Predictions for September 2031
museum-on-the-coast.com
museum-on-the-coast.com
I am an educated in the field of Computer Science, the field known for startups. The only disadvantage I have here is laziness."
I have reason to believe that my IQ is greater than 140, and my area of expertise is software development. I am also a World Class procrastinator. My net worth now (after retiring) is about $million, but at least 2/3 of that is due to my wife, who is exceptionally disciplined.
I think laziness reduces your chance of becoming a millionaire in 10 years significantly.
How about "I need to drive to the closest local retailer without human intervention". In many cities there's already the ability to buy anything without leaving your home, hell even our village shop will deliver at short notice.
"A lot can happen in 10 years. In 10 years I could be unemployed, divorced, and an alcoholic. I could also have a PhD, billionaire, and married to Zendaya. And there’s a giant spectrum of possibilities between those two paths."
You could even be an unemployed alcoholic billionaire with a PHd who just got divorced from Zendaya
My initial draft had a line really similar to that, great minds… Also, all things considered, I think that’d be a better than average outcome. Alcoholism and heartbreak can be overcome.
Honestly, I think it's more likely that we'll have ALL of - superintelligent AGI - contact with a space faring civilisation - the cure for aging
than I do that Disney will let copyright on anything go... :D
By 2031 most new cars will have lane keeping, emergency braking, traffic light & sign sensing. And likely more. Almost all cars will drive hands-off steering wheel on the highways. By 2031 a big proportion of new cars will be electric.
To make even one prediction, asking "what would have to happen for this to come true?", and following that chain back to the answer to the other question, "where are we now?" --all of that takes me hours at best, often months.
A wish is not a prediction.
I can identify many beliefs about the state of the present (now the past), and the state of the future (now the present), that I held around that same age, and that I'm now embarrassed by. I had no fully-formed idea of what success looked like, save for the meager success I'd enjoyed up to that point. Yet somehow, I felt qualified to hold those beliefs anyway.
Case in point: I at 24 (roughly the same age as the author, minus one year) was having a talk with a 37-year-old colleague, where he brought up a statistic he'd read: $27 million was self-sustaining - that, due to diminishing returns, you'd be living the same lifestyle solely off the interest proceeds, if you didn't work another day in your life. My first thought was, "that's not fully out of the realm of possibility - that's maybe even doable!" That was back when I was in the exponential growth phase of my career - I'd just graduated college, and had the word "Junior" dropped from my title shortly thereafter. I now know that's ridiculous, and I look back at 24-year-old me with some contempt for having thought it.
Predictions by HN from 2010 on the upcoming decade - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681
Predictions by HN from 2020 on the upcoming decade - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
Someone should do an analysis after the fact to see how well the predictions went. We might even want to do them at smaller intervals, like 1, 2 and 5 years.
The thing that's missing from a lot of the predictions is verifiability, though. As in, some predictions are vague enough so that it could be interpreted in a variety of ways. It'd be good to make the requirement "here is a concrete measure for which, if my prediction doesn't meet it, it will be considered invalid".
For anyone who is really into making clear predictions, the Long Now Foundation has a website where people can place 'accountable' bets at https://longbets.org/
I've divided my comments on the 2010 thread into three categories: Hits, Hit and Miss, and Misses. I'll start with the misses.
Misses:
2010 Prediction: Major changes will happen in Iran, one way or the other. The current trajectory they are on does not seem sustainable for a decade. —DanielBMarkham
2021 Review: Iran's power structure is largely unchanged for now.
2010 Prediction: During the second half of the decade, the Chinese bubble will burst. This will be a quite heavy shock. A lot of people will lose a lot of money. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China. —DrJokepu
2021 Review: This hasn't happened yet, though growth does appear to be slowing in China. I think it's interesting to note the use of the word 'populist' here; perhaps what the author had in mind was 'more responsive to popular opinion and less repressive' as opposed to 'nativist rabble rousing', which tends to be what people mean by 'populist' in 2021. Xi Jingping arguably is more populist by the latter definition, but not the former, and he isn't significantly younger than his predecessors.
2010 Prediction: Hugo Chavez & his friends will be removed from power in Venezuela. —DrJokepu
2021 Review: Chavez died in 2013, but his party and his chosen successor are still in power, despite an economic and political crisis that began in 2014, and a disputed presidential election in 2019.
2010 Prediction: Megan Fox or Jessica Biel is nominated for best supporting actress. —kevbin
2021 Review: If this referred to the Academy Awards, it didn't pan out. Both were nominated at the Golden Raspberry Awards for Worst Supporting Actress however, and Fox won for her role in 2015's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
2010 Prediction: Still no Duke Nukem Forever. —DrJokepu
2021 Review: It was released the following year.
2010 Prediction: Unauthenticated free wifi becomes nearly extinct after a major hacking incident is traced to Panera Bread (or similar) and a court rules that companies are liable for the actions of those on their free wifi networks. Realizing this, companies force authentication on everyone or turn off their wifi all together. —ericb
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: External brain-computer interfaces make progress, and typing begins to be replaced by the end of the decade. —ericb
2021 Review: Brain-computer interfaces are still mostly laboratory projects for now, and typing shows no signs of being replaced yet. Even voice interaction remains impractical for anything other than simple commands.
2010 Prediction: Boeing Dreamliner Delayed Until 2022 —edw519
2021 Review: The first Boeing Dreamliner commercial flight took place in 2011, though this was a humorous prediction.
2010 Prediction: Facebook will be gone in 5 years, just like MySpace. —InclinedPlane
2021 Review: Facebook was still very much around in 2020 and the company's market capitalisation is approaching a trillion dollars.
2010 Prediction: No more airline travel hassles in the USA, people will be able to board and fly without government restrictions or searches. —Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: Taxes in California will be the lowest in the nation. —Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: Politically, Generation-X will be in power--look out. —Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: The current US President was born in the 1940s, as were both his predecessor and his strongest competitor in the primaries.
2010 Prediction: Everyone will have their full genome sequenced if they need some sort of medical treatment. —brfox
2021 Review: This hasn't happened yet, but it does seem plausible for the not-too-distant-future, and relatively inexpensive SNP-based sequencing kits for ancestry and basic health insights are widely available to consumers.
2010 Prediction: Healthcare will start to become cheaper due to personalized medicine and more data based decision-making. —brfox
2021 Review: Healthcare costs are still exorbitant in the US and personalised medicine is generally expensive. This prediction might yet come to pass further in the future, but the timescale wasn't right.
2010 Prediction: Telerobots become commonplace. These will be not much more than a wheeled or tracked base with a pole and holder for a mobile phone. It allows you to visit people in their homes, visit companies or customers, provide some kinds of medical service and carry out inspections of remote sites. —motters
2021 Review: Nope.
2010 Prediction: the first terrorist small nuclear detonation —slvrspoon
2021 Review: Fortunately this one was a miss for the last decade.
Hit and Miss:
2010 Prediction: Ebooks defeat paper books. All high street bookstores go bust. —JulianMorrison
2021 Review: High street book sellers had a very hard decade, but people are still buying plenty of paper books online.
2010 Prediction: Driverless cars will appear. As they move down from the high end to the mainstream, they'll make taxis cheap enough that private car ownership starts to become quaint. Eventually, driving your own car will be considered selfish risk-taking, and banned on public roads. —JulianMorrison
2021 Review: Driverless cars have appeared, but the software is not yet reliable enough for them to be operated without human oversight under typical conditions. Small trials of fully driverless cars are underway in some places.
2010 Prediction: BPA and pthalates are finally banned from the food and personal grooming categories. —ericb
2021 Review: Some legislation was passed and BPA use did decline markedly for some applications, but this seems to have been mostly due to commercial decisions rather than a direct result of regulation.
2010 Prediction: The technology that will eventually 'cure' cancer is invented--essentially a find and kill tool for a genetic signature. Signature creation is built for more and more cancers and becomes more dynamic with added logic over time. —ericb
2021 Review: Progress has been made in this regard across a number of promising technologies, particularly immunotherapy, and there is some hope that the MRNA technology used for some of the coronavirus vaccines might revolutionise cancer treatment, but this remains to be seen.
2010 Prediction: By 2020, Chrome and Firefox each have 35% market share. Internet Explorer becomes insignificant. —artagnon
2021 Review: Internet Explorer's usage share is insignificant and Chrome's is estimated to be over 60%, but Firefox's is only a few percent.
2010 Prediction: Quantum computing will start to surge around the third quarter of the decade. It won't be a general tool and it won't be used for cracking crypto - it will be doing things like data mining, bioinformatics, and solving variations on the travelling salesman problem. —JulianMorrison
2021 Review: There has been substantial investment in quantum computing in recent years and quantum supremacy was demonstrated in 2019, so the prediction of a 'surge' around the third quarter of the decade was arguably right, but quantum computing still hasn't quite yet become a practical tool.
2010 Prediction: In 2020, AMD's 3rd generation holodeck isn't quite like Star Trek, but the future video games and videoconferencing/telepresence systems make today's tech look like something out of the stone age. —kf
2021 Review: Telepresence has not advanced much and videoconferencing has only improved incrementally, despite many millions of people being forced to use it for the first time during the coronavirus pandemic. Virtual Reality headsets are impressing people however, and ILM's StageCraft technology looks set to change the visual effects industry after being used successfully by Disney in the production of its Star Wars spinoff series, The Mandalorian. Raytracing and other technologies are also pushing video games increasingly towards photorealism.
2010 Prediction: The media as we know it now will fade away from people’s lives like the Oldsmobile and the Pontiac. Perfectly viable businesses, self-destructed, not important enough to qualify for taxpayer bailouts just gone from the scene like the horse and buggy. They had a good run but now it’s over. —Scott_MacGregor
And...
2010 Prediction: Death of traditional news industry. —Slashed
2021 Review: Social media has become the primary news source for many, and print media has continued to suffer serious declines in circulation and influence, but major national newspapers around the world have largely managed to survive by improving their online offerings, and they remain mainstream sources of journalism. Television audiences have also declined further, but the major networks are still around and influential, and, like the newspapers, have adapted by shifting their attention to the internet audience.
2010 Prediction: WIFI will be free for everyone in all major metropolitan areas and it will be 100% taxpayer supported. —Scott_MacGregor
2021 Review: Taxpayer-supported WiFi is not provided freely to everyone in all major metropolitan areas, but it is widely available free of charge from commercial establishments, and city governments do subsidise it in some places.
2010 Prediction: The first real AI is created, but isn't taken seriously until it comes up with a revolutionary way of promoting soap powder, which advertising executives describe as "blindingly obvious" in hindsight. However, its success is tragically short-lived, as advertising is mmediately redefined as not requiring genuine intelligence. The search for real AI continues.... —10ren
2021 Review: This has a ring of GPT-3 to it.
2010 Prediction: Some gene-therapy will be more commonplace. —brfox
2021 Review: Gene therapies are beginning to bear fruit, but they remain relatively rare.
2010 Prediction: Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments. —IsaacL
2021 Review: Chrome OS's usage share is estimated to be around 4% at the moment, though the major commercial developers are clearly trying to move more towards making their operating systems reliant on web access.
2010 Prediction: Augmented reality becomes a major entertainment system. You wear something like an EyeTap device and 3D content is projected into your field of view. The device also contains a accelerometers (same as the Wii controllers) to monitor head pose. Highly compelling 3D content, including games, business charts, street directions, ads, and even "adult content" can be interacted with at any location using the headset, which is wirelessly linked to something like a mobile phone or laptop. —motters
2021 Review: Augmented Reality has definitely developed substantially, and it achieved widespread public attention around 2016 when the Pokemon Go game became popular. Aside from some early adopters of headsets, however, it's still mostly confined to the screens of handheld devices and vehicle interiors. The prediction got the use of accelerometers etc. right. There are many practical uses of AR now of the kind the prediction envisaged, but adoption is uneven and a lot of applications are still regarded as gimmicks. Many people in the developed world are now carrying around devices with them all day that have quite sophisticated AR abilities, but at the moment it's still a peripheral feature for most.
2010 Prediction: Augmented reality could also be used for political purposes. I imagine that as part of an election promotion campaign a photo-realistic avatar of the candidate sits opposite to you in your living room and says "look Bob, it's like this...". The avatar has access to your data and can completely customize the political message to your individual circumstances. This ultra personalized campaigning could be highly effective. —motters
2021 Review: Personalised AR avatars might not have become a feature of political campaigns, but personalised targeting of political advertising over social media, and the use of data harvested from internet users to monitor and improve its effectiveness, certainly has; that aspect of the prediction was very prescient.
2010 Prediction: growth of a chinese middle class with a voice and some balls and independence —slvrspoon
2021 Review: The Chinese middle class has continued to grow, and they have a voice on social media, reacting to various issues and cultural trends. Their independence, however, is heavily controlled for now. The Chinese government seems to use social media to monitor and influence public sentiment, and there is strict censorship of politically sensitive speech, which seems to have increased in recent years.
Hits:
2010 Prediction: Electric cars become fairly common. A destructive feedback loop starts for gasoline fuel —JulianMorrison
2021 Review: Electric cars are now fairly common, if not yet dominant, and the governments of several large countries have legislated to phase out fossil fuel vehicles completely.
2010 Prediction: Still no fusion power. —DrJokepu
2021 Review: Accurate for now, though progress slowly continues.
2010 Prediction: Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else. —DrJokepu
2021 Review: Prophetic. Steve Jobs resigned as CEO the following year due to his health and died shortly afterwards. Apple went on to become the first publicly-traded company to reach a market capitalisation of a trillion dollars in 2018, and the first to reach two trillion dollars in 2020.
2010 Prediction: Lady Gaga will be the new Madonna. —DrJokepu
2021 Review: Arguably accurate.
2010 Prediction: I wrote my PhD on ubiquitous computing, and I can tell you that I heard "this is the year" for ubicomp every single year I spent writing it. I finished it last year, and stuff I wrote back in 2002 was still relevant. It's an incremental design that will slowly, slowly come, but nothing dramatic anytime soon, even across a decade. —adw
2021 Review: Sounds right to me.
2010 Prediction: Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp. That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are. he politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are. —kngspook
2021 Review: The author of this prediction might not have had precisely what we see today in mind, but in broad terms this was very prescient.
2010 Prediction: A habitable (to some life, not necessarily to human life) extra-solar Earth like planet is discovered by 2020. —kf
2021 Review: This still isn't known with complete certainty, but the science has progressed enough to identify many plausible candidates.
2010 Prediction: My timeline is that Kepler has discovered hundreds of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their suns by 2013. —kf
2021 Review: Accurate. The Kepler Space Telescope had identified hundreds of Earth-size planets by late 2011.
2010 Prediction: I think this is finally going to be the post-PC decade. The evolution of SmartPhones, set tops, cloud computing and other mobile devices is going to make the PC redundant for most people. By the end of this decade I could see the PC being exclusively a business tool or power user tool. —jsz0
And...
2010 Prediction: By the end of the decade, the phone is the personal computer. —ericb
2021 Review: Sounds more or less right to me.
2010 Prediction: Googles turnover exeeds Microsofts by 2015, if not earlier. —jacquesm
This happened around 2016.
2010 Prediction: 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. —ericb
And...
2010 Prediction: privacy as an issue for the common user —slvrspoon
2021 Review: Correct, though not specifically due to concerns about facial recognition, even though that technology has been widely deployed for surveillance, particularly in China.
2010 Prediction: KidneyExchange.com has 10,000th successful transplant —edw519
2021 Review: Non-profit kidney exchange is now a viable option for some patients and their families.
2010 Prediction: The Apple Tablet to Launch 1st Quarter 2020 —edw519
2021 Review: The iPad was launched in April 2010.
2010 Prediction: Trevor Blackwell's Robot Collects Rocks on Mars —edw519
2021 Review: NASA's (not Trevor Blackwell's) Perseverance rover is currently digging up rocks on Mars for later return to Earth.
2010 Prediction: Spherical displays ("you inside") —10ren
2021 Review: This has arguably come to pass, if Virtual Reality headsets count as spherical displays.
2010 Prediction: Multi-core, with identical cores, is abandoned in favour of highly specialized cores —10ren
2021 Review: Multiple cores haven't been abandoned, but there has been a definite shift towards coprocessors/accelerators and ASICs.
2010 Prediction: By 2019 newspapers may still exist, but will be a niche and relatively expensive retro media format for fashionistas. —motters
2021 Review: Pretty accurate.
2010 Prediction: America will pull out from Afghanistan, and the central government will fall before the decade ends. —varjag
2021 Review: A couple of years too early but otherwise prophetic.
2010 Prediction: Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years. —IsaacL
2021 Review: A nearly perfect prediction. Facebook was not displaced by another social network, and the IPO took place in May 2012.
2010 Prediction: Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company. —IsaacL
2021 Review: All correct. Twitter became profitable towards the end of the decade, though Facebook is much larger richer. Twitter remains independent for now.
2010 Prediction: Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles. —IsaacL
2021 Review: IsaacL is the Nostradamus of the 2010 thread.
2010 Prediction: Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law. —IsaacL
2021 Review: There is a strong consensus — though not universal — that Moore's law is failing. No new paradigm capable of sustaining advances in general purpose computing faster than Moore's Law has been clearly demonstrated, though something of that kind might conceivably be in the early stages of development. Quantum computing might be such a technology, and quantum supremacy has been demonstrated in principle (albeit only as an academic exercise), but more advances in both theory and engineering are still needed for it to be practically useful (e.g. algorithms with the potential for universal, rather than problem-specific, speedups on the theory side, and easily scalable error correction on the engineering side).
2010 Prediction: An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action. —IsaacL
2021 Review: Another eerily prescient prediction from IsaacL. The Paris Climate Accords were agreed in 2015; both China and the US were parties to the agreement, though the US officially withdrew in 2020 before being readmitted earlier this year.
2010 Prediction: Increasing fuel prices, and green taxes or incentives, will mean large shops will begin to replaced by warehouses, as traditional retail gives way to home delivery. —IsaacL
2021 Review: Spot on again. IsaacL noted at the end of his post that he would save a copy of the predictions and look back at them when the time came (presumably last year), writing that he was 'probably laughably wrong on at least 2/3 of them'. I hope he did look back and congratulated himself; I think he deserved it.
2010 Prediction: Both solar and wind power will be produced at a lower cost than power from coal and natural gas plants —DaniFong
2021 Review: This is now correct for many well-situated installations.
2010 Prediction: Internet will become for most people in developed countries as important as it used to be for "early adopters" in the past. —antirez
2021 Review: I'd say this is right, but I think it was already true in 2010 to a large extent.
2010 Prediction: continued problems with islam, terrorists —slvrspoon
2021 Review: There hasn't been another terrorist attack in the West on the scale of 9/11, but there have certainly been 'continued problems', and many lives lost in terrorist incidents.
2010 Prediction: we'll see a good-sized shift in our political base representing the un/under-skilled and unemployed. —lallysingh
2021 Review: This is difficult to assess, but my sense is that rising resentment about employment opportunities, related to concerns about offshoring and immigration, was indeed a significant factor in the 2016 US presidential election.
"7. Increase in adoption of non-scientific beliefs such as astrology/anti-vaxx/religion/flat-earth as a counterbalance to the increased complexity of everyday life."
And the relevant reply a bit further down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942679
"> 7. Increase in adoption of non-scientific beliefs such as astrology/anti-vaxx/religion/flat-earth as a counterbalance to the increased complexity of everyday life.
God save us from this future. I hope we can educate the dumb out of people, with some free college and better public school systems. Maybe end home-schooling unless we can make sure this doesn't propagate as a result."
Update: (Wow, there are a lot of interesting predictions to read)
#10 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21949721 "10. A deadly bacterial/viral disease will kill more than 1 million people worldwide"
This one really gets close - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943870
"1. A pandemic kills at least 2 million people. There are theories that the pathogen is bioengineered; they may even turn out to be true."
I would have rather read something with concrete goals. Not just oh hopefully maybe I'll be married and happy by then. Life is an insanely strange journey and the more you try to plan the more disappointed you'll become.
When it comes to finding a partner, excessive planning is actually very harmful. You start to develop the strange idea that your owed something, or if you do x y and z a partner will materialize. I have several friends who are divorced now, you just can't predict the future. You might fall in love with someone amazing and then they suffer a breakdown and can no longer continue the relationship. Or you might be the one who suffers a breakdown.
It's hard enough to predict what you're going to be doing next month to be honest. Why try to guess what's going to happen in the next decade?
... for fun? No one is making plans and saying "oh I better dump my Disney stock in 2030 because I think Mickey Mouse will be in the public domain in 2031 and that will only happen if the company goes bankrupt for some reason."
This is just for laughs. Not everything has to be all serious all the time.
* The health related stuff really catches up with you. I was skinny/lanky my whole life (and don't exercise) until suddenly 35 happens and BOOM "you got fat!" It's really, really annoying.
* My mind isn't as "spry" as it used to be. This, combined with skills that are not at the peek of demand makes interviewing, and employment, more difficult than it has ever been in my life. I wish I had planned for this, instead of bouncing between companies for my whole career.
I'm trying so very, very hard to provide an open alternative that matches its value-prop...
Your future is brights. Try many things. Getting kids is definite one of the highlights of my life, don’t fear becoming a parent.
If you're born in 1992 or earlier, the present is closer to the year 2050 than to your birth.
Well, if I were a betting man, I would not bet a lot of money on Trump still being around and fit for the 2028 elections (which he'd have to win for him to be president in 2031). But I would not bet a lot of money against it either.
Also, OP's fandom of 2 particular companies is obvious...