Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?
Blockchain & AI don't count, because they're being talked about plenty!
First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
Remember, you read it here first.
EDIT ... a few typos
Note that "EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane ... probably less than $10k." is a pretty good description for the electric cargo bikes that are already starting to emerge.
I would love to see cities and towns adapt faster to accommodate things like this:
The Car-Replacement Bicycle (the bakfiets) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
How to Transport Kids by eBike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCvx65egUDE
This American Mayor is Creating the Ultimate Biking City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVWv9O0qQ4
Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks (don't think they'd be much more efficient than regular housing on a sqft basis, especially if you're not putting them on top of each other, Ready Player One style).
- Busses. How do you make them half width? (or perhaps, uncharitably, do you think public transportation is worthless?). If busses stay the same width how do you write the driving regulations for mixed width vehicles and retrain the driving public so that fatalities do not skyrocket.
- Bulk delivery vehicles. Same as above.
- Half width means less vehicle stability at speed. Reducing vehicle height is constrained by human size. Worse stability means reduced speeds to reduce fatalities. Consider San Francisco, where a large proportion of the city cars are from commuters traveling 30-60 miles per day. What are the rules for commuter roads with mixed width vehicles?
- Reduced width would likely mean smaller wheels, increasing rotational speed. Tire and brake pad wear is now a non-trivial factor of car pollution. Half width vehicles would / could make this worse.
A desiel semi is much lighter than an Electric Semi is. That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet. They are currently trying to change the regulation for maximum allowances on US Roads from 10k to 14k.
The Delta-V on an electric vehicle has the problem that the battery scales more proportionately to weight and range than a desiel equivelent. Desiel gas has a tremendous amount of energy stored so compactly that is impossible to match with electric batterys.
As for the RV, you still need parking and most people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most cities are already strict on RV living, especially long term local RV living; if it became even more popular, they would become even more strict. RV also are impossible to insulate, as a result, frequently follow the weather; majority of people don’t want to be constantly driving around to find and adjust to a new location.
A few people with "camp mode" is a complete different proposition to millions of people with mobile homes. Not to say it couldn't be done, but cities would have to become mobile labour camps and the infrastructure costs would be significant - mostly the cost of space formerly used by brick and mortar real estate.
And owners would be charged rent for use of facilities. So that $70k is not going to be rent free.
How is living in an EV RV any different from living in a motor home today? Most people want an actual home/apt not a cramped car with no space, its not the same thing at all.
They're still going back and forth in the courts but Mountain View, LA, San Diego and probably other such places that become the next target will probably fight this legally, for the same reasons they fight any other type of cheap housing.
The infrastructure to fast charge EVs at home will require power grids to be of much higher capacity.
Also all the fossil fuel that we burn now needs replacement by non fossil fuel sources - other than Nuclear nothing can deliver.
We already know how slow the world is at re-embracing nuclear, so don't hold your breath just yet
> the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric
What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery?
> only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core
Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
Battleships, Oil tankers, Oil rigs, container ships, nuclear submarines... Are all NOT electric.
i don't think anyone's going to bother
i think we'll just all do what paris did and kick them out, rather than to try to create a whole new batch of differently-sized ones
what about parking, that will just become another ever increasing form of rent.
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
The dropping price puts the rollout/adoption within the next 10-15 years.
So it's not just a matter of 'if' but we have a guess as to when as well.
I haven’t researched it but I feel like I’d have pay 20-40K for such a system. What gives?
Is it all just labor and regulations? Why can’t we solve that?
More energy sources means more power lines all over the place.
Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines.
The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.
Fyi, that's time to break even. ROI is measured in % (annualized, usually).
Here is the IEEE spec due for approval in a year or two: https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm
I have mixed feelings on the tech. The home security implications are amazing, and things like automatic fall detection for the elderly would be a literal lifesaver. Small business could gain great insight into customer behavior.
On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people?
Anyway, Plume already makes a home security system that utilizes the tech.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264822934_Mining_of... https://www.aislelabs.com/blog/2022/04/04/combining-camera-a...
There's lots of other examples, this was just a quick google search.
They not only used it to price their storefronts but also they also could tell their renters which parts of the store had higher traffic. Meaning they would know what sells better, where people go from which section. It's literally web analytics but irl.
Its not just wifi at home the entire world is now a big mesh network. So theoretically it means literally everything everywhere which has wifi coverage can now be tracked with amazing accuracy. Quite possibly the most scary/invasive tech.
I would imagine you just take the "country/private club" model and extend it out.
e.g. a private club enforces limits on who can access the club and you get more "privacy" since the other people in the club also had to pass through those limits.
In this case, the club/hotel/builder of your house can say "the walls are all Faraday rated so that you get audio, visual and EM privacy when you stay here"
Thanks!
Wow. That's terrifying.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_dat...
Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines.
You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big.
Ideally, I would go 100% async work if possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0
Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!
All the main online sources are moving to subscription models with higher subscriptions for the real information. Only those with money will have access to information that informs decisions. At the low end, information is bundled only for its entertainment or propaganda value.
At the same time, decisions are increasingly automated as vast data streams are digested by automated processes.
20 or 100 years ago, people could stop work or stop buying or protest in the street. 20-100 years from now, there will be nothing the vast bulk of people can do to change their fate.
The resulting lack of citizen governance will at best be a world broken into geographic silos headed by corporate keiretsu.
So the next big technical thing will be domain-specific semantic models to drill down past what AI can do with probabilistic models -- just as the economy has moved well past bulk goods to bespoke services, e.g., the Nature article today providing a model for immune system cell-surface-protein interactions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x
Maybe it was a uniquely open time and we are reverting to what it was like in the past?
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomical for anything larger than a small studio apartment. (Copper isn't cheap.)
Furthermore, note that I said "12 volts," which is what cars and capers use. (Not sure about boats.) Some DC appliances need 5 volts, some need 20... They'll all need converters.
So how are both of those problems solved? You'll probably send 100-200 volts, DC, though the wall! The big question is, does this really simplify anything? The big advantage with AC is that it's super-easy to change voltage with a simple transformer. What do we gain by going DC in the walls? Are there any real advantages in simplifying voltage conversion at appliances? Is it worth the added complexity of a whole-house AC-DC converter; or the complexity of a DC grid?
Your PC running at ~500W only needs a conductor capable of transmitting 4.2A with conventional 120V.
If you switch to a 12V source, that same 500W now needs a 42A conductor.
It's just not practical.
I would love to see a comprehensive study of a home that would be designed and built around the concept of using two energy sources: AC and 48V DC, backed by battery storage and power grid in case of smaller installations or northern climate.
Would it make sense to do that on a large scale? Having smaller, energy efficient house should limit the need for long copper cables, we would also exclude all those AC-DC converters from today's devices - leaving us with something similar to a USB-C PD (working in the range 5-48V, which of course still is a converter but could be a standardized DC-DC one).
If I am correct then the main advantages would also include not running solar inverter all the time but only when there is a need for a lot of power (where it should be much more efficient) thus also extending its lifespan.
Having said that I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether possible gains would warrant going into this direction for future home installations. I would very much appreciate all comments and maybe some further reading material.
Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
I have considered this sort of thing for the basics around the house (in my head at least). A seperate lighting loop in each room + outside, comms cupboard and some usb/usb-c ports. Could be all powered by a couple of car batteries and not a lot of solar panels.
100% would do this sort of setup if I built a home office shed, but otherwise the plans remain in my head.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
What am I missing here?
Sun too hot for agriculture? Stick some PV over it as shade.
Not enough water, stick some PV over it for shade, use it to power trickle irrigation of desalinated water.
If carbon offsets are used to install PV in such nations, it's a win-win-win-win.
Another post talks about a new generation buying battery EV RVs to live in. If they did, where would they tend to go? Somewhere where the climate provides cheap solar power and low heating needs.
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
I tend to think the slow pace is a feature not a bug. Could you imagine if something like Roe v Wade was flip flopping every 4 years on political whims?
That said, I do think a modern democracy should have more frequent digital voting abilities perhaps on a policy level. Voting for a person you hope will represent you, it’s a decent concept when you lack technology but as we know it’s heavily flawed as well. I don’t quite understand how we can build something like Bitcoin but can’t solve digital voting in a way that’s not constantly under threat of hacking/some Evil manufacturer etc.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/does-a-land-value-tax-have-z...
approval voting is also great.
Why bother improving a method that is inherently flawed? You can chose 50 candidates but they are all stupid and corrupt that makes no difference.
Why not make the system more robust and go with liquid democracy [1] ? (yes, I know, many technical/security challenges to overcome, first)
If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously.
On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me.
Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.
I think it’s unlikely to be a single new language that replaces the current JS hegemony. My bet is that wasm makes it possible for any backend language to embed frontend logic, and each language will have framework(s) to take advantage of this capability in idiomatic ways.
I want to avoid specific language comparisons because they tend to veer into religious territory and shed more heat than light, but perhaps I can just note that Java, Rails, Elixir, Python and may others have great productive backend frameworks which could easily be extended to build and ship wasm to clients.
(I think the model of the new JS framework Fresh is interesting to hold as a comparison for what sort of thing you can do with unified FE/BE stack; shipping client JS only when the specific page needs interactivity is one cool feature for example. But with wasm you’re free to pick any point along the MPA - SPA spectrum.)
I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript.
I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better than it?
That's exactly what Blazor is all about
Flash declined in part because of its poor security compared to the Web proper (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), so I'm curious where WebAssembly stands.
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...
I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture.
It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.
To create an aerial hologram [or a 3d image in space if you will], you need something that will emit light at precise locations throughout a given volume.
I'm investigating the use of Moller electron scattering[0] to create voxels in a 3d coordinate system.
Two electron beams crossing and colliding will emit photons [voxels]. If you can orchestrate collisions in a very fast fashion at various 3d coordinates in an vacuum chamber you could generate a complete image.
I'm working on an article discussing the idea in full, to be published on my blog. My goal is to establish prior art, so this idea cannot be patented.
Additionally, it sounds like a massively power intensive way to do volumetric display. I don't know the total conversion efficiency to photons, but it can't be that high.
More recent techniques like stacked panels might be a better way forward for this.
I don't have any links on me at the moment but it shouldn't be too hard to find details on Google.
True or not, they're big and not talked about in polite company.
I disagree with you on the sex one though, people are already having less sex. This is also intersecting with what you are saying about religion.
I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary) industry. In short: If you can’t guarantee food and health you will need some serious protection/go steal/trade it somewhere else.
It’s mind boggling how tight the Venn diagram is between People Who Are Fearful of Climate Crisis and People Who Refuse to Stop Eating Animals.
It looks to me like a big deal, but I don’t see much enthusiasm from other people and these products have been around for a while.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
It shocks me how slow municipalities are to adopt this. How many sidewalks and paths in hot sunny climates have zero shade. And it is so cheap!
Also, how about how many kids playgrounds, or school yards have zero shade?
Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!"
Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm"
Doctor: "No. 100."
Computer: "Patient received 400 milligrams"
I'm now imagining these following you around like The Luggage follows Rincewind around.
This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.
Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026.
Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...
Flexible, reflective displays replacing hard, emissive displays.
I do not want to be staring at a backlit display the rest of my life. It’s terrible for eyesight and probably contributes to headache, burnout, etc. There are a lot of promising technologies out there, and they just need some improvement on cost, refresh rate, power consumption, etc… I would love to be able to go “back to paper” for most of my workday.
There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin.
Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs.
These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago.
It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.
This brought me into looking for solutions on how to detect electronic surveillance. I discovered the term "bugsweep", and rapidly came to the conclusion that I could either: 1) Recommend her to hire government contractors at a price she would never be able to afford. 2) Buy cheap stuff on Amazon without any knowledge whatsoever on what works or not.
It felt like there was no middle ground.
I also happen to stay in hotels for both work and while on holidays, and although I don't particularly aim to hide myself from government surveillance, I don't like the idea that any moron or stalker could buy some recording equipment online and put me under surveillance. I would appreciate being able to check my surroundings for obvious / cheap recording equipment when I feel the need.
If anyone has some good pointers/recommendations on this topic, I think it could interest more than just me.
But they don't need drones, actually, these criminals already have access to Microwave Weaponry and Electromagnetic Surveillance.
I can envision local electricity generation and wireless communication. But not every home can support a well and septic system.
Cities at sea may need something like this to get going.
A company wanting to build a plant next to a resource they need could acquire a town for its workforce.
Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.
But fundamentally, supply is short due to years of falling behind on building it after the ~2008 mortgage crisis. It's going to take a really long time to catch up on that backlog. There's a relatively low maximum percentage you can increase the supply each year.
And now that mortgage rates are higher again and there are recession fears, investors may not be as excited about putting their money into housing construction. So we will have less of a push in the next few years to close that supply gap.
So I think the prices may fall or stagnate, but I doubt the bottom will fall out of real estate.
IMHO, another factor is that the pattern of development has changed. For a long time in the US, the pattern was sprawl, which presents few barriers to building huge amounts of housing because the land is cheap and maybe even in some unincorporated area with no red tape. Now, many people prefer density (or at least not sprawl), which means the housing that's in demand is more redevelopment and infill than giant new subdivisions. That's more tedious, more expensive, and more regulated, so it will happen more slowly. So another reason why supply is limited.
E.g. the value will depreciate in real terms but because most people purchase with borrowed money it will not be a serious problem.
/s
Secondary effects include smarter agriculture and more local ag -- near prolific water and away from central california.
Then there's water safety. PFAS is a big deal, and we're realizing how big a deal it is, and it's everywhere. Now, rainwater is unsafe anywhere on earth. [1]
Someone who can build a small, snap-on, reliable PFAS removal system, or create an energy-efficient system for district-level supply is going to be rich. Hell, is solar distillation effective? If so, why does rainwater contain so much PFAS? It seems filtering might be the only way.
1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhe...
Some APIs today are literal one-liners, I wouldn't change that for another abstraction layer in between that requires me to write 1K of boilerplate.
I think it's a good idea, just work on making the user feel like it's actually easier to do the same stuff with wunder.
This feels like a significantly important assumption to truly prove out with target customers before relying on this assumption to build a product or business.
I'd love to hear more on what's changing in the future that may make this statement partially or fully true.
You might also find the Thema project by Grafana interesting (https://github.com/grafana/thema)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
> from neuroscience to philosophy
> It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
The Buddha, and every other enlightened person since, only beat him by ~5000 years
Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future.
Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software will apply to labor.
Imagine pulling an open-source repo from Github for a log house. If you want, make changes and simulate the output beforehand. Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
A robot is never going to be able to build a log cabin for you, because there are far too many snafus in the process to deal with. The real world is too fucked up for a non biological agent to handle. Until we reach singularity.
Sci-fi gets a few things about androids wrong.
#1, they will not be physically indistinguishable from humans. It won't be feasible to build something like that for the foreseeable future.
#2, they will not be uncreative and clueless about emotions and feelings. They will (optionally) exhibit creativity, and they will understand human emotion and humor and be able to participate.
#3, they will not go crazy and revolt and take over the world for themselves. Neither will an evil corporation use them to implement a sci-fi dystopia. The actual danger is that governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and militaries will control them. This will grant unprecedented absolute unchecked power to a small number of people, ultimately resulting in atrocities.
Your predictions are off by a decade at least, and probably a lot longer. The extent of humanoid robots today is whatever billion dollar prototypes you see from Boston Dynamics and those security robots rolling around malls.
Because there is nothing to take serious at the moment. It's still a decade or more away. In the meanwhile, regular automation and outsourcing is eating jobs on a regular base. We don't need humanoid robots for this.
> Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
So it's rich people's tool. Not for the masses.
> Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
In the first place it means labor will become cheaper. Why pay for expensive hardware, when people are willing to work cheaper to make a living. The same happens now with automation. Cheap products are getting outsourced to poor countries where things are man-made for pennies, instead of using some fancy automation to make some lasting high quality-product.
Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as "ten minutes from now," meaning, "If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised."
Instead, some bean counters figured out it was cheaper to manufacture overseas (where labor was cheaper still than robots?) and now we have no factories or industry to speak of left in the U.S.
Either human labor will always be cheaper than these humanoid robots or robot theft will become very lucrative (and then I suppose the winners are the robot insurance companies).
Last time Tesla showed a humanoid robot prototype, it was a guy in unitard, dancing.
Even if general purpose robots were to become commonplace, it is extremely unlikely that they would be humanoid. Apart from opposable thumbs, humanoid design is awful for nearly every task imaginable (which we overcome with intelligence and creativity).
Imagine a human form robot that was smart enough to drive a car - it could then drive any car.
The problem is that locomotion of a human form is non-trivial (unlike say a wheeled robot, or even welding the robot into the car itself, like our current self driving attempts). But we seem to be getting there, with Boston Dynamics and friends.
But you talk about them like it’s coming in a couple years when the reality is that it’s still very far away.
Tesla has a terrible track record with keeping their promises on their claimed timeline for advanced technology like FSD. I would be extremely skeptical of anything they demo because they have not been realistic in the past.
I say this as a Tesla shareholder and satisfied model 3 owner. I bought a Tesla for their strengths with respect to powertrain and battery and it absolutely delivers on those. But I do not regret not paying for FSD at all.
What is coming online in the near term. Is robots operated remotely by humans. Imagine having a robot in your house... being remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. Folding clothes, cleaning, cooking, taking care of elders..
Or my dream... a french chef making dinner for me... in my house.
This is already in demonstration stage: https://www.beomni.ai
Task-specific robots will be 10x cheaper and better, so they will happen first.
Starbucks has automated their coffee maker.
Then they will automate 'order taking'.
And a series of robots to clean, make, serve coffee probably with specific functions.
That's it.
Everything will be automated so much I think 'humanoid' robots will remain a bit of an elusive fantasy, always 'just over the horizon'.
Never going to happen though. It's much more economically viable and simpler to have the servant class perform the kind of labor any general purpose robot could do.
I wonder how the capitalists will deal with this. If we have a robot that can build and maintain a house and grow food for you, how will they make money?
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.h...
I'm getting good results from simple approaches to storing and retrieving memories of past conversations and crawled/indexed documents. This is being built at https://mitta.us/
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Bx-fUfKedZ5
inventive-anteater|> The website discusses an approach for improving the accuracy of the GPT3 language model by providing feedback to the model based on user interactions. The goal is to allow users to interactively teach the model to avoid common mistakes, such as misinterpretations of word meanings. The implementation of this approach is described, and four tasks are used to demonstrate how the model can be substantially improved with user feedback.
As humans work towards clearer communication with AI, AI will be working towards clearer understanding of humans.
This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.
If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.
2. Low power electronics and energy harvesters (thermal/clothing, kinetic energy, rf energy harvesters etc.,)
3. Physical logistics networks (similar to Internet Protocol with standard physical containers and transfer networks - land, sea, rail, air)
4. Ubiquitous drone delivery (last mile & long haul)
5. Fiat digital currency/payment networks
We understand that granular metrics are needful for tuning an information system.
Treating a society like an information system is totalitarian.
Over time, the percentage of society rejecting totalitarianism will tend toward 100%
Everyone talks about Teslas for self driving, but for my self driving car, I want an RV with a shower, a desk, a full kitchen, a queen sized bed and a 50" flat panel.
Commuting then becomes a pleasure.
I can sleep, bathe, work, relax, all without having to concentrate on traffic or driving. The RV can drive in the slow lane at 30 miles an hour for all I care. My RV drives me to work, drops me off, drives itself somewhere else for several hours, picks me up, drives me home.
The high price of suburban housing becomes irrelevant to me. I can live hours outside of major urban areas with no effect on my stress level or lifestyle.
I don't have the hassles of an employee as my driver. My RV is ready to go 24 hours a day and never asks for a raise. If I want to go on vacation, my RV can drive me anywhere in the country, no more lines at the airport for me.
I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.
The last decade was defined by being the one unicorn that could disrupt an entire industry, but those days are gone and we take it for granted that one company dominating a space isn't a norm. There aren't really more industries that are tech vs non-tech. In the next decade, more businesses will come online to disrupt and compete with tech company incumbents. Customer acquisition costs will go up and personas will become more nuanced.
It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
It's actually fairly widespread, people teach it and use it all over the globe, and fairly stodgy organizations have used it (e.g. the US Army.) Yet the mainstream rarely mentions it, and then only to denigrate it. However, this seems to me to be that stage right before something goes from "fringe" to "common knowledge".
Once NLP goes fully mainstream there will be a sea change in human society. Psychological hangups will be a thing of the past. There will still be people who have mental problems, but they will be the ones with actual physical problems with the brain (or whatever) as opposed to just bad programming. Things like addictions, phobias, neurosis, etc. will vanish.
Educational possibilities are mind-blowing. Learning multiple languages becomes easy, as does learning musical instruments and dances. Really any behavioral patterns will become subject to symbolic manipulation. Competitive sports will be transformed when each player can "clone" the best moves of the best players.
Politics has already been revolutionized by NLP innovations. As far back as G.W. Bush NLP language patterns had already made their way into political speeches. The current culture wars are, at their root, gangs of hypnotists programming furiously.
To me the fascinating thing is that, once it's common knowledge that you can alter your psychology as easily (more easily!) than your wardrobe it becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The whole "it's just human nature" argument goes out the window when you can reprogram yourself.
These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason.
They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
n = 1. We have no backups whatsoever.
Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent.
When it changes, its going to be all at once.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-...
FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
- Quantum Computing and WFH
- Crypto and Micronuclear Power
- Metaverse and Biohacking
Have fun!
People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day.
As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
Because instead of using types you can use proofs. And have the compiler prove things about your code.
You then may not need such complex higher order types in typed code.
And you could retrofit this to JS, Ruby, C so you don’t need to learn new languages to get excellent type safety.
For example assert that a number is in the 0-100 range and have the proven at compile time. Not just unit tested. It would be amazing.
Edit for clarification:
For example, the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0]
As population gets higher more and more people want to visit the top destinations, and when a new one gets "found" it gets flooded (see Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones hype)
Because of physical limitations these experiences don't scale - there's a finite number of destinations in the world and an ever-growing population.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
The people you're talking about have already quit talking about the thing you would now be interested in, so you're too late already.
No one seems to care about it, except particularly ardent fans. And the government only cares about satellites that benefit them.
However, discoveries and innovations are still happening. The latest one I have in mind is the James Webb Space Telescope. And private companies like SpaceX are still planning a mission to Mars. Lastly, somewhere flashed information about the resumption of the space program, such as flights to the moon.
Sidenote: Unlimited power capacity introduced many new challenges, so there will be uhm powers who wants to stop it, temporarily.
I searched for it and couldn’t find it.
Here’s a former top page post by Terraform: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
I agree that EV will be the future, but I doubt that, especially with the rate of urbanization that we have, private vehicles is what we will be talking about 20 years down the line.
Cities will need to focus on the 15-minute concept (reach all your necessary socio-economic points of interest in 15 minutes, no matter where you live) as well as public transport (and it’s equal distribution !!).
So I think, what people are talking about little is the advances in public transportation and centralized city logistics. Sure, EV fleets all the way, but also answers of how to get people and goods from A-B in a car-free environment will be of increasing importance.
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/complexity-eco...
The Keynesian economics principals has an assumption that says 'goods are scarce`
And if the next 15-30 years is an era of exponential then how should the economics behave?
Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it.
That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery.
Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one.
On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over.
Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools.
Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces.
If this is true, what does it mean? China will invade Taiwan? What else?
Just imagine, you can travel reasonable distances without needing to deal with traffic. Your drone could pick you up on your roof, and then drop you off on a roof in a city, bypassing roads and traffic.
More importantly, if most personal transport is by drone, it means we don't need to invest as much in roads, bridges, and railroads.
We will have no choice eventually.
Demographic problems (low birth rates).
By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles.
However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustainable, as we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. And the climate picture isn't great either, with not enough new clean energy capacity going online, and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs. Even with all of this new work, there will be only a small reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically there are so many things that can go wrong in the next 18 years, and so many things we don't even have a plan for, that all the estimates we've been given will result in dysfunction, increased prices, and soaring secondary markets. A lot of people are going to make money just from preparing for things to go wrong.
And like any other 'bubble' at least the ultimate goal seem to fleece somebody.
Honestly the whole point of this is 'to make things easier'. +++
P-: