6 ms·

Predictions for 2020–2029

30 points by longstaff2009 7y ago

bigdang 7y ago
This is interesting, but is essentially taking the present and multiplying it 10x. Which is never really how the future turns out, but always how humans think the future will turn out.
- longstaff2009 7y ago
  I found the thought process of trying to make the predictions quite rewarding to go through, it will be interesting to look back in 10 years and see how close or not they are
adrianmsmith 7y ago
Under the section on “reimagining search”: > We live in a state of anxiety without a path to financial independence. The path to creating wealth from last century no longer applies. The path to reimagining search begins with helping people to understand their money. The first step starts with delivering insights into the stories that data can tell. Not sure what financial independence has to do with search results? I’m not actually sure those sentences really mean anything at all...
- war1025 7y ago
  > > We live in a state of anxiety without a path to financial independence. The path to creating wealth from last century no longer applies. As Marx said, you need to own the means of production. The beautiful thing about capitalism is that the means of production are for sale on the stock market.
- longstaff2009 7y ago
  You are right that section could be much clearer. Long term transaction data and browsing history could be used to train a federated learning algorithm to generate search results. Getting access to that data to understand what stories it can tell is difficult ask without offering a lot of value in return. In the short term I believe providing insights into a persons finances is the way to provide that value. E.g. if you have an extra $5k how do your circumstances change if you - pay off student debt - pay extra on your mortgage - buy solar - contribute to your 401k / retirement savings or showing how changes in spending alters the amount of pretax money you need to earn to support your lifestyle. or how does your spending compare to people like you?
  - mmmuhd 7y ago
    You know in my futuristic hallucinations i always come up with this search solution that truly knows you (in an abstract way) from your day to day electronics interactions, that could bring you the exact result of your searches, much like when you know your data and your are writing sql joins to bring you exactly what what you want. I hope someone build that someday.
sverige 7y ago
I predict the vast majority of people will never again understand that new decades, centuries, and millenia begin on January 1st of years ending in '1' and not '0' because there never was a Year 0. Everyone knew that 50 years ago, which is why Kubrick didn't call it '2000: A Space Odyssey.'
- quotha 7y ago
  It's the 20's, deal with it.
  - huseyinkeles 7y ago
    It is 20s, but not a new decade :) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade
    - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
      You all are correct but no one cares. Numbers ending with 0 is what gets attention. Going back to the year 1 doesn't add much anyway since we are pretty sure that the count of years since the birth of Jesus (whoever he was historically) is off.
      - ShamelessC 7y ago
        https://m.xkcd.com/2249/ https://m.xkcd.com/2249/
    - rejschaap 7y ago
      > A decade is a period of 10 years. Technically, every year is the end of a decade.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  The 21st century is 2001-2100 because we count them and the first century was 1-100 (there is no 0AD). But nobody refers to decades as the nth decade. We in fact refer to them by their leading digit. So no, it’s the 20s again.
insickness 7y ago
> People are scared and want their leaders to protect their jobs from foreign competition. It's not 'competition' that people are afraid of, it is unfair government intervention and tariffs. The idea with Trump's trade wars is that if a country imposes tariff's on US goods, the US will respond in kind until those tariff's are removed and fair competition is restored. Whether or not this is actually happening in practice is another story, but to say nationalists are afraid of competition misses the mark.
- longstaff2009 7y ago
  My understanding is that Trump's trade war was apart of the America First economic policy to reduce the US trade deficit. This had the added benefit of making manufacturing more viable in the US.
- mtberatwork 7y ago
  > It's not 'competition' that people are afraid of, it is unfair government intervention and tariffs. People aren't afraid of that either, they are afraid of the rise in cost of living compared to the tepid rise of their wages.
dibujaron 7y ago
The section on Nationalism indicates to me that we're heading towards a period of major, great-power conflict. I could see it being a lot of smaller, officially unrelated wars or one big one. Since WW2 we have enjoyed the longest ever period without direct conflict between great powers. How much longer can we expect this to last?
- rwmj 7y ago
  The difference in great power wars since WW2 is we now have nuclear weapons (yes apart from the bombing of Japan). As long as we fight proxy wars (Vietnam, Syria) then we haven't used them, but I can't see a war between for example the US and China over Taiwan or European states and Russia not devolving into nuclear war very quickly.
  - 7777fps 7y ago
    How long can nuclear weapons be kept without being used? We are as close as ever to nuclear war according to the doomsday clock, just two minutes to midnight.
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      The former is controlled by commissioned officers. They will not appoint you in charge of anything nuclear if they have a 1% suspicion that you are unstable. The later is (rightfully) hand-wringing by science people.
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  He's really far off about the EU. The EU will fix its problems and join into the geopolitical theatre as a unified block. No one wants to follow the UK.
  - phenkdo 7y ago
    I concur, in fact Brexit might have the reverse effect of France, Germany led EU moving towards a closer union.
chapium 7y ago
What benefits does a distributed ledger such as blockchain provide enterprise scale users?
- longstaff2009 7y ago
  in private consortiums, instead of having data locked up in silos across organisations, everyone can have a copy of the data and build their own view on top of it. you don't have to trust any party as to the authenticity of the data as you can see every change that has been made. I wrote about the supply chain use case here https://medium.com/twohands/lobsters-on-the-blockchain-df5998ad817e https://medium.com/twohands/lobsters-on-the-blockchain-df599... and how I approach looking at distributed ledger tech here https://medium.com/@ben_longstaff/my-framework-for-how-to-look-at-the-future-of-blockchain-719f4243491f?source=friends_link&sk=a867889e653507062d357cd4c2581e2a https://medium.com/@ben_longstaff/my-framework-for-how-to-lo... :)
  - rorykoehler 7y ago
    These problems are already solved with audit logs and apis. Especially at enterprise level.
baumgarn 7y ago
Regarding the section "The World is on Fire": The farmers protests recently in Berlin were a normal expressions of freedom to demonstrate in Germany. Not much to worry about, and a sign of a healthy democracy.
n_ary 7y ago
Interesting. It is fun to look at this and imagine exciting future. Random things I remember predicted about 2020: + Moon & Mars colonization + Touch-screen TVs + consumer computing moves to Google Glass + VR + Universal currency (BitCoin et al.) + Flying Cars + Cars that can run on Land & Water + Household Garbage to electricity converter + Everything runs on Solar power + Doomsday + AGI + Self driving cars + Holographic displays(like in movies) + No. 5 from the article + Biomed breakthroughs (aka Theranos) These are from various sources I have read. Interestingly, most rely heavily on trending topics/techs of the time predictions were being made without accounting for how tech & field suddenly changes, such as Theranos and blockchain. :) [edit: fixing list formatting ]
rvz 7y ago
Seriously, when will the frivolous soothsaying on every decade predictions ever stop? As soon as I saw (2) and (3) and below I had to stop reading. They are the same speculative lunatics that attempted to predict the price of Bitcoin to rise beyond $20k. After looking at these latest predictions, I just drew a big sigh. I'm sorry but even my machine learning crystal ball forecasting an incoming tech crash in this decade is more accurate than the majority of these nonsensical 'predictions'.
bobosha 7y ago
IMHO the search paradigm of 10 links itself needs to be reimagined. One idea is of that of a self-assembling, dynamically updating "view" of the underlying information (without the need to read documents). I suspect several smart people are working on it and the challenges are many, but eventually, we will get there.

30 points by longstaff2009 7y ago

This is interesting, but is essentially taking the present and multiplying it 10x. Which is never really how the future turns out, but always how humans think the future will turn out.

longstaff2009 7y ago
I found the thought process of trying to make the predictions quite rewarding to go through, it will be interesting to look back in 10 years and see how close or not they are

adrianmsmith 7y ago

Under the section on “reimagining search”: > We live in a state of anxiety without a path to financial independence. The path to creating wealth from last century no longer applies. The path to reimagining search begins with helping people to understand their money. The first step starts with delivering insights into the stories that data can tell. Not sure what financial independence has to do with search results? I’m not actually sure those sentences really mean anything at all...

war1025 7y ago
> > We live in a state of anxiety without a path to financial independence. The path to creating wealth from last century no longer applies. As Marx said, you need to own the means of production. The beautiful thing about capitalism is that the means of production are for sale on the stock market.
longstaff2009 7y ago
You are right that section could be much clearer. Long term transaction data and browsing history could be used to train a federated learning algorithm to generate search results. Getting access to that data to understand what stories it can tell is difficult ask without offering a lot of value in return. In the short term I believe providing insights into a persons finances is the way to provide that value. E.g. if you have an extra $5k how do your circumstances change if you - pay off student debt - pay extra on your mortgage - buy solar - contribute to your 401k / retirement savings or showing how changes in spending alters the amount of pretax money you need to earn to support your lifestyle. or how does your spending compare to people like you?
- mmmuhd 7y ago
  You know in my futuristic hallucinations i always come up with this search solution that truly knows you (in an abstract way) from your day to day electronics interactions, that could bring you the exact result of your searches, much like when you know your data and your are writing sql joins to bring you exactly what what you want. I hope someone build that someday.

sverige 7y ago

I predict the vast majority of people will never again understand that new decades, centuries, and millenia begin on January 1st of years ending in '1' and not '0' because there never was a Year 0. Everyone knew that 50 years ago, which is why Kubrick didn't call it '2000: A Space Odyssey.'

quotha 7y ago
It's the 20's, deal with it.
- huseyinkeles 7y ago
  It is 20s, but not a new decade :) See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    You all are correct but no one cares. Numbers ending with 0 is what gets attention. Going back to the year 1 doesn't add much anyway since we are pretty sure that the count of years since the birth of Jesus (whoever he was historically) is off.
    - ShamelessC 7y ago
      https://m.xkcd.com/2249/ https://m.xkcd.com/2249/
  - rejschaap 7y ago
    > A decade is a period of 10 years. Technically, every year is the end of a decade.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
The 21st century is 2001-2100 because we count them and the first century was 1-100 (there is no 0AD). But nobody refers to decades as the nth decade. We in fact refer to them by their leading digit. So no, it’s the 20s again.

insickness 7y ago

> People are scared and want their leaders to protect their jobs from foreign competition. It's not 'competition' that people are afraid of, it is unfair government intervention and tariffs. The idea with Trump's trade wars is that if a country imposes tariff's on US goods, the US will respond in kind until those tariff's are removed and fair competition is restored. Whether or not this is actually happening in practice is another story, but to say nationalists are afraid of competition misses the mark.

longstaff2009 7y ago
My understanding is that Trump's trade war was apart of the America First economic policy to reduce the US trade deficit. This had the added benefit of making manufacturing more viable in the US.
mtberatwork 7y ago
> It's not 'competition' that people are afraid of, it is unfair government intervention and tariffs. People aren't afraid of that either, they are afraid of the rise in cost of living compared to the tepid rise of their wages.

dibujaron 7y ago

The section on Nationalism indicates to me that we're heading towards a period of major, great-power conflict. I could see it being a lot of smaller, officially unrelated wars or one big one. Since WW2 we have enjoyed the longest ever period without direct conflict between great powers. How much longer can we expect this to last?

rwmj 7y ago
The difference in great power wars since WW2 is we now have nuclear weapons (yes apart from the bombing of Japan). As long as we fight proxy wars (Vietnam, Syria) then we haven't used them, but I can't see a war between for example the US and China over Taiwan or European states and Russia not devolving into nuclear war very quickly.
- 7777fps 7y ago
  How long can nuclear weapons be kept without being used? We are as close as ever to nuclear war according to the doomsday clock, just two minutes to midnight.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    The former is controlled by commissioned officers. They will not appoint you in charge of anything nuclear if they have a 1% suspicion that you are unstable. The later is (rightfully) hand-wringing by science people.
rorykoehler 7y ago
He's really far off about the EU. The EU will fix its problems and join into the geopolitical theatre as a unified block. No one wants to follow the UK.
- phenkdo 7y ago
  I concur, in fact Brexit might have the reverse effect of France, Germany led EU moving towards a closer union.

chapium 7y ago

What benefits does a distributed ledger such as blockchain provide enterprise scale users?

longstaff2009 7y ago
in private consortiums, instead of having data locked up in silos across organisations, everyone can have a copy of the data and build their own view on top of it. you don't have to trust any party as to the authenticity of the data as you can see every change that has been made. I wrote about the supply chain use case here https://medium.com/twohands/lobsters-on-the-blockchain-df5998ad817e https://medium.com/twohands/lobsters-on-the-blockchain-df599... and how I approach looking at distributed ledger tech here https://medium.com/@ben_longstaff/my-framework-for-how-to-look-at-the-future-of-blockchain-719f4243491f?source=friends_link&sk=a867889e653507062d357cd4c2581e2a https://medium.com/@ben_longstaff/my-framework-for-how-to-lo... :)
- rorykoehler 7y ago
  These problems are already solved with audit logs and apis. Especially at enterprise level.

baumgarn 7y ago

Regarding the section "The World is on Fire": The farmers protests recently in Berlin were a normal expressions of freedom to demonstrate in Germany. Not much to worry about, and a sign of a healthy democracy.

n_ary 7y ago

Interesting. It is fun to look at this and imagine exciting future. Random things I remember predicted about 2020: + Moon & Mars colonization + Touch-screen TVs + consumer computing moves to Google Glass + VR + Universal currency (BitCoin et al.) + Flying Cars + Cars that can run on Land & Water + Household Garbage to electricity converter + Everything runs on Solar power + Doomsday + AGI + Self driving cars + Holographic displays(like in movies) + No. 5 from the article + Biomed breakthroughs (aka Theranos) These are from various sources I have read. Interestingly, most rely heavily on trending topics/techs of the time predictions were being made without accounting for how tech & field suddenly changes, such as Theranos and blockchain. :) [edit: fixing list formatting ]

rvz 7y ago

Seriously, when will the frivolous soothsaying on every decade predictions ever stop? As soon as I saw (2) and (3) and below I had to stop reading. They are the same speculative lunatics that attempted to predict the price of Bitcoin to rise beyond $20k. After looking at these latest predictions, I just drew a big sigh. I'm sorry but even my machine learning crystal ball forecasting an incoming tech crash in this decade is more accurate than the majority of these nonsensical 'predictions'.

bobosha 7y ago

IMHO the search paradigm of 10 links itself needs to be reimagined. One idea is of that of a self-assembling, dynamically updating "view" of the underlying information (without the need to read documents). I suspect several smart people are working on it and the challenges are many, but eventually, we will get there.