Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
- SpaceX will land a human on Mars and create some super great marketing material. This will strongly galvanize interest in space. Many ambitious people will be interested in space projects or startups<p>- deep learning will continue to amaze people in being able to solve problems considered not well suited to it. Some of these applications will seem crazy in retrospect<p>- folks at OpenAI or Google will get something crazy to happen with a huge amount of compute. It won&#x27;t feel like AGI but it&#x27;ll make AGI seem way less insane<p>- theorem proving with deep learning will start to work<p>- material science using lots of compute and deep learning will start to work<p>- deep learning will be applied to fuzzing (finding vulnerabilities in software) and this will be a big thing by the end of the decade<p>- there will be some large scale multiagent AI projects aiming to learn intelligence through just big simulations of civilization but they will not have interesting results. Definitely happens at OpenAI and possibly elsewhere. They really expect this to work but it won&#x27;t<p>- Apple releases an AR headset. Oculus turns into an AR effort instead of VR. The VR wars turn into the AR wars. Lots of money pumped into it. Unclear if it actually becomes the next mass platform, but there&#x27;s a small chance<p>- crypto people will find success approaching incentive design problems in more traditional avenues like large organizations and charter cities. Most crypto projects will be dead in the water, including Ethereum, but there will be diehard enthusiasts who stick to it. The money will dry up, forcing others out. Cryptocurrency, like BTC, will still be a big thing on the internet<p>- teleop robots. Globalization of physical labor starts to happen. It will seem like an emerging trend by the end of the decade<p>- self driving cars will be seen to be largely a fad, with lots of wasted money<p>- there&#x27;s a chance the olivine beach climate change project gets a huge amount of traction<p>- student loans and for profit colleges in the United States have some kind of reckoning. People stop believing in college: more people all over the world think like Lambda School and the software industry<p>- senior software engineer salaries in the Bay Area continue to climb<p>- Silicon Valley stops being so obsessed with China. It&#x27;s more obvious that Chinese innovation is heavily lagging behind<p>- defense technology starts to capture the attention of more of Silicon Valley and the innovative class. Anti-defense stance stops being the default. Tech bro patriotism: more people think like Anduril. This leads to some really crazy defense capabilities of the US. E.g, auto targeting killer drones<p>- Social media usage per person goes down, for high income people<p>- YC is no longer cool at the end of the decade, but hacker news still is.<p>- lifestyle software businesses continue to be seen a lot more positively in the industry: more software engineers think like patio11&#x2F;csallen&#x2F;levelsio. Starting a small software business becomes more of a viable career path and seen as more responsible and mature than the VC unicorn path.<p>- meat alternatives grow faster than anyone expected them to<p>- Tesla is the most valuable car company but still hasn&#x27;t figured out full self driving<p>- sci-fi reading and blog post style writing will be a major status symbol in the tech industry<p>- Bay Area will be less dominant in interesting tech startups than it is today, because of immigration and housing. The next place will be the internet or somewhere open to outsiders like Estonia, not China<p>- Donald Trump will do something too shocking and it will actually end his career. Society will learn an antibody to his populism, but it might be a long time after he&#x27;s president. Will happen by the end of the decade though<p>- deep learning is a very centralizing technology. Even bigger tech companies will be started where the value they create is their machine learning network effect. They might not be as big as 1T by the end of the decade but they&#x27;ll get there in another 10 years<p>- more power shifts from government to private enterprise<p>- tech companies remain underrated and continue to grow and have way bigger market caps<p>- VR porn ends up driving adoption of the current set of VR hardware. Funny but FB executives won&#x27;t be happy about this and that&#x27;ll make them look to AR.<p>- Facebook social VR with strangers doesn&#x27;t work. But FB social VR with your real life friends might work and be really popular. This would be the main application of VR, if any : then it&#x27;ll morph into AR<p>- religion continues its decline. New internet ideologies continue to proliferate. Some of them will be pretty weird yet have a lot of impact, like the alt-right did this decade<p>- the penny is abolished in the United States<p>- US inflation is a lot higher than it has been in the past; US treasury bonds not seen as super safe anymore<p>- if there&#x27;s a recession, it won&#x27;t affect the economy as uniformly as historical recessions (overall hit may still be really big, but higher percentage of people will end up well off). More variety in the economy and people&#x27;s lives where it&#x27;s not as correlated<p>- tech companies funding more and more media&#x2F;content (like Netflix&#x2F;Amazon, but also upstarts). Traditional media gets eaten by tech-enabled companies<p>- everyone worldwide has a lot less sex<p>- marijuana and psylicobin legalized federally in the US; stigma against drugs on the decline globally (related to decline in religion + rise of internet ideologies)<p>- more local manufacturing. Specialized manufacturing countries&#x2F;cities stop making as much sense. Let going to China to make your hardware thing; you&#x27;ll just do it wherever.<p>- the US will be more obsessed with Africa than China (may take 25y instead of 10y; caused by population dynamics)<p>- 10-30% more happens in 2020s than 2010s; accelerating progress but it&#x27;s not very noticeable yet<p>- Stripe becomes a gigantic company  Because of that, the SaaS economy goes global: microSaaS is the new doctor&#x2F;lawyer&#x2F;engineer, especially in India and Africa