with Revolut.

</comment><comment><USER483> Looking at the predictions from a decade ago, it's spectacular how many of them are wrong. Like, probably more than 95% of them are in the "very wrong" category. That should be a severe cautionary note for this kind of prognostication among this kind of group.

Nevertheless, here goes:

What won't change (much):

\- We still won't have L5 autonomous cars.

\- We _will_ have L4 in various places, mainly as public transport systems, and this will essentially evolve out of existing segregated autonomous on- demand systms, such as the WVU PRT and the Heathrow Pod. Increasing sophistication of the navigation AIs will make the degree of segregation less and less over the years, but full automation will still require a significant element of environmental / infrastructure design, which is what makes it L4. There will be a lot more such systems, but it will be an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary change.

\- No AGI, sorry. Not that we'd necessarily recognise it if we had it. There will still be no effective working definition of "consciousness".

\- Laptops will still suck. Different constituencies will still regard old Macbooks or Thinkpads as the zenith of laptop desgin, with a nostalgia that resembles that of Amiga or BeOS fanatics. (And this won't make them wrong.)

\- Linux will still be niche on the desktop. Although enthusiasts will claim that it doesn't, it'll still suffer from the same useability problems that have it did in 2020, and 2010, and 2000. "Oh there's some stupid mouse behaviour which is making your GUI almost unusable? You can change it with this simple hack of X-windows in the shell."

\- Social media will still suck, and will still be a vector for significant psyops, both political and commercial, with politically and economically destabilising effects. Dictatorships will be better at weilding this than democracies, which will still be on the backfoot.

\- The climate crisis will still be going from bad to worse, unfolding as a series of localised extreme weather events and population displacements. Although the sociopolitical response to it will finally be turning the other direction.

What will change:

\- The majority of vehicles sold will be full-electric.

\- The way people live will be changing. A lot more co-ops, co-living, and even straight-up communes. This will represent a very small percentage of the population, but the social effects will be significant.

\- Universal Basic Incomes will have been implemented in several places.

\- There will be dozens of people living on Mars, hundreds on the moon, and thousands in Low Earth Orbit.

</comment><comment><USER484> The future won't be the present with better stuff.

Instead, the internet will be mass rejected as a point of authoritative information. Something else is coming, an internet round 2 without all the bullshit.

Money will still be an insulation against climate change.

Africa will have trendy tourist friendly cities with large economic power (Kinshasa, Lagos)

This fascism wave will lead to something really awful, probably hastening the rejection of Internet v.1

Silicon valley will no longer be special and there will be a mass exodus of real estate capital and a rebuilding of the culture. The media will paint it as a recession, when really it'll just be prices no longer being stupid insane. Everyone will actually be doing fine for the first time in decades there.

Solar will be about $0.01-$0.02/kwh due to Swansons Law, beating every other power generation by significant margins. There will be common cheap large scale storage based on mechanical energy or some kind of newtonian physics (as in non electromechanical). It'll break down into stationary and portable storage.

The US will have a significant, unambiguously socialist political contingency spread throughout all layers of government. The third way dems will still be around, but nobody will be confusing the two any more. There will also be an openly fascist contingency without any precondition or restraint. They will openly advocate for genocide and an ethnostate and something like 1/4 of the public will be totally on board.

The electoral college will be rendered insignificant by a majority of the states electors having legislation to be committed to the candidate with the most votes. (see here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact))

A constitutional convention will be called by the same mechanism (ALEC is 85% of the way there). It will be a complete shitshow. Nothing will get done. It will collapse and nothing will come of it.

People will start building systems and communities that don't require significant money and capital, something like the 1871 Paris commune, where work doesn't really need to be done. The cult of the individual will collapse and thatcherism will finally die.

GDP will be fundamentally challenged as a mechanism of global financial bullying and some other metric, not based on economic growth, will take its place.

All these cybernetic marvels will happen but the human use of human beings will become more defended than ever. It will be viewed in repulsion, as some perverted manipulative vice to invade natural spaces with technotrash.

Something will cause the police of a city to go on strike. Crime won't increase, everyone will be fine. The defund/disarm the police movements might make some victories

This is because the boomers are drying, the gen xers don't care and the millenials and zoomers can finally build what they've been wanting

</comment><comment><USER485> Hacker News will be orange

</comment><comment><USER486> my 2c: Hacker News will still be around and going strong _wink_

</comment><comment><USER282> I expect things are going to change less than most people think. The past decade in a number of ways represented less of a change from a technological perspective than the several leading up to it, and I expect that will most likely continue. The alternative would be a massive new technology that changes everything, like AGI, or possibly level 4/5 self driving vehicles, but I don't expect either of those are coming in the next 10 years. Could be something else no one sees coming, but I doubt it. So for now I think we're on the tail end of an S-curve of change that has spanned several decades and numerous individual technologies.

So, specific predictions:

-fully driverless cars will see some limited use, perhaps with remote monitoring, but will not be ubiquitous.

-electric cars though will become very popular, with most new cars being electric.

-solar and wind installations will continue to grow. We'll probably see some innovation around distribution and metering as a result of electric vehicles and/or renewables, like smart home panels that pause charging when load is high or renewable production is low, or even draw from the electric vehicle to provide supplemental power when necessary. I doubt those things will be common in 10 years, but they'll be at least talked about.

-AI will continue to have more niche applications, but will not result in major societal change or job loss.

-no country will meet the current Paris climate agreement thresholds. However, climate change will widely be recognized as a serious problem. Climate change denial will continue the shift from "doesn't exist" to "not caused by humans", and then to, "even if caused by humans, nothing we can do". However the denial side will carry less weight, and most first world governments will have implemented carbon taxes or other schemes to reduce greenhouse gasses. We will be on course for > 2 degrees of warming though.

-There will be presidents from both parties in the White House after Trump.

Generally I expect where there are large changes, they will be political/geopolitical, not technological. I expect some change to be driven by increasing polarization and by the pressures of climate change. Most likely that will be a further entrenchment and isolationism, but there's a small chance that there could also be a significant backlash to that trend with something like the Green New Deal or open borders.

</comment><comment><USER487> South East Australia and several other places will become uninhabitable because of fires, drought or floods.

Self driving cars will be the norm, but we still have a steering wheel for unexpected situations.

Trump will be reelected and start a new war. A big attack will be done on american soil.

Cannabis legal in almost the entire US and europe (except Sweden and Norway).

<comment><USER487> And batteries will improve significiantly, and charging time of an EV is as fast as filling your car with gas. This also means longer drone ranges and better carrying capacity, home delivery by drone and a lot more illegal activity with drones. This comes with a lot of new regulations.

The worlds countries has become more or less co2 neutral, except for China and the US, so humanity fails the 2 degrees goal. But we have optimism in moving to Greenland in the future. The US still wants to buy Greenland.

Greta Thunberg looses relevance as she grows past 20, but she becomes active in Green Peace or the Green party and studies at Globala Gymnasiet and then at Stockholm University.

Its more common to take the train than flying on vacation in Europe, you can even take the train to asia more easily with Chinas new huge railway system. China owns basically everything.

<comment><USER487> Transparent screens will come, and obviously foldable screens will become affordable, but i dont think the interest is big enough for it to really take off

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> * Reddit goes the way of Digg with a mass user exodus

* Several major candidates will lose an election because of their internet usage history earlier in life

* Much of the inflation that the US hasn't seen over the past decade will come back, in line with a recession. Very few investments will be safe. It'll come at the time, or just before the time a democrat is elected to office, and retroactively blamed on that democrat.

* The evangelical movement collapses under the weight of its own cognitive dissonance, in response to a well organized criticism campaign

* Amazon suffers a major misstep of their own making and loses a significant enough amount of customer trust to affect its growth rate.

* Home prices in San Fransisco and Seattle do not fall. Homelessness is the same or worse in each area by the end of the decade.

* A major new region becomes popular for tech workers to move to, on the back of major corporations moving there rather than startups

* Startups that exist and succeed are more rare, and larger. This decade is the age of the corporate titans, and the small are agile but most cannot compete.

* No major structural reform put to climate change

* Trump re-elected

* VR remains niche

* Worldwide poverty is continuously reduced

* A civil war or conflict takes place in a european country

* As the power changes hands to millenials, countries liberalize the social safety net

</comment><comment><USER488> 1\. Still no flying cars.

</comment><comment><USER489> Quantum computing on aws

</comment><comment><USER490> 1\. More profitable artificial food will replace natural foods, similar to how canola oil replaced butter for cooking. Vegan 'meat' will be the default, cheaper option in McDonalds which in turn makes natural food more expensive.

2\. Russia and China will launch a competitive, international currency to fight the US dollar and China will humiliate the US in a regional conflict.

3\. Most countries in the world will benefit from global warming or see no ill effects. Climate fear mongering will continue unimpressed by this.

4\. Smartphones will be replaced by smaller optionally wireless computers, the screen will just be a screen and receive all the computing information from a detached CPU/GPU/computer you keep in your wallet. Commonly sold desktop monitors will have a place where you can slide in or connect your personal wallet computer wirelessly.

5\. As social support systems in Europe start to crumble under the strain of continued limitless immigration, they will enact openly communist policies such as a duty to work for all citizens. This will be celebrated across the world as a progressive action to fight the low economic performance of the EU compared to China.

</comment><comment><USER491> * 2022 Google goes the way of FB in terms of press.

* 2023 Apple re-enters the social media market (leveraging iMessage)

* 2023 FB starts placing ads on external websites, eating into Google's market

* 2024 Amazon's commingling strategy and federated approach to "sellers" & "shippers" turns against it, making room for another major player to enter the market by focusing on quality.

* 2024 Comcast stops trying to push their TV service with Internet packages

* 2024 Y-Combinator adopts a syndicate system (similar to Angel List)

* 2025 A universal flu vaccine is universally available

* 2026 Alexa is now seen as the Hyundai of assistants. Google is Mercedes. Siri is Tata.

* 2026 Online ads revolution - a new format of ads, cleaner, more precise/focused, less intrusive (but more efficient) takes over.

* 2027 FB market cap overtakes Google & Apple

* 2027 Google launches a human-like virtual assistant that can handle everything a human can.

* 2028 China walls off even more of the internet.

* Around 2029 a new category of wearables appears. Not mainstream yet, but very promising, turning current interaction paradigms on their head. Google is a major partner, but not a leader of this.

* 2029 WiFi is largely available for free in all public areas (including on a plane).

<comment><USER465> More info regarding Y-Combinator adopting a syndicate system?

<comment><USER491> the more vague I leave it, the more likely it is to be interpreted as true 10 years from now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER492> In 2030 people will look back in disbelief that society once thought vaccines were a safe and sane thing to do. It will be the new smoking, ie. "Can you believe doctors used to tell patients to vaccinate their children?!"

</comment><comment><USER493> 1\. EU becomes the global super power. Western balkan states (Albania, Serbia) join the EU. Turkey does not join the EU. Poland becomes a powerhouse and Warsaw quite a global city that attracts global talent and pays super high salaries. The EU becomes the #1 destination for international students. Spain becomes a powerhouse too.

2\. Some cities in Latin America and Africa experience quite a major boom that is the result of good trade relations with the EU.

3\. Spanish starts replacing English as the global lingua franca.

4\. Most tech unicorns are outside the US and some of them do not even care about the US market.

5\. The major Canadian cities (Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto) become undesirable, nobody wants to live there and Toronto in 2020 is a crime ridden city with lots of precarious labour. Canada, in general, experiences quite a decline and is no longer considered a civilized country.

6\. Privacy regulation: by the end of the decade, most software developers will have to have some sort of certification in GDPR, PCI etc. in order to be employable.

7\. CQRS / ES is the software architecture winner. Statically typed FP languages win. Explainable machine learning models win. Software becomes less clunky. Users demand minimalistic UIs. On-premise threatens the cloud again and huge projects to move companies off the cloud.

8\. No recession. Huge shortages of labour (plumbers, electricians, nurses, doctors etc. ). But the US grows much slower than the rest of the globe.

9\. Tech solutions (e.g., capturing CO2 from air) and political will pauses global warming to a large extent.

10\. The collapse of US style dating culture and online dating sites such as Tinder. The way to meet people becomes "through friends".

11\. Middle class becomes stronger and the rich stagnate. Globally and not in the US. 32 hour work week is norm if you work for a good company. 36 hour work week is norm in most civilized countries.

</comment><comment><USER340> Elon goes to Mars, secedes from the US, is declared Emperor.

</comment><comment><USER494> The next AI winter is coming.

Wasm will be a letdown

The microsoft duo will fail later this year

China will remain communistic

</comment><comment><USER495> 1-US leaves Afghanistan after negotiations with the taliban.

2-Conflict between Us forces and Iranian backed miltas in Iraq leads to a political settlement that forces the US to leave another middle eastern country.

3-Insurgent left-wing democratics take control over the party and begin to purge moderate elements. Resulting in an increased polarization of American politics.

4-China suffers a major economic collapse that causes an uprising similar to the occupy movement in the US.

5-Mines all over the world are shut down as increasing regulations make extraction politically impossible.

6-Borders become increasingly irrelevant as nations give up on attempts to stop climate refugees.

7-Research on graphene based batteries finally reaches the market, leading to a massive decrease in energy storage costs.

</comment><comment><USER58> 1\. Right wing will continue to rise along with radicals across the globe and will peak in 2nd half of the decade (hopefully without a holocaust or WW).

2\. Facebook, MS, Google, Apple will stay dominant. Though EU, Russia and India will put more checks in place.

3\. Fake News and Deepfakes will continue to rise with (1), causing an arms race with detectors.

4\. Even more consolidation across consumer content web.

5\. Electron/RN/* tech will merge web/mobile/desktop apps development into one.

6\. New development in battery will make electric cars dominant. Nuclear will have a strong resurgence and China/India will be driver of clean fuel requirements.

7\. Autonomous cars will be limited to particular community/use cases. Though Automated Trucks on highway will be popular.

</comment><comment><USER496> Singularity.

</comment><comment><USER497> Safe:

* Recession will happen that will affect the global economy causing at least a 30% decrease in major world stock indexes.

* China will stumble in a major recession but the Communist Party will maintain power.

* Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft will still be the biggest tech companies by market cap.

* A new company that hasn't been started yet will be in the top 10 tech companies by market cap.

* The duopoly of cloud computing services will be AWS and Google Cloud. Nearly all Fortune 500 companies will use one or the other.

* Big Tech will not be broken up because of their large value decline during recession, with focus being diverted to prop economy back up.

Bold:

* Breakthrough battery technology will make electric vehicles better for consumers than than their fossil fuel counterparts.

* The breakthrough battery tech will allow a very affordable manned mission to Mars.

* Solar will be the dominant form of energy creation in the United States.

* HIV vaccine available to nearly all healthy adults.

* Netflix will be bought by Disney.

* DeepFake technology will be used to create an entire feature film by a major studio.

* Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election despite being unsuccessfully tried during impeachment.

* In the United States, majority of people will eat synthetic meat over animal-based meat.

* San Francisco Bay Area will not be globally in the top 10 areas of funding for new technology startups.

Crazy:

* A state in the United States will successfully secede.

* Glaciation will increase in parts of the world with their albedo effect predicted to offset most of the temperature increase from man-made climate change.

* Major disease epidemic will kill at least 20 million people. Will not be noticed at first but will rapidly kill after long incubation.

* Artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be achieved, accidentally.

* Despite AGI, self-driving cars will not be the majority of vehicles on the road.

</comment><comment><USER498> New decade starts with 2021... Just saying

</comment><comment><USER499> Random things I feel are coming...

\- Amazon/Apple/Netflix dominate sports coverage (pushing out e.g. Sky in the UK).

\- The rise in right wing/conservative power peaks in around the mid 2020s, probably with a smallish 1st world country electing an extremist government.

\- Overall politics becomes even more partisan, led by media organisations. The biggest media spenders will get elected. (This is basically true already).

\- Electric cars will be widely expected to be ubiquitous but will not quite make it any 2030.

\- SpaceX will land something on Mars, but not humans.

\- Someone (probably either China or India) will begin landing lots of hardware on the moon.

\- 5G and ridiculously low-cost chips mean lots of home automation startups; I'm maybe betting on a major new company coming from this area.

\- Security consciousness peaks and tails off, next generation accept surveillance culture

\- LGBT will still be marginalised; as with politics perspectives will become even more partisan.

\- African nations will have a greater role in world affairs; economically and politically. Arab nations will swing toward conservative democracy. Asian nations will continue to grow economically. USA will be recognised as a declining world power in 2030.

\- Europe will have a standing Army

\- There will be a major war in Asia, but not Korea. It will probably also be a China/US proxy war - and I am least convinced by this prediction but: the US will lose.

\- VR will still just be a toy/gaming device.

\- most games consoles will start following the Wii's dual mode approach

\- Folding screen phones will die off quickly

\- There will be at least one major financial disaster (other than pensions).

\- Crypto currency will be on the decline.

\- Oh, as it seems popular... we probably don't have fully autonomous cars but the tech starts to become mainstream as a driver aide and in the second half of the decade it becomes widely adopted in the transport industry (I predict major disruption to transport/delivery industries in the 2030s; I.e automated Amazon deliveries)

</comment><comment><USER500> \- People will still talk about the ending of Moore's Law, while it still actually continues throughout the decade

\- Facebook will be the first to market with a consumer friendly successful AR device. But Apple and Google will be more successful, due to their tie in with mobile operating systems. First successful consumer AR headsets will be phone accessories like Apple Watch \- AR gaming, maybe connected to Desktop PCs, will be successful once a company makes a AR headset with good input (allowing for BeatSaber in AR)

\- VR/AR entertainment will be larger than game console industry. Mobile games still massively larger than all others. \- Console industry and PlayStation/Xbox devices will decline, as anything single screen based can be streamed for the same experience \- Google will continue to develop and invest in Stadia, slowly increasing its market share

\- Valve will finally make 'Steam Machines' running Linux a reality, selling them as primarily for VR (with included headset).

\- WebAssembly becomes the main way to deliver all apps - native and browser based. Because of this difference between operating systems becomes less important. Google transitions Android to Fuchsia on some new devices \- Rust will continue to continue to rise in popularity as the main language for systems / server / game development

\- SpaceX's Starlink works, helping to bring total internet access of the world up to 95%. Other LEO satellites launch mid decade from an alliance of companies to compete. SpaceX's Starship reaches Mars - might transport people depending on space's health risk to humans \- Starlink /Loon / Wifi access disrupt mobile carriers

\- Man made climate change will still be debated the same - with minor change in public perception towards believing in it. Geoengineering will have some success and be seen as a viable solution at the end of the decade

Cryptocurrency will be a larger component of the world financial systems, but will still not take off in any way with the general public. Still a niche store of value. By the end of the decade decentralized block chain companies will begin to take off

Instagram will make more revenue for Facebook than the Facebook app

Driverless taxi services are mainstream in major cities by the end of decade

Cloud: AWS will remain 1, Azure 2, Google a more distant 3rd.

Deep learning tools will be a more common part of IDEs and productivity tools. Accessible Deep learning tools for amateur creators to create visual effects equal to blockbuster movies. Tech like 'De-aging' will be basically free to add to any video

Europe continues to decline. China has a major recession. The US stays at its relative position

AI is solving difficult problems (such as math proofs), with humans then needing to interpret and understand the proof afterwards (many different published papers interpreting the results)

</comment><comment><USER501> Africa 2020 - 2029 predictions The last 10 years have seen great changes in Africa with a lot of them being a direct cause of tech adoption and more people looking for efficient ways to do business and improve quality of life. Looking back, they look subtle and not as drastic as we would imagine but I think the next 10yrs is when greater changes are going to happen.

Technology and Privacy \- Rise of quality internet speeds. We have had slow jumps from 3g to 4g but the jump to 5g will be the first meaningful change in relation to internet speeds. It will be like jumping from 2g straight to 5g. This is dependent on telcos companies realising more people want good services. \- Airtel exiting a few African countries. At least for Kenya, am calling it on Airtel quitting the market and we will have new entrants who will either buy airtel or new telcos will enter the scene. \- Online e-commerce stores like Jumia will struggle. For Jumia specifically, I see them exiting or being bought with another company. \- Increase in logistics companies will benefit more from intra-trade. \- Apple will make its first big push in Africa. Having almost hit saturation point in china and India, it will be time for them to push into the African market launching official stores, introducing hackathons and pushing MacOs into the scene through promoting local made apps/content. \- Open source will be adopted more. Moving away from walled gardens like chrome in favour of firefox and even Linux gaining more users. A result of mistrust with current state of privacy. \- Twitter will pivot, die or be bought \- An African social media company will displace Facebook in Africa just like in Russia and China. If not, most countries will have their own thing going. \- Self driving cars won't enter the African scene. Maybe the next decade. Major infrastructure investments still need to be done to catchup. This will also affect other autonomous things like drones. \- The decade of African unicorns (private companies worth a billion dollars) \- Intentional companies like uber, glovo, amazon, KFC, etc will see a decline as people start adopting local/African centric companies. \- Fin tech startups are a bubble that will burst and die down this decade. \- More foreigners will continue launching in Africa with massive financial backing but will have to move entire operations within the continent. \- More African companies will let employees work from home \- \- Surveillance in Africa will take off. Street cameras, DNA, online, tracking of phone calls and chats. This will be pushed more by China and human rights problems will still be prevalent. \- Africa will have the biggest cyber security risks with even more people adopting tech. \- Blockchain will finally become useful as governments adopt it to increase transparency and efficiency. \- One stable coin/ crypto currency will gain adoption for regional and intentional transfers displacing banks and mobile money. \- Mobile money will still be huge but push from banks will mean more people will be banking and using mobile banking apps for transfers with service like Pesalink in Kenya gaining a lot of traction. Banks partnering might develop the tool for the point above this. \- The dot com generation (born 1980 onwards according to me) will lead push in funding local startups with African venture capital companies starting up.

Politics and economy \- All dictators will fall \- Younger presidents will be elected (below 60yrs) in more counties \- Rwanda will be in top 3 biggest economies in Africa by the end of the decade \- Urban rural migration will reverse with more developments in outside towns \- Like the rest of the world, Artificial intelligence use like deep fakes and fake news will wreck havoc and continue to be a big problem in politics especially during elections. \- Airplane ticket prices will become affordable especially intentional to other African counties. \- Moving around Africa will be flawless with more countries doing away with visas with East Africa becoming the single biggest market. This will face stiff competition with west African countries moving to single currency. I don't think East Africa will push for single currency anytime soon. \- A few African countries will sink into recession as they struggle to payback China. Infrastructure growth will slow down and we might see the return of the West into Africa as they try to gain favour with new projects \- We will see less Made in China and more Made in (insert African country) \- More international companies will transfer their 'low level' work force like companies into Africa Ethiopia as a leading example.

Religion & culture \- More Africans will shun religion with traditional and indigenous tribes being on their death bed. This might also lead to radicalised and extremist groups continuing to cause terrorism but eventually it will die down maybe in the next decade \- Islam will be the only religion with an increase in followers by the end of the decade \- FGM will be illegal in the entire continent \- Same as early child marriages.

Energy and climate change \- Increase in energy demands means alternative green energy will be main focus for African countries to keep up with energy demands. We will even see more data centres being setup in more African counties to serve more localised content. \- I wont rule out African countries adopting old energy sources like coal. General thinking is we have had the least impact in effects of climate change. Other nations got rich through coal and oil. Why not us? I dont support the argument but it can't be ruled out. \- A new push for nuclear energy and at least 1 country joining the nuclear arms race. \- Plastic bags will be banned in the entire continent.

Tourism & entertainment \- With climate change destroying more national parks, African countries will have to find new ways to sustain their economies away from tourism which might mean rise of theme/amusement parks. Maybe Disney  \- We will see more african artists breaking into the intentional scene and having the first African artist with a song with over a billion views in YouTube. \- African made movies will enter the international scene doing world premieres. \- E-sports will be huge with growing global trends.

</comment><comment><USER502> 1\. More than 50% of the existing,large PBM companies will be acquired by pharmacies or insurers

2\. Saudi Arabia will experience a coup, but it will be unsuccessful.

3\. At least one of the large non-mobile telecoms in the US, will be acquired, taken private, or go bankrupt.

4\. Venezuela will have a peaceful transition into a new government

5\. Amazon will come inder tremendous pressure to break up, after at least 1 of their product listings is directly traced back to consumer deaths due to poisoning, malfunction, or misuse. This will lead to changes (wider) liability regulations / court decisions affecting online platforms across at least 5 US states, and spark a wider discussion that threaten to spillover over content companies like FB.

6\. The plastic straw and the plastic bag will mostly dissappear

7\. 1 country in the world will make the US dollar or the Euro their new official currency.

8\. The tv (and potentially other) remote control will increasingly be complemented/replaced by competing remote apps.

9\. Brands (Kellogg etc) in the cereals space in the US will see at least 1 M&A or bankrupcty.

10\. Same as (9), but in the sweets space (Hershey's etc).

11\. A new credit card issuer will enter the US market (brex?)

12\. A new (nonwinner) nation will win the soccer world cup

13\. Snap, Dropbox/Box or Kayak/Priceline will dissappear/be acquired.

14\. Hezbollah will dissappear as a political party in lebanon, but the armed wing will continue in some fashion

15\. Signal will accelerate market share acquisition and in fact emerge as a viable US competitor to whatsapp.

16\. A new company will out of nowhere become a huge by making road travel more pleasant

17\. We will continue not to find traces of life outside our planet (hope im wrong here)

18\. Coffee machines will start to noticeably dissappear from the workplace in favor of tea.

19\. Medicare age will be raised

2o. The boring company will actually be a success, like space X. Tesla will be ok but solar will continue to limp along.

21\. Changes in the US student loan program will send many 4 year colleges into a financial tailspin. Changes will limit loans in many ways or ask colleges to directly shoulder some of the risk.

22\. Netflix, GNC/Vita, and Nike market cap will be reduced by 25%

23\. The stetoscope will finally dissappear

24\. Diamonds will lose market share by 20%, replaced by simpler wedding bands

25\. The MLB will see a contraction in one of the following: total games played per season, total teams in league, total tv air time

26\. The number of hospitals in the US will grow below the population growth %

27\. Violation tickets will cease to be paper records in most US metros.

28\. A new budget airline (probably Azul) will expand in latin america and bring down airfares in the region by 20%.

29\. Cell phones will have ubiquitous pediatric toolkids for parents sold: thermometer,oxigenation,etc will all be included and easy to operate.

30\. I will read this post in 10 years!

</comment><comment><USER20> 1\. While neural network research continues at a somewhat steady pace (slightly increased by the influx of new grads influenced by the last decade's glow around AI), neural nets become very small building blocks for task-design (by that I mean that all current small advances with neural nets can be integrated in a bigger-picture kind of design software to quickly prototype higher-level concepts such as modelling certain subsets of the brain, such as many of the Vs in the visual cortex)

2\. Surveillance increases throughout the world (in numbers of cameras, privacy-invading devices and techniques, changes in legislation, improvements in AI), as well as counter-measures to AI-powered tools (wearables/clothes with specifically crafted noise to deceive detection algorithms, randomize gait, etc). Very little is won by people on the legislation front despite protests, since tracking ties in so well with advertising that there is enormous financial leverage and lobbying working on it.

3\. SpaceX puts rich people on space trips mostly in orbit around the earth & spacewalks, maybe on a moon trip

4\. VCs overall bet on remote work, ecology, as well as more upfront sustainable business models than in the previous decade

5\. EU learns (a bit late) to cope with migrant crisis and improve its immigration (in part due to a more diverse aging population), albeit at the cost of perhaps losing a couple Eastern-European members.

6\. Still, the improvements don't compare quite as much with Canada, the population of which increases at the highest rate in western countries thanks to immigration (including a lot of skilled workers), its increasingly better weather (one of the only relatively lucky countries facing climate change), and its bridge between US-UK-EU via new agreements (with UK and perhaps EU).

6\. Decentralized networks become mainstream for specific fields (not sure which), prompting an evolving dialogue about the future of the internet

7\. A new form of betting-investment mimics the bitcoin craze of a few years ago, mixed with a patreon/kickstarter/gofundme-type structure (something that makes it easy for the layman to invest in exchange for perks or financial promises that supposedly beat the market at short term)

8\. Either a non-white or a non-male US president is elected at least once

9\. FDA-approved research around drugs that were traditionally shunned by older populations (thanks to the war on drugs) proves fruitful for very specific needs (certain types of depression, PTSD, BPD, insomnia, etc), thus progressively bringing them into mainstream at a pace only slightly higher than what happened with cannabis. Drugs involved are mostly psilocybin, ketamine and mdma.

10\. A bit farfetched but why not: one astronomical event scares the bejesus out of the world, leading to substantial improvements in the following years. (Asteroid passing far too close without being noticed -> sharp increase in NASA and ESA budgets.. or Solar flare destroying power grids and electronics over an entire continent -> huge investments in shielding, or in alternative power sources perhaps even for individuals - depending on where the event happens)

</comment><comment><USER503> I don't normally try to predict out 10 years, but I'll throw a few out, with (importantly) the corresponding probabilities I'd assign off the top of my head.

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Safe predictions

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1\. Deep Fakes will _NOT_ substantially alter public discourse or cause a widespread erosion of public trust. (0.78)

To be sure, there will definitely be a lot of hand wringing, particularly among older generations, but younger generations will quickly adjust the same way they adjusted to Photoshop. For the most part, nothing will change.

2\. Machine Learning will become widely regarded as a dead end for real AI progress. (0.65)

This is already a non-niche opinion, but by the start of 2030, it will be the consensus of almost everyone in the field, and current claims about massive progress from systems like GPT-2 will be _widely_ seen as hopelessly naive in hindsight.

3\. Chrome will still be the dominant browser. (0.7)

No other browser will have passed Chrome in market share. This doesn't mean they won't be making progress, just that 10 years is not enough time for anyone to catch up.

4\. Javascript will still be the dominant language on the web. (0.95)

WASM will open up a lot of interesting opportunities and make a lot of cool technologies possible. Most web devs will ignore it, and most web coding will still be done in Javascript. Sorry, Bernhardt.

5\. PCs will still be around, people will still buy laptops. (0.9)

The mass migration to tablets and obsoletion of PCs that people have been talking about forever will still not have happened. The PC's place as a non- niche, common consumer device will be reinforced by the continued rise of convertible laptops, which will make tablets less distinct and less attractive on metrics other than cost.

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Risky predictions

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6\. Krita (specifically Krita) will become reasonably competitive with programs like Clip Studio. (0.35)

Krita will occupy the same space as Blender, in which it will be regarded by the general public as a similarly viable, serious contender with professional programs.

7\. Matrix will become a defacto standard in the Open Source & security community over platforms like Signal, Wire, etc... (0.3)

Interoperability and more open clients will cause a snowball effect. Platforms like Signal will still have better security, but that won't matter. Everyone will recommend that you use Matrix purely because it works with everything, and will have good enough security for most things.

8\. Apple will swallow its pride and make a convertible Macbook with a touchscreen. (0.4)

The argument that consumers widely don't want touchscreens on Laptops will become impossible to defend. There will be a Macbook that has one, and it will probably be a convertible. The iOS and Mac OS merger may also happen, which will make iPads into a paired-down version of the Macbook, rather than a completely separate product.

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Out-there predictions

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9\. Mastodon will become a 'serious' Twitter competitor among the general public. (0.15)

Mastodon will not only still be around, and will not only still be usable for niche communities, it will be seen in the general, non-techy public as a reasonable alternative to Twitter, and Twitter will be forced to respond to it, particularly where younger generations are concerned.

10\. Eating meat will be a political indicator. (0.15)

Currently, I can make a reasonable prediction that if you don't eat meat, you lean Democratic, but enough Democrats eat meat that I can't really make a prediction in the opposite direction. By 2030 I'll be able to -- if you _do_ eat meat, I'll be able to make a reasonable prediction that you probably lean Republican.

</comment><comment><USER342> Off the top of my head, starting from some course notes on "Digital Transformation" :

Big Data - "I wish I had more data literacy" will be considered desirable by more people of the educated population. Although many people would like to have more (coding and data analysis) skills, often it will be wishful thinking like "Next year I'll be losing weight and get fitter".

Shift to the Cloud - This will continue slowly but steadily through the next 10 years. For IT pros, some classic sysadmin skills - such as patching cables, administering RAID devices, physically ordering PC components and configuring PC operating systems- will become obsolete (because it gets also more complicated. I'm looking at you Windows 10). These skills need to replaced with a "cloud literacy skillset". The tech giants will be pushing their cloud based offerings (because it's all pay-per use or subscription based)

Internet of Things - This will slowly also but steadily continue, as more wireless devices are released into the public space (LoRaWAN). Consequently IPv6 will become more mainstream. Many IoT devices will have many capabilities and see forms of integration, just like smartphones are powerful multitools today.

Innovative Manufacturing - 5G local grids, 3D printing and biotech innovations (tissue growth?) will become more mainstream in all parts of the globe where there is still a middle class.

Cyber Security - In most respects it will get worse, because nobody is able to understand modern processors and microcontrollers anymore. Even the smallest devices will have powerful CPUs in them because it's cheaper than secure special-purpose SoCs. Protecting Your real online identity will be super- important.

Artificial Intelligence - Spectacular applications and discoveries will continue to make national news, as will creepy misuse cases such as instant Face Recognition and deep-fakes.

Blockchain technologies - will become mainstream, as a mechanism to ensure authenticity of digital assets of any kind (e.g. "Live footage" videos). Many people will use it but few will understand it. Cryptocurrencies will find more widespread acceptance, as some central banks adopt them, tech giants promote them, and they can also be used for private banking.

Public health crisis - it continues as society ages. The opioid crisis, obesity and diabetes epidemics, and antibiotics resistance increasingly take their toll. Might also happen during the 2030s. The healthcare market will become more important and see some bizarre developments.

Long term global environmental problems - they will lead to economic collapse in many parts of the globe and to continental-scale dystopia (in Africa, Near/Middle East, Australia).

The 2020s will be completely unlike the 2010-2020 years.

</comment><comment><USER504> My predictions of things that probably happen till 2030:

1\. Level 5 self-driving cars will be available.

1.a. Humans will be blamed for self-driving and news like this will be common: "Another kid died because X turned off the self-driving mode. Why?"

1.b. Insurance companies will see the business for self-driving and solve most legal problems.

1.c. Most cars won't be self-driving yet.

1.d. Trucks and logistics will see major shifts in fast time.

1.e. Political targets will die in self-driving accidents.

1.f. This will be the change with the most positive impact on the world economy.

2\. One major western economy will be hit extremely hard by a days/week long outage on their power or internet because of an easy cyber attack on their insecure infrastructure.

3\. The wage-gap will be even bigger in the USA. The super-rich will be completely in power.

4\. Major rich and/or political people will be the target of a never seen before data-breach. Laws regarding privacy will change across the west.

5\. I assume an new economic crisis. But maybe the world is to complex now for one big crisis across all industries.

6\. People in Europe won't accept the rising prices for healthcare and for housing/ground anymore.

6.a. The prices of healthcare will rise anyway because of new medical possibilities.

6.b. Housing will be automated but this won't affect renting prices enough.

7\. Aging will be seen as a disease and the first treatments will start to appear.

8\. New contraceptives for men will shape the young male generation like nothing before.

9\. The near-east will start to be irrelevant again because of the electrification of cars.

10\. Africa won't change a lot except for places where China invests.

11\. China will suppress any revolution with ease and will help other countries to do the same.

12\. The public internet will start to split into multiple enormous silos like in China now. As a European, I might won't be able to access HN anymore. Only the biggest companies can navigate this regulation mess.

13\. SpaceX will be first world-wide ISP and it will be enormous.

14\. Europe, USA, China and India will be equally powerful. The USA will have the hardest time to deal with this new situation.

15\. The Sovereign Wealth fund of Norway will get even better. Norway will let any western economy look like crap. Why inherit dept from your parents when you can get wealth and dividends. People in the Europe will start demanding the same as Norway has.

</comment><comment><USER505> Ah what the heck, may record mine for posterity as well. Most things rather bleak, still hope for some positives surprising me.

Tech:

1\. Industrialization and commodification of deep learning.

2\. No AGI. Substantial progress in understanding human nervous system though.

3\. The the tech landscape solidifies the split between privacy-conscious and pricey 'ware and the mass market 'ware paid for with surveillance.

4\. Network pollution caused by 5G and/or similar. Average person will have their home littered with random appliance transmitters they have no awareness about.

5\. Actually controlling what your computers do will be a more esoteric and in-demand skill. CS departments will correct towards the pre-1980s mode when you were expected to actually learn most of the stuff at the university.

6\. The push for tech regulation will sunset the unicorn era. Tech giants start to look more like telco giants, which still means people work for them for big money and less luster.

Geopolitics:

1\. China will be an ideological superpower, Cold War or Age of Imperialism style, with a sizeable sphere of influence on most of continents, and many ideological adherents to the "safety and order by total surveillance" brand of totalitarianism in the West. There will be again two recognizable world systems, with one centered in the US (or possibly EU, if many things change) and the other in China. This can include new centers of manufacturing linked to the former.

2\. There will be little organized response of the Western world to this, barring significant new popular movements in the US/EU. Non-US NATO countries will be mostly left to their own devices, with some fear of criticizing China by private citizens.

3\. Russia will be moving towards becoming a client state of China, possibly with subtle hints of warlord decentralization.

4\. The populist camp in the West, depending on the country, will be either flirting with China or evolve towards a kind of McCarthyism (some hints of that in the GOP nowadays). The establishment camp will be battered by unpopular but kinda necessary policies around pension reform, climate change etc. It's possible that a new camp based on the likes of Greens and Pirates, or something unquestionably leftist will gain viability.

5\. Overall, there will be a global rethinking of nation state with stress on the "cyber" sovereignty. More world fragmentation in terms of tech, government policy.

6\. On the other hand, political positions will be more global and homogenized, and English-speaking.

7\. Climate change will incur a heavy cost, catastrophic in specific places, with little global response, more blame-shifting and elaborate denial.

8\. With the increasing role of governments there will be visible progress in global regulation of finance.

</comment><comment><USER506> 1\. The impacts of climate change are felt not as a bang but as a cacophony of whimpers - severe weather events wipe billions from local economies in vulnerable areas, protracted recoveries and financial mismanagement in the wake of such disasters are the norm and not the exception as are 'soft exits' where there's no real recovery at all and the area is left to rot with media being expertly manipulates into falling silent. With the right eye, most of the front page of any given newspaper will become issues easily linked to the impacts of climate change. Reactions to this will be paradoxical - <USER8> development of vulnerable areas (Miami, flood plains, hurricane alleys) and employ harmful techniques that act to deepen the problem in future (concrete, fossil-fuel-dependent movement of material over long distances). The collective consciousnesses awareness of the locked-in and second-order effects of. Linate change will slowly widen, taking into account things like the 30-year lag, clathrate gun, albedo, and an acute awareness of the CO2 PPM measurements of their locale.

2\. Developed nations decline thanks significantly to repeated election of divisive, ineffective politicians and the neutering, budget cutting and general reduction of the public service that executes on an increasingly constrained vision with greater focus on media perception over results. Which ever side prevails in any particular election will cheer loudly yet their champion will prove just as ineffective as their opponent was imagined to be. This applies to the USA and Britain for sure but likely also many other democracies.

3\. The middle class squeeze will continue and the bottom-of-the-hill ambulances in the form of social services, health and mental care will continue their steady march to privatisation, fuelled by the class divide that sees the uppers not rely on such things and so be easily drawn to the raw profit of liquidating it. There will be increasing calls for UBI while the ongoing failure to sustainably fund partial basic income, the pension, will progress.

4\. Alternative living arrangements such as tiny houses, van dwelling, intentional communities, Airbnb and even straightforward lodging will be increasingly punished/regulated in paradoxical complement to the wider issues of eroding social services and climate change. Telecommuting/remote work will continue to be a niche, enviously studied by office-dwelling dreamers tracking the lives of a small number of success stories carving their niche (and also revenues) in the blogosphere.

5\. We will see increased calls for intensified urbanisation and migration to tackle the obvious increasing poverty divide between nations/regions and provide a path to renewed GDP growth. This will have the net effect of furthering political divides, increasing per-capital emissions, and draining the skills base of developing nations.

6\. The imagined bunkers which we would all retreat into as a means of survival from the world will not eventuate in a literal sense except where some billionaire crafts an elaborate folly that we all get to bray over in our news feed. However, bunkers will come to exist in less literal ways - households will continue to shrink, more people living alone with pets and no kids. Social circles will also shrink and the next generation of minds will be crafted by the distant yet immediate judgment of their peers and yet they will rarely meet in person and the expenditure of personal energy in such an endeavour (or indeed any endeavour at all) will become vanishingly rare. Our diets will be made up of increasingly single-serve, processed substances delivered directly to us in single-use packaging.

You know after typing all this out I've realised it's just as much a summation of the past decade as a projection of the next one. Here's to another ten years of this, then, I guess. Where's my scythe?

</comment><comment><USER507> Predictions are fun! Here's hoping I come back to read this in 2030.

1\. There will be a breakthrough in VR gaming. Kits with similar features to today's most expensive will start going on offer for prices lower than or comparable to consoles, and new high-end kits will offer full motion tracking without needing treadmills or the like. VR cafes, similar to the Internet cafes of old, will become a mainstream choice for entertainment, especially for teenagers and young adults. Half-Life: Alyx will be a major contributor in establishing industry conventions that other developers will build upon.

2\. Piracy will drastically increase for video content following the fragmentation of streaming services. A subscription to have access to all streaming services will appear, and we'll have completed the loop back to cable television.

3\. Electronic voting will be adopted in a few more countries. One will have an election hacked, resulting in a different party being elected than the one people actually voted for. A major scandal following that will halt the trend.

4\. Web development will continue to remain highly fragmented. There will be fewer and fewer individuals that understand all the layers of applications due to continually exploding complexity. Containerization will be taught as a core competency in any development course. Firefox will gain 10% of market share, but Chromium-based browsers will remain king. JS will lose market share but will remain at the top.

5\. There will be a rising trend in using neural networks to prepare APIs and interfaces for the most common app types, and it's going to be advertised as magic. It will result in a decrease in entry-level freelancing jobs, and a decrease in the revenue of companies based on providing no-code websites - unless they're the ones that offer the service.

6\. A new standard for designing apps will appear from one of the tech giants and be adopted into the mainstream after 2 or 3 years, similar to Material.

7\. There will be a massive push in many major cities to discourage personal vehicle ownership, proposing the use of public transportation or bikes/electric scooters instead. Part of the push will be in decommissioning lanes, the other in taxes.

8\. Gen Z will turn out as a generation of extremes. To the surprise of many, tech illiteracy will be a serious problem.

9\. There's going to be a global scare due to a superbug, i.e. a virus that is resistant to antibiotics. It may get as far as having border lockdowns.

10\. China will continue its rise to power, and individual freedoms will continue to decrease. On a related note, Hong Kong will be subdued in a subtle manner, and a history rewrite will be attempted.

11\. There will be an economic recession within three years. Many companies will feel the effects on their bottom line from decreased sales and will try to automate entry-level positions in response.

12\. Mirroring what another poster said in this thread, deepfakes will become so commonplace that only lived experiences will remain fully credible; and yes, there will be an industry based around trying to sell content as being fully unedited.

13\. Open offices will finally start fading out, remote work will become more mainstream. Despite experiments in several countries, the 8-hour workday will remain the norm.

14\. Again mirroring other posters in this thread, crypto won't have a massive breakout, though it will continue to rise in popularity. Investors will start wincing when they hear about crypto startups, the already established ones will start seeing some mainstream use.

15\. And the one I'm most sure about: we'll still be playing videos using VLC in 2030.

</comment><comment><USER508> 1\. Developer tools become more and more integrated, solutions become mainstream where everything is automated with your whole stack (DNS/domain, CI, Git repos, Scrum board, analytics, app/database etc) created in one click (already happening, I know). AWS buys Gitlab or Atlassian.

2\. GCP fails on its goal in becoming as large as AWS/Azure

3\. Data Science becomes as commonplace in software development as Agile methods, Git etc with easier to use tools (which require no actual knowledge how the math works)

4\. In the developed countries electric vehicles achieve approximately 50% market share

5\. Some great advancements in battery technology, which only still result to about 50% better energy density than as of now

6\. Some new social media (a la Snapchat) rises, possibly based on VR or AR

7\. VR & AR games become more mainstream, AR particularly with couple hit- games (perhaps similar to board games?)

8\. No fusion power, and not that much progress in it

And my political predictions:

1\. Africa becomes the new "China", a lot of manufacturing is transferred there

2\. Africa also sees a steep increase in GDP in some countries which receive these new investments (eg Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia perhaps)

3\. China rises in political power but falls short on becoming a true superpower, mainly due to lack of soft power (Chinese culture will stay as isolated as it's now). Also while becoming the absolute best in few key industries (electronical devices mainly), won't achieve similar success in other areas (software, cars)

4\. The rest of the Balkans join EU (with maybe the exception of Albania), people continue complaining about EU but still nobody else other than Britain leaves the union

5\. EU deepens its military co-operation, NATO decreases in importance mostly because of USA's erratic behaviour

6\. A major proxy war is fought in Middle-East, yet again. Iran contests Saudi-Arabia's dominance. Saudi-Arabia fails to transition from oil to other industries

7\. Global warming will create the strongest and the most devastating hurricane yet to hit US. Deniers will still fail to see any correlation between them

8\. Global warming will also create mass starvation and desertification in Africa causing mass-migrations and thus pressure on the neighbouring countries and especially EU, with again populists getting votes with their anti- immigration rhetoric

9\. Populists world-wide will gain a stronger foothold, even more having prime ministers in various EU countries (not just in Eastern Europe)

A bit conservative predictions, I know. But it's still only 10 years so any bolder predictions will probably fall short

</comment><comment><USER509> Field: Software -

Around the start of the decade -

\- Nearly every old SAAS company would become a platform, offering marketplace and hosting for custom-built solutions. \- Rise of very narrowly focussed software companies. (superhuman for X trend - to me this means - software with an extremely narrow set of features, with a focus on being fast). \- Reduced time to market for software products, followed by a decline in the quality of software (performance, security, speed of building features). \- A rise in a number of open-source full-fledged-products. \- Rise of NoCode, would facilitate the Rise of micro-SAAS.

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Around the middle of the decade -

\- Rise of paid Open Source developers. \- Rise of IT dept. in the organizations. \- Data engineering would be a part of IT. \- More organizations would turn to inhouse development. \- Rise of FAAS (Feature as a Service) on the top of the SAAS and Open Source, would be facilitated by a small set of teams, serving the Enterprise market. \- Every IDE would offer ML-based code-completion. This would be adopted quite quickly by the companies, in hopes that tech-debt would be paid. \- Experienced software engineers would consolidate behind the core-tech companies or churn out of the industry.

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Around the end of the decade -

\- CS (subject) would just become AI/ML and would follow the path of core engineering degrees, where having a post-grad degree is no longer optional. Would be offered as a combined UG+PG degree. The curriculum would be more or less the same, only the name change would happen for the UG. Universities would struggle to attract candidates in the CS stream as the popularity of lambda school and other boot camps soars. \- CS (subject) would be merged with other degrees to offer combined degrees. The curriculum would include the first two years of CS - programming, database, data structure, data engineering, software engineering and some IT subjects around DevOps. \- Rise of industry, function-specific NoCode apps/services. \- Postgres-Rust - release of Postgres, rewritten in Rust (in general - nGinx, Python, not all, but one of the major tech component)

\- Day 0 for the Sofware industry. It bottoms out, before rising up again in the next decade. Mythical man-months would be the bible for the new s/w industry. \- Day 0 for the distributed internet, distributed apps.

\- A hardware company, bigger than Intel at its peak. \- First truly distributed organization - the start of an experiment.

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Random Predictions

\- Nationalist sentiments are on the rise in India, this might force consumer- facing companies to take some drastic measures, such as - Walmart and Amazon to either merge or leave India. \- Amazon would peak. \- Gold rates would be all-time high. \- Mental health issues would be on a rise. \- Cloud kitchens/ delivery only restaurants would be the norm. \- Ownership would start moving towards digital (digital money, space in VR land, etc). \- Expect breakthroughs in quantum computing and the internet. \- I hope for some progress in self-configurable robots. \- The sharing economy would grow.

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</comment><comment><USER510> 1.) Piracy effectively kills independent movies and books. \-- Outside of showstopper Marvel, Star Wars, Avenger-esque media, most movies lose money or are rolled up into subscription services. \-- However other showstopper type franchises arise as people tire of the same old Marvel universe crap.

2.) Most magazines go out of business.

3.) Because of 1-2 maybe we actually start to do something about piracy and enforce laws?

4.) Autonomous cars only work on the freeway and use mostly commodity parts (cheap LIDAR, cameras). Level 5 driving is abandoned.

5.) AMZN and MSFT grow. GOOG shrinks or stays the same.

6.) FB shrinks by 50%. SNAP, TikTok, FutureSocialNetwork all grow, however a large set of young people abandon social media all together.

7.) Related to 6: AAPL releases iMessage for Android, puts some security settings in there, adds bitmoji, face filters, etc, and kills 50% of all social networks overnight. Twitter is still the go to place to listen to celebrities.

8.) VR is abandoned or is a niche product.

9.) Tech bubble bursts. 300k programmer salaries are gone. Lots of unemployed coders out there. People with generic CS degrees are a dime a dozen.

10.) Hard sciences rule. People with Masters+ in Material Science, Biomedicine, Aeronautics, Mechatronics/Robotics are king.

11.) People that know how to setup data processing pipelines to facilitate #10 are still valuable. As are those who know how to build the systems that robots rely to navigate and manage their work. Specialize or die.

12.) Recession. Reduction in prices of housing, but consolidation of the housing market into the hands of the elites who no longer want anything to do with VC.

13.) Many IT, agricultural, warehousing, retail, grocery, and trucking jobs are lost. IT takes the biggest hit.

14.) Machine Learning is tapped out. No AGI. Insights from Big Data aren't what they are cracked up to be. ML helps discover patterns for drug discovery, helps robots to orient in space and see surroundings, but the logic is still driven by humans.

15.) Crypto goes to 0.

16.) Species loss and human sprawl continues.

17.) "Peak software startup" reached in 2018. Next startups are in medicine, energy, space, environmentalism. This is good. Bad for coders though.

More positive thoughts:

18.) Incredible advances in medical diagnostics. Routine screening (for wealthy people) includes full body MRIs and ML detection of cancer. A Theranos style blood test is invented. Many cancers, if caught early, and maybe alzheimers are manageable medically.

19.) Crispr is still immature and not widely used.

20.) Plastics are slowly being phased out.

</comment><comment><USER511> 1\. A major earthquake / the 'big one' will hit California.

2\. A major correction will happen in 2020, causing a larger depression than the one we saw in 2008. The corporate debt bubble will initiate the correction, with Softbank as well as other financial institutions taking a huge hit / collapsing due to risky investments relating to maximizing growth / revenue without paying attention to net income. The Canadian and Australian real estate bubbles will also burst, although these corrections may happen in 2021 rather than 2020. A new approach to setting interest rates will be assessed by the Federal Reserve in either 2021 or 2022. Cryptocurrencies will be the 'new gold' as the market buys crypto to try to counteract inflation in 2020 / 2021.

3\. Climate change will continue causing global temperatures to rise, initiating major flooding and fires around the world, as well as adding power to newborn tropical storms. This will fuel a huge investment in renewable energy / energy storage companies and this growth will continue to accelerate by the end of the decade.

4\. Full autonomous driving won't be completely delivered, although each car will come with features which allows drivers to take a break from driving on long stretches of highway routes approved for autonomous driving. This will initiate a massive wave of layoffs of truck drivers, as companies start building branches near traffic routes approved for full autonomy and laying off workers to try to cut costs.

5\. Cashier-less registers will become prominent. A security guard will stand at each exit checking and ensuring that self-checkout goes smoothly, with most stores only having one cashier on hand for anyone who needs assistance or to assist with scanning / placing items on the conveyor belt.

6\. Electric cars will continue taking a large market share from regular vehicles, with Tesla playing a huge role in building the infrastructure for re-charging stations in North America.

7\. Elon Musk's starlink will start delivering satellite based internet around the world, taking major market share from existing telecom companies.

8\. Advanced generalized artificial intelligence will not be completely established, although humanity will take major steps toward creating one as new approaches to tackling 'deep' learning start taking hold. Prolog type interpreting engines and tree based / CORELS based engines which attempt to infer rules will be built underneath neural networks, delivering more generalized functionality and creating new capabilities for automation.

9\. Uber will become bankrupt within 3-5 years, losing out to Lyft / other entrants. Google will lose market share in the search space, although this will be offset by gains in the cloud computing (fueled by its quantum computing breakthroughs), self-driving, and AI/ML space. Apple and Amazon will take major hits, fueled by their lack of customer focus and a shift in maximizing shareholder value rather than focusing on the customer experience. Microsoft will take a hit during the next correction, although they'll continue to flourish under Satya Nadella.

10\. Parallel computing / Erlang will become much more popular by 2029; along with logic programming / Prolog which will accelerate in popularity starting from 2025, fueled by new breakthroughs and approaches to ML / AI.

</comment><comment><USER512> Optimistic:

1) At least a couple of cities will have managed to deploy a successful autonomous shuttle fleet that fulfills uber/lyft like real time request but with the benefit of density that riding in a shuttle / bus / van provides. Dedicated lanes that only allow these sorts of vehicles will help make this a success and will ensure that no matter how far away level 5 still is, it actually does work without a safety driver for the geofenced region of the city. In these examples, the autonomous shuttle system will be the main form of mass-transit and will be convenient enough that the same percentage of people that co car-less in NYC will do so in smaller less dense cities where these have been deployed.

2) Meat will largely have replaced by plant based or lab grown for most fast food experiences. You will still prefer the real thing when going to a nicer restaurant but happy to eat a plant based burger when on the road or at an airport.

3) Similarly, a synthetic form of coffee will be the norm at fast food places and gas stations. Higher end coffee shops will offer both. Aficionados will still prefer the real thing but most people will be fine with the smooth taste of e.g atomo (and maybe it's even them who win this market!)

4) Robotic manipulation will have progressed enough to achieve "careful farming" at scale - just like a medium size organic farm that is weeded by hand, but by robots. This will also be the basis of popular services that will come and tend your vegetable garden for you.

5) Social and cultural norms to communicating online have begun to materialize that help us collectively make sense of the world and communicate more effectively without the constant freaking out and negative personal attacks. We've learned to systematically ignore trolls while tolerating earnest unpopular assertions.

6) There will be several successful open source projects that maintain AI models for common tasks such as object detection / human skeleton pose estimation in images and videos, speech transcription, voice commands etc. These will enable open source photo management solutions that match the convenience of google / apple's offerings, which will be used by many geeks, and this will put pressure on the big tech companies to offer true privacy, much in the way apple has begun to and google has shown steps with its e.g offline voice transcription app.

7) camera based 3d reconstruction will become commoditized enabling open street maps or another open mapping platform will be reasonable to use in place of google maps with the help of a community of people willing to share video feeds from dash / bike / helmet cams, including live updates to things like traffic, construction, new business openings / closing etc.

Pessimistic:

1) AR still isn't good enough for mass market use - it feels a little uncomfortable and distracting to wear for anything but professional use. There are an increasing number of jobs where AR headsets have become the norm.

2) blockchain never found a mass market in a truly decentralized / trustless manner, but has been adopted privately by banks to make international transactions easier

3) There still won't be an easy way to build end to end general purpose user facing applications without writing code - despite at least a few more noble attempts ala WithEve

4) We still will not have managed to curb global warming even after largely adopting electrification and plant based diets due to the material demands of a growing richer population and an inability to collectively enforce the truly radical changes required

5) Despite the ubiquity of learning resources the job market will remain about as meritocratic as it is today, with many, but by no means all, of the best jobs won by a combination of skill and connections rather than largely by skill

Crazy:

1) Hippy co-ops of open source technologists will emerge - sort of like the Amish but only use open source hardware and software. Similar to what Neil Stephenson depicted in Anathem with concents but not quite as monastic or centralized. It will be a collective of households taking a pledge and helping each other out. People will participate out of a feel they have to to avoid surveillance and retain control of their lives. Many open source projects will be lead by these communities. copy-left open source licenses will be in vogue again.

2) Robots that can survive in the wild (e.g a solar powered autonomous drone) that will live for years even after losing touch with the original human(s) that deployed them

</comment><comment><USER513> Reminder that longbets.org exists if you like thinking about this stuff.

Apple will continue to alienate their traditional consumers, but will maintain relevant through aggressive release cycles, new tech, and ecosystem lockin.

Electric cars will gain significant market share of new vehicles, but won't cross 50% of consumer cars.

Driverless cars will exist in a small sector of use cases.

Rick and Morty becomes this generation's South Park.

Gen Z will have less kids as they enter adulthood.

China's growth as a world power will let them get away with more human rights abuses.

A big recession/depression will start caused from student loan debt, an aging population, automation, stagnating wages, increasing rents, increasing wealth inequality, and climate change.

A well-thought out UBI and tax reform plan will be proposed and gain populist appeal.

There will be more large scale populist protests worldwide.

An antitrust case will be started against Google.

Public transit becomes much, much better

Fake meat increases to grow in popularity as veganism and vegetarianism increases in younger populations.

Some places will place a tax on red meat

There will be another high profile death ruled as a suicide that creates conspiracy theories.

Automation enters the market before proper legislation happens.

AI and deepfakes become heavily abused before becoming regulated, but the damage had already been done.

In general, legislation will happen too late.

Amazon will find a way to compete more directly with Google and Facebook. The internet becomes a worse off place because of it.

Adobe will release a cloud computing platform for their software.

Linux gains significant, but not competitive, market share as cloud based computing and postmarketOS become more consumer friendly.

Scientists will discover the secret to the universe is actually 43.

Cryptocurrency won't gain significant relevance

Climate change will continue to get worse and the market will continue to prevent dramatic change to happen.

Most people will still be complacent like they are today.

Cannabis will be legalized medicinally nationwide, but will remain illegal on the state level.

Ketamine treatment becomes easier to obtain and has better results vs placebo than other antidepressants.

Art continues to get worse

A republican presidential candidate will run on a platform "saving the children" that is only going to make the future worse but the present better.

Flavored vape juice will become legal again.

A high profile tech celebrity (Bezos, Gates, Musk, or a new startup probably) will win a Nobel Prize. Some HN'ers won't be happy about it.

Nuclear doesn't gain traction but still remains a pipe dream for a lot of people.

Natural disasters are going to cause massive problems, death, and some violence.

Netflix becomes close to being irrelevant but somehow stays competitive.

</comment><comment><USER514> Ooooooh I wanna add mine!

1\. [WILL BET $100 with one person] Energy management (e.g. battery research, energy infrastructure development) becomes a far bigger concern. The forcing functions of high population, increased well-being, and a world that cannot sustain that well-being with current techniques will mean new types of energy reserves will need to be found, tapped, and converted into material wealth. Whatever country develops a strategic advantage in this field will win the 21st century, just as the U.S. won the 20th century through the Texas oil boom (with a little help from 2 world wars).

2\. [LIKELY] A harder world will mean the increased rise and stay of authoritarianism and totalitarianism despite attempts to check it. The 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the U.S. as the sole hyperpower was an abnormal state, and the 2020s will see the world finishing a decades-long readjustment to a truly multilateral world, with independent military pacts and spheres of influence by 2030.

3\. [LIKELY] The United States' brightest days will still be ahead of it. The U.S. dollar will remain the world's reserve currency, and the U.S. market will still be the world's largest, unified, open commercial market, with a more-or- less natural balance of producers and consumers. There may be a recession or even depression, increased political polarization, and maybe even a major war between great powers, but tight federal policing over states, the lack of any militarily strong neighbors, resource availability, strong communications, and simple inertia will mean no serious discussion of systemic weaknesses on the scale of decolonization or secession like those held in the U.K.

4\. [STRETCH, and I'll bet $50 with one person] The first JavaScript hardware stack will become commercially available. JavaScript becomes the new x86. Due to Moore's Law flatlining, as well as increased cloud dominance and serious work done behind a protocol, more and more companies will want JavaScript portability with high performance. The first company to embrace this wretched reality and deliver a JavaScript hardware stack that performs as well as a Chromebook may find demand to be higher than expected.

5\. [LIKELY] Industrial IoT becomes synonymous with big data. Blob storage tasks like streaming media will be too fractured with proprietary technology to build a tooling ecosystem to get shared gains, and other tech like VR will still need to create the market, and sell to skeptical consumers with steadily decreasing median purchasing power. Enterprise remains a solid market, and more devices will get wired in the name of convenience over security and more analytics will be required out of every connected device.

6\. [LIKELY] The Linux desktop finally becomes a thing. Please.

7\. [HOPEFULLY] I'll be married to somebody I love and have kids :)

</comment><comment><USER515> Predictions:

\- Due to more control systems being networked, and processes automated, there will be a bug or hack that results in a disaster scenario where people are seriously hurt and die.

\- Similar to other nations in the 2010's, the US will make use of an internet 'kill switch' to stem leaks, dissent or unrest. This might mean turning off access to a particular resource on the internet or web access altogether for a large region.

\- Decentralized solutions to cloud-hosted services will be productized and shipped to consumers. Today's edge computing, home automation hubs, etc will combine with a Synology-type product that lets you add storage, modules, etc and run apps for your home and personal network. This will contrast with PCs that are general purpose and still too complex for the average person to put together, and today's Synology products that are typically geared towards data hoarding and require a bit of knowledge to use.

\- The mobile operating system options will broaden, and a viable option for open software enthusiasts will open up.

\- The glut of capital in the consumer space will dry up as that market holds less and less purchasing power. Most people will look back on the 2010's and their many investor subsidized 'X-as-a-Service' services comparatively fondly to their present economy that has all but abandoned them.

\- The problem of "I can't get good internet speeds indoors" won't be solved for another decade, and if it is, a weird point-to-point outdoor antenna solution for buildings will be involved.

\- The fact that the US relies on cheap foreign labor will come to a head as underdeveloped countries develop. More companies will be found to have foreign slave labor somewhere in their supply chain, and they will all claim ignorance when it happens.

\- The bulk of developers will still be paid to write HTML + CSS + JS and it will still be a bad experience for everyone involved.

\- Outside of the major metro areas, local news will be replaced by centralized services that just push out localized paid-to-publish content and ad fluff. Local governments will become much more of the good ol' boy networks that they already are today.

\- At least one country will make people get chips implanted, whether they're immigrants, refugees or their own citizens.

\- The Rent-a-Center model of renting goods beyond housing and vehicles (though renting of both will increase) will become more popular and not associated with RaC specifically.

\- Embryonic gene editing won't catch on except for very specific indications and diseases, and rich people will rely on genetic tests for embryonic selection prior to implantation.

</comment><comment><USER516> \- EVTOL will start to grow from the current nothing, but will not be a revolutionary transport mechanism by 2030. People will be investing in it and trying to make it work though, but even the bullish EVTOL investors like Uber will be struggling to make it work as globally as expected.

\- I think autonomous cars will be much further along, but only in certain parts of the World - more likely to see them in Monaco than in Mumbai or Manchester, not for economic reasons but because of road and typical weather conditions.

\- Most "liberal democracies" will slide to the right for a prolonged period of time. There is no appetite for a move to the left, as much as many of us think it's "obvious" that people will eventually see through right-wing messaging or will die off naturally.

\- The USSR will be back in all but name. It arguably already is, but by 2030 we'll know what a post-Putin World might look like, and it will not involve more democracy in Russia. The majority of Russians will be fine with this.

\- India in the '20s will be like China in the '10s, but greener.

\- China itself will try to go big on green tech, but will struggle to economically justify it until consumers show they're prepared to pay for it (which they never have to date).

\- I am quite bearish on the EU post-Brexit. I think France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal will all face a rise in anti-EU sentiment amongst voters.

\- Meanwhile the UK will be a strange mix of striving for a new Industrial Revolution with a tax and political environment that reminds people of Singapore.

\- Most software engineers will spend a bigger proportion of their time taking off the shelf ML/AI tools and plugging them together and facing a business problem. I think a "Ruby on Rails of ML/AI" is quite likely.

\- I think the companies that have spent the '10s trading on personal data (Facebook, Google, etc.) will struggle with that business model as the audience becomes more aware and careful with their private data.

\- Bitcoin is going to muddle along, but even if most of the problems with it (transaction rate, power usage, etc.), get fixed then most people are now so sceptical of crypto coins, they will all struggle to get public mind share.

\- Meat consumption will be way, way down. Maybe below 3/4 what it is today, driven by environmentalism, animal rights awareness and a growing landscape of decent competitors.

\- At least one major metro or municipal area will have gone carbon neutral, and at least one country will be on target to be entirely carbon neutral by 2035.

</comment><comment><USER404> Trump will win the elections again this year and continue as President.

</comment><comment><USER517> hoping that Donald Trump don't make more mess .... oh wait ... shit, World War 3 is coming

</comment><comment><USER518> Predictions:

1\. CIA becomes obsolete, they will not be able to keep their secrets and they have no asymmetric advantage in killing other country leaders while protecting their own leadership from being killed in retaliation. (mutually assured destruction on a small scale)

2\. Garbage dump mining startups will have a capital hey-day (story about "bitcoin ladened trash-PC recovered" blows up in the headlines)

3\. UFO stories become more and more prevalent in the news. Non-Newtonian aircraft presented by US space-force.

4\. Quiet surveillance on the rise with sudden opportunities appearing for movement-leaders; security services disband-through-kindness rather than through cohesion.

5\. Wealth becomes impossible to hide, oligarchs, corrupt politicians exposed through a series of leaks.

6\. The internet is fragmented, but Elon Musk creates a network of networks which allows the American's to continue its colonization of all information systems.

7\. Uni-gate, dept burdened millennials and post-millennials align politically and go after the universities/officials who have bankrupted their futures.

8\. Meme-force established. Information cascades are monitored and foreign influencers are shut down or even forcibly stopped.

9\. Google over-steps, internal anti-trust emails exposed, the search monopoly is broken and other search engines come online

10\. Backlash against Chinese funded foreign nationals in western STEM programs.

11\. First brain hack and thought probe occurs via a brain-to-computer interface mixed with an AI system.

12\. Telepathy RFC introduced

13\. Rene Girard's memetic theory gains in popularity as post-modernism continues to fall.

14\. First massive state sponsored bank account attack wipes out hundreds of millions of electronic records; creating chaos in the western financial system. Crypto surges.

15\. "Identity politics" based political arrests start to occur due to thought-crimes.

16\. Small scale micro-voting systems innovate how small groups make decisions. (voting nerdom becomes a thing, democracy disrupted in a good way)

17\. First asteroid mined

18\. Mental health task-force (Chinese like system) established and funded to identify people who are competent enough to harm the whole (frequency of mass shootings reduced)

19\. More political parties entirely bypass traditional (captured) media and talk directly to their base (Trump style political approach catches on)

20\. Re-invention of the university system outside of the United States (Maybe from the African renaissance)

21\. Factory farms are out-competed by lean and ethical agricultural systems. Ag-gag laws are unenforceable because drone surveillance become so inexpensive.

22\. Mark Zuckerberg becomes president of the United States.

</comment><comment><USER519> 1\. State of AGI - No AGI happens but AI bots with multiple pre-learnt skills would begin being available for popular consumption

2\. Self Driving Cars - Almost all cars will be self-driven.

3\. FAANG - Facebook will face Government action, will cease to be the biggest social network, will change market and be a major player there. Some non-US company is the biggest social network. Google will no longer be top player in any major market, but will continue being a huge company. Amazon and Netflix continue innovating and improving. Apple is replaced by some other most innovative consumer hardware company. Microsoft is still one of the top companies of the decade. [Obviously subject to non-occurance of major leadership changes; MS would have shrunk in the last decade if not for that.]

4\. Social Networks: Centralized and private social networks co-exist. Data interoperability is possible. The market for Social Network stops increasing by the end of the decade.

5\. Politics: Allegiance towards national governments is heavily reduced. People are more active in their local communities.

6\. Religion: If 5 happens, organised central religion loses importance, but subcultures with eccentric practices and beliefs emerge throughout the world.

7\. Recession: No major recession happens.

8\. Space Exploration: Manned flights to other planets possible. Too expensive. Interplanetary civilization is still far-fetched.

9\. VR: Headsets become ubiquitous. Developer ecosystem for VR is at the onset. Huge opportunities ahead. No existing major player/hardware company is able to make a successful headset in-house. An independent company reimagines hardware and software, ships well built and cheap hardware, and owns the market for a while. Followed by other companies shipping similar hardware.

10\. Decentralization: Distrust in central government, currency, religions, news corps, social networks, banks will be at an all time high. Decentralization will be the popularly accepted and still debated by conservatives.

11\. Education: College education stays, ends up being reinvented. Archaic colleges start losing relevance.

12\. Startups: Building new solutions in existing systems is a hard problem. Startups appear to get easy and ubiquitous, but the ease of doing a startups is supposed to remain constant throughout history and future.

13\. Environment: Companies and governments will have to take more action because of public outrage. The situation doesn't improve much.

14\. Remote Work: Most companies allow for remote gigs. Apart from more 'hip' companies emerging, major companies remain conservative about remote work. Tools like Slack, Asana, Notion would become giants.

15\. Cryptocurrency: Cryptocurrency enters consumer use. Multiple currencies compete initially; winner takes all. Social Crediting a major feature of the winner.

16\. Deepfakes: Applications on it become popularly available. People realize it's just another fad like anonymous social networks.

17\. Airpods and Audio: Airpods lead the headset market, big companies happen in audio space. 2-hour non-interactive podcasts don't work, some other format becomes the standard for the industry.

18\. US, China and India hold the top three spots for largest economies.

</comment><comment><USER520> (1) Britain will exit from the EU, and there will be more such exits.

(2) The major countries will make big and somewhat successful efforts to increase the birth rates.

(3) Internet content, especially video, will grow quickly in volume and variety with a lot of quite high quality.

(4) The one size fits all mainstream media will change or shrink, likely shrink, as new media with great variety will explode.

(5) Small team, inexpensive, but innovative, entertaining, and often quite popular video story telling will grow quickly. The better funded effort will make a lot of use of computer generated images, e.g., extrapolation of and big steps up from the movie _Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow_.

(6) Trump will win in 2020, dominate the Republican party, and do at least some good recruiting promising _players_ for the future. Also in 2020 the Trump Republicans will win the House. Due to the Republican victories, the Democrat party will be lost wandering in a desert at least for Trump's second term. But then some Democrats will get serious and rebuild the party. By 2030 we will have two strong political parties both going for the center of the road voters. Some of the news media, on the Internet, will report the news objectively and with considerable depth and, thus, greatly help US government.

(7) We will have some big surprises in astrophysics.

(8) We will have some big surprises in exploration of our solar system, especially asteroids.

(9) We will have some big surprises in progress in curing diseases, maybe even mostly cure cancer.

(10) The economists, the Fed, etc. are getting enough understanding of how to get full employment, rapid growth, low interest rates, and low taxes. The growth in the economy will will reach a level which pays off the national debt quickly.

(11) Home schooling via high quality materials on the Internet, as Web pages, PDF files, and video clips will grow quickly as will corresponding testing and certification. Tens of thousands of families will have their 12 year old children through current college STEM field materials. Generally the Internet will do much better in instruction for skills, crafts, professional development, etc.

(12) The US will start deploying nukes for electric power again, sometimes for the grid and other times, with small nukes, for just local housing or plants.

(13) A major fraction of Internet traffic will go via satellite, especially in poor or sparsely populated areas.

(14) There will be at least one moon base with humans there for months at a time.

(15) The James Web telescope will yield astounding results.

(16) The Mideast oil states will grow quickly in sophistication and development.

(17) Supersonic passenger planes will return.

(18) Automobile manufacturing will be much more highly automated with some cars with prices under $10,000.

(19) The Internet will enable significant flows from the most crowded areas to less crowded.

(20) There will be a lot of one day and same day deliveries for consumer shopping, including for refrigerated and frozen items.

(21) There will be a lot of retail selling direct from the factory, in the US or other countries. So, some item that costs $10 now may sell for $2 -- generally prices will fall. I.e., quite broadly the _middleman_ will get _disintermediated_.

(22) New house will get a lot cheaper: (A) The move to rural land will lower the costs of lots. Such lots will use water wells and septic systems and, thus, lower costs of utilities. Internet access can be via satellite and, thus, from anywhere, e.g., some house in the woods, a boat on a lake, a cabin on a mountain top. Houses can be _manufactured_ and just delivered to a site and be ready to move in in two days or so. Otherwise, there will be larger manufactured components for just Lego style plug together houses.

(23) Medical research will make good or better progress in control of obesity.

(24) Warehousing will become nearly fully automated.

(25) Automation in manufacturing will expand rapidly.

(26) New materials, e.g., carbon fiber, Kevlar, plastics, adhesives, etc. will grow quickly for cars, buildings, etc.

(27) There will be much more fossil fuel extraction from the continental shelves of the continents, especially in Asia.

(28) Solar power with batteries and fossil fueled backup generators will become much more popular due to more rural housing that, finally, needs no connections for electric power, telephone, Internet, water, sewer, or anything else, thus greatly lowering the costs of rural housing. Such rural housing will also drive more home schooling based on the Internet. Small communities, of say, a dozen homes on some 100 acres of land will grow up and maybe have their own small nuke for electric power, including for home HVAC.

(29) Generally cost of living will go down significantly due to some of the above -- buying direct from factories, much cheaper housing, cheaper cars, more automated manufacturing, due to home schooling, no more school taxes and, thus, much cheaper local taxes, due to rural living, much less in government services, e.g., snow plowing, traffic lights, road and sewer construction, and, thus, much lower taxes.

(30) Due to (29), etc., a much higher birth rate.

(31) Due to the information via the Internet, much better informed voters and much better politics and government.

(32) Also heavily due to the Internet, much cheaper alternatives to traditional college.

(33) The US will solidly stop the flows of illegal drugs into the US, and Mexico will make a lot of progress recovering from a narco state.

(34) The US will make good progress toward astoundingly capable unmanned jet fighter planes.

(35) CRISPR techniques will make astounding progress in plant and animal _breeding_.

(36) Generally a lot of prices will get pushed down due to lower prices for oil and natural gas from fracking, continental shelf drilling, and ANWR drilling, higher agricultural productivity from better seeds, feeds, equipment, and computer based information, more automation in manufacturing, direct selling from factories to end users, more efficient order processing, warehousing, and shipping, generally more computing and automation. But the low interest rates are causing lots of capital investment, low unemployment, and higher wages. Higher interest rates would risk depression from prices falling from the improved efficiencies and higher unemployment; so interest rates need to stay low to avoid recession due to falling prices.

</comment><comment><USER521> Politics:

\- Trump will get reelected, but the next US president will be a democrat.

\- In Europe, although the last 10 years were led by the rise of extreme right and conservatives, socialists and ecological parties will take the lead in most countries.

\- China will keep being very conservative and totalitarian and most people will just accept it. As the economy keep slowing down there will be more dissents, but there will be no civil war in this decade.

\- China won't be able to fix its global lack of soft power, except in Africa, and the belt and road initiative won't be a success.

\- I'm going to be bold and say that Xi won't be reelected in 2022, however he will stay close to the power in the shadow and his successor will follow the same tracks.

\- Hong-Kong will keep having it's own system like now. There will be more protests against incoming pro-Beijing bills.

Environment/Energy:

\- There will be only few consequences due to global warming in this decade : more forest fires, a few more species will disappear, but no massive sea-level rise, no big population move, no infrastructures or agricultural lands in danger.

\- There will be much less skepticism about global warming and climate change, but some people will embrace it and even try to accelerate it, mostly for profit.

\- There will still be plenty of oil reserves, but, as the demand lower, and the extraction becomes harder, prices will greatly increase in the end of the decade, accelerating the rise of electric and fuel cells vehicles.

\- The public opinion will increasingly support nuclear energy, both fission and fusion

\- There will be no breakthrough in fusion in this decade, but major advancements like the completion of ITER

\- However, photovoltaic panels will keep becoming more efficient and profitable, greatly increasing their rise.

\- The rise of air travel will be mitigated by the rise of rail, especially in China.

\- China will keep moving to renewables at a slow/moderate pace in the first half of the decade, but foreign policies like the EU border carbon tax will force them to accelerate.

Technology:

\- There will be growing concern about people's privacy, even in China (where nobody cares now). There will be many software/devices sold to help protect privacy (like some kind of masks or special clothing to avoid facial recognition)

\- Supersonic commercial flights will appear again in the second half of the decade, and people will very slowly adopt them as they become cheaper and more convenient.

\- US and… Africa will mostly use their phones to pay commodities by the end of the decade, many people in Europe will be reluctant.

\- China will launch its own cryptocurrency and it will be greatly adopted, but only in China. Cash won't disappear anywhere in the world though.

\- No human will walk on Mars in this decade.

\- Space-ISP like Starlink will be a niche market, eventually failing.

\- Gene-editing experiments on humans will keep being publicly blamed and governments won't encourage them (even China)

\- There will be many level 4 autonomous cars on our roads in 2030, but not level 5.

\- We won't have incredible I-Robot kind of AI, but the one existing will be powerful enough to depreciate several human jobs and will require political changes.

Misc:

\- Fully remote jobs will keep increasing and more people will prefer living in mid-size cities or in the countryside

\- Population in Europe will start decreasing

\- These 2 predictions will lead to a decrease of the real estate market in big European cities.

Many things about China, because I'm living there (although I'm french). I tried to not be too safe and kind of specific because I like to play. I hope many of these predictions won't come true.

</comment><comment><USER522> Here goes nothing:

\- bio startups rise, ag tech startups rise, food startups rise-- everything to do with engineering life.

\- second and third tier cities rise in the US while first tier cities ebb. Places like Austin see continued growth, while cities like Baltimore and Cincinnati begin to really revitalize as local market become more important than global markets.

\- mobility increases as people are less tied to their jobs/families

\- Google slows on the innovation front. FB is increasingly weak as social networking just isn't as profitable anymore. Amazon keeps churning away. Netflix wins best picture at the Oscars.

\- AI progress slows. The ML community fragments again. Neurips is no longer where the best ML researchers publish.

\- At least one climate protest with over 5M people involved nationally, calling on Congress to act now

\- China, mired in internal political upheaval, faces a lost decade. They will either no longer be one of the two biggest economies or they will be on a clear trend down but third place is a long way to fall

\- twice as many people consider themselves vegetarian or vegan. Foods for this demographic have gotten much better and more diverse. Consumption of meat is still high, but the trend in 2030 will be clear: the meat industry is shrinking rapidly in the US and Canada. Other nations will lag here, meaning almost all of the innovation will happen in North America

\- NYC will have built only two new subway stations

\- a third political party will gain at least 5 seats in the House

\- there will be a recession. Likely due to housing again. As the boomers die out, their millennial children inherit their suburban homes. Unfortunately they don't want to live in the suburbs and selling the house would pay off their student loan debt. But who is going to buy all these houses?

\- political divide in the US heals, but it's not pretty and it all feels chaotic. Political parties weaken in favor of some new form of factions.

\- CS undergrad enrollment declines but CS course requirements pervade nearly every STEM field. The common wisdom will now be that interdisciplinary jobs, not vanilla software engineer, are the growth sector, especially in bio/medicine/food/agriculture.

\- Medicare age lowered to 50 as a transition toward single payer that will take another decade

\- the world has missed its chance to avoid global warming. The schism in the debate will now be about what to do. Radical positions (open borders for mass refugees, a trillion dollar climate change R&D bill) will become more mainstream.

\- Cities all over the US will be calling for federal infrastructure to build new train and tran systems, obviating the market demand for autonomous taxis. Uber and Lyft go under. Long haul autonomous vehicles are at 10% of all interstate traffic

\- a common political point will be about how the US needs to stop subsidizing corn. As crops becomes more important in this decade (ag tech, rise of vegetarianism, climate change) it will be clear that corn is an over investment but political inertia will not let things change this decade.

\- A dominant Canadian tech company will arise that rivals Google/FB or is at least rising rapidly

\- towards the end of the decade, robotics is starting to reach the early- success stage. This will have impacts on all sectors as co-working spaces pop up with access to reprogrammable devices that can prototype commercial products. Think: Roomba for X. 2030 is still early days for this, but there's buzz, articles about robo-spaces Wired, etc.

</comment><comment><USER523> * side-effect free programming (aka functional) will continue to take off; most new languages will embrace read-only by default

* React will still be very popular

* Typescript will be 2x as popular as today

* Rust will grow and be regarded as the "right" way to do anything performant but sadly C++ will still hold the majority

* Formal verification will still be mostly a research thing, but maybe a couple prominent tools will be used by a few specific fields

* Programmer wages will be slightly lower than today as the field is flooded with talent, but total payout to all programmers will be larger than today (the field will grow, ~2-10x)

* Scripting will be important to a much larger portion of jobs

* Excel will still be king of data for most businesses

* IoT will not take off, but usage in industrial applications will be much larger

* HCI will be in the same place: touch screens for phones & tablets, keyboards, touchpads & mice for laptops & PCs

* Software will continue to increase in complexity for no real gain, eating any gains in hardware spee. iPhone 11s will run iOS slowly (but still be supported).

* Stadia will be dead after ~5 years and the MSFT equivalent never really launched

* Gaming will basically be in the same place, but high-budget games will forgo high graphics in favor of good gameplay on a wide range of devices (think minecraft & BotW)

* Phones will be basically identical to today, but hopefully at least Apple makes one that is small again and can be used with one hand

* Bluetooth will still exist and stuck, but Apple devices will work well together. Nothing better will exist.

* More electric cars but still not the majority

* Climate change debate will be at basically the same place, a few more countries 100% green, but most not. Death due to climate related issues will increase 2-10x but it won't be enough to persuade most countries to take serious action. Still no carbon accountability between nations, and carbon taxes won't be a thing

* Related to above, immigration and land-value changes due to climate change will be just taking off

* Anti-immigration will win politically and immigration from poorer to richer countries will be 1/2-1/10th the size of today.

* Germany is going to be in a recession, sadly. Due to declining demand for their specialized manufacturing, esp. in auto industry.

* Village bakeries and butchers in EU will be 1/4th of what they are today

* There won't be a major world war, but tensions will be worse than today

* Homelessness will still be a major issue.

* There will be no tech-bubble bursting. Software will continue to eat the world.

* Automation will have led to much more job loss

* Healthcare in the USA will be better but still much worse than most of the developed world

* Political polarization will be the same or worse; still first-past-the-post voting; private money still will win elections; still two parties in USA

* Facebook won't grow as fast as the other tech companies but it'll still be bigger than today

* A lot more people (proportionally) living in vans & RVs

* Capitalism will still be the norm and wealth & income will be even more concentrated

* The average person investing in index funds will be gaining ~4% per year in 2029, even though the "economy" will still be growing, somehow almost all the gains will be captured by the wealthiest

* China will be in a much stronger position than today, with roughly the same level of oppression. A few other countries will have bought China's oppression tech.

* The tensions in the middle east won't be any better, but won't be catastrophically worse

* 0-1 nukes will be detonated in a populated area

* Solar will still be growing rapidly but still far behind fossil fuels

* The Witcher will end after 5 seasons (books content ends midway through 3)

* Internet prices and access in the USA will be only slightly better, same with phone plans

* Some world leader will have been assassinated by a drone carrying a pipe bomb

* Average marital age will be >30 in USA for men and women

* Trump wins 2020, democrats 2024-2032

* At least one other corruption scandal with Trump that goes nowhere

* Disenfranchisement in USA is ~1.5x worse

* "AI" will still be making some progress but no singularity, no fully self driving cars, nothing super revolutionary

* quantum computers won't be having a business impact yet

* bike shares, scooter shares, and car shares won't take off

* No meaningful progress on passenger trains in USA

* Windows update will still suck

* Apple will still have the best experience but won't keep up with MSFT & Google & Amazon in growth

* Big three will be MSFT & Amazon & Google in that order

* Netflix won't be considered a tech company

* DIY will be booming, as well as off-grid living

* Snow sports will be a lot more expensive as climate change robs snowy days and larger population crowds the mountains

* Data leaks will decline but still happen and no significant accountability will happen

* News and journalism will be more or less the same, but there will be a few more good options out there that you can pay money for

* It'll be easier to point to data like actual tax spending in debates with friends instead of just "all the money goes to welfare", "no it all goes to the military", "n-uh", "yu-huh"

</comment><comment><USER524> 1.) As quantum computing advances, there will be at least one successful 51% attack on a major cryptocurrency.

2.) Tesla/SpaceX StarLink will become a major competitor in the ISP space. Most transmitted data throughout the world will touch a StarLink satellite.

3.) Financial downturn/semi-recession in mid-late decade primarily caused by excessive corporate stock buybacks artificially inflating stock prices. (Stock buybacks will be driven by executive compensation/bonuses continually being linked to earnings per share)

4.) Drone deliveries will become more common as drone automation tech improves. Airspace will become more regulated to facilitate this.

5.) It will be considered stylish and/or a power move to not own a cell phone.

6.) Solar/wind/hydro electricity generation will become much more commonplace on personal properties. As electricity prices turn negative and not enough cost effective battery capacity to efficiently store it, power plants will be built/redesigned to turn electricity into hydrogen fuel. This will lead to auto companies creating electric/hydrogen cell hybrid cars.

7.) In January 2030, people will comment on this post with their predictions for the following decade, not realizing this post is 10 years old.

<comment><USER525> I would happily take the other side of the bet on EVERY item here! But I do appreciate your boldness in predictions.

<comment><USER524> Care to elaborate why?

<comment><USER526> Not GP, but...

1) Practical quantum computing seems to have made little practical progress this decade. This is mostly a gut feeling on my part since I have no professional experience in the field.

2) Starlink will be a major competitor in the _rural_ ISP space. The extremely low maximum density of ground stations means that they can't possibly be a major competitor in a dense urban core or even a dense suburban community.

3) I don't see any particular reason to believe this _will_ happen anymore than that it won't.

4) In the sense that 1 is "more common" than 0, this one is probably true, but I have a suspicion that the economics don't work out nearly as well as we hope. The second half is already true (I work on research that supports making those new regulations)

5) ~~Not much of a prediction. It's already true in some circles.~~

Edit: I should say that it's already stylish in some circles to not own a _smartphone_. So far everyone I've met in that category still caries some kind of cellular device capable of making emergency calls at the very least. With a near-ubiquitous cellular network available, it's very hard to articulate a reason why you wouldn't use it in an emergency situation. Furthermore, with the rise of the cell network, payphones have fallen out of fashion, meaning that there's even less infrastructure today that there once was for those who wish to eschew cell phones entirely for whatever reason.

6) Again, not my area of professional expertise, but I don't think solar on every roof in the US would actually be enough affect this change. Wind is likely to meet push-back from neighbors, and I don't even know why hydro is listed. The grid will change radically over the coming _century_ , but the next decade is going to see continued incremental change to draw down coal generation and increase storage capacity.

<comment><USER527> 7) Posts lock after a couple weeks, so good luck with that one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER528> Long time lurker. Decided to post so I could look back with a chuckle in 10 years. Here are some 20's predictions split up into different categories.

Technology:

\- The web will continue to eat everything. Local applications outside of gaming/office work all but die, replaced by web apps, wasm payloads, and electron apps.

\- Self Driving cars continue to be "just around the corner"

\- Smartphones reached a design peak in the 10's and we will be surprised that they don't radically change in the 20's

\- Electric vehicle sales eclipse ICE

\- Lab grown meat finally happens (released at similar to meat prices) but is a complete flop because it's not "real"

\- Slow and steady battery tech improvements are going to unleash a ton of innovation in this decade we can't anticipate yet.

Culture:

\- Pot is legalized federally and a general wave of decrim for other substances like psilocybin/lsd goes mainstream.

\- A president or serious presidential candidate will have their nudes leaked and it will be a huge deal for about a week and then nobody will care. They go on to win the election :p

\- Privacy becomes even more dead than it is now. Private cameras and audio assistants are already ubiquitous; imagine that but 10x. All us nerds will continue complaining and the general public won't care.

\- Boomers begin retiring en-masse but they have not saved enough. Expect lots of stories about medical bankruptcy and boomers having to take minimum wage jobs to stay afloat. I also expect the "lazy millenial in the basement" trope to completely reverse and become "millenials helping boomers age in place"

Business:

\- The news industry continues to be a mess. Local papers that are struggling now all go under leaving only the very large "Papers of Record" left. TV news declines as everyone shifts to online.

\- Streaming video becomes a very big deal. I expect a new platform to ascend and for all new "News" and "Entertainment" personalities to pop up. Think Joe Rogan but 10x. Presidential Candidates will have to go on these shows to be taken seriously.

\- Of the faang stocks I expect Apple and Netflix to do poorly this coming decade. Apple has little innovation left in it and Netflix has a ton of competition. Facebook and Google I expect to be solid businesses still but not innovative. Amazon will continue to dominate to the point that anti-trust is seriously considered.

\- I expect a recession to hit in the next 3 years. It's going to really hurt Boomers who are trying to catch up on underfunded 401ks. It will be a short recession though because any stock correction of note will be aggressively countered by fed policy and government spending. There will be no serious consideration given to austerity. Inflation will finally be unleashed by this process.

Global:

\- Closed internets become common. The Great Firewall or similar techniques will be adopted in many countries to stifle dissent but also as a means to stop ubiquitous hacking.

\- Africa becomes the new global growth hot spot - it already has been happening but this is the decade everyone realizes it and rushes in like they did to China.

\- Kim Jong-un will still run NK and still be shooting off rockets every 6 months or so to get attention.

\- Global warming effects will really set in and be obvious to everyone. The talking points on this will completely shift from denial to fatalism ("well its already a little damaged so why not more?"). Nothing continues to get done though because of the need for coordinated global action in a new decade of nationalism.

</comment><comment><USER529> Economic/Political/Geological:

\- US reelects Trump in 2020. Climbing gyms, lately increasing in popularity also become popular in Mexico.

\- global warming causes endangerment and extinction of many species, but traditional oriental medicines extinct the rhinos.

\- China, due for a recession now, does not go into a recession despite the real estate/housing bubble because Xi and his government continue to find more ways to manipulate their economy. Consequently, the Shen Yun poster factory expands into money printing.

\- Avian migratory patterns shift significantly due to global warming, except flightless birds which begin deevolution into dinosaurs.

\- Boomer retirement causes US GDP growth decline. Zoomers are to blame for being unproductive.

\- The education bubble bursts. Millenials degree now worth nothing.

Tech:

\- Deep fakes used to create fake statements by Donald Trump. Trump denies fabricated statements, and proceeds to create his own.

\- Boston Dynamic robots find gainful employment and enter the workforce, but not doing something people can already do because human labor is too cheap.

\- Bitcoin never takes off, but the price climbs erratically whilst its most significant contribution to the world: crypto mining greenhouse gases, double.

\- 5g is implemented by all major telecommunication companies promising new technological capabilities, but its primary use remains dopamine injections and advertisement.

\- wasm causes a mass migration of desktop preferred applications to the web. Despite the existence of wasm, Reddit gets slower and buggier.

\- Javascript continues domination of the web. Hipster developers now prefer declarative programming over functional. React Declarations now lets you write directly in HTML.

\- Uber introduces Uber Flight - innovating both flying cars and driverless cars. Uber still not profitable.

\- Adam Neuman starts a shared-restroom company in New York. Masayoshi Son can't get enough of We Sh*t.

\- First VR(or AR) based esports that requires physical movements enter mainstream gaming. Pro gamers in korea now indistinguishable from kpop.

\- VR hand controllers continue to evolve making current designs look like the N64 controller.

\- VR/AR finds commercial use outside of the gaming industry, but VR gaming still leads the market with Cubicle Simulator.

\- AI used heavily in cgi, computer graphics, and animation industries. Animators now work for more hours and less pay.

\- Online dating becomes even easier, swiping becomes too 2010's. Loneliness increases even further.

\- Elon gets first man on mars, Elon bores tunnels and builds a base on mars. Elon builds solar panels to power base on mars. Elon establishes neuralink to mars. Elon is in endgame now.

Medical:

\- Zoomers suffer from unprecedented myopia epidemic, root cause discovered - heavy screen use to blame. Fix of more natural daylight is never taken nor implemented. Luxotica remains in control of the eyewear industry.

\- Despite all medical and technological advancements, eating your vegetables, exercise, fresh air, natural daylight, and contact with friends remains the best way to stay healthy.

Cultural:

\- Basketball rules change due to the prevalence of 3 pointers.

\- Disney remakes a remake. Disney also remakes Pocahontas using cgi, which is just Avatar with native americans.

\- New form of rapping created even more incomprehensible than mumble rap.

</comment><comment><USER530> In the spirit of the year number itself, here are 20 predictions made in early 2020.

1\. The US stops subsidizing the global order, pulling back substantially from international involvement. Its continued international presence is primarily felt through alliances, but its military more openly acts like a mercenary force. Global geopolitics reverts to the mean, and a series of wars between now-unshackled regional powers in other areas of the world follows.

2\. The US builds a military presence on another celestial body.

3\. The US and UK ink a trade agreement after Brexit. The agreement is comparable to Lend-Lease in its blatant favoritism for the American side. The Brits take it anyway because it protects them from an economic depression.

4\. The US intervenes in Canadian and Mexican politics/internal affairs.

5\. China's Communist Party collapses. Capital flight and a demographic inversion (reaping what was sown by the One-Child Policy) produces a nation that cannot stand up to the survival pressures of a more-disorderly world. Unable to continue subsidizing its aging population, the current central planners lose their grip on power and something new replaces their influence.

6\. The European Union fractures. Germany rearms itself.

7\. Renewable energy turns out to be overhyped almost everywhere - <USER9> Texas, which leads the world in renewable energy production.

8\. The US federal government legalizes at least one current Schedule I substance.

9\. Medicine, law, and real estate are disrupted by technology in the way taxis and hotels were in the 10's. Medtech, lawtech, and proptech become popular buzzwords. Retired/aging Baby Boomers invest their money heavily in these sectors during the decade, fueling a new wave of startups in each field.

10\. Investigative journalism exposes something horrifying a big tech company did (think something comparable to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"), and that exposure galvanizes public opinion in favor of substantially increasing regulations on tech companies. SaaS margins go down across the board as a result.

11\. MMT becomes the prevailing ideology for economists, who use it to justify continued quantitative easing. Goldbugs and bitcoiners continue rooting for the collapse of fiat money, and central banks aren't really questioned outside the political fringes until the end of the decade.

12\. AI research - another AI winter. No major advances of the state of the art.

13\. AI application - we invent many more ways to apply neural networks, and solve many practical problems previously thought unsolvable.

14\. The political gyre widens in the US, as the factions continue to live in their own alternate versions of reality. A major crisis shatters this polarization, eventually leading to a renewed American nationalism and civic pride as old institutions are destroyed and new ones are built in their place.

15\. Cryptography becomes the only "trustworthy" way to verify digital information in a world of deepfakes. A big public blockchain gets a new lease on life as a public identity management system.

16\. The first consumer-grade quantum computing hardware is launched, with a minimum of 8 qubits.

17\. There is an IOT confidence crisis. When people realize their smart devices power botnets, a de-teching consumer movement brings purely mechanical devices "with no computer attached" back into vogue.

18\. There is significant pollution cleanup in the oceans. Unfortunately, it's not driven by climate altruism - it's driven by a desire to harvest and reuse plastics, because oil is too expensive for much of the rest of the world to consider making them from scratch.

19\. Genetic engineering cures cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, or some other major disease. The ethics of genetic engineering thus enters the public consciousness and debate - and the tone of that debate is just as divisive as the abortion debate.

20\. We discover some sort of physical anomaly which violates the Standard Model. A flurry of new activity in physics follows.

I wish you all continued success and happiness in the coming decade!

</comment><comment><USER531> * Cellular is replaced by global satellite coverage. Every single person has a smartphone with 24/7 unlimited high speed internet, with 100% geographical coverage globally.

* Satellite Internet censorship is managed by international bodies, and authoritarian countries can't control it as tightly as today.

* Internet global culture continues to grow (through memes, social networks, games, blogs, news sites, etc..) and an internet language starts to emerge

* Wealth distribution across rich and poor continue to worsen, and we are basically back to seignorialism

* 30+ countries and startups have rovers / unmanned stations on the moon (or concrete plans to get there short term) and the Outer Space Treaty is being actively challenged as the main obstacle to sustainable investment in space conquest

* Environmentalism has grown massively and 90%+ of people globally cite environment in their top 3 concerns

* Yet we don't know what to do to protect the environment, politicians are pushing for random stuff (like plastic straw interdiction). The lack of strong fact based recommendations means environmental protection is organised more like a religion, and environmental issues are very hard to reason about

* Well being for all and inclusion issues are not solved. Major institutions, universities, companies, open-source projects are paralised by those issues, up to the point where some of those institutions disappear

* Student debt bubble explodes. As with the subprimes, no banker go to prison, and the only consequence is merger between big players in the Banking / Asset Management industries. Finance is becoming more and more an oligopoly.

* Cars are totally banned from most city centers in Europe and Asia. e-cargo bikes are the main mode of transport globally.

* Parcel delivery are heavily taxed by environmental laws. Amazon goes bankrupt. Alibaba buys AWS, which now stands for Alibaba Web Services.

* Planes are heavily taxed, and it becomes hard to travel across the world

* Labour laws and classic employment contract are now seen as a way for the ultra rich to enslave people. People are now fighting for the freedom to work as freelancers.

* Apple watch and other wearable are still useless. Air-pods are still not a platform. The exception is smart glasses that start to appear in the second half of the decade

* Security on the internet is a major issue. 2FA is required by law, and companies must certify their backend by 3rd parties according to ISO certification (as it's the case for most physical goods)

* Inequalities between developed and developing countries continue to decrease fast. This, + environmental laws on imported pollution, means it's now better to manufacture locally. Factories are back in the US and in Europe.

* Crypto currencies are not a thing.

* Bitcoin still exists and is worth $100k+ but is still extremely volatile and is not used in real life.

* Cash is not accepted in most shop anymore

* Banking is global. Illegal activities, fraud and tax evasion becomes more and more difficult as all transactions are tracked and reconciled. In particular, credit card fraud on the internet is almost no longer a thing.

* Intelligence agencies have won the first war of privacy (i.e. they have backdoors in ISP, WhatsApp, FB, etc.). From now on, this war starts again every 5 years with new services trying to resist. Some try to operate from space.

* Ederly care is an unsolved problem globally. Scandal about mistreated ederly people appear every other week.

* Political debate in Europe is no longer about right or left wing, it's National vs European, with the first European parties winning significant national elections by 2025

* Still no nuclear fusion

* Still no shortage of petrol

* A new scripting language appears, focusing on making network API calls easy and building GUIs. In particular, everything function call is by default asynchronous, so nothing special has to be done to call external APIs vs local code, and the standard lib will include a very powerful UI framework. Kids will use it as a toy (as with the early days of web), then it will replace spreadsheets, then ultimately it will replace HTML/CSS/JS first through WASM then through native implementation in browsers.

</comment><comment><USER532> 1\. Public pensions in the US will start cutting benefits and/or getting tax increases to avoid bankruptcy. Which of these is done will vary by state/city; both will lead to drawn-out legal battles. Social Security's reserve won't quite be depleted, but people will be talking more seriously about how to address it. Democrat politicians will be mixed between cutting benefits and increasing payroll taxes; Republican politicians will support just rolling over the deficit into the general fund, further increasing the national debt.

2\. The US won't be formally at war, but it will be engaged in one or more significant, costly occupations or proxy wars based on questionable pretenses (a la WMDs in Iraq) despite public opposition. DRC is my best guess as to the location.

3\. The IRR of commercial solar and wind installations will be over 30% annualized. However, natural gas will continue to be the single largest energy source in the US, and new coal plants will still be constructed due mostly to special-interest-driven subsidies. Nuclear fusion still won't be viable, and fission still won't be adopted at any significant scale in the US.

4\. China's GDP will exceed the US's, though not on a per-capita basis. It will continue to indoctrinate its citizens and perpetrate human rights violations comparable to Nazi Germany (though not at the same scale), and the Western world will continue to generally not care. Hong Kong will not gain sovereignty and will mostly lose its autonomy.

5\. Negligible measures will have been taken to address climate change, including in the US. Warming continues to outpace even the most aggressive projections. The National Flood Insurance Program will consistently have shortfalls in the tens of billions per year, effectively subsidizing coastal properties in Florida just as it does today.

6\. US health insurance will continue to be dominated by employer-provided coverage. There will be a public option, but few care providers will accept it because it reimburses at a lower rate than private insurance, and it will only be used by "gig economy" workers, or whatever that sector evolves into. Spending per capita will be about double that of the rest of the Western world.

7\. Amazon will be forced to spin off AWS; this will be big news at the time but mostly won't have much effect. Each will be a trillion-dollar company. Amazon Retail will finally figure out how to automate "boring" everyday purchases including groceries. (For posterity: currently they only have Subscribe And Save, which is great if you know exactly how long it takes you to use a tube of toothpaste.)

8\. Microsoft will open-source the Windows kernel. Azure will be larger than AWS despite a generally inferior product suite. People will still be writing VBA for the Azure version of Excel.

9\. Facebook will still be ubiquitous, but young people won't even bother adding their friends on it anymore, since they only use it to keep up with extended family. Instagram will go the way of MySpace. Facebook will own the most popular dating app for a year or two, though that whole space will be a revolving door.

10\. GCP will be shuttered, since Google still won't figure out how to sell to enterprise. Meanwhile, they'll use data from one or more genetic testing companies to figure out the exact genes that determine susceptibility to different forms of advertising. Also, they'll release another messaging app.

11\. Netflix will be far less valuable and less ubiquitous than it is today, to the point that its inclusion in "FAANG" will seem anachronistic. Apple will still make the best mobile devices, but it will undermine its position as a status symbol due to the introduction of cheaper devices.

12\. SF's housing issues will only get worse. Saudi-backed VC funding for US startups will dry up, and while capital will still be available, it will no longer make financial sense for most startups to start in the Bay Area. The only new startups in SF will be started by, and exclusively hire, former employees of FAANG + unicorns. (More generally, programmers' salaries will become even more bimodal, and the relationship between coding ability and salary will become even more tenuous.) For other startups, there won't be a new centralized startup hub (though Austin will probably be the closest), and this decentralization will lead to increases in bootstrapping and remote work.

13\. Urban and inner-ring suburban housing in desirable US cities will continue to get more expensive, and housing elsewhere will continue to get cheaper, since new college grads will increasingly need to move to these cities to find decent jobs. (Empty nesters mostly won't downsize to condos, although there will be an uptick in news articles presenting anecdotes about the ones who do.) Urban taxpayers will increasingly subsidize infrastructure for rural communities as this happens, though they'll continue to mostly not notice or care. Most, though not all, of these cities will have implemented good housing policy by 2030, but new construction still won't keep up with demand, and the lack of construction in the 2010s will have a lasting impact on the availability of housing in the 2nd and 3rd price quintiles.

14\. Wealth inequality in the US will continue to increase. The US will implement a wealth tax, but it will have so many exemptions (housing, trusts, holdings in certain corporate entities) that the only beneficiaries are tax lawyers. Low-income people will only ever see a tiny fraction of their paychecks, as landlords and utility companies will require that employers pay them directly.

15\. Despite continued subsidies for the meat and dairy industries, cheap fast food (e.g., whatever replaces the McDouble) will be plant-based by 2030. We still won't have a good lab-grown steak, but most staples will have readily available plant-based replacements, some of which will be better than the real thing. Vegans will still only make up a couple percent of adults in the US (and ~10% of yuppies), but the median American will only eat real meat 2-3 meals a week.

16\. Python will finally get good tooling for EDA and become the de facto standard for data science. R will be viewed in industry the same way SAS is viewed today, though it will continue to see use in academia.

17\. Non-tech companies will rightly give up on building out ML teams in-house for basic/standard problems, outsourcing that work to platforms like Sagemaker instead. They will continue to hire people with the job title Data Scientist, who will mostly be responsible for conveying to management a combination of pretty graphs and basic statistical reasoning.

18\. Document databases will mostly disappear. They'll be replaced in part by JSONB-style columns in relational databases, but more importantly, better tooling will make schema changes (and integration with application code) for relational databases much less painful, and keeping the schema in the database will be widely accepted as a Good Thing.

19\. Home Internet service will be uncommon, except for geeks and people in rural areas - most will pay for mobile network access on a per-device basis, including for computers. People will occasionally reminisce about the funny SSID names they came up with back when wi-fi was a thing.

20\. The current state of the art in ML is a dead end when it comes to achieving AGI, and we are approaching another AI winter, though this will still be controversial in 2030. It's still good enough to achieve autonomous cars that outperform human drivers, though they'll still be niche.

21\. Quantum computing will make significant progress, though it won't have any practical applications yet. Many cryptocurrencies based on quantum cryptography will be developed; these won't see significant adoption as mediums of exchange, though they'll create a new generation of crypto millionaires in much the same way as last time. Today's cryptocurrencies will fade into irrelevance over time, and Libra will never materialize.

</comment><comment><USER533> Computer technologies:

\- Autonomous cars are mixed into regular cab/rideshare traffic, with percent of fleet varying from city to city depending on weather, consistency of markings, construction, and so on. The world is not fundamentally changed, but long cab rides are now cheaper, contributing to a further decline in car ownership.

\- Deep learning has two-ish major new advances that keep the AI hype going for a while, but then it peters out. One of these advances is in style transfer and/or ML-assisted rendering, and it's very cool.

\- Nothing happens with cryptocurrency or blockchains. At least one blockchain-enthusiast reading this in 2030 thinks I'm wrong because they have a sufficiently incorrect and overly broad idea of what a blockchain is.

\- VR doesn't take off, but has consistent enthusiasts and occasional arcade hits (insofar as an arcade game can be a hit). Maybe next time.

\- AR doesn't take off.

\- Rust is an increasingly important part of drivers, operating systems, shared libraries, and web servers that don't serve HTML. People also use it for applications, games, and web servers that do serve HTML, but in that domain it's more on the level of language with lots of fans like Scala or Haskell than it is a major workhorse language. (Alternatively: somebody embeds a scripting language in Rust macros or something like that and Rust is technically everywhere.)

Biotechnology:

\- Gene replacement therapy is routine for certain conditions. Magazine columnists are sure this means eugenics any day now.

\- Meat substitutes are mainstream. Major drivers are activism, economic factors due to climate change, the success of Impossible Foods, and somebody figuring out how to market seitan.

Big name tech companies:

\- Google's position is increasingly derived from inertia and install-base rather than technical prowess. They have no new major product lines. It's cool to hate Google.

\- Facebook the social network is a ghost town. Facebook the company owns four of the five largest social networks. It's cool to hate Facebook, both the company and the network.

\- Apple is incapable of introducing substantial innovations, but their public image remains innovative and stylish as they continue to transition to technology as high end fashion brand.

\- Amazon has employed violence in a strike-breaking activity.

\- Twitter is still growing, slowly, somehow.

Tech culture:

\- At least one of the hottest tech companies uses an alternative ownership model, such as a worker owned co-op.

\- There's a minor open source renaissance, leading to compelling open source options for phone OS and cloud stacks. This does not affect normal people, but use is widespread among developers.

Geopolitics:

\- Global CO2 emissions have halved. Climate change continues.

\- Socialist and fascist movements are increasingly common, starting from the equator out.

\- A new strain of drug-resistant bacteria becomes a major problem for hospitals. It's not a global pandemic, but it does significantly reduce patient outcomes.

\- China is fine (Even if the 2030 thread probably predicts it'll fall apart). As its internal infrastructure matures, China depends less on western countries and more on its investments in Africa.

\- The next global recession hits after a major economy passes a large infrastructure/spending bill, improving bonds as an investment. All stock and housing prices drop. The worst hit are precious metals, cryptocurrency, and low-margin VC-backed startups.

Traditional predictions:

\- No flying cars.

\- You can buy a hovering skateboard, but they're not as good as the wheeled kind. Onewheels or their successors are cheap enough for cool people to buy them, and thus are now cool. Powered rollerblades are available too, where they're not banned.

</comment><comment><USER534> 1\. Self-administering gene therapy will become a more prominent, though still underground, thing. I know a few people who have already. Exciting!

2\. Self-administered gene therapy will quickly be made illegal in at least one U.S. state.

3\. Mainstream technology will continue being very boring and decades behind research and what hobbyists are doing unless intervention happens (think CARDIAC on a wider scale and a more broad dive through the dumpster of technology).

4\. We're going to see a Linux operating system that's actually pleasant to use. Not just a window manager, not just a desktop environment, but an operating system. It probably won't go mainstream, but it's going to be there. It may use GNU tools, it might not. It'll probably have its own suite of programs.

5\. Systems software research is going to return, even if it's not going to be as widely honored as Plan 9. I think one thing we're going to see is at least one person pursuing making a complete system in a minimal amount of code: think FoNC, but probably smaller.

6\. IRC will still be in daily use by at least a few thousand people.

7\. Rust won't take over the world.

8\. Bryan Cantrill is going to be a lot richer yet still virtually unknown.

9\. illumos is going to see a minor resurgence, a bit like what Plan 9 has experienced, yet a bit more commercial.

10\. YCombinator will probably get better now that the leadership has changed in a positive direction. (Reasoning: very soon after the most recent change in leadership, they stopped bending to China. This makes a person hope that the trend to not maximize profits at all costs continues.)

11\. The surveillance state will intensify.

12\. It won't intensify in a way that causes meaningful action on behalf of legislators. (I'd love to be proven wrong in this.)

13\. Paul Graham will probably come out of his self-induced exile/pseudo- retirement. My bet is that it will come before his kids are fully grown, though thoroughly after his essays finish the decline in quality we've seen since 2012 or so. (Not sure if essays will return to former quality when this happens.)

14\. The political climate will be much different. I'm not sure whether this will lead to meaningful change in how elections are executed.

15\. VR and AR will not meaningfully catch up to the MR research of 2005 for some time.

16\. One of the acquisitions that happens in the 2020s is going to hurt. "Oracle buys Sun" level of hurt, but worse.

17\. Adolescents will continue to be infantilized.

18\. IBM will still maintain compatibility with OS/360.

19\. IoT devices will be breached _en masse_ after it hits a critical point.

20\. The amount of vulnerable routers in America is going to hit a breaking point. (With a bit of luck, this will be used for good, not evil. Possibly distributed Tor relays?)

21\. Political tracking is going to become far more prominent, and far creepier. With how much data you can get by going into virtually any government office in America with $50, it seems inevitable. Might be under the radar, though.

22\. HN will not look meaningfully different when accessed via news.ycombinator.com on a conventional web browser. Maybe if we're lucky we'll see higher resolution arrows (or SVGs...pleaaaaaaaaaase, 'dang?), but I don't think we can count on that.

23\. The increase in cost of consumer goods because of the recent punishments on Chinese imports will make the lives of poor American consumers tangibly worse.

24\. APL might not see a comeback, but it's going to be a lot easier to learn soon.

25\. Taxes on sugar-filled goods will be demonstrated to have an actual, tangible impact on the average weight.

26\. We will not see as large of an increased (percentage-wise, not byte-wise) in storage capabilities for your average consumer until _at least_ 2028, probably not until after the decade is over, though.

27\. Xerox will buy, merge with, or be bought by H.P.

28\. Tech journalism will continue to get worse.

29\. There still won't be a language that's as easy to learn as FORTRAN was in the 1960s.

30\. Copyright terms will be extended again.

31\. We're going to see the first deaths of notable HN users that aren't by suicide. I'm pretty sure there are multiple people on /leaders that are older than 60.

32\. 1999's ThinkPads will still be humming just fine by 2029, though they'll probably need their batteries replaced.

33\. We're going to see the return of _real_ hardware companies.

34\. A Linux distribution will ship with nice default fonts rather than the poor ones that are shipped commonly now.

35\. TAoCP will never see itself finished, sadly.

36\. Linus will continue getting increasingly conservative in what he allows into the source tree. (He'll probably step back before it gets too bad, but I don't feel confident to make a prediction on whether or not that will be in the 2020s.)

37\. Struck with the realization that 2020+ _N_ seconds is closer to 2050 than 1990, we're going to see at least a few notable tech founders very visibly and noisily adopt religion.

38\. 'idlewords will continue his metamorphosis into a gonzo journalist.

39\. It will be magnificent.

40\. OpenBSD will see an increase in adoption because of its history of sane choices and solid reputation for noticing security catastrophes before they happen.

41\. C will still be prevalent.

42\. Unfortunately, Python will still be top dog in the ML space.

43\. Interpreted languages will experience a renaissance.

44\. 1366x768 is still going to be in the top-10 resolutions globally barring the event that VR displays become prominent.

45\. Algorithmically-generated music is going to become cheap to generate, Spotify and YouTube will get in on it, and weight recommendations for all but the most niche listeners to whatever their algorithms are putting out.

46\. 9front will still actively get improvements.

47\. Electronic mail will still be used frequently, and the ecosystem will decay even further.

48\. Traditional companies will become tech companies to an even greater extent as they notice their revenue peaking, and if there's any chance of a research operating system becoming a global phenomenon again, it will be because of this. (I think that revenue has a chance of aggressively hitting and falling from its peak because of falling birth rates in countries with currency that's worth anything.)

49\. In the event of venture capitalists becoming more conservative, stack will begin to matter again as the absurdly high cost of the cloud becomes more meaningful. (Whether this manifests as a resurgence in efficient languages or a resurgence in dedicated hardware I'm not sure of.)

50\. Unless Maciej gets hit by a bus (back up your bookmarks!), Pinboard will continue its brutal and unending conquest of tech.

</comment><comment><USER535> \- Technology further consolidates. Regulations designed to keep us "safe" make it impossible or impractical for the garage-based startup of yesteryear.

\- Apple remains big but gradually loses its influence.

\- As many people here are saying "offline" will be a thing. But in contrast, there will also be more people who will 100% buy into plugging-in to the Matrix in any way possible. The MSM will find ways to portray offliners as kooks because offliners don't contribute to the voluntary surveillance apparatus. We already see this treatment of people who are self-reliant(i.e. if you prepare or live off the grid then you're a nutcase who is obsessed with doomsday and is possibly dangerous)

\- The tech bubble will pop and lots of developer jobs will go away. We only need so many CRUD apps.

\- Population continues to decline because there are too many good alternatives to risky activities like sex and having families.

\- As more boomers and early X-ers retire or die off, more white-collar jobs will become fully or mostly remote.

\- "Side hustles" will become a greater thing than it currently is. More people will want out of wage slavery and find ways to make money on their own or start their own businesses. But establishment goverments love employment because it's a reliable tax stream and keeps people dependent on the supply chain. Just like with offliners, we will start to hear a narrative that trying to make your own success is somehow unsavory.

\- The field of psychology will see some reform and we will see significant advances in the ways that we treat neurological disorders.

\- Hardware will become even more closed and impossible to repair or modify. Fewer hardware will be cross-compatible. If you want everything to be connected to your smart home, then you'll have to exclusively buy Google devices, or Samsung, or Amazon.

\- Universities face decline and a reform by the end of the decade. Because most of a university's overhead can be done away with using technology and the internet, there will be very little reason to gatekeep people out of top institutions.

\- Soda industry declines because enough people will wise up to the sugar menace. Today's nutritionists will be gradually replaced with ones that actually understand that a calorie isn't simply a calorie.

\- Humankind will have not landed on Mars.

\- The internet will become more fractured, with different nations deciding to wall themselves off.

\- China's social credit system will be emulated in the United States. Don't worry, it will keep us _saaaaaaffffe_.

\- Companies like Google expand to a point where they begin to resemble proto- governments.

\- LinkedIn becomes less relevant and a challenger approaches.

\- JavaScript will still be around in 2030 but have optional type-annotations.

\- People continue to back away from atheism and nihilism, and will find ways to go back to religion or find spirituality. Science will be even more cherry- picked than it is now.

\- The distal effects of negative interest rates and the bursting of the corporate debt bubble will trigger an economic adjustment. This will create an opportunity for industries to replace more jobs with automation, and this economy will create civil unrest. Those in the top 5% will be mostly unaffected.

\- Most big Linux distros will still use X.org.

\- Hollywood becomes more bland because the global market will matter far more than those in United States and Europe, meaning that movies will be pure spectacle with no nuance or themes that will rock the boat.

\- Basic healthcare becomes revolutionized and streamlined. Imagine CVS Minute-Clinics, but far more ubiquitous and advanced, with nurses who use computers with AI to diagnose symptoms and consult with doctors remotely.

</comment><comment><USER536> \- Remote work will become the norm (especially in software engineering), along with contracting/freelancing (the "gig economy"). Subletting (eg. on AirBnB) will become the norm as the younger generation shuns home ownership and even 1 year rental contracts in favor of short-term and month-to-month. Being a "digital nomad" will become more mainstream as the young escape the corporate rat race and overpriced overcongested cities for greener pastures. Digital nomads will further flock to all the remaining cheap cost of living cities/countries just like they've already done to places like Bali.

\- "No-code" tools will become the norm for app development. Developers won't be hand-coding much HTML/CSS anymore, WYSIWYG editors will have evolved to a point where they are acceptable and standard practice.

\- Most web application development will be done with dead simple full-stack Javascript frameworks that automate all the repetitive CRUD operations (eg. in the spirit of feathersjs or meteorjs). No more separate frontend state management systems like Redux, state management will automatically integrate with and fetch from the backend (eg. like apollo GraphQL, but simpler to use). No more wrestling with 100 different JS libraries, webpack configs, routers, state management libraries, etc to set up a basic hello world website - frameworks with the simplicity of something like Next.js will be the standard.

\- Politically the hot topic of the decade will be wealth inequality. Universal Basic Income will be implemented in some countries, and maybe some form of a job guarantee. The U.S. will finally get universal healthcare, partial cancellation of student loan debt, and other progressive policies as wealth inequality and the anger of poor people reaches its tipping point and the older generation holding back progressive policies retire from politics and die out. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) will become more mainstream as people realize that debt denominated in one's own currency is not the same thing as household debt. Land value tax and Georgism will enter the debate.

\- Self-driving trucks and cars will be normal

\- Drone delivery will be normal

\- AI passes the Turing Test

\- We'll see an increasing movement against materialism, unfettered capitalism, "flex culture", and competition, and more of a movement towards cooperation, empathy, compassion, solving poverty, and living a life of meaning. Tech millionaires in San Francisco will finally think "ok what the hell has this city become? Why are there homeless people and human feces everywhere? Time to clean this damn place up." Right now being rich is considered cool even if you're an airhead who only films stupid vlogs flexing your Gucci merch. In 2030, people will care less about how much money you have and more about what you're actually contributing to humanity.

</comment><comment><USER537> My long list of predictions! Writing this was fun, I'm going to have to remember to look at this comment in 10 years!

Politics:

US political situation will be _significantly_ less stable/more autocratic than today. People will lose most of their faith that the government is fair. Mainstream news will be completely non-trustworthy. In general, companies will consolidate. No meaningful anti-trust action will be taken. The biggest companies will become pseudo-government entities. Facebook (surveillance) and Disney (media/propaganda) will the most notable new entrants. A socialist candidate with a lot of momentum in the US will get buried in an obviously corrupt/illegal way. Nothing will be done. Situation in North Korea will be the same.

Economy:

Areas of the southeastern US will be uninsurable and hit by extreme hurricanes yearly, causing a slow internal migration as people move away and are not replaced. The poor will be left behind, and we'll have multiple Katrina-like natural disasters. Trade between countries will decrease. Especially trade between US/China. No progress on an international climate change agreement. Little progress on emissions -- most progress will come bottom-up from ICE cars being phased out. Latter '20s will see a new robust pro-nuclear movement. New nuke plants will be planned (not completed) by 2030. A minor resurgence of manufacturing in the US.

Tech:

ML/AI:

No self driving cars, even by 2030. Freeway lanekeeping will be robust, though, and an option on economy cars by 2026. ML will hit the wall. It'll turn out that even a boatload of data will not help solve most big problems that are being attempted now. Research will pivot to hybrid methods. By extension, people will completely stop talking about "AI." It'll be somewhat embarrassing to talk about the singularity, or general purpose AI.

Transportation:

SpaceX will succeed, launching things into space will be 1/10/kg the current cost to LEO. Battery tech will be better (not revolutionary, just a bit better). We'll have autonomous last-mile drone delivery in large urban areas by ~2026. The drones will be electric and resemble a plane/helicopter hybrid. Planes for people will still need dino jet fuel, though. Drone delivery will make delivered food yet cheaper. Some new developments in hip big cities will do away with full kitchens. More electric than ICE cars will be sold by 2025. Gas stations won't be dead yet, but there'll be talk of how to phase out ICE cars in 2030.

FAANG:

Amazon will stagnate, multiple meaningful competitors will pop up in the online retail space. Ride share companies (uber/lyft) will go bust in the mid '20s. They'll restructure with a small fraction of the valuation they have now. Google will stagnate. Facebook will compete far more with Google than they do now, and they will largely win, with facebook ads not on facebook. Microsoft will have significant success in VR, web services, and consumer hardware. Facebook will continue to be relevant. Any new competitor in the social media space (there will be a few) will be acquired/crushed. People will talk about FB having too much power, but nothing will be done because they'll have such strong ties to government.

Apple:

The iPhone will still be a big money-maker, but Apple will see tremendous success in the '20s from the health space. Its market cap will 1.5x or 2x from selling health-related devices and services -- mostly the apple watch, but some more wearable health devices, too. I'll be wild and say Apple will launch a hospital + health insurance operation. It'll be expensive but the service will be impeccable and it'll sync with all your apps and devices. Wearing an apple watch will be mandatory to keep a subscription.

Health:

Alzheimer's will not be cured, nor will we get close. The big medical advance will be wearable/sensor technology. Innovation will come from medical device startups, not incumbents, who will play fast and loose with medical device rules. The FDA will struggle to keep up, and regulations on medical devices will be loosened. Type 1 Diabetes will be functionally cured, via insulin pump and glucose monitoring. Tiny, accurate, implantable (subcutaneous) glucose sensors will last for months/years, charged wirelessly. Fast acting insulin will be cheap, $40-$60 for a month's supply, instead of the $300 that it is now... (alright, this is wishful thinking)

Misc:

A Bitcoin will be <$100 by 2030. Oil will reach $200/barrel by the late '20s. Skeumorphic design will be THE hot thing. The big fashion of the later '20s will be earth-toned & naturalistic -- like the 70s. It'll be embarassing to be a fan of Kanye West, although he'll continue making music. HN will be exactly the same. Same design, same commenter snark. ;)

</comment><comment><USER538> ===== Biology =====

\- A major, non-amyloid, non-tau hypothesis for Alzheimer's. Because the old guard supporting these dogmas is falling out of vogue.

\- Really great advances made with CRISPR and immunotherapy, especially with respect to cancer treatment. The immune system already targets cancer or disease-state cells, but perhaps we can give it a little nudge?

\- Human cloning. It isn't at all infeasible, just politically/morally questionable. Someone will do it.

\- Insurance companies get ahold of biometric and DNA data. They're salivating for it. Google's purchase of Fitbit is scary. 23andme's recent sale of data is also troubling.

===== Politics / Global / Society =====

\- Democracy begins to fade. Trump's war on the media is the canary in the coal mine. Social platforms erode our critical thinking and ability to see through the miasma. The success of China's surveillance state and the fact that they can succeed without democracy sends the wrong message to the rest of the world.

\- Diversity increases in Hollywood, high-paying jobs, and political candidates. Racism and sexism begin to wane.

\- Millennials and GenZ (Zoomers? Zoomies? :P) come to the political forefront. GenZ is more politically active than GenX or the Millennials. There may be some cross-generational war with some younger candidates campaigning on cutting social security, pensions, and benefits.

\- As more young people move to cities, housing prices in all major cities will skyrocket. They're already steep, but this trend will continue. Housing prices in the suburbs will collapse as boomers retire/downsize and nobody wants to live there.

\- People spend even more time on screens.

===== Economics =====

\- We won't have a recession at the same level of the 2008 recession.

\- China has a recession.

\- Cryptocurrency is dead, no thanks to government regulation and crackdown. Bitcoin is $0.01.

\- We become a cashless society.

===== Energy / Transportation =====

\- Elon Musk becomes even wealthier. Tesla catches on like wildfire with lower-cost models, and they dominate the EV market with their healthy lead. But the real story is SpaceX leap frogging defense contractors and becoming the world's gateway to space. Starlink, if successful, might spawn a new era of connectivity.

\- Yet, gasoline still remains the dominant fuel for automotive transportation. EVs are still in the minority.

\- Trains come back in vogue as a hipster option for Millennial travel.

\- Nuclear still isn't being built out in the US beyond a few scattered projects (eg. Vogtle).

===== Deep Learning / Hardware =====

\- While deep learning isn't as big as proponents made it out to be, but we don't face another AI winter. There will be huge applications in media (Hollywood will be a big customer), process optimization, computer vision, and other areas. We'll even see it creep into consumer products.

\- Creative tools are greatly enhanced with deep learning and other techniques (computer vision, better models), leading to a creative explosion.

\- No self-driving cars. Yet. Weather, inconsistent roads, bad drivers... It's a hard problem.

\- Moore's law holds / is beaten. Deep learning is the driver.

\- Embedded devices languished for awhile (IOT), but are finally going to be hella cool and novel. Wearables, biometrics. But they remain a huge exploit vector.

===== Cloud =====

\- Anger at managed cloud computing lock-in sets in. We might see a swing back to the data center.

\- Edge computing is a huge thing. Despite Google Stadia failing, companies vie to run video games in the cloud.

===== Web / Social Media =====

\- The web dies and is replaced by more garbage like AMP, walled gardens like Facebook, Slack, and (now) Reddit. Chrome has removed URLs. RSS is dead. Lots of people are very angry at Google.

\- Lots of federation / distributed projects to try to fight back. None of them really take hold since they're not backed with the same staffing or scale as the incumbents.

\- In what remains of the web, Rust/ASM has replaced Javascript.

\- New privacy laws lead to adtech backlash. The masses don't care, but politicians, lawyers, and those in tech do and now have leverage.

\- Facebook (the site) is full of older conservatives and has gone the way of MySpace.

\- A few new social media sites come out, gain traction, and don't sell out to Zuckerberg.

\- Twitter eats itself and loses engagement. It still doesn't have a viable alternative.

\- Reddit becomes absolutely awful and starts to look more like Facebook or Digg than the site we used to use. They have succeeded in monstrous growth at the expense of the community. This leads to a very successful IPO. Unfortunately, nothing really replaces it.

===== Tech =====

\- Antitrust cases brought against Amazon, Apple, Google, and/or Facebook. None of them are broken up. Only slaps on the wrist.

\- Microsoft thrives, Google dives.

\- Slack gets disrupted. It's just chat.

\- Rust becomes the most popular programming language and sees deployment everywhere: OSes, servers, games, web apps, embedded, ... the ecosystem explodes.

\- Tech shifts away from SF. It's too expensive. Look to the southeast: Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte. Also distributed workforce growth by leaps and bounds.

\- Death to the open office floor plan.

===== Entertainment =====

\- Disney and Netflix get disrupted by a new form of media. They may still be players, but classical filmmaking is old-world thinking. Look at what teens watch these days. They want to be both involved and passive, creative and destructive. Twitch, YouTube, Fortnite are good examples. Tech eats Hollywood.

\- More radical/experimental new forms of video games. Games that let you play alongside celebrity streamers. Interesting MMOs and new concepts like battle royale.

\- More cool stuff like Twitch Plays Pokemon (did that happen this decade?)

===== Misc =====

\- We're going to see really cool (and really scary) applications for drones. People will use them to commit theft and vandalism (spray paint? knocking out windows?), and maybe even kill people.

\- Still no answer on P vs NP.

\- Still no discovery of life on Mars (or elsewhere).

\- Singularity isn't happening.

===== Personal =====

\- I'll get to use Rust professionally.

\- I'll finally launch a startup.

</comment><comment><USER539> 1\. Pension bomb — as you see, is about to go off in Europe. US is a bit safer in that regard as a younger country, and less generous expectations for pension in general. China... yep, lights off on that. 2\. Ubiquitous mobile/wireless internet integrated into even very trivial consumer goods — just about to happen

3\. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China. — Well, and even older, and more populist group of politicians have claimed power in China, and no, no bubble burst yet

4\. Google will experience change in management. From there, it will be downhill for them (at least for the rest of the decade). — spot on

5\. Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce — a bitter marriage doesn't simply crumble suddenly one day, it takes a life on its own and keeps biting you for years on: see Brexit

6\. Brexit — no comments needed

7\. mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people — somewhat true

8\. PMC's will become much more prevalent and popular — true, but not American ones

9\. 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 — it is 2020, and IE6 is still there in China...

10\. 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 — spot on

<comment><USER540> > A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China. — > Well, and even older, and more populist group of politicians have claimed > power in China, and no, no bubble burst yet

Keep an eye on news on Taiwan towards the end of January. We're about to see if the youth are committed to what they started when they rejected the KMT (the "pro-chinese" party) back during the sunflower protests in 2013.

I think one way or the other, the "Taiwan question" will be answered this decade, which very well could pop the China bubble if pro-democratic propaganda (from Taiwan and the falun gong) can overcome pro-PRC (from the Party and possibly KMT).

I know mainlanders convinced there will be war if Green isn't voted out, I know Taiwanese that are convinced it's going to be business as usual for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER541> Pretty concerned about how the EU will evolve. There is little introspection post brexit, and it appears to be just as rigid and clueless as before the vote.

On a positive note, I really really hope electric cars will become more accessible - both for consumers and for manufacturers (i.e.: small companies will get access to batteries and be able to build EVs themselves).

</comment><comment><USER542> 1\. I'll go against the herd and say China won't collapse but continue to grow and in 2030 China will be the largest economy in nominal GDP terms by a significant margin. Also, Sino-American trade will be at its highest ever in 2030.

2\. India will grow and easily overtake Japan to be the 3rd largest economy (nominal GDP) in the world.

3\. Vietnam and ASEAN will be the fastest growing economies ( country and region ).

3\. VR will become mainstream.

4\. Man will set foot on Mars.

5\. No general AI.

6\. No fusion.

7\. Magnus Carlsen will be the first human player to achieve a 3000 rating.

8\. Greater accumulation and conconcentration of wealth, growing income inequality, further decline in poverty, further drop in fertility rates and more mass surveillance around the world.

<comment><USER349> >Also, Sino-American trade will be at its highest ever in 2030.

By percentage of gdp or just total volume?

</comment></comment><comment><USER543> \- 2021: surprising and positive-themed social/election event, probably India

\- 2023: Non-terrestrial (or non homo-sapiens intelligent) life confirmed.

\- 2023: Space/solar-system tourism or mass publicity of human space missions.

\- 2024: First commercial autonomous human-like bipedal standalone android

\- 2025: Geo-volvanic/tectonic/oceanic disaster on same order of magnitude as Indian ocean tsunami but not as severe.

\- 2027: "Pseudo" AGI system. You can talk and interact with it and it has all the answers but it's still not quite "all there".

\- 2029: A lot of people die and infrastructure damaged in war act/atmospheric/solar event.

</comment><comment><USER544> 1\. Climate feedback loops will intensify.

2\. No actions of any great consequence re: #1 will be taken.

3\. Scientists will rename the planet "Uranus".

</comment><comment><USER545> A lot of optimism in this thread. Here's some pessimism, although I don't think it'll all be accomplished in the next 10 years I think some will be well on their way to be.

Non-tech: \- Remote work will become normalized. Initially it will be praised as the great revival of rural North America. North American corporates will invest heavily in knowledge-work related education in developing countries and emerging companies there. By the end of the century, most knowledge work on offer by "North American" companies will be fulfilled by people not living there, undercutting the local labour market drastically. Most tech jobs will have lost their sheen entirely.

\- Automation, especially around transport, logistics and retail, will decimate the labor market. A person driving a Truck/Bus/Subway/Train/Freight ships or working packing & shipping Amazon/Walmart/etc. boxes, or working at retail stores, will be virtually unheard of. We'll be lucky if they're replaced at a 10:1 ratio with bot operators.

\- Due to the above, the rich will get richer than we can even perceive now. The middle class will evaporate.

\- China, India, Saudi Arabia and their allies will become more powerful politically, economically, technologically and especially militarily, most especially in both cyber and nuclear warfare.

\- The above will lead to an even more dramatic rise in nationalism and the rejection of globalism in the West. The UK will be seen to have come out unscathed by leaving the EU which will cause a crisis for the EU as more states fight federalization, reject directives and propose to leave themselves. The unrest and uncertainty will drive the Euro through the floor.

\- Trump will be re-elected. The following government will be headed by a Democrat embracing nationalism and vowing to put American's first by taxing "the rich", implementing UBI, healthcare, creating government jobs, etc.

\- There will be at least one massive economic crisis in North America, likely the overvaluation of stocks through indexes held by massive pension funds causing a "re-evaluation" of many stocks we're currently taking for granted. Europe will go through far worse as mentioned above.

\- There will be at least 1 major cyber security related incident that will affect a country in a way that will change the nature of national access to the internet forever.

\- Jeffrey Epstein still won't have killed himself.

Tech:

\- Rejection of petroleum based products in the name of battling climate change will drive up the costs of consumer goods. Stagnating or falling income will cause people to buy less goods. Working longer for less pay will give people less free time. Consumption will therefore instead be turned toward services, especially services that promise to give you back time by automating household chores, providing day-to-day needs such as food and mind-numbing entertainment, especially in VR which I expect to be gamified to be as addictive and escapist as possible.

\- I expect there will be little autonomous vehicles everywhere. Peace and quiet in our skies will no longer be a thing. Our sidewalks will have a lane full of autonomous delivery bots.

\- Coupled with the above, electric vehicles will become the norm. However, they won't be owned by consumers unless you're very rich. They'll be be predominantly available as fleets used via subscription to access. Initially it'll seem glamorous but as with the airline industry, longer term we will be compelled to share the vehicle with other riders, sat on materials that cannot stain, with targeted ads for other services played throughout the duration of the trip.

\- AI will prosper but not general AI, mostly very well crafted advanced automation and mostly developed in the non-West.

\- DevOps will move to just Dev as Ops becomes almost entirely automated.

\- One cloud provider will prevail, the others will be relegated to being niche afterthoughts or disregarded altogether.

\- Med-tech will become normalized and people will end up expected to wear at least one device that is continually monitoring and reporting on their health. That data will of course be packaged and sold to be used against them by advertisers for, again, various services we'll be told we "need".

\- Privacy and the expectation of privacy will be gone forever. The governments will launch their full scale attack on encryption under the guise of protecting children or terrorism, others will take advantage of the backdoors created in it, and those seen to be trying to protect their privacy will be seen as people with suspicion and therefore subject to further monitoring.

\- Spurred by the above, cryptocurrencies will enjoy a brief revival as some try to move money privately but will ultimately be cracked down on and controlled as a "threat".

Prove me wrong 2020's!

Edit: Just scheduled an email to myself with this link for 01/01/2030\. It'll be incredible to read it.

</comment><comment><USER546> 1\. Brexit happens the UK becomes Singapore on the Thames. Net contributors to the EU (Germany, Holland, France, etc.) populous's become increasingly eurosceptic. Another country leaves the EU (Probably Holland) and the EU crumbles.

2\. Countries increasingly venture into building their own microchips; the world wakes up that letting China build most of the world's chips is a terrible idea on a national security standpoint.

3\. Trump wins the 2020 election, Democrats implode. Democrats move further to the left. Republicans have another celebrity/ popular candidate and win the 2024 election. The democrat's open borders policies and sanctuary cities screw over the democrats as Hispanics and naturally catholic and conservative.

4\. LGBTQ+ movement recognises paedophilia as an oppressed minority. Outrage ensues they lose all support from the public and the LGB section forms their own evolution that gains popular support.

5\. The links between US media funding and China get leaked. Massive scandal but mainstream media still somehow survive it.

6\. Myanmar (Burma) shocks most people to become the next industrial powerhouse (China). Most of the world suspects it will be Vietnam, but it won't.

7\. The full extent of Chinas gold reserves is known. Dwarfing US Gold reserves depending how this emerges it will be seen as an act of war and 2nd cold war will heat up. Gold prices soar to unprecidented levels RMB soars and (again depending on how the world finds out) the Chinese push for RMB to be the defacto global currency.

8\. The rise of Private Intelligence Agencys is more widley known. A high profile fuck up will happen and at least one nation state will have egg on their face.

9\. The Chinese leader Xi Jinping gets assasinated. More than likely by someone in the Chinese Miliatry with links to dissedents in ethier Hong Kong, Taiwan or Tibet. Massive internal power vaccum happens. The 'success' of his assasination sees a rash of other asian leaders getting bumped off including North Koreas leader.

10\. China invades Taiwan. First cyber war takes place. US thinks twice about a full blown war with mainland China and instead opts for intelligence lead / cyber capabilities to topple the chinese Government.

11\. Chinese government may fall due to economic downturns in China, belt and road isn't enough. Massive recession in most of south east asia and certain parts of africa also.

12\. Media will write articles in 2030 on trying to work out who exactly was botwriter and how were his predictions so close.

<comment><USER546> I've just been downvoted wonder if it's because of the china stuff :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER547> Trump wins. World peace. Climate problems solved. Historical stock market highs. Various nations divided by globalist agenda reunify. Medicine and education cost problems on the road to recovery.

 _PS didn 't vote for him._

</comment><comment><USER539> Chinar:

2022 — the last of political opposition to Xi makes its bid for power, it fails with some noise, and we see a compromise establishment for the rest of Xi's life

2022 — the last of political opposition to Xi makes its bid for power, it fails miserably, and Xi secures claim to absolute power, and reigns Brezhnev style to his last breath

EU:

Coming of Trump alike in Germany, or Austria is not unlikely.

If it comes to that, EU may well be under mortal threat

Russia:

Some orchestrated "transition" to some high profile mayor like Sobanin happens, but nothing really changes.

Alternative? Military insurrection by officers being tired of being sent to god forsaken places on whims of mafia boys.

USA:

Really no idea — your country has been defying common sense for 2 decades straight. Understanding America is beyond me.

<comment><USER548> Yes - well into the XXi century.

</comment></comment><comment><USER549> \- SpaceX will land a human on Mars and create some super great marketing material. This will strongly galvanize interest in space. Many ambitious people will be interested in space projects or startups

\- deep learning will continue to amaze people in being able to solve problems considered not well suited to it. Some of these applications will seem crazy in retrospect

\- folks at OpenAI or Google will get something crazy to happen with a huge amount of compute. It won't feel like AGI but it'll make AGI seem way less insane

\- theorem proving with deep learning will start to work

\- material science using lots of compute and deep learning will start to work

\- deep learning will be applied to fuzzing (finding vulnerabilities in software) and this will be a big thing by the end of the decade

\- there will be some large scale multiagent AI projects aiming to learn intelligence through just big simulations of civilization but they will not have interesting results. Definitely happens at OpenAI and possibly elsewhere. They really expect this to work but it won't

\- Apple releases an AR headset. Oculus turns into an AR effort instead of VR. The VR wars turn into the AR wars. Lots of money pumped into it. Unclear if it actually becomes the next mass platform, but there's a small chance

\- crypto people will find success approaching incentive design problems in more traditional avenues like large organizations and charter cities. Most crypto projects will be dead in the water, including Ethereum, but there will be diehard enthusiasts who stick to it. The money will dry up, forcing others out. Cryptocurrency, like BTC, will still be a big thing on the internet

\- teleop robots. Globalization of physical labor starts to happen. It will seem like an emerging trend by the end of the decade

\- self driving cars will be seen to be largely a fad, with lots of wasted money

\- there's a chance the olivine beach climate change project gets a huge amount of traction

\- student loans and for profit colleges in the United States have some kind of reckoning. People stop believing in college: more people all over the world think like Lambda School and the software industry

\- senior software engineer salaries in the Bay Area continue to climb

\- Silicon Valley stops being so obsessed with China. It's more obvious that Chinese innovation is heavily lagging behind

\- defense technology starts to capture the attention of more of Silicon Valley and the innovative class. Anti-defense stance stops being the default. Tech bro patriotism: more people think like Anduril. This leads to some really crazy defense capabilities of the US. E.g, auto targeting killer drones

\- Social media usage per person goes down, for high income people

\- YC is no longer cool at the end of the decade, but hacker news still is.

\- lifestyle software businesses continue to be seen a lot more positively in the industry: more software engineers think like patio11/csallen/levelsio. Starting a small software business becomes more of a viable career path and seen as more responsible and mature than the VC unicorn path.

\- meat alternatives grow faster than anyone expected them to

\- Tesla is the most valuable car company but still hasn't figured out full self driving

\- sci-fi reading and blog post style writing will be a major status symbol in the tech industry

\- Bay Area will be less dominant in interesting tech startups than it is today, because of immigration and housing. The next place will be the internet or somewhere open to outsiders like Estonia, not China

\- Donald Trump will do something too shocking and it will actually end his career. Society will learn an antibody to his populism, but it might be a long time after he's president. Will happen by the end of the decade though

\- deep learning is a very centralizing technology. Even bigger tech companies will be started where the value they create is their machine learning network effect. They might not be as big as 1T by the end of the decade but they'll get there in another 10 years

\- more power shifts from government to private enterprise

\- tech companies remain underrated and continue to grow and have way bigger market caps

\- VR porn ends up driving adoption of the current set of VR hardware. Funny but FB executives won't be happy about this and that'll make them look to AR.

\- Facebook social VR with strangers doesn't work. But FB social VR with your real life friends might work and be really popular. This would be the main application of VR, if any : then it'll morph into AR

\- religion continues its decline. New internet ideologies continue to proliferate. Some of them will be pretty weird yet have a lot of impact, like the alt-right did this decade

\- the penny is abolished in the United States

\- US inflation is a lot higher than it has been in the past; US treasury bonds not seen as super safe anymore

\- if there's a recession, it won't affect the economy as uniformly as historical recessions (overall hit may still be really big, but higher percentage of people will end up well off). More variety in the economy and people's lives where it's not as correlated

\- tech companies funding more and more media/content (like Netflix/Amazon, but also upstarts). Traditional media gets eaten by tech-enabled companies

\- everyone worldwide has a lot less sex

\- marijuana and psylicobin legalized federally in the US; stigma against drugs on the decline globally (related to decline in religion + rise of internet ideologies)

\- more local manufacturing. Specialized manufacturing countries/cities stop making as much sense. Let going to China to make your hardware thing; you'll just do it wherever.

\- the US will be more obsessed with Africa than China (may take 25y instead of 10y; caused by population dynamics)

\- 10-30% more happens in 2020s than 2010s; accelerating progress but it's not very noticeable yet

\- Stripe becomes a gigantic company Because of that, the SaaS economy goes global: microSaaS is the new doctor/lawyer/engineer, especially in India and Africa

</comment><comment><USER169> I'm pretty gloomy on the future, so most of my predictions are how a world reacts to the upcoming challenges we face.

1\. Distributed Internet - A combination of tech companies that have become too large, and government overreach result in an encrypted and distributed internet. The large companies of the past are not gone, but are slowing becoming irrelevant. Teens, and Gen-Z (zoomers?) will most likely be the first to start adopting. Boomers, and older millennials will be slower to adapt. The large companies are also facing a 2 sided battle as they also battle Washington.

2\. World un-united - In the post Trump world, the US no longer operates the infrastructure required for the post-ww2 united world we've been used to. This means countries will have to significantly increase their military spending, and more problematically, they will have to find new markets to export to (since most countries lack a large millennial generation to sell to.) The strong social spending European countries have become used to will start to dry up. The result will be the continuation in more authoritarian populist strong man leaders. As recession, and lack of social spending, combined with increased military spending start to increase, the 2020's will look a lot more like 1930's. Germany will be particularly hard hit.

3\. The US starts to become more aware of the Rural/City divide. In the early part of the decade, issues such as gun control will result in increased tension as "Red America" rises up against "Blue America" realizing it has no political power left, and "Blue America" is using it's power to change the things it cares about. Initially these disputes are isolated geographically to a few areas. Likely Virginia, and Washington/Oregon. But it might expand into something bigger... which in my opinion is one of the biggest wildcards of the future.

4\. An over leveraged China will stumble, It will be plauged with trade issues, and demographic issues.

5\. Software Engineering will split, highly skilled engineers will make more than ever before, but there will be a very large base of newly minted "lower skilled" software devs that make a lot less money.

6\. Despite the conversation about immigration probably only gaining in steam, the economic relationship between Mexico and US will only become stronger.

</comment><comment><USER550> * Science: We discover what Dark Matter is and it is not new physics

* Technology: Semiconductor industry renaissance as Moore's Law fails and more effort goes into alternative devices.

* Politics: Trump will announce a health issue and resign, possibly to save face. Pressure on China fades, causing the Uyghur situation to become Holocaust-level.

* Economics: Housing prices will be flat in the U.S. or decrease, after adjusting for inflation in 2029. There will not be a crash.

* Culture: Zoos where animals are largely in enclosures will be commonly seen as animal abuse

</comment><comment><USER551> \- At least one country will declare animals "Non Human Persons" and outlaw non plant-based foods.

\- Cryptocurrency will join other tech fads in the history books.

\- Big corps (Apple/MS/Disney) will have their own political representation and will try to amend the constitution in their favor.

\- More and better electric cars, still no L5 autonomy in sight.

\- Japan will declare a population emergency and start a national project to develop artificial Japanese babies through cloning.

\- The US will outlaw firearms completely after a major right wing revolt that will cause thousands of casualties, possibly following Trump losing and calling for an uprising.

\- A safe alternative to smoking/vaping is introduced by one of the fastest growing startups in history.

</comment><comment><USER552> 1\. Donald Trump wins next elections.

2\. Climate change turns out to be less severe than anticipated(by most) at the beginning of the decade.

3\. Netflix faces more competition and struggles to maintain its position, potentially losing its significance and dropping out of FAANG

4\. Significant advancements in fusion technology, but still no commercial solutions.

5\. Bitcoin is worth more than 100k$

6\. There is a global recession, but it's nowhere as severe as the last one.

7\. VR and AR technology matures and becomes widespread.

8\. UK struggles for the first few years after Brexit, but in the second half of the decade it prospers with GDP growth significantly outpacing that of Germany and France.

9\. The EU struggles to keep up with the American and Chinese competition due to extreme regulations and bureaucracy.

10\. Humans still didn't make it to Mars.

</comment><comment><USER132> I'm hoping analog photonic cOmputation will take off.

</comment><comment><USER553> Perhaps not very optimistic but:

1\. Climate change is ignored by the US and China (who combined make up half of emissions). It snowballs until it becomes irreversible and catastrophic.

2\. Countries lurch from natural disaster to natural disaster, incapable of focusing on more than short-term aid for its panicked citizens.

3\. Large groups of people become climate refugees as their towns/cities become uninhabitable from flooding, fires, disease, etc. Some desperately try to get entry into 1st world countries.

4\. Amongst xenophobia and desperation to do something about seemingly endless natural disasters, we see a rise of countries lead by strong dictator-types, who promise that they will fix our problems where others have failed.

5\. Hard clamp down on immigration. Human rights violations, genocide, world war.

6\. Still no level 4/5 autonomous vehicles.

<comment><USER72> How long do you think a decade is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER554> 1\. A +$1,000 consumer robot, humanoid or otherwise (and no, a self-driving vacuum cleaner doesn't count), becomes as mainstream as drones

2\. China's economy collapses and they are at war with multiple countries

3\. A new kind of drug, primarily consumed in vape, form will sweep the nation - some will call it "Myst"

4\. Air taxis (self-flying) become moderately common in urban areas

5\. A major "terror" attack involving a swarm of remote-controlled devices will cause regulatory panic for weeks

6\. Politicians will tell lies

7\. The average global temperature will be lower than the prior decade, and Carbon Dioxide will stop being blamed for climate change

8\. Cross-network gaming will, mistakenly, further commoditize game systems, resulting in a new surge in PC gaming

9\. Minimum wage will increase to $96/hr for the 3,500 people still earning minimum wage - all others will have been replaced by robots and computers that complain less and get more done

10\. Donald Trump will be reelected with 68MM popular votes and over 300 electoral votes, even though he technically looses electorally, because of a multi-state pact to cast electoral votes based on the winner of the popular vote

11\. People will set up traps for self-driving cars (think Wile E. Coyote on the Road Runner)

12\. We will still not have ever sent man to the moon

13\. A kind of standing bed will become popular

14\. Gen Z will surpass Millennials in total hours worked

15\. Brexit... still waiting (though nominally done)

16\. Queen Elizabeth II will no longer be queen

17\. Ace of Base will reunite

18\. Cigarette sales will be halved, in US per-capita terms

19\. Saying the word Israel on internet will become illegal

20\. Grocery shortages, including in the USA... majorly; the problem of the decade

</comment><comment><USER110> 1\. No one on mars

2\. Climate change has no significant impact, but whenever there's a hurricane climate change zealots tell everyone to repent because the end is near

3\. Nikki Haley is the Republican nominee, but loses to a white male Democrat

4\. Quantum Computing still irrelevant

5\. Africa has its first major globally dominant tech company, but most of the employees are from India

6\. AR is everywhere, but no one calls it AR

7\. Veganism loses its appeal as aging vegans look increasingly frail

8\. Pitchfork gives BNR and a 8+ rating to a reissue of a Skrillex album it panned in the 2000s.

</comment><comment><USER555> 1\. The next recession triggers a massive financial crisis (due to unsustainable debt and currency creation in 2010s) followed by a loss of confidence in central banks as various fiat currencies are destroyed in response.

2\. As a result of #1, the dollar loses its reserve currency status, probably in favour of a basket of currencies like IMF SDR.

3\. To restore confidence, states will be forced to peg their new currencies to something that can't be created at will, probably gold, but perhaps also Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.

4\. Environmental collapse continues, causing mass migrations adding further fuel to nationalist and fascist movements.

5\. Localisation becomes fashionable as globalisation gets blamed for many of the world's ills.

</comment><comment><USER556> 2000 was the millennium for those who could not count.

2001 was the millennium for those of us who could.

2020 is the decade for those who still cannot count.

Therefore, I will wait until next year for the third decade of the 21st Century to come around before I make my predictions.

...And such a simple counting error on Hacker News too. Oh dear, oh dear! What next?

__

EVEN MORE ERRORS:

"2020's version of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681"](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681")

...And I would add that _" 2020's"_ should not have an apostrophe (it does not need it, its use here shows ignorance and adds nothing but confusion)! [It is no wonder that so much of the world's code is buggy when programmers cannot get the most basic and simplest syntax correct. Right, it's logically incorrect to add an apostrophe here.]

<comment><USER309> Don't you know that we start counting from 0?

<comment><USER556> I've yet to see a calendar publisher (or anyone) call the 1900s the 19th Century, similarly 2000s the 20th Century. QED.

<comment><USER309> That is a thing in the English language, in eg Sweden we do the sensible thing and call the 1900s "nittonhundratalet". The English way is stupid, it is like saying that the current year 2020 should be called "The 2021th year" just to confuse people. I mean it is technically correct, but it is a dumb way to speak.

<comment><USER556> Perhaps so, but over 400 million people speak English as a native language whereas I'd guess those who spoke Swedish at most would be only 10% of that number.

That said, as a native English speaker, I'm not defending the goddam language it's such a mess you'd reckon it'd been through a blender. About the only thing going for English (other than its ubiquity) is that there is essentially one indefinite article to remember (unlike all the different and nefarious genders of many other languages).

On the matter of counting, irrespective of what you say, unlike the ancient Romans, we have all inherited a number system that includes zero—and that zero is added on the tenth digit (not the eleventh). If you wish to count or do mathematics in a different system other than in our common base-10 one then you have every right to do so. However, I, like most other people, have taken the easy way out and adopted the counting system that puts this "0" thing on the 'last' [already-repeating] number before the counting system repeats. (Right, I agree with you, it is strange but I can't think of an alternative other than to kick out the "0" and go back to the Ancient Roman way of doing things. Reckon though it'd be pretty clumsy. I reckon I'd truly struggle to do say vector calculus or square root by the long method in Roman numerals. I just shudder at the thought.

But as they say it's horses for courses, I signed off my recent Christmas cards in Roman numerals as I always do, last year just past being MMXIX.

You may have invented a better system but I'm damn sure it'll take a lot of convincing others to change the world's most common numbering system (despite its quirky faults—that, of course, is if you actually view them as faults). :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER557> In no particular order (mine are more US focused because I am an American)

\- Electric car prices will continue to go down, there will be more electric cars than gas cars in 2030

\- Bitcoin and blockchain products will turn out to be basically useless. there will be no huge blockchain successes in the next 10 years. bitcoin mining will need to stop because of climate change

\- there will be more "brexit" type events in the next 10 years, to the point that the EU does not exist

\- Donald Trump will (unfortunately) be elected again in 2020

\- Polarization in the United States will continue to get worse for a variety of difference reasons

\- Malaria will be eradicated

\- The university tuitions in the US will be significantly less than they are now because of less demand, with students electing to use free/cheaper online resources instead.

\- The percentage of people they say they are Christian in the US will be significantly less than it is now.

\- The world will see the first trillionaire

\- The US healthcare system will function similar to the UK's system

\- Spaced repetition systems will become more ubiquitous in all levels of education (there may be a billion dollar company in this space, it works!)

\- javascript will continue to dominate client-side development

<comment><USER76> 1\. More electric cars might be sold in 2030 than gas (a little skeptical), but there will still be more gas cars on road.

2\. Bitcoin will still be around. Prices will be higher than today. There will be more mining than today.

3\. There may be one or two more, but they'll be disastrous and not repeated.

4\. 50/50, but not too late. Get involved!

5\. True.

6\. Doubtful. See polio.

7\. No way. Tuition will be higher than ever. More students will be getting degrees in person than ever before.

8\. Hopefully! Almost certainly true.

9\. Doubtful on trillionaire unless they're head of state. Maybe by 2040.

10\. If only, but seriously doubt it. The senate being biased towards conservative rural voters in an age of increasing urbanization will make this almost impossible. Also the Supreme Court will still be leaning right.

11\. No. Flash cards and SRS have been around for decades. People don't care enough to use them and there's nothing that's not commodity here.

12\. Fuck, probably true. Hopefully mostly TypeScript by then at least.

<comment><USER558> Given last months UK elections I see it more likely that UK health care changes towards the US</comment></comment></comment>