- Use lists instead of long paragraphs.
- One prediction per list item.
Historical:
2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068
2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596
2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859
2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988
2017: none?
2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767
2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723
2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370
2013: none?
2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201
2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.
7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)
You assume that with the new technology the total number of people needed in this sector will be reduced, but I think the industry will simply adjust, and the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people. This is a competitive market (your success is determined by the amount of money you are willing to spend on producing content about your product), so the same people will just get their share for 1000x the work they have been doing in the past.
That’s not what they predicted; the “we just get more content! People won’t lose their jobs…” argument aside, the market that is willing to spend money on content seems reasonably likely to drop off.
People will continue to want content, yes.
People will continue to buy content, yes.
…however, it seems difficult to believe that as companies that can produce the content significantly cheaper and at higher volumes emerge, traditional providers of eg. stock photography, will manage to convince people to keep paying the same amount for it.
I personally predict a wave of race to the bottom startups that cheaply generate content, driving the costs to consumers down. Yay.
However, companies will accordingly reduce their spend, and move off of traditional providers onto the “super cheap” new comers, resulting in an overall collapse in the total spend on content, even as companies get more for the money they do spend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this.
If the marginal cost of producing X drop to virtually zero, people don’t just consume more of it (well, maybe a bit more), they mostly just spend less money and buy the cheapest product.
But, collapse completely is a bit extreme.
That is something that I believe it is already happening. I have the feeling that Senior Developers wages are going up in my country no matter what happens on Twitter or Facebook.
I think this is a definite possibility too. I understand the reasons why US tech comp is higher than the rest of the world, but I don't see why it is _that_ much higher - I'm not sure it's sustainable in the new remote-work world.
In almost all fields, Americans make more money.
The tech 2X is that historically hiring was done for the Bay Area, where cost of living is crazy, and also just basic supply and demand. If a few dozen engineers can build $100M-1B+ of value, it makes sense to pay them a lot (of investors’ money).
You forget the emergence of the creator economy, smaller communities and the move to the early, syndicated nature of the early 2000s Internet. That internet has no problems with any of those. All of the issues you list were created by establishment actors for their benefit.
Early internet: As long as there was copper, you generally could exchange {protocol} (i.e. HTTP, FTP, POP3, ...) to {person} in {country}, quite freely.
Current internet: Many egress and ingress connections are banned by {government agency} of {country}.
Future internet: What parent comment was predicting: An increasing number of governments increasingly aggressively ban an increasing number of internet services (i.e. connections).
It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
This is the "fracturing" the parent comment is alluding to.
Also, I disagree with #1 and agree with #3 to some extent. I think Globalization is already here and it will only intensify. It is not a zero sum game and all sides can benefit from it considering they stop thinking of Globalization as a bad thing.
Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
Concentration of ecological damage (eg smog in China, clear cuts instead of selective foresting etc).
Decreasing the varietals of foods brought to market so they're stable for shipping , easier to grade / machine. Second order cost -- higher risk to crop failures, loss of heirloom / heritage kinds.
IMO much of "Globalization" is really just power and market arbitrage. Things are inherently cheaper or easier there, the people are just poorer and more desperate. As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
The only thing stopping this from happening is that AI still hasn't figured out how to render hands very well.
Who's going to fight for TikTok? Trump tried to ban it, so GOP will be onboard. If it's a serious attempt, Biden and the Dems will be too. They're almost there anyway. So who'd be for Tiktok? The youth? They don't vote anyway, and will just move on to the next fashionable social network.
Dead Comment
https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
Sure, but OP said “continues to decline”, not “completely collapses.”
I’m not sure how that plays out, but hyperinflation can’t be good.
- Saudi Arabia will release an ethical standards requirement for each of its Western tech company holdings. The exact definition will be confusingly progressive, which will put everyone on guard.
- Google will cancel the Search product, with a press release that expounds beautifully about the future. They claim to be taking it down to bring it back in Q2 2024 powered by a LLM.
- Someone will fork Rust and C and combine them together into something called Crust. This will become wildly popular.
- James Cameron's Avatar 3 will be leaked early by accident, exposing that the movies aren't actually CGI, and all the money has gone to creating a Jurassic Park-style horrible genetic experiment.
- Twitter will have 4 separate CEOs, and end the year as a public non-profit holding.
But I’m sure this already happens without using medieval metaphors
https://github.com/NishanthSpShetty/crust
https://github.com/uwplse/crust
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-5953-8_...
I guess a lort of people are missing the worst. :)
https://gitlab.com/ktlthebestgroup/crust
I wouldn't be surprised if they created a new experimental search product using GPT3: GAIgle.
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-The rapid advances in AI slow down. Dalle and GPTchat will be an exception not a rule in the long run. The fraction of hard AI problems that can be solved with raw force of more parameters and training isn't that large.
-Paradoxically, AI will change everything. The advances that are already here haven't caught on yet. Legal documents in particular occupy this sweet niche of having some of the rigidness and strictness of coding but without the exact syntax requirements needed for code. The lawyers haven't yet noticed the machine coming for their job. I'm sure lawyers are not the only ones.
-A great recession isn't coming. The markets just sort of trade sideways for a while. You won't get 9% annual off an index fund like you did in the past, you won't loose your shirt either.
-The big issue on everyone's mind is the war in Ukraine. From what I've seen of just crude projections of when Russia would run out of tanks, APC's, whatever else, Ukraine will win the war outright in the first half of this year.
-China has basically given up on zero covid. I say this as someone who earlier was planning to speculate on China doing another major lockdown: they ain't going back to it.
-First the plague, now the war, next the famine!
But also: lawyering is good money, and they're adept at navigating the law. So breaking into that space with some sort of "tech disruption" has a high chance of getting you (metaphorically) dismembered.
Liability is the issue, as you say. If the software you use fails to flag an obvious issue that you consequently fail to flag to your client, you are in trouble, and the software provider won't be indemnifying you for it.
>First the plague, now the war, next the famine!
I'm noting no predictions on this page regarding the Colorado River and the drought in the US West. Will the drought continue? Get worse? Could it cause a famine? Or just widespread adoption of efficient watering systems?
Food prices in North America will continue to climb as drought worsens agriculture in California and Mexico. California supplies most of the food in Western North America, including the Western half of Canada
We probably need at least another doubling of global processing power before we will see any major advancements in AI tech, which will take 3-7 years in my opinion.
I would enjoy being proven wrong, but I fear I am actually overly optimistic.
Based on the quality of outputs I get when asking for help with somewhat complex AI research problems, I think it'll likely help accelerate the pace of other research as well, and discovery will be limited by people's speed of running the tests it suggests and feeding it back the results.
+1 for for the recession, it's not coming, that almost apparent right now. Yes, more will lose their jobs, but only because many of those positions should never have been created in the first place. There are still plenty of jobs, just less attractive ones. I will say: I have zero feel for the US job market, it's simply too weird to comprehend. For Northern Europe, plenty of work all around.
Russia won't run out of APC, but they will run out of tanks, they basically have already. They don't have the inventory to deploy tanks in offensive actions anymore. They won't run out of APCs. The will run out of good one and competent personal to put in them. The last more of a statement of current facts, not a prediction.
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He just told me today that China has lifted all restrictions surrounding covid and are letting it run its course. As a result, he and his gf have both gotten covid for the first time.
When it first hit they had tanks driving up and down their streets making sure people stayed in their houses, so it's definitely a shift for them.
- Magnitude 8 earthquake in British Columbia in November.
- Major world leader dies in plane crash in France in March. Part of an attempted coup.
- JWST breaks.
- Lebron misses 64 games due to a right leg injury.
- TCU wins the CFP.
- Shipping is blocked for 2 weeks on the Mississippi River near Memphis.
- Coinbase collapses. Crypto mostly dead.
- Tom Brady Super Bowl MVP.
- Salesforce buys the remnants of Twitter.
- Toyota buys the remnants of Tesla.
- Lockheed and Northrop buy the remnants of SpaceX.
- Meta buys the remnants of the Boring Company.
- Cocoa shortage causes global civil unrest.
- Amazon forks Chromium and releases their own browser. Requires Prime subscription.
- NATO directly intervenes in Ukraine and pushes Russia out. WW3 trends on Mastodon.
This is, errrr, very specific.
- It includes "any major world leader" not just French leaders;
- If a world leader of any stripe were to die in a plane crash next March, people would still argue in favor of the prediction being correct, because the line between "not a major world leader" and "a major world leader" is quite fuzzy with room for "reasonable" debate.
- "Part of an attempted coup" is a great specific-but-broad constraint. What is an "attempted coup", exactly? A "successful coup" would be much more strict, but "attempted coup" leaves both the attempted-and-failed as well as the attempted-and-succeeded variants on the table. Also, one could argue that an "attempted coup" has many possibilities that are not immediately identified as a "coup"--for example, would a violent protest count? What does it mean to be "part of" an attempt? For example, suppose a leader is not part of the attempt personally, but is associated with someone who is. In that case, would the leader who left the country be considered "part of" an attempted coup?
For context: I grew up Mormon and grappled through many prophecies that seemed incredibly "specific" and somehow, incredibly, turned out to be true. This proved Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God.
You can do this right now with 4 friends depending on the instance!
Sir. You have won the internet today. I salute you.
It is funny. It is timely. It works on several layers.
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He can’t keep getting away with it :(
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Allows click to buy anything you see on any page?
Most unlikely thing on here.
HOW DARE YOU
I think you have this backwards :-)
* AI will keep wowing us, but in 2023 actual change will be surprisingly little. Turns out the extra 1% is rather important for serious applications, and less serious applications could do with existing solutions - Third-world click/content-farms are surprisingly competitive economically.
* Website rendering will edge a bit towards WebAssembly+canvas stacks, essentially the second coming of Flash - the need/desire was always there, mobile is getting more powerful, stacks will adjust back.
World:
* The war in Ukraine will continue back and forth. Over the long run leading to a strategic defeat for Russia regardless of tactical results (The West's logistical superiority will win out in the end).
* The Middle East will flare up, since 'pretend the JCPOA is still viable' can't hold past 2023 (the West will worry about sunsets, Iran will look at its economy and double down as the regime always does).
* Add in shocks from China and the Fed, and a recession is guaranteed. For how long I can't say.
* Relative political stability in most of the democratic world, not that voters are pleased, but they'll stick with the current group for 2023.
When a competent specialist has doubts, they can say "I don't know",but ChatGPT is happy to say some non sense. This makes it very unreliable in a way we're not used to.
90% or more of the population of China will become infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants during the first quarter. Assuming infection fatality rate of around 0.1%, between 1 and 1.5 million people may die, however the Chinese government will report numbers that are lower by at least an order of magnitude. The supply chain will be impacted, and it is possible that new variants may emerge and spread to the rest of the world.
The Russo-Ukrainian war will continue. A second major offensive against Ukraine is likely. Mobilisation (both military and industrial) will continue, Ukrainian infrastructure and economy will be further damaged. There will be no negotiations. Russian regime won't collapse, Russia will not split, NATO will not become involved in fighting on Ukrainian soil. The risk of a full-scale nuclear war is very low, the use of tactical nuclear weapons is more probable, but still unlikely.
China will not launch an attack on Taiwan in 2023.
There will be many new startups based on the OpenAI API, and this market will become extremely crowded. OpenAI will continue updating their GPT model and release version 4, which will significantly improve the quality and reliability of text output and will be multimodal. There will be at least one major, publicly available, competing LLM, likely from Meta.
Twitter will add the ability to make payments on their platform and will work on developing e-commerce capabilities. Meta will follow suit, most likely on Whatsapp.
The hospitals will be full, so the IFR will be at the high end of whatever we fear.
The subvariant spreading in China is Omicron BF.7 with basic reproduction number of R0>=10. That means that herd immunity will be reached at 1-1/10 = 90% of population or higher, so by the end of 2023 the death toll may indeed exceed 1 million, depending on the exact IFR which is still uncertain.
- At least one instance of serious grid instability in Europe. Comes close to complete cascading collapse, but few people in mainstream notice/understand how serious it was
- Various real estate markets dive 40%. Canada, UK, Ireland, nordics
- Something in US politics breaks in a serious fashion (think capital riot) cause by the widening left/right split spiralling further out of control
- Russia gets a new leader
- China moves aggressively against Taiwan, but not a full frontal assault. Blockade of some sort. US backs down
- Major oil price drama from strait of hormuz or that general part of the world
- Robots/Drones that are 100% AI controlled and armed with lethal weapons are used for area denial patrol type in corridor fashion
- Revolution in sea unmanned navigation via AI, both underwater and above. Mostly cargo for above, military for under.
- Multiple major humanitarian crisis in Africa, mix environmental and socioeconomic/structural
- Knock-off ChatGPT style bots become a widely available but they are inferior to the openai one. aws/gcp/azure all have a go at it
ChapGpt is most likely to be disrupted by openai itself
Agreed. Prediction here is essentially that they run out of room to do so with sufficient force to counteract market forces
> ChapGpt is most likely to be disrupted by openai itself
Good point. They do have a head start for next wave
- Understanding why AI makes mistakes continues to be a black box.
- AI, despite fears, will enliven culture through DALL-e etc .
- We will be in a golden age of science and tech, not so much in fundamental discoveries but in successfully moving away from carbon based energy. Incremental improvements across a vast array of problems with create powerful synergies.
- The problems with globalization are with us for the foreseeable future, leading to increased trading among allies, less with non-allies.
- Labor unrest will increase everywhere.
- 60% Ukraine wins, 35% stalemate or increased fighting, 5% nuclear use.
- If the Ukraine situation stabilizes the stock market will take off.
I've been playing around with chat GPT and trying to find useful cases.
I asked it to come up with python assignments, such that I could train for a certification, and I provided the syllabus, which includes the datetime and calendar module. Among the many syggestions, one stood out to me: creating a CLI which accepts a date and uses those modules to calculate the following full moon and print it.
Sounded cool, but there's a catch: those modules don't have any information about moon cycles!
I guess it matched some pattern regarding dates and moon cycles to produce this bad answer. It's a creative suggestion, but quite unfeasible!
We cannot use these models as experts who provided answers, but instead as creative, sometimes nonsense assistants, who can give their input but we can clearly filter the good ideas from the nonsense.
Why do you think this will happen?