Ask HN: What's NOT going to change in the next 10 years?

2 points by tzhong 6 years ago | 5 comments

Interested in what people think are not going to change in the next 10 years (industry, behavior, etc)

- The need for human interaction (alternatively: loneliness - is that going to increase with social media?)

- The need for clean water

- The need for sleep

Question originally posed by Jeff Bezos. Context here:

I very frequently get the question: "What's going to change in the next 10 years?" And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: "What's not going to change in the next 10 years?" And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.

It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, "Jeff, I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher." "I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly." Impossible.

And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

aphextim 6 years ago |

Personal Opinions:

1)The fact that humans will continue to reproduce and multiply at an ever increasing rate.

2)The need to help the poorest countries/people will always be present.

3)The need for clean water I feel is not going to remain constant, but grow over time as we need water for more people.

4)I think in the next 10 years we still will have the group of 'older' non tech users who are oblivious to tracking/privacy and could use simple to use privacy solutions. Maybe by the time users who grew up with smart phones are 65+ then we don't have to worry as much about the technological illiterate, there will always be a difference is skill/knowledge but I feel the gap will shrink over time.

I'm sure I could think of more but I just came up with these off the top of my head. I do like the question, which is good practice to ask the questions that are the opposite of what everyone is always asking.

badrequest 6 years ago | |

> Maybe by the time users who grew up with smart phones are 65+ then we don't have to worry as much about the technological illiterate, there will always be a difference is skill/knowledge but I feel the gap will shrink over time.

In my experience (which I fully admit is anecdotal and therefore likely wrong), the kids who've grown up using iPads and iPhones know less about how computers work than the kids I grew up around who had PC Towers in their homes. Not suggesting this is anything particularly alarming, but does make me curious if the form factor of computing a user is exposed to has any bearing on the user's desire to understand more fundamental aspects of computers.

tlb 6 years ago | |

The rate at which humans reproduce has been decreasing since the late 1960s.

throwaway8879 6 years ago |

Corporations in bed with state actors to harvest data and spy on every single user despite running marketing campaigns on how they care about privacy so much.

ang 6 years ago |

This is more of a meta-point but it's always surprising to me when reading about older civilizations like Rome how alike the daily lives and problems were for people thousands of years ago.

Some things that won't change– and probably have never changed:

• People will continue to want to have fun

• People will continue to want more ways to make money

• People will continue to want things to be faster

• People will continue to want great tales of adventure