- VIDEO becomes what people thought VR/AR would be. Reality becomes mediated through video, not 3D graphics.
This is analogous to all the technical components for social networks being there in 1993 (BBSes, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), but Facebook didn't exist until 2004. And in 2010 people and businesses still needed websites -- the web was still growing like crazy 20 years later.
YouTube was acquired in 2006, Twitch was acquired in 2014, and there will be another big acquisition of a video company in the 2020's. (I hesitate to say that a video company will become bigger than Google or Facebook, but maybe.)
(BTW I followed the link to lesswrong, and someone predicted "videoconferencing" as a 2010's technology, and I think that was pretty accurate. I used little videoconferencing from 2000-2010 but used it a lot from 2010-2020.)
(And I hope in 10 years nobody points out that I learned how to clean my toilet on YouTube :) :) ;) 50/50 chance on that YouTube video still being there.)
- People will still wish for decentralization, and most of "FAANG" will still exist and be powerful. As I noted in the update to my comment, there will be "big data and compute" on the edge of the network, i.e. the data plane. But the control plane will still be centralized.
That will become a very common systems architecture. Computation and data won't be as centralized as they are with AWS, but "the cloud" will still be dominant.
- Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.
- Addendum: Even though IoT products are widely mocked now, and for good reason, I think the trend is inevitable. Automation is economically valuable and technologically feasible.
The IoT tech stack improve and many useful new applications will be found. There will still be security concerns and thus some significant holdouts. But overall both industrial and consumer "IoT" will greatly expand in the next decade.
Another prediction: there will be a swing back toward dynamic languages, or at least toward extremely fast PHP-like, R-like, shell-like iteration.
The language will either be dynamically typed or have an ultra fast (optional?) type checker. Or maybe 2 execution modes.
The constraints of human cognition change very slowly, and iterative feedback will be as valuable in 2030 as it ever was.
Right now there is a natural swing toward statically typed languages because so many huge codebases were built in dynamic languages (Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.), and people are understandably having trouble maintaining them. And the user base of web services has increased by an order of magnitude in the last decade, while Moore's law has stalled, so compiling to machine code with static types makes a lot of sense.
But in 2030 people will still want to iterate quickly on their code.
note: Maybe parallel / incremental typechecking will become commonplace. Fast feedback is incompatible with the status quo of single-threaded type checkers because type checking is a "global" algorithm, it scales non-linearly, and codebases are growing.
- VIDEO becomes what people thought VR/AR would be. Reality becomes mediated through video, not 3D graphics.
This is analogous to all the technical components for social networks being there in 1993 (BBSes, Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, etc.), but Facebook didn't exist until 2004. And in 2010 people and businesses still needed websites -- the web was still growing like crazy 20 years later.
YouTube was acquired in 2006, Twitch was acquired in 2014, and there will be another big acquisition of a video company in the 2020's. (I hesitate to say that a video company will become bigger than Google or Facebook, but maybe.)
(BTW I followed the link to lesswrong, and someone predicted "videoconferencing" as a 2010's technology, and I think that was pretty accurate. I used little videoconferencing from 2000-2010 but used it a lot from 2010-2020.)
(And I hope in 10 years nobody points out that I learned how to clean my toilet on YouTube :) :) ;) 50/50 chance on that YouTube video still being there.)
- People will still wish for decentralization, and most of "FAANG" will still exist and be powerful. As I noted in the update to my comment, there will be "big data and compute" on the edge of the network, i.e. the data plane. But the control plane will still be centralized.
That will become a very common systems architecture. Computation and data won't be as centralized as they are with AWS, but "the cloud" will still be dominant.
- Self-driving cars won't impact the average consumer in the next 10 years. It will continue to be cheaper to operate rideshares with human drivers in most parts of the world and most terrains/climates. It will make sense for commercial applications though.
- Addendum: Even though IoT products are widely mocked now, and for good reason, I think the trend is inevitable. Automation is economically valuable and technologically feasible.
The IoT tech stack improve and many useful new applications will be found. There will still be security concerns and thus some significant holdouts. But overall both industrial and consumer "IoT" will greatly expand in the next decade.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21929342