Ask HN: What were your tech predictions 10 years ago?
Personally, I distinctly recall this feeling that Facebook would be the largest and greatest tech company in the world for some reason. That obviously has not turned out to be the case, no offense to our many esteemed friends at Meta. Clearly the popular culture of the 2010s was not capable of predicting the future of our industry with much accuracy, and social media networks seem to have sufficiently saturated the world now.
My second distinct recollection is my belief that we were in the midst of yet another AI winter. Although this seems patently false in retrospect, as many things do, I remember this was not a fringe opinion on even HN at the end of the decade (now it is clear to me that the pioneers in this emerging field were busy hacking instead of posting). It was thought that attention and the transformer were the great breakthroughs, and that we would have some marginal improvements to Google Translate and other such applications that seem quite humble in comparison to what is now being released. To claim that advancements would be made so rapidly that the goalposts on AGI would shift on a daily basis would have been preposterous!
I don't intend to rant too much but it is remarkable how as a young programmer and computer science student it was really quite difficult to foresee how unpredictable and varied the development and use of my art would be. I only humbly suggest that we once again be cautious about the obviousness of our current predictions for 2034.