Ask HN: What does the techscape look like in 50 years?

8 points by desertraven 2 years ago | 6 comments

Even 20 years ago today, the world was very different in terms of technology. Obviously many of the same ideas were around, but the rate of improvement and invention still seems staggering in such a time.

My biggest concern is that as the bar for discovering technology gets higher, it may get withheld from the public. Feel free to share your concerns too.

mikewarot 2 years ago |

Silicon chips will be made at well funded makerspaces. Thanks to advances in electron beam lithography, structured light projection, and other advances. You'll be able to design a custom chip, and try out the prototype a few days later, depending on complexity.

Thanks to advances in technique, ground loop based heat pump systems will find their way into use in most new buildings. This will allow for the use of solar and other renewable power on a far wider scale, making the grid a welcome way to share power when needed, instead of a unidirectional network.

Parallel processing will find its way down to the bit level. Instead of fixed width architectures, you'll be able to scale the precision of a calculation as much as is needed, allowing the most efficient use of silicon (or its replacement)

Quantum computing will be an interesting research area.

Thanks to ubiquitous internet, computer hardware, software, and advances in both additive and subtractive manufacturing, it'll be possible to build almost anything in the home, provided the elements to do so (or acceptable substitutes) are on hand. It will be well within the capability of an enthusiast to build machines that can make more of themselves. It's the first 3d printer, taken to the limit.

Either we'll all enjoy secure general purpose computing, thanks to the capability object model form the 1970s... or we'll still be complaining about hacking incidents (unless laws prevent doing so)

I hope you all are having fun in that future.

dave4420 2 years ago |

What do you mean by “withheld from the public”? Technology is already partly trade secrets. There would be no point preventing the Dutch from exporting fab machinery to China if that were not so.

I’ll make some narrow predictions about programming languages:

- something like terraform will be integrated into most languages

- you’ll be able to switch your web api from being hosted on AWS Lambda / k8s / Cloudflare Workers / etc to a different platform just by rebuilding and redeploying, just like cross-compiling is trivial with Go today

- there will still be an awful lot of of C and COBOL hanging around

sim7c00 2 years ago |

i think, what we build now, was already envisioned way before we built it. up to 50-60 years. if you look at papers from early system designers they were definitely looking to.build neural networks etc. already. if you look at current new research concepts you might learn more about the future 50 years on. i think ibms light/photon based chips, and intels microfibers to connect chips etc. is super interesting. maybe well all have small devices with these photonic chips connected by microfibers. everything working at lightspeed seems a fair direction. these devices can even be made on current production lines. i also think, but am not sure about this,.that they might help with issues around power consumption which is a direction also being steered in. to try and get around moores law perhaps, or optimize the power for performance ratio

iamflimflam1 2 years ago |

Can you give some examples of the discoveries that have happened over the last 20 years that weren’t already being researched or at least predicted?

pestatije 2 years ago |

i think its going to be a combination of three:

- Cern dismisses the probability of a singularity event in one of its experiments

- the nuke tech gets so widespread and cheap it ends in the hands of non-government orgs

- robots decide they dont like being switched off and so act in consequence

solardev 2 years ago |

There'll be a few more Javascript frameworks.