What will become possible by 2025 in your field of expertise?
In your field of expertise, what's not possible now, but will become possible in 3-5 years? What about 10 years?
Looking at a 10 year window. There's a low probability, but non-zero, that I'll be able to correctly align and distribute DOM elements both horizontally and vertically. I might accomplish this by dropping support for the Internet Explorer family of browsers.
In the field of education, I believe we're not that far off from having basic teachable AI agents.
As the maxim goes, "The best way to learn is to teach". My vision here is that for any new topic a student learns, they (or the instructor) would be able to instantiate an AI agent with relevant preliminary knowledge, for the student to practice on. The student would try to teach the agent facts and/or how to perform basic tasks, and the agent, with some basic metacognition would be able to query the student regarding any unclear or conflicting points.
It definitely won't be anywhere near Turing Test level in 5 years, but I believe that by then we'll have something useful. And beyond that, I think there's real potential here, both for revolutionising education, and further down the line in terms of AGI.
This is slightly tangential, but this article from a few days ago strengthened my belief that we're getting closer -
https://reiinakano.com/2019/11/12/solving-probability.html
In about 10 years, it will be possible to run a cell lysate sample through a mass spec machine and get what a present-day scientist would call a pretty good picture of everything going on at the proteomic/metabolomic level, in perhaps ~5 hours.
But in that time we will have probably discovered several currently-unappreciated, biologically relevant biochemical mechanisms which we can’t efficiently probe like this. And also it will be considered next to useless because it doesn’t work on single-cell samples. :)
Enlightenment will be achieved when we develop One True Platform which marries front end and backend development so that we don’t need to maintain complex frameworks whose sole reason for existence is to make sure the computers don’t blow up passing data back and forth.
I have no doubt that deepfakes will be impossible to tell apart from real videos (at least to a human) in 3-5 years.
In 10 years I think we’ll be able to generate entire movies programmatically.
In the RF / wireless world, in the coming 5-10 years we may finally see commercial use of large phased arrays. This was supposed to come with mm-wave 5G, but probably will get pushed to 5G++ or 6G. Starlink actually looks on track to be the first consumer 'killer app'.
Hard to understate how big this will be for maintaining growth in wireless capacity. I think there's a timeline where we ditch copper coax and even buried fiber in most infrastructure.
We’re going to see ray tracing become dominant I think. Its possible now but its not good enough yet. Five years though? Id bank on yes.
I started working in RPA (robotic process automation) and what our team is working on will end up putting a lot of people out of work. In 3-5 years, I would expect most data entry jobs to be eliminated by the scripts our team is writing.
The scary part? I work in the health care industry. This means a lot of the heavy forms processing that goes on will soon be completely automated by robots and without any human interaction or decision making. The future is cold and calculating; without any empathy or consideration for the patient - only the bottom line for the provider is what matters.
Nearly every day I get the statistics of how many jobs our team's bots are replacing. In one instance, we had several bots that effectively replaced over 1,000 FTE's and saved the company close to $3 million. We have over 600 bots right now running which is in the top 1% of all companies in the country and they're looking to expand that number even more.
Nearly every day I feel the moral weight of what I'm doing and it gives me pause.
I'm a project manager. Putting aside the possible/not possible speculation for a moment, what I hope to see in the near future is a kind of support system that could evaluate work in progress, work done and other factors to better help us with risk management. Schedules are tighter than ever, deadlines are seen as life or death, penalties for delays are easily surpassing the million USD marks. So I think we need all the intelligence we can get to understand what's really going on in project and make the right decisions to minimize/eliminate risk.
Not sure about 3-5 years but within the next 10 years we'll likely have 3D sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel resolutions with 30+ fps. At the price and form factor of an entry-level DSLR.
In 15 to 20 years every smartphone (or perhaps pair of AR glasses) will have one of these.
Gathering actually reliable data from the healthcare system will enable the rise of true clinical science and the fall of the clinician-researcher star system.
You said possible. Not actually realized :-)
Full self-driving car that can operate using just cameras on a variety of weather conditions (still limited)
In 3-5 years if we are lucky, life expectancy in the US will stop going down.
I think we will start seeing more and more advanced composite 'metamaterials' being applied in the world outside of research labs.
These are materials with engineered structures at usually the nano or micro scale that have unique/unusual properties. Things like better antennas, imaging devices, or even materials that can perform computations.
As the manufacturing processes develop more I think we will start seeing them more widespread. Defence industries are in particular interested in this at the moment but the potentials are much bigger.
I'm looking forward to the consumer release next year of 1080p AR glasses. And hope one of them has sufficient visual quality and pragmatics to displace a lot of my laptop screen use.
In 3-5 years? Apple is rumored to intend both headset and glasses. So I hope for all-day AR, with >1080p resolution, eye tracking, and hand tracking, that Just Works. Enabling 3D GUIs. At least shallow ones - avoiding vergence-accommodation conflict in consumer devices may take additional years.
Expect to see the first ever commercial liquid fueled nuclear power plants under construction by 2025, maybe even operational. China will probably be the very first.
I'm a front end web developer. I hope we have better DOM - WebGL integration to enable some really nice effects and optimizations. Most users have reasonably powerful GPUs even on cheap smartphones but the only way to utilise them in a web page is disappointingly separate to the HTML side of things. Hardware accelerated position updates, lists, etc (more than CSS does already) would be awesome.
In 10 years major chip design houses might start seriously consider using analog computation for machine learning.
Programming for more than thirty years here.
Within five years there should be multiple AIs that specialize in different types of programming. They will have a combination of a natural language interface and interactive screens.
Most of these will be based on starting with existing template applications and tweaking them to handle special cases. They will manage that by training neural networks on datasets that provide requested tweak descriptions and the resulting code or schema changes. They will have a fallback to manually edit formulas or code when necessary. AIs will also be trained to read API descriptions and write code to access them.
Within 10 years fully general purpose AI will be available that can completely replace programmers even for difficult or novel problems.
By 2025, it's quite possible that vapor-deposited boron-based icosahedral superconductor and semiconductor materials will begin to revolutionize many areas, including quantum computing, slashing power requirements of existing chips by 90+%, and most importantly, quantum energy devices (think batteries that never need recharging, powered by the expansion of the universe) that effectively convert ambient heat to electricity just as PV cells convert ambient light to electricity. This uses a new quantum thermodynamics that has no classical analog. FWIW, these materials have already been invented, and the theory behind them is probably sorted out as well.
Not exactly my field as I’m mainly on the backend/infrastructure side of these projects but I see a lot of recent progress in consumer devices/wearables inching their way into the medical space and replacing expensive medical equipment for detection and prevention of certain ailments.
One recent example is using PPG on smartwatches like Fitbit and Apple Watch to detect atrial fibrillation.
In 3-5 years I see some more use cases like this being released.
In 2025 Cobol can into cloud.
By 2025, the "OS" of choice for at least the remainder of the first half of the century will become a set of cloud services APIs, but advances in hardware will allow these services to be pushed back to the edge much as mainframes were replaced by distributed networks.
In about 3 to 5 years, it will be possible to create ultra high-Q mechanical micro-resonators with extremely low thermal noise coupling. This will allow a huge number of new quantum optomechanical setups and experiments
I think the cost of storage will drop again sharply, after the current plateau, because there is so much push for it, and we are not quite at the physical limit yet.
In SW development, automatic code generation will breakthrough.
I expect to have a lot more secure remote access to the scientific instruments in my lab than my IT group can provide using the internet.
Working on it now.
Going to call it _Dial-Up_.
It will be possible to make the bullet obsolete
- In 5 years you will be able to easily write powerful programs through voice interfaces like Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and/or Google
- In 5 years you will be able to start and make 90% of the key design decisions for a new general or domain specific programming languages in a couple of days, a process that currently takes many months to years if not decades
- In 10 years it will be impossible for most software engineers to keep their jobs if they refrain from using program synthesis AI's providing "super-autocomplete"
I am Senior Software Development Consultant programming 20 years.
Based on expertise in multiple international projects i think in 5 years from now software will start to solve most important humanity problems.
In 10 years from now it will at last have substantial role in solving them.
3-5 years?
1. The IRS primary, secondary, and cold backup tertiary mainframes will have failed and not have sufficient replacements in place.
2. Library of Congress Subject Headings will be incomprehesible due to controversies over how they are not sufficiently "woke" and library subject cataloguing will have to reach back to revitalize the work of Minnie Earl Sears to try to maintain order.
3. There will be an Internet. There will be the FAANG properties. They won't overlap anymore.