69 ms·

Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

• danicriss 4y ago
  The sheer amount of land being freed when automated driving becomes mainstream
• b20000 4y ago
  unions
  • lolcat_cowsay 4y ago
• narrator 4y ago
  The next big thing that few people are talking about is that thing you get banned from social media for talking about and the consequences of that thing over the next few years.
• itqwertz 4y ago
  Dog vasectomy. Email me
• ChaloGonzalez 4y ago
  Walkaway safe nuclear reactors change EVERYTHING.
• jimbob45 4y ago
  Cultured meat[0] has the potential to upend the farming industry. This isn't near meat, it's actual meat and it's already here. We're simply waiting for the cost to come down from $10,000/kg or whatever crazy price it's currently at. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat
  • jazzyjackson 4y ago
    wish I remembered what podcast I was listening to... it was someone running a company developing synthetic milk and eggs explaining why meat will never scale up, the problem is the growth medium for muscle is also the perfect environment for bacteria, and we basically need to reinvent immune systems before you're going to get a cubed inch of healthy chicken to grow without contamination
    • shafyy 4y ago
      This is probably not the one you're referring to, but Pat Brown, co-founder of Impossible, also has quite a strong opinion on cultured meat. If somebody figures out how to grow animal parts artifically and reliably, there are much more interesting applications than to eat it. Such as medicinal applications. I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, that we don't have with the imminent climate and biodiversity crises. It makes much more sense to create meat directly from plant proteins than to try to grow it artifically. Brands like Impossible make damn great burger patties, chicken nuggets, and what not. I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
      • cassianoleal 4y ago
        So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough? Not much to see here. I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information. > I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test. Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
        • shafyy 4y ago
          > Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference. I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible. And don't forget that making a steak is also much harder with cultured meat, that's why they're also starting with burger patties and chicken nuggets. From a higher-level view, most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks. It's in the form of ground meat. If enough people switch to plant-based meats for let's say 80% of their meat needs, animal-based meat won't be able to compete anymore with the price of plant-based meats. So, for Impossible to reach their goal of getting rid of the animal based food system, they don't even need to be able to make steaks. Sure, there will always be meat, but it will be an expensive luxury and rarity that we will frown upon as society (e.g. like wearing fur coats today or hunting dolphins and whales). > So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough? Fair point. But also consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one? He had the experience, expertise and funds to do either.
• sprkwd 4y ago
  Mass control over access to drinking water.
  • pcdoodle 4y ago
    Frightening indeed. Care to share any more insights?
    • verdverm 4y ago
      it is a localized problem to places where there are too many people and agriculture for the available water budget, especially as you look out and fear climate change. I'm not as worried, believing in the spirit of human ingenuity. Desalination and piping it from the oceans (like we do for oil) will be fine. We just need the wherewithal to implement real solutions and invest in the sciences rather than regulate behavior.
    • jazzyjackson 4y ago
      see also "new world water" by Mos Def
      • Normille 4y ago
        I keep reading about these future "water wars" and can't help but wonder how much of the prediction is realistic and how much is coloured by Silicon Valley types extrapolating globally from what they see locally. I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall. Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier. Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater. Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
        • saberdancer 4y ago
• sacrosanct 4y ago
  Clean Energy, Water Desalination, Nigeria's crackdown on anonymous SIM cards, Monkeypox, Separation of Church & State in a post-Roe world, Computer chips made out of light, The managed decline of Britain, Crackdowns on E2E encrypted messaging apps, Quantum-resistant cryptography, Tesla cars charged by burning coal.
  • enos_feedler 4y ago
    No disrespect to anything on this list, but I would wager most of this stuff won't matter to the average person. I can't see how my life will change with respect to anything of these. I just don't think we can speak to these as the next big thing. For example: iPhone was clearly a big thing.
    • chrismeller 4y ago
      I tend to agree. Most of these seem like “vocal minority” issues.
    • aglavine 4y ago
      desalinization could be big in terms of migration
  • Lordarminius 4y ago
    >...Nigeria's crackdown on anonymous SIM cards Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ?
    • Sargos 4y ago
      > Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ? It's a very authoritarian move to threaten privacy and prevent people having free access to the internet. It hurts people at a minimum and causes the deaths of the most vulnerable in society at worst. Definitely up for debate and probably not one the Nigerian government can win in a fair debate.
• abrichr 4y ago
  Conscious realism and the cosmological polytope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813 https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813 According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions. The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness. This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history. Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote: "Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
  • katmannthree 4y ago
    That's a lot of words in those links. What falsifiable predictions does this make?
    • mrandish 4y ago
      Yes, that's exactly my question too. "Consciousness" is often ill-defined for experimental purposes and notorious for being abused through vague "deep-ities" to make unsupported assertions about "the meaning of everything."
    • abrichr 4y ago
      It's a good question, and as a layman I don't have the answer. However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles. In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
      • katmannthree 4y ago
        > In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing. I can't really comment on that as 1) I only skimmed a couple sections of the paper and 2) my field is more applied math than pure. I'm not attacking or dismissing anything, just asking how the claims made are substantiated. > However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles. Do those models cover experiments which have yet to be run, and more importantly are they predictions which differ from those of the standard model? There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model. Nobody really loves the state of physics as-is, but moving on to something else requires meeting those two conditions which has been an insurmountable hurdle as of yet.
• pcdoodle 4y ago
  I would say AR for specific applications. It would have profound effects in the trades/service industry.
  • verdverm 4y ago
    AR will impact everything, it is the (pandora's) unboxing of our digital world. The possibilities are quite exciting.
• verdverm 4y ago
  CUE (https://cuelang.org https://cuelang.org | https://cuetorials.com https://cuetorials.com) will become the common language of config & devops, enabling a whole new level of reuse, sharing, and safety. The philosophy is quite sound (https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic)
  • pipeline_peak 4y ago
    will?
    • verdverm 4y ago
      yes, while it is gaining adoption, there are still a couple of major tasks before it really takes off, namely dependency management and structural sharing.
      • cassianoleal 4y ago
        Since you're that good at predicting the future, would you mind DM'ing me the next EuroMillions numbers?
        • verdverm 4y ago
          What's the need to make a comment like this? Though I do appreciate you recognizing my track record ;]
          • cassianoleal 4y ago
            It's about as necessary as your comment stating facts about the future. :) In any case, I apologise - my comment was indeed unnecessary and didn't bring any value to the discussion. Had it been made to me I might not have been as good a sport as you have so kudos to you!
      • pipeline_peak 4y ago
        Who’s adopting it? I don’t even see a Wikipedia article.
• enos_feedler 4y ago
  I believe the next big thing will be the productization of building a home anywhere, without requiring municipal infrastructure. There is still a ways to go in terms of technology to make it all happen and make it affordable. But at some point, it will really reconfigure where and how we all live.
  • dotancohen 4y ago
    Including water and sewer? I can envision local electricity generation and wireless communication. But not every home can support a well and septic system.
    • mountainriver 4y ago
      I guess a well and a septic tank? Lived that way for awhile up in the mountains and it was tough
      • oceanplexian 4y ago
        I mean, I grew up with a well and septic tank and my life was literally no different than living in an apartment in the city. It’s not like a radical off-the-grid thing millions of homes are this way.
        • chris1993 4y ago
          Particularly when you look at modern septic which do tertiary treatment with inputs of power and a chlorine block every six months.
    • villmann 4y ago
      I just installed incineration toilet at my cabin. Works great and burns the shit to ashes. Works with a gass balloon and a 12V battery. 220V option being available.
  • Dylovell 4y ago
    This is something I have been think about for the past 10 year as well. If we can get enough cheap power production, incinerating toilets seem interesting. And the growth satellite internet is a big win for this area.
• Xcelerate 4y ago
  Just guessing, but: machine learning based off of algorithmic information theory / Solomonoff induction rather than neural networks, satellite internet (well-known in tech circles but perhaps not the general public), rapid advancements in computational quantum chemistry that start to replace lab-based experimentation to produce real world value. And I agree with the other commenter about a massive fight related to water allocation over the next few decades.
• unpopularopp 4y ago
  Climate migration. What happens Europe now/since 2015 is nothing that will come in the next couple of years. And the individual countries and so as the EU is pretty much unprepared. I'd even say that will be one of the cause of downfall of the union.
  • majewsky 4y ago
    I agree, but I don't think the "few people talk about it" criterion applies. It's not that it doesn't come up in debates, it's that nothing much comes of it (yet).
    • JasserInicide 4y ago
      Nothing comes of it because we're regressed into a hyper-sensitive society where topics that remotely involve race can't be discussed anymore for fear of someone's feelings getting hurt. Empires have collapsed in the past because of migrations of peoples, this is potentially no exception.
  • elevenoh 4y ago
  • nokya 4y ago
    I am under the impression that instead of preparing for climate immigration, EU citizens are actually slowly but surely mutually brainwashing themselves into increasing hate towards immigrants as a whole. From what I read and understood about climate change, a tsunami of immigrants from southern hemisphere countries towards northern hemisphere countries is to be expected. I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable. Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more. Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders". Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing? What am I missing here?
• jensneuse 4y ago
  Managing APIs like dependencies, with a package manager-like developer experience. (npm for APIs). The number of APIs is continuously growing. It's going to be impossible to manually manage API dependencies in the future. I wrote about our approach to solve the problem here: https://docs.wundergraph.com/docs/architecture/manage-api-dependencies-explicitly https://docs.wundergraph.com/docs/architecture/manage-api-de... I'm curious what others think of this problem space.
  • verdverm 4y ago
    I've been thinking about this from a slightly different angle (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof), but I think we are both getting at a higher level of reuse and dependency management. I just don't think we need to limit the idea to APIs, there are different granularities, both bigger and smaller, where the ideas are useful. You might also find the Thema project by Grafana interesting (https://github.com/grafana/thema https://github.com/grafana/thema)
  • moralestapia 4y ago
    Honest feedback, the whole point of this is to make things easier, but the examples on your post seem quite contrived. Some APIs today are literal one-liners, I wouldn't change that for another abstraction layer in between that requires me to write 1K of boilerplate. I think it's a good idea, just work on making the user feel like it's actually easier to do the same stuff with wunder.
    • jensneuse 4y ago
      Thank you, great feedback. You're right in that we should provide better examples. If you find anything else that bothers you, please keep it coming.
      • jrh206 4y ago
        This is a small thing, but one of the first sentences in the documentation you linked is "At least I have never thought about API dependencies before building WunderGraph." It makes the problem seem small, as if you can get away with not thinking about it.
• abetusk 4y ago
  Energy? I feel like it's been talked about a lot but maybe not? Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do). Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh. Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA). Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer. The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law
  • e_joules 4y ago
    Something about this cannot be right, surely? You are saying one can invest in a solar setup and have 7+ years of free electricity, and all that starting after 3.5 years?
    • abetusk 4y ago
      Why is this hard to believe? Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason. In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.
      • candiodari 4y ago
        One reason is that this will make it a matter of survival for energy companies and governments to mandate connection to the grid and buying of electricity, for fear of having these critical companies fail. Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free. Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.
• baxtr 4y ago
  TIL: Just mix two big trends and see what you can come up with. Like: - Quantum Computing and WFH - Crypto and Micronuclear Power - Metaverse and Biohacking Have fun!
  • OJFord 4y ago
    That's basically how joke 'startup generators' worked before GPT3 et al.
  • wolframhempel 4y ago
    Don't know why this was down voted, this is genuinely a simple and reliable framework to come up with promising ideas that utilise existing trends.
  • EddySchauHai 4y ago
    I bet metaverse archaeology becomes a thing in a university department before 2030 -.-‘
  • euroderf 4y ago
    R/C toys and mixed drinks
    • baxtr 4y ago
      R/C toys are a trend?!
      • euroderf 4y ago
        when deployed in support of cocktail hour !
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zh3 4y ago
  Pity it's not possible to open-source execution. So many good ideas fail due to poor execution (these days, quite possibly a larger number are killed by birth by bigco's - that's still a 'failure to execute' though, in a certain sense).
  • verdverm 4y ago
    To be fair, there is a lot more information and educational material out there on how to build new products more effectively, the last 10 years or so. It still takes time to learn even the basics.
  • CoastalCoder 4y ago
    > Pity it's not possible to open-source execution. I first interpreted this as pertaining to the death penalty.
• sneak 4y ago
  Planetary defense against civilization-ending-level threats. There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares. n = 1. We have no backups whatsoever.
  • wizofaus 4y ago
    Don't look up?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• handelaar 4y ago
  DC home electricity. If your future home has solar and local storage, and your domestic usage is mostly in appliances which convert back down to DC immediately behind the plug socket (most of us have this) then at some point we're going to start wanting to power our homes like houseboats or camper vans. Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside. But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
  • moralestapia 4y ago
    But wouldn't this cause more issues? Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
    • handelaar 4y ago
      Yes, it causes issues today. But tomorrow, I'm expecting that the transformer will be outside the device (as now with wall warts and most laptops) rather than inside (as with your TV). And that minority who are handy enough with tools can patch past the internal transformer with a soldering iron and a screwdriver in the meantime.
    • abetusk 4y ago
      The idea being that consumer items will, more and more, be able to take DC directly instead of expecting AC. For example, any device that takes in USB power with a 120VAC "wall wart" plug can just be used with a buck convert plug instead or being powered directly from the DC current. LED lighting is taking in AC then converting to DC to power the LEDs. Your phone is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it. Your laptop is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it. There are some household machines which will require some heavy duty power draw but much of the consumer products we use is powered off of DC to begin with. Powering directly off of DC would be cutting out the "middle man" of AC.
• ponorin 4y ago
  E-Bikes. The EV that almost nobody talks about yet brings multitude of benefits (virtually no congestion, less infrastructure/energy/environmental footprint compared to cars, health benefits, etc., all while being able to meet the majority of daily transport needs) if cities make way for them. The one especially absent from the discussion are cargo bikes.
• superasn 4y ago
  Technology wise merging backend and frontend into a seamless framework seems like the next big thing. A lot of progress has been made this year on this with liveview, et al but haven't seen any mass adoption yet as only few people are talking about it. But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
  • elevenoh 4y ago
• mrandish 4y ago
  When asking this question it's worth considering that historically, the hit rate of such predictions is quite low - even when made by experts based on reasonable-seeming extrapolations. Prior experience indicates predictions more than a decade out should be heavily discounted.
• TMWNN 4y ago
  The likely shutdown of all Russian gas to Germany this winter, resulting in a) 5-10X rise in home heating costs, and b) complete shutdown of many industries, resulting in a c) depression in the German (and thus European) economy
  • Normille 4y ago
    Let's hope so!
    • StefanWestfal 4y ago
      Why would you hope for suffering of millions?
      • bnt 4y ago
        I feel OP is welcoming Germany’s demise as the Economic Powerhouse of Europe rather than suffering of people. Tho, both are linked because Germany is a net-importer of human capital and many will be forced to move back East, thus further pushing East Europe back into poverty.
        • Normille 4y ago
          No. I'm welcoming Germany's [and on a wider level, the EU's] demise as their just desserts for acting as the US's poodle for the past several decades, instead of seizing the opportunity to create an independent and non-aligned Europe as a force for good in the world. But, yes, my remarks are aimed at nations and what they stand for, rather than people.
    • l_ron_mcbong 4y ago
      You do realize that we live in a globalized economy and that a collapse of the German economy would have significant consequences for the world at large?
  • philwelch 4y ago
    Russia is establishing this threat for leverage and Germany will probably concede to Russia’s demands rather than suffer this consequence.
• 1270018080 4y ago
  The rough polygon of Idaho - California - Arizona becoming less habitable every year. Mass migration to the east, water wars between wealthy landowners using most of dwindling water supply for agriculture and the rest of the population for drinking. I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
  • collegeburner 4y ago
    There's an easy thing we can do to start fixing: ban ag exports. We been subsidizing it for too long and literally shipping our water overseas. We reduce our own ag production to feed just us, even those uses of water are probably doable.
  • throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Buy land in Rustbelt cities. I’m convinced a warmer Buffalo with unlimited water is a very appealing option for people on water rations in a 128f Phoenix.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• samwillis 4y ago
  Tooling for developing real-time collaborative remote working environments is about to take of dramatically. CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market. Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view. CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free. The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_dat... 1: https://github.com/yjs/yjs https://github.com/yjs/yjs 2: https://github.com/automerge/automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge
  • ivanvanderbyl 4y ago
    Another project to add to the list is Replicache https://github.com/rocicorp/replicache https://github.com/rocicorp/replicache
  • cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
    Did this 20 years ago in an FMMS. It's not worth it. It's better to have an arbiter source of truth that can guarantee ACID principles with transactions rather than introduce merge conflicts or lose transactions for lack of synchronization. The internet is almost everywhere, so use that rather than provide academic features that cause more headaches than they solve. SQL databases with transactions and row locks are invaluable inventions. Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines. You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
• EddySchauHai 4y ago
  AR seems a pretty safe bet, things like HUDs for warehouse workers to improve their productivity.
• wizofaus 4y ago
  If by "few people" you mean "few people of the sort you might encounter on HN" then I'd be willing to bet the next big not-much-discussed thing comes out of China, maybe India. The sheer number of engineers in those two countries virtually guarantees some of sort revolutionary tech being developed there and taking the world by storm (I wouldn't exactly call TikTok revolutionary but it's a foretaste of what's to come).
• thom 4y ago
  Drone tech is going to get tiny. It’ll have microphones and cameras and it’ll probably be untraceable. It’ll spy on you arbitrarily and the equivalent of 4chan will have access to it in abundance. You will never again have any form of privacy unless you buy expensive countermeasures for your home and office. Fortunately deepfakes will be so good you can blame it all on that.
  • LeonTheremin 4y ago
    Criminals trained in 4chan will just hack other people's drones and use them instead of buying drones themselves. But they don't need drones, actually, these criminals already have access to Microwave Weaponry and Electromagnetic Surveillance.
  • jacknews 4y ago
    Yes, I watched some drone light-show/fireworks displays recently, and thought, 'wait till the drones are the size of flies, these shows will be happening in restaurants, bars, in your living room'. Imagine walking into a room full of fireflies that move around you as you walk, etc.
    • jazzyjackson 4y ago
      Bottleneck has been and continues to be energy density. But eventually there will be a breakthrough in battery tech and we will reach new heights of utopia/dystopia.
      • jacknews 4y ago
        That is true, but also remember the air gets relatively thicker as you get smaller, so flight gets easier.
    • machiaweliczny 4y ago
      Now imagine swarm of these with gps trackers and a laser gun following them. I bet US army already is working on it.
• YossarianFrPrez 4y ago
  I don't know about "big" in terms of a viral hit, but in terms of what will change in our day-to-day experience... Here are some wild guesses, mostly along the theme of a societal conversation about and re-thinking of "sustainability" on nearly all levels. * Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes. * An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc. * Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect. * Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater. * Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away? * Short-hop electric plane taxi things. * Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics. * The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc. The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction. Also: * Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
  • voisin 4y ago
    > Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect. It shocks me how slow municipalities are to adopt this. How many sidewalks and paths in hot sunny climates have zero shade. And it is so cheap! Also, how about how many kids playgrounds, or school yards have zero shade?
    • YossarianFrPrez 4y ago
      Especially given that the time to plant the trees is now rather than when they are really going to be needed. There is likely a way to do it / provide shade with native plants too, that would require less up-keep...
  • huijzer 4y ago
    > Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals. Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!" Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm" Doctor: "No. 100." Computer: "Patient received 400 milligrams"
• ohiovr 4y ago
  The west coast of the USA will be a desert very soon. Probably within a few years. Soon 40 million people will be without sanitation water. Then the next step is no drinking water.
  • GoodJokes 4y ago
  • tmaly 4y ago
    How soon is soon?
    • hattmall 4y ago
      Never. We will spend trillions of dollars to pump and desalinate, and as we do so costs will come down.
      • JasserInicide 4y ago
        You say that now, but our leaders have regressed to such a degree that I don't believe they have any kind of foresight to plan ahead more than a couple years.
• grej 4y ago
  Food shortages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will lead to immediate grain shortages. Decreased yields in future harvests will be created due to fertilizer shortages.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• ortusdux 4y ago
  WLAN sensing. Off the shelf mesh wifi systems are capable of sensing people reliably. This includes qty, position, motion, & gestures. Here is the IEEE spec due for approval in a year or two: https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm I have mixed feelings on the tech. The home security implications are amazing, and things like automatic fall detection for the elderly would be a literal lifesaver. Small business could gain great insight into customer behavior. On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people? Anyway, Plume already makes a home security system that utilizes the tech. https://support.plume.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043364893 https://support.plume.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043364893
  • alexpotato 4y ago
    > On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people? I would imagine you just take the "country/private club" model and extend it out. e.g. a private club enforces limits on who can access the club and you get more "privacy" since the other people in the club also had to pass through those limits. In this case, the club/hotel/builder of your house can say "the walls are all Faraday rated so that you get audio, visual and EM privacy when you stay here"
    • viggity 4y ago
      I can't imagine most people are going to put up with their cellphones not working in exchange for the privacy
      • rewq4321 4y ago
        Not the person you're replying to, but if you're willing to do that to your walls, you're probably willing to pay for an external antenna and internal transmitter
  • 4y ago
• sys_64738 4y ago
  EVs and the ability to power your house for several days. I think the combination of solar and and EV provide the ability to store power when the sun goes down. This starts to solve one of solar's paradoxes IMO.
  • soramimo 4y ago
    I thought about this too and came to the conclusion that home and EV batteries probably have different requirements. For instance, a home battery might have to be more durable (so withstand more charging cycles) but on the flip side can be heavier. That said there might be synergies by repurposing worn out EV batteries as home or grid storage batteries.
    • asdff 4y ago
      There is no chance that these corporations will allow us to repurpose our used EV batteries. Tesla doesn't even let you work on your car.
• mikewarot 4y ago
  Deglobalization -- In the US, we're about to be forced to rebuild all the manufacturing we outsourced since the 1970s. It's not going to go well for thos countries dependent on imported food or energy. It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them) Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
  • tkgally 4y ago
    > Deglobalization That’s what I was going to say. Some people have been talking about it [1, 2], but it’s not yet getting the attention it deserves. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220702164210/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/opinion/globalization-global-culture-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220702164210/https://www.nytim... [2] https://www.harperbusiness.com/book/9780063230477/The-End-of-the-World-Is-Just-the-Beginning-Peter-Zeihan/ https://www.harperbusiness.com/book/9780063230477/The-End-of...
    • TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
      For discussing deglobalization, those articles have a very perceivable 'Western Bias' and i'm from the US
  • kvothe_ 4y ago
    unlikely we'll rebuild locally. We will outsource it to a friendlier country with cheap labor. In 50 yrs the cycle will repeat. (Probably South America.)
    • orangepurple 4y ago
      That country will be Mexico. There is already a strong logistics relationship with that country and it will only get stronger
• mikewarot 4y ago
  Editors that directly manipulate the Abstract Syntax Tree, and regenerate source code as a view, offer unmatched ability to refactor code.
• Chris_Newton 4y ago
  I wonder what the future holds for WebAssembly. If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously. On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me. Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.
  • neon_electro 4y ago
    What does securing a WebAssembly runtime look like? Have browser developers made good strides on that front yet? Flash declined in part because of its poor security compared to the Web proper (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), so I'm curious where WebAssembly stands.
    • afiori 4y ago
      Until threads are included in WASM its security model is essentially the browser sandbox and scope limitation (WASM modules cannot access the global object nor call arbitrary functions) Essentially WASM can be transpiled to Javascript (or ASM.js more likely) almost line by line and it would have almost the same security. Flash and Java applet were so dangerous because the plugins introduced a ton of new APIs that skipped the browser sandbox. Wasm introduces no new API. For non browser environments WASM mostly brings static validation, opaque external references, and bound checking on linear memory access.
      • neon_electro 4y ago
        Thank you!
• sprkwd 4y ago
  We are currently in the middle of an information dark age. Among other things, information in walled gardens will just vanish without a trace.
  • tmaly 4y ago
    True but for the masses. There are people pushing other perspectives on lesser known networks.
• Balgair 4y ago
  Memristors (sorta) Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day. As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
  • tmaly 4y ago
    I thought HP had announced a breakthrough on these a few years back?
    • fzzzy 4y ago
      Yes. 14 years ago. :)
• smitty1e 4y ago
  Rebellion against the Surveillance Capitalism/State. We understand that granular metrics are needful for tuning an information system. Treating a society like an information system is totalitarian. Over time, the percentage of society rejecting totalitarianism will tend toward 100%
  • elevenoh 4y ago
  • collyw 4y ago
    I hope so, but the last two and a half years hasn't given me much reason to believe it will happen. Most people I know willingly signed up for a vaccine based social credit system without much question.
• gmuslera 4y ago
  If the next big things doesn't include how we generate and use energy, probably the really big next thing may be runaway climate change.
  • collyw 4y ago
    how can people actually believe this pseudoscience. What models have been accurate for a number of year? The IPCC one just averages others, so that is cheating.
    • mcv 4y ago
      What do you mean by "this pseudoscience"? Climate change? Runaway climate change? Climate change is already happening. At what point it becomes runaway climate change is a matter of definition and debate, but there are definitely some processes that reinforce climate change.
  • bilsbie 4y ago
    I feel like I’ve heard this before. When does the runaway change start?
• cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
  Forget general humanish AI and VR, self-programming systems will put a lot of low skilled coders out of work. FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
  • Normille 4y ago
• keenboy 4y ago
  Can I say what I hope/wish were on the horizon? 1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly. 2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
  • conductr 4y ago
    > legislation would likely move more quickly I tend to think the slow pace is a feature not a bug. Could you imagine if something like Roe v Wade was flip flopping every 4 years on political whims? That said, I do think a modern democracy should have more frequent digital voting abilities perhaps on a policy level. Voting for a person you hope will represent you, it’s a decent concept when you lack technology but as we know it’s heavily flawed as well. I don’t quite understand how we can build something like Bitcoin but can’t solve digital voting in a way that’s not constantly under threat of hacking/some Evil manufacturer etc.
    • neon_electro 4y ago
      The United States has a mechanism for slow-moving policy; the Constitution. That doesn't mean we can't have other mechanisms for policy that can be more nimble, local, or "temporary" (for better or worse). Tech policy is the best example of legislation that can't keep up with reality on the ground. (subject to corruption from monied interests, of course)
      • conductr 4y ago
        Does tech legislation need to be kept up more quickly? I really like the default being no regulation and filling in where needed. It’s reactive by nature. I don’t know what broad legislation would have been put in place proactively to help tech be better governed (without specifying honing in on a specific business/industry after the fact). I fear more of if the legislation process is too fast moving it become subject to mob mentality. Instead of #deletefacebook we may have gone straight to a knee jerk reaction of legislation that bans social media which I’m not sure I want to live in that world either.
• Shoemaker666 4y ago
  Fungus based mycoprotein for food and seawater battery. Im hopeful that the energy derived from saltwater may reduce the pollution of watervessels and maybe help in having more sustainable solutions where robots powered by the sea could be cleaning up the pollution.
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    Any ongoing projects in this space that would be worth checking out?
  • mslupski1 4y ago
    Yesss I feel like we're only scratching the surface of how powerful fungi are, and we'll keep uncovering new, amazing properties that will help us survive.
• 656565656565 4y ago
  Population control? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning We will have no choice eventually.
  • philwelch 4y ago
    If we have to introduce population control it will be to increase the population. All developed countries are below replacement.
    • CalRobert 4y ago
      Is that bad? Surely we can manage with fewer than 8 billion people. A gradual reduction should be welcomed.
      • philwelch 4y ago
        You first.
        • mcv 4y ago
          That's exactly what's happening. Lots of people are already not having any kids.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • CalRobert 4y ago
          Are you suggesting I'm advocating euthanasia? I just meant natural reduction in population over time due to lower birth rates.
      • bilsbie 4y ago
        The more people we have the more specialization we can have. Do you want 1000 people designing a jet engine or 20? What problems could we solve if we doubled the scientists and engineers working on it? Plus every new birth is a lottery ticket for our civilization getting the next Einstein.
• WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  Prompt engineering. The perfection of "programming as verbal intelligence".
  • abledon 4y ago
    In the case of Dall-E, isn't a hack for that to design _another_ ML system that looks at the training data 'descriptions' and infer a correct prompt strcture for the desired result. so the human uses this secondary system as a 'guide' to constructing prompts to navigate them towards the result (image) they want?
    • JamesSwift 4y ago
      I think in some cases you're right. But generally I think the real answer is more along the lines of near-realtime generation of results. That way you can iterate quickly to get closer to what you are looking for, and experiment with different approaches to see which is more aligned with how the AI model thinks about things.
  • kordlessagain 4y ago
    I'm working on prompt engineering. I can confirm this is the next big thing that hardly anyone is thinking about. I'm getting good results from simple approaches to storing and retrieving memories of past conversations and crawled/indexed documents. This is being built at https://mitta.us/ https://mitta.us/ https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Bx-fUfKedZ5 https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Bx-fUfKedZ5 inventive-anteater|> The website discusses an approach for improving the accuracy of the GPT3 language model by providing feedback to the model based on user interactions. The goal is to allow users to interactively teach the model to avoid common mistakes, such as misinterpretations of word meanings. The implementation of this approach is described, and four tasks are used to demonstrate how the model can be substantially improved with user feedback.
  • Workaccount2 4y ago
    I can't help but feel that this will be a fleeting skill. As humans work towards clearer communication with AI, AI will be working towards clearer understanding of humans.
• saberdancer 4y ago
  Russia will collapse.
  • mcv 4y ago
    I fear this is a definite possibility, and it's terrifying. Because the main thing that Russia has, their only real claim to being a major power, and the only reason why they've been able to get away with their invasion, is their nukes. And if the country really collapses, who knows what will happen to those nukes? I don't mean to upset anyone, and I think the chance of collapse is small, but it's not zero.
    • leesec 4y ago
      They didn't use nukes during the collapse of Soviet Union.
      • trash3 4y ago
        Only barely
      • greenpeas 4y ago
        The fear is not that they will use nukes during the collapse, but that after the collapse, there will be multiple smaller nations, each with their own supply of nukes and unpredictable governments. This was also a concern during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the US government worked closely with the USSR government to make sure that all nuclear weapons remain within Russia. In particular, Ukraine was forced/convinced to give up its nuclear arsenal.
        • nnoitra 4y ago
          Why aren't you afraid that Israel has nukes or Pakistan?
          • throwayyy479087 4y ago
            I am worried about Pakistan’s nukes. Israel has been a responsible regional power and I’m Jewish so i don’t worry about them.
• rdtwo 4y ago
  I think the next big theme right now is energy. From generation to storage to consumption were going to rethink how we deal with it. Right now our pricing model is broken due to government regulation but I think the coming energy crisis will push utilities to use spot rate metering like Texas has already started in places. Spot rate metering will finally make iot (formally known as the internet of shit) actually make sense as many of appliances can store energy while it’s cheap and dispense while it’s expensive (fridge, ac, water heater, even house heat). This will really help level load the grid and allow us to do more with existing capacity
  • bannedbybros 4y ago
  • jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    I think I speak for a lot of people when I say the last thing I want is for my local power grid to become a low regulation real time market. We've seen the flaws of the Texas approach, and doubling down on it with a sprinkling of IOT tech on top is not gonna go anywhere good.
    • dont__panic 4y ago
      Not to mention the fact that IoT consumes lots of unnecessary power and stuff like Nest that tries to "conserve energy with AI" ends up consuming more power for an ultimately shittier experience than simply manually managing the system. I suspect since there's money to extract and profit for the power companies, this will happen anyway in the next 5-10 years across the USA. I'm already bracing for the internet providers to start the same bullshit, claiming that the pipes are getting clogged at peak times...
      • rdtwo 4y ago
        We need to stop thinking about power and bandwidth on a per unit basis. There are times when it’s free someone’s you might even get paid to burn it and others when it’s super expensive. As for nest I agree it’s a shit experience and actually ends up peak loading the grid.
• solumunus 4y ago
  BBBY
  • felurx 4y ago
    I could only find "Bed, Bath & Beyond" as a search result for that. Could you maybe say what that acronym means, and elaborate?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• throwaway787544 4y ago
  The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustainable, as we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. And the climate picture isn't great either, with not enough new clean energy capacity going online, and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs. Even with all of this new work, there will be only a small reduction in carbon emissions. Basically there are so many things that can go wrong in the next 18 years, and so many things we don't even have a plan for, that all the estimates we've been given will result in dysfunction, increased prices, and soaring secondary markets. A lot of people are going to make money just from preparing for things to go wrong.
  • mdip 4y ago
    > we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. > Basically there are so many thing sthat can go wrong in the next 18 years ... There has to be a name for this particular kind of response to change (usually positive change[0]). Please don't read this as crapping on your points -- they're all valid. The problem is that it's identifying problems that "may occur in the future" using what technology we have, today, to solve them. It also presents those in a vacuum and ignores the unknown of what the world could look like after new vehicles sales gradually transition to 80% electric. We can speculate more easily on the negative, but it's a lot harder to predict the positive -- at least, the "societal changing positive effects". Consider that newer EVs can power your home during a power loss, or integrating EVs into the grid, itself. Reliance on traditional automobiles and how we rely on them is changing, as well. My driving habits, due to the vast availability of fully-remote work and the purchase of a OneWheel have been drastically reduced[1]. I went from ~20 gallons/week to ~10 gallons/month of gas. I've done the math a few times and it's stupid for me to own an ICE vehicle. I own it out of a desire of convenience that could probably be eliminated with Uber and when my kids are out of the house, I probably will no longer own a car. Until then, however, my car could basically be filling in that 30% gap (or whatever the gap happens to be at this very moment). Articles that recently hit the front page of HN related to Geothermal conversion of Coal Plants[2], the myriad of posts related to companies attempting the modern-day alchemy called "Nuclear Fusion", there's a lot of energy/money being spent in the space, much of it having nothing to do with reducing climate change but providing for an increasingly electricity dependent future. Even the incredibly slow-moving electric companies have made some pretty serious progress. I think back on my short life; I happen to currently live in the city I grew up in -- losing the power for a few days in the summer was a "normal thing", as was losing it during every miserable thunderstorm. The price of whole-home generators and the hardware to integrate it were so cost-prohibitive that few people owned one. I still do not, however, I've lost power maybe four times this year for under ten seconds. I've lost power once in three years for over an hour (still restored in under four hours). [0] I'm thinking something succinct like Hanlon's Razor. [1] 2,800 miles and going since I bought it. I grocery shop with it ... it's a good upper body workout carrying 6 bags back 1-3 miles. [2] Filed under "I'll believe it when I see it" but still.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  We saw a post the other day about using DALL-E and GPT-3 in conjunction with one another. I think more of these systems working together is going to revolutionize basically everything, especially when democratized with cheaper consumer hardware.
  • throwaddzuzxd 4y ago
    Did DALL-E and GPT-3 revolutionize anything yet? (I know it might sound snarky but it's not my intention, I genuinely wonder how they're used today, other than demos)
    • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      Revolutionize? No. I don't mean DALL-E or GPT-3 specifically, just that tech. I think as the hardware needed to run these gets cheaper and the tech is applied to other domains we will see revolutionary changes. My vision depends heavily on the forward march of progress with bigger better compute available cheaper.
    • rieTohgh6 4y ago
      If nothing else DALL-E showed that automation will takeover artists jobs too. GPT-3 can generate quite sensible paragraphs but is far away from generating pages of internally consistent content. On there other hand it works OK as semantic aware knowledge base: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32348768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32348768
• erokar 4y ago
  Lab-Grown Meat. Potentially revolutionary impact on reduction of animal suffering and climate change.
  • lopis 4y ago
    I think before lab meat, we're going to see an explosion in both volume and diversity of plant-based meats. Discount chains in Europe and NA are jumping on the bandwagon and creating all sorts of plant-based products and bringing the price way down - already cheaper than meat sometimes. Plant-based raw materials are the cheapest, we just need to improve processes and scale up. And unless governments increase meat subsidies even more, it's likely that meat, specially beef becomes too expensive for some people to eat regularly in the next 10 years.
    • asdff 4y ago
      Plant based raw materials are often cheapest, but unfortunately the plant based meats are often far from being raw material and are highly processed. Expensive too.
  • gbersac 4y ago
    I came here to say that.
• tboyd47 4y ago
  Türkiye is becoming the China of Europe in terms of manufacturing.
  • fomine3 4y ago
    Could you introduce some examples, like ODMs?
    • tboyd47 4y ago
      Unfortunately no. I don't work in the field, but I just spent a few months there networking for business, and everyone is getting into the export/import business. Even housewives are making money just buying products at the local malls and dropshipping them to Europe. The labor is ridiculously cheap after the lira crash, raw materials for practically anything can be sourced domestically, and it's right in the neighborhood of everywhere except America and China.
      • O__________O 4y ago
        Lira crash is cause, it’s not sustainable.
        • tboyd47 4y ago
          Perhaps, or maybe the world is transforming.
          • O__________O 4y ago
            Feel feel to name even a single manufacturer in Turkey that’s now more competitive that a comparable Chinese manufacturer within past year and provide reasoning beyond the collapse of the lira that they’ll be able to maintain that edge; otherwise you’re just speculating without even anecdotal examples, likely bias, and clearly have a conflict of interests, given you’re recent trip to the area.
            • 4y ago
• kickout 4y ago
  Autonomous machines operating in farm land in the USA. Several billion dollar companies could be spun up. Ripe for the taking right now/
  • kurthr 4y ago
    There are several I know of right now, although they're each in very specific spaces. From weeding, to insect removal, to high value picking.
    • kickout 4y ago
      There are a few no doubt. For being either 10x or 100x simpler problem to solve than full self-driving, there are far fewer companies pursuing it. All of the tech companies and all the ICE car companies should (in theory) be able to solve these problems on their way to FSD. But it largely ignored IMO.
  • pj_mukh 4y ago
    "Several billion dollar companies could be spun up" cries in John Deere Monopoly
    • kickout 4y ago
      They and Case deserve to be dethroned. They _should_ understand the problem and have the engineers to solve it, but I think they haven't figured out how to monetize it so they slow-walk it or down play it.
  • markisus 4y ago
    I heard about many companies in this space that have since shut down / become acquihired. Root AI acquired by AppHarvest [1], Abundant Robotics (shut down) [2], Traptic acquired by Bowery [3]. To me, this suggests that the problem is hard. Last I checked, the state of the art in robotic grasping seems similar to the state of many other AI systems before ML hit the scene. It's super-mathematized all to the questionable end of analyzing how a few points points can optimally apply forces to simple convex polytopes. A similar feeling exists when you look at the state of path planning for robotic arms. There, collisions must be avoided at all costs because we don't have the mathematics for it. So you make this super precise plan that carefully snakes its way around all the little voxels that happen to become occupied in your occupancy grid. To execute these plans we need to manufacture robots with expensive harmonic gearing and sub-millimeter level repeatability. These types of robots would not be economical for outdoor picking tasks. To make progress, I think there will have to be new ML techniques and new lower cost robotic hardware developed in tandem. [1] https://www.appharvest.com/press_release/appharvest-acquires-agricultural-robotics-and-artificial-intelligence-company-root-ai-to-increase-efficiency/ https://www.appharvest.com/press_release/appharvest-acquires... [2] https://www.therobotreport.com/abundant-robotics-shuts-down-fruit-harvesting-business/ https://www.therobotreport.com/abundant-robotics-shuts-down-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/following-acquisition-by-bowery-traptics-strawberry-picking-robotics-move-into-vertical-farming/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/following-acquisition-by-b...
• historytold 4y ago
  +++ News: +++ Aged Worker remain having social-contacts to colleagues and may have satisfying feelings if their knowledge is in demand. And like any other 'bubble' at least the ultimate goal seem to fleece somebody. Honestly the whole point of this is 'to make things easier'. +++ P-:
  • outsidetheparty 4y ago
    I'm having a very difficult time understanding what you're trying to get across here; can you rephrase?
    • mdp2021 4y ago
      I think the poster assumes that identification of trends reveals basically greed. And makes a plausible point in noting that the purpose of engineering is to alleviate and improve quality of life. Only, the tone is not really appropriate (and less so the assumptions).
• cauthon 4y ago
  Hey everybody, at the time I’m posting this, four of the top five comments are about energy. Many people are in fact talking about the climate crisis.
  • elevenoh 4y ago
• ChadNauseam 4y ago
  Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like. This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence. I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average. If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.
  • colinmhayes 4y ago
    Rich people already have children that are more attractive than average. Being attractive is the biggest signal for generational wealth which reinforces the need for trophy spouses which reinforces the signal and so on.
    • ChadNauseam 4y ago
      They're also probably smarter than average, because people who are smart are more likely to become rich. But I'm worried this will accelerate the effect. On the other hand, if you make the technology available to everyone, the effect would be mitigated
    • rgrieselhuber 4y ago
      Of the truly rich today, can you honestly say that they are more attractive than average? I’m not seeing it. I’m not talking Hollywood level but much higher, generational wealth levels. I realize that it’s hard to get data on this but just anecdotally, there aren’t many examples that come to mind.
• searchableguy 4y ago
• Vox_Leone 4y ago
  Real holographic display: To create an aerial hologram [or a 3d image in space if you will], you need something that will emit light at precise locations throughout a given volume. I'm investigating the use of Moller electron scattering[0] to create voxels in a 3d coordinate system. Two electron beams crossing and colliding will emit photons [voxels]. If you can orchestrate collisions in a very fast fashion at various 3d coordinates in an vacuum chamber you could generate a complete image. I'm working on an article discussing the idea in full, to be published on my blog. My goal is to establish prior art, so this idea cannot be patented. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B8ller_scattering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B8ller_scattering
  • defterGoose 4y ago
    Nitpick: not a real hologram. Additionally, it sounds like a massively power intensive way to do volumetric display. I don't know the total conversion efficiency to photons, but it can't be that high. More recent techniques like stacked panels might be a better way forward for this.
    • Olreich 4y ago
      So what is the definition of a real hologram? Lots of points of light in 3D outside of the media projecting it seems like exactly what I’d expect for a hologram.
      • defterGoose 4y ago
        For it to be a hologram, you'd need to be able to reproduce arbitrary wavefronts in real time. This gives you the ability to have features like occlusion, which you don't have with a "points of light" display. I.e., everything will appear translucent.
  • abracadaniel 4y ago
    I’m ready for a comeback of CRTs in the form of a crazy double electron gun hologram display. Bring it on
  • 4y ago
• irthomasthomas 4y ago
  Total sensor fusion
  • blurbleblurble 4y ago
    If you're talking about what I think you're talking about this is freaky as heck and will hit people out of nowhere Imagine this: https://youtu.be/NdTxgakQ-VA https://youtu.be/NdTxgakQ-VA (Spatial mm-wave imagery) ...crossed with all the data about you from social media, your phone sensor data, ad tracker data, location data and your gestural fingerprint from the many hours of VR gaming you've put in? And then imagine this can be synthesized and queried vaguely, generically and qualitatively via some GPT style interface to estimate your whereabouts, your mental state, to anticipate your plans, intentions, deeply personal interests etc.?
• woeirua 4y ago
  Nuclear war. It has fallen out of favor to talk about this as a serious possibility, but the world is in many ways closer to nuclear armageddon right now than it has been at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
  • c7DJTLrn 4y ago
    Ironically this could all be happening because a lack of nukes. Ukraine gave theirs away and have been left essentially naked and defenceless since. Would Putin have thought twice if they had a nuclear arsenal? Who knows.
    • machiaweliczny 4y ago
      I know, yes.
    • spywaregorilla 4y ago
      Ukraine didn't have the codes to use them.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        A nation-state reverse engineering the codes/ignition module is easier than collecting everything from scratch. But the general thought is that NATO would have had to protect them (I don't buy it, but that's the theory).
        • lesuorac 4y ago
          Why would NATO protect Ukraine? Nato isn't a signatory of the Budapest Memo [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
          • 4y ago
• Geee 4y ago
  General purpose humanoid robots. They're kind of mainstream idea, but very few people talk about them or take them seriously. Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future. Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software will apply to labor. Imagine pulling an open-source repo from Github for a log house. If you want, make changes and simulate the output beforehand. Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec. Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth. Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
  • ratg13 4y ago
    This is the one that scares me the most because the labor benefits are so big that the field will advance quickly, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts fitting them with rifles.
    • spaetzleesser 4y ago
      I always wonder what would have happened if the Bush administration had had such robots available in 2003. There were quite a few people in power who thought the US should just invade any country they don’t like and “fix” it. Turns out this was way more difficult than thought and cost soldiers’ lives but what if invading a country just costs money?
    • andsoitis 4y ago
      > and it's only a matter of time before someone starts fitting them with rifles. "DHS has chosen to lease its robot dog technology from Ghost Robotics, which has also debuted a company equipped with long-range guns" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/robot-dogs-us-mexico-border-surveillance-technology https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/robot-dogs-u...
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    “Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.l I wonder how the capitalists will deal with this. If we have a robot that can build and maintain a house and grow food for you, how will they make money?
• motohagiography 4y ago
  Reasoning it through, what don't people politely talk about? Sex, money, politics, and religion. Sex: the impact of the normalization of casual sex work on sustainable families, and how specific tech and financial services for managing single motherhood will be huge. Money: financial alternatives to emerging social credit based systems, grey markets, working class capital/savings flight, cyberpunk dystopia. Politics: polarization becomes relative isolation, increasing demand for parallel tribe-based economic and information services. Religion: pendulum swinging back from civic secularism among those disenfranchised by said secularists. Reconciliation of old time religions with current tech and science. The christianization of fringe ideas like "ancient astronaut theorists," conspiracy theories, simulation theory. True or not, they're big and not talked about in polite company.
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    The grey markets are intersecting with the parallel economies which are intersecting with the religious fringes. I disagree with you on the sex one though, people are already having less sex. This is also intersecting with what you are saying about religion.
    • orangepurple 4y ago
      I don't understand anything you just wrote
      • kuramitropolis 4y ago
        Blessed.
    • Bjartr 4y ago
      Where does the less sex statistic come from?
  • tomuli38 4y ago
    How exactly are secularlists disenfranchising religions? There is a large swathe believing the separation of church and state is religious oppression, and they act like the country is not for those of all faiths.
• rcarr 4y ago
  Don't know much about it but from what I gather quantum computing leaves anything that is only protected by a password very vulnerable to hacking.
• clavalle 4y ago
  The US codifying privacy as a Right. Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent. When it changes, its going to be all at once.
  • moistly 4y ago
    Codifying privacy as a right is not in the interest of corporations. I am extremely sceptical that the US government will harm corporations for something most people obviously don’t care about. The success of Facebook, Tictoc, Nest, etc are definitive proof that most people do not care about their privacy at all.
    • clavalle 4y ago
      I agreed with that...right up to Roe v Wade being overturned. Privacy is going to become a very important issue very quickly as some states start to make laws that will be shockingly backward to most people. And those laws will be sticky and will require Amendment level changes to correct. To prevent an Amendment, even Repbulicans will introduce sweeping and broad privacy laws and will likely point to big tech companies as scapegoats to divert attention from their own generally unpopular activities (that play great to their base so they don't get primaried out). Corporations are going to get swept up in the melee unless they begin to self-govern in a very real way very quickly to get ahead of this. Because every personal data player that does something can can be spun negatively will be dragged through the mud for political points from both sides.
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Governments source huge volumes of information from private organizations, very unlikely they would limit these organizations unless they had a way to gain the information in other ways that are unlikely to be cut off long-term.
  • alexb_ 4y ago
    >Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent. What incentive do they have to change? If anything, this seems to suggest the exact opposite, that privacy will never be codified as a right.
• personjerry 4y ago
  One thing I've been thinking about is, how do you scale tourism? Edit for clarification: For example, the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0] As population gets higher more and more people want to visit the top destinations, and when a new one gets "found" it gets flooded (see Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones hype) Because of physical limitations these experiences don't scale - there's a finite number of destinations in the world and an ever-growing population. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-tourism-register-pay.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
  • trgn 4y ago
    You don't have to. If the local environment becomes nicer (for americans, not a soul crushing schmear of strip malls and parking lots), people will do more things closer to home. The driving aspiration of the future will be that you live in a place worth visiting. Not a place you look forward to flee 2-3 times a year.
    • personjerry 4y ago
      That's just not true, the top tourism destinations are more popular than ever since covid restrictions have laxed, and the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-tourism-register-pay.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
  • Torwald 4y ago
    AirBnB?
  • paganel 4y ago
    The trend is to de-scale it, most probably airplane tickets will get even more expensive (I'm talking about things here in Europe), not to mention accommodation. It will suck for countries like Greece or Spain, which depend a lot on tourism money, but there's not much that they can do about it.
• Flatcircle 4y ago
  There’s a real possibility housing prices might go down or sideways for a decade or more. Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    If population starts to drop, people are going to be absolutely astounded to realize a house is a depreciating asset, and if the land isn't increasing in value to make up for it, it becomes a cost-center.
  • DontchaKnowit 4y ago
    I think that inflation will balance this out. E.g. the value will depreciate in real terms but because most people purchase with borrowed money it will not be a serious problem.
  • adrianmonk 4y ago
    It's absolutely possible that it's artificially high right now since it has risen so much. With a big jump, you can never tell whether it's the right amount, too little, or too much. But fundamentally, supply is short due to years of falling behind on building it after the ~2008 mortgage crisis. It's going to take a really long time to catch up on that backlog. There's a relatively low maximum percentage you can increase the supply each year. And now that mortgage rates are higher again and there are recession fears, investors may not be as excited about putting their money into housing construction. So we will have less of a push in the next few years to close that supply gap. So I think the prices may fall or stagnate, but I doubt the bottom will fall out of real estate. IMHO, another factor is that the pattern of development has changed. For a long time in the US, the pattern was sprawl, which presents few barriers to building huge amounts of housing because the land is cheap and maybe even in some unincorporated area with no red tape. Now, many people prefer density (or at least not sprawl), which means the housing that's in demand is more redevelopment and infill than giant new subdivisions. That's more tedious, more expensive, and more regulated, so it will happen more slowly. So another reason why supply is limited.
• moron123 4y ago
  Mushroom cultivation
  • throwayyy479087 4y ago
    I would invest in Ecovative if that was at all possible
• f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  Virtual Reality.
• emehex 4y ago
  I'm not sure enough people are talking about Demographics and population decline, especially with respect to China. Some experts [1] predict that China's population in 2050 will be HALF of what it is today! [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-rise-51655929850 https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...
  • JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Would that mean the population then will be much wealthier (as happened after the Black Plague)?
    • bombcar 4y ago
      It depends on how you measure it and how it happens, but if each couple has one kid, and that kid inherits from both parents, after awhile the kids are inheriting a decent amount. Or, all the excess "wealth" could be sucked up by the government/companies/large land-holders and everyone else stay roughly the same.
    • throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Unknown. It's never been tried in an industrialized nation. I have a feeling it could easily go the other way and return China to poverty with not enough people to sustain their current economic output. That depends a lot on what's possible to do with automation. It could also have drastic effects on the knowledge sector, breaking down chains of training and knowledge transfer. A lot of expertise could be lost.
      • asdff 4y ago
        If you want to see the results of a fully industrialized area losing over half its population look at urban Detroit.
    • rednerrus 4y ago
      The End of The World Is Just The Beginning delves pretty deep into this. Very interesting read.
• aaron695 4y ago
• jollyllama 4y ago
  People are aware of Deepfakes and AI generated media, and worried about it being used to generate fake news. I haven't seen a lot of talk about it being used to change our generally accepted histories, but I've been thinking about that for a while.
• m101 4y ago
  China invading Taiwan. Demographic problems (low birth rates).
• Spakman 4y ago
  I'm not nearly educated enough about this subject to try to summarise it, but the research being carried out by Michael Levin's group into how organisms control anatomy growth is completely fascinating and has the feel of a breakthrough. Almost all the talks I've seen are good, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0 Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!
  • polishdude20 4y ago
    Oh yeah I saw this a while ago on HN. Really mind blowing. I can definitely see us being able to regenerate limbs in the future because of this.
  • a1371 4y ago
    This one is the winner for me in the thread. I saw a video of it a while ago and I was fascinated by the idea that voltage differences are the way the DNA gets expressed. Yet nobody seems to be taking about the bioelectrical science of it except for this small academic crowd.
  • pettusftw 4y ago
    I am also not nearly educated enough, and also following this work very closely. With the strides made in the past several years I'm always surprised I don't see it being discussed more (outside of a niche of academics)
  • alickz 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. I have no background in biology but from what I gathered watching the talk this is some real sci-fi shit. Very cool
• Kyragem 4y ago
  Food waste contributes 7% to global warming. We need to figure out how to make food last longer.
  • dustractor 4y ago
    I agree on the issue but not 100% behind the solution. Making food last longer is something we've already optimized with hundreds of years of innovation so it seems like it would be better to focus on other aspects of the issue. Do you mean: Better preservatives? Better packaging? Better Refrigeration? Transportation? Here's a small example: An intact cabbage kept in a cool dark place will last orders of magnitude longer than the same cabbage, pre-shredded, in a plastic bag. The intact cabbage needs NO ENERGY INPUT whereas the cabbage that's been shredded and bagged needs CONSTANT ENERGY INPUT. The benefits of shredded versus intact cabbage come in terms of the employer being able to externalize a small amount of labor cost, at the expense of a small amount of extra plastic waste and an inferior product.
• trgn 4y ago
  I'll propose a more utopian future. The end of modernism and a return to humanism. A realization in the West that fetishizing technology has turned people into widgets. A genuine bottom-up counter movement that already exists today, but will be the mainstream. Man will yet again be measure of all things, rather than adapt to the measure. In practice; things like the triumph of the walkable city; more home schooling; disappearance of wage labor and more unionization, cooperative work-arrangements, stock-compensation; the extended family as the main arrangement to raise children; bans on social media and pornography; more GDPR and privacy-laws, ...
  • mdp2021 4y ago
    > a more utopian future Based on what, on the realistic intervention of which actors? And are you sure all the ideals in your set can be considered objective, naturally sharable, as opposed to ideological and partial?
    • trgn 4y ago
      > And are you sure all the ideals in your set can be considered objective, naturally sharable, as opposed to ideological and partial? Agreed, they are not objective. If you wish, you can change my first phrase to "a more dystopian future", if you think it's worse.
  • astrange 4y ago
    We already ended modernism. It ended when GenX grew up and didn't join the hippie counterculture. If anything, the problem is new generations will be pre-modern again.
    • trgn 4y ago
      > when GenX grew up and didn't join the hippie counterculture. That was a mistake. GenX should have distilled the insights of the hippies, but chucking away the cosplay and fairytales. Modernism has not ended, it is the current state of the world.
• hn2017 4y ago
  Alternative truths - Trump says election was fraudulent, everyone believes it. Crazy stuff like QAnon/Alex Jones. Blatant lies that are objectively false (bigger crowd size, etc..), Sandy Hook shooting didn't exist. Vaccines/5G/Bill Gates cause cancer/zombies. People will start living in an alternate reality devoid of truth which will splinter society
  • dqpb 4y ago
    I heard that coronavirus causes 5G internet.
  • tatrajim 4y ago
    Yes, really unbelievable how Trump completely denied the global consensus that he was being blackmailed by Russia for the "pee tapes". And even worse that Trump's slack-jawed acolytes continued to maintain that the Hunter Biden laptop was genuine when the most reliable mainstream media and intelligence officials all dismissed it as disinformation. How could the Trump idiots believe such transparent propaganda?!
• VonGuard 4y ago
  Bio-organic solar cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason. They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
• Lucent 4y ago
  Are there previous threads asking this from 5, 10, 15 years ago we can read to then see what writers of winning comments now say?
  • kulikalov 4y ago
    https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
• dqpb 4y ago
  Complexity Economics https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/complexity-economics/ https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/complexity-eco...
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  Living in a pod and eating insects.
• justin66 4y ago
  One word: plastics.
• Bjorkbat 4y ago
  The end of the social networking era as we know it. Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it. That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery. Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one. On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over. Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools. Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces. https://sprout.place/ https://sprout.place/ https://www.gather.town/ https://www.gather.town/
• pkrumins 4y ago
  • fzzzy 4y ago
    Rust has been written in rust for over a decade
• mbesto 4y ago
  Psychedelics for mental health: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-psilocybin-molly-mental-health.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-...
• sAbakumoff 4y ago
  how bad we are prepared for the next pandemic that will inevitably happen
• lolcat_cowsay 4y ago
• klntsky 4y ago
  80% of all USD have been printed since 2020. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL
  • david927 4y ago
    This is crazy big news and no one is talking about it.
    • kixiQu 4y ago
      Really? To me it seems to show up in every discussion about the general economy these days.
      • rodneyhayes 4y ago
        The FED printing money? All I hear is everyone blaming everything/everyone but the FED as far as inflation goes.
        • david927 4y ago
          It's not that there's inflation -- it's the level of it. It's massive and will play out in very large terms in the coming years.
        • kixiQu 4y ago
          Yes, the Fed printing money. Memes from the younger, paragraphs from the older. More rarely mentioned by the credentialed, but so ubiquitously brought up by the commentariat that I just can't buy this as "few people are talking about."
  • walls 4y ago
    That's probably because it's not true. You can see the definition of M1 changed at the exact time that chart shows a spike. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.h...
• david927 4y ago
  The end of the US/NATO hegemony / The rise of a BRICS equilibrium If this is true, what does it mean? China will invade Taiwan? What else?
  • throwayyy479087 4y ago
    Brazil is mired in government corruption and scandal and has failed to become even a regional power. Russia is a pariah with a shrinking population and no real economy outside of petrochemicals India is a more hopeful version if Brazil but still enormously corrupt. It’s also in conflict with Pakistan and China. China is more likely to be the next Japan than the next USA. Huge debt from infra spending + population that will halve by 2050 is not a great foundation. They sabre rattle but have never in their history had a blue water navy - the minimum to be a credible military power. My money is on places like Nigeria, Colombia, Namibia, Botswana. Places with relatively good governance and a functioning economic foundation, that are free of distractions from serious regional conflict.
• midislack 4y ago
  WWIV started, WWIII was the global war on terror. WWIV will be between major powers again. Better bring a hat!
  • david927 4y ago
    I wouldn't use those terms but my comment was similar: The end of the US/NATO hegemony / The rise of a BRICS equilibrium
    • midislack 4y ago
      There's to be a big war, too. Between the powers. Probably nuclear. So exciting!
      • david927 4y ago
        My email is in my profile. I'd like to talk more.
• RHSman2 4y ago
  Living simply and for the better of others?
• madrox 4y ago
  From a customer perspective, people are wanting to retreat away from a lot of existing, global players. How many people would use something that's basically Amazon/Google/Facebook/Twitter as long as it isn't Amazon/Google/Facebook/Twitter? The last decade was defined by being the one unicorn that could disrupt an entire industry, but those days are gone and we take it for granted that one company dominating a space isn't a norm. There aren't really more industries that are tech vs non-tech. In the next decade, more businesses will come online to disrupt and compete with tech company incumbents. Customer acquisition costs will go up and personas will become more nuanced.
  • kulikalov 4y ago
    How do you know that a lot of people want that? I personally see a few people in a few communities with a confirmation bias. I’m not saying that you are wrong, just genuinely asking
    • madrox 4y ago
      I can't quantify it any more than anything else in this thread is quantifyable. However, I see a trend in the problems major platforms are having in that they're failing serve lots of niche communities well, and if we've learned from history, consolidation of business under a generic banner like Walmart breeds a wave of specialized, boutique businesses. Shopify is already doing this somewhat to Amazon, and I believe it's a good bet to say this will happen to other platforms in the next decade. There's already been conversations here about how to disrupt Google, and you can't do that by trying to be be Google But Better. You do it by picking a subset of Google and being very, very good at it.
• DennisP 4y ago
  Possibly nuclear fusion. Everybody's still conditioned to respond with the "30 years away" meme, but it's getting serious venture funding because all sorts of enabling technologies have made it a lot more feasible. Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026. Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
  • gkfasdfasdf 4y ago
    Great piece from Bloomberg on funding of modern fusion tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp6W7g9no0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp6W7g9no0w
  • mslupski1 4y ago
    John Carmack mentioned that he's shocked by how little interest Big Capital has in nuclear fission (he's more into fission that fusion). He talks a lot about it in a recent Lex Fridman podcast, a good listen if you're into this. It's weird that this isn't the main focus of the whole energy industry.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      Presumably a lot of scary men who glow in the dark start to really care about your free time and personal connections when you do things with nuclear power.
    • DennisP 4y ago
      I've been meaning to check that out. There are actually a couple dozen fission startups. Fission is definitely an easier technical problem, but more difficult in other ways. Nobody minds if you fuse atoms, but you can't fission them without doing lots of up-front design and spending years getting through regulators. Some regulators are friendlier to new technology than others. Canada does pretty well, and has at least three molten salt reactor startups. Terrestrial Energy in particular is pretty far along and has high praise for their regulators. In the US, the NRC is much more difficult, and it's practically impossible to develop anything here besides a light-water reactor.
• ellis0n 4y ago
  AnimationCPU is a new live coding platform with code/no-code IDE. This demo video https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/732098541 https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/732098541 and some details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32181251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32181251
• entropicgravity 4y ago
  Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric. First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k. Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient. Remember, you read it here first. EDIT ... a few typos
  • simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    > largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) Battleships, Oil tankers, Oil rigs, container ships, nuclear submarines... Are all NOT electric.
    • le-hu 4y ago
      honestly many are, they are just producing their electricity on-site using other fuels :) u can't realy store enough energy in a battery to cruise the atlantic. EDIT - think of nuclear submarine as a swimming nuclear power plant
  • rep_movsd 4y ago
    Too soon The infrastructure to fast charge EVs at home will require power grids to be of much higher capacity. Also all the fossil fuel that we burn now needs replacement by non fossil fuel sources - other than Nuclear nothing can deliver. We already know how slow the world is at re-embracing nuclear, so don't hold your breath just yet
• roberdam 4y ago
  Qualia engineering
• vivegi 4y ago
  1. Passive radiative heating/cooling (paints, coatings, etc.,) 2. Low power electronics and energy harvesters (thermal/clothing, kinetic energy, rf energy harvesters etc.,) 3. Physical logistics networks (similar to Internet Protocol with standard physical containers and transfer networks - land, sea, rail, air) 4. Ubiquitous drone delivery (last mile & long haul) 5. Fiat digital currency/payment networks
  • aglavine 4y ago
    3 looks interesting
  • euroderf 4y ago
    About #3 - I would like to see a city try this. Standard containers and cheap/free mobility platforms for them. Grannies with groceries ? Check. Exhausted mothers with kids ? Check. Food/grocery/purchases delivery ? Check. Moving day ? Check -from living room to elevator to truck.
• wcoenen 4y ago
  Using power from solar panels to synthesize food (or at least, food components like starch). It turns out this can be done much more efficiently than photosynthesis. https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synthesis-carbon.html https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt... I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture. It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.
  • tled 4y ago
    come on, where have you guys been last couple weeks? It's all over HN front page, search 'Solein'.
  • asdff 4y ago
    If its cheap it will be used, doesn't matter what people think. People hate palm oil but its in everything because it has good properties and is cheaper than alternatives.
    • rewq4321 4y ago
      Fun fact: It's also far more environmentally friendly in terms of how much land is required to produce it: https://ourworldindata.org/palm-oil https://ourworldindata.org/palm-oil
  • kulikalov 4y ago
    Are you working in this/ related to this industry?
    • wcoenen 4y ago
      No, this is just my "armchair theorizing". It just makes sense to me that if food production can be done more efficiently in terms of energy and space, then it will eventually happen.
• CraftingLinks 4y ago
  Having gone through a lot of top posts in this thread, it's kind of disappointing how relatively boring these predictions for the future are. That's a sign were in a great wave of pessimism of what the future will bring. That pessimism may well be justified, but there's also an underlying 'hopelessness' emanating from the suggested unambitious 'next big thing'. Otoh, there's no shortage of CGI moonshot projects that feel like scams, so they fail to offset the depressing feeling.
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Generally speaking future is more like the present than most would wish. Climate change is really the biggest change coming and one given the progress that’s been made, likely only going to get worse, not better.
  • _hcuq 4y ago
    Ok…. Just for you I’ll predict flying cars, interstellar travel and everyone wearing silver suits. ;
  • euroderf 4y ago
    How about an AI toaster that can act as therapist and converse with you in the morning, over breakfast, when you are most open/vulnerable ? Naturally it will have zero web access.
  • krageon 4y ago
    This is reasonable commentary. That said, it would be more interesting to read if you gave some examples of optimism that makes sense.
  • mslupski1 4y ago
    Maybe it's not pessimism but realism? We're already living in extremely exciting future times, surrounded from all sides by things that the overwhelming majority of people on Earth couldn't even conceive of 10 years ago. Our brains aren't made to handle so much progress so fast, plus there's plenty of outdated thinking as well as outdated infrastructure out there. There's still a lot of modernization that needs to happen in many niche areas, and maybe that's why the predictions in this thread seem pessimistic. To use a SpaceX metaphor, if human progress were a rocket, we're no longer working on the propulsion, we're currently working on the landing pad and system to bring the rocket back to Earth. Less exciting maybe, but extremely important and difficult nonetheless.
• fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >What's the next big thing that few people are talking about? The people you're talking about have already quit talking about the thing you would now be interested in, so you're too late already.
  • gaws 4y ago
    Or they found a way to profit off the thing and took the conversations to private channels.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  Personal transportation by drone: (Basically, flying cars.) Just imagine, you can travel reasonable distances without needing to deal with traffic. Your drone could pick you up on your roof, and then drop you off on a roof in a city, bypassing roads and traffic. More importantly, if most personal transport is by drone, it means we don't need to invest as much in roads, bridges, and railroads.
• gshevchuk 4y ago
  Multi-material 3D printing: once we're able to combine multiple classes of functional materials, we'll be able to produce really unique products and inventions.
  • pedalpete 4y ago
    One of the things I like about the opportunity in 3D printing is the potential to move manufacturing closer to the source of sale. From an environmental perspective, I believe this is a big win, as well as JIT manufacturing. I'm not suggesting everyone will have a 3D printer, but if we can localize the printing, you can get your same day delivery without warehousing, etc.
• v3ss0n 4y ago
  Survival , you need to survive upcoming disasters first.
• gusbremm 4y ago
  Anything except the metaverse
• royandre2k 4y ago
  A fundamentally new power source, 100% renewable and with unlimited capacity for the entire planet. Since it's not invented yet I unfortunately don't have any details to share until a decade or two. Stay tuned. Sidenote: Unlimited power capacity introduced many new challenges, so there will be uhm powers who wants to stop it, temporarily.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• tatrajim 4y ago
  A deeper consolidation of insights from Neo-Confucian philosophy, including the elucidation of the grand ultimate 太極 and duality of form (理) and material force (氣), schematized in the diagrams of, among others, the tenth-century northern Song Dynasty thinker Zhou Duni 周敦頤 and the Korean Joseon-era philosophers Kwon Keun 권근 and especially Yi Toegye 이퇴계 in his "10 Diagrams on Sagely Learning 聖學十圖".
• carapace 4y ago
  Neuro-linguistic Programming et. al. It's currently considered a pseudo-science (which is technically false: it's pre-scientific. However, unfortunately, many practitioners and promoters do try to make it seem more scientific than it is.) It's actually fairly widespread, people teach it and use it all over the globe, and fairly stodgy organizations have used it (e.g. the US Army.) Yet the mainstream rarely mentions it, and then only to denigrate it. However, this seems to me to be that stage right before something goes from "fringe" to "common knowledge". Once NLP goes fully mainstream there will be a sea change in human society. Psychological hangups will be a thing of the past. There will still be people who have mental problems, but they will be the ones with actual physical problems with the brain (or whatever) as opposed to just bad programming. Things like addictions, phobias, neurosis, etc. will vanish. Educational possibilities are mind-blowing. Learning multiple languages becomes easy, as does learning musical instruments and dances. Really any behavioral patterns will become subject to symbolic manipulation. Competitive sports will be transformed when each player can "clone" the best moves of the best players. Politics has already been revolutionized by NLP innovations. As far back as G.W. Bush NLP language patterns had already made their way into political speeches. The current culture wars are, at their root, gangs of hypnotists programming furiously. To me the fascinating thing is that, once it's common knowledge that you can alter your psychology as easily (more easily!) than your wardrobe it becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The whole "it's just human nature" argument goes out the window when you can reprogram yourself.
  • mslupski1 4y ago
    Interesting. Could you suggest some resources to learn NLP for increasing productivity and improving your mind? Would love to dig into that
    • carapace 4y ago
      Regretfully, I can't. I'm not "in the field", I don't run in NLP circles, and my interest in it waned after I had alleviated some personal problems I was dealing with. However, as general advice, I could recommend reading "Get the Life You Want" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3803577-get-the-life-you-want https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3803577-get-the-life-you... Try out the exercises in that book to get the idea and then maybe seek out a local study group?
• w10-1 4y ago
  Deconstruction of discourse: the vast majority of humans out of the decision loop. All the main online sources are moving to subscription models with higher subscriptions for the real information. Only those with money will have access to information that informs decisions. At the low end, information is bundled only for its entertainment or propaganda value. At the same time, decisions are increasingly automated as vast data streams are digested by automated processes. 20 or 100 years ago, people could stop work or stop buying or protest in the street. 20-100 years from now, there will be nothing the vast bulk of people can do to change their fate. The resulting lack of citizen governance will at best be a world broken into geographic silos headed by corporate keiretsu. So the next big technical thing will be domain-specific semantic models to drill down past what AI can do with probabilistic models -- just as the economy has moved well past bulk goods to bespoke services, e.g., the Nature article today providing a model for immune system cell-surface-protein interactions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • paledot 4y ago
    If you're correct, the current intermediate condition where people have removed themselves from the (true) information loop but remain in the decision loop is the scariest state in that decline.
  • mbrochh 4y ago
    This is so bleak. Because it's probably true.
  • pantojax45 4y ago
    Pre-internet, everyone had to pay for access to information… how is that different from what’s happening online now? Maybe it was a uniquely open time and we are reverting to what it was like in the past?
    • o-o- 4y ago
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Refinement types. Because instead of using types you can use proofs. And have the compiler prove things about your code. You then may not need such complex higher order types in typed code. And you could retrofit this to JS, Ruby, C so you don’t need to learn new languages to get excellent type safety. For example assert that a number is in the 0-100 range and have the proven at compile time. Not just unit tested. It would be amazing.
• tarunmuvvala 4y ago
  This is something I have been discussing with forums and friends The Keynesian economics principals has an assumption that says 'goods are scarce` And if the next 15-30 years is an era of exponential then how should the economics behave?
• russellbeattie 4y ago
  Mid-level AI Knowledge Worker Apocalypse. There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin. Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs. These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago. It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.
  • euroderf 4y ago
    Humans will handle the edge cases and the gut calls and the cross-cutting concerns, but those too will be used as training sets for the AIs.
  • cookiengineer 4y ago
    Relevant primer: Humans need not apply (2014) [1] [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU https://youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
• esel2k 4y ago
  Agricultural revolution. I believe things like food, health and safety will become things not taken for granted anymore. Prices of all of these things will go up and take a major part of the household budgets. I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary) industry. In short: If you can’t guarantee food and health you will need some serious protection/go steal/trade it somewhere else.
  • kulikalov 4y ago
    What do you think about food replacements like US Soylent or EU JimmyJoy? It looks to me like a big deal, but I don’t see much enthusiasm from other people and these products have been around for a while.
    • 7373737373 4y ago
      Just test these for a week or two. I found the taste and texture intolerable after two days
      • kulikalov 4y ago
        Been on it since 2018. Also watching my health closely with tons of lab tests. I’ve never been in a better shape. I’m 29. As for the taste - not sure about Soylent, but JimmyJoy is very tasty.
        • bambax 4y ago
          Really? I tried JimmyJoy and had to throw it all in the trash after the first three. I found it absolutely horrible. I would love a pill that would give me all the amino acids I need; but I couldn't swallow this.
          • kulikalov 4y ago
            They are continuously improving the taste, particularly after 2020
• kbowerman 4y ago
  Decentralized social media. Cryptocurrency actors compete in live events produced on ‘The Nextbook’ to endorse their token and strengthen the blockchain. The Nextbook is a decentralized social media that pays the players (contributors).
  • kulikalov 4y ago
    How about just decentralized social media driven by open source without the crypto
    • kbowerman 4y ago
      There are many existing decentralized social media but none have made it to the popularity of FB, IG, or Twitter. Cryptocurrency actors are the drivers for gaining the worlds attention.
• aas1957 4y ago
  Manual labor and de-globalization.
• lynguist 4y ago
  Photovoltaics. I searched for it and couldn’t find it. Here’s a former top page post by Terraform: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-need-a-lot-of-solar-panels/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
  • klohto 4y ago
    Solar is talked about plenty imho. But every year it’s supposed to be “the year of solar”
    • april_22 4y ago
      True, though solar prices keep dropping
• kulikalov 4y ago
  Not a particularly big big thing, but here in the EU people are massively buying electric bicycles as the main transportation mean. I guess it comes along with the dropping batteries cost.
• Heffaklump 4y ago
  Wireless energy, as our air fills with radio waves those could be used to power super small devices. There are already pocs which produce a very small current from 5G radio and I think this technology is about to bloom. It’s going to be very interesting which side the law makers stands on in this matter.
• kulikalov 4y ago
  For those with doomsday predictions I’d really recommend reading “the beginning of infinity”. Fascinating book that, among other things, demonstrates how humanity was solving “inevitable” catastrophes.
• abdellah123 4y ago
  Edgedb
• withinboredom 4y ago
  Craigslist in other countries. Pretty much any niche part of Craigslist as it’s own product does pretty well. Lauch that in another country and you’ll be making bank.
• blurbleblurble 4y ago
  Integrated sensing and communications
• jvanderbot 4y ago
  Water management is going to be very important. Smart "grids" of water reclamation perhaps? Desal taking off? Water credits as part of trading or tarifs? Secondary effects include smarter agriculture and more local ag -- near prolific water and away from central california. Then there's water safety. PFAS is a big deal, and we're realizing how big a deal it is, and it's everywhere. Now, rainwater is unsafe anywhere on earth. [1] Someone who can build a small, snap-on, reliable PFAS removal system, or create an energy-efficient system for district-level supply is going to be rich. Hell, is solar distillation effective? If so, why does rainwater contain so much PFAS? It seems filtering might be the only way. 1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhere-on-earth-unsafe-to-drink-due-to-forever-chemicals-study-finds https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhe...
• thirdtrigger 4y ago
  MESHCode is a theory about how information might be stored in the brain. Very interesting and potentially has other implications for information storing as well. Check "The Mechanical Basis of Memory – the MeshCODE Theory": https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2021.592951/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2021.5929...
• plaidfuji 4y ago
  This one will be small relative to energy, climate, EVs, etc… but: Flexible, reflective displays replacing hard, emissive displays. I do not want to be staring at a backlit display the rest of my life. It’s terrible for eyesight and probably contributes to headache, burnout, etc. There are a lot of promising technologies out there, and they just need some improvement on cost, refresh rate, power consumption, etc… I would love to be able to go “back to paper” for most of my workday.
  • UncleOxidant 4y ago
    e-paper?
  • t_mann 4y ago
    Tbh, if there was demand for it we'd probably have them already. I'm afraid the most demand would come from those engineers who create the apps that glue everyone to their glowy screens, and from the sort of parents who have a zero-screens policy (those would be for themselves). Hardly a market that will get any VC excited.
  • josephjrobison 4y ago
    Likewise the emergence of analog outputs from a computer would be fun. It may be niche at first, but imagine if the output was moving some wooden sculpture or the output changed an analog letter board. Would create a bit of permanence rather than everything digital being so transient.
• seydor 4y ago
  Artificial wombs
• alexfromapex 4y ago
  The Voxon VX1 is pretty cool next gen holo tech. I would love to buy it but it costs around eleven thousand dollars right now.
• alexfromapex 4y ago
  There is a whole Nat Geo documentary on YouTube talking about the cool innovative things Singapore is doing in their city planning: https://youtu.be/xi6r3hZe5Tg https://youtu.be/xi6r3hZe5Tg the really neat thing is they are planning several decades ahead of time
• cik 4y ago
  Personal, targeted gene thereapy for cancers. I can already buy insurance that covers, and provides this therapy. It's become a reality here in Israel - I assume it's about to be so elsewhere.
• loandigger 4y ago
  Electric RVs with level 5 self driving. Everyone talks about Teslas for self driving, but for my self driving car, I want an RV with a shower, a desk, a full kitchen, a queen sized bed and a 50" flat panel. Commuting then becomes a pleasure. I can sleep, bathe, work, relax, all without having to concentrate on traffic or driving. The RV can drive in the slow lane at 30 miles an hour for all I care. My RV drives me to work, drops me off, drives itself somewhere else for several hours, picks me up, drives me home. The high price of suburban housing becomes irrelevant to me. I can live hours outside of major urban areas with no effect on my stress level or lifestyle. I don't have the hassles of an employee as my driver. My RV is ready to go 24 hours a day and never asks for a raise. If I want to go on vacation, my RV can drive me anywhere in the country, no more lines at the airport for me.
  • mcovey 4y ago
    It's still going to be accelerating and decelerating frequently so there's a lot you couldn't do, or would just be unpleasant to do while it's moving. I'm imagining taking a shower and it comes to a sudden stop for a train crossing. Better have a grab bar so you don't fall out!
  • badtension 4y ago
    Maybe it is a good thing to mix our bubbles, I hope I won't be too harsh. From an European point of view and with a climate catastrophe in mind the solution you are proposing is a disaster (or a joke?). We would be much better off living smaller, closer to each other, with less energy needs. The car-centric culture in America is something I cannot fully grasp. I think the idea of suburbian life with long distance travel each day has been very damaging [1]. I hope that when (if) self driving level 5 ever happens, it would be mainly to auto-steer buses and cheap car rental for driving where public transport does not go. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19okTYl8MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19okTYl8MA
• purefrost 4y ago
  I love how we got into this personal vehicle mindset. Cities are struggling with heat islands, a tremendous lack of biodiversity, and space for the most central animal in the city, the citizens. You see that all over the place in LA, SF, basically the whole West Coast, but the same holds true for the rest of the megacities in the US. The reliance on personal vehicles (and in some cities > 1 per head) will, in the end, bite us badly - and many city administrators already realize that. In Europe (I know, we’re all stupid and socialists), cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Vienna are reducing car-parking to reach an eventual 0 in the city. I agree that EV will be the future, but I doubt that, especially with the rate of urbanization that we have, private vehicles is what we will be talking about 20 years down the line. Cities will need to focus on the 15-minute concept (reach all your necessary socio-economic points of interest in 15 minutes, no matter where you live) as well as public transport (and it’s equal distribution !!). So I think, what people are talking about little is the advances in public transportation and centralized city logistics. Sure, EV fleets all the way, but also answers of how to get people and goods from A-B in a car-free environment will be of increasing importance.
• mcovey 4y ago
  It's not a very big thing nor related to technology, but ravens are making a comeback here in New England. Very interesting birds. I have a couple with 2 young that still beg for food and at this point they are reluctant to feed them and instead peck them in the face and throw food at them - they clearly want them to start being independent. I leave them cut up pieces of suet and they stop by promptly about 45 minutes after daybreak, often all 4 of them together. I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.
• terrycody 4y ago
  Organs can be replaced unlimited times thus to drastically improve human life span. Yeah, I am one of the eternal life believer. I believe this will come true in less than 20 years, but very few people think its possible, while it already shows enough signs of this.
• Kenneth39 4y ago
  What about the space program? No one seems to care about it, except particularly ardent fans. And the government only cares about satellites that benefit them. However, discoveries and innovations are still happening. The latest one I have in mind is the James Webb Space Telescope. And private companies like SpaceX are still planning a mission to Mars. Lastly, somewhere flashed information about the resumption of the space program, such as flights to the moon.
  • JPLeRouzic 4y ago
    Why not be more ambitious and asking about quasi (Alcubierre) warp drives permitted by innovation in meta-materials? https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/09/29/90189/how-to-build-a-warp-drive-using-metamaterials/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/09/29/90189/how-to-bui...
• michaelcampbell 4y ago
  Not sure if you mean Big Things to ... invest in? Study up on? Something else?, but my submissions might include CRISPR, micropollutants, & western civilisation balkanisation.
• jhylands 4y ago
  Magnesium diboride superconductors used in wind turbines and other generators
• hubert022 4y ago
  Neuralink. I can see it being the next huge ground-laying technology like the internet or smartphones. Imagine developing apps for people to use in their brain, it's next level. But probably 20 years away.