2022 Predictions from 2012 | Hacker News Reader

2022 Predictions from 2012

shkspr.mobi

41 pointsedent50 comments

Salt sensor (2009!): https://foodchannel.com/2009/salt-sensor-introduced-to-help-...

...so one of the predictions pretty much already existed, at least by the terms the author seems to be grading themselves (5/10?).

But then no one is good at predicting the future. So let's try.

Some predictions for 2032:

1. Smartphones are still ubiquitous and still look like black rectangles. They haven't been replaced by smart glasses or whatever.

2. Half the cars on the roads in the west are electric, and half of regular commutes are majority self-driving.

3. Self-driving taxis are a thing but barely profitable.

4. Actually profitable just-in-time grocery delivery services do, just about, exist.

5. Huge climate-change-related migrations of people. Politics gets even uglier.

6. Everyone is talking about conflict with China, and conflict between China and India. The leaders of China and India are the leaders we have in 2022.

7. London gains a couple more gaudy towers but otherwise look exactly the same. Ditto New York.

8. Popular music: pick a decade, it sounds like that. No music made in 2032 couldn't have been made in 2022 (or 2012).

9. There is no general AI, but a lot of people say that there is.

10. No human has been to Mars.

I'm going to put these in a Google calendar entry for 2023/05/07 - and hopefully get a laugh then.

I'll agree with all of these except maybe number 10... with a caveat. They won't have been there, no. But the mission is setting up the groundwork. They will be sending the modules, support systems and return craft necessary for such a system to work. The shortest flight time (six months I think) only comes around every two years or so (26 months, technically).

11. Google Calendar still exists and you still use it

Hehe, yes. And let's add: my most stable address is still my Gmail one.

we all know that Google will have abandoned and replaced all of their services at least 3 times until than

I'm going to piggyback off this.

1. Smartphones are ubiquitous, some are foldable.

2. Half the cars on the roads in the west are electric. Of those, Tesla is not even in the top 5. Self-driving is just lane-assist and adaptive cruise control rebranded.

3. You still cannot get a self-driving taxi from any major international airport (more than one terminal) to your hotel at any hour during the day.

4. Just-in-time grocery delivery services exists at 3 national grocers (e.g.: Whole Foods, Walmart, Costco).

5. Mass migration due to sea level rise is still 2 decades away. China and India to bear the brunt.

6. China, having hit peak population in 2023, struggles to grow the economy. Exacerbated by the aging population, cracks in the CPC begin to form.

7. Texas almost surpasses California for most populous state.

8. Latin American influence due to shifting demographics results in many "firsts" for Spanish songs at the Grammys.

9. No general AI but one AAA game is made where the quests/dialogue/storyline/world are generated by AI according to player inputs. Game becomes #1 meme generator within a month of launch.

10. No human has been on Mars. People are pushing for 2035 mission as Earth and Mars are at its closest.

Curious about #3. 10 years is a long time for Cruise or Waymo to get to SFO. Any particular reason?

Partly disillusionment honestly! I was in a self-driving car six years ago and it all seemed imminent, and wasn't. Turns out getting the last 5% of the way there is much, much harder than hoped.

> 5. Mass migration due to sea level rise

Sea level rise is far from the only impact of climate change that will cause mass migrations. Droughts, floods, changes in growing season, changes in temperature, migration or death of fish populations are some other impacts.

Much of the war in Syria is blamed on a drought, for example. Parts of the world are starting to experience 50C temperatures.

Not a bad attempt.

And I know this is all just a bit silly fun, but I'd prefer such predictions to reflect a world view/philosophy of how one thinks society will be designed (same or different) in that future. Some of these are too niche to reflect this - e.g., that London/New York will look the same. That doesn't really say much. Much more interesting would be some ideas about urban centers more broadly rather than cherry picking 2 which have already been relatively stagnant for a while.

And some are just not specific enough such that I'm actually confused. e.g., what does it mean to say that the leader of India in 2032 will be the same as in 2022. Do you literally mean that Modi will be India's PM? While India doesn't have a term limit for the PM, Modi will be ~82 in 2032. Or do you mean that the BJP party will still be in power? If so, do you mean that a RSS member of the BJP will be in power or a non-RSS member? Will the BJP be in power with a relative majority like it currently is, or with a particularly large coalition like in say the early '00s under Vajpayee (when the BJP won less than 24% of the vote but formed a coalition of 13 parties, as opposed to right now where the BJP has over 50% of the seats alone). The answers to these mean _very_ different things about India's direction come 2032.

I do mean Modi. Just my uninformed guess of course, and Xi is a surer bet on the China side. 2030s are going to be a gerontocracy for much of the world. (I rather hope to be wrong on this!)

Yes, fair. And I actually agree with you. But if on a technicality Modi isn't in power in 2032 and say Yogi Adityanath or someone is, I'd still treat your prediction as a correct one!

I would add that while self-driving cars are going to still be rather limited, self-driving trucks are going to be a normal view on highways, often in convoys with one human driver team and a bunch of autonomous followers. In cities, or near terminals, local human drivers will board and take over.

This will change what does it mean to be a trucker a lot.

>I'm kinda surprised that this hasn't happened. Food thermometers are a thing - where's the same thing for flavours? Why can't I stick something in my curry to see if it needs more spice?

Because taste is wholly subjective and far more nuanced and varied than anything like what this posits could account for. I am surprised by this person's surprise.

The food taster thing is a little silly IMO, Jacques Pépin taught me long ago the single most indispensable tool for the kitchen is the tongue.

Its akin to inventing a machine for a sculptur, which bounces sound across the thing they are working on to tell them what it looks like.

Edit: couldn't you test for acidity with a simple pH strip?

The acidity level you want would change with each dish, and with each person eating it. So technically, yeah, but it's not gonna really do one any good unless you know you love X dish at Y pH.

But to learn what pH you like in a dish, you'd have to taste test it yourself, using a spoon and your tongue. And what if maybe tonight you don't want as much lime? Or more?

I like how the author gives himself a 5 out of 10. That’s BS. At most it’s a 1 out of 10 (waiting for a taxi).

I hate it when “futurists” cherry pick an outlier situation and say their prediction was accurate - like the bartender example.

When people Read these predictions, they assume it’s going to be a widely occurring instance, not some cockamamie example

This person was like 0/10. I almost spat out my coffee when they said 5/10. I could not have predicted that

One might greet it with "hoots of derision", though.

I’d go 0 out 10. Waiting for taxi/uber/etc is still very much a thing.

I wanted to say the same thing. He moved the goal posts from things which "would draw hoots of derision from an audience from the year 2022" to things which there has been some marginal, unevenly distributed, incremental change to in the last 10 years, then said he got it about 50% right.

More generally, this is the issue I have with futurists: they get things wrong, and then just keep making more predictions. I suppose that's okay for them to do, unless they try to get people to believe them, and make decisions based on their guesses.

Maybe I should say this is really a problem I have with people who give any credence whatsoever to the foretune telling industry, to which "future studies" seems at least practically related.

Reminded me of the ray kurtzweil predictions: extremely generous grading.

This issue of grading fuzzy predictions is somewhat applicable to political pundits and stock market gurus as well.

There's an entire body of knowledge on how to create objectively measurable predictions (the book Superforecasting covers), but the mainstream isn't there yet.

Not only that but most of his correct "predictions" would have been true in 2012 using is very definitions of success. It doesn't really count as a prediction if it's already existing and adoption is growing before your eyes.

- traffic jams: GPS was widely used well before 2012, and by 2012 iphone adoption was already quite high. Plenty of people were already using google maps for directions with traffic info.

- Attracting a bar-tender's attention. The ipad came out in 2010 and I definitely recall a few novelty "order with an ipad" applications popping up right away. Sure the penetration wasn't that deep, but it existed and still isn't anywhere near universal today.

- Recharging gadgets. This has probably changed the most since 2012, but USB ports were already starting to show up in airplanes and hipper hotel rooms.

- Replacing used up items. Sure instacart was just starting out in 2012, but Task Rabbit had been around for a few years, and at least in SF, was used by a fair number of people.

- Waiting for a taxi. Uber was founded in 2009, and I distinctly remember it had already dominated SF by that point. Sure it hadn't expanded to other cities yet, but taxis in the Bay area where already widely replaced. Uber was arguably better in SF in 2012 than it is in 2022

Regarding this one:

> - Attracting a bar-tender's attention. The ipad came out in 2010 and I definitely recall a few novelty "order with an ipad" applications popping up right away. Sure the penetration wasn't that deep, but it existed and still isn't anywhere near universal today.

Just before the pandemic my spouse and I went to a TGI Friday’s for the first time in about 15 years. Every table now has an iPad where you can request drink refills, dessert, etc. and the kids can play games. It was super distracting, flashing at us the entire time. We ended up turning it around so we didn’t have to see it. But apparently all the restaurants like that (Chili’s, Appleby’s, Olive Garden, etc.) have these now. They are ubiquitous if that’s the type of place you eat. (Granted, it’s not at a bar, but at a restaurant.) It is much more convenient than trying to get your server’s attention when you want a water refill or whatever, but like I said, also really irritating to have it constantly demanding your attention.

At first, I thought it was going to be a commendable willingness to admit when one was incorrect with predictions about future technology, by showing how the author got 0 out of 10. But then it went a whole different direction...

It seems to me that both this person's own predictions and the predictions of past futurists that he criticises fundamentally fail in the same way: they assume that the faddish ambitions of the day will play out on exactly the timeline that the marketeers tasked with procuring funding for them claim, and largely ignore advances in all other fields. For a century up until the turn of the millennium, the faddish ambition in pursuit of funding was generally spaceflight or AGI, and so authors followed the herd with overly optimistic predictions about that; in 2012, instead, it was everyday convenience tech (as pushed by myriads of startups) and the renaissance of a certain high modernism in the US regarding transit and urban planning.

    Traffic jams.

Nope, still there; no major changes from what I can see:

https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/ranking/?country=... (compared to 2019)

https://www.adac.de/verkehr/verkehrsinformationen/staubilanz... (just highways; seemingly much worse, possible twice as many hours spent compared to 2012)

    Attracting a bar-tender's attention.

Nope, technical solutions to that "problem" are a curiosity, I think. Would immediately classify a place as less-classy in my eyes. Maybe that's just me, and maybe it's widespread in more futuristic parts of the world. Honestly, wasn't that big a deal in 2012.

    Resetting a microwave's clock after a powercut.

Nope. In addition, you get to update the firmware of your fridge and troubleshoot its wifi. I just got a microwave without any kind of display.

    Replacing used up items (toothpaste, butter).

Nope.

    Tasting a dish to see if it's salty or spicy enough.

I don't understand why you'd expect a "solution" to this "problem" to come up now. What's changed? What kind of technology is on the horizon for this? Who would even buy a gadget that purports to tell you something you can find out with a spoon?

    Recharging gadgets.

Nope. More gadgets, more recharging.

    Waiting for a taxi.

Nope. Apps instead of a phone call, that's the major change. And a percentage going to tech companies, of course. Though you could order a cab with an app in many places in 2012, and can't order one with an app in many places in 2022. Personally, I still call.

    Flossing, deodorising, and most manner of personal hygiene.

Again, why on Earth would you expect a solution to this arrive anytime soon? How would that even work, for something as general as "most manner of personal hygiene".

    Monthly billing cycles.

Nope. Many providers try to trick you into yearly contracts, but I don't think that's what was meant.

My predictions for 2023:

- A is just like now.

- B is just like now, but faster.

- Nobody is doing C anymore. Well, maybe some backwards people, but certainly not anyone who reads D (people still read D!).

- E, that scientists has been trying to warn us about for decades, is still happening.

- Teens are doing something that older people are either outraged by, or are trying (poorly) to emulate.

- The rich are richer and the poor are poorer.

- Nobody saw F coming. That was something... it really changed life in small but irreversible ways.

- The market has been fluctuating.

- People sometimes look back at 2022 - how simple things were back then.

Excellent list, I’ll add a few:

- X will be greeted with hoots of derision

- Breathless reporting on conspiracy theories will make them grow in popularity

- Y will not taste nearly as good as it used to

- The multiverse marks the beginning of the end of Marvel’s cultural stranglehold

- Poverty, now called Z, will still exist

> Why can't I stick something in my curry to see if it needs more spice?

Spoons exist though.

I have to say, that's one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard in my life. Cooking is like playing music, there is no "right" way to do it. No two chefs flavour their dishes exactly the same way, and if they did, I don't think I'd ever eat out again. There is no such thing as: "BZZZZZZ! YOUR CURRY IS INCORRECT! ADD 5MG TURMERIC!", and part of the joy of cooking is allowing the flavor in a soup, sauce or curry develop the way you want it to as you taste it, think "hmmm, needs amchoor/hing/whatever" and take it in the direction you want.

As someone who doesn't like cooking, guides with actual strict measures (and then tools to strictly measure) would be nice. I never know how much does a tiny bit of olive oil means.

I would try a good cooking book (one with measures in grams, etc) recipe verbatim, without any deviation. From there you can use that as the baseline and adjust/experiment everytime you cook it, or just stick with it.

The electric spiciness detector sounds like it is straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley

That looks like fun. Let's make a few predictions of things that will most likely be outdated in 2032, in no particular order :

-Faxes

-The notion of privacy when I leave my house

-Escape games as we know them

-Offline dating

-Not having some sort of drone /robot inside one's home

-100% Solo video games

-Not eating bugs

-Faxes: Japan won't let them die

-The notion of privacy when I leave my house: that's already lost

-100% Solo video games: indies won't let them die

I think even if we heavily narrow the prediction to AAA games only (ignoring not only the indies, but all the mid-tier studios like Larian or Obsidian as well), it won't be anywhere near true. We're already pretty deep into the era of the "live service" business model, and it's big but it's not all-consuming.

Look at everything Nintendo for starters, look at the Total War games, all the focused narrative action-adventure games. None of this is going in a direction which will exclude offline solo play.

If the prediction is just EA and Ubisoft and maybe Activision, yeah ok, that's a little more realistic.

Agreed, it definitely feels like we are already past "peak multiplayer-only" AAA games phase, and trend line corrected itself and now is looking stable. There's is less evidence now that single player games are going away compared to 10 years ago.

>Offline dating

What's that?

> Not eating bugs

I've been reading cutesy articles about this for 25+ years, and the obvious response is just, why aren't you simply eating lentils or beans for protein? Cattle farming may be an ecological disaster, but conventional plant agriculture is about as good as it realistically gets.

I like the saying that people overestimate what will happen in a short time and underestimate what will happen in a long time. 50 years or longer would be a more interesting period of time to measure changes.

Here are a few ways to attract a bartender’s attention:

- Give a big tip, so next time they prioritize you

- Wait

- Choose a less crowded / with nicer bartenders place.

I don’t think this is a technical problem.

What are some predictions you all have for 2032?

(1) Cobol is still necessary (2) Panic has not set in yet even though unix time ends in 6 years (3) Elon is still not making money with twitter (4) The multiverse is still not important (5) Everything is a blockchain even though it still makes no sense

Here's mine for 2032.

1. There will be more robots, and these will be of greater geospatial and socioeconomic distribution, reducing human workloads but further centralizing human wealth. Most of them will be specialized automatons and Musk's promise of an general purpose walkabout humanoid assistant for under the cost of a 2022 vehicle ("complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot") will be a laughable historic footnote.

2. The environment will continue to degrade. The last coral reefs and forests will become fervently defended, the reefs will die anyway.

3. Water shortages will be averted through emergent filtration technologies.

4. Food shortages will be a real problem due to supply chain shocks, partly due to climate, and the quality of food available to large portions of the human population will degrade in terms of freshness, choice and nutrient content. McSubstance-style synthfoods will continue to be culturally normalized, as we can see from marginalized populations in the developing world today.

5. The number of people using sit-down computer terminals will further decrease. We may see less typing, less sit-down, less manual procedural programming, less human programming and less human architecture. At least one autonomous software architect and implementation system will have eliminated substantial numbers of programming plumbing tasks. Voice interfaces will improve to decent for abstract concepts such as search, visualization, and associated process modeling.

6. Although online education resources will remain available, the social exclusivity afforded by elite universities will continue to bring unequal opportunities to the first world.

7. Statecoins will be a nontrivial portion of the global economy, led by China.

8. Law will become more transparent and objective (rule-based) with autonomous enforcement and greater physical and virtual surveillance becoming culturally normalized worldwide.

9. Supply chain will be rewritten with autonomous systems to allow for greater reputational transparency in general sourcing. Significant numbers of sales and purchasing jobs will be eviscerated. The technology may start in and escape from an economy that doesn't want this change to occur for sociopolitical stability reasons, to become a global phenomenon.

10. Personal transport may increasingly tend toward an abnormal luxury for most of the world, as the 1950s suburban utopia fades from memory and a new dense urban service-fabric replaces it.

If it's hugged to death, archive link: https://archive.ph/8vwVB

Who has some good predictions to read from 5/10/15 years ago? I’d say world events have blown a lot of this out of the water.

Does anyone actually set the time in their microwave? I always thought it was a useless feature.

why do you need the time on your microwave ?

Mine just reads `PF` since it's not hooked up to a UPS. ;p

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