Ask HN: Anyone willing to speculate on 'software in 100 years from now'?
Or is it just so far out that it's too ridiculous to even guess? Arthur Clarke made a few good guesses.
At one point natural resources depletion and the effect of climate change will reduce human population to a fraction of what it is now. The remaining ones will have to make do with less technology and more manual work.
I'd encourage every HN reader to read the Archdruid Report, eye opening.
Since it's impossible to know one way or the other I chose to think that our descendants will be sat somewhere in space watching the Sun go nova.
Fundamentally as a species we have two problems, energy and resources and both of those are for the taking in the solar system, We just need to stop screwing about and go get them.
I beg to differ. At least for heating, which is necessary for a lot of climates, and also often for cooking, wood is actually arguably the cleanest, easiest to establish, most universally available and most sustainable.[1] The historical trajectory is that it has been becoming impossible to obtain for most people because they are being progressively squeezed in to some sort of megacity of apartment boxes designed for worker drones, cars and mass-consumption. Some of them have never even seen a forest.
(I say as we know it because some civilization that hasn't existed might tend to slow growth prior to achieving a high standard of living)
Basically, wood is a huge win because it doesn't rely on having a vehicle, a credit card, a petrochemical distribution system, a bank, electricity and bureaucracy to manage all that, etc. Once you tally up the pervasive bullshit (transport, regulation, real state of reserves, enabling technology, overheads for the above) around most energy sources, you realize they're a hell of a lot more expensive and less long-term reliable than wood.
One axe, some land, a bit of time: sorted.
Have you ever cooked and heated for an extended period of time using wood that you fell with an axe? I haven't, but the little bit of axe work and wood splitting I've done is enough to dissuade me from being excited about it.
Anyway the points I was arguing were 'get cheaper' - clearly not the case when discussing a transition from free (grows on trees) to paid (to a private utility, often a monopoly, and one upon which you are dependent) - and 'get cleaner', not the case when moving from wood to other-system-plus-transmission-and-bureaucracy-overheads.
I agree with 'more available', though we've paid dearly for that in environmental damage.
PS. To thread originator, thanks for thearchdruidreport meme, I was skeptical but there are some really interesting thoughts there.
[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/11/nuclear-winter-and-hum...
I was point out how difficult it is to wipe out ~7 billion people, even with extremely advanced technology. Nuclear winter is just a convenient benchmark of that. The same resilience mankind has against nuclear winter is also applicable against genetic engineering, climate change, and nano-tech disasters.
For example, in 1967 Dennis Ritchie began work on the c programming language, still highly used today only almost 50 years later. In 1962 the Chinook helicopter when into service. Almost 35 years ago the US Space Shuttle went into service, and we still haven't seen a huge amount of new innovation there. Though maybe it will come.
Anyway, the point is, 100 years brings amazing innovations (before 1967 there was no c, after all! So it was amazing). But, progress happens a lot more slowly than I think most realize in our science fiction laden society. We probably won't have any strong AI Robot Overloads in 100 years. Most likely we'll still be writing software to solve our day to day challenges while sitting around and complaining about how poorly other software engineers write their code.
With enough engineering we could accomplish a crude approximation of this magic today. To really guess about 100 years from now is impossible. Chimps couldn't predict the evolution of computers and we can't predict ASI technologies.
No software is allowed release on the mass market unless it fits Apple's TOS (Apple is now the world government as well). All apps will be politically correct and use no porn, swear words, violence, or mention anything hinting at a competitor to Apple.
AI that can fix bugs and manage its own size will be a mere 10 years away.
Seriously though, I'd rather speculate on the risk of the super AI a company has developed until then turning against the company itself. Not from a 'destroy the world' type of scenario but from a 'marketing desaster' scenario.
What will really change is the sophistication of people who interact with software - the end user. They'll start writing code (within the confines of an application suite) in a big way. At the moment I imagine only a single digit percentage of users can write a macro or use a scripting language in an application, but that will change immensely. Everyone will use 'code' to manipulate data in their job. There will be a fundamental shift towards understanding things on an abstract 'everything is just data' level. The real question is whether that's 100 years away or 20 years away. I suspect it's going to be much closer to 20.
As today there are no more monastic scribes, there won't be coders anymore. "Writing code", ie, talking to machines will be easy enough for universal reach.
But you'd think with 130 years of software behind us we'd have code for everything.
Language hasn't changed much since Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Programming hasn't changed that much in 50 years since Lisp, Fortran, Pascal. We have more libraries, frameworks, tools, but it's still the same loops, conditions, functions.
I predict with total confidence things will be the same.
Adopting this philosophy means that it will be a language designer's responsibility to incorporate as many compatible features as possible (not as macros!) to avoid the temptation of layering a lisp.
(That is if languages continue to develop, rather than the slop-on-slop mentality fully taking over).
> Long after everything else you know has gone to dust, Vim will be there. Some version of Vim will be running on whatever computer triggers armageddon.