This time, it seems that my crystal ball is lacking inspiration for 2021 due to the uncertainty caused by this year.
2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988
2017: none?
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
2013: none?
2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201
* 1 Bitcoin will cost over $100k on Dec 31, 2021
* An animation tool rivaling Adobe Flash for the web will emerge
* FB releases a thin virtual reality headset https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/06/holographic-optics-for-...
* Austin Tx or Seattle Wa succeeds Silicon Valley as the next major tech hub. San Francisco and its century old Victorians become the Detroit of the tech world
* Section 230 doesn't get repealed
* WFH and quarantine continues until the summer
* A React competitor that compiles to WASM with promises of perf and space gains will emerge
* A Reddit competitor emerges and wins majority marketshare
* 2021 will be the year of punk and rock n' roll
New law enforcement techniques using DNS and other Intel techniques will be used to track, seize and tax cryptocurrency - which will cause increased popularity of Ethereum.
A qubit will travel around the world without decohering and increase attention on quantum internet investments. GPT4 and other ML models (maybe even with a neuro-feedback loop) will radically change entertainment for Gaming, movies, books, and music.
Smart Cities will start emerging ( and some cities which will ban the technology) with ML models and Intel systems capable of identifying all kinds of hazards (fires), threats (terrorists) and crime at scale.
A new “shadow net” will emerge from new mesh-networking protocols and massive amounts of compromised IoT devices- allowing users to bypass core internet routers and ISPs with the “shadow net”
XR with depth field scanning and smart tailoring with drastically change the fashion industry ( shoes and clothes). So people can virtually try on clothes and order perfectly tailored clothes from their home.
- Terence McKenna becomes more relevant again; recordings of McKenna's talks such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijA5RHTJaV4 reach million views
- if we look back in 2030, we'll see 2021 being the year that marks the beginning of the psychedelic renaissance
- as a consequnce of this, more VC money will be poured into BCI research & meditation tech; I expect headspace to ipo
- not optimistic about neuralink's consumer debut though
* more countries will have problem with clean water. Hopefully new technologies to make water purification easier or cheaper emerge
* given fall guys and among us success stories, there will be many more games aimed at that gameplay. Likely one or two of those will boom
* non code programming (drag drop, or similar to) will rise. Used to complement customization, not to replace code-based programming (dreamweaver for example)
* PWA or similar web-based app / installer will rise, while having more opposition from apple and google.
This will trigger an economic collapse which will bring down the eurozone. Germany will want country rated euros to avoid having to bail Italy.
House prices in Europe will drop to a rent / value rate similar to the USA, as property owners scrap for money.
USA will face similar problems and inflation will start being a problem.
China will start buying more in Europe and USA (same as they did with Africa).
Wonder if there are any companies I can invest in to cash in on this?
More no code platforms will emerge and grow
Fiat currencies will have major moves
Bitcoin will rise big and then drop sharply once people realize how useless it is
Inequality will continue to grow. More controls will be put in place to keep disadvantaged in line. Surveillance, social controls, brainwashing
Real estate will have volatility
Think YouTube + video creators, Spotify + artists, Netflix + more long tail video content, Substack + writers, TikTok + influencers, Doordash + indie chefs, Apple + indie developers.
I believe this will feel like visible people are losing jobs and making less money, but humanity as a whole will see wealth increase.
2. Remote work will continue to gain traction. Remember that in 2020 remote work was terrible for new remote workers, as they were unprepared and face hard conditions (stress, children with closed schools), but shows that remote working can work indeed. New tools for team building will pop-up and social life will be partially transferred to local and non professionnal events.
3. Real estate will slightly evolves as houses/appartment should not only be chosen to live in but could also be used to work : square meters/feet per person will increase, measurements of the quality access to water, electricity, Internet will become a standart. Commercial estate will fall hard. Locations with high life ROI will see new comers and increasing prices. City councils will be on huge pressure.
4. Take-away only restaurants and shops will increase.
5. Universal delivery box will happen to allow asynchronous distribution of goods (by night when traffic is low, by drone ?)
6. The EU e-privacy law altogether with more legal and financial penalties will make US companies to lose momentum in Europe
7. Google Ad network will either dismantled or facing a boycott from other parties
Right now green energy is only slightly cheaper than fossil fuel energy so it's effect has been minimal. But the price is forecasted to continue to drop the way it has over the last 50 years.
Energy is a massive component of the price of much of what we consume, from food to travel to chemicals to material.
Solar & wind energy have some troublesome characteristics, like their intermittency. But where some see problems, entrepreneurs see opportunity.
I'm not sure exactly how cheap power will transform the economy other than the obvious (fossil fuel producers are in big trouble). But I have no doubt it will.
Energy prices dropped massively and regularly between the industrial revolution and the oil price shock of the 70s. They've been relatively constant since then. It might not be an unreasonable prediction that the boom times between post-WW2 and the 70s might return.
People still wear masks quite a bit.
Parents of children in closed school systems in the suburban US will get even more outraged as schools stay closed into 2021, with dramatic political consequences.
Finally the US succeeds at anti trust for some big tech, though not for more beloved brands like Apple
Post COVID, Massive explosion of travel and restaurant visiting causes tons of demand that the waning industry can’t meet.
Major industrialized countries have better surveillance for potential pandemics. It’s taken much more seriously.
The major issue shifts to something completely unexpected (not Covid) by years end
- Much, much stronger ties between central europe and china
- Chia will become top 10 crypto
- DNA manipulation will become much bigger
- Facebook will go into proper decline
- Start of the break up of google ad business from google search business
- A few small EU alternative search engines come up
- Battery as a platform continues accelerating - new mobility form factors, battery grid scale storage
- Marketplaces with more than 2 links in the chain start eroding one of the middle links (primary ad channel will connect direct)
- Cross-border payments will become far easier
- Twitter will bring in a bunch of tools to combat toxicity
- So much travel in summer - hotels will have one of their best years ever
- AirBNB stock will do what tesla stock is doing - driven by reddit WSB kids
- Asia will crack down on scammy crypto companies
- MediaSynthesis will advance further - a major new tool that makes it trivially easy
- Google search results will start becoming way better and super personalised as their data efforts start showing results
- OpenStreetMaps will become a serious-serious contender to Google Maps
- Amazon gets into general purpose search?
- SSDs start dominating, NVME becomes standard for new desktops
- Google focuses far more on local, smaller sites to the detriment of big sites. Many well known brands (e.g tripadvisor) lose traffic
- Pinterest gets investigated for finance-related matters
- SARS viruses become the new normal
- Car traffic will be only slightly less than 2019 levels, despite rolling lockdowns all year.
- Brexit will start to be noticed on supermarket shelves.
- The built-up stresses of 2020/2021 will turn some relatively minor issue into a genuine political crisis, in a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back situation. It might bring down the government.
* The DJ mix fades slowly from Covid to climatechange
* Bill Gates does geoengineering
* Trillions of dollars printed -> effect -> bitcoin to the moon
* People will say that internet in 2020 had freedom
* Migration of taxpayers to other countries
Work from home is normalized. Commercial real estate prices will drop as companies pare-down their office space. Wework has better prospects than ever.
Travel stocks and in person events go crazy.
A renaissance for Ruby on Rails. Old fashioned SPA's are overbought/oversold, the pendulum will swing to the middle for many use-cases.
New security practices are developed, deployed, and become commonplace in the enterprise. I'd invest in this area if I had a way. Maybe honeypots, tripwires, or something new. Whatever can be sold as an antidote to the SolarWinds debacle, irony of security products as a vector aside.
Deepfakes start to surface in the public consciousness in a way they haven't so far. None of this is good.
Looking under Trump's rug gets ugly--Democrats are faced with seeming to "hunt" a political opponent, or letting some really bad stuff go.
* Boris Johnson will resign
* Tiktok becomes the most popular social media platform
* Japan Olympics go ahead causing hundreds of deaths
* Covid eventually fizzles out
JavaScript frameworks will feel a lot faster with more accessible implementations of SSR and React finally shipping concurrent-mode.
The singleton will be rediscovered and frameworks, languages and religions will form around the concept.
* Remote work will stay mainstream in tech, with most employees working at least a few days remote per month
* HN will get a dark mode
Cannabis will be decriminalized at the Federal level.
Covid Fatigue, no one will give a shit by summer.
DOW 36k. There is no limit to the amount of stimulus.
In turn, of course, suburbs will probably rise in value and attractiveness.
* A security breach bigger than SolarWinds will be discovered and will severely affect market position of a major cloud provider
* Google will make its biggest acquisition ever
* Inequality, censorship, and polarization will continue to increase
(I just checked on the latter and apparently it's scheduled to be released on the 23rd of January, so I guess that's pretty solid at this point. You never know, though; last attempt at release was postponed due to Covid, and it could happen again. If we're really lucky there'll be a US release in 2021.)
Apple's processor series has an upgrade and has an unexpected name
Apple gets tired of Qualcomm and starts making radios as well (Qualcomm's has not released adequate drivers to allow 5g in a multi-SIM environment, delaying Apple's ability to offer it)
A Camera manufacturer implements "Live Photos" in the RAW format with key frame selection
A cooler running version of the Raspberri Pi is released
More software libraries develop that use quantum algorithms in the backend.
One of the major company among IBM, Nvidia, Intel, Apple and AMD will release a prototype minimal viable Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) alongside CPU similar to GPUs.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as a predictable year
- Travel will boom towards the second half of the year, with people spending more on vacation/leisure and more “active” travel (e.g. luxurious hiking/camping trips).
- Protests and social upheaval once countries reach herd immunity via vaccination.
- People will spend more time looking at screens and socialize less.
It’s always atop my insight-free lists of long overdue events. Keep a pair of shoes and a gallon of water by your bed.
My hope is that this will rewire our society in two significant ways:
1) Through hREA and REA accounting in general, we will start having better wealth acknowledgement systems and a new grammar for different types of wealth [2],[3].
2) No more exclusive Intellectual Property rights (trade secrets and patents) that privatize and monopolize knowledge and ideas, the use of which currently comes at the expense of mother nature and society [4]. Our accumulated human knowledge is a shared inheritance, and it belongs to all children of the world, in the commons.
-
[1] "Holochain is a framework for writing fully distributed peer-to-peer applications. It is not based on blockchain technology. It is rather like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications."
This Medium post by a Holochain core developer is a great intro: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
[2] http://mikorizal.org/Fromprivateownershipaccountingtocommons...
[3] https://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/11/05/id-55
[4] Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
* There will be dev layoffs in areas where low/nocode handles most work, especially internal tooling and APIs for corps.
* Intel will give up on manufacturing and catch up to AMD (maybe towards the end of the year or the one after). Until then stocks will plummet.
* Most big game companies will be bought by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, maybe Apple, maybe Sony. Microsoft Gamepass will get them into a leading position (but wont beat Sony in 1 years time, more like 3 or 4)
* Environmental catastrophes will become commonplace, including massive refugee crises due to water shortages, heat waves and other hazards.
* There will be 1 more economical crisis before it gets better, maybe after covid when people realize that it won't get back to pre-covid levels as fast as they hoped.
* New applications built on web assembly (like Figma) will emerge and previously
* A plan will be solidified for space travel to the moon and Jeff Bezos will pour more of his money into Blue Origin
* A new foldable iPhone will be released
* Tech exodus from California continues as tax laws mixed with the WFH paradigm shift makes the area less attractive to migrants
* Fake news will cause a major scandal with the advancement of deep fake technology and the proliferation of fake articles made by one of the ever-evolving language models
* Waymo will continue to expand to more cities and progress the state of self driving technologies in the US
HN will continue to complain about the MicroSD card reliability.
The new board will sell well.
2. Markets will crash around April 2021. Won’t revive until before 2022.
3. The POTUS inauguration will not go as expected. Something unexpected and violent might occur. Current POTUS isn’t done yet. He will gain more power.
4. Possible American civil war(50%)
5. Two governments or some kind of split(USA)
6. Covid subsides but variants emerge at the fag end of 2021.
7. K shaped economy globally.
8. Crypto will reign.
9. Silicon Valley will bounce back.
* By the end of 2021 most cars will still use combustion engines
* A one-in-a-lifetime trip to space will become affordable for 5-10% of the population.
* Bitcoin will surpass $100k value
* Drone based delivery will not happen
* Nuclear fusion will not happen
* 25% of laptops will be using ARM
* Many small businesses will die. Amazon and other huge corporations will become even significantly bigger
* Jeff Bezos will be worth over $1T
* Facebook won't die but it will loose over 50% of it's users.
The question is - is it going to be replaced by something similar?
Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021. There will be some violence on or just after January 6 (certification of electoral college votes) and January 20, but it will be minor. Trump will rage and sulk, but Twitter will cancel his account on January 21 for violation of terms of service.
-An uptick in private security services.
-Bitcoin corrects into summer. 2021 is not the year of 6 figure BTC. (although that is probably coming in the next few years).
-I plan to make a bunch of changes and do dramatic things but do not. I do however do some unexpected things that turn out wonderfully.
Companies will push to have an annual Corona Virus Vaccine. Covered by insurance and mandated as much as possible.
RISC-V will start to show up in peoples hands.
Something interesting will happen with Intel.
That's really all I got, and two of them are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
For example, I'll happily bet some amount of money at 1:1 odds against some of the predictions here.
Before 2030, Snowden will not only be pardoned but will be appointed head of the CIA or equivalent.
* More pollution, global warming, rise of sea level, more health threats etc.
* Political and socio-economical instability, crisis and maybe a third world war?
The merits of this I will leave to the reader, but there has surely been a long-lasting shift in public opinion against social media due to the unrelenting assault of Trumpism. The irony of this assault being launched from twitter.com/realdonaldtrump is not lost on me.
* The vaccine efforts work out, and travel begins to open up again after August.
- Substantial number of tech workers remain remote as vaccines role out
- Remote workers crave community after covid lockdowns
- Commercial real estate is cheap
If remote is the future I expect to see mega coworking spaces filled with desks, gyms, spas, bars, workshops, etc. Will have the benefit of being able to choose who you're around every day and without the gaze of your company's HR department.
Big players in airline, restaurant and other hard hit businesses will go bust.
US war on Iran with some major development in the region especially Irak/Yemen.
Vaccination will be accepted by majority of people either through good results seen on elderly, or through a vaccine pass required by businesses.
I don't think there is much to argue about this. Every year changes everyone's life for the long term.
Work starts on annual covid vaccination programmes, similar to current annual flu programmes.
As vaccines are rolled out, death rates in the elderly drop, and rise comparatively among those aged 20s-30s causing much debate about whether this matters.
Covid is found to easily hop from humans to multiple different animals where it mutates before hopping back to humans again. Epidemiologists become hugely worried about this, but nobody seems to listen.
Governments (those who listen to the epidemiologists) attempt to divert more funds to bolster virus surveillance programmes, but are heavily stymied by rising nationalistic tendencies among the electorate. Investment in overseas collaborations such as surveillance programmes are attacked by populist/xenophobic pundits who clamour for protectionist policies. The political landscape becomes increasingly fractious.
* The theorem prover Lean 4 will be released.
Either Flutter Desktop or Sciter will be the defacto mode of cross-platform app development replacing ElectronJS and QT.
If Flutter desktop will be a thing at the end of 2021, Sciter will be abandoned.
Jurassic Park will actually open.
* Kubernetes/overengineering fatigue continues. Perhaps we see some fledgling attempts at a "platform" that handles external resources (load balancers, SSL) while still having a smaller scope and complexity. Sort of like k3s but a smaller footprint aimed at running on a single VM/host. I may just be describing Dokku plus some addons
* Evernote starts to slowly come back into the conversation as they continue with their wide spread refactorings (I just like their behind the scenes videos)
* More business get breached. No one seems to care
- Rumors about Apple AR glasses, but no release in 2021.
- GPT-4 ships, we see more trends pointing to AI generality with deep mind probably releasing another interesting paper.
- Vaccine distribution resolves covid in western countries by late summer/fall.
- Tesla ships cybertruck and full self driving beta to more users (maybe fleet wide to people who purchased FSD).
- VC 'move to Miami' rhetoric dies down and most people move back to SF bay in the short term post covid remote work.
- We see flexible remote schedules post covid, but most people still go into the office, most work still is office based (and those companies are more productive).
- Peloton continues to do well even post covid when people have gone back to normal life.
- Starlink ships and is a major telecom player, including in areas like China or the Middle East where governments try and control network access/comms. It makes good internet possible anywhere, Loon and other attempts fail to compete because their solutions are worse and less globally available.
- Bitcoin remains volatile
- Nikola dies, companies that went public via a SPAC are generally worse than companies that go public via other means.
- Post covid travel/consumer spend boom 'roaring twenties' response.
- USG institutions start to repair themselves post-trump crony damage, but congress is still largely grid-locked on legislation. Some republicans continue to refuse to accept Biden and pretend they're just doing the same thing dems did about the Russian interference/obstruction of justice in 2016 (they're not).
- Woke politics dies down a bit in Biden era, but is still an issue
- More writers go direct via Substack and newsletters siphon off the best writers. Major news outlets continue to get weaker and more partisan. Something interesting happens in this space.
1. ARM laptops will become mainstream. 2. Major brands will release their phones / tablets with reflective displays
* AMD makes an even larger dent in the consumer market, enterprise starts to ramp adoption.
* Apple will reach a $3T market cap.
* Google and Facebook will be largely unscathed by regulatory pressure. No major break-ups.
* TikTok implements more social features such as messaging, to take on Snapchat and Instagram.
* A breach larger than Solarwinds will occur, impacting multiple governments and large businesses worldwide.
Controversial:
* President Joe Biden reveals a serious illness known to affect mental state.
* One or more coronavirus vaccines are found to have serious side effects, including death.
* Tesla market cap will halve to $334B or less.
VR headsets as gaming platforms become commonplace
Global politics becomes even more strained
Prediction 2021: VR adoption leaps forwards but isn’t mainstream.
Prediction 2026: You will work in VR. All day.
Prediction 2031: You won't have a smartphone.
You will wear a pair of glasses that will pop up a screen when you want one, and give you other AR (augmented reality) features.
Obviously these changes will take time to trickle-down by socio-economic class and country development stage, just as smartphones didn’t reach everyone instantly. Just for specificity (predictions are more fun if you can be clearly right or clearly wrong!) let’s say, “More than half of people who type on keyboards for work now will use VR for work”
VR will represent the "next internet" in that everything will be reinvented around the headset.
We have “files”, “folders” and a “desktop” on our computer because it was a mental crutch that helped us understand how to think about a computer when what we had was paper, pens and desks.
We're currently in the phase where we lean on current navigation/thinking as a crutch, ("watch movies with your friends in a virtual theater!") but eventually we will sort out what a "website" is in this new context, and how we navigate and find things. Everything will be reinvented for this new medium as it moves from early-adopter to the way we interact online. It will be a blended shift, but eventually this will be the primary experience.
How we name the technology that is the exception shows us where we are now during this kind of technology adoption:
“Camera” meant a film camera. We didn’t even think about it. Then “camera” meant film and we added “digital camera” for context. Now “camera” means digital, and we would add “film” if needed for context.
“Online” means the internet “Online in VR” we’ll add for context. 2031: “Online” will mean VR, and we’ll say “legacy internet” (or something like it) to refer to what we now call the internet / online.
Fax Personal Computer Cellphone Internet Smartphone Social Media Electric cars Remote work pushed forward by COVID <-- we are here VR
What this means for startups/business:
Macro: As with any of the big leaps forward, some huge companies will fail to make the leap and they'll fall, and some massive new players will emerge. This is the realm of funded startups, because timing this leap is hard, there aren’t immediate revenue opportunities for most companies because the next generation platforms will be built over the next 5 years.
All of the big players are investing into this space. Facebook is the clear leader so far. Apple seems dormant but is great with hardware and will do well here, we just can't see it yet.
Multiple VC-funded companies you've never heard of will be a household names in 2031 because they correctly rode this wave. (Just like Zoom in 2020)
New opportunities:
Exercise will be reinvented around VR. It will be more social and more fun. Perhaps people will move around more rather than less once a computer isn’t something on a desk.
Real estate: People won’t leave their homes as much. Many won’t leave their homes at all. Where you live won’t matter, which will mean cities won’t matter (as much). Massive transfers of wealth will happen because of a shift in real estate values.
Travel / tourism: Completely reinvented. People will travel much less. Now you can see the Eiffel tower, or climb Mount Everest from home. They’ll also travel less because feeling like you are with family/friends will be almost as good as really being with them.
Drones / telepresence: You will use drones when you want to have telepresence. You will see out of the drone, and move / look around using the drone.
What else?
Fiscal and monetary policies will thighten compared to 2020. The assets that had the most speculation in 2020 will correct violently: Tesla, Bitcoin ...
The US-China relationship will improve.
Big social media (FB, Twitter etc.) will split amongst political lines.
* To be able to vote predictions
* To filter, sort, search, group, slice and dice predictions
Same goes for HN:Jobs and other threads like that. We need just a bit more structure.
Federal reserve cryptocurrency comes out of the blue and is finally released but it is hampered by privacy concerns and mistrust.
Edit: thanks for the downvoted guys... You're right, it'll likely be kamala as president by the time we're at war again
* Large companies will roll back generous WFH arrangements, claiming that it really is "better for your career" to be in the office.
* Dominic Cummings will return to Government in some form.
* At least one COVID vaccine will be withdrawn for safety reasons after a large number of people have received it.
My friend who I'm on the phone with: "most theaters will shut down and AMC will launch their own streaming service"
Tech companies will close offices and have most employees work from home
Google will finally make a smart watch on par with the Apple wacth
- Eventually the virus mutates and becomes less lethal –it needs a healthy host population to survive. Evolution, not vaccines will drive normalization.\n - Cloud gaming explodes in Q1. Just before spring we will have a killer app for VR. - Much more paid-communities... - Close to the end of Q3, Apple starts creating a buzz around AR glasses.
For 2021:
- coronavirus is still going strong in most of the developed world by March. By the end of the year it is still going strong in less rich parts of the world and there will still be measures to control it in most richer countries
- there won’t have been any successful antitrust action against a large us tech company (though perhaps some trials may be ongoing)
- there won’t be any large scale police reforms in the US
- there won’t be any new constitutional amendments getting the support of more than 20 US states
- tourism between rich countries in the northern hemisphere will increase significantly compared to 2020, and be similar to 2019 levels. Other tourism will not be close to 2019 levels.
- real estate prices will continue to rise in rich cities in the US and Europe
- relations between the US and China will sour slightly
- Belarus is effectively annexed by Russia
- hn commenters will move to the right, political flame wars will increase, and more people will complain about the site on Twitter. pg’s essays and responses to them will still regularly hit the front page.
For the 203rd decade:
- real estate prices (in rich cities) will have continued to rise above inflation. There will be more government schemes to somehow allow people to afford houses. Young people will complain about them but politicians won’t remove them.
- relations between China and the US/EU will sour. A smaller proportion of consumer goods will be made in China but some industries will be captured. Manufacturing will not have significantly returned to the US and manufacturing jobs certainly won’t have.
- brexit won’t have been a very good for the majority of people in the U.K.
- one of the following will happen: 1. Poland, Hungry, and other particularly conservative countries will leave the EU; 2. The constitution of the EU will change to prevent single members from vetoing policies; 3. (Most likely tbh) the EU gets into a US-style political deadlock where reforms can’t be made and bills come with loads of crazy things tacked on (either due to negotiations or because passing bills is so hard.)
- relations, and particularly public sentiment, between western countries and Turkey worsen, but those western countries will continue to need to make deals they don’t really like with Turkey.
- computer science courses at typical good universities in anglophone countries will be at least 65% male. Google will have made little progress trying to increase the gender balance of their workforce.
- hn will be a shadow of its former self and far fewer people will come here or post interesting comments.
- this will be the decade we realise we fucked it with climate change.
- oil prices and demand will go down. Some gulf states will be having significant political problems because of this, others will still be hanging on by relying on cash from better years.
- Statically typed languages with advanced type systems (in particular rust or something like it) will increase in popularity over the first half of the decade. Some new programming construct or paradigm will be invented that makes dynamic languages become more popular but maybe not as popular as they once were by the end of the decade. Garbage collection will still be very popular but some GC’d languages may offer more ways to have objects out of reach of the GC. Parallel programming, simd, and gpu programming will still be hard, even in the good languages. Python, JavaScript, C, C++, C# and Java will still be very popular.
The political divide continues to grow in the US. Terrorist acts are attributed to alt-right ideology, and government starts to remove particularly egregious examples of online hate websites.
Only a third of the country will be vaccinated by the end of Q2 2021.
- Vaccine program will mobilize and kick start the economy. Big Time. New restaurants will open up, it will be like a forest fire that wiped out the trees but new vegetation will grow. New business will start up.
- Travel is going to be out of control once everyone is vaccinated and cases plummet after herd immunity is reached.
- Python will have a great dep management finally.
- M1X is going to ignite the competition from AMD/Intel.
- US Senate will go blue next week. New pro-democracy laws will be passed in next 2 years after this shit show.
- Remote only jobs and startups will invigorate local towns and decentralization of cities. Local ISPs, local farming, local means of production.
- SpaceX starship will demonstrate further success.
Long Term:
- US, EU, APEC region will start becoming less reliant on China over the course of next 10 years. Fungibility of supply chain and decentralization. Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philipines, Eastern Europe, Mexico will see rise in manufacturing industries.
- New chip companies outside of Taiwan.
- Defense spending will go through the roof, defense stocks will do exceptionally well.
- Globalism 2.0 will put checks and balances for healthier international cooperation.
- BTC goes over $100k in 2021
- We will learn about Aliens more
- AR/VR will go mainstream. Something like Pokemon Go will appear & be huge.
- Fitness apps start to become mainstream. Mainly follow-along workouts like FitnessBlender on YT.
- Creator economy will be huge. We'll see more creators grabbing media spotlights like Logan Paul & Charlie D'amelio
- Elon Musk announces a new company & becomes the richest man in the world
- More unicorns come out of India
- WASM goes mainstream
- Covid Vaccine has various side-effects. There will still be a Covid billionaire.
- TikTok survives
- China tries to enter into US & India again, their biggest markets
- A new social networking platform will emerge
- Facebook is now only used by 50+ year olds
- More people start online businesses.
- Adult industry booms. OnlyFans wouldn't be just for NSFW content. Celebrities get on it as well.
- India launches Cameo & OnlyFans alternative.1. the vaccine will prove effective against a certain strains of virus but ineffective against other strains, giving a false confidence and later re-emergence of corona.
2. WFH will continue. and companies planning to reopen offices in mid 2021, will postpone till 2022.
3. Trump will refuse to leave White House. grabs popcorn
4. College students graduating in 2021 will face severe competition with 2020 unemployed grads leading to stagnation in salary for entry level jobs. C level positions will have no impact.
5. IT will forget about SolarWinds attack and move on as irresponsibly as before
My thoughts that I was going to post to HN were mostly political/dystopian/economic bound. None of it related to tech. I'm glad I didn't post it.
One poster made the observation that most of the '21 predictions on HN didn't have anything to do with tech. Maybe tech adjacent, such as what FB or google impacts might be, but not much on core technology. I think this is kinda accurate of the tech industry though. Not a ton of big changes, things really slowed down this year but still notable exceptions.
Here is my revised thinking with less dystopian and political takes.
Bitcoin will rise and fall through the year, no idea how high it gets or where it settles but it's gaining popularity and it's impossible to ignore as people look for new ways to invest because people simply want to park their cash somewhere.
Space. small sats are blowing up in popularity. There's so much new tech and parts, and cheaper launch services. It's getting much easier and less technical to launch a small cube sat. There's open source flight software and constellation management software now. There's open source parts and designs for small sats. On the what-to-do-with-it side of satellites, it's also blowing up. There's a lot of new companies crunching data from small sats for everything from investing to weather observation, conservation, and military proliferation.
Drones. The war with Azerbaijan and Armenia shown how powerful military drones are over conventional warfare. Tanks are no longer relevant. You don't want to be a solider driving or even walking around on a battlefield with a drone loitering overhead. Small commercial drones are also being used in warfare too. The Saudi pipeline that was blown up used small drones with bombs attached. Drone swarms have become a thing for both artistic display and terror. There's been reports of drone swarms overwhelming nuclear plants air space, overwhelming military responses. They're too small, too portable, to be effectively combated against. I think we see a rise in counter drone tech to match the rise in drone swarms and drone warfare. FAA(?) is already implementing more controls to limit what you can do domestically with them and it will continue although, interestingly hobby aircraft has been a thing long before quad copters became regular news stories but we haven't seen them really used for makeshift war yet. I also anticipate seeing drones used for more small 'army' type applications this year.
Electric cars continue to take market share. Finally we're seeing all of the major car companies go head first into this. I think it causes increase in Tesla's popularity rather than a bad thing like saturation. We're too far away from saturation for a few years still. With this battery tech continues to improve incrementally. I don't see any revolutionary changes to battery tech over the next years but incremental changes that are enough to satiate our desires. In a few years costs will drop but we're still on the developing new tech side. Alternatives will have to be found for it to continue at the current rate of growth due to lithium supply constraints. This also leads to more banana republics among countries which mine lithium.
Wind/Solar energy continue taking market share from coal/nat gas/nuclear. Solar roofs continue to become more common place which also helps drive battery tech.
WASM gains more traction by end of the year there will be major projects from big corps running on WASM.
The URL will start to die and not matter. More and more consolidation of the internet will happen and the web will commoditize in these huge mega corps. Google is a main driver in killing the URL but all big players benefit from it. I think PWAs contribute to this. The url doesn't matter if it's an icon on your phone just like an app. Link shorteners also contribute to the decay of the URL. When I say URL is dying what I mean is that it isn't as important anymore and people don't really care. They're clicking something off FB or google and the title is all that matters.
ML continues to get bigger, but there's less break throughs and instead tightening around things which have worked and dumping ideas/applications for ml that haven't.
Deep fakes combined with GPT-3/4(?) will have some big break through applications for entertainment.
People say SV will die but I think it already has. It hasn't been about startups for 4 years now. It's all about mega corps. And mega corps have been building satellite offices all over the country/world. Now they've all gone a year with WFH and I think the satellite offices will play a bigger role for them as they become hubs people work around.
Internet availability will play an even bigger role next year and focuses on municipal broadband will become more common topic. This also prevents a lot of migration around the US where people don't really leave cities but move around to other ones to find their cultural fit.
A rise in new text based social media sites (not tiktok/insta types) as alternatives to the common ones like twitter/fb/reddit. They won't be hugely successful or profit making, but I think we're at a tipping point where it's easier to just live in your own social bubble than trying to coexist on the same sites as everyone else.
We saw quibi fail and everyone celebrated. But it did sound like a good idea, it's what substack is to writing. However phone-only kinda backfired when everyone was stuck home and not commuting on the bus.
Auction sites alternative to ebay have been on the rise last year and will continue to grow and evolve. BaT for cars blew up and now has some competitors. StockX for shoes and now everything hype has blown up. which has also shined a bright light on bots and scalpers with a few big ticket items coming to market this year. I see new opportunities to curb this or take advantage of it coming out next year.
Something better than Stadia will come out by year end. Maybe MS hedging against consoles. They'd be in a perfect place given Azure and xbox.
Mentioned briefly above but more interest in biomedical/informatics will come out. The help-protein-folding-from-home applications were a great introduction. Many new people finding interest in these fields and we see new breakthroughs next year.
SolarWinds fallout will be unnoticed by most people but the security industry will have a great year.
Excessive monetary and fiscal policies sets off an unstoppable spiral of inflation in the US and Europe.
Trump declares himself US president. Escalating political violence in the US.
India might experience one or two major terrorist attacks.
Trump will be more desperate and loud.
Amazon Prime / Netflix might bring in pay-per-view / pay-per-hour options.
International travel will not be back to normal until 2022, however.
The vaccines will not be as effective as anticipated, but a combination of multiple vaccines, community spread, and large vaccination programmes later in the year will be sufficient to mostly eliminate fatalities.
This good news will be tempered by the realisation of the full economic consequences of covid. Many people will lose their jobs. The liquidation of assets will result in downturns in many markets, and probably a stock market crash. Inflation will take off. Governments will struggle with keeping down borrowing and investing to keep the economy going. It will be a great year for those supplying infrastructure.
At the same time, a desire to “roar” will lead to a boost in spending by those who can afford it, and we will see a “mini roaring 20s” in some ways, but more affordable ones. Lots of booze, drugs, divorces, and unplanned pregnancies. People will travel as much as they can, but a lot of it will have to be within country.
Scotland will elect a landslide of the SNP and an independence referendum will be scheduled for 2022.
It will become clear that Northern Ireland has essentially left the U.K. and this will lead to some discontent but the troubles will not return.
Belligerent behaviour by the U.K. will lead to an economic and legal confrontation with the EU. This will be drawn out and run into 2022.
American - U.K. trade talks will stall, ultimately resulting in the resignation of Boris Johnson, made somewhat inevitable by his previous behaviour towards the US.
The EU will have a year of huge decisions, but ultimately will come out stronger than ever.
It’ll be a surprisingly bad year for China, as they struggle with balancing authoritarianism with entrepreneurship, whilst also faced with strategic diversification by other nations acting in concert.
Twitter will finally be bought, probably in Q1 as Jack et al. realise it has peaked.
We’ll see about a 10% increase in home working but, apart from that, the predictions of the demise of the office will be mistaken. However, that swing will be enough to cause major problems for holders of commercial real estate, and major changes in the composition of rural areas as the rich displace locals, most notably in major beauty spots.
Biden will become president, but many of his left leaning supporters will be very disappointed with the compromises he makes and the distraction of the economic crises thrown at him, as well as further very serious problems with China’s foreign policy. Twitter will turn on him but support his Vice President. There will be some discontent within the democrat party on these accounts, but people will hunker down to wait it out.
It will be an amazing year for the fight against climate change, as Biden re enters the Paris Accord and vast amounts of money are pushed into green industries.
US Government will announce it has been studying sophisticated UFO activity seriously for decades. They will acknowledge that the technology is unprecedented and could be of extra terrestrial origin.
Joe Biden will have repeated episodes of public dimentia. Public trust in his abilities will erode.
Tesla stock will collapse by at least 25% over twelve months. Afterpay (APT.AX) will lose 80% of its market cap. The price of Iron ore will reach $175.
2. China will eradicate the virus within their borders, because their vaccine is easier to manufacture and deploy. And is probably safer, since it uses the traditional inactivated virus technique. So less side effects for most people.
3. Housings prices will continue increasing. Further separating the haves vs. the have-nots.
4. QE infinity is here to stay. Low interest rates will continue to push up asset prices for stocks and housing.
5. The virus will continue to ravage America for the next 5 years. Then the mutations will come.
6. Lots of houses will be foreclosed on, but wealthy companies and investors will swoop them up for pennies on the dollar.
7. American politicians will continue to be absolutely clueless, as to how their decisions and indecisions, will further ravage the fabric of society.
As the vaccine rolls out in the U.S., we should slowly see at least a short term economic boost as spending increases, potentially increasing inflation.
Housing prices will continue to rise with less and less inventory, especially for single family homes.
- Pandemic won't go away or show any signs of going away at the end of the next year. Multiple new strains will be around at the end of next year, some of which will not be protected by the vaccines. Many more countries, specially those under the Chinese influence (which there will be more of), will not shut down or have travel bans or vaccines or have any measures against the virus.
- The vaccines will kill people at a higher rate than the pandemic, mostly by other diseases than COVID (because the immune system is a very efficient adaptive model, if you bias it to be effective against one thing, it will be at a cost of losing effectiveness against most of everything else), and vaccines will be considered very successful.
- Bitcoin will have lowest value in the year around Christmas time next year, but it will still be around the lowest value this year. It may reach much higher before it drops.
- Most American big tech companies will lose significant value. At the same time, a few like Microsoft and Tesla will be completely unaffected.
2. Bitcoin will hit $60K but will also touch again $5K in 2021
3. Trump will remain President
4. $VIX will hit $100
* there will be hyperinflation and it will be reflected in asset prices
Off the back of that, stimulus and other popular liberal policies will be enacted. And they'll be successful and well-liked.
Companies will embrace remote work after they realize they can stop paying for expensive offices and all the expensive services associated to them.
AI/ML will get better at learning and all the skepticals will be ridiculed forever.