ASK HN: What emerging technologies do you think will trend in 2020 and why?

25 points by IsraCV 8 years ago | 26 comments

What emerging technologies do you think will trend in 2020 and why?

indescions_2017 8 years ago |

Optical computing.

Quantum ICs attract billions in research dollars. With cybersecurity perhaps being the key industry driver. But recent materials and design advancements in "electronic-photonic" interfaces have yielded incredible boosts to matrix multiplication and FFT calculation. And the temptation to create machine learning and AI capable mobile devices may speed adoption of a new generation of photonics.

Lightmatter, a startup using light to accelerate artificial intelligence, wins the 2017 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lightmatter-a-startu...

Light-Powered Computers Brighten AI’s Future

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/light-powered-com...

gamechangr 8 years ago |

This is asked and answered many times on Quora...take a peak there and you will find plenty of answers.

Here is a similar question for example: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-10-emerging-technolog...

Top19 8 years ago |

Wireless charging on a level not seen yet. The idea might be for a wireless charging network similar to what we already have for cell phones, so each tower has a 3 mile or so radius. You’ll never be without power in a sense that you’re not, most of the time, without cell coverage.

This would help a lot with the limits we are approaching with batteries, as well as the environmental effects associated with their production.

Long term, people are proposing the collection of solar energy in space, and the resulting energy beamed down in microwaves to the “cell towers” so described above.

sgillen 8 years ago | |

Maybe you are aware of a breakthrough that I am not, but the technology you describe does not sound feasible to me. If you're transmitting power everywhere that's an R^2 relationship under ideal circumstances, you'd have to pump a HUGE amount of energy into the air to charge everyone's cellphones in a three mile radius.

Maybe you can do beam forming and try to direct the energy at the phone you are interested in? Still seems like a big challenge though.

sova 8 years ago | | |

Wireless Energy Transmission by Nikola Tesla pointed to an entirely different approach. Using the earth as a resonant cavity, signals of electric conduition could be intoned and subsequently amplified by "striking" at the appropriate time and place on the globe, eventually saturating the well of the earth with such strong ambient electrical potential that anyone could stick an antenna into the ground and harvest electricity. Of course, no one has really demonstrated this yet, and these findings are based on my own research, but Tesla surely thought he was onto something and it does seem like a logical endpoint of wireless energy, that it would be freely and easily available anywhere on the planet. It is very much different from putting up cell towers and blasting powerful radiation, but maybe we will compromise with a hybrid approach.

chatmasta 8 years ago | | |

There is no need to blindly send energy into the air; the cell towers can already triangulate a phone's location. A phone could share its battery percentage with the cell towers, and the cell towers could optimize power distribution to phones, sending targeted beams of energy to those in need of a charge.

saimiam 8 years ago |

Micro dosing and "augmented" reality.

sova 8 years ago | |

Micro dosing is the way.

chrisco255 8 years ago |

Solar. AR/VR. AI. IOT. Blockchain. Robotics. I think we're at the cusp of a platform explosion. I honestly wonder if we even have enough engineers to fully explore all these burgeoning fields.

sova 8 years ago | |

We don't, and we could have many more brilliant minds working on such things! Let's get more people out of survival mode so we can all flourish

jetti 8 years ago |

Blockchain.

While it may not fit some people's definition of emerging I think we will see implementations outside of cryptocurrency. I know some clearing companies (related to the stock/futures/etc markets) are interested in it and so are banks. I can see them having something implemented in the next 3 years, even if it is just something that does a very small share of their business. I'm very excited to see applications of blockchain outside of cryptocurrency!

devopsproject 8 years ago | |

it would be a nice replacement for credit agencies

jetti 8 years ago | | |

It would definitely make it easier to dispute when you made payments but the collection company/company says that you haven't. Checking the blockchain would prove one party correct rather than he said, she said.

Herodotus_2 8 years ago |

I have a somewhat darker view: I expect we will see an increase in more flexible, more robust equipment as climate stresses increase... At least the emergence of that sort of a market. I bet a lot of people, after those hurricanes, would be interested in phones that still work in emergencies.

quickthrower2 8 years ago |

Haskell. There is a clear advantage in having a strong type system that lets you develop in userland what can only be language features in lesser languages. And language features means wait for it to be developed.

Also the compile time certainty that things line up is hard to live without.

demygale 8 years ago | |

I would be willing to be a significant amount of money that Haskell will not be a mainstream language in my lifetime.

quickthrower2 8 years ago | | |

Maybe not Haskell itself but very likely a derivative.

Look at it this way. ReactJS is functional programming but in JS. The natural home of this way of building UI is in a ML like language. Can already be done in purescript for example.

Once people get their heads around react and reduces, changing to a type system like ML will yield obvious advantages

LarryMade2 8 years ago |

Augmented Reality

Supportive tech for Self-Driving Cars (Travel planner, guides, entertainment, portable charging technology for Electrics

Semi-Autonomous Drone networking/clustering for coordinated tasks

Emergency response technologies involving drones/self-driving vehicles

forgotmyacc 8 years ago |

Augmented Reality. After Pokemon Go went viral and the iPhone X including AR Kit. AR will be the next 200$ hour job.

EGreg 8 years ago |

Solar Panels.

Decentralized energy generation and cellphone signals.

Local currencies and social apps.

Decentralization in general.

sova 8 years ago |

Utilizing blockchain + gitlike versioning for legal systems. kneels down to pray

hijinks 8 years ago |

solar for residental

kubernetes running a lot of companies workloads

blockchain for things people never thought they'd use a ledger for.

noam87 8 years ago |

Synthetic biology.

SirLJ 8 years ago |

Crystal balls for everyone