You kinda derailed your own post by writing cryptocurrency. HN hates it so we never have good discussions on it.<p>Obvious answers:<p>- Biotech, our ability to handle large amounts of data and compute should enable biotech to make huge strides forward in all sorts of ways. Personalized medicine (pill made for you etc) and so on.<p>- AR/VR, we've been talking about this for a long time but it seems like Apple will be launching something fairly soon for AR. It could very well kickstart a new boom.
VR has been steadily building for about 10 years and will continue to do so. Better headsets means more widespread adoption. Nearing a tipping point now I think.<p>- Getting 2 billion more people on the internet. Should allow for more niche products.<p>Outside the box:<p>- Online reality TV with avatars. An online world where people play different roles and you can choose which viewpoint you want to watch from. Online 24/7 with professionally built narratives happening in real time.<p>See GTA RP NoPixel streams on Twitch for an early example.
I think the next big thing will be how to organize/change society to deal with the lack of good jobs. You can loosely include inequality and recruiting in this. I don't think the outcome will necessarily be a good one. For example, it could result in massive outsourcing and automation.<p>There's constant talk of not being able to fill positions, but in many cases the pay or working conditions aren't good enough or the company is too picky about some minor attribute on a resume. 30% of millennials are looking to change companies after the pandemic has subsided (I think that's more of an if it subsides). I think this says a lot about how the increasing segment of the working population views work and jobs today. In some areas, it's more lucrative to be on support programs than to work too. I think this will increase as the cost of benefits continues to increase. At the opposite end of the spectrum people would rather hit big on crypto or options and check out of the work force before actually contributing to society. I hate looking at job postings due to the inflated fancy working of the duties section, the pay is usually just about the same as my current job if it's even listed (and the range can be huge - like $80k-120k is a 50% increase. How is that real/helpful?), and they all make it sound like they're saving the world when they're really just going to stick you in a boring app that does some basic CRUD for the business.<p>These are just my views. Maybe they are wrong. I do think <i>something</i> big will happen in the work force over the next decade.
Most of HN seems to hate crypto. My answer is still blockchain, but without the currency. I only recently (~1-2 years ago) got into Ethereum development and it turned my view of the digital world around. It showed me what the internet with a completely different monetization layer and without central entities like AWS or Google can look like.<p>Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and speculation is the most obvious use case right now, and I don't think that will change over the next 1-2 years. But I'm convinced that many more will follow.<p>I was just a little bit too young when the dot com boom happened, mostly playing games and hanging out in IRC channels during those times. I always imagine how cool it would've been if I had been a capable developer back then. The blockchain ecosystem(s) are the first technology in the last 10-20 years that feel the same - it's incredibly early with people hacking away trying to build basic things using a completely different model of the world.<p>I didn't "get it" for the longest time, ignoring cryptocurrencies for many years. But once I "got it" it completely changed my way of thinking. I don't know about the timeline, but I'm more convinced than ever that it's the next big thing and that the centralized internet as we know it will no longer exist in a few decades.<p>For the record, I hold neither BTC nor ETH (besides what I use for development) and I didn't get rich from it.
Alternatives to everything related to the reduction in fossil fuel use. Someone below posted 'night trains' and that is kind of a good example.<p>'Remote Work' is a big secular shift and that's going to be massive.<p>'Applied AI' is still just starting. We're a little bit past 'peak Hype' and high expectations, but we also know AI is 'real' and will be fairly broadly applied so there's a lot of legitimate opportunity.<p>There are 5B people coming out of poverty who need tech and want 'stuff' - so adapting classical systems to those areas is a big deal. Usually it requires localized knowledge, but that's possible for many. Retail Banking in Africa for example, may not resemble anything like Western Banking because of the lack of so much key infrastructure, so 'mobile first, trust-based' kinds of systems will likely lead the way, and out-compete the legacy institutions trying to put physical branches into every town.
Energy storage technologies should come of age this decade: Other than Lithium-ion batteries there are Zinc air batteries, Redox flow batteries, Liquid air storage, probably mechanical storages of some kind. Still a decade too early for Hydrogen but many other technologies will mature and give a boost to solar and wind.<p>Solar still has some room to run and go much lower in cost with such low marginal costs that we will produce 3-4x of demand and throw away surplus if energy storage is not available.
Private space industry.<p><pre><code> - SpaceX
- ULA
- Rocketlab
- Firefly
- BlueOrigin
- Virgin Galactic / Orbit
- Relativity Space
- Astra
</code></pre>
These are just the rocket folks. There are many others that are part of the supply chain. Space-based economy is the next biggest thing that's going happen in 10-30 years.<p>More here <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_companies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...</a>
Surveillance. This has always been an undercurrent of the internet revolution. I think during this decade the technological might will really be brought to bear in controlling various aspects of people's lives.
As cliche as it is - AI. Not strong AI but much better weak AI. Simply projecting existing trends (think Tesla autopilot) forward basically guarantees massive societal change along UBI lines.<p>There will be massive opportunities in that change. And for those facilitating it massive gain.<p>I also think we’re due an abundant energy breakthrough at some point but hard to predict the exact nature of it
Crypto won't be a thing outside speculation and illegal activities before volatility, transfer fees and validation times are fixed..<p>Imagine buying something with crypto at your local supermarket.. You'll stand there awkwardly waiting for $blocktime before you can say thank you, have a nice day.<p>The next big thing?
I'm gonna say/hope universal basic income, a gradual change from work-for-money-to-live economy to work-for-pleasure-and-enjoy-living nonconomy..
I hope it is next level of computing on every day use, without a keyboard and a mouse. I feel like I've been making keystrokes and clicking since forever.. It would be great to have a mind-digital bridge. Which seems horrifying even while writing, can't imagine how corporations will benefit on this, and try to reach and manipulate us inside, for advertisers to make us buy stuff.<p>I don't know the next big thing of course, always thought the future is bright, but seeing how everything evolving, our greed to make money, which is pretty an illusion considering we are species living on a planet in space, individually will eventually die, even the consequences of our actions may result turning this habitat to a non livable habitat for our species and others as well.. What is wrong with us?
I'm hoping it would be seasteading <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2016/04/04/the-seas-will-save-us-how-an-army-of-ocean-farmers-is-starting-an-economic-revolution" rel="nofollow">https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2016/04/04/the-seas-...</a>
The “shape-shifting” organization. At the moment, organizational dynamics are largely created and maintained by gut feeling, rules of thumb, and inertia. There will be a shift towards flexible organizations that can purposefully change form in response to needs internal and external.<p>Consider one common pattern. Startup CEO grows successful startup, then the board inevitably replaces said CEO with a more traditional CEO and organization structure. What made the company innovative then slowly goes away as it becomes entrenched in the same paradigm as the established companies the startup had been disrupting. Rinse and repeat.<p>Why must this evolution be so one-way and so rigidly predictable? Eventually, organizations will be able to flexibly shift to nearly any reasonable state, identifying which resources are needed to initiate such a change as well as when and where to apply them.
- 5G and computing in the edge might enable low latency on mobile devices. I can imagine that Apple will release their AR glasses in Gen 1 with computing performed on the iPhone or the watch and Gen 2+ might use the 5G edge
- Cloud computing crawl closer to the edge use cases like ultra low latency cloud gaming<p>Telcos work closely together with the well known cloud providers to utilize the edge. The model will likely be a revenue share model. Telcos might develop a neat new revenue stream. Once those "killer user cases" like the Apple Glasses hit the market I could imagine Telco stocks to rise.<p>I also expect optician stocks to benefit from the Apple glasses. Apple might use the optitian retail network to bring the Glasses to the customer.
Whatever happened to nanotechnology? I thought by now we'd have robotic nanoprobes that do maintenance, such as zapping cancerous cells or removing atherosclerotic plaques from our bodies. But zip, nada, nil.
By your logic cryptocurrency should be the answer now.<p>Cryptocurrency and blockchain have not been a big thing the last ten years, in that no one has solved a business problem or built something useful with it. My phone uses ML every day to tag the pictures on my phone. Developers use containers for deploying projects. These are shipped solutions.<p>So if crypto is going to be big, this is just the ground floor. We don’t know who the winner will be and how it will look —- who will be Google and who will be Alta vista? So far crypto and blockchain are just for speculators.
- The crypto economy is going to become much more than pumping coins, it will monetize all user content which is now given for free, and will replace Patreon etc. over time. IPFS is going to grow with it as the wikimedia of the entire internet.<p>- Someone will have to disrupt friendship, there are dating sites and social sites but people are still lonely and grow older. social norms have to adapt<p>- The oculus quest is a great seller and it deserves it, but i still think VR is missing killer apps, maybe there won't be any. WebXR will become a great medium though<p>- Neighborhood communities adapted for remote workers to move in and out. Can be themed (e.g. a specific national community). Startups will help them grow and organize. Airbnb was just the beginning.<p>- Brain implants. Biology is a complete tangled mess and making biotech work is hard. If we don't live long enough to achieve immortality, we can at least hope to download our brains for later use.<p>- Animal communication. This is super crazy but i think AI will be used to understand how to communicate with animals which could be revolutionary.<p>This decade marks the end of the baby boomer generation so the post-WW2 world order will largely become irrelevant, despite the trumpeting of nationalist tensions.
imo cryptocurrency is still not a "big thing" in that normal people aren't buying stuff with them as originally envisioned. It's certainly made a lot of people wealthy though.<p>in terms of low-hanging fruit with outsized returns: there's a ton of applications in machine learning. Google and Facebook are pouring billions into these ML models and they're all uploaded to github for us to use, free of charge. All you need is a bit of domain knowledge in how to apply it.<p>in terms of tech I'm actually looking forward to: the new space race, quantum simulation of biochemical reactions, GPT-X with multitask learning for video, audio and text.<p>in terms of impact on the world: things like height and IQ are highly heritable and almost solely determined by your DNA. It was never possible to predict these things, but with linear transformers it's looking kind of possible if you have enough data. I'm morbidly curious at what would happen if a government with utilitarian views on human rights started practicing Eugenics via this kind of phenotype prediction...
I think the most under-hyped tech news of the past year was that protein folding was baaasically solved: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03348-4</a><p>This could allow us to predict <i>in silico</i> what a given gene might do.
Energy. Storage is the topic of the day, but I personally think nuclear science is the tip of an iceberg we are completely blind of today. But when we start turning on the light in that corner, it’s going to rocket technological progress in very short order in ways we only ever dreamed. I’m very sure we’ll soon look back on our understanding and use of energy today like we do with horseback as a primary means of transportation now.<p>BioScience. So, so, so many things out there we ALREADY know/have/are capable of, but are held back from exploding us forward due to religiously founded governance. Younger generations are less tied to the latter, allowing the former to actually progress.<p>Both of these will happen faster than we think.
Whatever the next big thing will be I hope it will be something that can help us to have clean energy, clean water supplies and affordable nutritious food on a global scale.
I can see decentralised cloud computing gaining more traction, things like IPFS but with computation/logic processing too. blockchain and crypto are only just starting.
Remote work, or hybrid work. It's no longer just an experiment or idea. It's a system that has been done for over a year. It's inefficient... and yet people want it. If done right, it'll save billions in office rental space.
Survival of humanity. Between manmade and natural threats technical civilisation will be lucky to survive to 2040.<p>Personally, I am worried about all the IoTs getting hacked either deliberately or by error.<p>What would be the affect of a major solar flare? Or a SuperNova?
Health tech is one of the next big things.
In this decade, remote health care is going to transform multiple industries. A lot of great innovation happening from medical grade devices to advanced wearable devices
- Truth networks/channels<p>- Tactical forecasting/Super forecasting<p>- Highly improved warehouse robots<p>- First blockbuster VR Game<p>- More personalized ads in the real world
You know what's funny? I'd expected that this place would be the early adopters to cryptocurrencies back in 2010. Instead, all posts about them were flagged as scams.<p>There were many chances given. Alt-coin Faucets, Keybase giveaway (not a scam) literally giving 'free' cryptocurrencies (Not ICOs.)<p>They are not doing this anymore and now if you held them, well you're up >10,000%<p>> Your answer should’ve have been cryptocurrency.<p>True. Mostly everyone here was too focused on the 'tech' 'engineering', 'how to get into FAANG companies' and the 'cryptography' of cryptocurrencies to even care about 10x-ing their investments at the time.<p>Many cryptocurrencies (and some are still scams) were perceived as ponzi scam-coins, until they rocket off for little to no reason and now the 'mainstream' catches up. The actual winners are the ones who dared to risk >$5k on a 'scamcoin', 5 years ago and now it netted them 20,000x ROI.<p>> It is now 2021, what’s the next big thing?<p>No one knows, but the answer always starts somewhere from a tiny select few in the know or a fringe site. It could be from anywhere. Including this site.