First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
Remember, you read it here first.
EDIT ... a few typos
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
Here is the IEEE spec due for approval in a year or two: https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm
I have mixed feelings on the tech. The home security implications are amazing, and things like automatic fall detection for the elderly would be a literal lifesaver. Small business could gain great insight into customer behavior.
On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people?
Anyway, Plume already makes a home security system that utilizes the tech.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_dat...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0
Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!
All the main online sources are moving to subscription models with higher subscriptions for the real information. Only those with money will have access to information that informs decisions. At the low end, information is bundled only for its entertainment or propaganda value.
At the same time, decisions are increasingly automated as vast data streams are digested by automated processes.
20 or 100 years ago, people could stop work or stop buying or protest in the street. 20-100 years from now, there will be nothing the vast bulk of people can do to change their fate.
The resulting lack of citizen governance will at best be a world broken into geographic silos headed by corporate keiretsu.
So the next big technical thing will be domain-specific semantic models to drill down past what AI can do with probabilistic models -- just as the economy has moved well past bulk goods to bespoke services, e.g., the Nature article today providing a model for immune system cell-surface-protein interactions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously.
On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me.
Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...
I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture.
It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.
To create an aerial hologram [or a 3d image in space if you will], you need something that will emit light at precise locations throughout a given volume.
I'm investigating the use of Moller electron scattering[0] to create voxels in a 3d coordinate system.
Two electron beams crossing and colliding will emit photons [voxels]. If you can orchestrate collisions in a very fast fashion at various 3d coordinates in an vacuum chamber you could generate a complete image.
I'm working on an article discussing the idea in full, to be published on my blog. My goal is to establish prior art, so this idea cannot be patented.
True or not, they're big and not talked about in polite company.
I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary) industry. In short: If you can’t guarantee food and health you will need some serious protection/go steal/trade it somewhere else.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026.
Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...
Flexible, reflective displays replacing hard, emissive displays.
I do not want to be staring at a backlit display the rest of my life. It’s terrible for eyesight and probably contributes to headache, burnout, etc. There are a lot of promising technologies out there, and they just need some improvement on cost, refresh rate, power consumption, etc… I would love to be able to go “back to paper” for most of my workday.
There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin.
Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs.
These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago.
It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.
Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.
Secondary effects include smarter agriculture and more local ag -- near prolific water and away from central california.
Then there's water safety. PFAS is a big deal, and we're realizing how big a deal it is, and it's everywhere. Now, rainwater is unsafe anywhere on earth. [1]
Someone who can build a small, snap-on, reliable PFAS removal system, or create an energy-efficient system for district-level supply is going to be rich. Hell, is solar distillation effective? If so, why does rainwater contain so much PFAS? It seems filtering might be the only way.
1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future.
Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software will apply to labor.
Imagine pulling an open-source repo from Github for a log house. If you want, make changes and simulate the output beforehand. Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.
If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.
2. Low power electronics and energy harvesters (thermal/clothing, kinetic energy, rf energy harvesters etc.,)
3. Physical logistics networks (similar to Internet Protocol with standard physical containers and transfer networks - land, sea, rail, air)
4. Ubiquitous drone delivery (last mile & long haul)
5. Fiat digital currency/payment networks
We understand that granular metrics are needful for tuning an information system.
Treating a society like an information system is totalitarian.
Over time, the percentage of society rejecting totalitarianism will tend toward 100%
Everyone talks about Teslas for self driving, but for my self driving car, I want an RV with a shower, a desk, a full kitchen, a queen sized bed and a 50" flat panel.
Commuting then becomes a pleasure.
I can sleep, bathe, work, relax, all without having to concentrate on traffic or driving. The RV can drive in the slow lane at 30 miles an hour for all I care. My RV drives me to work, drops me off, drives itself somewhere else for several hours, picks me up, drives me home.
The high price of suburban housing becomes irrelevant to me. I can live hours outside of major urban areas with no effect on my stress level or lifestyle.
I don't have the hassles of an employee as my driver. My RV is ready to go 24 hours a day and never asks for a raise. If I want to go on vacation, my RV can drive me anywhere in the country, no more lines at the airport for me.
I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.
The last decade was defined by being the one unicorn that could disrupt an entire industry, but those days are gone and we take it for granted that one company dominating a space isn't a norm. There aren't really more industries that are tech vs non-tech. In the next decade, more businesses will come online to disrupt and compete with tech company incumbents. Customer acquisition costs will go up and personas will become more nuanced.
It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
It's actually fairly widespread, people teach it and use it all over the globe, and fairly stodgy organizations have used it (e.g. the US Army.) Yet the mainstream rarely mentions it, and then only to denigrate it. However, this seems to me to be that stage right before something goes from "fringe" to "common knowledge".
Once NLP goes fully mainstream there will be a sea change in human society. Psychological hangups will be a thing of the past. There will still be people who have mental problems, but they will be the ones with actual physical problems with the brain (or whatever) as opposed to just bad programming. Things like addictions, phobias, neurosis, etc. will vanish.
Educational possibilities are mind-blowing. Learning multiple languages becomes easy, as does learning musical instruments and dances. Really any behavioral patterns will become subject to symbolic manipulation. Competitive sports will be transformed when each player can "clone" the best moves of the best players.
Politics has already been revolutionized by NLP innovations. As far back as G.W. Bush NLP language patterns had already made their way into political speeches. The current culture wars are, at their root, gangs of hypnotists programming furiously.
To me the fascinating thing is that, once it's common knowledge that you can alter your psychology as easily (more easily!) than your wardrobe it becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The whole "it's just human nature" argument goes out the window when you can reprogram yourself.
These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason.
They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
n = 1. We have no backups whatsoever.
Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent.
When it changes, its going to be all at once.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-...
FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
- Quantum Computing and WFH
- Crypto and Micronuclear Power
- Metaverse and Biohacking
Have fun!
People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day.
As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
Because instead of using types you can use proofs. And have the compiler prove things about your code.
You then may not need such complex higher order types in typed code.
And you could retrofit this to JS, Ruby, C so you don’t need to learn new languages to get excellent type safety.
For example assert that a number is in the 0-100 range and have the proven at compile time. Not just unit tested. It would be amazing.
Edit for clarification:
For example, the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0]
As population gets higher more and more people want to visit the top destinations, and when a new one gets "found" it gets flooded (see Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones hype)
Because of physical limitations these experiences don't scale - there's a finite number of destinations in the world and an ever-growing population.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
The people you're talking about have already quit talking about the thing you would now be interested in, so you're too late already.
No one seems to care about it, except particularly ardent fans. And the government only cares about satellites that benefit them.
However, discoveries and innovations are still happening. The latest one I have in mind is the James Webb Space Telescope. And private companies like SpaceX are still planning a mission to Mars. Lastly, somewhere flashed information about the resumption of the space program, such as flights to the moon.
Sidenote: Unlimited power capacity introduced many new challenges, so there will be uhm powers who wants to stop it, temporarily.
I searched for it and couldn’t find it.
Here’s a former top page post by Terraform: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
I agree that EV will be the future, but I doubt that, especially with the rate of urbanization that we have, private vehicles is what we will be talking about 20 years down the line.
Cities will need to focus on the 15-minute concept (reach all your necessary socio-economic points of interest in 15 minutes, no matter where you live) as well as public transport (and it’s equal distribution !!).
So I think, what people are talking about little is the advances in public transportation and centralized city logistics. Sure, EV fleets all the way, but also answers of how to get people and goods from A-B in a car-free environment will be of increasing importance.
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/complexity-eco...
The Keynesian economics principals has an assumption that says 'goods are scarce`
And if the next 15-30 years is an era of exponential then how should the economics behave?
Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it.
That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery.
Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one.
On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over.
Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools.
Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces.
If this is true, what does it mean? China will invade Taiwan? What else?
Just imagine, you can travel reasonable distances without needing to deal with traffic. Your drone could pick you up on your roof, and then drop you off on a roof in a city, bypassing roads and traffic.
More importantly, if most personal transport is by drone, it means we don't need to invest as much in roads, bridges, and railroads.
We will have no choice eventually.
Demographic problems (low birth rates).
By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles.
However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustainable, as we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. And the climate picture isn't great either, with not enough new clean energy capacity going online, and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs. Even with all of this new work, there will be only a small reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically there are so many things that can go wrong in the next 18 years, and so many things we don't even have a plan for, that all the estimates we've been given will result in dysfunction, increased prices, and soaring secondary markets. A lot of people are going to make money just from preparing for things to go wrong.
And like any other 'bubble' at least the ultimate goal seem to fleece somebody.
Honestly the whole point of this is 'to make things easier'. +++
P-: