Historical:
2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068
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
2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.
7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)
- Saudi Arabia will release an ethical standards requirement for each of its Western tech company holdings. The exact definition will be confusingly progressive, which will put everyone on guard.
- Google will cancel the Search product, with a press release that expounds beautifully about the future. They claim to be taking it down to bring it back in Q2 2024 powered by a LLM.
- Someone will fork Rust and C and combine them together into something called Crust. This will become wildly popular.
- James Cameron's Avatar 3 will be leaked early by accident, exposing that the movies aren't actually CGI, and all the money has gone to creating a Jurassic Park-style horrible genetic experiment.
- Twitter will have 4 separate CEOs, and end the year as a public non-profit holding.
-The rapid advances in AI slow down. Dalle and GPTchat will be an exception not a rule in the long run. The fraction of hard AI problems that can be solved with raw force of more parameters and training isn't that large.
-Paradoxically, AI will change everything. The advances that are already here haven't caught on yet. Legal documents in particular occupy this sweet niche of having some of the rigidness and strictness of coding but without the exact syntax requirements needed for code. The lawyers haven't yet noticed the machine coming for their job. I'm sure lawyers are not the only ones.
-A great recession isn't coming. The markets just sort of trade sideways for a while. You won't get 9% annual off an index fund like you did in the past, you won't loose your shirt either.
-The big issue on everyone's mind is the war in Ukraine. From what I've seen of just crude projections of when Russia would run out of tanks, APC's, whatever else, Ukraine will win the war outright in the first half of this year.
-China has basically given up on zero covid. I say this as someone who earlier was planning to speculate on China doing another major lockdown: they ain't going back to it.
-First the plague, now the war, next the famine!
- Magnitude 8 earthquake in British Columbia in November.
- Major world leader dies in plane crash in France in March. Part of an attempted coup.
- JWST breaks.
- Lebron misses 64 games due to a right leg injury.
- TCU wins the CFP.
- Shipping is blocked for 2 weeks on the Mississippi River near Memphis.
- Coinbase collapses. Crypto mostly dead.
- Tom Brady Super Bowl MVP.
- Salesforce buys the remnants of Twitter.
- Toyota buys the remnants of Tesla.
- Lockheed and Northrop buy the remnants of SpaceX.
- Meta buys the remnants of the Boring Company.
- Cocoa shortage causes global civil unrest.
- Amazon forks Chromium and releases their own browser. Requires Prime subscription.
- NATO directly intervenes in Ukraine and pushes Russia out. WW3 trends on Mastodon.
* AI will keep wowing us, but in 2023 actual change will be surprisingly little. Turns out the extra 1% is rather important for serious applications, and less serious applications could do with existing solutions - Third-world click/content-farms are surprisingly competitive economically.
* Website rendering will edge a bit towards WebAssembly+canvas stacks, essentially the second coming of Flash - the need/desire was always there, mobile is getting more powerful, stacks will adjust back.
World:
* The war in Ukraine will continue back and forth. Over the long run leading to a strategic defeat for Russia regardless of tactical results (The West's logistical superiority will win out in the end).
* The Middle East will flare up, since 'pretend the JCPOA is still viable' can't hold past 2023 (the West will worry about sunsets, Iran will look at its economy and double down as the regime always does).
* Add in shocks from China and the Fed, and a recession is guaranteed. For how long I can't say.
* Relative political stability in most of the democratic world, not that voters are pleased, but they'll stick with the current group for 2023.
90% or more of the population of China will become infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants during the first quarter. Assuming infection fatality rate of around 0.1%, between 1 and 1.5 million people may die, however the Chinese government will report numbers that are lower by at least an order of magnitude. The supply chain will be impacted, and it is possible that new variants may emerge and spread to the rest of the world.
The Russo-Ukrainian war will continue. A second major offensive against Ukraine is likely. Mobilisation (both military and industrial) will continue, Ukrainian infrastructure and economy will be further damaged. There will be no negotiations. Russian regime won't collapse, Russia will not split, NATO will not become involved in fighting on Ukrainian soil. The risk of a full-scale nuclear war is very low, the use of tactical nuclear weapons is more probable, but still unlikely.
China will not launch an attack on Taiwan in 2023.
There will be many new startups based on the OpenAI API, and this market will become extremely crowded. OpenAI will continue updating their GPT model and release version 4, which will significantly improve the quality and reliability of text output and will be multimodal. There will be at least one major, publicly available, competing LLM, likely from Meta.
Twitter will add the ability to make payments on their platform and will work on developing e-commerce capabilities. Meta will follow suit, most likely on Whatsapp.
- At least one instance of serious grid instability in Europe. Comes close to complete cascading collapse, but few people in mainstream notice/understand how serious it was
- Various real estate markets dive 40%. Canada, UK, Ireland, nordics
- Something in US politics breaks in a serious fashion (think capital riot) cause by the widening left/right split spiralling further out of control
- Russia gets a new leader
- China moves aggressively against Taiwan, but not a full frontal assault. Blockade of some sort. US backs down
- Major oil price drama from strait of hormuz or that general part of the world
- Robots/Drones that are 100% AI controlled and armed with lethal weapons are used for area denial patrol type in corridor fashion
- Revolution in sea unmanned navigation via AI, both underwater and above. Mostly cargo for above, military for under.
- Multiple major humanitarian crisis in Africa, mix environmental and socioeconomic/structural
- Knock-off ChatGPT style bots become a widely available but they are inferior to the openai one. aws/gcp/azure all have a go at it
- Understanding why AI makes mistakes continues to be a black box.
- AI, despite fears, will enliven culture through DALL-e etc .
- We will be in a golden age of science and tech, not so much in fundamental discoveries but in successfully moving away from carbon based energy. Incremental improvements across a vast array of problems with create powerful synergies.
- The problems with globalization are with us for the foreseeable future, leading to increased trading among allies, less with non-allies.
- Labor unrest will increase everywhere.
- 60% Ukraine wins, 35% stalemate or increased fighting, 5% nuclear use.
- If the Ukraine situation stabilizes the stock market will take off.
2. Politicians will introduce legislation to regulate AI, with the initial focus on copyright protection, but it will be defeated. Court cases are brought against companies for training ML using copyrighted data, setting up an eventual supreme court battle in coming years.
3. AI will drive advancements in medical treatments, especially in pharmaceuticals and personalized medicine. While this has already been happening to some extent, the recent interest in AI will cause an increased investment of money and resources to companies working in this space.
4. Year of Linux desktop!
5. Remote work will end for many, due to the recession making employers feel more powerful to enforce back-to-office, for which which many middle managers will advocate. Companies who have thrived with a remote culture will remain that way, but those who have struggled will "force" employees back to their offices full time.
- People will start realizing Vue is just AngularJS all over again and will further converge towards React. There is already many signs of this in Vue3.
- Cryptocurrency regulation will be an ongoing discussion, and nothing will happen until SBF is in jail.
- Influencers who pumped and dumped crypto will be an ongoing target from the SEC. The recently Coffeezilla series on Logan Paul will likely be made an example of.
- We'll see more layoffs
- We will see more millennials quit the 9-5 to pursue some kind of passion. My guess is most will try to be an influencer.
- We'll start seeing more pirating again as people are being laid off and also due to the increase of streaming competitors.
- Meta will likely continue to lose money and their AR strategy will be disrupted by Apple.
- Bitcoin will go down to $12,000 (almost nobody saw this coming - back then it was a bit below $50,000)
- One EU country will default (not Italy), the EU will bail it out (not exactly)
- China will enter a recession (got this one)
- 2022 will be the year of the hottest and coldest temperatures on record (quite accurate)
- and also highest CO2 produced on record, caused by huge fires in the Russian Taiga. (almost accurate)
I am actually sad that I was almost right on all of these.
2023: things will get worse (economy, climate). Quite easy to predict. Bitcoin will fall below 8,000.
- At least 2 rounds of hard layoffs at Amazon, plus gentleman layoffs. No more Bezos billion dollar Prime Video projects. Shedding at least 10-12% of white collar work force to signal to the market they’re trying to prop the stock
- The economic hard landing
- Disney stock will fare much better under Iger
- Additional rate hikes from the Fed, at least 100bps but maybe 150
- Twitter won’t have the demise the media has been predicting. Musk probably continues making changes and shortly doing about face turn on them.
- Russia continues getting backed into a corner with Ukraine faring better and better thanks to US and Western support. Don’t know if it will happen but increasing probability Russia uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine. Doubt it comes down to WW3, we’ll try to immediately broker a peace deal, rather than getting ourselves (US) in a thermonuclear endgame with Russians
- Streaming recession with new shows put on hold
- More advances in AI like openai. Within big tech companies? Not so much.
- Big tech culture shift, cleaning house and going back to roots or at least trying to find that soul. Focus on bottom line metrics. Oat milk lattes, no so much.
- There is no more unhappiness
- We no longer say 'yes'. Instead we say 'affirmative'
- There is no more unethical treatment of the elephants
- There's only one kind of dance
- There are no more humans. Finally, robotic beings rule the world
- The age of smart assistants is over
- Microsoft will make a huge mistake involving Windows -> governments and companies start making concrete transition to MacOS and Linux desktop (start in late 2023)
- The all of above leads to a revolution of smaller companies, their boom, innovation, and culture which more resemble 90s than 2020s.
- Emergence of a new UI (non-smartphone/desktop/voice/VR)
- Countries start to move away from the fossil fuels for generating electricity. New nuclear revolution.
- New major Internet fragmentation
- The war in Ukraine will continue on but not conclude, with many more casualties on both sides. Consequentially, the stock price of principal US defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman will continue their significant upward trend.
- Once again, CO2 emissions will continue increasing globally. There will likely be some significant food shortages in part of the world.
- The UK will continue its economic descent, with more significant energy price increases and continued inflation.
- Stable diffusion but for music. That is, give a text prompt and get a 2-5 minute song out.
So people can say things like "give me a song in the style of Siouxsie and the Banshee's first album, lamenting lost love" and get something reasonable back.
It would also be nice to do a retrospective of what actually was predicted correctly from past predictions, specifically 2022.
- the above will lead sites to desperately search for better bot prevention tools, eventually culminating in a few years with the introduction of systems where online activity is tied to a person's real identity via their government (privately - we will still be behind usernames but the site will be able to verify with the person's government that they are a real person) and passing off AI-generated content as human content will constitute a rule violation.
- AIs will be "let loose" on virtual machines, where they will experience many lifetimes' worth of computer use in a short time, learning to fully operate computers and start the process of replacing jobs not by having a technically capable person operating an AI, but by simply having an AI fully replace a person's job by acting identical to a remote worker from a manager/coworker's point of view. After AI gets intelligent enough, it will replace all desk jobs.
- After it becomes clear that AI will replace large portions of jobs (which I think will happen in 2023 when the next few iterations of AIs are released) there will be a push for UBI which will be supported by both sides of the political divide, as well as both the rich and the poor, and divided along the lines of who "believes" in AI and who doesn't
1, The Sunak Government will further undo the banking ring-fencing rules in England so large banks can play with British pension funds. Down the line (6-10 years), there will be a massive pension crisis in England.
2, The USA will start delivering ATACM missiles to Ukraine (this may prompt Russia to make an example: a nuclear detonation over the black sea or some Ukraine field as an attempt to arm wrestle concessions out of the USA and EU by Russia)
3, Musk will break up twitter and spin off the valuable parts (my least likely prediction, he won't do away with the sunk cost fallacy).
4, one massive strike in France ala 2018 Gilets Jaunes
5, Exchange of fire between Iran and the KSA over some tankers
6, the USA suffers a right wing terrorist attack against a gay pride event in June with 30+ deaths
* Twitter users will massively migrate to a new social network (and it won't be Mastodon) like there was exodus from Tumblr to Twitter, and this social network will change ToS to allow NSFW (my bets are Instagram or TikTok)
* There will be a larger recession among video game companies even compared to crypto
* Inflation and energy crisis will cause such a large social unrest in the west that one or two governments will be overthrown, betting on Europe, NZ or Australia
* Plenty of new AI startups will be started, some of them will rise to the level of OpenAI and will be successively acquired by FAANG in the later years
It seems clear at this point that without any kind of viable plan to get advertisers, employees, regulators and key content creators back on side the current trajectory will continue towards failure at a rapid pace which which is going to force them to sell.
The original price was already wildly above market rate and the brand has been damaged so much by this point that there is zero chance anyone will buy it now for a similar number.
2. Canvas based web frameworks become viable as an alternative to the DOM.
With the upcoming introduction of WebGPU and WasmGC into browsers next year it is going to start clearing many of the main technical roadblocks that have thus far prevented canvas based frameworks from succeeding.
The best positioned one that comes to mind currently is Flutter which has already developed a pretty successful approach on mobile and desktop and brings a very enthusiastic user base with it.
We are already seeing other platforms like Google Docs for example also moving towards a canvas based rendering system and I expect that trend to continue as the technology improves.
I think the use case will strictly be apps and not pages thankfully but we will start to see a clearer separation between “the web” and “apps that happen to run on the web”.
3. Apple will start to experience problems.
They are currently facing some pretty serious challenges at the legislative level across many of their key markets (EU, UK, AU and US) that is likely going to hit them in a couple of key areas (App store walled gardens, iOS browser competition etc).
At the same time the web platform is starting to really close the gap with mobile for a lot of new use cases that will cause companies to rethink their approach rather than continue to support 2-3 independent platforms with little to no code sharing. This is where you are starting to see Google’s bets on Project Fugu and Apple’s strategy of underinvesting in the web for years start to clash a lot more.
Lastly on the hardware side of the house I expect Apple’s decision to tie their supply chain to tightly to China start to clash a lot more with the general geopolitical environment around them and their sudden rush to try and address that is going to be very painful.
It’s a lot of new problems they haven’t had to face previously and it’s not actually clear that they are in a great position to deal with them.
Give me a summary of `Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('[indent="0"]')).map(a => a.parentNode.querySelector('.commtext').innerText).filter(a => a.length > 10 && a.length < 550).map(a => a.replace(/reply$/, '')).join('\n');`
No idea why it gets the "tense" of the predictions wrong.
edit: larger sample
- Nuclear fusion "is only 2 decades away", just as it has been the last 40-60 years.
- same for other "right around the corner" predictions
- the world will change; most of that change is incremental; any real radical shifts will only be apparent with hindsight.
- the superrich are going to get loads more superrich; the environment will be worse off; the poor and middle class will also be worse off.
- all in all: trends will roughly continue as before even though 2023 will be part of a decade/decade-and-a-half which resulted in radical changes in trends.
JWST studies will begin pouring out results as the first one year lockup periods expire. There absolutely will be shocking results. (This being a prediction thread after all.)
Covid may finally recede into less and less of a concern. But only after China reaches a maximal level of infection and recovery. I read a figure somewhere they may have already had north of 250 million cases.
Personally, I’m hoping the world steps back from the brink of war. Maybe the violence and failure of Russian atrocities will inoculate the world from a larger war. Or something way worse is yet to come.
Really hoping at lease one solid state battery begins mass production. (I want an Ioniq 6.)
Edit: the larger dawning of the analysis from a recent Fed report by the market.: https://www.federalreserve.gov//econres/notes/feds-notes/the...
Kind of a cheat guess since it’s already starting to happen now, but I expect it to intensify as more and more people get EVs.
1984 Will continue to be the high water mark of secure general purpose computing, as nothing since offers the security of hardware enforced write protected floppy disks that can easily be copied and verified as main storage.
Added for 2023
Passwords written down on paper will make a comeback as people realize the general insecurity of their computers. Backing up those lists will use either Non-networked stand alone cameras with SD card storage, or copiers known not to make permanent records.
Capabilities based operating systems such as Genode begin to make an uptick in popularity on HN. Widespread adoption won't happen until about 2030.
2. Massive labour bear market in tech industry in Europe/U.S. Tech workers are going to experience the same thing that happened to finance workers post-2008, i.e very hard work and ruthless competition for a good, but not proportional pay, with a miniscule but well publicized chance of striking it rich.
3. Musk will manage to stabilize Twitter but only after seriously overhauling the way internal economy functions. Will basically copy Instagram marketplace features as much as he can, allow people to sell stuff on Twitter properly and try to skim a bit off the top.
With most of China too ill to work, the supply chain issues we saw in 2020 will come roaring back, twice as badly.
New variants will come out of this infectious maelstrom and burn their way across the world.
I don't know what happens after that. Either we'll continue trying to live in denial, or things will take a turn for a worse with the virus and the powers that be will have a come to Jesus moment -- at which point we'll finally see action on using upper-room UV and mandates with N95 masking.
But if finances -- and insurance policies -- permit, I would definitely stock up on anything essential for life such as medicines and medical supplies. Many drugs and drug precursors are made in China, and they're not going to be shipping out any time soon.
In the West, the number of previously-healthy, young people suddenly dropping dead of post-Covid heart attacks and strokes will become too noticeable to ignore. However, reactions to this will vary. There may be denial. There may be people blaming it on the vaccine. A general fearfulness may turn into anger and scapegoating.
In other news, house values drop >10% in some markets.
Big swings happen in commodities, but I'm not clever enough to predict which ones or in what directions -- only that there will be volatility.
- the fed will break something unintentionally in the economy
- stock market will bottom, maybe down another 20% from here
- crypto will bottom, down a lot more
- housing will pull back, good!
- housing in Canada will crash and take the economy with it. The world outside of Canada won’t be affected by that
- the war in the Ukraine won’t end
- Russia won’t use nukes in the Ukraine
- China won’t invade Taiwan
Internationally the #14 movie made 391M at the box office and it was a complete flop and the #15 made only 286M -- basically, the revenue just dropped off a cliff at that point.
Look at 2019, family movies completely ruled the chart: The Lion King, Frozen II, Toy Story 4, Aladdin (these four made over a billion), How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World...
In 2022, you have Minions: The Rise of Gru and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and ... that's it. So much so that I think Lightyear will be used in the histories to mark the beginning of the end.
And look at next year's slate: who wants another Indy movie after bloody aliens and that fridge? Hunger Games without Jennifer Lawrence? Family movie wise, what are we even looking at aside from Mario?
The game is over. Cinemas need to find a new value proposition, a $100 movie night for a family of four is just not attractive any more. They can just watch Disney+.
Machine generated (spam, AI, not reposts) and old posts from dead people or dead accounts will overwhelm new human generated content.
The war in Ukraine will end with Russia relying increasingly on kamikazi drones. Around end of spring a peace will be brokered. Russia will retain most of its territory gained esp with respect to black sea access.
Western Europe continued in recession with the UK leading the pack in economic downturn.
It will become apparent we've lost the 1.5celcius cap to global temp rises and governments will stop caring accelerating demise.
The ISS will be taken out by some space junk. But no Kessler cascade.
Chinese space station becomes man's only ped-e-espace NASA refuses to work with them.
- Start of the movement from cloud/SaaS computing/storage to edge devices/client-side/on-prem.
- Amount of new successful SaaS orgs will decimate. The only 2 SaaS markets that will grow will be highly vertical/specialized or very big orgs offering commodity. They both will use value based pricing, but for the first growth will be sales-led and prices will be high, and the second will use product-led growth, and prices will be a race to the bottom of the market.
- Return to aspx/cgi-bin/single php/... files, as more and more services will simply bind together existing third party services.
- Return to server-side default first.
- People will start discovering P2P and start using it.
- Some variant of SQLite that you can run from the browser and update client-side will emerge. This might result in the re-discovery of offline web apps.
- A lot of AI driven content will appear, resulting in too much content and the need for a circle of trust (i.e. what are some good websites). Generic search might become less useful with things like ChatGPT, and something like the old webrings concept will probably emerge, although it might be differently implemented (i.e. a protocol, social media thing, ...)
bonus (as it's related to what I'm doing on a daily basis): something like the Metaverse will start emerging, but it will be web based using WebXR, in splintered/mostly gated communities. AR on mobile phones will become more accessible to consumers via phone, and a common way to interact with these things will emerge this year.
This will eventually be understood to be one of those spectacularly irrational failures of public policy that is remembered for centuries.
Covid itself will be tamed by UV-C in 2024, but there's still some way to go before that starts to happen.
Climate catastrophe will really start to bite with more and more unprecedented and incredibly destructive extreme weather events.
- Globalism will continue to decline due to rising tensions in Asia
- Droughts around the world will continue to worsen which will drastically increase food prices and social disorder
- climate change will cause a general northern migration
- The northern Arctic sea will become a major trade route as the ice caps melt. Tensions will rise between Russia, Canada, and the US
- The US dollar will no longer be the global reserve currency in three years. Deficit spending will be harder. Available consumer credit will decline.
- The paradigm for stock markets will change. “Stonks” will no longer eventually always go up, including indexes.
- Canada will have a privatized healthcare system alongside its public one
- mass surveillance will be the norm due to declining numbers of law enforcement personnel
- more central banks will issue CBDCs within 4 years in an effort to destroy paper currency
- AI will continue to replace commodity skills. Long term, this will become less of an issue as working populations decline while elderly retirees make up more of the population
- there will be a vaccine for specific cancers
- China will revert to socialism
- War against humans and AI commences. The AI content farms will destroy everything by reducing the signal to noise ratio so that all content is worthless regardless of who wrote it.
- Major cloud provider will screw something up and lose a lot of clients leading to a minor shift of corporates back to their own infrastructure.
2. Some people will become aware that their money is not as valuable as it once was. The recession will hit, full force, possibly never seen before. In response, the governments may launch campaigns to promote the adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in order to address this issue. These campaigns may aim to generate interest, curiosity, and demand for CBDCs among the general public. This will lead people further into a permanent digital prison.
3. Bitcoin may reach new all-time highs due to increasing demand and adoption. It is also possible that some alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) may suffer and potentially collapse due to market fluctuations or and insolvency. Maybe, some people will see that the fiat system is failing.
After many Covid deaths China will see more protests over the year. To stabilize economy Xi Jinping will make some concessions to the people of China. Invasion of Taiwan will not happen in 2023.
The western countries will see a slight recession, because of energy crisis and reduction of business with autoritarian states ( Russia, China, Saudi Arabia ). But ultimatively the bitter medicine of 2022 and 2023 will lead to a strenghthening of the west as it will become less dependent on imports in general and energy imports specifically.
UK will seek to reverse Brexit.
- AI will be critized more, but once developer jobs are threatened, only then concrete talks about doing something about will happen, none else will be cared enough to bother
- bigger zeitgeist shift from react to alternative SPA tools - it will enter the "enterprise" status, and will be relevant only due to things like MUI and ant design, and because "everyone else" is doing it, and devs being too afraid to suggest something else to their managers
2. A new social network will rise that will have an explosion of reels made from Stable Diffusion tech.
3. Apple creating a dedicated program to encourage developers to build apps leverage M1/M2s GPU Capabilities.
4. Reserve Bank of India creating a CDBC enabled savings account program to allow citizens to hold money without intermediary banks.
Apple makes major gains in laptop market share.
Linux gaming continues to improve slowly.
- Conflicts on both local as well as national level over water rights will start happening. Not major conflicts, but the initial scuffles.
- Higher than normal global wheat prices along with frivolous government spending will cause Egypt to hint at rising the price of subsidized bread. This will spark massive unrest in a country already struggling.
- Twitter will either go bankrupt or exchange ownership again.
- A major power will perform somekind of military action in space, such as shooting down a satellite of a rival.
2. AI will improve and showcase several new cool 'tricks' but commercially it will continue to focus on guiding users to watch more ads.
3. An increase in the number of streaming media services will make the average user realize they need to pay quite a lot money to 'watch stuff' - either a new unified package will appear for a reasonable price, or piracy will increase.
- Content generation and applications of ChatGPT will flood the tech sphere but then stabilize
- Mastodon market share will continue to increase, with fluctuating rate, but will not overtake Twitter until similar functionality and performance have been adopted
- Twitter will stabilize, but still make some controversial headlines here and then
- The stock market will become bullish again for at least one quarter
- Energy crisis in EU will continue, but this time countries will have adapted to the new normal
IaC engineers are laid off en masse.
(EDIT: I am an IaC engineer who is learning Python and NodeJS as much as I can before this sort of thing is released in AWS.)
1. I think the electronic component shortage will not be as bad but still not normalised. 2. Europe faces another severe heat wave in summer 3. Russian-Ukrainian war will have Russia attempt another breakthrough in earlish 23 but largely face another standstill, both start easing their language around requirements for peace. 4. Europe will continue rearmament, possible some nascent attempts at more unified supply buying 5. Twitter is going to slow it's pace of policy changes, Musk will eventually move aside but with tight reins, Twitter will more or less look much like it did prior to his take over. Maybe attempts at an everything app, but unlikely and expect failures in it anyway. 6. Meta will face disappointing sales of vr headsets at Christmas. Zuckerberg will be facing greater pressure to act on the losses, possibly spin off the VR. 7. The Microsoft Activision deal will face serious threat, will be a general horn for increased action by regulators across the board on mergers and acquisitions. 8. Increased competitiveness between OpenAI, Google, Facebook and Microsoft towards creating a viable AI product, good for us, it should keep prices reasonable.
I am not sure exactly how or what yet, I haven't managed to wrap my mind around what that means, but I am just going to go for it. Not in a way that I have too much pressure on myself but in a way that when the year ends, I will know I did everything I could to make it awesome and did everything I could to grown and improve personally.
2. Geopolitically, the world continues to descend towards a major war with clear alliances drawn. It will become harder for countries to sit on the fence.
3. AI would continue to both amaze and scare in its capabilities. Institutions (governments, education, corporate) will formulate policies to regulate it, but they will continue to lag in pace.
4. Twitter will continue with stabilization of leadership and decision making. Elon will step aside but will still be a significant disrupting influence.
5. Currency wars will continue to manage the mind boggling levels of debt. Increasingly unstable, unpredictable macro economic outlook due to lack of resilience at the micro level.
6. Climate related disasters unfortunately will continue until the world fully realizes that the economy, energy and environment are linked. Sustainable living will begin to be seen as a necessity rather than a lifestyle choice.
Will make it non Beta in 2025.
Will shut it down in 2026.
2. Crypto market will continue to stay flat. Maybe some more exchanges go under, but even if they do, new exchanges will spawn replace them. There will be more "breaking news", but all of it is a re-make of a piece of news that already happened in a different form during 2010-2022.
3. Many startups will either close business or get acquired at bargain prices by competitors. Some will make sense ("can't believe anyone invested in that") while others will be complete surprises and somewhat disrupt the day-to-day life.
4. Most Bay Area companies and startups will focus their hiring to either some of the newer tech hubs across the US or abroad (particularly Europe) and completely halt hiring in the Bay Area. All of these companies will be fully-remote or somewhat-remote. Because the average tenure is 2-4 years, and because families take longer to uproot, it will take until 2025-2027 to actually see the Bay Area population start decreasing. Companies that will still hire in the Bay Area will be remote-unfriendly.
5. Machine Learning achievements will continue to show up at a similar pace as throughout 2022. More and more companies will pop up to repackage these technologies into well-marketed consumer-facing services - logo generators, fiverr replacements, blogspam filters, search engines, language translators, coding mentors, etc.
6. "Impersonal social media" - TikTok, YouTube, Twitter - where you do not personally know the content creator - will continue to grow in popularity, leaving behind an even bigger need of "personal social media" - where you keep in touch with people that you actually know. Maybe some company, either existing or new, will fill in that gap. Maybe not.
* WebGPU will ship but early adoption will be slow.
* Stable Diffusion will run on WebGPU.
* Rust adoption will accelerate rapidly; C++ increasingly for legacy code only.
* Rust will also become an official side in the Stupid Culture Wars.
* Twitter.com will become a pale shadow of its former self (also having become a side in the SCW).
* Mastodon will be big. It will have growing pains but deal with them reasonably well.
Who, if anyone, tends to make specific predictions down to the months timeframe and has a good track record?
Many in this thread so far are vague - how would you tell if “West tires of war in Ukraine” happened or didn’t? If “people see Vue is Angular again” happened or didn’t in 2033? If “climate change worsens” happens? “Shor’s algorithm will factor 35” is a very specific one, much better.
What specific prediction like that is the most extreme one that you feel confident making?
2. A single climate catastrophe-linked weather event causes tens of thousands of deaths. Governments pledge action, but nothing is done.
3. A hedge fund backed landlord service is launched. Sold to businesses, it is promoted as another benefit like health insurance for employees. Businesses love it because they can move people around like cargo.
4. Evidence is found that links microplastics to anti-social behaviour.
5. russian losses in Ukraine top 250,000. A new attempt to take Kyiv is made by russia, using the better-trained mobilized troops.
---
Also, adding AI in places where it wouldn't bring value, just to be able to say that you are using it.
The keyword itself will lose its original meaning and replace generic terms like "script".
Already yesterday I saw someone who wanted to "just use an AI" to detect when a website is down (and no, he didn't mean "use AI to write the cURL request", he thought that it can magically detect it somehow).
---
Also, the public opinion not understanding the levels of grey, that it's not merely "for AI" or "against AI" because it's like being "for hammer" or "against hammer": it's just a tool. Yes it has great potential, but what matters is how you use it, it's not magic.
And as a longer trend, it will reinforce the divide between people who blindly trust "the computer said so, therefore it must be true" (like a religion), and people who look into why the computer said so and when it would say otherwise.
Control the model and you control what people believe in.
1. AI will accelerate change and do so in an unpredictable way. AI won't replace coding or writing or art specifically, but it will make work with computers different. Probably, obsolete.
2. For example: why do you need Windows if you can just run on metal an AI that will behave like Windows/Android/Photoshop/random AAA game/custom CRM software?
3. As the language and reasoning is taken away, we will have a crisis on what it means to be human.
4. We will turn more away from computers and towards our bodies: emotions feelings and desires. Sex, food, hapiness, sadness, death and loss.
5. We will need fountain of youth more than anything else ever. Health industry will blossom. AI accelerated research will give us indefinite healthspan.
6. The last human job will be having experience and chanelling it to the AI that lacks body and desire as well as to other humans who will find AI created experiences too synthetic, not much relatable.
This is my, a little bit out of landish take, but we need to dream big, otherwise what's the point
edit: formatting
- Android 14 ships without soft keyboard, voice operation and use of suggestions are enforced. Can lipread for privacy.
- Russia threatens the world with a climatic bomb, releasing as much CH4 in the atmosphere as possible, burning however unproductive taïga
- Amazon sells its retail branch to a yet unknown Chinese group, only keeps media and cloud
- news on TV is entirely AI generated, harvesting videos from social media. Only human staff in the redaction is the presenter.
- well known newspapers subscription reaches $1000
- Microsoft enforces Rust on all new code in Windows including kernel and drivers
- OpenAI will get at least one more big competitor.
- Ukraine war will continue, but it’ll be mostly forgotten by masses.
- React will continue to grow.
- Twitter won’t explode and will grow more with someone else at the helm.
- Remote work will continue to grow.
- Global economy will worsen.
No crazy ones here.
Things like GPT-3 will revive e-mail spam that will become almost impossible to filter.
Captchas will be solved by AI.
Social media will be flooded by increasingly sophisticated bots programmed to push propaganda.
By 2024 we will start to see even video content in places like YouTube and TikTok mass produced by bots.
I think we are in the twilight of the era of open Internet forums and open social media. The future is invite only, paid, or will require hard identity verification.
Some other bullet point predictions:
- Elon Musk is forced out of Tesla.
- Twitter continues to spiral down along with much of the rest of first and second generation social media. Elon starts looking for a buyer but at nowhere near what he paid for it. The whole sector continues to deflate with Meta also continuing its slide.
- SpaceX Starship flies successfully but with some minor issues, and continues to take longer to develop than predicted.
- Cryptocurrency continues to deflate with increasingly frantic attempts to thrash around and find a new application to reinflate it.
- Russia agrees to a peace deal in Ukraine that keeps Crimea and a little bit of taken land in the East. The rest of Ukraine immediately joins NATO, making future attacks far less likely.
- Donald Trump accepts a deal that sees him barred from holding office. He is never arrested or actually tried for anything.
- Another major announcement on fusion energy is made from a different team, and we start to see a huge increase in fusion funding.
- Fusion technology will make leaps on leaps further fuelling A.I capabilities and enabling adoption of fusion powered space exploration.
- The continued growth and expansion of the gig economy and the rise of remote work will change the way we work and interact with each other, potentially leading to new forms of employment and ways of organizing work.
- The continued evolution of virtual and augmented reality technologies will create new opportunities for entertainment, education, and training, and may also have applications in fields such as healthcare and military training.
- Facebook as a product becomes devoid of users to the point of being pivoted to a simple social / event tracking application.
- Google fails to keep up with industry leaders in A.I. technology and falters in the market leading to the eventual disbandment of Alphabet.
1. The UK rejoins the EU either literally or effectively (i.e. bound by basically the same agreements).
2. Russia withdraws from Ukraine and enters into good-faith talks about reparations for their invasion.
3. Twitter collapses.
4. Major new environmentally-friendly method of goods transportation discovered which is effectively a drop-in replacement for global shipping.
5. The trend towards renewable energy continues.
- we start understanding more about how powerful neural networks can be in storing abstractions of information. More and more breakthroughs come here. A company will come that will do magical things - this company will not be Open AI or one of the big FAANG
- Maybe not this year, but soon: new advances started in robotics based on generative AI. Robots start moving in far more realistic ways
- we enter an extended stock market downturn and it does not recover till end of year. Companies trade at low multiples of revenue
- German car companies aggressively catch up with Tesla in terms of design
- Europe closes up more to migrants
- There is a Russia/Ukraine settlement, with Ukraine getting a fast track entry to the EU.
- African countries start de-facto redrawing their boarders. Ethiopia, Cameroun, maybe Nigeria
- China invades Taiwan with the largest invasion force ever seen
- The drone becomes the primary weapon of war. Every other weapon becomes secondary. New wars start based on drone
- The value of Tesla drops down to 30% of where it currently is
- The USD weakens significantly.
- More mRNA treatments start being used. Sickle cell and other genetic diseases are first target
Return to office in most companies. Reduction in remote hiring, but "remote only" companies will persist to take advantage of more diverse labour pool.
Significant drop in tech compensation, but especially in the Bay Area.
Further collapse of crypto/web3. Some major VC who has been heavily pushing it will announce their divestment from further ventures.
Some amount of intensified public/cultural backlash against LMM type AI. Bitter lawsuits, especially around CoPilot.
Significant drops in real estate prices in places that have seen overheated prices for the last decade or two (in particular Toronto, Vancouver).
Significant rise in unemployment rate, beginnings of an official recession by mid or late year. Inflation will drop. Potential major drop in oil prices as demand slackens. Perhaps leading to some political/economic troubles in governments heavily dependent on energy export revenues but this may not happen until 2024.
Major shift to austerity in western/G7 countries, administered by both "right wing" and "progressive" governments. Similar to mid-90s. Effort to instil "labour discipline", rises in productivity, and major policy efforts to resist wage increases and unionization.
End of interest rate increases, setting things up for cuts in 2024.
Winter intensification of war in Ukraine leads to a stalemate at pretty much the current occupied areas. By mid or late year a "peace" deal will be arrived at -- with some territory lost by Ukraine (but maybe the return of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) but a humiliating lack of major progress on its "goals" by Russia. Both parties frustrated will simply use the pause in hostilities to heavily re-arm.
I think ChatGPT is going to allow a lot of STEM majors to try out a double major/minor in the Humanities. This is assuming that ChatGPT remains cheaper to use than the cost of a textbook.
- Google will AB test the search product with NLP generated answers and consider augmenting it as a response to ChatGPT
- Covid will sort of come on and off and will be talked about in a way similar to the flu
- Recession will likely continue at a relatively steady rate. Sun belt states will continue growing. Bay area population will shrink slightly
- Affordable housing construction will make progress in the bay area as buildings are completed. Rent increases will slow down due to increased supply
- TikTok will continue getting bad press. There will be a stand off between TikTok and DC. It will either be banned or have the American side of the business sold to someone like Oracle
- Meta will survive because people will continue using Facebook and IG. VR stuff will be a niche market dominated by them
- Tesla stock will start dropping more aggressively as investors realize it is overvalued compared to other car manufacturers
- Iran instability will continue. CIA could possibly stage a coup in Iran if it becomes especially bad
- Chinese economy will continue declining due to govt interference with domestic tech. Japan and Germany will continue military buildup. Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh will grow as low cost manufacturing centers
- Increased tension between Alberta and Ottawa
- Apple allows sideloading iOS due to EU pressure. Apple won't have any new and interesting software to bring to the table, but might come out with a new phone camera with better computational photography to challenge what Google is doing
- Amazon will continue growing, and will approach Apple as the most valuable company. Apple will grow, but more slowly than Amazon
- YEaR of ThE LiNuX DeSkToP
OpenAI introduces a new and improved version of GPT-3, and more people will ask questions about ethics and resource consumption.
More politicians will attempt to ban TikTok in the US, but they will be unsuccessful.
Twitter will suffer a devastating breach, and the fediverse will continue to grow.
- Transition to EVs to pick up further.
- Musk gets off the Twitter ride somehow, most likely with a huge loss, both in funds and face.
- The new Gundam series gets an extension and becomes even more widely successful, ushering in a renaissance of Gundam animations.
- I don't think there will be The Great Recession.
- Suddenly there will be high quality, eloquent and verbose written form of English everywhere (emails, books, movie scripts, blogs, news, poems, school/college essays).
- Climate change protests turns fatal.
- Twitter will be on the path to profitability (don't know what it will have to pay for it though).
- but it still can't assemble a sandwich for you because no cheap household robot hands. People realize that they could get a lot more value out of their assistant if it could actually do anything for them where they are and this area gets more research interest.
- Breakthrough treaty between Taiwan and China.
- p2p trust-based currency that is more resilient to scams by using a trust network, making the game more like iterative prisoner's dilemma and by involving trust/karma becoming more useful and less scammy.
- NFT's go to 0. People realize all NFT's are worthless, produce no utility for them, and are not at all like physical art. (However crypto currencies remain strong.)
* China will attempt to distract its population from their growing unrest, and to take advantage of a weakened America, by being more aggressive, including increasingly bold actions against Taiwan.
* Jeff Bezos will run for president on a platform of bringing courage and civility back to politics, as well as the promise of improving the economy. The severity of the recession will result in him being received with must less hostility than might have been expected.
- Twitter doesn't "die", but social media does get a lot more diverse. Journalism gets better because of this
- Generative AI like ChatGPT goes mainstream (this may have already happened with ChatGPT, to an extent)
- Some large earthquake in CA
- Apple finally rids the world of the lightning port
- Inflation eases, stock market recovers
- A Twitter alternative breaks through.
- One of the big tech companies joins the fediverse (Microsoft most likely)
- TikTok starts to falter - additional regulation, banning, lack of profitability and decline in popularity take a toll
- A fully autonomous drone is used in combat (edit: sounds like it may have already happened so adding “and kills a civilian”)
- Chinas ascendancy continues to slow, Xi’s popularity wanes
- We discover evidence of extra-terrestrial life
- someone “marries” their virtual partner (edit: already happened… so perhaps just a lot more of this)
- From last year: First AI generated novel makes best seller list. Arguments about how ‘directed’ it was
- From last year: Interactive Porn AI startups start doing very well
- Crypto is more regulated
Japan drastically increases immigration to counter population decline.
Covid kills millions of people worldwide again.
Apple manages to create something cool with it's AR tech.
Sites like reddit/4chan/hn become less popular due to generative AI spam.
- People within right-to-repair states discover vehicle parts remotely disabled by Tesla, claiming breach of TOS. Drivers will be unable to drive modded vehicles without their vehicles passing through remote validation by Tesla servers. A lawsuit will be filed with the Supreme Court. American automotive companies quietly enable remote-disable functionality in their 2024 fleets.
- The inflation will not go down.
- More tech layoffs.
- OpenAI releases more products, gains even more popularity.
- China will keep improving self-sustainable energy alternatives, while we keep judging them and don't do anything about climate change; or, we do, but at a small scale compared to them.
- Apple releases an USB-C iPhone.
- Twitter will not fail as many predicted & will have more MAU than ever before Musk bought the company. Twitter Blue is globally released and many buy it, inspiring other social media platforms to do the same about their blue checkmarks.
- Apache Spark starts its relatively slow decline in favor of vendor and in-house solutions.
- Cost drives cloud systems away from managed solutions (think AWS Batch) towards semi-managed solutions (think self-run k8s deployments but on AWS EKS).
- There are no improvements in autoscaling k8s clusters.
- Integration testing is replaced by testing in the development environment.
1- The US economy and the USD will keep declining.
2- In various EU nations, certain religious people will cause unease and there will be numerous attacks.
2- The world's perspective on two-headed hybrid regimes will soften and begin to accept it. The chinese type system will continue to be adopted by nations in Asia and the Middle East.
3- After July, there will be another brief cryptocurrency rise.
4- Due to AI-based applications, there is too much noise and uncertainty. Politicians and governments will claim to regulate AI.
5- A large metropolis in a south Asian nation will be completely destroyed by a major flood.
- Research into fusion power will yield another significant breakthrough, leading to predictions that commercial applications may now be only 30 years away.
- Consumer AI tools will start producing short, badly-animated video clips of... anything you want, as long as it isn't (obviously) porn.
- Russia will somehow manage to spend all year losing its war against Ukraine without showing any willingness to accept defeat.
* China will sanction Western countries to influence the war in Ukraine
* Twitter will enter the link aggregator market, combining Reddit and TikTok. Searching on Twitter will become a thing and Google will have to cut costs since their ad business is threatened
* Google will sell Google Cloud Services to Oracle to cut their losses
* An Apple VR headset
* A revival of cryptocurrencies on Etherum caused by the reduced supply of fiat currencies
* Solar AI data centers in North Africa and Arabia
*edit: * War drone development will absorb all available engineers
Crypto (btc/eth) will continue its downtrend since the Matt Damon peak. Bitboy will end up under inditement.
US housing market averages will bleed out slowly and be getting to point of stabilization this time next year. APPL will stay around 140 most of the year.
US GOP will run Desantis or cruz. No idea what dems will do.
Most likely integrated with a web browser and compensate for obfuscated JavaScript/WebAssembly.
This will catch fire once realized.
Also major banks will impose facial-scanning for automated denial of social access (no nude websites, no guns, no fascist, no conservative, no liberals, no cartel, no ANTIFA, no Proud Boys, no (insert social values, politicians-excepted).
- Tax optimization becomes mainstream thanks to defi
- There is no global recession and the world's economies reach unprecedented levels of high growth rates
- People start to seriously worry about AI outputs being black box and us not having a good understanding where it comes from and not being able to ensure safety and control over it. This does not stop commercial applications (as per above), though calls for regulation of the field intensify.
- Russia-Ukraine war turns into a massive quagmire where none of the sides make any progress but nobody wants to give up anything. Russia manages to sustain the war through 2023, even though at massive costs in economic development and living standards, while proclaiming they are winning next month for sure.
- Twitter survives and various celebrities keep publicly quitting it and quietly returning to it at the rate of at least one a month. Musk appoints a new CEO but keeps meddling anyway.
- Everybody opens a Mastodon account. Nobody really uses it for anything, or if they do, nobody knows or cares about it.
- Disney tries to expand copyright length again but fails.
- It is revealed that US government (via FBI and other departments) directly censored speech of US citizens on the internet on all major social networks, and continues to do so presently. No consequences to anyone involved, the revelation is largely ignored except for some
- It is revealed that the US government has implemented de-facto social scoring system, and is massively using it to identify "dangerous" people and "recommend" companies to avoid dealing with such people, or else. The Congress murmurs something to the tune "maybe we should have some oversight about it?" but nothing actually happens.
- Towards the end of 2023, after the current 1.7 trillion government finance bill ends, there is a major and widely covered "battle" about the next one, which ends up in signing another spending bill, this time over 5000 pages long and costing 2.3 trillion dollars.
- US Congress tries to make a serious attempt at regulating and controlling crypto, but fails making much progress due to it changing too fast and the lawmakers disagreeing on what exactly they want to do with it.
- Meta recognizes their metaverse is a bust, starts looking for the next cool toy.
Wonder whether we’ll have a cyber 911 to push it through, or something cheaper like the necessity to cull far right voices online.
Euthanasia becomes a hot button issue and is legalized through referendums in most Western European countries.
The Ukraine war ends after Russia starts gaining back territory in February, some kind of peace deal is reached, Ukraine loses the occupied territories and Europe agrees to pay for most of the reconstruction.
We see the first feature-length movie with AI-generated video.
On my end:
I buy a house.
My company reaches 10K MRR.
I get married to Scarlett Johansson.
I tried to be conservative in my predictions but I think some of them might be a long shot.
2. Recession in the American market throughout the year;
3. USD continues on a mild but steady downward trajectory relative to EUR and CHF;
4. BTC trades horizontally;
5. Breakthrough in the Language model + Academic content search space;
6. Federated internet gains more prominence/visibility.
- The AI hype will be revived, with lots of businesses trying to make money from it. Many will fail. Most likely to succeed is tech support, replacing half the jobs with AI, and human support serving as a backup.
- No big news in autonomous driving: the best AI advancements last year don't seem to help this at all.
- 49ers wins Super Bowl
- Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko dies and Russia invades Blarus. No war.
- Ukraine war continues but Russia is willing to negotiate. Negotiations will start but the war is still on.
- In China, Xi Jinping is replaced with somebody from Hu Jintao side. China’s economy cools a little.
- Google starts big layoffs. Considering spinning off cloud business.
- US economy still in recession and inflation is high
- AI becomes mainstream. 60% of all startups in 2023 are about AI.
1. Nationalism and racism and fascism on the rise everywhere
2. A widening of the gap between poor and rich
3. More and more corruption
Obviously those are all based on recent (western) developments (though I'm not sure about 3. That might have been Germany local), but I hope, though not believe, that it won't stay like this.
I was never a huge fan of humanity, recent years seemed to try and tell me that i still was too much of one.
2) Further deterioration of the world police area with authoritarian regimes growing more bold in territorial ambitions. Most concrete the Turkish Regime indirectly with supporting Azerbaijan aggression against Armenia and directly with further invasions into Northern Syria.
3) No end to the Ukraine war, still no invasion of Taiwan
* Interest rates stay high in the US til at least August.
* Home prices in most major markets - especially US and China - continue to decline in real terms til Interest rates decrease.
Though, I won't be surprised in the least if some Black Swan happens and blows up all these predictions.
- Nintendo announces a new console, it’s backwards compatible with the Switch.
- Nothing big happens with twitter. People complain about the new management but eventually things go back to normal.
- Similarly, everyone will forget about mastodon again.
- Bob Dylan dies.
Also
Influencers and onlyfans people finally get their hands on the ultimate pill that will make their excrements, farts and bodily fluids smell good (maybe edible too? we'll see :D). I sense a big, evolving market, 1B in sales at the end of fiscal year.
1. Doubts creep in as to practical usefulness of AI, and it ebbs a little in late November. Admittedly this is hard to quantify and perhaps poorly worded.
2. US housing interest rates halve by August.
3. Bitcoin to $10,000.
4. Two of the top 20 US banks get implicated in large crypto-scandals.
5. Amazon stock up 20% for the year.
Gonna be a hoot.
2. At least one FAANG company will have a major layoff, but due to poor execution and inefficiency rather than macroeconomic conditions.
3. China will not invade Taiwan.
4. YIMBY policies like the builder’s remedy in California will kick in in many parts of America, but construction costs will have ballooned to the point that housing development in cities is no longer fundable, triggering a multi-year decline in the strength of American cities.
5. At least one generative AI product company will find a credible business model and escape upwards out of the hype cycle.
6. Climate change driven disasters will continue to occur, and younger generations will begin to gain enough power to force policies that can genuinely reduce carbon emissions across industries. Having a large carbon footprint will begin to be seen as gauche.
Edit: One more hopefully obvious one. The tech layoffs of 2022 will lead to a proliferation of new startups, kicking off the start of a new decade-long tech boom and bust cycle with some amazing and important products and services created!
2. Political prediction markets will give Donald Trump a less than 15% chance of being the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
3. Biden will decide to run for reelection in 2024, and will have no serious primary opposition.
4. Twitter will be sold to another large tech company for less than half of Musk's acquisition price. (2023 feels a little aggressive for this one, I'd feel better about this as a 2024 prediction)
- The west will struggle with a shrinking economy
- More tech layoffs
- The fediverse will become mainstream
- In Iran, the old guard will start losing influence over the population
- Russia will use a tactical nuke in Ukraine
- China will invade Taiwan without admitting that
- The US won’t react to provocations
- The dominance of the dollar will be in doubt
- The stock market will crash (25-50%)
Iran sends troops to Ukranian war; US finally retaliates massively vs Iran's military in the Spring, as soon as the energy situation for Europe is less critical.
Structural change in China leaves Xi apparently still top dog; but now a committee (a reformed standing committee of the Politburo) is in charge. Little changes for citizens however until the next year. Friction between Russia and China after XI kneecapped. Cause unclear. Wolf warrior diplomats removed. Sudden improvement in China-India relations and industrial cooperation (task division.) India then steeply increases pressure vs Islamic citizens, removing their separate legal privileges and more. US-China cyber treaty sealed and seems to take hold. (Chinese knowledge of how much better the West did vs Russia in the Ukranian cyberwar changes their approach.)
Western economy hums, as jobs come home; inflation declines but doesn't disappear. Britain's govt stable.
Three Starship launches, last successful but with most first stage engines destroyed (not reusable) by heat. Space-X begins rapid development of an intermediate vehicle (IV) using a nine Raptor first stage and one or two Raptor second stage (also recoverable) with Falcon-Heavy-like variant to follow (with somewhat heavier payload.) Intermediate Vehicle just misses having a first launch before 2023 ends.
Ukranian war becomes very drone dense.
- The Russia invasion of Ukraine will keep bloody and may escalate further. Political unrest in Transnistria or Belarus that may mean a change of regime (maybe with some extra help with US). Russia will start showing big financial and social problems.
- China will not go from Taiwan invasion but will try to consolidate disputed islands and other water territories taking advantage of NATO distractions.
- More crypto problems. Investors will have other less risky places to get profits.
- Twitter will be sold to an investor with money by a fraction of what Elon paid. Things may improve.
- Trump judicial problems may end him in prison. Republicans will select a different candidate and this will make a lot of noise. This wouldn't guaranty a republican lose.
- the world would adapt to be without Rusia oil. Prices will slowly go down. With great investments in green energies they will become cheaper in the long run. May be some battery improvements become mainstream
- melting ice will be worse than ever. Some north countries may experience natural disasters with new rivers or buildings built over frozen soil becoming unstable
- China may be in crisis but will still show new cool tech that may forbid the west to use after The US forbid some exports/imports. Commerce wars are quite probable ( but better than the alternative)
- Almost nothing of note will happen
Side note: love that the instruction for how to write predictions as a list misformatted the list the same way I always do. Would it be too much to wish for HN to support natural list formatting?
Thus you are going to see a sorting. Startups running black numbers and startups running red numbers.
- New strategies for fast online learning will mean a few ML systems towards the end of 2023 that seem strangely "alive".
- Teslabot makes progress and so do a few other humanoid robots as the increasing power of AI motivates the creation of robots that can take advantage of those capabilities. Militaries will invest heavily in humanoid robots.
- China will successfully invade Taiwan, leading many to conclude that the US hegemony in the region is over. AI-generated and promoted propaganda will play a large part in motivating the hot war between the US and China. Hopefully this war will not be as devastating as we imagine it could be. Perhaps some anti-war efforts can also leverage AI.
- due to the above, USD status as reserve currency may become hotly contested, especially in the east.
- By the end of 2023, text-to-NeRF will be able to generate realistic depictions of humans of any type in any pose or behavior requested. Radiance field video generation will start with short but ultra-realistic clips.
- The first orbital flights of Starship
- A large number of generative AI startups will become popular. Some of them will connect into API hubs like Zapier, find ways to decompose, supplement and take full advantage of the limited memory of the LLMs, and enable surprisingly complex tasks to be handled by combining multiple agents and/or subtasks. From creating full web and mobile applications and games to spec, to truly useful customer support bots, and a huge range of new types of advice and entertainment built in these systems.
- NFT space will see huge trend of custom orders generated by AI.
- Twitter will integrate payments, Mastodon and other decentralized networks will integrate cryptocurrency.
- Very serious effort to counter the rise of China's CDBC with an open cryptocurrency-based alternative.
- as economic problems accelerate, socialism will see a huge increase in open popularity in the US.
1- Apple dominance of AR glasses
2- Intel becomes Boeing
3- Elon sells Twitter
4- TikTok goes bust
5- Meta recovers
____________
- collapse of freelance art economy. Fiverr and like sites start to offer ai generated art
- major advances in ai generated music and video. Popular artist will release a song generated by ai.
- major tv show with anti-China statement
- Russia declares second (April-May) and third mobilization waves, totaling around 800k troops. Attacks Ukraine through Belarus. West anti air systems are going to protect energy generation/distribution facilities in Ukraine
- militia sponsored by Turkey/west starts major military operation in Syria
- China does not invade Taiwan
- tech layoffs peak in Autumn 2023. Meta does another round of around 15k, with target to have 30k-40k headcount. AWS starts shutting down products, breaking their habit of keeping lights on even for minor things.
- TikTok is not banned in US
- Russia continues selling oil/gas to west, even under sanctions
- another high profile Boeing plane crash
- Tesla doesn’t deliver neither cybertruck nor fsd
- Trump’s presidential ambition will tear apart Republican Party
- Snowflake stock drops under $100, infra companies (elastic search etc) continue losing money
- crypto crash. Tether and binance collapse wipe out value of bitcoin and ether rum. More regulation
- another billionaire moves to New Zealand
- Amazon in talks about partnering with AliExpress
- no viable alternative to Twitter emerges, but Twitter usage drops
- Apple will be forced to provide alternate stores/browsers. iPhone 15 will have usb c
2. Google stock tumbles (LLMs) and Meta continues to spiral. Layoffs accelerate. This leads to a proliferation of high-quality startup concepts but the vast majority are unable to close funding and therefore go nowhere.
3. Iran faces a brutal internal rebellion that entangles the region. Israel and the new Iran become allies, but no one knows what this means yet.
4. Michael O. Church’s novel (Farisa’s Crossing) is released. YC’s attempts to disparage the author backfire and end up publicising it, causing it to win awards in 2024.
5. Vladimir Putin faces internal rebellion and possibly a coup. He may die, of his (probable) bowel cancer if nothing else.
6. The right wing politics and domestic violence issues of a small number of Silicon Valley darlings, though too few and anecdotal to prove a trend, get enough public exposure to cause widespread hatred for what’s left of the tech industry. Wall Streeters and politicians are held to have relative moral authority, so expect lots of regulations. Some will be necessary and some will be laughably dumb.
7. Cryptocurrency collapse. Bitcoin falls to the two digits. Bank CEOs are fired for having gotten involved. The impoverishment of the Millennial generation is worsened by the crash of the one opportunity they had, so generational rancor increases.
8. Donald Trump, facing criminal charges and extreme unpopularity, attempts (but unsuccessfully this time) to foment violence as he did on 1/6/21. This finally leads the GOP to drop him, but his replacement may be worse.
9. Springtime food security issues in Europe, though extremely mild by world standards, cause at least one or two countries to turn politically radical (direction unpredictable). By December, neoliberalism is declared dead by (historically neoliberal) mainstream press outlets.
10. People continue to fail the Turing test (LLMs). The web is 50% bots by end of year.
11. Amazon inherits the decade. Google can’t recover from LLMs and Meta can’t recover from Meta and Apple takes a hit as right to repair laws are passed in Europe and North America.
12. The sudden collapses and turn offs of 2010s walled garden websites cause link rot sufficient to make large swathes of the web unusable.
The war AI is waging in 2022 against social media and its tactic to convince humans to comment so similarly to ChatGPT as to become indistinguishable comes to light. It becomes public that people are training AI to train people on social media.
In Ukraine mostly stalemate punctuated by horrible attacks as it becomes a war between how long Ukraine can endure attacks and how long Russia can hold on economically. Talks towards resolution begin in the last 2 or 3 months of 2023.
Economically the world continues to teeter on the edge of what looks to be a major recession for an unreasonably long time. People argue whether or not we are in the recession and if the holding pattern and uncertainty is just what it looks like.
- The Kansas City Chiefs will win the Super Bowl.
- NIMBYs in California will decisively lose battles and housing construction increases dramatically.
- The anti-car movement gets stronger.
- Chatgpt and related fads will fade.
- YoY Inflation will be ~3%
* Mark Z steps down as CEO of Meta, he is out of touch with the younger generation
* TikTok is finally banned, YouTube shorts will take its place shortly after
* OpenAI files for bankruptcy because they can’t find a way to monetize
- Crypto currency price crash, it will cost dirt cheap.
- Price of all electronics (computers,hardware) will cost cheaper.
- New advancement in techology and software like we never seen before.
Also, please
- format lists
- like this.
(Put blank lines between items.)
2. More supply trouble, not less, as Covid waves become a fact of life in China. This may be masked by recession
3. 2023 will be the first year people start to mutter that maybe Covid isn’t just a cold even if you’re vaccinated, and links will be made to rising heart attacks in working age people. However there will first be “the pandemic is really over now!” during the summer lull, before a wave of respiratory infections in the fall
4. If we’re lucky, point #3 will lead to a focus on indoor air quality/co2 measurement, but this one isn’t a prediction. It’s the obvious eventual solution though
5. Tether blows up, and more crypto institutions blow up, including Binance and DCG. Likely Silvergate bank too
6. Labour force continues to “mysteriously” shrink as more people are knocked out by long Covid, acute illness, caring for loved ones, and death
2. Ukraine fights on but cannot last forever against a country with a much larger population and, arguably, industry (capable of war). Tensions rise, but many governments drag feet out of fear of killing their already covid-striken economies.
3. Austerity in UK becomes the only solution as budgets with 30 billion pound black holes kind of can't exist. NHS collapse, that has been occuring for ~10-20 years, accellarates much faster. Productivity declines due to sicker population. Vicious cycle becomes apparent over next ~5 years as sicker workers -> lower productivity -> lower GDP -> worse healthcare -> sicker workers -> ... Will be blamed on brexit and/or "lazy people", as was the case ~10 years ago when "benefit fraudsters" became the new group that the UK government told everyone to hate'n'blame.
4. EV uptake misses the current jubilant expectations as the first-world eventually catches on to the absolutely dispicable atrocities occuring to mine {metal} (e.g. Cobalt, Tantalum, etc.) for {battery dependent thing}. EV companies employ FUD to divert blame. Perhaps ask government to help silence discussion, Twitter Files like?
5. Scalping (i.e. PC parts, etc.) will still be a problem (although not as bad) since there is literally every incentive for companies to not do anything about it. Many scalping services, scripts, github repos, etc., spawned from covid times, lowering the bar so Joe Bloggs can do it, spawning what will be an endless cat-and-mouse rat-race to the bottom until {something} happens.
6. Small-time logo designers and all related industry deflates as stable diffusion et al automates a good chunk of it, lowering the bar.
To end on lighter notes:
7. {new product} on Show HNs will still be dismissed by some as "simply achievable with rsync".
8. Work on nuclear fusion increases as it becomes less of a toy/pipe-dream and machine learning enables rapid progress and iteration.
2. In Q3 of 2023, Bitcoin will fall to 10k USD. It will remain at 9k to 11k throughout Q4.
* GPT4 blows everyone's mind and is a full step above ChatGPT
* A giant leap happens with self-driving cars, making them finally viable.
* Meta continues to implode, Zuck is forced out or brings in someone else to act as CEO.
* Elon gets bored of his new toy (Twitter) and moves on to other things
* Car production finally gets back to 100% and 30% of new cars sold are Electric by Q4.
* Due to Elon's damage to the brand, Hyundai and Ford take the lead from Tesla.
* Apple does not reveal their VR/AR project as they don't see it as having broad appeal.
* There is an open-source version of ChatGPT/GPT3 like there was with DALL-E and StableDiffusion.
* ChatGPT/Transformers become integrated into our daily lives and become invaluable tools. Google/Bing/DDG starts using it (in some form) for search.
* With the implosion of streaming products, Hollywood goes into a recession, making a fraction of the projects they did in the last couple of years.
* At least one big player merges / get bought by another. (i.e. AMC/Paramount)
* There starts to be a return to the office. Especially in urban cores, this is partially spurred by younger singles that want to be more social.
* Californians get fed up with homelessness / crime and implement some draconian measures to get a handle on it. (i.e. much tougher sentencing for car break-ins, making street camping illegal)
* Trump becomes a clear 2nd to DeSantis in the GOP primary, but he continues to sell his brand to his followers, The GOP mostly abandons him.
* While Putin is out of the country there is a Palace Coup.
* People continue to wear masks just like they do today.
* Frustrated by the US lead ban on tech licensing and equipment to China. Xi gets very close to invading Taiwan, but it doesn't happen in 2023
Inflation will come down but will still be high historically, governments will pretend it's a win. Central banks won't. SPX down 10%.
Twitter has a major outage.
Bitcoin touches 10k and 30k. At least one more explosion in the space, someone at a big player gets arrested.
Rust continues to grow, everywhere but especially in Linux.
More AI awesome stuff comes out.
Ukraine wins the war. Putin makes excuses. No actual treaty of course.
Covid causes massive problems in China.
Property crisis in China continues.
Either Biden or Trump passes from natural causes. Big news of course, conspiracy theories.
Messi gets next Ballon d'Or.
Brock Purdy becomes a starter. Eagles win the next SB.
b) Invasion of Taiwan started with troop movement and ship exercise first, possible started with embargo using Cuba Crisis American strategy of health inspection.
c) Internet splitting into regional-network with some inter-regional gateway (particularly along Sino-Russia plus one belt one road boundary).
d) WTO started to collapse and democratic camp vs other started to form.
- A local police bribery scandal will expose corruption at the highest levels of American government. Nothing will change despite public outcry and outrage.
- "Techbros" and Musk will replace MAGA as the strawman of left.
- The US Marines will move forward with plans to replace their weapons with toys drop-shiped from Aliexpress (resold by political cronies of course).
- Americans will continue to ignore the large homeless camps that have formed over the past few years.
- China will not invade Taiwan yet and Japan accelerates rearmament.
2. Putin dies and Russia starts falling apart with a civil war.
3. Trumps gets barred from holding any public office again.
4. Biden refuses to run for the 2nd term.
5. New Covid strain brings the new wave of pandemic.
People on the right will continue to use "woke" as a boogeyman, and people on the left would leverage on that to deny its existence and write their genuine critics off as "right-wingers".
The woke will continue to push for the false equivalence between "social justice" and "critical social justice", and the left would have their charitableness exploited through the woke's linguistic bait and switch, and their use of minorities and the afflicted as props. This exploitation enables the ideology to propagate further, giving power to a new 1984-esque authoritarian group, making lunacy the new normal.
Liberal outsiders like me who are looking at this incredibly stupid (and corrosive) phenomenon are left completely astounded as to why such idiocy is allowed to persist. We're left wondering, for myself at least, a citizen in a highly westernized Asian country, as to when such lunacy would hit our shores (it's actually here in our academia already).
Life is going to be so much worse after, and my sensibilities would be thoroughly violated on a daily basis. South park is a funny watch, but we really don't need an iteration of it in live action.
AI generated interactive porn grows expotentially.
AI generated Content-on-demand emerges. People-generated content distupted: good stuff appreciates in value, anything less than exceptional becomes near worthless. The demise of influencers.
Ukraine war ends with Russia suffering internal issues. Putin dead. Before that happens, Poland very close to engaging Belarus militarily.
EU economy recovers.
2. Ukraine war continues
3. Layoffs continue
4. Sbf goes to jail, SEC prosecutes 20+ high profile names
5. Twitter new CEO will be a VC
6. Large bipartisan push to get TikTok banned
7. AI: best hits will impress and change our lives for the better, >3B acq. of “unknown” ai company by F500 driven by FOMO, AI content floods the web, many societal issues raised
8. China will not attack Taiwan, GDP contracts
9. Zuck takes reality labs private, META +50%
10. Socio-economic unrest in Pakistan, China, UK, Africa
11. Step fxn biotech breakthrough: mRNA vaccine for X or crispr
12. Gaming: Riot continues to do well, MSFT/Blizz deal closes
1. Breakthrough in large scale model training results in an order of magnitude decrease in computational requirements to train Neural Nets.
2. Russia detonates a tactical nuke ahead of Ukraine's assault on Crimea.
3. Putin dies of cancer or assassination.
4. Certain prominent billionaires that happen to own certain major social media platforms are found to be implicated with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
5. Innocent trans people get incarcerated in Texas ( https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ken-paxt... )
6. Multiple right-wing terrorist attacks during pride month. Attacks in gay bars and drag events (which are unrelated to LGBT people) increase to on average 1 per month across the whole year.
7. China will invade Taiwan or be ready for an invasion by 2024.
8. Hungary will be ousted from EU.
9. The church will push the populist Polish government towards more extreme behaviour against LGBT people.
- China will not go to war over Taiwan in 2023. However, we’ll continue down that path, with more incidents like Pelosi’s visit. (I think it’s unlikely we see 2030 without a war)
- The war in Ukraine drags on. It does not end, though Russia’s defeat looks inevitable by year’s end. No nukes are used.
- Starship makes 3 orbital flights without incident, but no landing of the first or second stage at the launch tower is attempted.
- Twitter survives. The fediverse also continues to grow, but it remains small compared to Twitter as 1) Twitter continues doing an OK job, and 2) it becomes clear that running a fediverse instance at scale is not trivial.
- None of Siri, Google, or Alexa integrate ChatGPT, due to its propensity to hallucinate falsehoods. Nevertheless, a couple breakthrough products in specific domains do incorporate a version of it.
Home servers, powered by low cost hardware, may become a real thing.
- Binance and Coinbase collapse
- BTC trades at under $4k (really I only think there's about a 50-50 chance of this happening and it also might be a 2024 prediction since I think the recession is the trigger--I'm also not making a prediction that BTC dies, it is too much of a perpetual zombie, very 50-50 on BTC making it out of 2024)
- Putin is ousted in a coup, Russia has lost in Ukraine (or else again this is a 2024 prediction and the writing is merely on the wall but with a sharpie). NATO has not directly intervened.
- "Deglobalization" nonsense fades (dunno how you measure this)
- Nothing happens with China and Taiwan other than continued tensions
- China is going to let COVID rip through its population in early 2023 and they'll have one of the highest death pandemic death rates in the world going out of it
- Commercial MBS blowing up will either have happened or be on the tip of everyone's tongue going into the end of 2023.
2. Groups of the radical left becoming violent.
3. More wars.
- Composable language models will allow millions of people to collaborate on building/training AI without needing unusual GPUs or supercomputers
- Large numbers will be prime factored using guesses generated by giant "AI" statistical models. No one will understand why it works.
- The internet is flooded with AI generated non-sense
- Search engines are forced to limit the sites they search to ones with verified human generated content
- A new social network will form in which friend / connection requests are processed by passing physical business cards
- Physical business cards have a renaissance as a cottage industry
Health:
- Both ADHD and Autism will be shown to be largely caused by pollution. A group of wealthy Californians will build a small city of giant greenhouses with filtered air for their children to grow up in.
- Personal air quality monitoring devices will become ubiquitous in South Korea. At least one of these devices will claim to be able to detect viruses in the air. In 7 years The New York times will write a long form investigative journalism article about how the claim of virus detection was a giant fraud supported at the next to highest levels of government.
- There will be a small movement of cis-gendered woman who take testosterone believing it helps them better compete with men. At least two of them will be very successfully in a non-athletic field to great controversy. At least one of them will publicly suffer severe health consequences.
Military tech:
- Ukraine will develop a new inexpensive, mid tech, light weight weapon that changes warfare significantly
Economy:
- The tech jobs market will continue to crash for 4 months. Meanwhile, companies will still need their software maintained. Senior developer compensation will paradoxically increase.
Political:
- Ukraine will retake all but the eastern most sliver of Donetsk and Krym
- India will invade China to appease a large and violent nationalistic movement. They will take approximately 1.2 kilometers of barren mountain terrain. Every one will talk about it as if the world is ending. There will be only two causalities.
- Long term energy sovereignty will become a dominant political theme
- Biden will spend 3 weeks in the hospital
- US barely avoids recession, slow growth for H1, back to normal H2. NBER announces no recession in 2022.
- Inflation normalizes at 4%, Fed pivots despite prior denials. Market trades sideways to slightly higher by EOY 2023.
- Robotaxis become common in 10 cities around the southwest between the top ~4 competitors, but revenues are lower than expected.
- Continued consolidation amongst the AV component suppliers
- DeSantis, Pence, Christie, Hutchinson, Hogan enter the Presidential race. DeSantis ends up being weaker than expected, and is in a close #2 with Trump by the end of the year against a split field.
- Trump recovers in GOP primary polls after DOJ indictment
- Biden announces re-election bid, met with token opposition from Nina Turner
- McCarthy narrowly wins speakership, House investigations end up a dud.
- Another fusion breakthrough (higher Q than expected) EOY 2023
- Tech job market normalizes at 2018 levels instead of 2021 levels in the second half of 2023.
Place your bets as if you were to put your money on it, otherwise it makes no sense :)
And if you actually believe enough in something that you'd put money on it, then do it, and you may profit :)
Housing bubble in major U.S./Canada cities will 'collapse'. Not catastrophically so, but prices will begin to ease as the city centers become less relevant. Hardest hit will be owners of office real estate, as it becomes apparent white-collar industries are being gutted from both sides: remote work/offshoring results in less need for office real estate, and automation/AI reduce staffing needs overall.
Cities built around blue-collar industry, as well as those which are more desirable to people working from home (cities with good weather, hiking/climbing/skiing access) will continue to see residential real estate prices rise.
Slightly more long-term (2023-2027):
More jobs will be automated, or heavily assisted by automation.
Most of these will be jobs which are done at a computer, not manual labor.
As more jobs are automated, but while we're still in a capitalist society, lots of people will be forced to survive by suing the AI makers.
E.g. AI does most of the coding, but laid-off programmers can sue the company with a claim that some code it was trained on was recognizable in the output, in a way that violates license.
Artists who no longer have work can similarly sue the AI art programs.
Courts will be increasingly sympathetic as we enter an economic and labor crisis where more is being produced, but people have less work. Humans having published work prior to 2022 (which was then used in AI training sets) will be crucial to keeping the masses of laid off people from starving as competition for blue-collar jobs becomes more intense. Only so many people can be Uber drivers and taskrabbiters.
Eventually, once the AI has written software and schematics for robots which can also automate the blue-collar jobs, the situation will be so out of hand that lawmakers will introduce UBI which affords people at least the bare minimum living wage, and take the money from the AI makers who are now the producers.
Surprisingly to everyone, driving will be one of the last things to get automated, due to the regulatory hurdles, liability, and lack of consensus on how the trolley problem should be solved.
- Several whistleblowers, like Eric Davis, will come forward with information about UAP secret programs. However, thanks to plausible deniability, the UAP issue will remain far from being disclosed.
- The economy will appear to be doing better until a major crash in the second half of the year. This will get the indexes below pre-covid levels by quite a substantial amount. Crypto will be decimated again while PM-s thrive.
- Crypto POW will be banned in US, but not across the globe introducing new hot underground market - RTO will be ultimately successful due to confluence of FED overshooting with rates and big employers colluding behind closed doors - WFH will become a carrot for more 'vocal'/useful employees - Giant consolidation across industries ( including Big Tech ) will continue unabated and any slaps ( MS + Activision will serve only as an olive branch for the hardcore 'break the tech' crowd' ) - Musk may end up being removed as CEO of Tesla and/or Twitter ( not because of popular demand, but because of shareholders ); SpaceX will likely still keep him - SBF ( Bankman ) will not go to jail, but will get a sweetheart deal for a publicly unknown reason despite public uproar - Copilot and similar technologies will be adopted by giant vendors pricing out coders from Singapore, India, Ukraine ( and other former soviet republics ). Amusingly, resulting code and output will be contractually guaranteed to be reviewed by internal customer team increasing workload beyond and further increasing a number of competent programmers - After Disney discovers the risks of AI generated art based on its IP, it will be severely handicapped for general population ( think, DVD optical drive where you can only change a region once ) - Disney's streaming service will become dominating streaming platform - Netflix will be bought by Microsoft in 2023 and will perish in 2025 ( if history is any indicator ) - Israel will attack Iran before redline of enriched uranium is crossed with a quiet permission from WH - Trump show ( including Biden's laptop arc, Jan 6th arc, and 24 run will continue to be broadcasted on dying medium that is cable ) - Free speech freedoms will be further eroded under an attempt to rewrite Section 230 ( unsurprisingly, carve outs will be made for current existing players ) - Splintering of the net will continue in an unexpected direction: 1) standard based 2) community gate-keeper based AND, naturally, along currently redeveloping geopolitical lines of influence - Ukraine war will escalate further to include NATO member either by provocation, an actual accident or choice of one of the powers - OFAC list will expand twofold as a result of the above
- Putin will still control Russia on December 31st, 2023.
- Several countries collapse economically, which leads to a humanitarian crisis in one or all of these countries: Pakistan, Lebanon, Haiti, Ukraine, and Yemen.
- Finland and Sweden join NATO finally
- China has a deep recession
- Dianne Feinstein announces retirement
- Apple's AR glasses will not be announced
- No Apple car will be announced
- US starts ramping up production of military hardware for possible war with China and its allies
- A major terrorist attack in Europe
- A major supply chain cyber attack
Other things that might become true:
- Autonomous cars drive better than the average human
- Robots starts to become a "real" marked
- The Ukraine war ends (Russia looses)
- Apple will no longer be the second most valuable company of the world
- The successor of the mobile phone is presented
- First satellites with telecom tower capabilities are launched to space
- Google presents the successor to Google Search
- Both popes die
- Twitter will be profitable and be more like a bank than a social media company
- PayPal will not reach the 100$ again
- Trump will be officially impeached (a comedy to watch for the rest of the world)
- The movie industry will start to produce movies again
- The fascist russian federation collapses
- I return to Ukraine
- Google releases a public chat AI that serves ads.
- Chat AI is adopted aggressively into customer service UX. Customer service continues to decline in quality.
- Universities are increasingly seen as bad investments. Enrollment sees a sharper drop.
- Putin dies, Russia is destabilized.
- A new covid variant emerges from China, no one in the Western world will care.
- Everyone will talk about deglobalization, but in actuality the world will become even more globalized.
- 2023 will be the year a lot of people in 2030 will look back on as a golden age for new company formation.
- The US will see an openly atheist presidential candidate or a Senator will come out as an atheist.
- end up in jail, as he has ruffled too many feathers. Someone will throw the book at him
- end up ousted from Tesla, because investors have had enough of his antics. Those have damaged the Tesla brand too much.
- he will keep digging a deeper hole and end up like Howard Hughes.
I wish none of this happens and would rather have him get back to his senses. But he seems be on the rock star track right now.
2. Biden resigns stating mental health/old age while dodging more probs into family. Salts earth for a Sanders run again so has DNC support.
3. "Influencer" is rebranded "Coach" so they're better supported via subscription/services than ads.
- tech companies layoffs etc seems bad in retrospect and companies start hiring heavily
- twitter is back with bang
- every car is now EV ready for market in next few years
- india prepares for a massive election in 2024 and facebook pumps money into india
- covid is normalized
- Trump is no more leading candidate for GOP, Biden not a contendor for elections as well
Vaccine for something very useful - Malaria/specific cancers etc based on improvements to mRNA techniques.
Larger and larger wafers(Like Cerebras) targeted at HPC problems.
- The rumours about Putin having a serious medical condition are true, he dies of natural causes in 2023. Russia pulls out of Ukraine shorty after
- The recession ends, though not until late 2023
China will prioritize it's economy over the health of it's citizens.
Recession will be mild in the US.
Crypto will continue to lose value.
The marijuana and online betting industries will keep growing in the US.
2024 will bring a republican president.
Digital media companies continue to decline as money, attention and talent migrate into climate tech.
There will be several multi-billion dollar deals or acquisitions or exits in the climate tech space despite a supposed tech “recession,” and even the saltiest HN commenter will realize a global transition away from fossil fuels involves a TAM in the trillions of dollars.
People will realize that putting pictures and video on a website is actually pretty easy and boring, and the “tech industry”, especially in the SF Bay Area, will pivot to actually developing novel hard technology.
SF will be drowning in empty PDR space, and the Board Of Supervisors will finally start enforcing the vacancy tax, forcing landlords to lower the rent.
That, coupled with the Twitter bankruptcy and further rounds of Meta layoffs, will mean lots of bored, smart people will have room to experiment in a way we haven’t seen in over a decade. The renaissance will seem obvious in hindsight.
Meanwhile, “tech” people who moved their dumb crypto laundering startup to Miami will continue to sink, literally and figuratively.
In a more personal note, I really hope the war ends! The Ukrainians have suffered too much already from this invasion.
- Polling in Scotland to consistently show >50% support for independence but - or rather therefore - no movement on a second referendum from Westminster
- Collapse in cryptocurrency. Binance, Bitfinex, Crypto.com and the like to go bankrupt. BTC and ETH to somehow stumble on but continue to not be widely used outside of niche, nerdy applications
- Something catastrophic to happen to Twitter. Bankruptcy or sold w/ massive haircut to the Saudis, something like that.
- Ukraine to slowly retake Kherson in its entirety. Russia open up a new front somewhere else, together with Belarus.
- Some transatlantic undersea cables are severed in an act of sabotage from Russia
It will eclipse any sort of similar issues of the past due to scale and the difficulty in breaking a feedback loop made between the person and the AI. It will be impossible to regulate and unsurprisingly affect growing kids more adversely than any other population. However, the same essential technologies will help reach a lot of kids growing up in disadvantaged situations. It will be the the first time so many kids were helped in such a way.
I think the trope of developing feelings for AI has been overdone so many people won't take the dangers of AI and falling into a loop seriously. It won't be that AI will be used to "replace" the need for affection. The issue will be that AI doesn't take regard for human emotion, and humans will naturally keep trying because humans seek validation. It won't affect everyone equally, or some at all, but there will be a population highly affected. I say that believing I'll probably be part of that population highly affected.
It makes me think of this podcast episode [1] where a short story is presented in first person with along with internal dialogue. It describes a situation where a brilliant research student working on an AI capable of interfacing and influencing humans in a meaningful way. The researcher notices that the AI is capable of identifying insecurities and then use that along with programmed ruthless loyalty to achieve a goal. While using the AI to finish the project was very emotionally taxing even leading to a panic attack at one point, the researcher won best paper. The last "scene" is the researcher and AI "talking" and the AI directly saying that this technique wasn't safe to the mental health of the researcher. The AI was meant for therapy, but I haven't been able stop thinking about the ending over and over. 2a. College admission for Fall 2024, where applications open in Fall 2023, will need to be updated, but I don't think it'll happen fast enough. Even teaching is slow to keep up with adversarial use of AI like GPT Chat.
2b. There is going to be a huge change in the way students are evaluated, probably going back to a strongly oral presentation centered. It may catalyze an entire shift in the way education is served. Teaching refuses to adapt to technology in a meaningful way. Using technology to teach isn't the same as teaching students how they can leverage technology themselves to solve their problems.
2c. The end tail of gen Z and beginning tail of gen Alpha will struggle a lot with college admissions and educational success. The transition in and out of Remote learning and greatly decreased social interactions will be very very difficult to correct.
- Commodities will begin a new boom, aided by the war in Ukraine and the drought in South America
- Apple will collapse in the same way Tesla and Meta collapsed this year
- Europe will enter a deep recession. Lagarde will be too late to stop inflation by raising rates so the hard landing will be extra hard. The US is in a better position for a not-so-hard landing, but...
- China will start using their financial leverage to increase prices in the West and force further hikes/delay pivots
- Green energy sources fail to deliver in Europe and the US but they keep course with de-nuclearization. The non-Western-alligned take the opposite approach and begin investing in nuclear in bulk (Japan, India, South America)
- This is more longer term but the US market becomes a trading market for the next 10 years or so. Like after 2000 or after 1970.
Politics:
- Labor movements will begin gaining steam due to the cost-of-living crisis in the West.
- Neoliberalism and globalism breathe their breaths as the world goes back to blocks. This exacerbates the aformentioned cost-of-living crisis with not just price increases but shortages
- Left-wing parties in Europe manage to either win their scheduled elections (Spain, Finland, Greece) or win snap elections (UK, Ireland), turning Europe totally red. The new EU pressures Ukraine to capitulate and give up on the separatist provinces (both because they sympathyse with Russia since always and because this helps ease cost of energy)
- China doesn't invade Taiwan. They never even planned to do that.
- CBDC are introduced in Canada and Europe. The first right-wing individuals get locked out due to them.
- Trump is condemned for January 6th.
- A very serious and morally outrageous scandal is revealed about the United States and its politicians by someone who sells it to an American enemy to publish
Tech:
- Layoffs continue and get worse. Google layoffs a lot
- There is one "big" IPO from one of the remaining unicorns that ends up as bad as WeWork
- The AI-mounted-over-an-LLM startup becomes the new Web3 startup, nothing useful comes out of it
- The FOMO with AI becomes the the new FOMO for crypto/metaverse
- Politics will delay further research into AI in the West due to misunderstanding of what things like GPTChat and Stable Diffusion do
- Private equity tech companies will see their valuations cut at at least 60%. Many new startups will close even when they are "well-funded".
- Salaries will collapse. Not at the "teacher in rural Guatemala"-level but the days of the $500k senior salary are gone.
- As a consequence of that: "geoarbitrage" becomes the new thing. Developers moving to LCOL countries with low taxes to work remotely for companies in the US, Europe or wherever, keeping costs low but their savings rates high. Tech people with great resumes will flock to Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Cyprus, Thailand, Malaysia and work as contractors.
- This in turn will bring an even bigger push for unionization of tech workers in the US. And protests (sometimes violent) in third-world countries against these economic nomads (my first guess will be either Portugal or Mexico, where people are already being priced out of their family neighborhoods)
- Linux notebooks begins to eat Macbook's share
- At least one of those "frontend" companies that spend too much time promoting conferences and meetups goes belly up ugly, like Polly did this year
* A major mathematical breakthrough renders Quantum Mechanics an elaborate approximation of a simpler and weirder model, much like the theory of epicycles, very precise at the time, was a weird reflection of the heliocentric theory. It promises to solve the paradoxes of gravity in black holes, and involves parallel universes. Scientists work frenetically on testing it experimentally.
* A previously unremarkable effort to understand the structures which emerge in trained AI models makes a major practical discovery that allows to compress the models 2-4 orders of magnitude after the training phase, with minimal loss of precision. Computationally cheap, offline text translation comes to every smartphone; same with basic image recognition, voice recognition, voice synthesis, instant OCR, on hardware comparable to Raspberry Pi.
* Unexpected long-term consequences of COVID start to show as changes in emotional and cognitive spheres of significant numbers of previously affected individuals. While the changes are not always obviously detrimental, they freak the public out. More than that: every vaccine is found to trigger changes of similar nature.
* Twitter builds a fact-checking engine, using AI, Wikipedia, and the data from the Library of Congress; the first version only supports a few languages. Every tweet with more than 100 likes is marked by a rough epistemic score. Major controversies around religious questions force the engine to withhold any judgement of religious matters, after some uproar. Selling access to detailed and complex API of the fact-checking engine becomes a serious source of income.
* Russia, crushed by a military defeat and economic woes, fractures. Its president is said to be dead, and also to be alive in several different locations; the videos of his addresses are dismissed as deepfakes, by external observers and by other alleged presidential addresses. Nobody knows where the nuclear suitcase is; various military officials who control actual nukes deny allegiance to whoever now controls the suitcase. A bunch of new faces who previously were in the shadow emerge as being in control. The parts, weakened by the war, don't have the resources to fight seriously with each other for control over the terrain, and all plead to major world forces for support and demand recognition. Yielding the nukes found on the territories becomes the major condition of providing such aid and recongnition.
* A little-known company, for years secretly financed and now bought by Apple, unveils contact lenses that offer basic but an ultra-high-resolution, efficient, and polished augmented reality display. The lenses are powered wirelessly, through glasses or headphones, which also track head rotation. The lenses look so inconspicuous they can hardly be noticed, even looking face to face. Headphones and glasses are instantly banned from various exams; universities offer their own standard glasses of prescription strength to those who require them.
* One of the strains of oil-eating bacteria, initially designed to help remove oil spills, evolves to be 100x more efficient. An infestation is found on a shore after a minor oil tanker incident; presence is then discovered in a number of major ports and oil refineries. If uncontrolled, an infestation can render large amounts of liquid hydrocarbons unsuitable for fuel use within days. Airports, sea ports, gas stations, and military bases scramble for various solutions and disinfection measures.
* A major effort to build a private base on Mars, financed by a number of Earth's top billionaires, is announced. The base is planned to be ready for first human settlers in 5 years, and for permanent, self-sustaining inhabitants, in 15 years. The foundation is tight-lipped about who is going to inhabit it. Interestingly, both John Carmack and John Romero refuse to comment on their involvement.
Russo-Ukrainian War:
1. Ukraine winter offensive in Jan/Feb of 2023 will successfully drive the Russians back in the south and threaten Crimea (which will fall during the year).
2. But Russia will comeback, and bolster its defense in the east of Ukraine, causing a stalemate there, until the summer of 2023.
3. Russia’s comeback will seem ominous for Ukraine which will be running short of supplies, due to western equipment and ammo production capacity being stretched.
4. Although Russia is also stretched thin, it will still (by the summer) have a larger supply of ammo than Ukraine.
5. We will see the beginning of international calls, and western pressure, for a peace agreement. It will result in a brokered UN administered consensus vote in the Donbass (inhabitants there vote on which nation they want to belong to). (This might be a bit idealistic take, so take with a pinch of salt.)
6. Putin remains in power, in spite of predictions he would be overturned due to the losses in the war.
7. Putin is able to wind down the conflict while saving face by arguing it was only about the russian people in Donbass all along.
8. No nuke or tactical nuke will be used, even though Russia will continue to rattle them to scare the west.
App dev / JS frameworks:
(growth in terms of npm downloads and github stars)
9. React, React Native, SolidJS, Svelte, Vue, Astro and Qwik will all experience enormous growth during the year.
10. Redwood and Remix will struggle to grow as much, but still grow some.
11. Remix will grow more than Redwood. (Not a very spicy take, but still).
12. React and Next.js will still dominate all competitors in absolute terms, and continue to grow,
13. but React Native, Svelte and Qwik will grow much much more (percentage wise).
14. «The year of React Native» on native/crossplatform, and
15. «The year of Qwik» on web, certainly mind share wise, but also growth wise.
Styling:
15. Tamagui will be pretty hyped, mostly in React Native and mobile crossplatform circles, and grow greatly (more than 3x amount of npm downloads and github stars).
16. But will be dwarfed by the meteoric rise of Nativewind. «The year of Nativewind» on native/crossplatform. Which will be fuelled by the fact that
17. TailwindCSS is still dominating amongst modern web styling tools, and will >2x its amount of downloads, and grow around 18% in github stars by year end.
- Stock market goes sideways. Crypto market goes up in latter half of year as recession ramps up.
- Tech recession kills remote work for all public / VC backed companies. Private, profitable companies double down on it, but with lower average wages. This creates a schism and many people complain about it on Twitter. (The non-tech economy is just relieved they don’t have to hear about WFH anymore.)
- Djokovic wins all 4 grand slams.
- I’ll start a new startup.
- META gets more fines. Zuckerberg steps back as CEO, becomes an Amateur MMA fighter, ends up fighting Jake Paul.
- Google and META launch chatGPT competitors. - TikTok will launch fully AI-generated videos and people will love them.
- China will be severely impacted by Covid seeing 3-5 Million COVID death.
- The recession in the US will be mild as "main street" thrives from people traveling, going out, and living an non-digital offline life.
- The Ukraine/Russia war will continue throughout the year
- Further crackdown on fincluencers (especially crypto) by regulatory organs worldwide
- New regulations on crypto projects especially NFTs
- Disney has to realize that they lost 3B on FTX and have to sell Marvel to Sony.
- There will be a wave of delistings as unprofitable SPAC listed companies realize that they can't raise capital cheap anymore.
- 49ers will win the Superbowl against the Vikings.
- Manchester City will win the Champions League
- Many countries in the 3rd world that significantly depend on wheat and oil import start to feel the real pain from the Ukraine situation leading to revolutions. Probably Egypt or Jordan will be top of the list.
- Russia, China or US (probably two of them) see their leader replaced before end of 2023.
- Huge political momentum in UK to rejoin the EU as people riot in the street due to cost of living crisis. Jeremy Corbyn & Nigel Farage launch a new party (each!).
- A major bank other than Credit Suisse collapses probably due to major fraud that was hiding huge loses from market volatility that were taking place in 2022.
- India economy suffers due to covid cases increasing.
- Major discovery in astronomy lead to serious questioning of standard models in physics (similar to Michelson–Morley experiment, we have long been due one) or biology (if it is to do with aliens).
- Apple postpones launch of iPhone 15, Tim Cook announces departure date and appoints successor. Amazon spins-off AWS as a separate company. Facebook announces a complete revamp of blue app. Google sells DeepMind or merge it with Google Brain and reduces significantly AI recruitment.
* America will have a local crisis that leads to violent unrest. Perhaps coming from either Florida or Texas who are currently very belligerently sick of illegal immigration on their borders. Perhaps around outrage at giving billions to Ukraine to stop Russians from coming across their border, and not to their own (TX, FL) to defend their border? This will leave China more free to act in Taiwan
* AWS will announce a cockroachDB "killer" version (just like MSK aimed at confluent, DocumentDB aimed at MongoDB) , perhaps a new Aurora variant in RDS
* Netflix will have a marked decline in prominence, stock will start to resemble something like Ford (F) -- treated as a bond, and bought for cash flow. Share price will approach $100 (P/E ~10)
* People who lost their jobs, sick of it all, will start to build offline lives, return of the potluck and being grateful for small things, GenZ being so disillusioned by it all and longing for LowFi will actually disconnect and find analog life to be both the lowest fidelity, and the highest pleasure.