Ask HN: Whats your prediction for what 2030 will look like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Whats your prediction for what 2030 will look like?

16 pointstopaztee20 comments

VR/AR won't become the Next Big Thing, but prices will have stabilized and demand in most developed countries will be steadily increasing. Will never become as ubiqitious as smartphones in developing countries.

People will be happier, but I can't predict why.

India won't have progressed in a significant manner. Corruption will be as rampant as ever, and Hindutva will still be the prevailing ideology. The youth will try to protest in ..certain ways, but they will not be successful in bringing about the change they would like. Mumbai will be one step closer to being a dead city. Bangalore won't be its successor. The higher education system will not become better in any meaningful way but the importance of IIT/NITs will have slightly declined. For most students they will remain the only option.

Tech jobs will have lost their allure due to oversaturation in India. We will see a funding winter in 2030-2033. We will see more skeptics.

india's got hurdles, no doubt. but with the progress in space tech and the startup scene hungry for local solutions, there's room for optimism. oversaturation in traditional tech might happen, but that energy could transform healthcare, agriculture...the stuff that impacts everyday life. plus, smaller cities could become the new powerhouses if clean energy investment booms.

the shift is happening. soon, india will lead in creating solutions tailored to its needs, not copying silicon valley. UPI and ONDC prove this innovative spirit.

Like today, but more so.

More dysfunctional politics, more geopolitical (inter-state) friction, more weather, more inequality, more housing crisis, more suicides, more siloing. More HR, more surveillance. More PV electricity farms, not as many more EVs as optimists were predicting last year. Ditto robots. Fewer opinion writers masquerading as journalists, I hope. Worse infrastructure, more oppressive laws controlling action and speech.

+1. I've always described this phenomenon as "everything you love will get better but everything you hate will get worse."

That seems incredibly pessimistic. Hopefully that's not how it goes. What should we be optimistic about?

More surveillance, more noise, the generation that grew up on the internet finally is willing to spend money on it for quality content.

You are being hopeful I see, more noise could be the best way to counter spying.

Phones will be slightly better than they are now. They will likely have some custom ML chips for on-device LLM type stuff. Yes, unfortunately LLMs will be regulated and neutered to shit. Our dream of AR glasses still will not have materialized. Self driving cars will finally become more widespread, available in most major cities, but all the hype will have died down and nobody will care. Crypto will still be around and the people pushing it will be as annoying as ever. The big tech companies will become even more integrated with the military-industrial complex. I'd guess we are likely to see some pretty crazy biotech innovations too, I'd guess that by 2030 there will probably be startups that you can pay enormous sums of money to for your children's protection against genetic diseases via CRISPR or similar technologies.

The year of the Linux Desktop.

Followed by 2031, the last year of the desktop. Code that requires more CPU power or memory than a phone or laptop will run in the cloud.

If you need/want more screens, you’ll wear glasses that simulate them.

Building desktop motherboards may become a bad idea, economically, given that the large cloud providers all build their own boards.

Killer robots created by a self aware LLM eliminate most of the human race. The only remaining humans are the prompt jailbreakers, who live like warlords, the bedraggled refugees who live under their reigns of terror, and somewhere out there, some unlikely hero who will free us all from our technological overlords.

Also cryptocurrency will be regulated after another wave of scams, the MCU will stop churning out movies, we'll see some interesting innovations in CISC architecture, and probably will see global decreases in fossil fuels usage.

Because I work in the field of AI and ML, I'll answer from that perspective: More control over the use and outputs of LLMs. Enterprises will integrate AI into their services, ecosystems and internals heavily. Developers' daily life will get easier. Folks will realize the potential and come up with very interesting ways to use the power and capability of AI. All in all, the field of Artificial Intelligence will get more settled and new realms will uncover.

I would say "something akin to the setting of Neuromancer or The Matrix", but I don't expect all the nerve-splicing / neural interface tech to progress to that level by then. Maybe a better comparison would be "something like the last couple of seasons of Person of Interest".

At the very least, I wouldn't be surprised if we have something akin to Gibson's "Turing Police" by then, whether or not they are in fact needed.

Snow Crash is more likely. I agree with you on the Turing police, except instead of monitoring actual emergent intelligence they'll be mall cops harassing people who train for too many epochs.

AI/LLM winter sets in; GPT-6.5 is no AGI, but the wide-ranging societal effects of AI systems are visible at all levels.

VR/AR Spring finally arrives; Apple Vision 6 SE is a satisfying mass product for under $600.

Tech wise we will be geo engineering in a big way to attack climate change. One of the feedback cycles has made the problem get the same attention and immediacy as Covid or Pearl Harbour.

Russia/Ukraine war is still raging. Congress fighting for a 9th $100B aid package.

Nvida will go bankrupt

AI + human dating

LLMs and their derivatives will be completely neutered (AKA censored and useless, unless you go the illegal route).

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