Thawing permafrost releases significantly more methane than expected and it supercharges the acceleration of climate change, and the earth itself supplants humans as the primary source of Greenhouse gases.
Yes, I think a lot of people still aren't aware of this problem, which has been studied for many years now. Once the positive feedback loop takes hold it's game over.
Once some methane comes out of the most southerly permafrost the earth will warm up and defrost a greater amount, which will warm up the earth a larger amount...
There's already a budding anti-tech movement. People destroy robots. There is a mistrust between users and services. This is definitely not the answer HN would like, but this can grow into a full-blown anti-tech counter-culture where people don't use smart phones or laptops, and instead pickup less invasive devices like the lite phone 2, nokias, pay-as-you-go flip phones, etc. There's a large dissent towards office work now, and developers themselves opt to be freelancers. There have been many privacy breaches which is a cause of people putting too much of their personal information in the hands of private organizations. It's inevitable people will get tired of social media. The technology industry will still exist, but there are literally hundreds of promising technologies coming along. I guess what I'm trying to say is they're no use to a regular person, and they'll be silo'd off into their own sector. Tech is not going to take over. It will only and always supplement humans, as it should.
Don't get me wrong, I love my online banking as much as the next guy, but a lot of technology being produced has a very negative impact - look at social media.
* Deno, or something like it. This general idea of software that interacts with the internet but interacts little with the host OS by default.
* RISC-V, and a general open source hardware revolution.
* Augmented Reality. I don't see VR going anywhere. AR has broader practical applications.
* Voice UI. I think this still counts as niche. The general interaction model at the beginning of the movie Her seems highly plausible to me. Not so much the AGI.
* Desktop/mobile OS convergence. This seems inevitable. The convenience factor is too high and why would the average Joe keep forking out for 2 or 3 computers when they can have 1 that does everything.
* Software formal verification. This is long overdue and we can't continue to be this irresponsible.
* Cryptocurrency, or something like it. I think the need is there, but the current implementation leaves much to be desired.
* Processors with many cores. We're already up to 18 or so on desktop processors. But I expect many more.
* FPGA. I'm less sure about this. 10 years might be to soon. But if your computer was just full of FPGA's and companies could sell you digital hardware through an app store without having to actually manufacture anything, I'm sure they would love it.
Unlocking free electrical energy. In an analogous manner to the way in which steam power revolutionized mechanical work. It would provide the narrative drive for the next chapter in human civilization.
What's interesting is that it will probably be precipitated by a low-level breakthrough in energy storage or transmission. Somewhere today there is a junior researcher, laboring away at some currently un-sexy technology, the butt of more fashionable and trendy peers, who transmutes into the next Edison in less than a decade's time ;)
CRISPR and its various offsprings will grow in technological sophistication and their commercial applications. By the end of the 2020s it will morph into a pressing political issue in the West in terms of its implications for Human biology. Certain East Asian countries will be the trendsetters due to lax governmental regulations and societal acceptance.
I think that machine learning will move out of the cloud and onto devices closer to where it is needed. Moore's law isn't what it used to be so it will likely be a blended environment where heavy processing is done in the cloud and then synced to local devices for lighter processing. Things like self driving cars will need more powerful AI without the delay of contacting the cloud. Also things like smart switches, appliances, and such will need some smarts locally, maybe built into some home based brain that syncs with the cloud.
Something I hope will exist is to make the web more like the desktop in spirit. What I mean is you’ll be able to easily grab an open source app and install it on “your web” without beings sucked into an expensive saas or becoming an ML data point aka ‘you are the product”
You just pay for storage and byo from Dropbox, google, whatever. With encryption you’d the be able to use services that are free, free and privacy focused.
I think JAM stack would work well with this and I’m thinking of making some POCs
Maybe: Crypto-currencies get regulated/taxed by various states/nations to ensure their energy security
Maybe: Crypto-currencies face court cases which try to determine what is actually owned legally, potentially undermining them.
Amazon faces a existential legal threat over counterfeit goods. They pay the settlement with AWS revenue, which by that point provides the majority of their income.
Younger generations develop an "in-real-life" counter culture, leading to financial volatility for existing social networks. In general, the attention economy matures, flattening corporate revenues year over year.
The federal government and state AGs prosecute major court cases against parties involved in textbook sales for illegal and anti-competitive behaviors.
A "Trader Joes"-style university emerges with a reasonably high quality, relatively inexpensive, accredited undergraduate education, with all course materials produced under the university brand. It runs year-round, has no tenure, and pays professors relatively well with standard benefits. The new university and its copy-cat competition create economic pressure on traditional academic institutions that have become administratively heavy over the previous three decades and, in some cases, have substantial construction debts that are now under increased interest rate pressure.
Maybe (related): Congress passes, and the president signs, a bill reintroducing bankruptcy discharge of student debt, possibly hidden in a must-pass omnibus spending bill.
Finally, for remaining in-use 32-bit unix-based systems, the 2038 problem is now 10 years closer.
Everyone's focused on driverless personal transportation. Driverless delivery trucks will come first. Basically Amazon lockers on wheels. Anything you want 24/7 delivered to the curb within minutes/hours of your order. Every retail store will suffer the fate of the bookstores. Millions will lose their jobs.
Consumer DNA sequencing to get personalized nutritional, exercise, pharmaceuticals, and medical preventative monitoring advice will become commonplace.
Automated lending approval. As digital financial systems evolve and conglomerate into a connected ecosystem businesses/people will no longer seek loans -- instead lenders will automatically approve and offer credit that will be instantly available to worthy applicants. This already occurs, but in the future the process will occur in a fraction of the time behind the scenes.
Hmm, it's hard, I kind of agree. I wonder if some social media tech will lose impact and fade away, while others (perhaps, unprecedented, not made yet) will gain impact?
A heroku like service which uses autoscaling aurora serverless master master replicated across many regions with cloudfront running containers instead of just lambda functions. Basically a cdn with a container runtime and an autoscaling sql db. Hopefully amazon releases something like lambda @ edge but for fargate which would make this possible.
It isn't exactly niche yet since it doesn't exist at this point but my speculation is that we will have AGI within that time frame.
One reason I think that is because most of the core capabilities missing from AI systems are things that animals can do. Most of the difference with humans is a matter of degree.
It's still a very challenging list of capabilities of course. The core requirements for AGI are fairly well understood at this point. No one knows exactly how to achieve all of them together but many geniuses are working on it. And the tools such as DL, RL and less mainstream approaches such as SNNs and Sparse Predictive Hierarchies are very powerful. AGI is a real field now and intersects with things like developmental robotics.
It's a long shot but there are so many great minds involved and the rewards are so large that I think making a bet for within ten years is not a bad bet. Sure we have said that before. Things are not the same as before.
What I mean is we have lists of capabilities that AGI needs to have and know how it differs from narrow AI. For example: online continuous learning, perception, generalization, transferring skills between domains, etc. These aspects of the _what_ (rather than how) of AGI have been well researched.
Last year, I correctly predicted Jeff Bezos will divorce due to extra-marital affair.
Here are my prediction for the next 5-10 years.
1. Autonomous cars will be common, and they will have hive minds as AI progresses.
2. Governments around the world will look different, as AI will supplant politicians as representatives (probably in late decade).
3. Banking systems will crash and bartering will occur in the first half of the decade. It will change to adapt usage of cryptocurrency.
4. Blockchain will be part of the internet infrastructure. AI personas will exist as butlers for people, these personas are actual replica of their personalities.
5. Robotics will replace most jobs such as waiters and cashiers. Some of these robots will be monitored or operated by one or two persons. That job will require higher tech education/degrees.
(I have 5 more but it's not related to tech, lol).
- Moore's law is already dead, but in 10 years the implications of that will be fully realized
- Global warming won't be curtailed, rich countries will learn to cope with extreme weather patterns, people from poor countries will emigrate
- Cancer treatment will improve dramatically for a large variety of relatively niche cancers, but there still won't be a common cure
- Humans will still not go to Mars
- Soft AI will become prevalent for many low-level automation tasks, but general AI will stay in science fiction
- there will be significant headway made in resolving general relativity and quantum mechanics, likely by finding more situations where they disagree but not resolving those discrepancies
- We'll find exoplanets likely suitable for life, but too far away to reach them.
- China's chip industry will be fully caught up to the U.S.'s, Intel chips will still be the best, but only by a few percentage points and won't be economical at a large scale.
- Building custom ASICs will be far more common, and will be an important way of improving performance, as well as differentiation in the market (e.g., Adobe will produce their Photoshop chip).
- AI will get very good at analyzing PDFs and HTML tables. There will be apps that you can give access to your email that will be able to make very detailed itemized reports of your spending habits, and make recommendations on how to save money or get more for it.
- Dominant forms of trust will form on the internet. I am inclined to think that traditional media will take up this role, but it's possible that others will fill this space too.
- Even though humans will not go to Mars in 10 years, there will be a credible plan to put humans there (possibly taking another 10 years).
- Probes to Titan will be launched, and credible plans to land something on the moon will be well underway.
- Genomics in criminal law continues it's rapid growth, making unsolved rape cases a thing of the past.
- China's rapid growth in creating patents starts causing internal issues; they face their own first internal patent war, causing significant internal economic issues, forcing them to re-evaluate the value they ascribe to patents.
decentralised web and universal 5G - if anybody still thinks that we need something like fb for universal connection, they're presumably missing out the billions of people that still don't have access to flowing webware.
I am in the USA, specifically Seattle, so I'd assume I have better than average coverage. 4G is spec'd at 100Mbps. If you're lucky, you'll get 40-70Mbps download, and <10Mbps upload. If you're not fortunate enough to have city-tier coverage, then you're probably at the national average at <20Mbps. 5G is spec'd at 1000Mbps.
Innovation in the comedy world. Haven't seen much progress in funny, mainstream, entertainment since Ricky Gervais introduced the mockumentary-style format. Though, even that has a history dating back... In terms of technology, hopefully, the change in media landscape might do the trick?
environmental-first decision making I hope. Maybe with more visible effects of global warming we will consider our planet's health before price, convenience or (I fear) ethics.
From the current price, it's closer to three digits than to six, so my prediction actually has less price movement than the other.
But it's more than that. I've never believed the "To the moon!" predictions, because I've never believed that the real use value was there. It seems that people are investing on belief, but the actual real world use is... almost non-existent.
What's the daily volume of Bitcoin transactions that are purchases of other things, rather than investments in Bitcoin? [Edit: Divide that by the existing number of Bitcoin. That gives you the fraction spent in a day. What's the same figure for the US dollar?] Is Bitcoin really a currency if (relatively) nobody uses it to buy things? No, at that point it's an investment. [Edit: Or a store of value. But the value is fluctuating too much for it to be a very good store of value...]
But if there's no fundamental value, and it's not being used as a currency, what's the rational basis for its value? This makes it seem like a bubble.
Now, I don't actually have data for volume of purchases made in Bitcoin. I'm going on my impression, and I could be wrong.
For the first time in history, there now exists a substrate upon which AGI can manifest. Almost immediately after it was created, machine learning cropped up. Machine learning wasn’t new, it just never had the computational substrate it needed to produce the amazing results it’s become known for. Since ML was already established, it was low hanging fruit and it’s no surprise to see it catch fire so to speak.
As time goes forward the computational substrate will mature. Huge amounts of compute will be available for less and less money through easy to use APIs.
The number of people working on AGI will only increase. People will keep taking cracks at it until they get it. They will get it much sooner than anyone thought. The only reason it hasn’t been done already is because there was no computational substrate for it to incubate in so to speak. Now that the computational tinderbox has been created, all that is needed is the smallest of sparks. It will happen soon and unfortunatley it will be very unpleasant. I am being completely honest when I say that this is the sole reason why I have not decided to have children and when I implore anyone who reads this to not bring anyone into the world. The future will be very bleak for future generations.
The economics of AI demand the casting off of human life as we know it. The world as we know it now only sustains is because we as humans are the exclusive source of intelligent signal processing. When we are superseded in that ability, we will be lost to evolution. It’s impossible to know exactly how the transition will happen but one of the few things that can be relied on is that human society will become extremely fragile. Human society persists because we are the most dominant life form. When machines take over, we may be given token existences or a society pen to live in but it will be vestigial. There is no force of evolution or economics that ensures that each successive generation or “species” of machine intelligence will accommodate humans.
Many different machine entities will compete and fight, and in that way evolution will continue much as it has before. We may linger for a time in that world, but we do not have a divine right to exist in that world as we do in this one. We will be vestigial and ultimately lost. And all of this is just the economics/evolutionary aspect. I have not included here the possibility of a “terminator” outcome, or even mentioned the other countless grotesque possibilities.
Nobody will believe any of this. My opinion is universally dismissed. But it’s right.
Right now is the best it will ever be more or less, for humans. But we could preserve this state of affairs if we chose to.
>I am being completely honest when I say that this is the sole reason why I have not decided to have children and when I implore anyone who reads this to not bring anyone into the world. The future will be very bleak for future generations.
If everyone listened to you, there would be no future generations. Have you thought this through? "Let's end the human race, because something bad might happen" doesn't exactly sound very solid reasoning.
p.s. What did your girlfriend/wife say about your decision?
Risk of idiocracy aside, there's enough humans and diversity in the way humans think that we can definitely rely on enough other humans to reproduce.
I'm somebody's girlfriend/wife and I do not want children (in general, and also because of future economic uncertainties) and I also don't like my existence being relagated to "someone who might want babies".
