The Future | Hacker News Reader

The Future

kurtsp.com

46 pointskespindler42 comments

This is a "spiky version of the present" future - all the prominent things seen by one individual, extrapolated linearly. As such it has a discontinuous shape.

The main element I would critique is in the culture. Culture in 2015 will feel old and dated by 2030 - our memes, our artisan craft breweries and hip indie games. Something else will overtake them. Culture has the soft power to change people's perception of reality even as the substance of that reality remains more stagnant. And culture isn't directly associated to a new tech so much as it is the proliferation of that tech.

For example: "Drone" today equates to big war machines dropping bombs. "Drone" tomorrow could mean the kid across the street with a new toy and the ensuing shenanigans inflicted on stodgy 50-year-olds who think you're going to blow everything up.

Exactly. It is very hard to make credible predictions for longer period of time, but linear extrapolation normally works for 2 to 5 year scope http://liuliu.me/eye/predicting-future-2016/

>tomorrow could mean the kid across the street with a new toy

Or you know, more destruction and loss of life for unfortunate countries, constant policing for developed countries, a huge blow to the people's ability to protest and do demonstrations, etc...

That reads like one of the flying car predictions from the 50's. Here's my prediction: the future in 40 years will not look and feel much different than the present, or 40 years, or 100 years in the past, at least in the '1st world'. Fashion will look different, music will sound different. Faster and smaller computers are hardly life-changing, especially if they are only used to make your restaurant order easier. Autonomous cars are useless when people no longer need to travel large distances day by day.

The biggest change will be that more people in the 3rd world will enjoy better living standards, and that's a huge achievement on its own. We don't need flying cars for that.

The world was very very different 100 years ago.

On first glance yes, but I would argue that living in a city in 1910 or 1920 was not that much different than living in a city today, look at photos or read newspapers from that time. I'm convinced that you can take a time traveler from the 1910's and he would get around in a modern western city within a week. All the basic things like electricity, sanitation, public transport, commerce, entertainment, fast communication via telegrams or phone already existed. One big difference to today is that poverty was reduced drastically, and access to these things is much easier and cheaper today. But there is a 'good enough' barrier beyond which things don't improve anymore, since they are good enough (see trans-sonic flight).

I think there have been much more drastic (positive) changes during the 19th century for the western world than during the 20th century.

Yet there are measurable changes in health, lifestyle and behavior. Obesity; neighborliness; attention span; entitlement. Where once only the ruling class could afford to be snooty and entitled, now most everybody can do it.

Even access to the outdoors - a century ago everyone lived in nature, to a degree unthinkable today. Sure, some tiny fraction still take their GoPro out and record it for the rest of us. But while parks, camps, outdoor programs have growing participation they have not kept up with simple population growth. Which means outdoor activity has dropped precipitously per capita.

I blame computers and games, for the pandemic of couch-potato twitch gamer culture. Not seen since the rise and fall of the opium dens.

10 years ago there were no smartphones. 30 years ago nearly nobody had a computer.

Both of these are by far not as important as sanitation, cheap food and affordable housing.

There is a big achievement in the 20th century, which is that the time-barrier has been slashed for spreading information, and that spreading information has become cheap. IMHO this is the biggest thing since the invention of writing (== communication over large distances) and the invention of printing (== cheap mass reproduction of information, but you still had to physically transport it around the world). The internet goes hand in hand with cheap personal communication devices, I give you that. It's a shame that it is mostly used for shopping and looking at cat images ;)

And now that they have them, they are not life changing in any significant way (except for niche cases, e.g. helping someone with a disabillity connect etc).

Sure, one can work as a web designer now, and they couldn't before. But they'd still have some other job anyway in the past. Same with smartphones. We wouldn't have selfies, and casual surfing on a restaurant and constant BS calls while on the move. Other than that, not much would change.

Whereas things like women rights or seggregation or cars or toilets or flights or electricity etc have much more changed how we live in a much more profound way.

Nah, it's just that much of the future won't happen in the first world which has problems keeping up with the present. China is 10 years in the past and 10 years in the future at the same time. It's going to be even more like that for India and (parts of) Africa.

Free public transit and easier restaurant ordering with wearables? India dominating the world? Little college campus utopias were everyone is smart and rides bikes?

Sounds like someone has spent too much time in the tech industry in San Fransisco and perhaps should broaden their perspective a bit. Maybe go back to Ohio and look at the meth labs and bulldogs and then think about the future. Also, 30% of the world (at least) probably barely works now. This includes to some extent people who are nominally employed.

This. Maybe I'm being unfair, but it does remind me somehow of George Packer's New Yorker piece[1]:

"It suddenly occurs to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up."

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/change-the-worl...

What about nature, ecology, biodiversity? What about third world societies? Natural disasters, immigration, gentrification, violence, crime? I imagine the author as living in a big city, working in tech, living the connected life, but seriously, this kind of "future" is to me rather narrow-minded.

I agree. Also very US centric, what about the future outside the US in other Western countries?

"Many people live throughout their life in campus environments similar to college campuses of the early 21st century. These campuses were seeded from the ruins of cities ravaged by crisis (Detroit), the transition of festivals to sustained existence (Burning Man), and around the headquarters of major companies. These mini Utopias on earth are small, high density villages with everything a person wants. A high density of friends, intelligent people, exciting activities, all in walkable or bikeable distances. Importantly, there is high mobility between these campuses (changing companies, new research projects), but little mobility from outside to inside." This one got me because this is not the future, this is the past, a lot tried it in the 60s and 70s, I tried it with the punks in the 90s, it didn't work, I still don't want it to work, this concept goes against the privacy feature these cultures want to provide so it fails in the end.

There's a little bit of a "best parts of living in a village" vibe to this. We try to provide something like a traveling version of a campus-like community via hackerparadise.org.

From living in and helping facilitate this "campus environment" for the past year: it's kind of nice. I can't say how well it works yet long-term, but I very much appreciate being in a community where I know who my neighbors are, what they're up to, where I actually care about how they're doing. More than just the benefit of being surrounded by like-minded, intellectual/creative people, there's this shroud of anonymity that living in a city comes with. It's refreshingly pleasant to live and work in a community where the shroud is lifted.

Campus' recent shutdown was a step backwards. I don't know if the author is right; the biggest open question to me is financial sustainability (IE, are enough people willing to pay a premium for communal living to fuel growth & innovation)?

No mention of pollution or climate change? The trend for climate change been observed since the 1950's. 99% of Scientists agree that it's really happening, and it will have a major impact on how livable our planet is.

This paper[1] looks at things from the perspective of cumulative CO2 emissions, as they have a roughly linear relationship with the temperature increase. For example, over the period of 1870 to 2012 we added about 1,430 (+- 70) GtCO2 to the atmosphere, and we're already observing a +0.8°C mean global temperature increase:

> Taking into account CO2 emissions prior to 2014, the remaining emissions quota (from 2015 onwards) associated with a 66% probability of keeping warming below +2°C is estimated to be 1,200 (900–1,600) GtCO2. This +2°C quota will be exhausted in about 30 (22-40) ‘equivalent emission-years’ at the 2014 emission level (40.3 GtCO2 yr^-1). Owing to inter-annual and decadal variability, the actual year when +2°C will be reached is uncertain. The remaining quota associated with a 50% probability of committing to 2 °C of warming is estimated to be 1,500 (1,100–1,900) GtCO2 (Table 1), corresponding to 37 (27–47) equivalent emission-years at the 2014 emission level.

So, within the 40 year timeframe mentioned in the link, and assuming (optimistically) that we've reduced global CO2 emissions to 2014 levels (recall: global emissions have been growing by 2.5% each year for the past decade.), we'll have hit a 50% chance of having locked in > +2°C of warming.

[1] -- Friedlingstein et al - nature geoscience, 2014 -- pdf version http://www.globalcarbonproject.org/global/pdf/Friedlingstein...

I don't think that a linear relationship between temperature and CO2 level is a safe bet. The climate is pretty chaotic, it seems unlikely that such a simple relationship is true in general. It seems entirely possible that we'll hit some kind of runaway effect at some point that completely breaks the linear relationship.

Anyway, I'm not a climate scientist and there are a number of people who claim that 1000 GtCO2 lead to 2 degree warming, so your 1500 GtCO2 seem only a little optimistic. However, just reducing CO2 production is not enough. We have to completely stop, because CO2 takes basically forever to sequester from the atmosphere, and every degree of warming we cause increases the likelihood that we leave the "safe" linear-relationship territory.

See http://trillionthtonne.org/

> Greater empathy by proliferation of virtual reality.

For a vr world where you can live someone's life that's not crap we will have to have hit the singularity, which conflicts with a lot of the other ideas.

> Gestures that previously were arcane are now the way to invoke computer programs

This is a strange one. Why would you gesture for a check and not just push a button to just pay it. Is it a themed restaurant?

> China, India, and the United States are the three world powers.

Not sure why these three are picked. China I get.

>A good segment (30%) of the world barely works.

There's no reason the think the rest of the world will support them. Besides which currently most people can live this in the first world. Rural property is cheap and so is simple food. But most of the population wants more than just food and a house. Like high end medical care and GoT.

> More and more infrastructure follows a pay-per-use model.

People don't like making a stack of small losses. We prefer to pay big then use the products at our leisure. I can't see this changing.

There's some interesting thoughts here's. Misses the mark in bits as well though. Burning man that never ends, not sure what to think about that. But I can see it happening.

>> More and more infrastructure follows a pay-per-use model. >People don't like making a stack of small losses. We prefer to pay big then use the products at our leisure. I can't see this changing. You're assuming that it will be humans who will be making the switching decisions for themselves. If humans employ agents that algorithmically negotiate with different infrastructure providers, then I think it's possible.

"Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit. Combine UberPool and self-driving cars and this is what you get. It could be actually free with ads..."

I don't see how self-driving car services could be "almost free". Self-driving cars cost money to manufacture. Like all mechanical equipment, they have finite lifetimes, so their purchase cost needs to be paid back over that lifetime. They need to be maintained, e.g., tires and shocks don't last forever, and metal corrodes over time (especially in environments where roads are salted for de-icing). Someone will need to clean the interiors every day (or more often), since people tend to leave messes (sometimes really disgusting ones).

The power for them isn't free. Even if they're solar powered, solar panels have to be manufactured, installed and maintained (e.g., cleaned off periodically to maintain maximum efficiency), and they need to be replaced after their finite lifetimes expire. Rechargeable batteries need to be replaced after a certain number of recharge cycles.

Roads, bridges and tunnels cost as much to maintain for self-driving cars as for conventional cars. There will still be tolls and taxes. As gas and diesel vehicles die off, the revenue from the taxes on their fuel will need to be replaced by other taxes, such as per-mile taxes on electric vehicles.

I doesn't seem that merely showing ads to passengers could pay for all these capital, labor and tax expenses. And if the cars are owned by a for-profit company such as Uber, there has to be enough income for the company to have a profit after paying their operating costs and taxes.

Let's make some generous assumptions -- a taxi costs $20K, lasts 300,000 miles, gets 50 miles to the gallon and fuel costs $2.00 a gallon. (Or equivalent, electrically, I'm easy.) Then fuel is four cents a mile and depreciation is seven cents a mile for a total cost of eleven cents a mile.

In the future, running an ultra-efficient electric car we can imagine the fuel price could be lower and the range before replacement even higher.

Is eleven cents a mile "almost free"? It's certainly a lot cheaper than the vast majority of public transport trips I've taken in recent years. Could it be ad-supported? Well, maybe. How much would advertisers be willing to pay to captively monopolise the attention of someone whose individual tastes and spending habits were already well profiled? Quite possibly more than eleven cents a mile (a few cents a minute in traffic).

(Personally I'm more than willing to outbid the advertisers in order to get peace and quiet.)

This is pretty close. Benedict evans did a more accurate calculation , and got ,for electric self driving cars, 14-19 cents/mile:

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/636684338352951297

One thing he forgot - what about shared transport - say sharing with 3 people could offer ride time relatively close to a car. That gets us to 4.5 cents/mile. That comes about to $50 a month/american-person(avg 13.5K miles/year) , less for a kid, surely less for people in dense cities(say $25) .

EDIT:and if you're willing to ride an on demand bus/minibus , maybe it could go to 1/2-1/3 of that , so maybe your monthly transport demands could be met by less than $10.

Sharing rides with strangers is precisely the kind of thing that I'd hope to avoid by replacing public transport with self-driving cars.

But anyway, yes, it does appear that the economics of the self-driving taxi beat the economics of the bus or the train, especially given that buses and trains generally operate at a large loss and still charge people, on average, a higher fare than what they'd pay for a self-driving taxi.

A self-driving bus that operates a route could be even cheaper, but why bother when you can hail a cab to take you straight to your destination without stops for just a few tens of cents more?

I can imagine a self-driving taxi , for shared rides, that's designed for privacy , so you don't feel like riding with others, except for a bit of an extended trip.

I wonder why nobody have build such a car yet, but there's good likelihood it will happen in a huge self driving market.

When all cars are self-driving, small single-person cars are a realistic option.

I did my own calculations last week and came to about 2x his numbers (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-cheap-can-uber-self-drivi...). He makes a few faulty assumptions (ex. maintenance costs and depreciation are tied to miles, not years) and in my opinion underestimates costs significantly in areas like insurance, and over-estimates billable miles that will be driven per day. Still amazingly cheap, though, especially if carpooling and/or using public transit part of the time. For comparison, CalTrain runs between 17 and 25 cents per mile if you take it more than one zone.

The advertising is going to be extremely targeted too. If person is going to the shopping mall to see an optometrist then the stores at the same mall could bid to pitch to them. They would literally be showing their ads to someone who is about to be a short walk away and trump even Amazon on how quickly a product can be in the hands of the consumer: "press purchase now and we'll have it waiting for you at the front desk for pickup". Doing a late evening airport to hotel journey? Ads for takeaway food to be delivered to your room or ads for tours and events in that city. Not on the same level of annoying as audio ads for something I don't want playing while I am trying to read an article. I am sure they will figure out a way to be extremely annoying though; I can easily imagine poorly targeted ones that play automatically and so loud you can't have a conversation in the taxi.

Secondly, most companies have now realized that disruption is the way of the world, and thus most have become 'venture builders' that continuously run experiments and attempt to disrupt themselves, thus permanently remaining on top.

I'm pretty skeptical of this one, but I am curious to see how that plays out. I suspect there are some inherent, systemic rigidities that develop in large companies, that will prevent this from coming (entirely) to pass. If so, small companies / startups will continue to emerge with some technological innovation (or business model innovation) or other and "disrupt" existing models.

That said, an interesting related question would be "will be actually reach 'the end of technology' at some point?" That is, will we reach a point where we have mastered all of the technologies that can exist, given the constraints of the laws of physics? I mean, if we assume a fundamentally unchanging universe (unchanging in terms of the fundamental laws) then human / technological progress has to stop at some point, no? The question is, how far from that point are we?

>> "will be actually reach 'the end of technology'

In general ,technologies are building blocks of newer technologies.Maybe we'll run out of problems first ?

At some point you run into the laws of physics. Right now it looks like we can stretch things quite a bit further, but there's only so much free energy in the world and only so many ways to shape it. It's completely conceivable that we'd run out of new technology before we run out of problems.

"A good segment (30%) of the world barely works" - and behaves exactly like disgrunted arabs in poor muslim countries?

I.e. radicalize, want to blow up the world, ready to take arms for $150/month?

Another role model for those people is 1st world ghettos. We're not doing it better than that yet. "The cost of subsistence has been driven down significantly", that's nice if you actually have some independent source of income. Otherwise you're a slave of someone who has it.

"Solar panels are everywhere" - making electricity out of rain, darkness and misery anyone? Not every country in the world has enough sunshine (however, most do)

Not a world of explaination why India is superpower. Not a word about Europe.

Anyway, that's not "future". That's more of "now". Can we please have some real future sometime?

With, I don't know, space travel, teleportation, telepathy, nanoassembly, digital democracy, aliens?

And unicorns spreading magic dust...

I'd bet more than 30% of Greeks "barely work" and they're not radicalized. I wonder why that is?

Because they've only been out of work for relatively short period of time. Of course, people with european mentality will take more time to radicalize, but it's going to happen.

Greece is also already home to far-right and far-left political forces seeing mainstream acceptance.

Also, being a part of united Europe, they can find work in other european countries. Thus the most energetic people leave and get busy.

The way it looks to me housing will be a bigger factor. People are more and more moving to cities leading to rising prices, which makes it difficult for most people to earn what they need for living.

I don't see how this will be changing in the future.

>A good segment (30%) of the world barely works. The cost of subsistence has been driven down significantly and peer-to-peer marketplaces have proliferated, so a good percentage of people have chosen to check out of the rat race. They do odd jobs for cash, but they primarily devote their time to their passions, working as artists, artisans, or community builders.

In Portland maybe. In most of the developed world most of the 30% that doesn't work hasn't decided to "check out of the rat race" but just can't find anything decent (or, in some countries, anything at all).

Sadly, I see this article as an overly optimistic view of the not-so-distant future.

Maybe 40 years seems like a lot of time in some fields (electronics, software, human life-span), but not so much in some major areas (culture, some hard sciences, societies, economy).

Yes, the rate of technological advances are sometimes exponential. But in some fields, they are clearly slowing down, and stabilizing. And even when technology can alter our daily lives, introducing new elements to our lives, most changes are introduced as a convenience, or a way to enhance our productivity, but our daily life remains almost the same, in the big scope.

Sometimes, a REAL revolutionary element emerges, like the Internet. Computers enhanced the way companies did their work, but the Internet introduced changes much more intensive, enabling new markets, new products, new channels of communication, and above all, changing how we learn, distributing knowledge, and empowering the people to express and divulge their thoughts and opinions.

But in the end, the core of our lives remains the same. If we compare the daily life of a middle class man living in 1935 (80 years to the past, not just 40), to the daily life of a middle class man living in 2015, we would find, generally speaking, that they are really similar. The general structure remains the same. Sure, we enjoy lots of new gadgets, and maybe work 1 or 2 hours less... some of us.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Our grandchildren”, would work around “three hours a day”..

"Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!"

Of course, for the vast part of the society that didn't happen. And that won't happen in the next 80 years...

You'll see... One could argue that our standard of living is better than what kings enjoyed 200 years ago. Better infrastructure, better services, better medicine, less physical work, etc. But that standard of living has a cost. Of course, we live in a society, and we pay that cost between all. And as a society, as we get more specialized and qualified jobs (comparatively better jobs), we "earn more". But we have a lot more things to pay for. More services, more products, more everything. And then comes inflation. In the end, this is the key: Cost of living adjusts as we move forward in time, as we introduce new elements in our lives.

If someone is not rich, and would want to stop working, he could try to live like a Mennonite, while spending his savings, but that's not what most people want.

So, in order to get better lives and adjust to our new standards, we either work more ours or we try hard to be more productive, more competitive, increase your social network, get more educated to get better jobs, increase our sales, etc. And as we do that, we live more stressed lives.

Real change in our lives comes when major social change arrives. And revolutionary social changes, often comes from complex origins, not easily attributable to a single technological change.

In my previous example, I proposed comparing a man's life in 1935 and 2015. Now, compare an average woman's life in the same years. During WW2, women became part of the labor force. When men came back, women had to go back to their roles as housewives. But didn't last long. Women proved capable of doing "real" work (getting paid), and they claimed their rights to be included. To have a life outside their homes.

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> Almost-free on-demand point-to-point public transit.

Cheaper, probably, but not almost-free. Unless it's a public utility and it's owned and subsidized by a state, then it's going to be profit-based, and given the level of investment needed, it can't be almost-free.

>Magic is real.

As someone else posted, that kind of uses feels awkward.

>A good segment (30%) of the world barely works

As I wrote before, this may happen but not because "people have chosen to check out of the rat race." But because automation and the increasing concentration of wealth is leaving lots of people out of the market.

>Many people live throughout their life in campus environments similar to college campuses of the early 21st century.

Communities and cities growing around major companies is nothing new. On the contrary, that was far more common in the early 20th century. And it wasn't really a nice environment. What the future will see, is the expansion and proliferation of gated communities. And eventually, private cities. Nordelta, in Argentina, is an example of that. With 5 schools, medical center, 20 restaurants, shopping center, hotels, golf, sports fields, parks, offices, etc. And of course, high density != friends.

>Hyper-personalized healthcare.

For the ones who can pay it. This is one of the areas where the difference between high-end and low-end services will increase enormously. If you are rich, custom-made organs and genetic treatments, tailored just for you, will be available. If not... you'll have something a little better than now, but not that much better.

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So, in general, what I care the most about the future are the big social changes, and those are not necessarily the technological ones. Those are my predictions:

- Middle East will still be a mess. Governments coming and going. Factions fighting for power, etc.

- As the clash of civilization escalates, people will take refuge in their own value systems. Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia will increase A LOT. More and more.

- Religion will recover lost ground in the west and the far east. We saw this happen in the Middle East, when secular governments fell (some puppets, some dictatorships and monarchies) and theocratic and radicalized movements expanded their influence. I'm seeing this happening in some parts of Europe and Latin America.

- A new wave of New-Age like movements will make appearance, promoting healthier spiritual lives.

- The gap between the rich and the poor will increase.

- As China's economy and influence expands, and it's workforce is paid better, new opportunities rise in cheaper-labor countries, and many companies will move their production centers. This poses a threat to the Chinese Government.

- US and China economies are very entangled. So, direct confrontation benefits no-one. A new economic cold war, under the table, will be fought. Something like the current Cyberwar.

- Eventually, the world will see the first WMD attack (radiological, bio or chemical).

- We'll see the rise of a new kind of fascism or pseudo-Nazism. This is one of the things that scares me the most.

- As we get used to mass surveillance, our expectancy of privacy will go to the floor. And the sad part is that we'll get used to it. And we may even convince ourselves that this is for the better.

- Proxy wars between China, Russia and USA will be fought in Asia and Africa.

- The quest for ever-cheaper labor will lead to Africa.

- A large scale cyberwar will be executed.

- But eventually, money (and not war nor peace) will find the way.

While I try to be realistic, I seem to have a pessimistic view of what's to come.

This is a much more realistic outlook, and much better expressed than I ever could. Thank you.

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