Ask HN: In the next 5 years which markets will grow the most and why? The more specific you are the better. |
Ask HN: In the next 5 years which markets will grow the most and why? The more specific you are the better. |
But when you go back historically, predictions of what life would be like "now" all left out the world changing invention of computers and internet.
There is a scene in the movie "The Graduate" where he is at a party and everyone is telling him what he should go into as his career because it will be big in the future. One person tells him "Plastics!" This was a joke at the time, a ridiculous statement. Years later, the plastics industry used that bit in a TV commercial.
If you really, sincerely believe "The Future is all about X industry," you aren't telling people that on the internet. You are quietly behind the scenes buying more shares in X or getting training to work in X or otherwise trying to make sure you are the firstest with the mostest in X.
Today, you can get a tablet for under $50 and Google is (or has) split its search stuff into PC and mobile search and is actively optimizing stuff for mobile because mobile search is eating the world. I seriously doubt anyone expected mobile to take over like this when it was new tech.
In contrast, "net books" seem to have gone extinct. I think that was supposed to be The Next Big thing -- until tablets came out and began eating their lunch.
Why? Because, web browser is second most software used after operating system by a normal computer users. If you are developer you use editor and web browser, if you are writer you use world processor and web browser, if you are market person you use trading software and web browser and so on. I mean web browser is something used by everyone.
We have written applications ( for computer and mobile device ) for most useful sotware - operating system to reach out our users. Now, it is time to target next software used by everyone. You might create a website but it will only be there until user do not close that tab. But, with extension, you will be in constant connection with user.
Currently thid market is uder estimate as many developer consider that it is not something that consider as programming. But, I think every website specific limit to connect users. and at that situation, add-ons will come to rescue.
The total market cap for cryptocoins will grow from $50 billion today to $1+ trillion in the future.
We've just started to fully appreciate the possibilities of the Blockchain particularly. I was reading some academic paper on analyzing and querying blockchain transactions and I found it absolutely outstanding. I'm also keen on seeing what large commercial projects are built on the Ethereum platform.
To me though, the only thing crypto-currencies currently are good for is buying illegal drugs on the internet. There just isn't any reason to use them over regular money the rest of the time.
It's not going to magically become better. This is the thing lurking in the shadows that will cause major problems.
Augmented Reality, I would suspect in a year or two we will have the first successful product.
Services and entertainment for aging populations.
Real estate auction services, Trump is going to have to sell of a lot after going to prison.
That aside, there's a cost threshold beyond which it wouldn't makes sense to offer cloud services at such ridiculous prices. If anything, I actually think compute prices might increase in future as demand for cloud services become globally outrageous, from Alaska to Zagreb.
AWS seems cheap, but egress is where they get you.
I second this.
The 2 billion people coming online in the next decade will be from the developing world and the developers serving them wont pay the kind of fees that AWS et al currently charge for cloud services.
I'm hoping for a market to end all markets, where the product is money. You sign up with a company, it pays you. All anyone wants is cheap, cheaper, free. Getting paid tops that.
So maybe solar panels are just getting competitive, but getting paid to put them on your roof, that's hot.
Turo is hot.
Universal basic income is hot. Maybe politicians don't have the imagination to make it happen, but we do. Secretly every employee in the world yearns to load the part of their job that even a monkey could do into a spreadsheet, go home, and still get paid. Given the permission to automate our own jobs, we’ll do it gladly and in large numbers. The only thing stopping us is really really, ridiculously rich people, and people with no imagination. Somehow we have to find a way to pay them as well, and keep paying them, no matter how much they don’t want to get paid.
We're going through something similar to the industrial revolution, lots of people will lose their job to AI (or still be employed, but with significantly lower wages - even previously untouchable professions like lawyers, doctors and programmers).
To avoid riots, these people will be fed either through existing welfare programs or new basic-income style ones. But the old guard will want to make sure they don't blow their money on hookers and blow and booze, so anyone who peddles "here's how we can figure out which of the welfare recipients is non-compliant with their spending habits" is going to make a killing.
Sad, but inevitable in the current political climate.
Also, some form of artificial companionship.
consumer internet privacy and security (think barracuda for the home market -- above and beyond a standard router/firewall possibly with active L7 features)
consumer and enterprise storage management (they literally can't even make enough ssd's right now, people and companies are hoarding data and can't manage it effectively or reliably)
rural and wilderness area wireless internet (people will start moving out of cities again and will want the same > 50 megabit low latency service).
Have you sent someone money internationally before? How about across different banks? Typical transfers process at around 3-5 days. With the help of cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Steller and the like. Transfers happen in seconds. This will grow because now, banks will utilize this technology to get rid of the old one (Swift anyone?) and will save banks lots of time and money.
The market will grow from zero to millions in this time, but it will be entirely consumed by one of the big five and everyone will just think of it as a Google feature or something.
I think semi-automated systems will become more automated using some of the AI that is in the news today.
We may even see better automation on the programming front in terms of being able to create stuff.
I think we will see more software and automation in government at all levels. There is drive to automate everything, but governments tend to be even slower than enterprise to adopt things given the budgetary process.
Lastly, I think we will see some significant gains in genetic programming that come out of the CRISPR technique. If you recall the tech that allowed us to sequence the human genome was very slow at first. Eventually they developed faster techniques, and not you can sequence things an order of magnitude faster.
"AI will not become as big as people want to believe today."
However we are seeing technologies like WebAssembly and WebGL which are directly addressing the benefits of desktop applications. What would a desktop application offer over browser based app?
There are few people I'm aware of who think to the contrary who are actually working at a technical level in the field of AI, and not founders of a startup riding buzzword funding or who have financial or PR interests to hype AI.
I'll add a caveat that the invention of general AI would accelerate this timeline. I think it will require paradigm shifts, not feature-augmented/ exotic ensembles of neural networks with RL layers, or other approaches possible with current techniques, but think it is still more possible, sooner than AI skeptics believe, but still beyond 5 years.
Some "Minimum wage jobs" are disappearing -- a local fast food joint now has about 1/3 of the employees it had a couple of years ago: they have better automated machines in the kitchen, and a smart ordering kiosk that most people use (though there's still a person at the register, for people who are uncomfortable with the kiosk or requests that are not available through it).
Translators, as a job, have almost disappeared (relegated to those needing "an official translation"). That happened in the last 10 years, starting with an awfully funny and weird altavista or google translate that would give you results that could only be meaningful if you had some familiarity with both languages - down to modern translation which, while not perfect, is readable and understandable.
Professional photohgraphers for newspapers used to command a $3,000/day salary just 10 years ago. Now it's closer to $300/day, if they can get it at all - because there's already someone on the scene, with a smart phone camera -- the pictures are horrible, but people are willing to give them for credit, so a photographer is unneeded.
The army of people working for Google/Facebook/Amazon to moderate user content, is being decimated.
It's started to happen to lawyers; It's not prevalent yet, but it is eating the more "mechanical" parts of a lawyer's job - finding relevant historical cases and summarizing them. Computers are now slightly better than the interns that used to be assigned to these jobs. In 5 years, they might be better than the experienced partners at these kinds of jobs.
It's closer than most people think in many, many jobs. Truck drivers will likely not be completely replaced in 5 years, but their jobs might change to "24 hour shifts" in which they are allowed to sleep until the automated truck wakes them up to deal with some condition.
You know, writing down what's in a picture, was almost sci-fi 10 years ago, and right now you have Google, Microsoft and ClariFi offering this as a cheap API.
This is a solved problem in most of the world, except for US and Canada
(Inside SEPA they're almost like a domestic transaction as well though it takes a couple a days)
The trick is to match flows of cash so they money isnt actually transferred internationally - my cash from the uk was sent to someone else in the uk and my US bank account was credited from some other US-based bank.
When a transfer is made from country A to country B, the money gets first transferred from the sender in country A to local Transferwise account in country A (avoiding fees and conversions). Then they send the money from local Transferwise account in country B to the recipient in country B (again avoiding fees and conversions).
The magic is how they ensure that the local Transferwise accounts in each country have enough money to do the transfers. They own a bank account in every country they operate in, and the money flows between those bank accounts. They need to move money between their local accounts in each country while minimizing the amounts transferred, but also minimizing the fees and conversions. When they actually move the money is up to them, they just need to ensure they have enough on each account. I guess there's a lot of variables to optimize for, and it would be interesting to know more details of the process.
I've also seen a company called Azimo trying to do a similar thing, but I haven't tried them yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers
Humorously:
"Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014" was the huge headline summarising the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker...
http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketi...
I agree with the previous remarks - the tablet industry was pretty well established 5 years ago and hardly cutting edge tech - 10 years ago is definitely a better comparison at this point, with the crappy tablet devices Microsoft were pushing at much higher price points then.