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A pesimistic view - the inequality will be rampant, well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML and a huge surplus of developers will be fighting for

by bitL 9y ago

A pesimistic view - the inequality will be rampant, well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML and a huge surplus of developers will be fighting for scraps, requiring 1-2 side-jobs to pay their expenses. 25% of jobs will be gone due to self-driving cars boom, causing another round of consolidation among car manufacturers as people stop buying cars. Most of 1st world will resemble Brazil, gated communities of lucky ones and shanty towns for the rest. There will be a significant population decline in the 1st world due to widespread cheap availability of sexbots, with universities researching "baby factories" to keep humanity going. Eugenics will be alive and well and culture completely shifts to survival of the fittest, with hunger games becoming main sports TV broadcast. Global warming causes massive ocean die off, prompts massive emigration out of the area between two tropics, disrupting economies world-wide. Fossil fuels will be largely depleted, people would lose the knowledge how to extract them from great depths as the productive generation passes away. Most people will be selfish narcissists with no regards to each other, living their artificial life on social media and in advanced VR. Cryptocurrencies cause governments to lose any effect on economy, advanced cryptology prevents effective capital control, allowing largest players to completely dominate.

iamdeedubs 9y ago
This sounds like the Idiocracy plot summary, which is still predicting the future more accurately than I'd prefer. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
- tomaskafka 9y ago
  Oh boy, this is a #1 on my 'underrated movies' list.
tomjen3 9y ago
>well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML The first thing I started to code in was Delphi 3, which I think was one of the first IDEs to have code-completion, which speeds up development quite a lot. It still required you to manually handle memory. Today we have much more powerful computers, much more power languages, far more powerful IDEs, tools like code testing, code review and commonly use version control systems - and a shortage of programmers, with their salaries just going up. I am not saying that AI won't ever make devs obsolete, just that it will be one of the last fields to be made obsolete, as we are likely to integrate it into our tooling (perhaps in the future, rather than write code you review and fix AI generated code). Sexbots will definitely be a thing, but I still think they will be a niche, because the real sexy times will happen with AR (it is both far more deniable than sex-bots and, according to reviews I have read, way better than internet porn). As for fertility, that has been in decline in the US for years, and the rest of the west. The average European rate is only a tad above 1.5, so in the future net-import of brains (zombie-mode) will be required, but the world is also full of smart people who wants very much to go to the west. The main problem will be reaching political consensus. Given that the US have a problem of reaching much, if any, consensus this may be the biggest hurdle.

by bitL 9y ago

iamdeedubs 9y ago

This sounds like the Idiocracy plot summary, which is still predicting the future more accurately than I'd prefer. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

tomaskafka 9y ago
Oh boy, this is a #1 on my 'underrated movies' list.

tomjen3 9y ago

>well-paid IT-jobs will evaporate due to advances in ML The first thing I started to code in was Delphi 3, which I think was one of the first IDEs to have code-completion, which speeds up development quite a lot. It still required you to manually handle memory. Today we have much more powerful computers, much more power languages, far more powerful IDEs, tools like code testing, code review and commonly use version control systems - and a shortage of programmers, with their salaries just going up. I am not saying that AI won't ever make devs obsolete, just that it will be one of the last fields to be made obsolete, as we are likely to integrate it into our tooling (perhaps in the future, rather than write code you review and fix AI generated code). Sexbots will definitely be a thing, but I still think they will be a niche, because the real sexy times will happen with AR (it is both far more deniable than sex-bots and, according to reviews I have read, way better than internet porn). As for fertility, that has been in decline in the US for years, and the rest of the west. The average European rate is only a tad above 1.5, so in the future net-import of brains (zombie-mode) will be required, but the world is also full of smart people who wants very much to go to the west. The main problem will be reaching political consensus. Given that the US have a problem of reaching much, if any, consensus this may be the biggest hurdle.