Ask HN: What will the world be like in 10 years?
How do you think a particular industry you're familiar with will be like in 10 years? Or other aspects of the world?
I don't know much about other industries, but I do know what happens when there's a long and hot summer in where I live. The water shortage was so alarming in Manila this summer, so I expect water shortages in certain parts of the world to be more exaggerated than what happened this year. Any industry that deals to contain/service water/ice during heat waves will be raking in cash.
We will probably have way more cameras that are doing all kinds of scary facial recognition for good and evil.
I’m hopefully we’ll have made some pretty steady progress with crisper gene editing and have a far better understanding of the role of bacteria in the body for good...
I think the future is bright
The problem is not so easy and we are quite far from solving it. It can work on the highway and great weather conditions. Yet, what will happen in the narrow streets of Italian cities? What will happen in a situation that is hard to predict? Would there be some service guy who would come and 'help' the car off the road? Not to mention traffic and safety regulations tec.
I think around the early 1900s people experienced rapid technological changes as the automobile and electricity spread throughout the U.S. within a decade or two. I think change happens rapidly but in spurts. I believe the 2020s will be another period of rapid change.
In ten years everyone, even current climate change deniers, will be fighting to survive in a much changed world; in thirty, humans may be possibly have gone extinct, or be well on the way to being so.
The basic needs for life are food, shelter, and water. For modern life, energy is required. But we have virtually unlimited energy vis-a-vis nuclear technology (if we have the will to use it). Solar tech has gotten only cheaper and cheaper and battery tech has gotten only more efficient. There is absolutely no reason to believe that there will be less than the current population in 10, 20, or even 50 years. Period.
I can't imagine we can extinct, we are the least-threatened of the species living on this planet.
Facial/voice recognition along with AI that will constantly try to figure you out is definitely gonna happen.
As for the USA, the telecom, entertainment and tech industries will join forces to become Ma-Bell 2.0 (control over your social media, traditional media and telecommunications). Social security will finally end with everyone having to invest on their own. The middle class will continue to shrink or disappear.
Digital currency will be the new dollar to get paid in.
I still don't see the media finding a good monetisation model, and I suspect by then most of the remaining news sources run by for profit companies will have died off for good.
The games industry probably won't have changed too much by this point, since VR still seems a fair way off and streaming services are highly unpopular with current audiences. I do hold a small amount of hope that Nintendo will have realised the demand for Wario Land 6 by then, and that some sort of proper Paper Mario revival might be on the cards, but I've hoped for that for a while now. Lootboxes may be classified as gambling by then too.
Not going to predict anything web development or tech related, since those fields change a lot, and well, who knows what things will look like after 6000 different JavaScript frameworks have come and gone. All we can know there is that HTML, CSS and JavaScript will probably be used for websites and apps in some form or another.
Finally on a political note... well a schism may be on the horizon in some societies. At least, the US seems to be more and more divided between the 'left' and 'right', and the cultural values underpinning both sides seem to completely unreconcilable at this point in time. So I can see tensions building, politics becoming more divided and fraught and things getting worse until eventually, one side tries to change the law (or constitution) in a way that breaks the camel's back and things just collapse.
I also see at least one 'first world' country ending up as a dictatorship, if only because the rise of populism and authoritarianism seems to be an issue just about everywhere right now.
But those are just a few minor predictions right now.
Almost all jobs that physically allow it have become remote. Most people are co-living in nice places outside big cities. The institution of marriage is abandoned. Most jobs have not yet been automated - and in the ones that have been, workers have been able to find work of equal skill levels. Genetic engineering of children and artificial wombs become the norm. GEnetic modifications do happen, but very very carefully (after a number of initial failures).