Personally, I distinctly recall this feeling that Facebook would be the largest and greatest tech company in the world for some reason. That obviously has not turned out to be the case, no offense to our many esteemed friends at Meta. Clearly the popular culture of the 2010s was not capable of predicting the future of our industry with much accuracy, and social media networks seem to have sufficiently saturated the world now.
My second distinct recollection is my belief that we were in the midst of yet another AI winter. Although this seems patently false in retrospect, as many things do, I remember this was not a fringe opinion on even HN at the end of the decade (now it is clear to me that the pioneers in this emerging field were busy hacking instead of posting). It was thought that attention and the transformer were the great breakthroughs, and that we would have some marginal improvements to Google Translate and other such applications that seem quite humble in comparison to what is now being released. To claim that advancements would be made so rapidly that the goalposts on AGI would shift on a daily basis would have been preposterous!
I don't intend to rant too much but it is remarkable how as a young programmer and computer science student it was really quite difficult to foresee how unpredictable and varied the development and use of my art would be. I only humbly suggest that we once again be cautious about the obviousness of our current predictions for 2034.
On top of that the price of BTC is so disjointed from reality that a singular transaction at the time of writing this post costs ~12$. Imagine taking a single trip to a grocery store, a bakery and a meat shop and paying 36$ for, well, paying. It's insane.
I was so optimistic 10-15 years ago. I thought the internet was genuinely going to connect to the world. I thought the world would grow so small that national conflicts and rivalries would seem silly.
I also thought people would want freedom. It really shocked me when people started to be deplatformed around 2016. But more than the deplatforming itself the silence and lack of outrage was the thing that shocked me the most.
I think really the only thing I kinda got right was the growth of AI. Around 2012 through 2015 there were decent number of AI breakthroughs happening. I had a bet around this time with a friend who was a machine vision researcher that by 2030 people would have started losing their jobs on mass to AI. I may still be a little early on that, but right now we're definitely ahead of my expectations in many ways
I was really excited about the idea of self driving cars.[2]
[1] https://mikewarot.blogspot.com/2014/01/its-nearly-impossible...
[2] https://mikewarot.blogspot.com/2013/01/self-valeting-cars.ht...
I thought face recognition tech would be more widespread, but it turns out that its type 1 and type 2 error rates are far too high for many applications. I also believed that what Theranos was selling was feasible.
I'm more impressed by what hasn't happened than what has.
Nowadays I do work remotely. Thanks Covid!
I was very wrong. We moved everything to the cloud and amazon is the cloud.
I dreaded the idea of "serverless" and micro-services, and I'm happy to say for the most part those didn't catch on. Or where they did, they've begun to putter and die.
Predictions for 2034 - Less internet freedom. More tech to ferret out hate actions. - Most content will be AI, and the net will in part die. Google search are already less than they were. - Everything will be subscription, and always connected will be required because there will be a need to check your subscription status. - EV's regulations will make it harder/impossible for people to buy cars, and fixing an ICE will also be super hard.
There weren't many real tech companies in Malaysia. Even FAANG was still unstable, nobody really expected them to last. Especially that Amazon dude who was never making any profits.
Most of the tech work here was just advanced spreadsheets. I thought the future was just boring stuff like better/faster/more scalable CRUD. There were a lot of poor jobs for intelligent people - basically if you graduated from Stanford, you'd probably end up selling foreign tech, building better spreadsheets, or consulting for a bank that doesn't care for tech.
What I would bet on then was optical routers and 5G. Much of the other stuff was just sci fi.
AI was one of those things. It's always been around as long as computers have; what are the odds someone would actually figure it out? It's more likely that some other paradigm like evolutionary programming would have taken off.
I expected the cost of compute from major cloud providers to be a race to $0.
Never happened.
Compute from major cloud providers is still extremely expensive.
You only get those savings from ‘smaller’ cloud providers, like Hetner/OVH/etc - where it’s hard to even purchase a server, rack it and host it for the same cost they can. (Which is what I expected would happen with the majors)