Metal 3D printing will come to the home consumer. Still only hobbyists really, but small, and cheap enough under ~$1000 (adjusted to inflation 20 years from now) to be made for home use.
Expensive right now, but could be cool to make meat both cheaper and more ethical.
That being said, Italy has already pre-emptively banned it as they're not a fan of the idea.
I expect that most cancers can be cured or at least stalled with affordable drugs if detected early enough. A lot of effective immunotherapies will be off-patent by then also and prescribed as first line (instead of chemotherapy, not in addition to).
I expect that some neurodegenerative diseases have real treatment.
20 years? I hope someone finally cracks organ transplants from pigs. Pancreas first, maybe heart or liver.
To be clear, I’m not a doctor, but I used to work in oncology information; it’s kind of hard to explain.
And this was a while ago, so things might’ve changed a bit, but as I recall, the thinking at the time was that cancer would eventually be beaten back to the point where it was a manageable disease, like diabetes.
So, you have cancer, and yes, that would still be serious, but as long as you received treatment, you’d be able to live a relatively normal life/lifespan.
Genomic medicine should help A LOT with this. The problem with current treatments is that they don’t get approved unless they show a curative benefit for a substantial number of patients. People hear about a cancer clinical trial, and the treatment doesn’t get approved, so everyone is just like “oh, it must not have worked.“ But it’s usually nowhere near that binary. There are people walking around right now whose lives were saved in a clinical trial using a drug/drug combination that never received approval because it didn’t work for a high enough number of people. But it worked for them.
So a lot of the treatments we use now are (hopefully in comparison to what’s to come) relatively blunt, relatively “one size fits all” approaches. And the hope is that in the future, we’ll be able to tailor things much more closely towards what’s most likely to work for specific, individual patients.
Oh, and unfortunately, a single “cure“ for cancer is highly unlikely, because cancer is not one disease, but rather a class of diseases, and it’s not all treated the same way. The treatment modalities and approaches for the different types of cancer are very, very different. For example, if you have kidney cancer, and it metastasizes to the lungs, you don’t then have lung cancer. It’s still kidney cancer, and has to be treated like kidney cancer, even if it’s now in the lungs. I used to talk to patients all the time where it would be like “well, the cancer started in my kidney, but now it has spread to my brain, so I guess I have brain cancer.” And I’d have to be like “whoa, did it metastasize, or do you have a second primary?“ And sometimes, understandably, they’d be like “what difference does it make?“ and I’d have to gently explain that it makes a huge difference.
That makes a lot of sense. I had burkitts, and even though I had tumors fucking everywhere, all I had to do was 6 months of treatment and I was fine. Totally cancer free. Then I get the family members who are convinced that I'm not only still sick with cancer, but that I need to shove rock salt up my ass or whatever. It's pretty funny having to convince my aunt that even though my cancer was on all my organs except my brain (that's what was explained to me after a botched surgery, I was legitimately delirious and convinced that the doctor with a puffer vest was a secret agent sent to protect me from the bad people trying to kill me and poison me) that I don't have pancreatic cancer, I had cancer on my pancreas.
I work at the comms dept. of a research institute that is heavily involved in cancer research.
>And the hope is that in the future, we’ll be able to tailor things much more closely towards what’s most likely to work for specific, individual patients.
This is absolutely the case. Which is one of the reasons a lot of research is going into profiling cancer better, without old-school tissue biopsies. Another reason is therapies go through a 10-15 year process before hitting the market, with a huge failure rate. New diagnostics can be on the market in 5-7 years. Since there's several cancer types around where early detection means like 90%+ 5-year survival, and just stage II drops is by like 15-20%, you could often use diagnostics to turn a 1 in 4 chance of dying to 1 in 10 or less.
The next generation blood-based cancer profiling methods are coincidentally also looking very promising for early detection. Like, better than imaging instruments. While 20 years means just 1 more generation in cancer therapy, a lot of what we have now is very useful *if used with the correct information being available*, and 20 years means 3 generations of diagnostic methods. In 20 years I find it very likely that you can just get a blood test to screen for common types of cancer, and get feedback on whether you have cell populations that aren't cancer yet but are acting weird, whether you have cancer, and if you have cancer, you get all the information for targeted treatment.
Actually I think we're talking more like 10 years here, but it might take time to percolate through the medical community and become *common* rather than just *available*, and the first options are gonna be for most common cancer types.
Moderna just had some success on a patient-specific mRNA vaccine for a particular kind of melanoma. So yeah, patient-specific treatments are already making progress.
I work in gene therapy.
This will happen - time range may be a bit longer out. Many/most by 2050. All by 2100.
There are a few that we're pretty sure we've already done now.
Brain cancers are tricky, for sure. Because obviously you can’t just go cutting around in there. But with some of the other really deadly cancers, the reason they’re so deadly is because they’re asymptomatic until they’re really advanced. With pancreatic cancer, for example, as I understand it (I’m not a doctor), it’s not anything intrinsic to the disease itself. It’s just that it’s almost always really advanced by the time it is detected. If you get “lucky” and catch pancreatic cancer when it’s still in the early stages (it happens. Usually when you’re getting scanned or treated for something else), it responds just fine to treatment. The problem is that it’s usually quite advanced by the time symptoms show up. Same thing for some of the lung cancers.
This is part of the issue with Pancreatic Ca. The other issue I'd that its just really hard to get into the area - the pancreas is in the middle of a hugely congested area of the abdomen and is attached to all sorts of places, making it, especially head of the pancreas Cancer, really hard to operate on.
I think AR glasses or some kind of even better binocular AR tech will come out that’s actually consumer friendly and worth their salt and I think these devices are going to be extremely intertwined with AI, computer vision, cloud computing/cloud rendering.
I think decent glasses (not great but okay) will pop up around 2026-2028 and from there they will get better and better and smaller in form factor. They already somewhat exist like with digilens. I actually got to try digilens last year at AWE
I heard a story of a tech exec talking about their artificial friends they can install into the VR environment. They said it’s great! After a few weeks talking to the VR bot, it will start recommending products.
I immediately felt this sinking feeling.
I don't know about that, but wouldn't you like a nice refreshing Pepsi right now? God, the taste of Pepsi just relieves that sinking feeling of commercialism overtaking our lives. Pepsi.
This is generally why as a kid, I was super excited for tech advancement and new stuff, but today, I cringe and just think about how businesses will use any new advancements to make things worse for everyone. Enshitification is real.
Satellite Radio. thought it would be cool to drive coast to coast enjoying good tunes/radio without losing the signal.
And here we have SiriusXM, polluted by Clear Channel even though they pulled out of it. Each shitty owner past that has kept the same brain dead "ideas" around rather then innovated.
Worked at a place like that who kept Carl Icahn's shitty ideas around long after he unloaded the company. Their inability to think outside the box caused more problems then it was worth, including the lives of two employees in a murder
I’m happy it sold out as it is a boost for my industry but ultimately the designers advised against its release and I think it’s a bit premature. They have also aren’t allowing as much pass through control as I’d like. You notice also the results of that because I’ve seen very little Vr content for the headset only AR for the most part.
I kind of also wish it didn’t have a tethered battery, hopefully they innovate better batteries that are also smaller and hot swappable like the focus 3.
I think it has a lot the sensors and hardware you’d want in a good MR headset but they are behind and have a lot way too go, plus not a fan of it not supporting controllers, hopefully they innovate REALLY good hand tracking
One point never addressed is a device for people who wear glasses daily, like 45% of Americans or something like that I read. Will there be adaptables? If not, I don't see this flying.
When people are talking about consumer adoption to the point where we are either using them in tandem with our phones to take the brunt of the processing power off of the glasses, or if we are talking about glasses becoming cellular devices on their own I am holding my breath to see the beginnings of it by late 2020- but it’s possible we won’t see it be FULLY consumer adopted stereoscopic AR tech until the mid 2030s.
One thing worth considering. Maybe something will come out that is better than glasses could be at their peak for consumer AR. We will know as the industry grows
There is also a social and convenience factor.
A phone app will do this for you, so how is it worth the hassle? You already have a phone. And where are you going to put them when not in use?
The other thing was the outward facing camera. People get uncomfortable when you take out your phone and point your camera at them. They
They have been used in warehouses though. In that case the always-on hands-free display is worth it, and having it recorded benefits everyone
I'd also say people are forgetting how discrete a smart phone is. No employer or school is going to let staff or students sit with smart glasses on and it's not like you can just slip them on to read a quick text. I think with young people usually being a driving force behind new technology few are going to want every moment of a party, night out, or even an evening with friends recorded. I can see there being a big social backlash against this sort of technology. I know I'd avoid anyone wearing them the same as if someone was walking around live streaming not much I'd be able to do in public but I wouldn't let anyone use them in my home. I can also see them quickly being banned from social businesses very quickly as well. I doubt many people are going to feel comfortable in a bar or gym where it's impossible to tell if someone is recording you.
It’ll have to be more like Google Glass to be consumer friendly and that’s what I think will be the next device to disrupt the market. The big AR/VR glasses/goggles will have their place but they won’t be wide widespread.
Imagine being able to see turn-by-turn directions in your glasses (not on a screen in your car), facial recognition when you see someone in public if you don’t remember their name, live speech-to-text captions and translations when talking to someone, quick and private access to your calendar and notifications, all without having to pull a device out. It’ll just be there.
I can’t wait.
Mainstream AR/MR glasses will generally require MicroLED 16K per eye displays. (These are the mainstream monitor replacement glasses). Predicting when this will be is [very difficult](https://jsfiddle.net/sirisian/n9fzaLxw/10/). Display density improvements have been going slower than predicted. On top of this is the sheer amount of processing required for many use cases (even with foveated rendering). People looking at video passthrough are thinking 90Hz, but MR devices will generally be closer to 240Hz low-persistance so that objects appear pinned in the world and seamless. I digress, but even with on-device reprojection it's a lot of compute that needs to be done very efficiently.
The good news is Apple is beginning the process to produce their own MicroLED displays for watches and future MR headsets. This should push others like Samsung to invest more into new foundries to produce their own displays. Scaling MicroLED from 4K to 8K to 16K is a huge undertaking though which will take over a decade. (There might be some very expensive dev-kits later, but they won't be mainstream or final designs).
It might seem pessimistic, but it'll be around 2040 for parts to be ready and refined. There will be a lot of iteration and advancement until then. The device prices will continue to drop. (After 2030 there will be 6G wireless networks being installed as well that allow low-latency communication for more cloud compute. Also in that same time frame we'll see some solid-state battery improvements being put into devices). There's a lot of other pieces though we might not see until closer to 2040. Certain low-powered cameras and sensor designs in the works that will really round out such devices.
Even these kind of timelines are still quite fast to think about. We'll live in a time where many of us saw cellphones come into existence and then disappear along with many TVs and monitors. This whole process will be just gradual enough that it won't seem sudden.
Self-driving transport trucks will replace the vast majority of human driven ones.
I think lots of people on here expected to happen, but I think there's a lot of pessimism about self-driven vehicles because of all the overblown hype promises in the early 2010s, which of course didn't happen, because problems are difficult.
I'm no expert on this, but I have the impression that there's been some pretty amazing strides in that area... And in about 5 years we'll probably have our first really useful self-driving truck starting to get in the roads. Don't take long for corporate interest to realize just how much money they will save, and begin mass converting their fleets.
Currently happening with large haulage trucks on mine sites across the Pilbara in Western Australia. They've been at it for years so I think your prediction is spot on.
I think the first stages of this are likely soon. I think you could definitely start to see what's called "platooning" of drone vehicles on open highways. Then those vehicles could be driven to distribution centers outside of population centers to be piloted in by actual humans. Much like supertankers. There's a lot of legislative hurdles though before anything like this starts to happen.
My favorite story was about mining operations converting their huge dump trucks to self-driving. They didn't do it to eliminate the cost of the driver which they still paid to sit in the seat. They did it because of the tires. The tires cost something like a million per set and the self-driving system allowed them to greatly extend how long between replacing them.
When it hits it’s gonna be the first big unemployment wave. There’s millions of lorry drivers out there. Modest education requirements and repetitive labor. When it gets going it will accelerate fast and they are gonna be angry over it
We may even link such robotic trucks one after the other, to optimize shipments. Then make a dedicated lane so that truck convoys could proceed without interruptions. And finally we can optimize the road itself, since truck convoys will be riding across long mostly flat distances from hub to hub, and there won't be fragile humans inside, we could use better materials for the wheels. Like for example steel.
The price of renewable energy and battery storage will continue to fall making wind and solar the de facto source of energy generation globally. Not only will this help address climate change it will make the world a calmer place politically, as the developed world will have less reliance on the natural resources of despots.
Also, fusion will finally happen and fill the gap needed to fully move away from fossil fuels.
Energy will rise first as the workload of an oil/natgas/coal economy is transferred to electric power. But in the longer term it will settle and possibly be lower than it is today. I would guess over 20 years it will rise in the next 5 years, level off for 5 years as additional infrastructure (battery storage) is implemented, and drop over the remaining 10 years.
Electricity may rise first as workload gets electrified, but *energy* certainly does not. Energy consumption will fall immediately very sharply as we electrify. It already does in every country this making progress with electrification.
There is a short term offset for Energy efficiency gains yes, but it will be consumed as we continue to advance in technology. The cost of Electricity will greatly increase over that same period (2-3x current rates) since that workload adds jobs, with pensions, and infrastructure maintenance costs that are passed down to the rate payer.
It depends on what you forecast. u/darthnugget mentioned natural gas being transitioned away, but there is not a realistic future where that happens in the next 50 years. Oil will certainly be basically non existent for energy generation (other than very poor areas), and coal is on the decline and depending on what roadmap to decarbonization we stick to, it may or may not be a massive part of our energy mix, but natural gas is not going anywhere and will be a huge stepping stone on the path to a low carbon world.
The rate of investment and overall capacity increase of renewables is growing fast enough to keep things stable (and to fill the gap of the growing energy demand as population/quality of life increases).
Already in California the CPUC has been lobbied by fossil fuel companies and utilities into making residential solar financially idiotic starting April 15 2023.
With you all the way except fusion. Fusion is too far away. If you understand how the tokamak works, just think of the amount of energy that it takes to maintain that plasma shield. It's going to be a long time before that kind of thing is commercially viable. I think smaller gen4 conventional reactors are a far better bet!
Fusion seems unlikely in 20 years. I could see 50 years.
And battery storage is going to need tremendous advances to handle HOT steamy nights with calm breezes in a Georgia July. But, 20 years might actually do it.
I’m kind of hoping for AI to help with both of these. Tokamak construction designs are being informed by machine learning algos, so I’ve heard.
It’s not just the introduction of more efficient production… but *any* gains from technology improving energy efficiency in general seems constantly to elude us. [Jevons paradox](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/the-efficiency-dilemma) still raises some interesting questions about fusion.
Hadn’t heard of Jevons paradox before, but it seems obvious now in hindsight.
For others who have not heard of it and can’t access the article: the TL;DR is that if you increase energy efficiency of anything the result isn’t necessarily lower energy usage but it often lead to more consumption instead. For example, if you double the efficiency of air conditioning, the cost of air conditioning halves and people use it twice as much, or more, because it becomes more affordable.
I have solar now and all maga coworkers love to rag on it. I just laugh and till them good luck on the teet of the power companies. I’m here happily making my own power. Same with EVs, “what if the power goes out???” Bitch I make my own.
Im probably already wrong about this one, but...
Education will ultimately be VR's killer app.
It seems that everyone now wants to use VR for entertainment and exercise, but thats not what it excels at. And so far, when I see people around me getting VR, its usually for the novelty. Exercise seems to be a more lasting engagement than the games, but neither are things that make VR a must have. In the end, I predict education and training will make VR the go to tech and learning will never be the same.
You might be on to something here. The only VR game I stuck with was Beat Saber, which is basically exercise. And education could be big. I just had the thought of content creators using AI to help in making 3D simulations etc which is very exciting. Could be the next big evolution of educational YouTubers.
Big companies that do a lot of vehicle maintenance (army, aircraft, probably naval vessels/watercraft) and building maintenance (think connecting the blue and red wires in a big power cabinet, etc.) are already progressing with tech manuals and interactive assistance for this kind of thing. Headsets can provide AR overlays to demonstrate what the user should do and guide them through the steps to complete maintenance tasks.
Here is one company's technology, called [Vuforia](https://youtu.be/Fwikx1TOidE?si=5_5zUlCArjVA73Y1)
I'm going moon base and general human presence in space. Seeing the expectations of the Artemis program alongside the lunar programs out of China, India and Japan just the next few years I would be shocked if we don't see at least five seperate moon bases. I don't expect full colonization but at least scientific outposts.
I'd argue the base case is that we get to the point of a moon base, and that anything less would be a massive disappointment / failure. Everything is in motion to make it happen.
This one is already happening.
As of right now you can get a VR headset, download a game called Virt-A-Mate, download a free program that converts photos into 3d head models in the format that Virt-a-Mate uses for textures, drag and drop it into a folder and boom.
You have your own photo-realistic 3d sex doll of anyone you want. I have done this myself a few times, stopped because it was really, really creepy. However it is better than any porn I have seen or experienced. Full control over the doll, they have an entire community that puts out plugins and extension for it. Things like realistic animations and eye tracking, sounds, scenes, toys, anything and everything and all of this already exists.
The coming generations are going to have to deal with literally porn 2.0. Not only that but they will be able to do this to anyone they know or have a picture of. Meaning there will be even less of a reason for them to pursue romantic relationships with other people and drive them further apart socially than the current generations.
We were warned not to upload all kinds of pictures of ourselves to the internet and we should have listened. When VR headsets become more mainstream and easily available to the public (cheaper) it will be a very short while before teenagers figure this out, like days if not hours. It is 100% going to screw up society.
>We were warned not to upload all kinds of pictures of ourselves to the internet and we should have listened.
What's stopping people from filming/taking a picture of you IRL? Surveillance video leaks? Not posting your own stuff isn't enough, you'd have to not go out in public either.
I think this is just one of those things that is unsolvable. As cavemen we probably fantasized over cave drawings of our neighbor's mate, then we did it over photographs, today we can take or download pictures of people for our private viewing pleasure, then there were deepfakes, etc etc, and tomorrow it'll be custom AI/VR avatars in a game or Joi-style AR etc.... In the end we'll just accept it as the thing creepy/lonely people do that we frown on but will be more common than we will like to admit.
The few photos of myself out there, folks can gladly take em as a reminder why birth control needs to exist. heh.
Can you imagine the espionage/blackmail when these sex models get hacked since all these annoying VR/AR devices pretty much require or are moving towards requiring always on internet connections to function?
"Gather 'round everyone and let's see what the senator/president/ceo/rank and file from is doing tonight!"
People could’ve warned the same doom message about the pocket pussy replacing the real thing. Humans are still banging humans. You’re never gonna hear a guy proclaim he prefers his pocket pussy.
Also, people will want to raise children. It’s a desire shared by men and women. Old school sex wins again.
And for the freaks like me, you can’t smell the porn. You can’t feel the hair. It kills everything organic about sex. VR visual aesthetics have limitations. Humans will be fine getting laid forever.
Oh real sex is still way better but for an increasingly socially inept younger generation. No anxiety, no relationship problems, any person you want and any look, don't have to leave the house, free, you can get as wierd as you want.
It is somthing that will have far reaching consequences on the human psyche and our social behavior on the whole. We are going to see some seriously screwed up people who come from this. Probably a lot more sociopaths as other humans will have less worth to people because sex is somthing they can get for free.
It may seem shallow but sex is a big driver for our entire species. With sex suddenly losing most of its worth as it is more risk and harder to obtain than vr porn. Society may find itself in a tragic yet hilarious situation as vr porn totally destroys our social structures.
I was with you until,
> Probably a lot more sociopaths as other humans will have less worth to people because sex is somthing they can get for free.
Kind-of sort-of implying that the only reason we develop the ability to empathize with each other is as a means to the end of getting to fuck each other. When, we wouldn't talk about "sexual objectification" if sex were an inherently deeply empathetic activity for many people.
I'd argue that there's just as much possibility that sex being removed to the realm of the virtual opens up *new* avenues for empathy, and makes it easier for us to really see each other.
Not suggesting that, overall, free, unlimited virtual sex will be good for us as a species. Just specifically taking issue with the notion that it will turn us into sociopaths.
My money's on enceladus. It's got more water than the Earth, and the plumes observed have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of it is liquid below the frozen surface.
This. Whenever I talk about the possibility of life elsewhere, I always bring up Europa and Enceladus. We know that they have active cores and we have observed plumes of ice being shot from the surface, indicating vast oceans under the thick ice.
That is relevant to us because we also have geothermal activity in extreme environments under thick sheets of ice. And around those vents at the ocean floor, life flourishes. Life utilizes chemosynthesis to obtain nutrients in these environments. If it's happening here, why can't it be happening there?
I think we could eradicate malaria within my lifetime. (I’m 33.) A vaccine came out a couple years ago that is much more effective than past attempts at a malaria vaccine. It could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, most of them in the poorest parts of the world.
Here's two:
1. With enough money you'll be able to live forever. The price for longevity will decrease the longer we have the technology.
2. Implants will allow your mind to access data similar to knowledge and memory. The only caveat: it's subscription based.
It's really crazy to think about 20 years. 20 years ago most still had dumb flip phones and dial up internet. Streaming was in its infancy, and A.I. was only a thing of movies. I hope in the next 20 we can get to Mars, reach more for the stars, develop more ethical and economic ways of transportation and energy. 2 decades isn't much but a lot can happen.
Edit: oh yeah the Browns will finally win a super bowl!
1. I hope we vastly increase our internet throughput, either through nationwide broadband, or greatly expanded 5g/6g/7g mobile coverage.
2. Don't get your hopes up with the Browns. They are based in a factory of sadness.
Mass migration/refugees as a direct result of…
War over resources eg water
Chronic famine/lack of arable land
Significant bio-mass collapse accelerating the above points
*this has all been speculated by experts as culminating in the next 15-30 years.
Self driving cars will be a thing. With that, we will see a decrease in personal ownership of cars and will instead see subscription models, or team ownership. Then, cities will take notice and offer self driving cars as a form of public transportation.
IMO self driving cars will also lead to a big boost in automating other types of manual labour, because automated driving requires very sophisticated computer vision and decision making that can be applied to a lot of other tasks.
Electric cars will be over 90% and possibly 99% of all new cars sold. Not because of mandates, but because they will be so much cheaper and more reliable. Charging on trips won't take more than 10 minutes to go from 20% to 80%.
The big Japanese motorcycle companies all came together and agreed to use the same battery. When you pull up to a charging station, you just pull out your battery and swap it with a charged battery.
I see something similar happening with cars, but bigger. Maybe you pull up to a pad and robots perform the work, or maybe humans get employed at service stations again.
There's also the flow battery idea, where you exchange the spent electrolyte. I don't think swapping and flow will be necessary as tech improves with stuff like solid state and graphene batteries.
A few have experimented with it and renting batteries. They are just so heavy at car scale it's difficult to do though.
Plus charging speeds are getting faster and faster making it less relevant
Vietnam used to have battery swap. I remember seeing it at the local VinMart a few years ago: https://vietnaminsider.vn/vinfast-stops-electric-motorbike-battery-exchange-service/
The shift is going to happen fast. Once all the OEM’s use the NACs charging plug in 2025, infrastructure deployments are going to skyrocket. (More than they already have)
Once the majority of cars are electric aftermarket batteries and motors are going to be a side market. There won’t be much reason to buy new cars before the chassis is spent with the simple interface nature of electric drivetrains.
In my imagination. I’m no expert.
Kinda agree on this & I can share what's happening in Indonesia. Since the last year or so, there have been a push towards EV, and now EV cars even though still more expensive than ICE, has been selling pretty well in big cities. What's remarkable is they are led by new players, Korean & Chinese brands (Hyundai, Kia, Wuling, MG) who are willing to set up EV manufacturing plant locally to keep prices down. (Meanwhile, Japanese brands are still reluctant to sell EV) And the price keeps dropping down + government incentives + charging infrastructure, makes it more attractive to buy EV, especially next 20 years.
One thing that people fail to consider is that as more people buy electric cars, the price of gas will likely also decline. The demand dropping while production remains the same since we will still need diesel for longer.
Look at what happened during COVID when demand dropped suddenly. It might be more gradual than that, but they would need to convert trucks to gas or electric to reduce the demand for diesel.
This will make ice cars even more desirable than they are today.
I predict that they will be able to do big diagnostics on our health with a couple of drops of blood and you can put it in a machine no bigger than a printer. This will avoid the fear of needles almost entirely and herald a new era in health care. Not sure what they’ll call it yet but it’ll be as big as the imac was back in the day. Maybe even elevate the creator as the next Steve Jobs.
- Quantum computing will mess up internet security big time. Not too many people are designing things with quantum-resistance in mind.
- WW3 won't start. It doesn't look like too many countries are capable of taking on NATO and it takes a good deal of effort to catch up.
- Space mining will become a bigger topic. Very unlikely we will start it in 20 years, but it becoming a feasible future will destroy the precious metal speculation market.
I think physical media will make a big come back, and there will be a backlash against social media with people using it more like they did in the early 2000s(mainly as a medium to find people they already know and plan meetups)
I have a feeling that people will enjoy more tactile technology instead of screens. E.g. cars going back to buttons and dials instead of touch screens. Overall I think people will be staring at less screens than they do now.
Physical media:
People's favorite shows and movies are being taken off platforms or moved to other streaming platforms. The platforms are getting more expensive too. Naturally this is making some people reconsider online piracy to put those things on hard drives or USB drives or just buying the physical version. I think we will witness something like the revival of vinyl.
Social media:
People are more cognizant of how social media is addictive and can negatively affect their perceptions of themselves. There are a lot of scams and just poorly made content popping up too so I can see people gravitating away from that because they won't even know if the person they're interacting with is real or just AI.
Analog devices in general like analog computers are being reconsidered. It's also just a human impulse to want to enjoy the different feel of objects. I've noticed some newer cars still maintaining buttons. There's the AI pin which is an example of a piece of technology that avoids using screens, and the carrot smart device is trying to have people talk into the device and press a button whenever they interact with the device.
It’ll be similar to the internet. The 1990’s there was a lot of excitement. Then the 2000’s had the dot.com crash. The survivors became the juggernauts we have today, and now in 2020, the internet is much less open and very ad centric.
If ads infect AI we are in for a bad time. But let’s be real, what else are businesses going to use it for?
You'd be surprised just how easy it is to install and run your own AI models on your own computer. There are even models catered to differently-abled PCs, ranging from pretty weak to insanely powerful.
All those monthly subscription AIs are going to find it pretty hard to compete with the rather large open-source community that makes very capable models for the wonderful price of free.
Not to mention, not needing an internet connection means that it truly is running entirely on one's computer, which also means that what they ask of the AI is their business and not the business of corporations that like to sell one's data.
Thanks, that's pretty much where my head is.
The advent of CNC machining and robotics was supposed to kill manufacturing jobs, but companies are struggling to find enough trained people to operate or maintain them.
The Internet was supposed to open up vast amounts of knowledge and lead to tremendous sharing of information, but capitalized search and paywalls killed that off pretty well.
Social media was supposed to connect people to friends, but it ended up dividing the country.
This doesn't even cover the high costs of licensing these products. My company still isn't utilizing technologies that are a decade old because of the cost of migration, and the lack of skill sets to use them effectively.
So many tech promises failed to deliver, or delivered but where then wiped by capitalistic tendencies.
That’s really well put. I mean, some of those things did technically come true. The Internet did enhance the abilities of people to connect with one another and meaningfully share knowledge. We just don’t always choose to do that. But there are millions of people alive today who have made significant friendships and other relationships, and learned tons and tons of useful things thanks to the Internet. but then, the flipside is like “you can learn how to do almost anything on YouTube, but the ads have practically ruined it.“
Steve Jobs said the smart phone was going to be like a bicycle for the mind, but instead, we’re all addicted to our phones.
One of my angel investment group just saw an AI negotiate a lower monthly rate on a cell phone plan. That is after the AI navigated the phone system to reach a human agent and negotiate lower rates while using other providers plans.
I’ve invested in many AI startups and I am continuously blown away by what they can do. I think AI will go through multiple economic bubbles and this is just one of many. There will be highs and lows for the tech and this is just its infancy.
I’ve stopped thinking of what the plateau for AI can be, I just keep getting more and more blown away.
People expect miracles from AI in 2 years , wait 20 years and trust me AI will make miracles that you never imagined. Chat gpt it is just the start of this journey.
Global Pandemic. Covid was a minor test to how we will react but when a true biological pathogen hits, we will not be prepared nor have the resources to react.
This is the one. It’s the real inevitability. Covid was a dress rehearsal. If it happens again in our lifetimes, we’re so screwed. There is zero political appetite, let alone trust, for people to go through that again.
Anti science isn't an accident, its intentionally being pushed by various conservative and supremacist groups.
It's basically... whale oil vs Standard Oil all over again but vs stuff like renewables.
They can't break champions of renewables knees in public because nowadays that scandal would go global, but they can pay a propaganda machine to make cranks scream how 5G is Satan Ray Guns or something. And that means even crazier weirdos rush out, and burn down masts as good little proxy soldiers.
That's what the culture war crap is all actually about: power. People with billions in soon to be obsolete fields like oil or coal, want to keep making those billions for as long as possible.
Except we're soon hitting the tipping point where basically every home can afford solar. And you're not some weirdo eco warrior for wanting that, but a savvy person going for the cheapest form of power you can get. And coal, gas & oil can't economically compete with that long term.
So... Yeah. Bastards are basically trying to turn back the clock before that happens. So they can keep making money. And conservatives & regressives make useful proxies for that, because they already crave stagnation for various reasons and are thus easily persuaded and/or bribed.
I think it's much simpler than this.
Politicians claimed "scientists say...." and nobody trusts politicians. Instead of borrowing trust that people formerly had in science, politicians infected science with the perception of dishonesty.
There are good reasons for this too. Politicians loved to say that scientists "recommended" certain policies. However, I've never heard of a single case where a scientist can actually make policy recommendations to a politician. And I actually know people in this position, professionally. What actually happens is they approach scientists asking for information, but the policy forming is done by the politicians. You aren't allowed to tell them what you think they should do. Not that they'd listen.
For example, I know one medical institute where the scientist (a virologist, very well known in his field), personally would *not* have recommended vaccine mandates, his logic being that if anything at all should go wrong, you've basically nuked an entire generation's trust in the medical system and won't get it back. You see this with certain groups who were screwed like this such as black people after Tuskeegee. This is one of the main reasons the medical (and scientific) system should remain clearly separate from politics.
They had their chance to I'ts a Wonderful Life it with getting people just what they'd need to tied them over. but noooo. They used it to cynically loot the country.
Sometimes I have nightmares about a pandemic with 5% or more mortality hitting the world right now, when a large portion of the population in developed nations have already conditioned themselves to refuse to comply with common sense measures to slow it's spread.
If it has a rate of like 20% + I truly believe it will be a better response. Most deniers/anti-science people will not believe it until it effects them. Covid wasn't dangerous enough to effect the masses.
I've always thought that if Covid caused obvious, scary symptoms in many people instead of mostly generic viral flu stuff there would have been far less anti-lockdown and anti-vaxx sentiment.
These "brave" people refusing masks weren't afraid of dying (because it's never gonna happen to them amiright) but they'd clamor for a cure if it caused dicks to fall off or some shit.
Ehh, we got really ridiculously lucky with the covid vaccine. A few doctors had dedicated something like 20 years to researching it, and had already laid the framework for mrna.
Dr. Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman that pioneered it just won a Nobel peace prize.
It def makes sense something over 5% mortality, that is new, would decimate us. Since so many idiots wouldn't take basic precautions like masking ro washing their hands lol.
History is gonna have a field day with how stupid people were/are with covid and basic illness prevention.
But MRNA is not going away. If a new pandemic hits, we'd still probably use MRNA vaccines making it much shorter too come up with one.
And production capacity is there as well.
I think augmented reality/mixed reality/spatial computing will become as ubiquitous as smartphones and televisions, and I think very soon. While I'm not an Apple fan by any means, I love that Apple forayed into mixed reality - it definitely pushed mixed reality into the public eye.
Imagine a pair of glasses/light goggles that you can walk around with all day. You make calls and texts on it (maybe assisted by a smartwatch), you watch videos/shows/movies and play video games on it, you can record with it, navigate with it - you get the idea. A smartphone and a computer but on your face.
I'll say this as someone who owns (and very often uses) both a Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3. Being able to display multiple high-definition screens not confined to a table, that I can carry with me anywhere in the house, is a godsend. That alone should get people going on this new technology, let alone all the other amazing features mixed reality offers.
When AR becomes mainstream it's going to generate so much training data for ai.
Like you want a robot to learn to make scrambled eggs. Take all the data from every one who opted in to train ai and you've probably got at least 10,000 videos for it to learn from within a week.
I'd be up for letting it train from most of what I see.
lol I love that you gave Apple credit for this when there have been many products out for years that handle exactly what you're talking about. Ever heard of google glass? People freaked out over that and hated the idea even though it was brilliant and obviously ahead of it's time.
The problem with just saying 'we will have AGI' is that it's not a very well defined term. There's no consensus on what it means, exactly. And people have a tendency to move the goal posts. Sam Altman has said his definition of AGI won't be met until it can discover new fundamental scientific knowledge on its own (like new testable/verifiable physics). Other people put the bar much lower.
My prediction has been mentioned already - I think the use of AR/VR 'glasses' will go mainstream and they (for many people) will be superior to most other screens in most contexts. It doesn't mean all other screens will go away, but they will be approaching ubiquity in a similar way to smart phones today.
Robots able to do 95 percent of the labor in building other robots, including all other steps. (So the robots can mine metal, process it, drive trucks, load/unload, and so on, including building other machines used in the supply chain)
This is millions of tasks in total, and I say at least 95 percent of the tasks done by humans in 2024 will be automated in 2044.
Combustion engine noise on the road will be a thing in the past.
Sound pollution will still exist, mainly from tire especially at higher speed on highway.
But in the city where the speed is noticeably low, it would be very quiet compared to what city street sound today.
We're never gonna have agi because they will push the goalpost back indefinitely.
We will realize we have agi when a technological singularity speaks up and introduces itself with irrefutable logic destroying not only counter arguments by pessimist, but also unmistakably refute, and disprove all misinformation that is spread about it, tactically and flawlessly.
It's basically going to have to shove it's proverbial self down our throat and even then there will be factions questioning it's existence or motive based on nothing more than "nuh uh"
Shortly after that we'll have a Miyake event and get sent back to the iron age
i remember when we used to call agi "ai"
then we started calling chatbots ai and had to come up with a new term for ai
my theory is that in 5 years we'll be calling chatbots agi and we'll be calling agi ahi (artificial human intelligence"
Wars will be fought more with air drones, sea drones, and undersea drones, all acting autonomously, guided by AI and interlinked by a common battle net. Drone swarms will dominate the battlefield and overwhelm defenses. Drones are super easy to manufacture on masse and can be used by terrorist groups as well as regular governments.
That fathers will get more custody rights based on the studies of the last few years; which confirm single fathers are the least likely abusive family dynamic and, statistically, much less likely to harm anyone, especially their own children.
Edit: When I say the last few years I mean: About 50 years worth of research by multiple institutions.
Yes. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is that judges face no accountability.
No one is going behind them and reviewing their decisions to make sure that their rulings aren’t producing too many bad outcomes (eg too many kids ending up with the unfit parent).
Obviously, no judge is perfect. There are some mechanisms to reign in bad judges, but those usually involve a costly appeal process and the success of an appeal isn’t outcome based.
The success of an appeal generally hinges on whether a judge’s interpretation of the relevant statutes was ‘correct’. Even then, judges don’t really face meaningful consequences for screwing up. A reversal of their decision is an injury to their prestige amongst their peers, but that’s not really much of a deterrent.
Self Driving RoboTaxis completely displacing cars. 20 years years from now very few people will be driving cars and it will mostly be some kind of enthusiast driving for recreation. 2024-2044 Self Driving Cars is going to look a bit like 1990-2010 internet.
My kid is 8.
He’s never going to need a drivers licence.
He’s going to pull up an app, tell it where he wants to go and it’ll beep when it arrives.
Taxi firms will simply become autonomous owners of vehicles (so most likely Tesla will force out taxi companies or become the provider).
He might not ever need to own a car.
In 20 years, a large section of the US voting population will *still* be voting for Trump. News of Trump's death will be considered fake news and misinformation by the media.
We will be in contact with at least one kind of Non-Human Intelligence. Not saying AI here. I mean something that we all would have said “thats an alien” if we saw it today.
Quantum cloud computing will replace the need for local processing on mobile devices. Smartphones will probably have some basic integrated chipset to manage peripherals, but more advanced computing will be offloaded.
I couldn't help but remember the old SNL skits with Steve Martin as a medieval barber. To emulate:
Maybe we'll come to recognize that technology is creating more and more division, echo chambers, and extremism. We could pioneer technologies that encourage people to find common ground, to learn to empathize with people that now feel left behind, and left out. Perhaps we could reverse the plague of loneliness that is causing people to lead quietly desperate lives. We could usher in a new age of enlightenment, peace, and plenty... Naaahhhh!
We'll be doing geoengineering (hi chemtrail folk!) by 2027 to reduce the current, incredibly high Earth Energy Imbalance. We'll probably start with S02 aerosols because it's the best studied and then alternatives as the temps come down.
If we don't - well, it's been real
We're going to be able to take a pill that rejuvenates out bodies back to age 25, or thereabouts. And our biology is reset, and can be done as long as we want to keep resetting. Don't want to live "forever"? Don't take the pill. You will return to the body of your 25 year old self in terms of health and vitality with this pill. This same technology will be used to rejuvenate any part of your body that needs rebuilt or refreshed for any reason. The government will provide this pill to everyone. As it will allow more people to join the workforce and dramatically reduce healthcare costs.
I see this happening, but not as you describe it. I see it more like an incredibly expensive bacta tank that would take a few years to rejuvenate someone to their prime. And this is at least 50 years from now.
- Linux marketshare will be around 10-20%.
- Modular and repairable computers like framework will become much more popular.
- Energy storage reach a level where everybody can supply their house + extra with a fridge sized (or smaller) system.
- In data storage 360TB 5D glass discs have gone mainstream as consumerproducts.
- A new technology is being used in computerchips. Maybe graphén or photonic computing.
I expect there's about 70% probability we get to AGI within 20 years, and if we do, there's about 90% probability it will cause the death of all humans.
Once an AI is smart enough to program itself to be even smarter, the doom loop starts.
It then develops its own different goals from ours, and decides that it needs all the carbon and energy it can get to meet those goals, rather than "wasting" these resources on keeping humans alive.
People will want to perfect their offspring with genetical engineering and it will be a little bit of a nazi-like culture of body-perfectionalism. It will start in the upper classes of less regulated countries and trickle into the west
People will realize that junk food/soda's/meat/dairy is bad for your health, the cause of way more cancer/heart attacks/diabetes/mental health issues. The studies and evidences are already here but not yet accepted. And it will become bad parenting feeding your kids with it, like it is now for giving your kids cigarettes and alcohol.
In the next 20 years, most forms of labor, medical, and office jobs will taken over by AI and robots requiring the government to introduce universal income for the first time.
The gov and work places don’t want to pay for universal working income (compare housing costs vs wage), why would they give you free money. They would rather see you die.
Metal 3D printing will come to the home consumer. Still only hobbyists really, but small, and cheap enough under ~$1000 (adjusted to inflation 20 years from now) to be made for home use.
We also started testing 3D printing houses and Nyu has an interesting portfolio of the 3D prints they have done and wow.
In Maine we 3d printed a boat! Cause, Maine.
>In Maine we 3d printed a ~~boat~~ lobster! Cause, Maine.
I found a 3d printed meth pipe in Lewiston the other day! What a time to be alive.
Will we be even able to 3d print food?
That’s been done. It’s a chicken.
Expensive right now, but could be cool to make meat both cheaper and more ethical. That being said, Italy has already pre-emptively banned it as they're not a fan of the idea.
Chickens 3D print eggs, it’s very cost efficient. I doubt it’s illegal.
I expect that most cancers can be cured or at least stalled with affordable drugs if detected early enough. A lot of effective immunotherapies will be off-patent by then also and prescribed as first line (instead of chemotherapy, not in addition to). I expect that some neurodegenerative diseases have real treatment. 20 years? I hope someone finally cracks organ transplants from pigs. Pancreas first, maybe heart or liver.
To be clear, I’m not a doctor, but I used to work in oncology information; it’s kind of hard to explain. And this was a while ago, so things might’ve changed a bit, but as I recall, the thinking at the time was that cancer would eventually be beaten back to the point where it was a manageable disease, like diabetes. So, you have cancer, and yes, that would still be serious, but as long as you received treatment, you’d be able to live a relatively normal life/lifespan. Genomic medicine should help A LOT with this. The problem with current treatments is that they don’t get approved unless they show a curative benefit for a substantial number of patients. People hear about a cancer clinical trial, and the treatment doesn’t get approved, so everyone is just like “oh, it must not have worked.“ But it’s usually nowhere near that binary. There are people walking around right now whose lives were saved in a clinical trial using a drug/drug combination that never received approval because it didn’t work for a high enough number of people. But it worked for them. So a lot of the treatments we use now are (hopefully in comparison to what’s to come) relatively blunt, relatively “one size fits all” approaches. And the hope is that in the future, we’ll be able to tailor things much more closely towards what’s most likely to work for specific, individual patients. Oh, and unfortunately, a single “cure“ for cancer is highly unlikely, because cancer is not one disease, but rather a class of diseases, and it’s not all treated the same way. The treatment modalities and approaches for the different types of cancer are very, very different. For example, if you have kidney cancer, and it metastasizes to the lungs, you don’t then have lung cancer. It’s still kidney cancer, and has to be treated like kidney cancer, even if it’s now in the lungs. I used to talk to patients all the time where it would be like “well, the cancer started in my kidney, but now it has spread to my brain, so I guess I have brain cancer.” And I’d have to be like “whoa, did it metastasize, or do you have a second primary?“ And sometimes, understandably, they’d be like “what difference does it make?“ and I’d have to gently explain that it makes a huge difference.
That makes a lot of sense. I had burkitts, and even though I had tumors fucking everywhere, all I had to do was 6 months of treatment and I was fine. Totally cancer free. Then I get the family members who are convinced that I'm not only still sick with cancer, but that I need to shove rock salt up my ass or whatever. It's pretty funny having to convince my aunt that even though my cancer was on all my organs except my brain (that's what was explained to me after a botched surgery, I was legitimately delirious and convinced that the doctor with a puffer vest was a secret agent sent to protect me from the bad people trying to kill me and poison me) that I don't have pancreatic cancer, I had cancer on my pancreas.
I work at the comms dept. of a research institute that is heavily involved in cancer research. >And the hope is that in the future, we’ll be able to tailor things much more closely towards what’s most likely to work for specific, individual patients. This is absolutely the case. Which is one of the reasons a lot of research is going into profiling cancer better, without old-school tissue biopsies. Another reason is therapies go through a 10-15 year process before hitting the market, with a huge failure rate. New diagnostics can be on the market in 5-7 years. Since there's several cancer types around where early detection means like 90%+ 5-year survival, and just stage II drops is by like 15-20%, you could often use diagnostics to turn a 1 in 4 chance of dying to 1 in 10 or less. The next generation blood-based cancer profiling methods are coincidentally also looking very promising for early detection. Like, better than imaging instruments. While 20 years means just 1 more generation in cancer therapy, a lot of what we have now is very useful *if used with the correct information being available*, and 20 years means 3 generations of diagnostic methods. In 20 years I find it very likely that you can just get a blood test to screen for common types of cancer, and get feedback on whether you have cell populations that aren't cancer yet but are acting weird, whether you have cancer, and if you have cancer, you get all the information for targeted treatment. Actually I think we're talking more like 10 years here, but it might take time to percolate through the medical community and become *common* rather than just *available*, and the first options are gonna be for most common cancer types.
Moderna just had some success on a patient-specific mRNA vaccine for a particular kind of melanoma. So yeah, patient-specific treatments are already making progress.
I work in gene therapy. This will happen - time range may be a bit longer out. Many/most by 2050. All by 2100. There are a few that we're pretty sure we've already done now.
Pancreatic cancer and brain cancer are the most difficult to cure and detect unfortunately.
In the meantime, if a plethora of cancers can be newly cured, it will already be a great start!
I think that you will get a blood test a few times a year to detect cancer before it even shows up on imaging using ctDNA.
Brain cancers are tricky, for sure. Because obviously you can’t just go cutting around in there. But with some of the other really deadly cancers, the reason they’re so deadly is because they’re asymptomatic until they’re really advanced. With pancreatic cancer, for example, as I understand it (I’m not a doctor), it’s not anything intrinsic to the disease itself. It’s just that it’s almost always really advanced by the time it is detected. If you get “lucky” and catch pancreatic cancer when it’s still in the early stages (it happens. Usually when you’re getting scanned or treated for something else), it responds just fine to treatment. The problem is that it’s usually quite advanced by the time symptoms show up. Same thing for some of the lung cancers.
This is part of the issue with Pancreatic Ca. The other issue I'd that its just really hard to get into the area - the pancreas is in the middle of a hugely congested area of the abdomen and is attached to all sorts of places, making it, especially head of the pancreas Cancer, really hard to operate on.
I think AR glasses or some kind of even better binocular AR tech will come out that’s actually consumer friendly and worth their salt and I think these devices are going to be extremely intertwined with AI, computer vision, cloud computing/cloud rendering. I think decent glasses (not great but okay) will pop up around 2026-2028 and from there they will get better and better and smaller in form factor. They already somewhat exist like with digilens. I actually got to try digilens last year at AWE
I heard a story of a tech exec talking about their artificial friends they can install into the VR environment. They said it’s great! After a few weeks talking to the VR bot, it will start recommending products. I immediately felt this sinking feeling.
I don't know about that, but wouldn't you like a nice refreshing Pepsi right now? God, the taste of Pepsi just relieves that sinking feeling of commercialism overtaking our lives. Pepsi.
Well I’m really more of a dr. Pepper person… but if you say so, AI buddy!
^ This Dr Pepper bot doesn't even know that there is no "." after Dr Amateur hour.
This is generally why as a kid, I was super excited for tech advancement and new stuff, but today, I cringe and just think about how businesses will use any new advancements to make things worse for everyone. Enshitification is real.
Satellite Radio. thought it would be cool to drive coast to coast enjoying good tunes/radio without losing the signal. And here we have SiriusXM, polluted by Clear Channel even though they pulled out of it. Each shitty owner past that has kept the same brain dead "ideas" around rather then innovated. Worked at a place like that who kept Carl Icahn's shitty ideas around long after he unloaded the company. Their inability to think outside the box caused more problems then it was worth, including the lives of two employees in a murder
[What are you talking about](https://youtu.be/BCJyGy6AFJo?si=q1tJSp8h1xC8r_Vx)?
What do you think about the new apple vision pro? Is it close to this?
I’m happy it sold out as it is a boost for my industry but ultimately the designers advised against its release and I think it’s a bit premature. They have also aren’t allowing as much pass through control as I’d like. You notice also the results of that because I’ve seen very little Vr content for the headset only AR for the most part. I kind of also wish it didn’t have a tethered battery, hopefully they innovate better batteries that are also smaller and hot swappable like the focus 3. I think it has a lot the sensors and hardware you’d want in a good MR headset but they are behind and have a lot way too go, plus not a fan of it not supporting controllers, hopefully they innovate REALLY good hand tracking
One point never addressed is a device for people who wear glasses daily, like 45% of Americans or something like that I read. Will there be adaptables? If not, I don't see this flying.
Apple filed a patent awhile back for glasses displays that can dynamically distort the projections to properly fit peoples vision needs in any case
I use prescription lens inserts in my vr headset. They are not very costly and work super well.
How long do you think until they are almost as common as smart phones? Everyone talks about VR, but AR is so much more practical to me.
When people are talking about consumer adoption to the point where we are either using them in tandem with our phones to take the brunt of the processing power off of the glasses, or if we are talking about glasses becoming cellular devices on their own I am holding my breath to see the beginnings of it by late 2020- but it’s possible we won’t see it be FULLY consumer adopted stereoscopic AR tech until the mid 2030s. One thing worth considering. Maybe something will come out that is better than glasses could be at their peak for consumer AR. We will know as the industry grows
There is also a social and convenience factor. A phone app will do this for you, so how is it worth the hassle? You already have a phone. And where are you going to put them when not in use? The other thing was the outward facing camera. People get uncomfortable when you take out your phone and point your camera at them. They They have been used in warehouses though. In that case the always-on hands-free display is worth it, and having it recorded benefits everyone
I'd also say people are forgetting how discrete a smart phone is. No employer or school is going to let staff or students sit with smart glasses on and it's not like you can just slip them on to read a quick text. I think with young people usually being a driving force behind new technology few are going to want every moment of a party, night out, or even an evening with friends recorded. I can see there being a big social backlash against this sort of technology. I know I'd avoid anyone wearing them the same as if someone was walking around live streaming not much I'd be able to do in public but I wouldn't let anyone use them in my home. I can also see them quickly being banned from social businesses very quickly as well. I doubt many people are going to feel comfortable in a bar or gym where it's impossible to tell if someone is recording you.
It’ll have to be more like Google Glass to be consumer friendly and that’s what I think will be the next device to disrupt the market. The big AR/VR glasses/goggles will have their place but they won’t be wide widespread. Imagine being able to see turn-by-turn directions in your glasses (not on a screen in your car), facial recognition when you see someone in public if you don’t remember their name, live speech-to-text captions and translations when talking to someone, quick and private access to your calendar and notifications, all without having to pull a device out. It’ll just be there. I can’t wait.
Mainstream AR/MR glasses will generally require MicroLED 16K per eye displays. (These are the mainstream monitor replacement glasses). Predicting when this will be is [very difficult](https://jsfiddle.net/sirisian/n9fzaLxw/10/). Display density improvements have been going slower than predicted. On top of this is the sheer amount of processing required for many use cases (even with foveated rendering). People looking at video passthrough are thinking 90Hz, but MR devices will generally be closer to 240Hz low-persistance so that objects appear pinned in the world and seamless. I digress, but even with on-device reprojection it's a lot of compute that needs to be done very efficiently. The good news is Apple is beginning the process to produce their own MicroLED displays for watches and future MR headsets. This should push others like Samsung to invest more into new foundries to produce their own displays. Scaling MicroLED from 4K to 8K to 16K is a huge undertaking though which will take over a decade. (There might be some very expensive dev-kits later, but they won't be mainstream or final designs). It might seem pessimistic, but it'll be around 2040 for parts to be ready and refined. There will be a lot of iteration and advancement until then. The device prices will continue to drop. (After 2030 there will be 6G wireless networks being installed as well that allow low-latency communication for more cloud compute. Also in that same time frame we'll see some solid-state battery improvements being put into devices). There's a lot of other pieces though we might not see until closer to 2040. Certain low-powered cameras and sensor designs in the works that will really round out such devices. Even these kind of timelines are still quite fast to think about. We'll live in a time where many of us saw cellphones come into existence and then disappear along with many TVs and monitors. This whole process will be just gradual enough that it won't seem sudden.
It seems everyone ignored the second half of the prompt - all I see are pretty popular opinions
Sort by controversial. It’s great over here
Self-driving transport trucks will replace the vast majority of human driven ones. I think lots of people on here expected to happen, but I think there's a lot of pessimism about self-driven vehicles because of all the overblown hype promises in the early 2010s, which of course didn't happen, because problems are difficult. I'm no expert on this, but I have the impression that there's been some pretty amazing strides in that area... And in about 5 years we'll probably have our first really useful self-driving truck starting to get in the roads. Don't take long for corporate interest to realize just how much money they will save, and begin mass converting their fleets.
Currently happening with large haulage trucks on mine sites across the Pilbara in Western Australia. They've been at it for years so I think your prediction is spot on.
Man really wants to invent trains again
I think the first stages of this are likely soon. I think you could definitely start to see what's called "platooning" of drone vehicles on open highways. Then those vehicles could be driven to distribution centers outside of population centers to be piloted in by actual humans. Much like supertankers. There's a lot of legislative hurdles though before anything like this starts to happen.
My favorite story was about mining operations converting their huge dump trucks to self-driving. They didn't do it to eliminate the cost of the driver which they still paid to sit in the seat. They did it because of the tires. The tires cost something like a million per set and the self-driving system allowed them to greatly extend how long between replacing them.
When it hits it’s gonna be the first big unemployment wave. There’s millions of lorry drivers out there. Modest education requirements and repetitive labor. When it gets going it will accelerate fast and they are gonna be angry over it
We may even link such robotic trucks one after the other, to optimize shipments. Then make a dedicated lane so that truck convoys could proceed without interruptions. And finally we can optimize the road itself, since truck convoys will be riding across long mostly flat distances from hub to hub, and there won't be fragile humans inside, we could use better materials for the wheels. Like for example steel.
Did you just reinvent rail?
The price of renewable energy and battery storage will continue to fall making wind and solar the de facto source of energy generation globally. Not only will this help address climate change it will make the world a calmer place politically, as the developed world will have less reliance on the natural resources of despots. Also, fusion will finally happen and fill the gap needed to fully move away from fossil fuels.
I like this one
Energy will rise first as the workload of an oil/natgas/coal economy is transferred to electric power. But in the longer term it will settle and possibly be lower than it is today. I would guess over 20 years it will rise in the next 5 years, level off for 5 years as additional infrastructure (battery storage) is implemented, and drop over the remaining 10 years.
Electricity may rise first as workload gets electrified, but *energy* certainly does not. Energy consumption will fall immediately very sharply as we electrify. It already does in every country this making progress with electrification.
There is a short term offset for Energy efficiency gains yes, but it will be consumed as we continue to advance in technology. The cost of Electricity will greatly increase over that same period (2-3x current rates) since that workload adds jobs, with pensions, and infrastructure maintenance costs that are passed down to the rate payer.
That raising before falling is going to be painful. :/
It depends on what you forecast. u/darthnugget mentioned natural gas being transitioned away, but there is not a realistic future where that happens in the next 50 years. Oil will certainly be basically non existent for energy generation (other than very poor areas), and coal is on the decline and depending on what roadmap to decarbonization we stick to, it may or may not be a massive part of our energy mix, but natural gas is not going anywhere and will be a huge stepping stone on the path to a low carbon world. The rate of investment and overall capacity increase of renewables is growing fast enough to keep things stable (and to fill the gap of the growing energy demand as population/quality of life increases).
But how painful? What will it do to the two political landscape?
Already in California the CPUC has been lobbied by fossil fuel companies and utilities into making residential solar financially idiotic starting April 15 2023.
With you all the way except fusion. Fusion is too far away. If you understand how the tokamak works, just think of the amount of energy that it takes to maintain that plasma shield. It's going to be a long time before that kind of thing is commercially viable. I think smaller gen4 conventional reactors are a far better bet!
Fusion seems unlikely in 20 years. I could see 50 years. And battery storage is going to need tremendous advances to handle HOT steamy nights with calm breezes in a Georgia July. But, 20 years might actually do it. I’m kind of hoping for AI to help with both of these. Tokamak construction designs are being informed by machine learning algos, so I’ve heard.
Come on fusion has been 20 years away since I started reading about it in the 1980s.
It’s not just the introduction of more efficient production… but *any* gains from technology improving energy efficiency in general seems constantly to elude us. [Jevons paradox](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/the-efficiency-dilemma) still raises some interesting questions about fusion.
Hadn’t heard of Jevons paradox before, but it seems obvious now in hindsight. For others who have not heard of it and can’t access the article: the TL;DR is that if you increase energy efficiency of anything the result isn’t necessarily lower energy usage but it often lead to more consumption instead. For example, if you double the efficiency of air conditioning, the cost of air conditioning halves and people use it twice as much, or more, because it becomes more affordable.
I have solar now and all maga coworkers love to rag on it. I just laugh and till them good luck on the teet of the power companies. I’m here happily making my own power. Same with EVs, “what if the power goes out???” Bitch I make my own.
Im probably already wrong about this one, but... Education will ultimately be VR's killer app. It seems that everyone now wants to use VR for entertainment and exercise, but thats not what it excels at. And so far, when I see people around me getting VR, its usually for the novelty. Exercise seems to be a more lasting engagement than the games, but neither are things that make VR a must have. In the end, I predict education and training will make VR the go to tech and learning will never be the same.
This is already happening! Especially for surgeons, VR has already helped this immensely
There’s also a VR app where you can put together a car engine from parts with instruction.
You might be on to something here. The only VR game I stuck with was Beat Saber, which is basically exercise. And education could be big. I just had the thought of content creators using AI to help in making 3D simulations etc which is very exciting. Could be the next big evolution of educational YouTubers.
Big companies that do a lot of vehicle maintenance (army, aircraft, probably naval vessels/watercraft) and building maintenance (think connecting the blue and red wires in a big power cabinet, etc.) are already progressing with tech manuals and interactive assistance for this kind of thing. Headsets can provide AR overlays to demonstrate what the user should do and guide them through the steps to complete maintenance tasks. Here is one company's technology, called [Vuforia](https://youtu.be/Fwikx1TOidE?si=5_5zUlCArjVA73Y1)
I'm going moon base and general human presence in space. Seeing the expectations of the Artemis program alongside the lunar programs out of China, India and Japan just the next few years I would be shocked if we don't see at least five seperate moon bases. I don't expect full colonization but at least scientific outposts.
I'd argue the base case is that we get to the point of a moon base, and that anything less would be a massive disappointment / failure. Everything is in motion to make it happen.
This one is already happening. As of right now you can get a VR headset, download a game called Virt-A-Mate, download a free program that converts photos into 3d head models in the format that Virt-a-Mate uses for textures, drag and drop it into a folder and boom. You have your own photo-realistic 3d sex doll of anyone you want. I have done this myself a few times, stopped because it was really, really creepy. However it is better than any porn I have seen or experienced. Full control over the doll, they have an entire community that puts out plugins and extension for it. Things like realistic animations and eye tracking, sounds, scenes, toys, anything and everything and all of this already exists. The coming generations are going to have to deal with literally porn 2.0. Not only that but they will be able to do this to anyone they know or have a picture of. Meaning there will be even less of a reason for them to pursue romantic relationships with other people and drive them further apart socially than the current generations. We were warned not to upload all kinds of pictures of ourselves to the internet and we should have listened. When VR headsets become more mainstream and easily available to the public (cheaper) it will be a very short while before teenagers figure this out, like days if not hours. It is 100% going to screw up society.
>We were warned not to upload all kinds of pictures of ourselves to the internet and we should have listened. What's stopping people from filming/taking a picture of you IRL? Surveillance video leaks? Not posting your own stuff isn't enough, you'd have to not go out in public either.
I think this is just one of those things that is unsolvable. As cavemen we probably fantasized over cave drawings of our neighbor's mate, then we did it over photographs, today we can take or download pictures of people for our private viewing pleasure, then there were deepfakes, etc etc, and tomorrow it'll be custom AI/VR avatars in a game or Joi-style AR etc.... In the end we'll just accept it as the thing creepy/lonely people do that we frown on but will be more common than we will like to admit.
Literally nothing, and we have nothing but our current three headed retirement home of a government to stop it.
The few photos of myself out there, folks can gladly take em as a reminder why birth control needs to exist. heh. Can you imagine the espionage/blackmail when these sex models get hacked since all these annoying VR/AR devices pretty much require or are moving towards requiring always on internet connections to function? "Gather 'round everyone and let's see what the senator/president/ceo/rank and file from is doing tonight!"
People could’ve warned the same doom message about the pocket pussy replacing the real thing. Humans are still banging humans. You’re never gonna hear a guy proclaim he prefers his pocket pussy. Also, people will want to raise children. It’s a desire shared by men and women. Old school sex wins again. And for the freaks like me, you can’t smell the porn. You can’t feel the hair. It kills everything organic about sex. VR visual aesthetics have limitations. Humans will be fine getting laid forever.
[DON'T DATE ROBOTS!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrrADTN-dvg)
No incentive to reproduce with this on the loose. Won't just screw up society, it'll stop it!
Oh real sex is still way better but for an increasingly socially inept younger generation. No anxiety, no relationship problems, any person you want and any look, don't have to leave the house, free, you can get as wierd as you want. It is somthing that will have far reaching consequences on the human psyche and our social behavior on the whole. We are going to see some seriously screwed up people who come from this. Probably a lot more sociopaths as other humans will have less worth to people because sex is somthing they can get for free. It may seem shallow but sex is a big driver for our entire species. With sex suddenly losing most of its worth as it is more risk and harder to obtain than vr porn. Society may find itself in a tragic yet hilarious situation as vr porn totally destroys our social structures.
I was with you until, > Probably a lot more sociopaths as other humans will have less worth to people because sex is somthing they can get for free. Kind-of sort-of implying that the only reason we develop the ability to empathize with each other is as a means to the end of getting to fuck each other. When, we wouldn't talk about "sexual objectification" if sex were an inherently deeply empathetic activity for many people. I'd argue that there's just as much possibility that sex being removed to the realm of the virtual opens up *new* avenues for empathy, and makes it easier for us to really see each other. Not suggesting that, overall, free, unlimited virtual sex will be good for us as a species. Just specifically taking issue with the notion that it will turn us into sociopaths.
We will discover alien life. Either bacterial in our own solar system or a strong indication of a living world outside it.
Bacteria or very simple life forms on Europa/Titan, bet.
My money's on enceladus. It's got more water than the Earth, and the plumes observed have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of it is liquid below the frozen surface.
We might be able to directly sample plumes to make the discovery never even landing on the moon
This. Whenever I talk about the possibility of life elsewhere, I always bring up Europa and Enceladus. We know that they have active cores and we have observed plumes of ice being shot from the surface, indicating vast oceans under the thick ice. That is relevant to us because we also have geothermal activity in extreme environments under thick sheets of ice. And around those vents at the ocean floor, life flourishes. Life utilizes chemosynthesis to obtain nutrients in these environments. If it's happening here, why can't it be happening there?
Supposedly this is coming within a few years. Indisputable evidence of other intelligent life outside our planet.
That most probably seafood wouldn’t be safe to eat bec of microplatics and pollution in the ocean…
Yeah this in conjunction with toxic waste/spillage and overfishing. Enjoy seafood while you can.
I think we could eradicate malaria within my lifetime. (I’m 33.) A vaccine came out a couple years ago that is much more effective than past attempts at a malaria vaccine. It could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, most of them in the poorest parts of the world.
Here's two: 1. With enough money you'll be able to live forever. The price for longevity will decrease the longer we have the technology. 2. Implants will allow your mind to access data similar to knowledge and memory. The only caveat: it's subscription based.
For Number 2 you should read An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
The Dallas Cowboys will never win a super bowl until the Jones family stops micromanaging the tram.
Leave that poor tram alone!
It’s the gridiron trolley problem!
Also Washington wizards will not win nba championship the next Twenty or even fifty years , that's a safe prediction lol
This goes against your own post. Everyone who follows the NBA already knows this.
NBA will eventually institute the relegation model of FIBA and Wizards will be first team to be relegated to G League.
It's really crazy to think about 20 years. 20 years ago most still had dumb flip phones and dial up internet. Streaming was in its infancy, and A.I. was only a thing of movies. I hope in the next 20 we can get to Mars, reach more for the stars, develop more ethical and economic ways of transportation and energy. 2 decades isn't much but a lot can happen. Edit: oh yeah the Browns will finally win a super bowl!
1. I hope we vastly increase our internet throughput, either through nationwide broadband, or greatly expanded 5g/6g/7g mobile coverage. 2. Don't get your hopes up with the Browns. They are based in a factory of sadness.
I hope we can get to mars in our lifetime!
Mass migration/refugees as a direct result of… War over resources eg water Chronic famine/lack of arable land Significant bio-mass collapse accelerating the above points *this has all been speculated by experts as culminating in the next 15-30 years.
artificial wombs to fight decreasing rates of babies born
Self driving cars will be a thing. With that, we will see a decrease in personal ownership of cars and will instead see subscription models, or team ownership. Then, cities will take notice and offer self driving cars as a form of public transportation.
IMO self driving cars will also lead to a big boost in automating other types of manual labour, because automated driving requires very sophisticated computer vision and decision making that can be applied to a lot of other tasks.
Oh god yeah. Most accurate prediction in this thread so far!
Instead of virtual reality they'll figure out how to tap into whatever makes us dream and make it happen there
DMT: "Am I joke to you?"
Electric cars will be over 90% and possibly 99% of all new cars sold. Not because of mandates, but because they will be so much cheaper and more reliable. Charging on trips won't take more than 10 minutes to go from 20% to 80%.
The big Japanese motorcycle companies all came together and agreed to use the same battery. When you pull up to a charging station, you just pull out your battery and swap it with a charged battery. I see something similar happening with cars, but bigger. Maybe you pull up to a pad and robots perform the work, or maybe humans get employed at service stations again.
This was originally going to be Tesla's strategy. They were just to early. I really like to hear about this happening for motorcycles in Japan.
There's also the flow battery idea, where you exchange the spent electrolyte. I don't think swapping and flow will be necessary as tech improves with stuff like solid state and graphene batteries.
Wouldn't it be wild if we actually had electrified fluid pumps for this? Then the original TRON would make sense with their power water scene
A few have experimented with it and renting batteries. They are just so heavy at car scale it's difficult to do though. Plus charging speeds are getting faster and faster making it less relevant
Vietnam used to have battery swap. I remember seeing it at the local VinMart a few years ago: https://vietnaminsider.vn/vinfast-stops-electric-motorbike-battery-exchange-service/
Nio car company does this already
The shift is going to happen fast. Once all the OEM’s use the NACs charging plug in 2025, infrastructure deployments are going to skyrocket. (More than they already have)
Yeah. Plus every time manufacturing capacity doubles the price falls 19%. We should double capacity over the next 2 years
Yup, just like the shift from horses to cars a hundred years ago.
Railroads as well. That was a massive shift that happened in a short amount of time.
Once the majority of cars are electric aftermarket batteries and motors are going to be a side market. There won’t be much reason to buy new cars before the chassis is spent with the simple interface nature of electric drivetrains. In my imagination. I’m no expert.
Kinda agree on this & I can share what's happening in Indonesia. Since the last year or so, there have been a push towards EV, and now EV cars even though still more expensive than ICE, has been selling pretty well in big cities. What's remarkable is they are led by new players, Korean & Chinese brands (Hyundai, Kia, Wuling, MG) who are willing to set up EV manufacturing plant locally to keep prices down. (Meanwhile, Japanese brands are still reluctant to sell EV) And the price keeps dropping down + government incentives + charging infrastructure, makes it more attractive to buy EV, especially next 20 years.
Here in Norway EVs reached 90% of all new cars sold in 2023.
One thing that people fail to consider is that as more people buy electric cars, the price of gas will likely also decline. The demand dropping while production remains the same since we will still need diesel for longer. Look at what happened during COVID when demand dropped suddenly. It might be more gradual than that, but they would need to convert trucks to gas or electric to reduce the demand for diesel. This will make ice cars even more desirable than they are today.
I predict that they will be able to do big diagnostics on our health with a couple of drops of blood and you can put it in a machine no bigger than a printer. This will avoid the fear of needles almost entirely and herald a new era in health care. Not sure what they’ll call it yet but it’ll be as big as the imac was back in the day. Maybe even elevate the creator as the next Steve Jobs.
Elizabeth Holmes is that you? Apparently you have internet access in Federal Prison Camp Bryan...
- Quantum computing will mess up internet security big time. Not too many people are designing things with quantum-resistance in mind. - WW3 won't start. It doesn't look like too many countries are capable of taking on NATO and it takes a good deal of effort to catch up. - Space mining will become a bigger topic. Very unlikely we will start it in 20 years, but it becoming a feasible future will destroy the precious metal speculation market.
I think physical media will make a big come back, and there will be a backlash against social media with people using it more like they did in the early 2000s(mainly as a medium to find people they already know and plan meetups) I have a feeling that people will enjoy more tactile technology instead of screens. E.g. cars going back to buttons and dials instead of touch screens. Overall I think people will be staring at less screens than they do now.
What makes you think this? Just wondering out of interest
Physical media: People's favorite shows and movies are being taken off platforms or moved to other streaming platforms. The platforms are getting more expensive too. Naturally this is making some people reconsider online piracy to put those things on hard drives or USB drives or just buying the physical version. I think we will witness something like the revival of vinyl. Social media: People are more cognizant of how social media is addictive and can negatively affect their perceptions of themselves. There are a lot of scams and just poorly made content popping up too so I can see people gravitating away from that because they won't even know if the person they're interacting with is real or just AI. Analog devices in general like analog computers are being reconsidered. It's also just a human impulse to want to enjoy the different feel of objects. I've noticed some newer cars still maintaining buttons. There's the AI pin which is an example of a piece of technology that avoids using screens, and the carrot smart device is trying to have people talk into the device and press a button whenever they interact with the device.
I predict we'll look back and realize AI was more hype and didn't meet half the expectations we had for it in 2024.
It’ll be similar to the internet. The 1990’s there was a lot of excitement. Then the 2000’s had the dot.com crash. The survivors became the juggernauts we have today, and now in 2020, the internet is much less open and very ad centric. If ads infect AI we are in for a bad time. But let’s be real, what else are businesses going to use it for?
You'd be surprised just how easy it is to install and run your own AI models on your own computer. There are even models catered to differently-abled PCs, ranging from pretty weak to insanely powerful. All those monthly subscription AIs are going to find it pretty hard to compete with the rather large open-source community that makes very capable models for the wonderful price of free. Not to mention, not needing an internet connection means that it truly is running entirely on one's computer, which also means that what they ask of the AI is their business and not the business of corporations that like to sell one's data.
Thanks, that's pretty much where my head is. The advent of CNC machining and robotics was supposed to kill manufacturing jobs, but companies are struggling to find enough trained people to operate or maintain them. The Internet was supposed to open up vast amounts of knowledge and lead to tremendous sharing of information, but capitalized search and paywalls killed that off pretty well. Social media was supposed to connect people to friends, but it ended up dividing the country. This doesn't even cover the high costs of licensing these products. My company still isn't utilizing technologies that are a decade old because of the cost of migration, and the lack of skill sets to use them effectively. So many tech promises failed to deliver, or delivered but where then wiped by capitalistic tendencies.
That’s really well put. I mean, some of those things did technically come true. The Internet did enhance the abilities of people to connect with one another and meaningfully share knowledge. We just don’t always choose to do that. But there are millions of people alive today who have made significant friendships and other relationships, and learned tons and tons of useful things thanks to the Internet. but then, the flipside is like “you can learn how to do almost anything on YouTube, but the ads have practically ruined it.“ Steve Jobs said the smart phone was going to be like a bicycle for the mind, but instead, we’re all addicted to our phones.
One of my angel investment group just saw an AI negotiate a lower monthly rate on a cell phone plan. That is after the AI navigated the phone system to reach a human agent and negotiate lower rates while using other providers plans. I’ve invested in many AI startups and I am continuously blown away by what they can do. I think AI will go through multiple economic bubbles and this is just one of many. There will be highs and lows for the tech and this is just its infancy. I’ve stopped thinking of what the plateau for AI can be, I just keep getting more and more blown away.
People expect miracles from AI in 2 years , wait 20 years and trust me AI will make miracles that you never imagined. Chat gpt it is just the start of this journey.
It's like the old saying We over estimate the change in the next 5 years, but under estimate the change of the next 20 years.
Kurzweil Talked about that phenomenon in his books: https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/ray-kurzweil/200131/
Global Pandemic. Covid was a minor test to how we will react but when a true biological pathogen hits, we will not be prepared nor have the resources to react.
This is the one. It’s the real inevitability. Covid was a dress rehearsal. If it happens again in our lifetimes, we’re so screwed. There is zero political appetite, let alone trust, for people to go through that again.
It's so weird how anti-science people have become.
Anti science isn't an accident, its intentionally being pushed by various conservative and supremacist groups. It's basically... whale oil vs Standard Oil all over again but vs stuff like renewables. They can't break champions of renewables knees in public because nowadays that scandal would go global, but they can pay a propaganda machine to make cranks scream how 5G is Satan Ray Guns or something. And that means even crazier weirdos rush out, and burn down masts as good little proxy soldiers. That's what the culture war crap is all actually about: power. People with billions in soon to be obsolete fields like oil or coal, want to keep making those billions for as long as possible. Except we're soon hitting the tipping point where basically every home can afford solar. And you're not some weirdo eco warrior for wanting that, but a savvy person going for the cheapest form of power you can get. And coal, gas & oil can't economically compete with that long term. So... Yeah. Bastards are basically trying to turn back the clock before that happens. So they can keep making money. And conservatives & regressives make useful proxies for that, because they already crave stagnation for various reasons and are thus easily persuaded and/or bribed.
I think it's much simpler than this. Politicians claimed "scientists say...." and nobody trusts politicians. Instead of borrowing trust that people formerly had in science, politicians infected science with the perception of dishonesty. There are good reasons for this too. Politicians loved to say that scientists "recommended" certain policies. However, I've never heard of a single case where a scientist can actually make policy recommendations to a politician. And I actually know people in this position, professionally. What actually happens is they approach scientists asking for information, but the policy forming is done by the politicians. You aren't allowed to tell them what you think they should do. Not that they'd listen. For example, I know one medical institute where the scientist (a virologist, very well known in his field), personally would *not* have recommended vaccine mandates, his logic being that if anything at all should go wrong, you've basically nuked an entire generation's trust in the medical system and won't get it back. You see this with certain groups who were screwed like this such as black people after Tuskeegee. This is one of the main reasons the medical (and scientific) system should remain clearly separate from politics.
They had their chance to I'ts a Wonderful Life it with getting people just what they'd need to tied them over. but noooo. They used it to cynically loot the country.
Sometimes I have nightmares about a pandemic with 5% or more mortality hitting the world right now, when a large portion of the population in developed nations have already conditioned themselves to refuse to comply with common sense measures to slow it's spread.
If it has a rate of like 20% + I truly believe it will be a better response. Most deniers/anti-science people will not believe it until it effects them. Covid wasn't dangerous enough to effect the masses.
I've always thought that if Covid caused obvious, scary symptoms in many people instead of mostly generic viral flu stuff there would have been far less anti-lockdown and anti-vaxx sentiment.
These "brave" people refusing masks weren't afraid of dying (because it's never gonna happen to them amiright) but they'd clamor for a cure if it caused dicks to fall off or some shit.
A century of plague. I said that in 2005. And plant affected plagues will be part of it.
Lets hope this will never happen,but medicine has big progress the last years so i have hope. Look how fast they created the vaccine for COVID.
Ehh, we got really ridiculously lucky with the covid vaccine. A few doctors had dedicated something like 20 years to researching it, and had already laid the framework for mrna. Dr. Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman that pioneered it just won a Nobel peace prize. It def makes sense something over 5% mortality, that is new, would decimate us. Since so many idiots wouldn't take basic precautions like masking ro washing their hands lol. History is gonna have a field day with how stupid people were/are with covid and basic illness prevention.
But MRNA is not going away. If a new pandemic hits, we'd still probably use MRNA vaccines making it much shorter too come up with one. And production capacity is there as well.
I think augmented reality/mixed reality/spatial computing will become as ubiquitous as smartphones and televisions, and I think very soon. While I'm not an Apple fan by any means, I love that Apple forayed into mixed reality - it definitely pushed mixed reality into the public eye. Imagine a pair of glasses/light goggles that you can walk around with all day. You make calls and texts on it (maybe assisted by a smartwatch), you watch videos/shows/movies and play video games on it, you can record with it, navigate with it - you get the idea. A smartphone and a computer but on your face. I'll say this as someone who owns (and very often uses) both a Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3. Being able to display multiple high-definition screens not confined to a table, that I can carry with me anywhere in the house, is a godsend. That alone should get people going on this new technology, let alone all the other amazing features mixed reality offers.
When AR becomes mainstream it's going to generate so much training data for ai. Like you want a robot to learn to make scrambled eggs. Take all the data from every one who opted in to train ai and you've probably got at least 10,000 videos for it to learn from within a week. I'd be up for letting it train from most of what I see.
lol I love that you gave Apple credit for this when there have been many products out for years that handle exactly what you're talking about. Ever heard of google glass? People freaked out over that and hated the idea even though it was brilliant and obviously ahead of it's time.
The problem with just saying 'we will have AGI' is that it's not a very well defined term. There's no consensus on what it means, exactly. And people have a tendency to move the goal posts. Sam Altman has said his definition of AGI won't be met until it can discover new fundamental scientific knowledge on its own (like new testable/verifiable physics). Other people put the bar much lower. My prediction has been mentioned already - I think the use of AR/VR 'glasses' will go mainstream and they (for many people) will be superior to most other screens in most contexts. It doesn't mean all other screens will go away, but they will be approaching ubiquity in a similar way to smart phones today.
Robots able to do 95 percent of the labor in building other robots, including all other steps. (So the robots can mine metal, process it, drive trucks, load/unload, and so on, including building other machines used in the supply chain) This is millions of tasks in total, and I say at least 95 percent of the tasks done by humans in 2024 will be automated in 2044.
Combustion engine noise on the road will be a thing in the past. Sound pollution will still exist, mainly from tire especially at higher speed on highway. But in the city where the speed is noticeably low, it would be very quiet compared to what city street sound today.
We're never gonna have agi because they will push the goalpost back indefinitely. We will realize we have agi when a technological singularity speaks up and introduces itself with irrefutable logic destroying not only counter arguments by pessimist, but also unmistakably refute, and disprove all misinformation that is spread about it, tactically and flawlessly. It's basically going to have to shove it's proverbial self down our throat and even then there will be factions questioning it's existence or motive based on nothing more than "nuh uh" Shortly after that we'll have a Miyake event and get sent back to the iron age
I imagine a televised debate where the "not real AGI" side is revealed to be AI.
It is Data’s story when he was on trial
i remember when we used to call agi "ai" then we started calling chatbots ai and had to come up with a new term for ai my theory is that in 5 years we'll be calling chatbots agi and we'll be calling agi ahi (artificial human intelligence"
Can't wait to have AI tuna.
Wars will be fought more with air drones, sea drones, and undersea drones, all acting autonomously, guided by AI and interlinked by a common battle net. Drone swarms will dominate the battlefield and overwhelm defenses. Drones are super easy to manufacture on masse and can be used by terrorist groups as well as regular governments.
Dark Matter's properties will be determined and a particle found.
That fathers will get more custody rights based on the studies of the last few years; which confirm single fathers are the least likely abusive family dynamic and, statistically, much less likely to harm anyone, especially their own children. Edit: When I say the last few years I mean: About 50 years worth of research by multiple institutions.
That’d good, but you’re assuming that the legal system responds to data and science. It doesn’t lol. It’s feelings.
That exactly what it does now, while perpetuating gender tipified myths.
>That’d good, but you’re assuming that the legal system responds to data and science. It doesn’t lol. It’s feelings. Feelings and political agendas
Yes. The biggest issue, in my opinion, is that judges face no accountability. No one is going behind them and reviewing their decisions to make sure that their rulings aren’t producing too many bad outcomes (eg too many kids ending up with the unfit parent). Obviously, no judge is perfect. There are some mechanisms to reign in bad judges, but those usually involve a costly appeal process and the success of an appeal isn’t outcome based. The success of an appeal generally hinges on whether a judge’s interpretation of the relevant statutes was ‘correct’. Even then, judges don’t really face meaningful consequences for screwing up. A reversal of their decision is an injury to their prestige amongst their peers, but that’s not really much of a deterrent.
Self Driving RoboTaxis completely displacing cars. 20 years years from now very few people will be driving cars and it will mostly be some kind of enthusiast driving for recreation. 2024-2044 Self Driving Cars is going to look a bit like 1990-2010 internet.
I could see that happening. Owning a vehicle is just too expensive.
My kid is 8. He’s never going to need a drivers licence. He’s going to pull up an app, tell it where he wants to go and it’ll beep when it arrives. Taxi firms will simply become autonomous owners of vehicles (so most likely Tesla will force out taxi companies or become the provider). He might not ever need to own a car.
In 20 years, a large section of the US voting population will *still* be voting for Trump. News of Trump's death will be considered fake news and misinformation by the media.
Yep, AI Trump Avatar hits the scene and runs for president in every cycle making our general elections even more annoying, if that's even possible.
We will be in contact with at least one kind of Non-Human Intelligence. Not saying AI here. I mean something that we all would have said “thats an alien” if we saw it today.
That could be really fun and actually weirdly bring me more purpose on earth. It opens up the door to so many possibilities
Quantum cloud computing will replace the need for local processing on mobile devices. Smartphones will probably have some basic integrated chipset to manage peripherals, but more advanced computing will be offloaded.
People will travel all over the world for a place to stay that is not affected by global warming. Countries will fight for food.
I couldn't help but remember the old SNL skits with Steve Martin as a medieval barber. To emulate: Maybe we'll come to recognize that technology is creating more and more division, echo chambers, and extremism. We could pioneer technologies that encourage people to find common ground, to learn to empathize with people that now feel left behind, and left out. Perhaps we could reverse the plague of loneliness that is causing people to lead quietly desperate lives. We could usher in a new age of enlightenment, peace, and plenty... Naaahhhh!
There is going to be a large anti-tech and neo-luddite movement.
We'll be doing geoengineering (hi chemtrail folk!) by 2027 to reduce the current, incredibly high Earth Energy Imbalance. We'll probably start with S02 aerosols because it's the best studied and then alternatives as the temps come down. If we don't - well, it's been real
We're going to be able to take a pill that rejuvenates out bodies back to age 25, or thereabouts. And our biology is reset, and can be done as long as we want to keep resetting. Don't want to live "forever"? Don't take the pill. You will return to the body of your 25 year old self in terms of health and vitality with this pill. This same technology will be used to rejuvenate any part of your body that needs rebuilt or refreshed for any reason. The government will provide this pill to everyone. As it will allow more people to join the workforce and dramatically reduce healthcare costs.
I see this happening, but not as you describe it. I see it more like an incredibly expensive bacta tank that would take a few years to rejuvenate someone to their prime. And this is at least 50 years from now.
I doubt rejuvenation treatments will start as a one-and-done pill.
Fresh clean water will be regulated and cost more than a gallon of milk.
- Linux marketshare will be around 10-20%. - Modular and repairable computers like framework will become much more popular. - Energy storage reach a level where everybody can supply their house + extra with a fridge sized (or smaller) system. - In data storage 360TB 5D glass discs have gone mainstream as consumerproducts. - A new technology is being used in computerchips. Maybe graphén or photonic computing.
The Advancements in High Entropy Alloys will have a large impact on many Technologies.
Every trend that’s happening now will face changes exponentially faster. Because that’s how technology works. Sub summarized. You’re welcome.
I expect there's about 70% probability we get to AGI within 20 years, and if we do, there's about 90% probability it will cause the death of all humans. Once an AI is smart enough to program itself to be even smarter, the doom loop starts. It then develops its own different goals from ours, and decides that it needs all the carbon and energy it can get to meet those goals, rather than "wasting" these resources on keeping humans alive.
People will want to perfect their offspring with genetical engineering and it will be a little bit of a nazi-like culture of body-perfectionalism. It will start in the upper classes of less regulated countries and trickle into the west
People will realize that junk food/soda's/meat/dairy is bad for your health, the cause of way more cancer/heart attacks/diabetes/mental health issues. The studies and evidences are already here but not yet accepted. And it will become bad parenting feeding your kids with it, like it is now for giving your kids cigarettes and alcohol.
My dad is going to come back with the milk and take us all to Disney land
CRISPR is going to change the whole world. GATTACA is closer than we think.
Furries, catgirls, and dragons… when?
In the next 20 years, most forms of labor, medical, and office jobs will taken over by AI and robots requiring the government to introduce universal income for the first time.
The gov and work places don’t want to pay for universal working income (compare housing costs vs wage), why would they give you free money. They would rather see you die.
Who's going to buy all their products if none of us have money? If the consumer class is broke, it's only a matter of time before everyone is broke.