Ask HN: Predictions on what will be the most surprising technology in 10 years?

55 points by sstanie 8 years ago | 66 comments

I often read articles talking about the next big thing in the short term (2-4 years), but thinking about the Bill Gates 2-year-10-year quote* has me wondering about 10 years from now: Will the most surprising thing be an expansion of an already rising technology? (AI, blockchain, biotech, nanotech, AR,...)

Or will it be something most people have never heard of yet? Thoughts/ predictions?

* "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."

hyperpallium 8 years ago |

First, the negatives:

   Another AI winter
   Another VR winter
   Another hype-cycle of home automation
   Another hype-cycle of growing teeth

There will be tech progress, but behind the scenes, doing the same things as before, just better. As prosaic as more modular manufactured goods, in the sense of prefab home construction, automobile components, FPGA's for electronic goods. Some may revolutionize the value-chain in an industry - but you won't see it unless you're in it.

Fundamentally new tech takes 20-30 years to come to market - especially if it really does change things (government regulatory regimes, infrastructure, how we live).

Now Moore's Law isn't giving us shallow victories any more, there is opportunity for deeper changes, that properly absorb and apply its past advances.

Right now, we are undergoing a re-orientation of our political systems, in the sense of how democracy operates without a traditional press; the continuing march of multi-nationals being more powerful than sovereign states; the hyper-concentration of wealth (due to the means of production no longer being land, nor labour, but technology). Social systems are a kind of "technology".

The central question of this technological change will be: why do the hyper-wealthy need people?

The most surprising technology will be new mathematics - not TB machine proofs, but quite simple and basic ones, akin to the positional number system, algebra, calculus. They will analyse complex systems, like Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics; the operation of deep learning networks; internet and traffic congestion; and cortical organization. They won't give magical results, but they will offer a new point of view, that some will experience as magical.

bsenftner 8 years ago | |

> The central question of this technological change will be: why do the hyper-wealthy need people?

This is what concerns me. They already apply their wealth and organizations to treating the general public as a farm they cultivate. They shape the educational, tax, media, and legal structure in their favor quite successfully today. With the technological advancements in media development and their hold over education policy, tomorrow has a terrifying forecast unless some educational miracle of critical thought occurs.

jraines 8 years ago |

Genetic / biotech stuff, driven by CRISPR. All the ones you mentioned, except nanotech maybe, are pretty locked in to create massive changes. I think the bio stuff will be the most "surprising", not least because it's harder to to write believable breathless hype about it. Not to say there won't be plenty of attempts, but I feel like the public is a little more inoculated against wild health/medical claims than "killer AI" or "$100k bitcoin", which is both a good thing and more likely to create surprise when a few of them turn out to be true.

AR a really close second, but I think people will be a little bit more ready for it given prevalence in sci-fi and experience of rapid computer & graphics progress in our lifetime. So it's easier to "expect" a world of Pokemon Go on steroids in your AR glasses than it is, say, one where a boutique offshore firm is offering to give your baby the ability to see into the infrared spectrum or something.

kichik 8 years ago |

Solar power, wireless service, remote working and transportation advances might change where we live. You can have a house powered by the sun without an electric grid, connect to LTE+++ with 100gbps, work remotely, and have food automatically delivered with self-driving trucks or drones. You could live anywhere you'd want.

Tylerosaurus 8 years ago | |

I like the way you think. That would be my dream. Time to start investing in property out in the middle of nowhere.

kichik 8 years ago | | |

With the way population is growing, owning land anywhere (that's not going to be swallowed by the sea) sounds like a good idea to me. If you have some disposable income and don't mind a possibly long wait (and the taxes too), I'd say go for it.

jimangel 8 years ago |

I heard something recently about how terrible we are at predicting the future inherently.

I can't find the source, but I heard on a manager tools podcast that ~50 years ago they surveyed professionals about the future of flight. There was a ton of predictions about crazy concepts, but the winner was "bigger planes going more places"

This is also kind of a fun read: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions

WaltPurvis 8 years ago |

Re the Gates quote: Unless you're Ray Kurzweil, in which case you always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and wildly, ludicrously overestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

I'm old enough to have lived through the Drexlerian nanotechnology mania, and the Kurzweilian exponentialism mania, so I've learned to be extremely skeptical about anyone predicting earth-shattering advances in any field of technology in a mere decade's time. (The Singularity is not just over the horizon. Stop. You're not going to live for a thousand years or upload your mind to a computer. Just stop.)

My prediction is 2027 will be almost indistinguishable from 2017, if we're lucky, i.e., barring nuclear war or some CRISPR-crafted super-virus. However, if I had to choose a technology surprise for ten years from now it would involve being unlucky, i.e., the Loss of Everything Good due to an overwhelming tide of cyberterrorists and cybercriminals. I think few people (including me) fully appreciate how much destruction and chaos could be wrought, and how difficult it could be to protect our vital systems, so in that sense it would catch a lot of people by surprise.

The optimistic technology outlook for 2027 is petabyte thumb drives, 16K televisions, 8G wireless, cheaper solar cells, and marginally better medical scanners. It's a pretty uninspiring list, and none of it is surprising.

That's my hope. Please let there be no surprising technology in 10 years. Because the chances of a good surprise are vastly outweighed by the odds of bad ones.

Aron 8 years ago | |

Hey, are you gonna drink that half-empty beer or can I have it?

aquadrop 8 years ago |

Well, it's like guessing which number is least likely to be guessed in the same game. If you could predict it right, it's probably not that surprising :)

ChuckMcM 8 years ago | |

Sadly this is all too true. By their nature, surprises are unexpected. That said, I would be surprised if we had an operating fusion power plant, a workable age reversing treatment, or a recreational space station.

10 years ago in 2007 I would have been surprised if we had a car that could drive itself, or a way to edit fairly specific genes.

oAlbe 8 years ago | | |

> a workable age reversing treatment

Is that really a thing though? I keep hearing about it, articles saying that the first human to reach 300 years of age is already born etc. But is all this true? Of all things mentioned so far (AI, VR, AR, fusion power..), this is the one I have the hardest time imagining. Going from ~90 to 300 in 10 years is a huge leap compared to even the ~40 to 90 years leap of 200 years ago and today.

Do you have some trustworthy reading material on the subject?

baddox 8 years ago | |

It's not quite like that, because HN readers are probably more technologically savvy and educated on nascent technologies than the average person.

Aron 8 years ago | |

I think people can be vaguely expecting something to happen yet still be entirely surprised when they see what it actually is in practice.

namlem 8 years ago |

Some sort of inexpensive, portable neuro-imaging device could be huge. It would allow us to interact with technology almost seamlessly, and solve a lot of problems. If it becomes ubiquitous, it also solves almost all out security problems. Brain-based biometrics that work by measuring your brain activity while you look at a particular image. Unlike other biometrics, it's easily cancelable and extremely secure. You can change your "password" by selecting a different image.

It would also grant us the ability to much more effectively monitor our mental state. I bet it could be extremely helpful in combating anxiety and promoting mindfulness.

Snowdax 8 years ago |

VR. Next two years are going to be pretty stagnant. The resolutions, etc. just are still enthusiast tier.

But 10 years time? We could be seeing the beginning of the end of TVs, smartphones, cinema, social media, etc. as we know it today. VR arcade warehouses popping up in many places. Perhaps even starting to impact the layouts of newly architected houses to have less walls, focus more on wide one-story dwellings (but stacked on top of each other) and more open space to roam wide in virtual reality.

uptown 8 years ago |

Surveillance will not only be pervasive (it already is) but normalized on a global scale. Read up on China's "Social Credit System" for a glimpse of where we're headed.

ash663 8 years ago | |

A system like the one you mentioned not only encourages surveillance but also paves way for more corruption at the top level (assuming the government goes ahead with rating businesses as well). I sincerely hope this system is abolished before other countries begin implementing it as well.

borplk 8 years ago |

One of my predictions is that the AI pendulum will swing again at the other direction and people will wake up again to the reality that AI is far from achieving the romanticised stuff that the so called experts and book authors want the public to believe.

We will see gradual incremental improvement in specialised AIs for things like voice, face and character recognition. We will see an increased usage of AI and AI based technologies to improve efficiency and assist the humans in decision making. But it will not put nearly as many people out of jobs as some people suggest.

eldavido 8 years ago | |

Yes and no.

I agree the effects on number of jobs will be smaller than people are predicting. It won't be mass unemployment.

On the other hand, people need to realize how sensitive the job market really is. Typical unemployment in the US is 4-5% in the last 10 years. If 1% of the workforce is put out of work by new technology, something I feel is very likely, that's a 20% increase in unemployment. If it gets much larger, even maybe 8-9%, there could absolutely be mass riots and outrage.

The point is, job markets are like marriage/dating markets. They aren't smooth, they're something almost everyone wants, so even tiny little changes (like NYC's surplus of women) have dramatic, nonlinear effects. I don't think people appreciate what a "butterfly effect" this will have if, say, 10-20% of truckers (the most popular occupation in many states) are put out of work. That's an instant, large-scale political event.

EDIT Source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/unemployment-rate-and-u-6-...

borplk 8 years ago | | |

Yes I agree that it is sensitive.

The part that annoys me is this backdrop of "machines are going to be doing everything and no one is going to have anything to do".

When in reality it's going to be an assistant next to the existing people, increasing efficiency. Like farming tools for a farmer, or auto-pilot for a pilot, or robo-equipment for a surgeon.

I often hear from non-programmers and non-technical people who somehow seem convinced that AI is some kind of dark magic that is going to kick in at some point and everything is going to be magically solved by it.

sevensor 8 years ago |

New materials. The search space in materials science is so impossibly huge that it's an endless source of surprises. The last ceramics hype cycle was about 20 years ago, so we're due for another one. Maybe room-temperature ceramic superconductors?

bllguo 8 years ago | |

I'm biased as I studied MSE but I think this is the best one. All the other answers - electric cars, AI, robotics, etc. - are already dominating headlines; they aren't surprising. A new material could be very surprising. This is a common saying in materials science - notice how the major ages of human development (bronze age, iron age, even arguably the silicon age) are named after materials? Who would have predicted them before they occurred?

Unfortunately, from my experience, the turnaround from finding an innovative new material to actually using it in real products is absurdly long.

graycat 8 years ago |

I'd vote for by CRISPR and the rest of bio-technology, e.g., as in Eric Lander and his MIT lectures at YouTube, for, my guesses, better crops, healthier farm animals, attacking insects, e.g., mosquitoes, attacking causes of infections, for curing some of the remaining difficult diseases, especially cancer.

A second guess, or a guess for second place, would be artificial general intelligence (AGI) if and only if someone or some team or project gets going on that problem and has some good, basic, enabling ideas.

I have some ideas, but since they really are just architectural or heuristic and not mathematical and not in code I can make only wild guesses for how good the ideas are.

A third guess, or a guess for third place, is my startup and its crucial core enabling technology, i.e., some original applied math I derived based on some advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Why? In broad terms the core technology of the startup makes some powerful progress on meaning. Is this progress full AGI? Nope. Does the progress fully solve the problem of meaning? Nope. To repeat, IMHO the progress is "powerful".

Is the technology widely applicable? The range of applications should be somewhat wider than the application of my startup, e.g., as some core technology in some infrastructure for some more applications, but for now my original applied math is proprietary and in my startup is locked up and invisible in my server farm.

Why third in this list? Because it doesn't deserve first or second, but, if people like the results of my applied math and what I've programmed, then my startup can well become a big thing, big enough to be third on this list in a few years.

Gee, today I'm wrestling with Microsoft's NTBACKUP. So, today it's grunt work!

legulere 8 years ago | |

We already have the possibility to change genes, CRISPR is just making it easier.

The problem is the lack of understanding and ability to engineer non-trivial things. (Most GMOs are just Glyphosate resistant or have the BT gene).

I guess we will deepen our understanding but still not be able to change big things for the next decades

graycat 8 years ago | | |

Yes, but my guess is that with CRISPR we will be able to do DNA editing and experiments much faster. Then slowly, but much faster than in the past, we will be able to figure out, first cut, what some segment of DNA does what and, second-cut, some of the more complicated ways DNA works.

Then applications to agriculture, medicine, etc. might come along in a nice stream.

Still, of course, it stands to be a very long line of work to figure out much about how DNA causes a human actually to "work".

Aron 8 years ago |

I think the transition to self-driving electric cars as a service will be in full force by then, and it will only be slowed down by the sheer number of interlocked changes and requirements to finish that process. The sheer scale of the numbers will ensure significant palpable changes, and for once, it's a change occurring in the physical world of atoms.

rcarmo 8 years ago |

Paraphrasing Douglas Adams, I'd go with a volume knob for children, simply because it would be quite surprising if someone was able to get that working...

ratherbefuddled 8 years ago |

Automated driving plus Uber style infrastructure plus electric vehicles and improved batteries will start to change the way people use them significantly. Private car ownership will have peaked and begun falling, people will just order one on an app and let it drive off after they've arrived to the next job. Cars will spend much more of the day on the road instead of parked outside houses or offices rather like aeroplanes. Perhaps not a revolutionary or surprising idea in itself but I think the speed of this change will be surprising in hindsight.

_up 8 years ago | |

I think with automated cars we don't even need that much improvement in Batteries. We simply could use self driving battery packs that wait at the street corner and follow you and dock on, if you need extended Battery-Mileage. Also since Electric Energy is very expensive for private Consumers in Germany. Why not order Batteries that can be delivered per self driving car. Garbage disposal is also very expensive and you can not opt out but you can order a smaller Bin and maybe order and self driving car to get rid of the rest cheaper. I actually wonder if this is why the Investor/Trade Agreements (TTIP) where pushed that hard. Because with these, Investors would have to be paid compensation if regulation would outlaw these Businesses.

felipeccastro 8 years ago |

Blockchain, decentralized apps - perhaps based on Ethereum, perhaps not. They have the potential to enhance capitalism in equivalent ways as the current wave of "sharing economy" startups (Uber, Airbnb) has done, or even surpass that.

- it's much easier for more people to become investors, since buying coins/tokens will become increasingly easier and common.

- you won't need to be located at a specific startup hub to launch successful business, because it's so much easier to get investment from around the world.

- it has a great approach for solving the "network effect", where no one can challenge the major players with strong networks, by providing strong incentives for early adopters to join and grow their networks (either by buying very cheap tokens, or producing content that will render them "free money").

- it enables the creation of new business models that might disrupt (ugh, sorry) several existing industries, due to how they solve the trust issue between parties that have no reason to trust each other without a central controller entity. Some are calling this next wave of startups the "Web 3.0".

Sure, it looks like the wild west now, and there are all sorts of problems from scams to scalability issues, but maturity might be only a matter of time.

ellius 8 years ago |

3d printing. My buddy works at a major American industrial manufacturer and the work he describes is fascinating. They're slowly starting to take on bigger and bigger chunks of the overall business as their capabilities grow and different business units discover them. I can only begin to imagine the host of fields that will be affected by the ability to do really nifty agile experimentation with physical products.

jMyles 8 years ago |

Most surprising? I'm thinking AR, mostly because it's much less discussed today than similarly positioned tech, but no less viable.

Also, it seems about time for another psychedelic revival / breakthrough, so don't count out research on psychoactive plants and compounds (if that counts as tech per your metric).

schnevets 8 years ago |

Industry 4.0 and the rise of intelligent manufacturing. A marriage of 3D printing, AI, and IoT technology will change what consumers can order and how quickly it arrives to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0

tomashertus 8 years ago | |

I agree with this one. Given the advances in 3D printing, distributed applications and IoT this concept is inevitable and there will be a big shift in manufacturing.

Are you working in this field?

JustSomeNobody 8 years ago |

In the U.S.A.

10 years from now will look surprisingly similar to present day. Political lobbying will continue (and worsen) to stifle innovation and even iteration. We'll still have a single choice in ISP. Broadband speeds will still be ridiculously slow in most parts of the country. Driverless trucks will only just be getting a foothold, and people will still be wondering where the driverless cars are. Managers will still expect "butts in chairs", so WFH will still not be an option for most. We were talking about encryption backdoors in the 90's (clipper chip), we're still talking about them now and we'll be talking about them in 10 years.

It will be hotter outside.

10 years, is... just not that far away.

legulere 8 years ago |

The most surprising thing will be that most things will stay the same as now.

frandroid 8 years ago |

AR headsets.

There were MP3 players before the iPod, but they weren't taking off quite yet. Then Jobs came, and the iPod changed the music market. And then changed the smartphone market. Google Glass was a good first mass market prototype, Microsoft seems to be going in the right direction with Hololens, but we all know it's not quite there yet. Whoever manages to figure out what the magic combination is for an AR headset that gets massive adoption, will usher in the next UI/portable computing revolution.

ponci 8 years ago |

"Internet of things". It's one of the few things that is already here, economically viable, but not organized or "distributed" as Gibson would say. There's simply no reason not to have connectivity in everything if you do it well with electronics and it provides value. Maybe not surprising as such, so you have to figure out the implications which is usually what tends to be the surprising part.

reindeerer 8 years ago |

Small satellite and generally small spacecraft will drastically change the affordability of space, which will drive a lot of new development in space. It's already creating a lot of demand on market for new, small launchers as well to actually get significant numbers of sats up there, and it will become an accelerating loop between nanosat launch providers and small spacecraft getting more affordable quickly

angryasian 8 years ago |

usable and realistic holography will be the next big step forward in visualization and interactivity.

frandroid 8 years ago |

"Plastics!"

scottlegrand2 8 years ago |

China cleans up their air and Shenzhen disrupts Silicon Valley, creating a semi-totalitarian, technocratic city that is somehow more free and libertarian than Silicon Valley has become.

thinkmilitant 8 years ago | |

checks library Yup, that's how I have it in all my cyberpunk books. :)

iforgotmypass 8 years ago |

I'm kinda surprised noone mentioned teleportation.

Also, what about human-computer interfaces? (communicating with your smartphone and receiving responses using only thoughts)

whataretensors 8 years ago |

AI. Nobody knows what will happen, or if/what roadblocks await. If it continues to scale in the best case, we are in for strange times ahead.

corporateslave3 8 years ago |

One more is the automation of distributed computing. "Big data" will be completely encapsulated and hidden to the end user.

rajington 8 years ago |

Laptops will be replaced by phone-powered VR goggles with wireless keyboards.

jboggan 8 years ago |

Software will eat programming jobs.

donatj 8 years ago |

Honestly I think with the mass availability of escapist devices innovation is largely over.

JauntTrooper 8 years ago |

Insect-sized mini-drones that will create ubiquitous surveillance.

corporateslave3 8 years ago |

cryptocurrencies, whole new asset class, wild west

graycat 8 years ago | |

If cryptocurrencies get very "wild" as an "asset class", then the US SEC, etc. will make regulations and/or Congress will pass laws to calm it down.

The powerful governments in the world won't let crypto be means for money laundering, tax evasion, moving lots of money across country boundaries secretly, undisclosed assets, inheritance and gifts without taxes, etc.

It may be that the important, remaining, applications will be for cases of contracts, secure communications, etc.

rainboiboi 8 years ago | | |

It is one thing to make regulations and the other to enforce.

subsubsub 8 years ago |

Sticks and Stones as high tech weapons of war.

JauntTrooper 8 years ago |

Tomatoes will taste great again.

Danihan 8 years ago |

Bioweapons.

billconan 8 years ago |

I think Robotics will be big.

SirLJ 8 years ago |

crystal balls, teleportation and time travel