We review and read so many bits of technology that we forecast into the future. I was wondering what everyone thought - explicitly - about what will be happening over the next few years.
These are already trends and will continue sickeningly in the near future. Anything targeting these new facts of life will do well, but at the cost of entrenching this millenial conceptual scheme.
Rate dropping in developed countries though? Did you mean consumerism?
I need a shower after writing this post.
Has humanity and its evolution peaked and are we soon headed into a downward spiral turning into a retarded society? Is the pride of our advancements our undoing?
With that said, I think we should be careful of where our collective conscious takes us.
There are certain attempts to fix the knowledge gap issue, namely Q&A sites, as well as places where people can share their knowledge. But Q&A doesn't seem to work for most things beyond the basics: there isn't an objective answer, as everything is a trade off, and questions aren't as good as a conversation would be for context and everything else. Even for Quora, where the questions and answers can be subjective, there is an implicit requirement that both of them have to be self-contained (otherwise, it just doesn't make sense). It's evident to see in the "naive" question on Quora: sometimes you can tell the asker knows a bit and wanted to ask for more, but the resulting questions just come out very awkward.
And finally, I think that people are more reluctant to just share their knowledge (directed at no one), for a variety of reasons: it's actually hard to just write about things - there are a big gap between knowing something, and being able to write it down clearly, we mostly can't write a book, but everyone of you will have a thing or two to teach me regardless. It might seem wasteful (who would read this?), or it's just simply never come to our mind that's the knowledge is valuable - familiarity makes everything seems trivial. Most of those issues would not exists in a small group settings.
For a more concrete idea, think of a small but active mailing list, IRC channel, or subreddit, that's approximately the desirable result. If you can, make those mainstream, pretty please :-).
One-on-One connectivity with a (self proclaimed?) subject matter expert, where the subject could be anything.
Things like Reddit and Quora exist, and Ask HN, how to wikis, guide web pages, etc. etc. but one issue I have with the forum style is that it doesn't foster a student-teacher / master-apprentice experience because there's always someone saying "no, that's wrong" -- or something to that affect.
Connecting students with teachers, where 'student' means someone wanting to learn and 'teacher' means someone willing to share experience and knowledge.
Does such an app exist?
I've actually been working on a side project for a couple of weeks - it's a chatroom-based community. I think it'd be nice to have a place where people could go and talk about specific topics, without having it be all about "content", and without the judgmental weed-out process that karma-based sites force on users. Kind of like a live version of Reddit, you know? As useful as IRC is, I don't think it will ever become mainstream.
Anyways, here it is - let me know what you think! http://www.toka.io/
*You'll need to sign-up to use it.
Smart watches.
Fitness devices. Millenium Generation are putting more money into fitness stuff and Under Armor just bought myfitnesspal app. Google released their own. Those things will amass a good amount of big data for companies so I see that becoming big.
Electric cars. Tesla really pushed it. BMW and Nissan is embracing it. All the hyper cars are moving to hybrid right now. It's easy to see where the direction is going.
Machine learning/ Data science. It's going to grow. As for the tech stack I'm not entirely sure, but I know Spark will be vying for some market share if they keep the momentum up but Flink can be an underdog. Eventually, we might get a good realtime framework/software instead of batches and micro batches.
Scala is going to go down as people are going to see how complicated the language is really. I've seen few move to Clojure. That's the trend I'm predicting for this language.
Autonomous cars ain't going to be here by 2018.
Things I think will not be a trend:
I wouldn't add google glasses type of thing because I don't think the technology is there to make it last more than an hour or two really.
Open Source Graph data base. Titan is going to going to die and there won't be any promising open source one in the horizon and I'm sadden by this.
Front side js rendering is going to be still fighting for dominance. React, angular, ember, etc... It'll have massive code base shift with ECMA 6 and nothing will settle and everything is still wild wild west in this frontier.
Interesting prediction. What do you think will be the fate of other JVM languages?
>Open Source Graph data base. Titan is going to going to die and there won't be any promising open source one in the horizon and I'm sadden by this.
Why not OrientDB?
Had a chat with a founder about it today.
Middle finger to the city - smart people use big cities for networking and to meet people, then start up their businesses in a town miles away and say fuck you to those overheads. Tech could facilitate this. Previously unknown small towns around the world become the next silicon valleys.
What set me off was the Startup Podcast episode on equity crowdfunding platforms.
Emergence of VR and related technologies (it's a trend in this thread as well)
Failing startups in the hundreds, who've exhausted their funding by then.
Smartwatches/health bands
Beginning or mobile phone stagnancy
4K TVs and displays may start picking up
1) Health (e.g. theranos)
2) Artificial Intelligence
3) Virtual Reality
4) Internet of things
Podcasting will get even bigger
Wearables
eSports