Ask HN: What's NH's opinion of the next big thing in tech?
What does everyone think the next big innovation that will be widely adopted be? Be sure to put your time horizon into the discussion so we can tell when you think it will occur.
If you're looking for the next big tech opportunity it's in helping businesses with fewer than 50 employees expand their reach outside of the 10 mile radius around their physical locations.
- Applications that aren't slow: "In a world where an app opens right when you click on it".
- Fast websites: type in the url, hit enter, and you're in. You click on a link, and voilà..
- Split second boots.
- Chrome not killing my computer when opening too many tabs (I used to open 120+ I think with Firefox).
- Make sbt not download the whole internet (yes, cache and all).
- Printers that actually print when I want to. Also make printing in black not require other colors.
- Automatic transmission cars that don't do a jerk motion when they stop.
- Universal cartridge format.
- Time tracking app that magically monitors what you do during the day without your intervention and can show you a treemap. Over the years, you can learn something.
- A huge dataset on every company and human that was ever formed and its life through success or failure. Maybe we can learn from that.
- A way to encode and distill the whole human knowledge. A graph of "knowledge" of sorts.
- Peer review that works.
- Time management, cognition, meta-cognition, deliberate practice, empathy, cognitive biases, and how memory works lessons in primary school.
- Voice calls on (Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger) that sound like a phone call.
- A way to simulate your life with varying parameters and find a path to a desirable outcome.
- Natural computation: A billion objects falling don't require nature to spin up more VMs to handle all their trajectories and write a Medium post about how it did it. Physics seems to handle great loads, concurrent events, several processes mutating the same object simultaneously, out of the box. A computer that does that.
The age of information seems to have become a breeding ground for misinformation. I don't really mean "fake news", but deceptive, plausible, half true news. This had made democracy a little... weird lately, especially in an era you can deliver different news to someone based on their location.
Our economic system has been based on supply and demand. But what if we basically have unlimited supply, as is the case with software? AI is going to hit hard here, with it being smart enough to replace all minimum wage foreign labor. A lot of governments are experimenting with basic income in their own way.
We've also had this weird effect where a small company can raise millions in investment and seriously threaten well-established companies within a decade.
These changes will take a while to hit, at least a decade. But I think the moves will have an impact on what kind of tech emerges.
Consider when most of our economic and political systems were first founded. Information was sparse. Game theory wasn't even a thing yet. None of the founding fathers (of our nation or any other) could have possibly fathomed the sort of interactions happening today.
At some point, we're going to have to face the fact that, over the years, the underlying rules of how things works has shifted but that the laws on the books haven't matched.
They're currently about $275,000 and I only know of one on this Earth. Also jet fuel is expensive.