This time, it seems that my crystal ball is lacking inspiration for 2021 due to the uncertainty caused by this year.
2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988
2017: none?
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
2013: none?
2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201
cmd-f 'virus': 0 results
Predictions are hard
2010
-People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025787
2011 - none 2012 - none 2013 - none
2014
2) Security/privacy will become something normal people and businesses ask about, and ask fairly superficial questions about, during many transactions (e.g. people are going to stop being fucking morons and just relying on "the cloud" for sensitive data without questioning it; they may still end up using the cloud, but will want to make a more informed choice.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
I'd like to believe that we'll be more privacy-conscious in 2014, but I don't actually think that will be the case. I'd like to see more scrutiny of the data companies collect about users, particularly because they are now collecting more data than ever before. Some companies like Google have staggering amounts of user data. They're probably salivating at the prospect of capturing even more precise user behaviour through an OS (Chrome) that potentailly captures everything you do online.
Far from the tech community (who you might hope would be most informed about this) actually raising concerns about the privacy implications of this, I think Google (and other companies) will continue to get away with barely any scrutiny at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6995005
2015
2. More hacking scandals come to light and they are used as cover to restrict privacy and empower the intelligence community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8823311
Privacy still will be a target to crush for governments, and so any activity/communication media/etc that could affect that main objective.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8823103
- Privacy will become more mainstream. After apps like DarkMail are introduced, Google and the other players will start to reconsider privacy and we, the people will gain.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8823303
2016 - none 2017 - none 2018 - none 2019 - none 2020 - none 2021 - none
(Note that large threads are still paginated and you have to click More at the bottom of the page to see the rest.)
* 1 Bitcoin will cost over $100k on Dec 31, 2021
* An animation tool rivaling Adobe Flash for the web will emerge
* FB releases a thin virtual reality headset https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/06/holographic-optics-for-...
* Austin Tx or Seattle Wa succeeds Silicon Valley as the next major tech hub. San Francisco and its century old Victorians become the Detroit of the tech world
* Section 230 doesn't get repealed
* WFH and quarantine continues until the summer
* A React competitor that compiles to WASM with promises of perf and space gains will emerge
* A Reddit competitor emerges and wins majority marketshare
* 2021 will be the year of punk and rock n' roll
It’s already here https://gif.com.ai
Count me in! That would definitely make this year happy for me.
Those who are better informed than me, who are the main movers here?
Or from react itself that compiles into WASM, similar with react native.
Yew look like they’re trying to be that alternative.
So many have tried and failed already. I would really wish that to happen though.
Currently being tested in Seattle! Had a conversation tonight about it. I hear there’s a ray-ban branding partnership. And the product is supposed to be way less creepy than google glass, but similar.
Can’t recall if this was spoken to me in confidence. Alcohol. Happy New Years!
It's happening https://ruffle.rs/
Glad to see we are learning from the mistakes of John McAfee
Over the long term (more like decades), a prediction like yours might eventually take place but it's not going to happen in the next 365 days.
Yes, old Venice eventually lost its 13th century financial supremacy to New York and London, and New York City lost its film industry to Hollywood California. Therefore, Silicon Valley's dominance won't last forever but they'll still be the #1 tech hub in December 31 2021.
Happy New Year 2021!
AnimationCPU is probably an alternative to Flash. Here is the project site https://animationcpu.com/ and Twitter with demos https://twitter.com/acpustudio
Join to TestFlight!
I don't see why the Treasury and Mint would start making more paper money and coins.
It really bugs me when people incorrectly talk about the money supply as 'currency'. Currency is printed by the US Mint/Treasury. Money appears out of thin air when banks make loans.
* Accelerating inflation perhaps leading high single digits low double digits in the next several years.
* Stocks continue to rise as a function of inflation.
* Unemployment measured by workforce participation rate stays high or increases.
* Full self drivering cars are no closer.
* 50% chance of Bitcoin crash like in 2018, 50% chance of further price appreciation but I think $100,000 is absurd for a commodity that has close to zero intrinsic value...
* Major urban areas see falling rents as WFH continues.
* Silicon Valley loses some of its prominence as a function of WFH but I doubt a wholesale shift could happen in a year.
* 50 % chance of major social unrest in the USA as Trump diehards refuse to accept Biden.
* Tech advertising bubble begins to collapse. Tech bubble begins to collapse by year end. AI, self-driving vehicles discredited.
* Amazon reduces its own shipping service as a money loser increases use of UPS and USPS.
* Subscription web services (rather than ad funded) services begin to emerge.
* Reddit continues to decline in quality but no clear alternative emerges.
* Open source, distributed alternative to Facebook emerges, or linked-in subscription based competition.
* 25% chance major world leader dies
* 25% - 33% chance of major armed conflict, especially involving China.
* 20% chance of well attested "alien" contact.
* 20% chance of second novel pandemic in addition to Covid-19
* 20% chance of extra solar "asteroid" like Oumuamua
* >50% chance of Middle East Peace agreement between Arabs and Israel
* Large chance of abnormal oil price volatility.
* Brexit results in deep recession in UK, Boris Johnson is out.
"$100 is absurd for a commodity that has close to zero intrinsic value"
"$1,000 is absurd..."
"$10,000 is absurd..."
At this point, the burden of proof is on sceptics to show why a commodity with zero "intrinsic" value trends upward despite those sceptics' predictions during the last ~10 years.
New law enforcement techniques using DNS and other Intel techniques will be used to track, seize and tax cryptocurrency - which will cause increased popularity of Ethereum.
A qubit will travel around the world without decohering and increase attention on quantum internet investments. GPT4 and other ML models (maybe even with a neuro-feedback loop) will radically change entertainment for Gaming, movies, books, and music.
Smart Cities will start emerging ( and some cities which will ban the technology) with ML models and Intel systems capable of identifying all kinds of hazards (fires), threats (terrorists) and crime at scale.
A new “shadow net” will emerge from new mesh-networking protocols and massive amounts of compromised IoT devices- allowing users to bypass core internet routers and ISPs with the “shadow net”
XR with depth field scanning and smart tailoring with drastically change the fashion industry ( shoes and clothes). So people can virtually try on clothes and order perfectly tailored clothes from their home.
A bit different from your example, but a small group of us started a "Bill of Models" project for our department. We spent too much time failing to manage complexity with fancy tools. We ended up writing our own simple tool for reading custom BOMs to create and manage simulations.
At first we just created some "Bill Of Models" to define systems and simulations. Slowly we've expanded the scope. Each BOM contains a system definition, components, subcomponents, interfaces, and some metadata. There's pointers to different repositories, parameter databases, and scripts to configure runtime environments. We have a small tool that reads BOMs and instantiates them as full simulations.
When someone wants to test a new system variant, they can usually just modify an existing BOM. If they have a new feature, BOMs give them an easy way to see and create every variant simulation to work with. We had to do a lot of standardization of our models, but that helped our efforts to move toward fully automated tests and CI/CD. We now have a web-based catalog of models and BOMs that are automatically generated, run, and tested. All of this has also helped get new people to use simulations for their work.
At this point, our group is actively pushing back on SysML, at least for our roles. Each group's system(s) has a well defined interface to the whole, and everything else is decided within the team. We've found SysML mostly just duplicated work for us. Our software is already written in Simulink so we just build models of our system in that, too. We don't get much value from SysML, and whenever someone else tries to use SysML (like an architecture team) they don't know enough of the details our system.
I don't claim to know much about this stuff, but that's been our experience. The speed and flexibility of our engineers has vastly improved. We've started catching integration issues months in advance, when they are still easily fixable.
Virtually trying on clothes would be cool but I don't think there's any way you could get actual tailoring, but maybe adding a few intermediate sizes from the standard s m l?
My prediction for fashion change would be more towards ideas like NTWRK. I hate the false scarcity 'drops' trend, but doing a cool digital launch experience is fun and chunking out a season like Jacquemus seems to build anticipation.
https://qz.com/quartzy/1539036/the-zozosuit-has-been-an-expe...
Everything can stay under the control of the designer, including 2FA of the end-user, the degree of fidelity of the rendering, rate limits for requests, timed release to selected partners, etc, etc.
Personally I don't get the appeal. Seems to me like those who want to actually try on clothes want the tactile feel which you can't get virtually. Versus shoppers like me I just can see from images online what I like and read the fabric, especially a designer I enjoy I already know what the quality is.
DNS? Not sure how that's relavent. And furthermore why would a crack down lead to more popularity?
> A qubit will travel around the world without decohering and increase attention on quantum internet investments
Well that would be good for researchers, there are basically 0 applications so i'm not sure why it would generate imvestment excitement (who needs QKD when you have public-key crypto?)
Quantum internet is different than QKD. The best analogy I can give is its like the difference between Morse code and the internet. Things like quantum teleportation, superdense coding and distributed quantum computing through a quantum internet will be revolutionary.
Why?
> quantum teleportation
What is the practical near term (next 10 years) applications? I can't think of any.
> superdense coding
Somewhat better compression is hardly a killer app, especially given the costs imvolved.
> distributed quantum computing
Need actual quantum computers before you can have that (definitely more than 10 years away imo). I'm also a bit unclear as to how applicable quantum algorithms are to parallelization in distributed machines.
Unlikely. Biden once said to putin directly that "he had no soul".
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-biden-idUSKBN0...
> "I said, 'Mr. Prime Minister, I'm looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,'" Biden told the magazine. "He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, 'We understand one another.'"
The source is Joe Biden. There is absolutely no way that actually went down as he described it.
To me, BTC looks like an inefficient way to partially solve a problem that doesn’t exist — the problem of trust.
It’s only a partial solution because it only deals with the money in a transaction and not the goods/services.
In addition, it also exists purely by consensus and is therefore just as vulnerable to majority demands for inflation (the limit of 21 million is a choice, not a fundamental constraint).
Furthermore, I do not believe that there is a real problem of trust to be solved, not because governments never mess up currencies (of course they do), but because right now they are not messing up currencies — the stability of most major currencies demonstrates that they are broadly trusted, and conversely the value of BTC fluctuates wildly compared to fiat or resource-backed currencies because it isn’t broadly trusted.
It’s also inefficient by design, being a proof-of-work that doesn’t solve real-world problems, and also limits itself to a really small number of daily transactions over all uses of the currency.
While Bitcoin might not be the payment system some have been hoping for, it surely provides a hedge against the incoming increase in inflation rates which is why institutional investors are increasingly replacing cash reserves with bitcoin.
I expect the government to do so, and I also expect that it will usually be done in a controlled fashion and for broader economic benefit. Conversely, I expect that when Bitcoin goes wrong and the 21 million unit limit is replaced (call it “Bitcoin Future Fork” or whatever), this will be done by people not too familiar with hyperinflation.
I’m also hedging against inflation with property, although I could also hedge against it with shares or precious metals.
I suspect many don't and many underestimate the effect inflation has on their savings.
> Conversely, I expect that when Bitcoin goes wrong and the 21 million unit limit is replaced (call it “Bitcoin Future Fork” or whatever)
Bitcoin is 10 years old, there are already numerous forks which changed several parameters of the original Bitcoin implementation. According to their market value, all of them failed in comparison. In fact, Bitcoin's hesitation to implement breaking changes (hard-forks) may be what the market finds valuable.
Most people don’t have significant cash savings. I forget the percentage, but a ridiculously high fraction of the USA population can’t put together $1,000 for an emergency.
> Bitcoin is 10 years old
Early days then. The Euro is only 22 years old, and decimalisation of GBP [0] happened about 50 years ago. Both still have people shaking their canes and dreaming of the Before Times.
Also: the 5,600,000-fold deflation of BTC in that time makes it almost, but not quite, as impressively unstable as hyperinflation, just in the other direction — it’s not a good thing for the economy when everyone holds onto their money instead of spending it.
Unfortunately those are often the same people that get hit the hardest once inflation increases the sales prices while their salaries remain stagnant and they can't afford hedge options.
> The Euro is only 22 years old [...] the 5,600,000-fold deflation of BTC in that time makes it almost, but not quite, as impressively unstable as hyperinflation.
The initial exchange rates of the Euro was determined by the European Central Bank whereas Bitcoin is decentralized and started with an "exchange rate" of literally zero (they were gifted via mail and forums).
Calculating a fold-increase or 'volatility' on this timescale is thus arbitrary (you could just as well argue it's "infinite"). The SD of daily returns as a volatility measure for Bitcoin has decreased from >10% in 2011 to <4% in 2020 and the 3-month realised volatility is mostly comparable to and sometimes even lower than "traditional" tech stocks like AAPL and AMZN.
Dominant risk in Bitcoin is not volatility or 0-day anymore but key management (e.g. exchange hacks, wallet loss, scams/phishing attacks). GBTC for example is an ETF-like trust which allows you to invest in Bitcoin without holding any.
Interesting side note: ~9% of currently available Bitcoins are held by companies on their balance sheets (~7% by companies which are publicly tradable btw).
HN might still be cautious about Bitcoin, but the market thinks it has matured.
> "The new study by researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich suggests that Bitcoin mining was consuming 45.8 terawatt-hours of electricity per year as of November 2018.
That, in turn, produced estimated annual emissions of between 22 and 23 megatons of carbon dioxide, slotting the operations between the nations of Jordan and Sri Lanka in terms of greenhouse-gas pollution."
It creates more CO2 than entire nations. And that number most definitely has not decreased in the past two years. We may very well be up to or past 0.1% of all global CO2 emissions due solely to crypto mining, a number that will only increase as the value of bitcoin, etc increases.
What is the good that has been gained that offsets that?
- Terence McKenna becomes more relevant again; recordings of McKenna's talks such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijA5RHTJaV4 reach million views
- if we look back in 2030, we'll see 2021 being the year that marks the beginning of the psychedelic renaissance
- as a consequnce of this, more VC money will be poured into BCI research & meditation tech; I expect headspace to ipo
- not optimistic about neuralink's consumer debut though
As Stanislov Grof has said:
> Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.
* more countries will have problem with clean water. Hopefully new technologies to make water purification easier or cheaper emerge
* given fall guys and among us success stories, there will be many more games aimed at that gameplay. Likely one or two of those will boom
* non code programming (drag drop, or similar to) will rise. Used to complement customization, not to replace code-based programming (dreamweaver for example)
* PWA or similar web-based app / installer will rise, while having more opposition from apple and google.
Google is the one pushing it, actually. And wasn't there a recent post on HN that Firefox devs are planning to remove PWA support?
Solar energy is dropping in price like a rock, and desalination uses tons of energy. Desalination can run on intermittent energy, storing water in tanks for the periods without sun. So new technologies aren't required, just continuation of existing trends.
At work it seems anyone can habe Linux as long as they support it themselves and it generally feels a lot like when Mac broke through.
But whatever, 2021 it is then!
Hope to see som really good distro releases this year then and maybe one more vendor will officially supoort it? Or maybe we will see a MS Office for Linux beta release this year?
Microsoft has been flexing their muscles for years now to the point were my personal laptop has a dual-boot partition with official(!) Norwegian Nynorsk(!) language settings.
This will trigger an economic collapse which will bring down the eurozone. Germany will want country rated euros to avoid having to bail Italy.
House prices in Europe will drop to a rent / value rate similar to the USA, as property owners scrap for money.
USA will face similar problems and inflation will start being a problem.
China will start buying more in Europe and USA (same as they did with Africa).
In that scenario, the UK will have no influence in the EU and not a single person in the EU will think it's important to protect Britain's political interests.
If that happens then interest rates will rise, which will be very, very bad for both businesses and home owners. If it happened quickly enough it'd make 2008 look like a walk in the park.
I thought it was quite interesting that 30% of the budget is debt servicing.
If they didn’t have any debt, they wouldn’t need to loan any money.
The ever-expanding massive pile of debt robs the economy of dynamism, which prompts an economic heat death. That's what happened to Japan and it's exactly the reason US growth keeps trending ever downward and will continue to and why the Fed has been doing crazy shit and can't spur the expected inflation result. The US has begun to suffer a debt-based heat death economically, where the cost of debt and the (mis)allocation of capital to low-return (de facto junk) debt robs the economy of the capital required for investment to expand effectively. And the more debt piles up the worse the effect gets, until you get to a point where the bureaucrats in charge just start doing direct currency chop-downs (aka mauling the population's standard of living), which is the point Japan arrived at several years ago. You end up with tens of trillions of dollars tied up yielding zip, heat death. Covid accelerated the dire fiscal situation for the US by nearly a decade, which is about to hand China the keys to taking superpower charge of half of the planet (if you're in Asia, you're particularly about to be screwed, as the US is going to be increasingly forced to stand-down there; before the decade is out, a transfer of hegemonic power will occur in Asia). The US is now blatantly bankrupt and spiraling (not just slipping toward it, the US is sprinting at it), it will be forced to pull back. The US jumped right to print to fund everything mode (there is nobody to buy $1.5-$2 trillion in junk debt every year other than the Fed), which will speed up the heat death by a lot (and as that gets worse, the politicians will want to spend ever greater sums to attempt to offset the stagnation to placate the angry voters, which will make it worse even faster; spiral). If China didn't release the virus on purpose, strategically it would make perfect sense to do so (and hell, if you're them you might consider doing it again given the amazing results, their global export share is now the highest for any nation since the US in 1981).
And to throw a new wrench into the economic disaster, the American population has had enough of it all. The clowns in charge in DC can no longer throw around bailouts without having to pay off the public with magic printed money too. They'll never be able to do bailouts again without throwing large sums of money at the public (all via debt and currency destruction, adding to the previously mentioned economic heat death scenario). $2,000 stimulus checks? $463 billion, 2/3 of the military budget. You see the choice that's coming very soon? The bureaucrats can feel it at this point, their senses are tingling; this, or that; this, or that; which will it be? For a bit yet they can pretend we can do both, but that won't last much longer at the rate Rome is fiscally burning. Then all hell breaks loose (already begun) as the factions start to eat eachother over priorities.
Europe is enjoying much of the same effect, including the intense economic stagnation (for 13-14 years now Western Europe has seen zero net GDP growth, and it'll continue). Trillions of euros held in garbage paper yielding negative, their economies have been in the freezer for a long time now. Nothing like paying a government to eat you.
Inflation will once again surprise the clown economists. Golly gee, what magic is this such that 0% rates aren't causing a lot of inflation. Golly gee it worked before, what's different now versus the 1970s. We just can't figure it out, our textbooks say this should work. Print more fiat, we gotta spur inflation! $20 trillion in worthless Keynesian stimulation isn't enough? Print more! We'll find the number eventually, keep digging that hole.
No field has more idiots than economics.
Keynesian economimists understand what's going on perfectly well. It's the mainstream Chicago school economimists that can't gasp what's going on. Because Keynesian's totally know what a liquidity trap is. Keynes would easily understand that monetary stimulus in a liquidity trap just results in capital imposing larger and larger burdens on the real economy.
Put the due where it's due. The ideological followers of Milton Friedman the dummkopfs you're talking about here.
Alternative explanation: economics is hard & illusory superiority is a thing.
FTFY
Hey now, we're talking about predictions, not things that have already happened...
Wonder if there are any companies I can invest in to cash in on this?
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2020/12/29/tot-500-baby-s-meer-...
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon got you good!
Frankly, I hope some areas are abandoned or made radically cheaper, and are reclaimed by impoverished artists and other bohemians. This process has happened in the past and has enriched many old cities. By the same token, I'd also love to see blue-collar workers able to move back into cities where they work, but where they're currently priced out of house ownership.
We might see a boom in commuting two or three days per week, and a growth in clusters of more localised communities, more like villages than cities. They might encircle a city made of a mix of business meeting places (office blocks) and the more bohemian/blue-collar pockets I mention.
At least, that's what I'd like to see. I don't know if it's a prediction as such.
I'd also like to see desk- and office-rental businesses openly embrace this and explicitly move away from current models that encourage the corporate sterility seen in many modern cities, and towards an enriched, happier working environment.
I can hope!
More no code platforms will emerge and grow
Fiat currencies will have major moves
Bitcoin will rise big and then drop sharply once people realize how useless it is
Inequality will continue to grow. More controls will be put in place to keep disadvantaged in line. Surveillance, social controls, brainwashing
Real estate will have volatility
or when the liquidity catches up to the prices on exchanges, like every bitcoin rally ever and people keep building on it regardless? it isn't controversial for commodities to have cyclical trading patterns.
As a vaccine roles out, one would expect these online services to die back down again to roughly where they were, if a little elevated due to some good exposure.
> Fiat currencies will have major moves
I see a few large movers now trying to push micro-transactions which could be interesting. I know for example China are pushing Alipay very hard.
> Bitcoin will rise big and then drop sharply once people realize how useless it is
I think of Bitcoin essentially as a pyramid scheme, it has zero real world value. I think banks made a major mistake in trading in it.
I always thought it would be more interesting (if not more illegal) if it was used for solving computationally hard problems, where people post bounties for their completion and it can be proved the computation was done correctly. For example cracking a strong key pair or website certificate, or doing some computation for research like protein folding.
> Inequality will continue to grow. More controls will be put in place to keep disadvantaged in line. Surveillance, social controls, brainwashing
See the point about micro-transactions. Cash-in-hand agreements grease the palms of the working man, if they can make that digital then they can tax it.
> Real estate will have volatility
After the protests/riots in the US and the COVID situation in all major cities, I think many people are looking to move out to more rural areas. In New York I hear the markets are in a very bad way.
There is no change in monetary policy globally, and every country injected even more printed money into the system for Covid relief. 2021 should see new all time highs across all equities, particularly tech.
>Bitcoin
Crypto will have a meteoric run up until the Coinbase IPO in February, and then people will take their profits, but I expect it to rise with the rest of the economy by the end of the year again. Overall, everyone should be buying the major dips on crypto until 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics when China is expected to do a roll-out of their digital currency. I don’t recall if it’s exactly blockchain based, but it’s a sentiment booster for digital cashless economy and should boost the general crypto market.
I personally don’t over think this one, just buy/sell the trends on this stuff. If you bought 1btc at 3kish, you are sitting on 24k. Didn’t we all know Bitcoin wasn’t going to stay at 3k? This will be a never ending cycle and will be our generations Gold (what makes that go up or down now days is anybody’s guess, but the sentiment cycle is real on this stuff and it’s best to surf the trends).
>Inequality
Most likely due to economic growth. In the shuffle, the working class doesn’t get it’s fair share of the pie.
————————————-
I’ll add five:
1. Tesla really benefited from government subsidies for energy efficient vehicles. I expect the Biden administration, and the Democrats to push hard for “Green” subsidies across the board. Don’t be surprised if suddenly the new meme startup pitch shifts from blockchain over to “green”. Buy anything selling solar, electric vehicles, etc.
2. Restaurants come back different in a leaner way. Smaller locations, delivery first, little to no dine-in. Think more food trucks. Suddenly that mobile robotic pizza truck SoftBank invested in might not sound so insane. What was insane was an entire industry unable to survive because of people and real-estate costs. Not so wild to consider location-less/people-less alternative.
3. If Democrats win the run-off next week and take Congress, marijuana will get federally legalized.
4. Covid annihilated companies will merge or get acquired in 2021. They won’t be given a chance to rebound, but instead be snapped up at the first sign of an uptrend.
5. Online learning platforms will become enterprise grade platforms leveraged by school systems. I expect to see 10x more companies building a Blackboard alternative for k-12, as school districts will look negligent for not investing in one to facilitate remote learning.
Growing inequality with near zero interest rates is a sign of wealth re-distribution, not economic growth.
Think YouTube + video creators, Spotify + artists, Netflix + more long tail video content, Substack + writers, TikTok + influencers, Doordash + indie chefs, Apple + indie developers.
I believe this will feel like visible people are losing jobs and making less money, but humanity as a whole will see wealth increase.
2. Remote work will continue to gain traction. Remember that in 2020 remote work was terrible for new remote workers, as they were unprepared and face hard conditions (stress, children with closed schools), but shows that remote working can work indeed. New tools for team building will pop-up and social life will be partially transferred to local and non professionnal events.
3. Real estate will slightly evolves as houses/appartment should not only be chosen to live in but could also be used to work : square meters/feet per person will increase, measurements of the quality access to water, electricity, Internet will become a standart. Commercial estate will fall hard. Locations with high life ROI will see new comers and increasing prices. City councils will be on huge pressure.
4. Take-away only restaurants and shops will increase.
5. Universal delivery box will happen to allow asynchronous distribution of goods (by night when traffic is low, by drone ?)
6. The EU e-privacy law altogether with more legal and financial penalties will make US companies to lose momentum in Europe
7. Google Ad network will either dismantled or facing a boycott from other parties
Right now green energy is only slightly cheaper than fossil fuel energy so it's effect has been minimal. But the price is forecasted to continue to drop the way it has over the last 50 years.
Energy is a massive component of the price of much of what we consume, from food to travel to chemicals to material.
Solar & wind energy have some troublesome characteristics, like their intermittency. But where some see problems, entrepreneurs see opportunity.
I'm not sure exactly how cheap power will transform the economy other than the obvious (fossil fuel producers are in big trouble). But I have no doubt it will.
Energy prices dropped massively and regularly between the industrial revolution and the oil price shock of the 70s. They've been relatively constant since then. It might not be an unreasonable prediction that the boom times between post-WW2 and the 70s might return.
People still wear masks quite a bit.
Parents of children in closed school systems in the suburban US will get even more outraged as schools stay closed into 2021, with dramatic political consequences.
Finally the US succeeds at anti trust for some big tech, though not for more beloved brands like Apple
Post COVID, Massive explosion of travel and restaurant visiting causes tons of demand that the waning industry can’t meet.
Major industrialized countries have better surveillance for potential pandemics. It’s taken much more seriously.
The major issue shifts to something completely unexpected (not Covid) by years end
Related, some enjoyable wisdom from Morgan Housel (one of my favorite personal finance writers): https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/sure/
- Much, much stronger ties between central europe and china
- Chia will become top 10 crypto
- DNA manipulation will become much bigger
- Facebook will go into proper decline
- Start of the break up of google ad business from google search business
- A few small EU alternative search engines come up
- Battery as a platform continues accelerating - new mobility form factors, battery grid scale storage
- Marketplaces with more than 2 links in the chain start eroding one of the middle links (primary ad channel will connect direct)
- Cross-border payments will become far easier
- Twitter will bring in a bunch of tools to combat toxicity
- So much travel in summer - hotels will have one of their best years ever
- AirBNB stock will do what tesla stock is doing - driven by reddit WSB kids
- Asia will crack down on scammy crypto companies
- MediaSynthesis will advance further - a major new tool that makes it trivially easy
- Google search results will start becoming way better and super personalised as their data efforts start showing results
- OpenStreetMaps will become a serious-serious contender to Google Maps
- Amazon gets into general purpose search?
- SSDs start dominating, NVME becomes standard for new desktops
- Google focuses far more on local, smaller sites to the detriment of big sites. Many well known brands (e.g tripadvisor) lose traffic
- Pinterest gets investigated for finance-related matters
- SARS viruses become the new normal
This one is very surprising to me. I think Google's results have been getting worse for me every year for a long time. They used to supposedly have the goal of getting people off the search page as quickly as possible, but it seems to me their recent data efforts have the goal of making people spend more time on search pages where they can see and click on ads. I.e. worse search results, caused by ignoring search terms and showing unrelated things instead. Why would 2021 be any different?
I can believe they’ll do this but it won’t make the results better. Google search would go the way of YouTube.
Maybe not this year, but I can see this happening over the next five.
- Car traffic will be only slightly less than 2019 levels, despite rolling lockdowns all year.
- Brexit will start to be noticed on supermarket shelves.
- The built-up stresses of 2020/2021 will turn some relatively minor issue into a genuine political crisis, in a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back situation. It might bring down the government.
NI is now effectively separated from the rest of the UK, so will rely on Ireland a lot more for trade. For sure there will be more cooperation between the two countries, but in the last survey only 20% of NI residents favoured a united Ireland. [0] I doubt Brexit has shifted that number too much. I'd more expect NI to become an independent country, but Scotland will be first.
In terms of Ireland I think this is good for them, as it'll give them more opportunity to be more independent. At least when I was there (nearly 10 years ago, in Dublin), it felt like 'the UK but slightly different', i.e. very different from the rest of Europe. Online retailers often didn't have an IE store, but most UK retailers would ship to IE for extra shipping.
Now it will probably be the other way, IE retailers will ship to NI for a little extra. The combined markets have a population of nearly 7m people, so it's bigger than a lot of European countries.
As OP says it might be painful to begin with (for NI and IE) as they adjust to the new position. Ireland drives on the same side of the road as the UK, and uses UK plugs, so cars and consumer goods will most likely become more expensive too.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Northern...
[1] https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-nireland-poll/poll...
[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/election-2020-we-want-uni...
In Northern Ireland identification primarily with the UK or with Ireland is a defining identity issue for Protestant and Catholic communities respectively. The 29% figure for near term unification can still rise but campaigners for a United Ireland there face two problems: firstly that many in their own community broadly sympathetic to the idea of a United Ireland are concerned that changing the status quo now would lead to a return to the sectarian violence of a generation ago, and secondly that the Protestant community is slightly larger and also less flexible on national identity.
If Northern Ireland is following the Republic of Ireland/EU commercial regulatory framework, and not the rest of the UK's as that quickly diverges, there will be a new pragmatic argument for Northern Ireland to leave the UK.
I'd give it at least 5 years, though.
* The DJ mix fades slowly from Covid to climatechange
* Bill Gates does geoengineering
* Trillions of dollars printed -> effect -> bitcoin to the moon
* People will say that internet in 2020 had freedom
* Migration of taxpayers to other countries
if you're assuming that printing money will inflate currency, won't every asset go to the moon (hold its value against depreciation of currency)? why would bitcoin particularly benefit?
> Baizuo (/ˈbaɪˌdzwɔː/; Chinese: 白左; pinyin: báizuǒ, literally White Left)[1][2] is a Chinese neologism and political epithet used to refer to Western leftist ideologies primarily espoused by white people.[3] The term baizuo is related to the term shèngmǔ (圣母, 聖母, literally "Blessed Mother"), a sarcastic reference to those whose political opinions are perceived as being guided by emotions or a hypocritical show of selflessness and empathy.[4]
Work from home is normalized. Commercial real estate prices will drop as companies pare-down their office space. Wework has better prospects than ever.
Travel stocks and in person events go crazy.
A renaissance for Ruby on Rails. Old fashioned SPA's are overbought/oversold, the pendulum will swing to the middle for many use-cases.
New security practices are developed, deployed, and become commonplace in the enterprise. I'd invest in this area if I had a way. Maybe honeypots, tripwires, or something new. Whatever can be sold as an antidote to the SolarWinds debacle, irony of security products as a vector aside.
Deepfakes start to surface in the public consciousness in a way they haven't so far. None of this is good.
Looking under Trump's rug gets ugly--Democrats are faced with seeming to "hunt" a political opponent, or letting some really bad stuff go.
The scary Deepfakes will be the ones that are 90% benevolent with 10% subtle naughty bits. They'll go undetected by the press. Imagine spreading anti-CCP propaganda in China but not in obvious ways that it can go under the radar of CCP censorship. Complete disarray.
If they make a 1000x improvement it becomes even more dangerous because it can make you feel safe and unaware of sword of Damocles hanging over your head.
I hope I will be proven wrong, but I don’t think any of the current approaches will deliver level 5 autonomy.
* Boris Johnson will resign
* Tiktok becomes the most popular social media platform
* Japan Olympics go ahead causing hundreds of deaths
* Covid eventually fizzles out
Although aliens might invade or some other crazy s*t.
2021 will be a year of the messy downsides of Brexit becoming ever more clear, plus the economic fallout from mismanaging Covid.
Boris will be history the moment challengers in the Cons Party judge he not they will be held accountable.
The affects of brexit won’t be felt just yet, and I don’t see his party pushing him out unless they’ve found a reasonable successor.
Imagine the irony of the UK more or less trying to forbid the Scots from seceding the union when they just seceded themselves from the EU. That won't go down well, no matter what legalese the argument will be cast into.
Brexit will cause issues, but I don’t think many of them will happen in the next 12 months. The UK won’t “cease to exist” with the next few months let’s not be alarmist. (And I’m the one in an alternative universe?).
It’s more likely that Scotland will continue to ask for a referendum and Boris will continue to deny it.
https://www.dw.com/en/scotland-nicola-sturgeon-aims-for-2021...
Scotland will be disproportionally hurt by their lack of EU membership and voted strongly against leaving the EU.
As for people not wanting Johnson out of office due to COVID: we are in a similar situation here in NL, but at the end of the day results are what matter and Johnson has done the UK citizens absolutely no service with is performance so far. Maybe it will take some time before that sinks in and I don't have a shred of doubt that he will try to pin the blame on the EU for all of his own failures.
JavaScript frameworks will feel a lot faster with more accessible implementations of SSR and React finally shipping concurrent-mode.
The singleton will be rediscovered and frameworks, languages and religions will form around the concept.
* Remote work will stay mainstream in tech, with most employees working at least a few days remote per month
* HN will get a dark mode
Maybe in 2022 ;)
Cannabis will be decriminalized at the Federal level.
Covid Fatigue, no one will give a shit by summer.
DOW 36k. There is no limit to the amount of stimulus.
The inequality in the city has reached a point where is impossible for people to catch up.
In turn, of course, suburbs will probably rise in value and attractiveness.
For example, Vancouver's real estate is pricey because it's one of the nicest places to live in the world. The rise of teleworking won't erase the mild weather all year round, the access to world-class mountain sports (hiking, climbing, cycling, skiing, etc.), the ocean with its views, great asian food, the rule of law, liberal culture, etc.
That's a very different scenario than, say, Winnipeg where it's -30 half the year and the other half the year the insects are so bad they send trucks around to fog pesticides. Plus you have conservative culture, no mountains nor ocean, little in the way of outdoor sports unless you like quad biking and fishing, or hockey.
I lived in Vancouver for a short while, and have visited Winnipeg several times for conferences and work trips. I can see reasons to live in Vancouver even if you didn't have to live there for work. I can see no reasons to want to live in Winnipeg unless someone was literally bathing me in money.
further, shutting down websites at random or just specific domains would be wildly unpopular with all voters. I like how you're thinking, though
* A security breach bigger than SolarWinds will be discovered and will severely affect market position of a major cloud provider
* Google will make its biggest acquisition ever
* Inequality, censorship, and polarization will continue to increase
Which one?
1) They don't have time to build it. 2) Since, they will need to buy it, it should be a business that already generates significant revenue, thus the biggest acquisition price tag 3) The longer they stick to click-based ad revenue the lower their chances to diversify and the higher the chance that someone else comes forward with a new revenue model that will irreversibly undermine Google's.
(I just checked on the latter and apparently it's scheduled to be released on the 23rd of January, so I guess that's pretty solid at this point. You never know, though; last attempt at release was postponed due to Covid, and it could happen again. If we're really lucky there'll be a US release in 2021.)
First screenings for press were held in December already, so there is no going back, fortunately.
Apple's processor series has an upgrade and has an unexpected name
Apple gets tired of Qualcomm and starts making radios as well (Qualcomm's has not released adequate drivers to allow 5g in a multi-SIM environment, delaying Apple's ability to offer it)
A Camera manufacturer implements "Live Photos" in the RAW format with key frame selection
A cooler running version of the Raspberri Pi is released
More software libraries develop that use quantum algorithms in the backend.
One of the major company among IBM, Nvidia, Intel, Apple and AMD will release a prototype minimal viable Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) alongside CPU similar to GPUs.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as a predictable year
edit: It's been so long, but we should remember Libya, Mali, northern Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo. Liberia and South Africa are stable though, and most African countries merely languish in peaceful obscurity.
- Travel will boom towards the second half of the year, with people spending more on vacation/leisure and more “active” travel (e.g. luxurious hiking/camping trips).
- Protests and social upheaval once countries reach herd immunity via vaccination.
- People will spend more time looking at screens and socialize less.
It’s always atop my insight-free lists of long overdue events. Keep a pair of shoes and a gallon of water by your bed.
My hope is that this will rewire our society in two significant ways:
1) Through hREA and REA accounting in general, we will start having better wealth acknowledgement systems and a new grammar for different types of wealth [2],[3].
2) No more exclusive Intellectual Property rights (trade secrets and patents) that privatize and monopolize knowledge and ideas, the use of which currently comes at the expense of mother nature and society [4]. Our accumulated human knowledge is a shared inheritance, and it belongs to all children of the world, in the commons.
-
[1] "Holochain is a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is not based on blockchain technology. It is rather like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications."
This Medium post by a Holochain core developer is a great intro: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
[2] http://mikorizal.org/Fromprivateownershipaccountingtocommons...
[3] https://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/11/05/id-55
[4] Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
* There will be dev layoffs in areas where low/nocode handles most work, especially internal tooling and APIs for corps.
* Intel will give up on manufacturing and catch up to AMD (maybe towards the end of the year or the one after). Until then stocks will plummet.
* Most big game companies will be bought by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, maybe Apple, maybe Sony. Microsoft Gamepass will get them into a leading position (but wont beat Sony in 1 years time, more like 3 or 4)
* Environmental catastrophes will become commonplace, including massive refugee crises due to water shortages, heat waves and other hazards.
* There will be 1 more economical crisis before it gets better, maybe after covid when people realize that it won't get back to pre-covid levels as fast as they hoped.
* New applications built on web assembly (like Figma) will emerge and previously
* A plan will be solidified for space travel to the moon and Jeff Bezos will pour more of his money into Blue Origin
* A new foldable iPhone will be released
* Tech exodus from California continues as tax laws mixed with the WFH paradigm shift makes the area less attractive to migrants
* Fake news will cause a major scandal with the advancement of deep fake technology and the proliferation of fake articles made by one of the ever-evolving language models
* Waymo will continue to expand to more cities and progress the state of self driving technologies in the US
HN will continue to complain about the MicroSD card reliability.
The new board will sell well.
2. Markets will crash around April 2021. Won’t revive until before 2022.
3. The POTUS inauguration will not go as expected. Something unexpected and violent might occur. Current POTUS isn’t done yet. He will gain more power.
4. Possible American civil war(50%)
5. Two governments or some kind of split(USA)
6. Covid subsides but variants emerge at the fag end of 2021.
7. K shaped economy globally.
8. Crypto will reign.
9. Silicon Valley will bounce back.
* By the end of 2021 most cars will still use combustion engines
* A one-in-a-lifetime trip to space will become affordable for 5-10% of the population.
* Bitcoin will surpass $100k value
* Drone based delivery will not happen
* Nuclear fusion will not happen
* 25% of laptops will be using ARM
* Many small businesses will die. Amazon and other huge corporations will become even significantly bigger
* Jeff Bezos will be worth over $1T
* Facebook won't die but it will loose over 50% of it's users.
The question is - is it going to be replaced by something similar?
Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021. There will be some violence on or just after January 6 (certification of electoral college votes) and January 20, but it will be minor. Trump will rage and sulk, but Twitter will cancel his account on January 21 for violation of terms of service.
I think that a lot of people worked from home for the first time, but without the required preparations. Which left a bad taste and probably turned a lot of people off.
Working from home is not a universal experience, the experience varies if you live in villa or a one room apartment. Varies, if you're sharing the space. Varies, if you have had to take care of kids at the same time, etc...
I see a lot of people who couldn't wait to get back to the office even if it meant they had to wear a mask all day.
In any case, I think that what the executives and CEO want will trump what the individual workers prefer.
I mean, it existed before, just not at this level. The difference is that it won't be weird or fringe. You're applying for a job, but you want to work from home? For the majority of places, that was a deal breaker before. Now it won't be.
-An uptick in private security services.
-Bitcoin corrects into summer. 2021 is not the year of 6 figure BTC. (although that is probably coming in the next few years).
-I plan to make a bunch of changes and do dramatic things but do not. I do however do some unexpected things that turn out wonderfully.
Companies will push to have an annual Corona Virus Vaccine. Covered by insurance and mandated as much as possible.
RISC-V will start to show up in peoples hands.
Something interesting will happen with Intel.
That's really all I got, and two of them are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
For example, I'll happily bet some amount of money at 1:1 odds against some of the predictions here.
Before 2030, Snowden will not only be pardoned but will be appointed head of the CIA or equivalent.
* More pollution, global warming, rise of sea level, more health threats etc.
* Political and socio-economical instability, crisis and maybe a third world war?
The merits of this I will leave to the reader, but there has surely been a long-lasting shift in public opinion against social media due to the unrelenting assault of Trumpism. The irony of this assault being launched from twitter.com/realdonaldtrump is not lost on me.
Apple controls 50% of domestic US computing and has redefined the concept of a computer to be a highly taxed walled garden with mysterious, byzantine rules.
More companies like Epic will sue them and Apple will ultimately be forced to open up iOS to 3rd party apps.
Apple can't be a smartphone manufacturer, computer manufacturer, OS provider, services provider, Hollywood film studio, music studio, automotive company, etc. This is standard oil.
* The vaccine efforts work out, and travel begins to open up again after August.
As I understand, it is relatively easy to cross-contaminate samples. How is this risk reduced? Or do all people who handled the biological evidence also get DNA tested to exclude themselves?
And do all US states and federal level courts treat DNA equally. More interesting to me: Might we see a case where a criminal can be tied to the crime by biological evidence, but there is a court system "gotcha" that allows them to remain free?
- Substantial number of tech workers remain remote as vaccines role out
- Remote workers crave community after covid lockdowns
- Commercial real estate is cheap
If remote is the future I expect to see mega coworking spaces filled with desks, gyms, spas, bars, workshops, etc. Will have the benefit of being able to choose who you're around every day and without the gaze of your company's HR department.
We are turning our workplaces into identity politics re-education camps, and paying our own prison guards.
Big players in airline, restaurant and other hard hit businesses will go bust.
US war on Iran with some major development in the region especially Irak/Yemen.
Vaccination will be accepted by majority of people either through good results seen on elderly, or through a vaccine pass required by businesses.
I don't think there is much to argue about this. Every year changes everyone's life for the long term.
Work starts on annual covid vaccination programmes, similar to current annual flu programmes.
As vaccines are rolled out, death rates in the elderly drop, and rise comparatively among those aged 20s-30s causing much debate about whether this matters.
Covid is found to easily hop from humans to multiple different animals where it mutates before hopping back to humans again. Epidemiologists become hugely worried about this, but nobody seems to listen.
Governments (those who listen to the epidemiologists) attempt to divert more funds to bolster virus surveillance programmes, but are heavily stymied by rising nationalistic tendencies among the electorate. Investment in overseas collaborations such as surveillance programmes are attacked by populist/xenophobic pundits who clamour for protectionist policies. The political landscape becomes increasingly fractious.
* The theorem prover Lean 4 will be released.
Either Flutter Desktop or Sciter will be the defacto mode of cross-platform app development replacing ElectronJS and QT.
If Flutter desktop will be a thing at the end of 2021, Sciter will be abandoned.
Jurassic Park will actually open.
* Kubernetes/overengineering fatigue continues. Perhaps we see some fledgling attempts at a "platform" that handles external resources (load balancers, SSL) while still having a smaller scope and complexity. Sort of like k3s but a smaller footprint aimed at running on a single VM/host. I may just be describing Dokku plus some addons
* Evernote starts to slowly come back into the conversation as they continue with their wide spread refactorings (I just like their behind the scenes videos)
* More business get breached. No one seems to care
- Rumors about Apple AR glasses, but no release in 2021.
- GPT-4 ships, we see more trends pointing to AI generality with deep mind probably releasing another interesting paper.
- Vaccine distribution resolves covid in western countries by late summer/fall.
- Tesla ships cybertruck and full self driving beta to more users (maybe fleet wide to people who purchased FSD).
- VC 'move to Miami' rhetoric dies down and most people move back to SF bay in the short term post covid remote work.
- We see flexible remote schedules post covid, but most people still go into the office, most work still is office based (and those companies are more productive).
- Peloton continues to do well even post covid when people have gone back to normal life.
- Starlink ships and is a major telecom player, including in areas like China or the Middle East where governments try and control network access/comms. It makes good internet possible anywhere, Loon and other attempts fail to compete because their solutions are worse and less globally available.
- Bitcoin remains volatile
- Nikola dies, companies that went public via a SPAC are generally worse than companies that go public via other means.
- Post covid travel/consumer spend boom 'roaring twenties' response.
- USG institutions start to repair themselves post-trump crony damage, but congress is still largely grid-locked on legislation. Some republicans continue to refuse to accept Biden and pretend they're just doing the same thing dems did about the Russian interference/obstruction of justice in 2016 (they're not).
- Woke politics dies down a bit in Biden era, but is still an issue
- More writers go direct via Substack and newsletters siphon off the best writers. Major news outlets continue to get weaker and more partisan. Something interesting happens in this space.
1. ARM laptops will become mainstream. 2. Major brands will release their phones / tablets with reflective displays
Similar is Google detecting heart disease from photos of the back of the eye, whatever happened with that? [1]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/08/non-invasive-glucose-monit...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/19/17027902/google-verily-ai...
* AMD makes an even larger dent in the consumer market, enterprise starts to ramp adoption.
* Apple will reach a $3T market cap.
* Google and Facebook will be largely unscathed by regulatory pressure. No major break-ups.
* TikTok implements more social features such as messaging, to take on Snapchat and Instagram.
* A breach larger than Solarwinds will occur, impacting multiple governments and large businesses worldwide.
Controversial:
* President Joe Biden reveals a serious illness known to affect mental state.
* One or more coronavirus vaccines are found to have serious side effects, including death.
* Tesla market cap will halve to $334B or less.
VR headsets as gaming platforms become commonplace
Global politics becomes even more strained
Prediction 2021: VR adoption leaps forwards but isn’t mainstream.
Prediction 2026: You will work in VR. All day.
Prediction 2031: You won't have a smartphone.
You will wear a pair of glasses that will pop up a screen when you want one, and give you other AR (augmented reality) features.
Obviously these changes will take time to trickle-down by socio-economic class and country development stage, just as smartphones didn’t reach everyone instantly. Just for specificity (predictions are more fun if you can be clearly right or clearly wrong!) let’s say, “More than half of people who type on keyboards for work now will use VR for work”
VR will represent the "next internet" in that everything will be reinvented around the headset.
We have “files”, “folders” and a “desktop” on our computer because it was a mental crutch that helped us understand how to think about a computer when what we had was paper, pens and desks.
We're currently in the phase where we lean on current navigation/thinking as a crutch, ("watch movies with your friends in a virtual theater!") but eventually we will sort out what a "website" is in this new context, and how we navigate and find things. Everything will be reinvented for this new medium as it moves from early-adopter to the way we interact online. It will be a blended shift, but eventually this will be the primary experience.
How we name the technology that is the exception shows us where we are now during this kind of technology adoption:
“Camera” meant a film camera. We didn’t even think about it. Then “camera” meant film and we added “digital camera” for context. Now “camera” means digital, and we would add “film” if needed for context.
“Online” means the internet “Online in VR” we’ll add for context. 2031: “Online” will mean VR, and we’ll say “legacy internet” (or something like it) to refer to what we now call the internet / online.
Fax Personal Computer Cellphone Internet Smartphone Social Media Electric cars Remote work pushed forward by COVID <-- we are here VR
What this means for startups/business:
Macro: As with any of the big leaps forward, some huge companies will fail to make the leap and they'll fall, and some massive new players will emerge. This is the realm of funded startups, because timing this leap is hard, there aren’t immediate revenue opportunities for most companies because the next generation platforms will be built over the next 5 years.
All of the big players are investing into this space. Facebook is the clear leader so far. Apple seems dormant but is great with hardware and will do well here, we just can't see it yet.
Multiple VC-funded companies you've never heard of will be a household names in 2031 because they correctly rode this wave. (Just like Zoom in 2020)
New opportunities:
Exercise will be reinvented around VR. It will be more social and more fun. Perhaps people will move around more rather than less once a computer isn’t something on a desk.
Real estate: People won’t leave their homes as much. Many won’t leave their homes at all. Where you live won’t matter, which will mean cities won’t matter (as much). Massive transfers of wealth will happen because of a shift in real estate values.
Travel / tourism: Completely reinvented. People will travel much less. Now you can see the Eiffel tower, or climb Mount Everest from home. They’ll also travel less because feeling like you are with family/friends will be almost as good as really being with them.
Drones / telepresence: You will use drones when you want to have telepresence. You will see out of the drone, and move / look around using the drone.
What else?
Fiscal and monetary policies will thighten compared to 2020. The assets that had the most speculation in 2020 will correct violently: Tesla, Bitcoin ...
The US-China relationship will improve.
Big social media (FB, Twitter etc.) will split amongst political lines.
* To be able to vote predictions
* To filter, sort, search, group, slice and dice predictions
Same goes for HN:Jobs and other threads like that. We need just a bit more structure.
Federal reserve cryptocurrency comes out of the blue and is finally released but it is hampered by privacy concerns and mistrust.
Edit: thanks for the downvoted guys... You're right, it'll likely be kamala as president by the time we're at war again
* Large companies will roll back generous WFH arrangements, claiming that it really is "better for your career" to be in the office.
* Dominic Cummings will return to Government in some form.
* At least one COVID vaccine will be withdrawn for safety reasons after a large number of people have received it.
Also, similar geographic and demographic countries have performed vastly different in different parts of the of world (eg. South Korea or Japan vs. UK in order of magnitude)
This is an interesting study which takes a wide variety of factors into account - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.6043...
There are no studies which have found statistically significant links between political measures and excess COVID deaths.
From the conclusions section:
“Regarding government's actions (i.e., containment and stringency index), no association was found with the outcome, suggesting that the other studied factors were more important in the Covid-19 mortality than political measures implemented to fight the virus, except for the economic support index.”
One difference with those is that their governance and infrastructure to tackle a pandemic already existed, which counts. You could write that off to existing 'public health', as you have tried to stretch from the paper, but that is a disingenuous of that research.
A quick search implies that you are also not looking very hard to find studies that don't find linkages. "The results presented in this paper suggest that policy interventions may well explain the majority of cross-country variation in officially reported Covid-19 deaths."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-020-00466-5
Since we’re not there yet, let’s wait and see.
My friend who I'm on the phone with: "most theaters will shut down and AMC will launch their own streaming service"
Tech companies will close offices and have most employees work from home
Google will finally make a smart watch on par with the Apple wacth
I highly doubt that. They've managed to ruin even the amazing Pixel phones with poor hardware and poor decisions on pricing and availability. I have a Pixel 2XL and desperately want to upgrade but I can't because both Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 are not available in India! I've been waiting to buy a good non-Apple smartwatch for years now but I can't wait anymore. I prefer Android over iOS, but the current affair of things is making me give up and just go for iPhone and Apple Watch.
So I agree with the parent comment, but I want to clarify that I don't think the parent comment meant as "doordash for weed company will emerge". I think they were implying that the law changes that would allow that to happen, and then one of the companies in that niche will become truly big and successful.
- Eventually the virus mutates and becomes less lethal –it needs a healthy host population to survive. Evolution, not vaccines will drive normalization.\n - Cloud gaming explodes in Q1. Just before spring we will have a killer app for VR. - Much more paid-communities... - Close to the end of Q3, Apple starts creating a buzz around AR glasses.
For 2021:
- coronavirus is still going strong in most of the developed world by March. By the end of the year it is still going strong in less rich parts of the world and there will still be measures to control it in most richer countries
- there won’t have been any successful antitrust action against a large us tech company (though perhaps some trials may be ongoing)
- there won’t be any large scale police reforms in the US
- there won’t be any new constitutional amendments getting the support of more than 20 US states
- tourism between rich countries in the northern hemisphere will increase significantly compared to 2020, and be similar to 2019 levels. Other tourism will not be close to 2019 levels.
- real estate prices will continue to rise in rich cities in the US and Europe
- relations between the US and China will sour slightly
- Belarus is effectively annexed by Russia
- hn commenters will move to the right, political flame wars will increase, and more people will complain about the site on Twitter. pg’s essays and responses to them will still regularly hit the front page.
For the 203rd decade:
- real estate prices (in rich cities) will have continued to rise above inflation. There will be more government schemes to somehow allow people to afford houses. Young people will complain about them but politicians won’t remove them.
- relations between China and the US/EU will sour. A smaller proportion of consumer goods will be made in China but some industries will be captured. Manufacturing will not have significantly returned to the US and manufacturing jobs certainly won’t have.
- brexit won’t have been a very good for the majority of people in the U.K.
- one of the following will happen: 1. Poland, Hungry, and other particularly conservative countries will leave the EU; 2. The constitution of the EU will change to prevent single members from vetoing policies; 3. (Most likely tbh) the EU gets into a US-style political deadlock where reforms can’t be made and bills come with loads of crazy things tacked on (either due to negotiations or because passing bills is so hard.)
- relations, and particularly public sentiment, between western countries and Turkey worsen, but those western countries will continue to need to make deals they don’t really like with Turkey.
- computer science courses at typical good universities in anglophone countries will be at least 65% male. Google will have made little progress trying to increase the gender balance of their workforce.
- hn will be a shadow of its former self and far fewer people will come here or post interesting comments.
- this will be the decade we realise we fucked it with climate change.
- oil prices and demand will go down. Some gulf states will be having significant political problems because of this, others will still be hanging on by relying on cash from better years.
- Statically typed languages with advanced type systems (in particular rust or something like it) will increase in popularity over the first half of the decade. Some new programming construct or paradigm will be invented that makes dynamic languages become more popular but maybe not as popular as they once were by the end of the decade. Garbage collection will still be very popular but some GC’d languages may offer more ways to have objects out of reach of the GC. Parallel programming, simd, and gpu programming will still be hard, even in the good languages. Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C# and Java will still be very popular.
The political divide continues to grow in the US. Terrorist acts are attributed to alt-right ideology, and government starts to remove particularly egregious examples of online hate websites.
Only a third of the country will be vaccinated by the end of Q2 2021.
Hate speech is free speech in the US, though. The government can only get involved if there's incitement of "imminent lawless action". I could see private companies trying to stomp out the sites (refuse to host them, etc.), but the government can't do anything except in the case I mentioned earlier.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/united-states-seizes-domain-n...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/united-states-seizes-27...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/california-operators-my...
- Vaccine program will mobilize and kick start the economy. Big Time. New restaurants will open up, it will be like a forest fire that wiped out the trees but new vegetation will grow. New business will start up.
- Travel is going to be out of control once everyone is vaccinated and cases plummet after herd immunity is reached.
- Python will have a great dep management finally.
- M1X is going to ignite the competition from AMD/Intel.
- US Senate will go blue next week. New pro-democracy laws will be passed in next 2 years after this shit show.
- Remote only jobs and startups will invigorate local towns and decentralization of cities. Local ISPs, local farming, local means of production.
- SpaceX starship will demonstrate further success.
Long Term:
- US, EU, APEC region will start becoming less reliant on China over the course of next 10 years. Fungibility of supply chain and decentralization. Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philipines, Eastern Europe, Mexico will see rise in manufacturing industries.
- New chip companies outside of Taiwan.
- Defense spending will go through the roof, defense stocks will do exceptionally well.
- Globalism 2.0 will put checks and balances for healthier international cooperation.
I'm curious about this one. Who do you think will put the pressure / lead the change? (In terms of organisations or gov groups rather than countries)
Sincerely doubt that: for once a very big percentage of the population will refuse vaccination for all the reasons one can think of, many businesses have gone bust so travel is accessible to less people and considering the state of the airline industry, I'm willing to believe that prices will be through the roof and into deep space.
> - Python will have a great dep management finally.
I think it's ok to dream but I've given up hope on that.
- BTC goes over $100k in 2021
- We will learn about Aliens more
- AR/VR will go mainstream. Something like Pokemon Go will appear & be huge.
- Fitness apps start to become mainstream. Mainly follow-along workouts like FitnessBlender on YT.
- Creator economy will be huge. We'll see more creators grabbing media spotlights like Logan Paul & Charlie D'amelio
- Elon Musk announces a new company & becomes the richest man in the world
- More unicorns come out of India
- WASM goes mainstream
- Covid Vaccine has various side-effects. There will still be a Covid billionaire.
- TikTok survives
- China tries to enter into US & India again, their biggest markets
- A new social networking platform will emerge
- Facebook is now only used by 50+ year olds
- More people start online businesses.
- Adult industry booms. OnlyFans wouldn't be just for NSFW content. Celebrities get on it as well.
- India launches Cameo & OnlyFans alternative.1. the vaccine will prove effective against a certain strains of virus but ineffective against other strains, giving a false confidence and later re-emergence of corona.
2. WFH will continue. and companies planning to reopen offices in mid 2021, will postpone till 2022.
3. Trump will refuse to leave White House. grabs popcorn
4. College students graduating in 2021 will face severe competition with 2020 unemployed grads leading to stagnation in salary for entry level jobs. C level positions will have no impact.
5. IT will forget about SolarWinds attack and move on as irresponsibly as before
My thoughts that I was going to post to HN were mostly political/dystopian/economic bound. None of it related to tech. I'm glad I didn't post it.
One poster made the observation that most of the '21 predictions on HN didn't have anything to do with tech. Maybe tech adjacent, such as what FB or google impacts might be, but not much on core technology. I think this is kinda accurate of the tech industry though. Not a ton of big changes, things really slowed down this year but still notable exceptions.
Here is my revised thinking with less dystopian and political takes.
Bitcoin will rise and fall through the year, no idea how high it gets or where it settles but it's gaining popularity and it's impossible to ignore as people look for new ways to invest because people simply want to park their cash somewhere.
Space. small sats are blowing up in popularity. There's so much new tech and parts, and cheaper launch services. It's getting much easier and less technical to launch a small cube sat. There's open source flight software and constellation management software now. There's open source parts and designs for small sats. On the what-to-do-with-it side of satellites, it's also blowing up. There's a lot of new companies crunching data from small sats for everything from investing to weather observation, conservation, and military proliferation.
Drones. The war with Azerbaijan and Armenia shown how powerful military drones are over conventional warfare. Tanks are no longer relevant. You don't want to be a solider driving or even walking around on a battlefield with a drone loitering overhead. Small commercial drones are also being used in warfare too. The Saudi pipeline that was blown up used small drones with bombs attached. Drone swarms have become a thing for both artistic display and terror. There's been reports of drone swarms overwhelming nuclear plants air space, overwhelming military responses. They're too small, too portable, to be effectively combated against. I think we see a rise in counter drone tech to match the rise in drone swarms and drone warfare. FAA(?) is already implementing more controls to limit what you can do domestically with them and it will continue although, interestingly hobby aircraft has been a thing long before quad copters became regular news stories but we haven't seen them really used for makeshift war yet. I also anticipate seeing drones used for more small 'army' type applications this year.
Electric cars continue to take market share. Finally we're seeing all of the major car companies go head first into this. I think it causes increase in Tesla's popularity rather than a bad thing like saturation. We're too far away from saturation for a few years still. With this battery tech continues to improve incrementally. I don't see any revolutionary changes to battery tech over the next years but incremental changes that are enough to satiate our desires. In a few years costs will drop but we're still on the developing new tech side. Alternatives will have to be found for it to continue at the current rate of growth due to lithium supply constraints. This also leads to more banana republics among countries which mine lithium.
Wind/Solar energy continue taking market share from coal/nat gas/nuclear. Solar roofs continue to become more common place which also helps drive battery tech.
WASM gains more traction by end of the year there will be major projects from big corps running on WASM.
The URL will start to die and not matter. More and more consolidation of the internet will happen and the web will commoditize in these huge mega corps. Google is a main driver in killing the URL but all big players benefit from it. I think PWAs contribute to this. The url doesn't matter if it's an icon on your phone just like an app. Link shorteners also contribute to the decay of the URL. When I say URL is dying what I mean is that it isn't as important anymore and people don't really care. They're clicking something off FB or google and the title is all that matters.
ML continues to get bigger, but there's less break throughs and instead tightening around things which have worked and dumping ideas/applications for ml that haven't.
Deep fakes combined with GPT-3/4(?) will have some big break through applications for entertainment.
People say SV will die but I think it already has. It hasn't been about startups for 4 years now. It's all about mega corps. And mega corps have been building satellite offices all over the country/world. Now they've all gone a year with WFH and I think the satellite offices will play a bigger role for them as they become hubs people work around.
Internet availability will play an even bigger role next year and focuses on municipal broadband will become more common topic. This also prevents a lot of migration around the US where people don't really leave cities but move around to other ones to find their cultural fit.
A rise in new text based social media sites (not tiktok/insta types) as alternatives to the common ones like twitter/fb/reddit. They won't be hugely successful or profit making, but I think we're at a tipping point where it's easier to just live in your own social bubble than trying to coexist on the same sites as everyone else.
We saw quibi fail and everyone celebrated. But it did sound like a good idea, it's what substack is to writing. However phone-only kinda backfired when everyone was stuck home and not commuting on the bus.
Auction sites alternative to ebay have been on the rise last year and will continue to grow and evolve. BaT for cars blew up and now has some competitors. StockX for shoes and now everything hype has blown up. which has also shined a bright light on bots and scalpers with a few big ticket items coming to market this year. I see new opportunities to curb this or take advantage of it coming out next year.
Something better than Stadia will come out by year end. Maybe MS hedging against consoles. They'd be in a perfect place given Azure and xbox.
Mentioned briefly above but more interest in biomedical/informatics will come out. The help-protein-folding-from-home applications were a great introduction. Many new people finding interest in these fields and we see new breakthroughs next year.
SolarWinds fallout will be unnoticed by most people but the security industry will have a great year.
https://www.newsweek.com/ufo-report-government-agencies-180-...
Excessive monetary and fiscal policies sets off an unstoppable spiral of inflation in the US and Europe.
Trump declares himself US president. Escalating political violence in the US.
India might experience one or two major terrorist attacks.
Trump will be more desperate and loud.
Amazon Prime / Netflix might bring in pay-per-view / pay-per-hour options.
I am very curious to know what made you predict this
International travel will not be back to normal until 2022, however.
The vaccines will not be as effective as anticipated, but a combination of multiple vaccines, community spread, and large vaccination programmes later in the year will be sufficient to mostly eliminate fatalities.
This good news will be tempered by the realisation of the full economic consequences of covid. Many people will lose their jobs. The liquidation of assets will result in downturns in many markets, and probably a stock market crash. Inflation will take off. Governments will struggle with keeping down borrowing and investing to keep the economy going. It will be a great year for those supplying infrastructure.
At the same time, a desire to “roar” will lead to a boost in spending by those who can afford it, and we will see a “mini roaring 20s” in some ways, but more affordable ones. Lots of booze, drugs, divorces, and unplanned pregnancies. People will travel as much as they can, but a lot of it will have to be within country.
Scotland will elect a landslide of the SNP and an independence referendum will be scheduled for 2022.
It will become clear that Northern Ireland has essentially left the U.K. and this will lead to some discontent but the troubles will not return.
Belligerent behaviour by the U.K. will lead to an economic and legal confrontation with the EU. This will be drawn out and run into 2022.
American - U.K. trade talks will stall, ultimately resulting in the resignation of Boris Johnson, made somewhat inevitable by his previous behaviour towards the US.
The EU will have a year of huge decisions, but ultimately will come out stronger than ever.
It’ll be a surprisingly bad year for China, as they struggle with balancing authoritarianism with entrepreneurship, whilst also faced with strategic diversification by other nations acting in concert.
Twitter will finally be bought, probably in Q1 as Jack et al. realise it has peaked.
We’ll see about a 10% increase in home working but, apart from that, the predictions of the demise of the office will be mistaken. However, that swing will be enough to cause major problems for holders of commercial real estate, and major changes in the composition of rural areas as the rich displace locals, most notably in major beauty spots.
Biden will become president, but many of his left leaning supporters will be very disappointed with the compromises he makes and the distraction of the economic crises thrown at him, as well as further very serious problems with China’s foreign policy. Twitter will turn on him but support his Vice President. There will be some discontent within the democrat party on these accounts, but people will hunker down to wait it out.
It will be an amazing year for the fight against climate change, as Biden re enters the Paris Accord and vast amounts of money are pushed into green industries.
(Obligatory "I wish only the best for the president-elect and his family", in case that was unclear)
US Government will announce it has been studying sophisticated UFO activity seriously for decades. They will acknowledge that the technology is unprecedented and could be of extra terrestrial origin.
Joe Biden will have repeated episodes of public dimentia. Public trust in his abilities will erode.
Tesla stock will collapse by at least 25% over twelve months. Afterpay (APT.AX) will lose 80% of its market cap. The price of Iron ore will reach $175.
2. China will eradicate the virus within their borders, because their vaccine is easier to manufacture and deploy. And is probably safer, since it uses the traditional inactivated virus technique. So less side effects for most people.
3. Housings prices will continue increasing. Further separating the haves vs. the have-nots.
4. QE infinity is here to stay. Low interest rates will continue to push up asset prices for stocks and housing.
5. The virus will continue to ravage America for the next 5 years. Then the mutations will come.
6. Lots of houses will be foreclosed on, but wealthy companies and investors will swoop them up for pennies on the dollar.
7. American politicians will continue to be absolutely clueless, as to how their decisions and indecisions, will further ravage the fabric of society.
Don't you think some of the other vaccines (like AstraZeneca's, or maybe Novavax or the Russian one) will be deployed at a large scale?
It might take the EU and US regulators a month or two to approve them, but then things should move pretty quickly...
As the vaccine rolls out in the U.S., we should slowly see at least a short term economic boost as spending increases, potentially increasing inflation.
Housing prices will continue to rise with less and less inventory, especially for single family homes.
- Pandemic won't go away or show any signs of going away at the end of the next year. Multiple new strains will be around at the end of next year, some of which will not be protected by the vaccines. Many more countries, specially those under the Chinese influence (which there will be more of), will not shut down or have travel bans or vaccines or have any measures against the virus.
- The vaccines will kill people at a higher rate than the pandemic, mostly by other diseases than COVID (because the immune system is a very efficient adaptive model, if you bias it to be effective against one thing, it will be at a cost of losing effectiveness against most of everything else), and vaccines will be considered very successful.
- Bitcoin will have lowest value in the year around Christmas time next year, but it will still be around the lowest value this year. It may reach much higher before it drops.
- Most American big tech companies will lose significant value. At the same time, a few like Microsoft and Tesla will be completely unaffected.
2. Bitcoin will hit $60K but will also touch again $5K in 2021
3. Trump will remain President
4. $VIX will hit $100
How?
It sounds like Pence is the one that counts (or doesn't) the electoral votes, so depending on the circumstances it could result in neither candidate getting 270, which results in a "contingent election" - one vote per state, from the House of Representatives, which would be majority Republican, for the president. The Senate would choose the vice-president in the same way - so if this actually happens, it's apparently possible (if absurdly unlikely) to get a Trump/Harris or Biden/Pence outcome.
One possible reason Pence could do that is if the contested states send two sets of electors - one certified by the governor (how we usually do it) and one by the (Republican) legislature. My understanding is that if both groups of electors are correctly certified, either Pence would have to choose which to count, ignore both, or the Supreme Court would get involved. Key phrase for finding more on this is "dueling electors"; a lot of places are saying the legislature-certified ones wouldn't be valid, but a handful say it's possible.
* there will be hyperinflation and it will be reflected in asset prices
Off the back of that, stimulus and other popular liberal policies will be enacted. And they'll be successful and well-liked.
I also think Joe Biden won't do anything to stop the filibuster.
He will work with Democratic senators to set their agenda during his term, and part of that is decisions regarding whether to keep the filibuster or whether to push to end it, or to work around it. He can express his will via the bully pulpit, and via communication & coordination with Senate Dems, the same way basically any president has been able to convey their agenda to the senate for as long as we've had presidents and senators.
Obama and Harry Reid had this exact conversation over whether to continue using a filibuster, and Obama listed it in his autobiography as a regret that he didn't accept Reid's suggestion to nuke the filibuster.
Companies will embrace remote work after they realize they can stop paying for expensive offices and all the expensive services associated to them.
AI/ML will get better at learning and all the skepticals will be ridiculed forever.