Comment by yarapavan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yarapavan | Hacker News Reader

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20 "Mega Trends" from the article:

1. Continued increase in global abundance

2. Global gigabit connectivity will connect everyone and everything, everywhere, at ultra-low cost

3. The average human healthspan will increase by 10+ years

4. An age of capital abundance will see increasing access to capital everywhere

5. Augmented Reality and the Spatial Web will achieve ubiquitous deployment

6. Everything is smart, embedded with intelligence

7. AI will achieve human-level intelligence

8. AI-Human Collaboration will skyrocket across all professions

9. Most individuals adapt a -like “software shell” to improve their quality of life

10. Globally abundant, cheap renewable energy

11. The insurance industry transforms from “recovery after risk” to “prevention of risk

12. Autonomous vehicles and flying cars will redefine human travel (soon to be far faster and cheaper)

13. On-demand production and on-demand delivery will birth an “instant economy of things”

14. Ability to sense and know anything, anytime, anywhere

15. Disruption of advertising

16. Cellular agriculture moves from the lab into inner cities, providing high-quality protein that is cheaper and healthier

17. High-bandwidth Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) will come online for public use

18. High-resolution VR will transform both retail and real estate shopping

19. Increased focus on sustainability and the environment

20. CRISPR and gene therapies will minimize disease

I predict that nothing of this will happen in the next decade.

I'd be wary of saying that exactly nothing will come to pass, especially since some of the criteria are so vague as to permit a wide range of outcomes.

> 19. Increased focus on sustainability and the environment

This is the most likely to me, although less in the sense of more action and more in the sense of more talk, e.g., political debates. I definitely don't think it will overpower other typical topics, but in the sense that it will probably be a perennial topic on the list I can see it happening.

Indeed. "7. AI will achieve human-level intelligence" should call in to question the whole analysis.

Author's premise is entirely based on a > twenty year old book running at about a 19% accuracy rate for its current-decade predictions: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcGBmDEe5qXB7dFBF/assessing-...

Then either you don't seem to be very good at predicting the future, or you're a very pessimistic person, or possibly both.

As just one example, #20 is already being done for COVID: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/new-test-detects-cor...

And another disease: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2835-2

I could go on, but I think I've made my point.

For something to be widely available in 10 years, the R&D has to be mostly done right about today. I think it's likely that we'll see a CRISPR-like technique in the experimental stages for one or two diseases in humans in the next decade, but it's basically impossible that we'll have many such therapies approved in that time. We're in the "kind of works in mice" stage of research. That's very far from approved in humans.

> I could go on, but I think I've made my point.

Is COVID "minimised" yet? Quite the opposite. So it looks like the prediction of "disease can be minimised" is an absurd one.

Pfizer would like to have a word with you.

I look forward to their call, but realistically, I am not holding my breath today. Maybe next year.

Is COVID "minimised" yet? (1) Would Pfizer say so?

1) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54935700

Clinical trials take so long that emergencies like covid could be the few diseases wiped in the next decade.

The research is bearing fruit, seeing that on the ground is a different matter.

Things related to shopping and widespread embedding of chips/networking are very much already coming in. Having an Alexa-alike in common toys is probably only a few years out.

The high end medical therapies are probably also going to be a thing.

The more funky computing-shell and AI predictions are a flop IMO.

The smart home is pretty dumb. Cameras, lights, roomba, lawnmower, watering. It's not smart. It's a cron job OR'd with voice recognition. It's an automated home - useful in its own right, but let's not hype it inappropriately.

> 18. High-resolution VR will transform both retail and real estate shopping

To me - this one sounds most plausible.

You beat me to it.

Actually, we are already pretty much there. [0]

You might say these aren't 3D, but that's easy to add by following these instructions [1].

You might say there isn't true immersion, but that would be the next step, and already done in a music video. [2]

[0] - http://members.har.com/cwsites/dispVirtualtours.cfm?id=21

[1] - https://www.harconnect.com/2020/07/14/har-virtual-tools/

[2] - https://nofilmschool.com/music-video-lidar-point-clouds-unre...

As for #2, note that it was done with the combination of a Leica LIDAR scanner, an iPhone, and pulled together ultimately in Unreal Engine.

> AI will achieve human-level intelligence

This would certainly surprise me very much.

> Autonomous vehicles and flying cars will redefine human travel

https://www.facebook.com/theseinfeldfriarsclub/videos/flying...

> 7. AI will achieve human-level intelligence

Instant eye-roll from me.

Counterpoint: https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

> 15. Disruption of advertising

is advertising currently "rupted" ? in a steady state of calm non-disruption? My guess is no.

17 nullifies 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 18

> 20. CRISPR and gene therapies will minimize disease

Bear in mind that producing a vaccine to a new disease COVID-19 in 2 years would be simultaneously a) smashing existing records and b) far too slow to stop it being a catastrophe, then this prediction looks ridiculous.

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