HACKER Q&A
📣 t0bia_s

What are your predictions for 2023?


What are you expect in 2023? From personal and global view.


  👤 NickRandom Accepted Answer ✓
My prediction: The Rich will continue to get richer and corporate profits will continue to skyrocket while the poor continue to get screwed over because the global economy is in recession while in fact the global elite continue to profit at the expense of the common man.

Ok, not much insight there (aka ‘same as it ever was’) but I am always fascinated about how easily human behaviour can be moulded, moderated and distracted simply by reducing the amount of crumbs left on the table to create infighting and disharmony instead of focusing attention on where the money is going and to who.

I mean, I get it - When the choice is between paying the bills and keeping a roof over your head or fighting for social justice and equality then the choice (on an individual level) is an easy one but I'm always disappointed that the populace are so easily distracted and divided by the creation of artificial scarcity and that they/we/us continue to fall for it every single time.


👤 PedroBatista
World economy will collapse triggered by nuclear war. This will lay the path for 2023 finally be the year of Desktop Linux.

The mass extinctions will also help Lisp developers becoming the dominant species for the next millennia.


👤 sethd
Musk will be arrested on various fraud charges.

Musk supporters will convince themselves that he is a victim of political persecution. We won’t hear the end of it.

Will his scheme to avoid legal consequences work?


👤 jamil7

👤 report-to-trees
Models like ChatGPT and Stable diffusion will go the way of self-driving tech as everyone realizes they are not good enough to replace any actual human work.

👤 samsquire
Everyone has an outbreak of positivity, goodness and love.

People become grateful for all the good and what is right in the world.


👤 __coder__
Bad days will continue for FAANG. Russia-Ukraine war will end. Inflation will remain high.

👤 akmittal
2023 being the year startups have to show profits so i see lots of big companies going bankrupt

Lots of investment moving to AI based companies

New wave of companie focusing on AI hardware too


👤 pattt
GPT3, Stable Diffusion etc. will really kick off. People will start accepting these blackbox Big Data sequence prediction models as a new norm, a powerful assistance for all sorts of domains. There will be some resistance but the argument that one doesn’t need to understand digestion in order to eat food and survive will eventually settle and the path of these models becoming a natural extension of our minds will be laid out. We will see different interfaces (speech recognition, OCR) and pipelines being created to fit these models into real problem solving pipelines and address their inaccuracies, i.e., with additional fact/spec checking and computation logic. some successful startups and products will emerge mostly from folks who already started their ventures into this space.

👤 dazc
People will continue to get angry about things that don't personally affect them.

👤 krapp
Posts complaining about how decentralized and federated networks have become ruined now that the normies have discovered them will become commonplace, and techies will create ever more obscure custom protocols like Gemini to hide out in.

Related, a centralized ActivityPub-as-a-service app will surpass Mastodon in adoption.

We'll see the first fully AI generated movie, album or game. It won't be great, but it will be better than you'd expect, and it will make money.


👤 valdiorn
Continued collapse of the top-end rech jobs. More layoffs at FAANG type companies as people realise the hoarding of talent and million dollar bonuses are just a waste of company resources. This will have a drastic effect on the tech jobmarket, globally, for years to come, as "second tier" companies become competitive with the top players in terms of comp. and people start shedding the golden handcuffs.

👤 Jemm
A return to sanity maybe, but more likely not.

👤 rvz
Well I guess that this year's tech crash and layoffs that the 'four horse men' told me about finally happened. [0] Perhaps there is more to come; but either way, no-one is safe.

Along side the other predictions at the start of the decade I made [1][2] with the majority of the predictions being accurate so far, I am still predicting that startups that don't turn a profit will be struggling to raise further capital by VCs as it will get harder to seek more capital for them to stay afloat in 2023.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20993919

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926473

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22663119


👤 t0bia_s
Because of economic instability, gonverment will limits cash and create more and more "advatages" in digital payments and ID.

Other regulations in name of limiting CO2 expected as well.


👤 HellDunkel
VR Hype will continue to fade away. Zelda Tears of the Kingdom will be amazing. Avatar 2 will not make as big a splash as expected.

👤 weatherlite
A.I gets talked about almost weekly in the context of job losses. Websites like HN and Reddit will be filled with GPT4 stories.

👤 nairboon
What was that first meme/AI religion comment about? It was just deleted a minute ago.

👤 archerx
Some kind of global food crisis.

👤 CM30
The war in Ukraine ends. Not sure who 'wins', but it feels like resources are low enough on the Russian side that an end to the conflict will be a priority.

Putin might not make it through 2023. If he keeps pushing for the war and the rest of the elites/political sphere in Russia want it to end, I can see him being taken out by them.

Twitter crashes and burns. Musk is already doing everything in his power to achieve that, and it feels like the site/company is on thin ice right now, in pretty much every sense.

The Mario movie comes out, does well. Nintendo announces the Donkey Kong movie that's suppposedly in production, plus a few other adaptations.

The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom comes out, does well. Some people feel it doesn't do enough that's new, but the general design is good enough to get high review scores nonetheless.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe gets character DLC

At least one long running show finally ends. Maybe this is the time The Simpsons finally comes to a close? Or could it be Family Guy, South Park, Spongebob, etc? Eh, if the Pokemon anime can be rebooted without Ash, this seems viable too.

Crypto continues to struggle, as people realise there aren't many use cases for things like Bitcoin outside of questionable activity and countries with broken economic systems.

The cracks show for Meta... Horizon Worlds isn't catching on, and Facebook is dying. Eventually it'll hurt the company financially too.

Discord tries to monetise its services more, users get annoyed.

Either the UK PM steps down, or another election is called.

The cat leaves the bag, and AI tech becomes usable outside of hosted services. All kinds of ethical questions get raised.


👤 tareqak
Stable Diffusion but for video: everyone becomes a TikTok content creator.

👤 tamaharbor
HN contributors will submit several items regarding Elon Musk.

👤 sapporo_197
1. A cyberattack, possibly by a state actor, causes enough damage and loss of life that this ceases to be something only wonks and nerds care about. The threat becomes real.

2. Farisa’s Crossing (Michael O. Church’s book) is released in September or October and is actually good enough to win awards.

3. Major recession. Housing market becomes dysfunctional and illiquid. This puts the Fed in a tough spot because the only way to solve housing market illiquidity is inflation (people get anchored to the nominal prices they paid, so inflation is the only way to get them to accept losing money instead of hoarding) but inflation is something most people despise, even when it’s the good kind.

4. An act of violence against a private equity fund occurs and draws public support. Jury nullification becomes a dinner table topic.

5. Black hat uses of large language models become enough of a problem that regulators get involved.

6. Donald Trump is proven culpable enough of criminal activity that it would be fatal to a normal political candidate. Not sure it will be for him.

7. Vladimir Putin’s health worsens. What happens here is hard to predict. The people around him, on one hand, will be frantically trying to prevent a desperate old man from destroying the world. But they will also be jockeying for their own individual positions, which makes things unpredictable. They might be more dangerous than Putin, who is evil but is not stupid or irrational.

8. Elon Musk. I wish there was a verb. There isn’t. I would prefer the sentence be “Elon Musk retires to get to know his family.” But it won’t be. Just, Elon Musk.


👤 yawnxyz
Most of the hyper growth companies are going to fail spectacularly… from Bird to Carvana to most SPACs to even some of the more “real” startups like Uber. But of course we’re seeing that already so it’s not much of a prediction.

Maybe… Half Life 3 will be released?