2026 Predictions
Kinda early with this one, but I’ll start:
1. There will be at least one AI personality that will become household famous.
The sun will disappear on August 12, 2026 over Western Europe, unless the locals agree to give me treasure
Very high inflation in the US.
The next administration is dealing with a high inflation environment but their policies are also inflationary adding more fuel to the fire, while the DoGE stuff is pretty unrealistic. You will probably get tax cuts funded by QE.
1. Rust lang will continue its growth, but it will will convert from curve/exponential to linear growth
2. Zig and go will continue gradual stepwise growth, due to incr adoption in the domains they already incr grow in.
3. AI in gaming hw/sw will continue to grow, with tech like onboard dlss not only being heavily marketed, but successfully executed to so as to launch certain benchmarks thru the roof, creating more shortages on top tier chips with roof busting pricepoints
4. TikTok will not be banned in the US
5. US Blue state govt climate coalitions will continue to execute despite reds in the feds. At least one trad red state will onboard into said coalition due to clear economic incentives
6. US rents will continue to increase as total % as cost of living
7. Trader Joes will sell less sweets and double fresh grocery offerings
AI investment bottoms out, and it turns out that running a small 512 MB model on your phone is enough for most people.
The moat keeps drying up every time its flooded, and people are quite happy splashing around in blowup paddling pools
Robo helper in the household
Ai personal assistant who knows me and understands what I want
Ais chat among each other to figure out if their “owners” are good matches. If they are the ais set up a time and place for the first date
I think it's possible a very affordable and capable VR headset will be released (deckard?). Something with the technology of the vision pro, but competitiveness of the steam deck when it was released.
It would be a huge engineering challenge to make something like that but I think it would really rock the market.
> 1. There will be at least one AI personality that will become household famous.
Does Alexa count? Because that's already true then.
My prediction: Between AI search results, the various LLM platforms, and improved phone assistants, traffic to web sites drops at least 10% across the board by the end of 2025.
Breakthrough in prime factorization before end of 2026
Demand for machine learning engineers at most companies drops by 2026. I speculate that the demand for in-house models drops as the gulf between them and the major players grows. I think it will be (is?) easier and cheaper to rent time on someone else's model.
The ancillary tasks those MLEs were doing (data prep, model perf analysis, etc) will fall on other nearby roles (backend/data eng or data annalists). Ultimately I speculate that all of this work will end up being another integration backend/generalist engineers will handle.
Programming becomes irrelevant as a career
Bitcoin will dramatically fall to $250k from the heights of $600k
A 2028 Predictions thread on HN
Dedollarization accelerates
The US tech industry will still be in a recession. The war against Chinese offshoring will work, but at the cost of thousands of jobs in the American tech labor industry. American businesses will become more frugal as a result and invest heavily in lobbying and future defense against the DOJ. Software startups will become more popular and less successful, hardware startups will begin waning as investors lose appetite for high-margin, high-risk entrepreneurship. ZIRP will make a return as the US realizes this, but investors will fuel a liquidity crisis that dissolves most struggling businesses.
2027 will be a more concentrated tech market with fewer small players and more money going toward "sure thing" investments in businesses with a clean track record that are too big to fail. This would be great for established high-risk brands like Tesla, provide plausible deniability for economists that only wanted to put America first, and likely crush most chances for small businesses to compete. Assuming the Trump administration intentionally gimps the DOJ (I mean, why wouldn't they?), America will be at the whims of it's own wily market.
Netcraft will confirm Reddit is dead.
Unemployment rate goes all time high.
Apple vision sales surpass iPad
Trump either defuses the war(s) in the middle east or it accelerates and becomes nuclear.
1. There will be at least one AI droid that is set off upon us to destroy the wealthy.