What technology, if any, will make today's critics look foolish in 20 years?
Nuclear energy is something that should unite both sides of the political aisle: whether or not you're scared of climate change, everybody wants access to cheap energy to power industry and human needs.
There are very few dishes that can't be enhanced by adding just a little bit of diced onion (even many sweet or salty dishes), and many dishes benefit from adding fresh onion as well. There are also so many different varieties of onions, and each has its own subtly different taste. Learning which kind of onion is the right kind to use for which dish is a fun and rewarding pastime. Not to mention that they can be caramelized in a non-stick pan without adding oil, which is pretty useful.
In 20 years, people will no longer be sleeping on this, and as a result onions will be much more expensive than they are today. I've started going out at night and burying onions in the front yard of my apartment complex so that I'll be able to cash out when this happens.
They’re not be leveraged well now, but having an assistant to remind you about a complex pill regimen or physical therapy exercises will be huge for medical care (for better and worse).
Even stuff like adding things to a grocery list, then mapping across to a shopping app is mostly possible now with issues; in twenty years, that barrier will be gone.
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Also, the Yanko sink/toilet to save water. We gotta stop wasting drinkable water.
https://www.yankodesign.com/2010/01/20/all-in-one-loo-with-a...
Partly privacy, partly poor implementation. It showed so much promise, once implementation improves I don't see how it wouldn't be ubiquitous.
Anyway, it was a jolly good read
The DALL-E/GitHub Copilot conversations are a nice hint. They were mocked for being if/else statements or "a solution looking for a problem" 1-2 years ago. Today, we're having conversations on whether they're moral; a hint that they actually represent a threat to artists.
I think they'll probably become similar to tractors or digital marketing in the future. Despite tractors, farmers still have to do hard labor, they just make more output from their endurance. Digital marketing didn't kill offline marketing. But they'll all still change the nature of jobs.
Granted, computers can certainly generate something that looks cool or just pleasing to the eye. Something you might want to hang up on your wall or something to add a splash of colour to the room. In that respect I suppose there’s some limited threat.
Just like artists currently use Adobe software to emulate brushes like real paintings, there is no reason an artist couldn’t use AI generated art to accomplish things that would otherwise be manual.
It's a step from artist to art director - the difference between a musician playing an instrument and a composer. But if the composer cannot play an instrument, it's hard to do improv jazz.
I strongly disagree here. I think we tend to anthropomorphize AI, atrributing emotions and humor as something only sentient beings can do.
What it does is really spot patterns. It's akin to someone who has read not only thousands of books, but also also surfed Reddit for thousands of years, and read all the smutty fan fiction out there.
OpenAI stuff (DALL-E 2 and recent models of GPT-3) feels rather "smoothed". It's like looking at someone on LinkedIn and then thinking they don't have a personality.
It's capable of subtext. I ask it to describe anger, and it could be anything between a yelling person to someone who is cold and sarcastic.
It's capable of humor. It's capable of flirting. I use GPT-3 for poetry, because it's a hell of a lot better at writing poetry than me. It does poorly at finding rhymes and it doesn't understand syllables, but it can definitely find different ways to express an idea.
Another weakness is that people who don't understand poetry or art are bad at giving instructions to AI. If you hire Shakespeare on Upwork and give him instructions to, "Write a love poem to my wife for her anniversary," the output is going to be uninspired.
People will have to learn to work with AI the way a director works with actors, not the way a scrum master works with engineers. The director sees the big picture and how the scenes flow into each other, while the AI has to be trained to get into character.
There would be a central regulatory bank that administers financial transactions and serves as a source of truth while Point of Transaction registers send the data for the plusses and minuses in every non-physical cash transaction event.
It wouldn't supplant the physical dollar in any reasonable time as there are many reasons why such bearer bonds would be useful, but I could see it displacing the VISA/MC/AMEX/DISCOVER dominance over electronic financial transactions in America at least.
Everything trends towards centralization. Tech especially. All the top chains are heavily centralized in (Hash rates, holdings, influence, Insert blockchain metric here). Blockchains has trended towards centralized entities and personalities and i expect the trend to continue.
>these nodes are run by an anonymous collective
up until around 2017, that's how blockchain worked and gained traction.
And now most high level entities in blockchain tech now have identities/companies and individuals associated with them. Twitter has allowed these identities to stay 'psuedo-anonymous' sometimes but their 'identities' and leadership influence over the chain/ pools and infrastructure has remained.
>That’s a regression in the trust-value chain for most real world applications
Blockchain trustlessness is the whole value.
Since this question routinely comes up on HN, I gathered a few legit examples[0] of how Crypto is helping.
I am also willing to have a bet about overall Crypto market cap[1] at the end of this decade (11:59pm PST on 31st Dec 2020) - I bet it will be more than 1T USD vs 932B today.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 [1] the number at the top of https://coinmarketcap.com/
What are you thoughts on the next wave?
I think 2018 was a legitimate run when we were all thinking of legit use cases and arguing whether they were practical. The last few years were more of a bubble, with NFTs and shitcoins all over the place.
Crypto seems like something that would benefit from Gustafson's Law. Digital finance infrastructure is not yet good enough to make it useful. Like Instagram relying on web and app tech, crypto still needs lots of changes in how we deal with money and how governments treat it.
What are the factors that will lead to the growth of vertical farming?
The economics don't really add up for most farming, but do for some. It works for specialized things like the living lettuce already in super markets, sprouts, quick and fresh stuff. Things that take months to reach harvest, and have a lot of waste plant material (we don't eat the entire thing like lettuce) it's wildly uneconomical. It's good from a pest management standpoint as well. Any gains in water efficiency and fuel savings are erased by the energy cost to power the grow lights and climate control. It's great for specific things like lettuce, pot, mushrooms, etc. but for 90% of our food supply like fruits, vegetables, grains, etc. it's just not viable.
I am not sure how will it work for the developing world where the buying power is very less.
I love the fact that the EV bring a lot efficiency.
What?
Bill Gates became famous for founding Microsoft, which listed for an IPO in 1986, way before the internet really took off.
Somewhere in the Microsoft Windows 95/98 era is generally the first experience most Americans had with the internet.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
20 years from now we should have enough data on its applications that there will be simple treatments and cures for many lifelong afflictions.
old school would have taken 6 months minimum to grow a vaccine and large scale bioprocess plantization would have been needed.
the covid virus changes so fast that old school bioprocess would have left us effectively without vaccine.
The first time I got COVID I was sick for three long arduous weeks.
A few years later, the second time I got COVID ~ after having rounds of the mRNA vaccines, I was only sick for a week or so. No fever, no loss of taste, with extremely mild symptoms.
That was a pretty marked anecdotal improvement for my life. Pretty sure I’m not alone with that either.
However, they are not weight loss pills in a sense that they do something to reduce bodyfat on its own. They just suppress appetite, and you lose weight naturally by eating less.
And unless you experience significant side effects from those drugs, imo this would be preferable over drugs that do something to actually mess with bodyfat levels directly. Potential side-effects of that direct approach just seem to not be worth it, but that's just a speculation, given such a method currently doesn't exist at all.
Besides, both were just Apple's entrances into particular markets, not technologies themselves.
- Nuclear power
- AR
- EVs
- Alternative style EVs like the Arcimoto.