1. Deglobalization accelerates as the Bretton woods organisations become increasingly irrelevant and trade moves to being bloc and region based.
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)
> The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
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.
> the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people
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.
"Stock photography" covers a lot of ground. I don't see company art directors shifting to generative AI--at least not yet--for a variety of reasons, including legal concerns. However, you'll probably see a lot of use for people looking for graphics, any graphics to illustrate things. But for content like that, people today are probably mostly using Creative Commons or (more commonly) just grabbing stuff of the Internet.
That's a statement about 2023. I don't pretend to know what will be the case in five years.
A stock photo agency can exist even if the cost of acquiring a particular picture is exactly zero.
Their paid service would be / always has been curation and selection. Customers rarely need a random picture (else they just use unsplash), they need a particular picture conveying a particular idea / mood / style.
I agree with the original premise. It is a repetition of the history of graphic design: around 2000 you would need a graphic designer to create a good website, it took time and several iterations. It worked similarly for years until Twitter Bootstrap appeared and many jumped to use it as is or do small custom changes.
Yeah I think I over egged this slightly. But I imagine if you're in a team of half a dozen copywriters like a friend if mine that by the end of 2023 there's only going to be one left.
I interpret "collapse" to mean "many people doing it full-time lose their jobs and the market price of the outputs drops significantly". In which case I agree with the assertion that collapse is coming soon, although having played with the tools quite a bit I'm not convinced on 2023. Definitely by the end of 2025.
'''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.'''
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.
Depends on how they're benchmarked. If you're a non US employee doing senior dev work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company then I think you are probably correct.
> 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.
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.
I think SV will continue to pay top prices for world class talent to relocate there and work in office. Think AI PhDs, chip designers, systems programmers, graphics experts, and the like. But the days of 100k interns and 300k SWE 4's are over, and that portion of the workforce will devolve to the national average.
Americans work 15-20% more hours, at least compared to Europeans (<2 weeks vacation compared to 4-6, etc.), and have to pay huge amounts for healthcare.
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).
I know, I know. But look at the difference in price worldwide of developers (it's so much more than 10-20%). Think of the 10s of thousands of engineers paid insane starting comp to do feature-work at the tech giants. I don't know, but I think this may well become a thing of the past in the next decade.
Globalization will always be too tempting to ignore when some countries have labor costs that are ten times lower than others. Large companies will continue to have enough political power to veto the laws that would be required to reverse globalization.
Globalization is a bit more than just companies setting up shop where labour is cheapest. It is a rules based order that relies on institutions like the World Bank, IMF, a bunch of treaties and other institutions and a set of norms about how relations between States should be constructed. It also relies on an elite consensus that globalization is good. I think there is a sense however that this consensus is breaking down, hence the turn towards nativism in various polities. The increasing willingness of China and Russia to flex their muscles and (re)build regional power blocks means that while international trade may not decrease it may no longer be "global" in the way it is now.
Globalization then will continue along the lines of cultural and political alliances. EU is one striking example of globalization, of you take a look from a perspective of 100 or even 50 years ago. Advanced chip will still continue to be made in Korea and (hopefully) Taiwan on machines built in Europe for companies that build products in the US and in Japan.
What is going to dwindle or even cease is cooperation with not-exactly-friendly countries, like, well, China and obviously Russia, and maybe not exactly hostile but culturally remote, like Saudi Arabia.
India and Africa will remain important cultural and economical battlegrounds between the West and China. China is investing a huge lot into African countries, and I suppose the more advanced of them, like Nigeria, will become the new "tigers" with explosive economic growth in the coming 15-25 years, like Korea in 1980s.
So I'd recommend checking out Peter Zeihan but he argues globalization isn't a natural economic result but rather globalization came about as the US agreed to allow other countries to participate in the first world market on the condition that they don't ally with the Soviets. Thus arguing globalization was only ever a security not economic policy and now that the security problem it is trying to solve is no longer there globalization is failing.
I came here to say the same and I really like your description of the core idea of his last book. After reading it (and with some caveats and small disagreements such as the cost of dealing with Climate Change) it is clear how the US has been the gluing force of globalization for around 70 years as securing mechanism against the Soviets.
Zeihan is as critical of the United States as anyone. He’s just more critical of China and Russia. While capital may always chase cheap labor, his point is that it may not be able to in a fractured economic and security environment. It’s gonna be a hell of a decade.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Part of the problem is people thinking that such countries are creating the fragmentation whereas it were the US companies who literally partitioned internet through algorithms, walled gardens, filters and blacklists. A national firewall can be circumvented by VPN and many do. Its much harder to circumvent whatever limitations such corporations that control large parts of the internet create.
> A national firewall can be circumvented by VPN and many do
FYI, this can be quite difficult for certain countries. Source: I have had friends who live in China and the Middle East, and VPN IP addresses are very quickly found and blacklisted. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
And honestly, this is why I'm ok with big tech getting highly regulated.
In many ways they're _ALREADY_ more powerful than state actors. They were pretty open about their attempts at manipulating the last presidential election, and I personally think it was a gigantic mistake for them. It's only going to get worse imo.
#1 and #3 are contradicting each other. If deglobalization accelerates, why would hiring be anywhere in the world where labor costs are lower ? Shouldn't it be the opposite ?
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.
An alternative to globalization is not necessarily isolationism, which I agree is unlikely, but instead the re establishment of distinct blocs that operate largely independently of each other, according to distinct sets of rules, as during the Cold War when you had the (Sino) Soviet bloc, the "West", and a large number of countries that mostly traded with just their immediate neighbours or with former colonial powers. The current, second, period of globalized trade (the first ended in 1914) is built on a rules based international order that is beginning to break down for a variety of reasons, including China's increased economic power, the reemergence of nativism in various polities, Russia's desire to reestablish it's empire (I know that's a simplification but not by that much) and an increasing belief in the EU that the USA is no longer interested in being a guarantor of it's security. A deglobalised world is one where trade still happens, but it is much more likely to be constrained within blocs and be carried out according to different rules and norms depending on where you are.
I suppose that right now the US is doing a colossal job of showing the EU how it's interested in protecting the Europe. The amount of total US aid to Ukraine, which is standing between the newly expansionist Russia and the West, is comparable or exceeds the EU aid, and its military part is significantly larger than EU's.
Globalization is only good for GDP and only on first order thinking.
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.
> Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
One thing I'd like to mention is that sea shipping is actually very efficient, and the things being shipped usually have much more CO2 associated with their production and use than the shipping itself. For shipping cars:
> A cargo ship produces 16.14 grams of CO2 per metric ton of goods shipped per kilometer.
I continue to believe that eating locally sourced meat is just a way for people to feel good while continuing to damage the environment 99% as much.
And one last thing:
> As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
And how do these poor countries acquire a middle class without resources or trade?
This isn't to say that I disagree with your overall point that going full on globalist has hidden costs. National security concerns are often not addressed for one.
If you look at China, it's exactly due to the West's insatiable appetite for cheaper labor that it has become more technically competent, and more well-off, especially the coastal cities. And this is why it now (for some years) ceases to be a pool of cheap labor: the living standards, while not near Western, have risen so much, the Western customers started finding the labor cost too high. Now it's the turn of Vietnam for many industries.
Previous participants of this joyride: Japan, Korea, half of Southern Europe.
Reserves of cheap labor are not endless, and it's great that the capital actively seeks them out and eventually fills them in.
Let's not forget rampant corporate espionage, and deliberate IP infringement whereby designs used contractually to produce something, and then stolen to make knock offs as well.
In practice, in aggregate they are. As you mentioned, there were other countries filling that gap before, and there will be new ones. East Asia got there first because of a combination of factors (cultural, historic, and logistical), but once that area is spent, new frontiers will be opened. In fact, in markets where there are fewer logistical constraints (i.e. software), those new frontiers are already coming online (South America, Africa, etc).
The chief beneficiary of Bretton Woods was the non-West but I think deglobalization will be seen as simply a disengagement with the non-West. There will continue to be brisk trade between Italy and South Korea. There will be less trade between China and the United States.
>5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
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.
I think the argument against TikTok being banned is the inability of US government to regulate tech at all, even if both sides agree in concept. Casey Newton talks about this.
With top notch analysis like this, you should consider claiming a salary from the fifth directorate of the Federal Security Service. This is just the kind of stuff that'll allow them to continue building on their stellar track record of 2022!
I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe.
edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.
I'm not sure of your motivation either, but we all have our biases; those are powerful predictions, and it's a shame you've been hit with such a downvote attack.
I would not be surprised if people downvote this sort of comment since—no matter the predictions—it seems like an attempt to piggyback off the parent post to make more people see your own post when just posting a top-level comment would have been more appropriate. Not trying to imply intent, though.
I intentionally made predictions that could be verified after a year but would also be minority views on this site, since repeating where I agree with the majority does not add to the debate. Sure, they won't all happen, but say, a 50% chance of happening or better, and made a sufficient number of them that I expect a lot of interesting predictions will take place. With the Turkey/Syria meeting, Erdogan has already been asking for it, and at some point Assad will give in. US troops there are surrounded and having trouble resupplying. For the mutual aid treaty, this is based on some under the radar meetings already taking place. That Ukraine lost 100K was inadvertently leaked by Ursula but really everyone paying attention knew -- for example they announced they needed to do a new mobilization of 100K to replace lost men. 100K is most likely a sever under-estimate. Presence of Polish, Georgian, and other troops in Ukraine is already well known, but they haven't been focused on in the West yet. The arrivals of 1000 dead bodies to Poland is forcing the issue into public debate. Other documents have also been leaked.
But this just goes to show how strong Narrative enforcement is in the west. Downvoting is nothing, you have people denied banking services, getting fired, put on no-fly lists, fined, and in Europe even imprisoned for speech -- for questioning NATO narratives. So HN downvotes is not important, it just reveals the various narrative enforcement mechanisms at work even here, but with a lot less at stake.
If this was a Chinese message board or Russian message board, I could make opposite predictions and be met with much more interesting debate and intellectual curiosity, as their information control mechanisms aren't nearly as sophisticated, and as a society they tend to be much more pragmatic and intellectually curious. The West is unique in being so ideological in the present moment - basically it is going through something similar to the cultural revolution period in China, and of course that was not a time to go against official narratives.
But in any case -- just wait a year. I'll be happy to compare my predictions in Dec 2023 against others'. It would be funny -- and quite appropriate -- if the some of the most interesting and accurate predictions of the last year were flagged on this site. But that's up to HN management, and they most likely have limited capacity to stand up to information warfare policies in the west and the hordes of professionals with hurt feelings flagging everything they disagree with. I don't take it personally at all, it's just a sign of the times.
> If this was a Chinese message board or Russian message board, I could make opposite predictions and be met with much more interesting debate and intellectual curiosity, as their information control mechanisms aren't nearly as sophisticated, and as a society they tend to be much more pragmatic and intellectually curious.
How do you mesh this with the fact that you can and will be arrested in Russia for calling the war in Ukraine a war, or for even protesting with a blank sign?.
As a simple example, there was an employee of a TV news station in Moscow that started screaming pro-Ukraine things on the air, on live TV. She was given a 100 ruble fine (for causing a disturbance) and released.
Meanwhile, people in the EU are actually imprisoned for supporting Russia. And of course Ukraine has death squads, and merely being accused of supporting Russia or being accused of speaking Russian is enough to end up in one of the filtration camps.
I’d suggest you find better new sources because I have seen the videos of the people being hauled off by the Russian police for holding a blank sign where as your example does not even exist.
> Around the same time, it's clear that there are more than 200K Ukrainian dead and all Narratives of them winning the war or even maintaining a stalemate are gone, even from western media.
I am curious as to what leads you to make this prediction?
Not him, but from current predictions to 200k isnt that big of a jump. If i recall we are likely at over 100k dead servicemen (matching Russian losses) and something around 40k dead civilians.
Not so sure about such a drastic shift myself, but its a possibility if you think of it in terms of having overdone the whole propaganda aspect and inadvertently triggering a reaction. Especially as having observed it for the better part of the last year, i suspect Russia has been goating western media/commentators/politicians into especially brazen stuff. To give an example for especially brazen instances, there is the propaganda channel "Perun" on youtube who does a great job framing itself as open source intelligence. When it came to the Ukrainian Kherson offensive he however dropped the ball and transparently crossed the line from miss- to dissinformation when he
1) Congratulated the Ukrainian government on "preserving manpower" by banning military age males from leaving the country
2) Stating that the Ukrainian military was made up solely from "volunteers", thus the great fighting spirit
3) Congratulating the Ukrainian government on its willingness to take losses in Kherson with the strategic aim of worsening the Russian supply situation
Add to stuff like this the reports that got brazenly silenced like the Amnesty International report about Ukraine having soldiers positioned in schools and hospitals. The rational being that Russia knew about all prewar military positions in case you wondered.
Its the old problem of exploiting a bogey man too brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working.
edit: Minute 26:06 in the Video from 17th of September (Seven months from Kyiv to Kharkiv), Minute 27:30 and 41:40 of the Kherson video from 20th November. Binge watched them so not sure where he mentioned the volunteer part, but the preserving manpower with ban to leave the country should be mentioned in the Ukrainian mobilization video. But also referenced at around min 13 in the Kyiv to Kharkiv video.
Russia will not have a sudden reversal in capabilities. China is not going to abandon its strategy of hedging its bets to tie itself to a sinking ship all of a sudden. Iran and Saudi Arabia will not have a sudden change of heart to adopt a completely opposite position. Zelensky is already to US liking and Ukraine has shown itself to be capable rather than on the verge of falling apart.
Basically OP was positing a complete reversal of existing realities that all just happen to align with enemies of the US all of a sudden becoming more capable and deciding to band together. In reality political alliances, as well as military and economic capabilities, don't do screaming 180 degree turnarounds.
But Russia is accomplishing their objectives, so there would be no reversal. Ukraine is holding on by pouring tens of billions of dollars worth of Western armaments into the conflict (which are coming slower and slower), not to mention the lives of servicemen.
It's not a very optimistic picture is it? Definitely feels like we're heading in to one of those "things are going to get worse before they get better" periods
As some other has pointed out this sounds way too disruptive to be true (how exactly would 200k deaths change the entire prospect of the war?).
Why would the US need to replace zelensky with a "puppet"? Ukraine wants US boots in Ukraine.
China recovery of their GDP is going to happen how? They got multiple issues systemically destroying their GDP growth (pollution, corruption, housing market collapse, over fishing, bad policies being enforced with no room for negotiation, etc. ).
To be fair, when your survival depends on the military spending of someone else, the lines between "alliance" and "vasalism" starts to blur. It will (understandably) take some balls for Zelensky to ever refuse anything from Biden in the short term ; and in the long term, US will likely not refrain from using the "remember when we saved you from Putin" card (we've heard this in France for, what 50 years ?)
I'm pretty sure Churchill and De Gaulle were called "pupets of the USA" at some point, and they seem to have gone on _fine_.
That being said, it would be foolish from the US to not "destroy the Russian army for less than 5% of its defense budget, without loosing any soldier".
I agree, and of course I expect the US to use their "hey remember that time" card a few times, and I'm sure Ukraine itself (not just Zelenskyy) expects the same.
And for context, the US helping Ukraine to this extent pretty immediately means the US is loved in Ukraine, and the country will be pretty happy to follow the US in whatever for quite a while.
"Puppet" has other implications, though. A puppet, in its most literal form, is an empty face and body where you put your hand; it does your every move, everything you exactly want it to.
The implications of calling Zelenskyy the US's puppet are appalling. It implies Ukraine didn't choose him, rather that the US placed him. It implies Ukraine has no agency, but is just the "United State Border Office for Russia". It implies that Ukraine's biggest problems are whatever the US is concerned about; rather than what currently threatens its existence.
I'm tired tired tired of americans thinking they're so god-damn important in the world, that every other nation is a "puppet state". And they always say it with disdain at their own administration, as if that makes it okay. Not to say the US hasn't had puppet regimes installed, but fuck, it's seriously egocentric.
I think you're more or less spot on, but very far with the last one on UK.
The economy is more resilient than you think, especially the City. I have a feeling the war ironically helped. It prevented the finance from moving out to the continent.
While the city may be resilient ( and I'm a bit dubious about that) I think the economy outside of London is increasingly fragile as the past decade of under investment in infrastructure is really starting to bite. The levels of political instability also make the UK less attractive than it has been in the past and I can't see us getting through 2023 without at least one self inflicted constitutional crisis around either Northern Ireland or Scotland.
The inflation situation in the UK is getting out of hand. With Brexit and post Covid, companies are struggling for staff and the prices being charged for everything are eye watering.
I’m not sure how that plays out, but hyperinflation can’t be good.
There are a few other cities that have done and are continuing to do well such as Manchester, but the North East continues to decline, Liverpool is betting that being a Freeport (again) will save it (it won't), Birmingham is just a bit rubbish, Wales is independent enough from Westminster to be ignored and not independent enough to change its own destiny, and Scotland (or the SNP) desperately wants to leave the UK, rejoin the EU, keep the oil, become a wind, wave, tech and finance powerhouse and also have a rainbow sparkle unicorn pony. It's not a great picture.
- USB 4, Series D will be defined, with 3 possible orientations, one each for display, power and data transfer
- 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.
This is a joke but maybe it actually is a viable model to deal with geopolitical issues/differences. the “emperor” has overall control and gets paid his “taxes” and the local kings have some autonomy in how to deal with their regions.
But I’m sure this already happens without using medieval metaphors
- 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.
Bold and seemingly contradictory predictions by me:
-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.
100% lawyers have noticed. For example: they've been trying to automate discovery for a while now. I'm sure the new LLMs are making waves in those circles.
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.
Yes, my firm is investing loads into AI and other tech solutions to common legal problems. I first worked with eDiscovery software eight years ago. More recent trends including using machine learning to (partially) automate legal due diligence.
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.
One of my predictions is that this will lead to an AI arms race. The front line won't be weird melty pictures and code that doesn't work but looks like it might, but increasingly expensive automated suits by legal AIs against other legal AIs.
This will - ironically - create the Singularity. And then we're all either in jail, bankrupt, or legally executed.
Yep. My buddy actually worked at making one practice less paper dependent. If there is a place, where tech did not make a big impact yet ( and some of it for a reason like confidentiality ), this is it. Naturally, doing it well will be hard ( and suddenly finding a lawyer that knows what he/she is doing tech wise will be about as bad as .. any other company on the planet ).
Most of these are pretty good, if not a big stretch.
>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?
There's more than a few "oh shit the food supply" stories sizzling in the background. Wheat exports from Ukraine/Russia is an obvious one. Spotted lantern fly eating the crops we like to eat in the American North East is another. Colorado River drought is yet a third. They might all be nothing, but only one of them has to be something.
Drought is hitting Europe and Asia as well. Water will be traded as a commodity if it isn’t already beyond water purification companies.
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
Yeah it's been hitting even central Europe (Germany, France, Benelux AT/CH etc) for the last few years.
It's harder to notice from afar because it's not deserty (yet) but the temperatures are going up all year and with it the obvious problems and also new and "exciting" fauna and flora is arriving.
Many places in that area are historically very water rich that's why the consequences to everyday life are often not yet that severe.
No idea about Europe but I think the Colorado River watershed will improve in 2023, ruining any chance of getting meaningful change accomplished - and guaranteeing deadpool by 2030.
Nice prediction but I think that lawyers will be the last to feel the change. You don't pay a lawyer for crafting a document, you pay a lawyer to take responsibility for the document and to foresee any possible problems.
I believe AI will be one of those things where the first 80% is the easiest and the last 20% very difficult.
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.
The real moment of truth will be if any models start to assist massively in research in the hard sciences.
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.
For 2023, AI will go nowhere, even if developed further. It will remain a gimmick. Expectations are too high, and AI research can't deliver.
+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.
I have a friend who has been in china since before covid hit, teaching english to kids.
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.
It's a great almost-specific prediction! Followers of ancient prophets would be proud. It's the kind of thing that has a 1% chance of being accurate--it sounds very specific because it mentions France, but has ample wiggle room:
- 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.
* 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.
They will come but unless the quality is better than what we have for image and text generation, the same thing applies. 95% is not good enough for most serious applications, so it’s not going to replace most jobs.
> 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.
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.
The thing with content farms is a lot of the listicles etc. trade in currency, e.g. the best five blah-blahs of 2023. In general, that's not the sort of thing that generative AI is really set up for today. That will come as will rewriting press releases with some additional context. But, as you say, major impacts are probably later this decade as opposed to 2023 which will still be in the curiosity phase.
The US will see a slowdown in GDP growth, with a rate of 0.2%, while the Eurozone may experience a mild recession, with a rate of -0.1%. Inflation will remain high, particularly in Europe, though it will be lower than in 2022.
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.
While I don't know what IFR to use for China -- I'm not familiar enough with their vaccines nor their rate of vaccination -- remember that in general, there's one IFR for "sick people can go to the hospital" and another, much higher one for "sick people cannot go to the hospital because they are full."
The hospitals will be full, so the IFR will be at the high end of whatever we fear.
You've got a good point there, but we also need to consider the time frame. I'm talking about the first quarter and my predictions may be way too pessimistic. Once the virus infects the urban population (~60%) it will slow down. IHME forecasts 300k deaths in Q1.
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.
- Tesla struggles to compete against old school manufacturers that have a grip on quality and make advances on the EV tech side
- 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
- The flaws in AI become more evident even as models become more powerful. Basically AI algorithms learn patterns, not abstraction, limiting reasoning in fundamental ways.
- 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.
> Basically AI algorithms learn patterns, not abstraction
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.
We can't move away from carbon-based energy without a very unlikely fundamental discovery. Rather we will keep using more and more carbon-based energy (and that for years, until it becomes more and more expensive and we start having energy problems).
1. We will learn that one or more traditional banks have taken on cryptocurrency exposure and will need to be bailed out to prevent another financial crisis.
2. Politicians will introduce legislation to regulate AI, with the initial focus on copyright protection, but it will be defeated. Court cases are brought against companies for training ML using copyrighted data, setting up an eventual supreme court battle in coming years.
3. AI will drive advancements in medical treatments, especially in pharmaceuticals and personalized medicine. While this has already been happening to some extent, the recent interest in AI will cause an increased investment of money and resources to companies working in this space.
4. Year of Linux desktop!
5. Remote work will end for many, due to the recession making employers feel more powerful to enforce back-to-office, for which which many middle managers will advocate. Companies who have thrived with a remote culture will remain that way, but those who have struggled will "force" employees back to their offices full time.
After buying a chromebook a month ago I am completely convinced this came a few years ago and no one paid any attention as it wasn't the vision they had of the Linux desktop.
I was blown away by how nice ChromeOS is to use, how seamless everything is, and how well Crostini (I think it's called this) works at running Linux programs. ChromeOS is honestly the single best Linux experience I have ever had.
> After buying a chromebook a month ago I am completely convinced this came a few years ago and no one paid any attention as it wasn't the vision they had of the Linux desktop.
I noticed but I don't think this is a satisfactory Linux Desktop. It goes against many stuff Linux Desktop proponents could be fighting for, mainly privacy and controlling one's computing. The main point of the Chromebook is to make your computer a thin client to run your computing on Google's servers. I think computing should go the opposite way. It's fast and has no virus though.
As for the market share, I know nobody with a Chromebook around me, I don't think it's a big thing where I am.
As someone who used ChromeOS for a year or so, I think its kinda cool that mainstream people are using Linux, but
1: They don't know they are using Linux. Most users dont even know what Linux is.
2: Not open source.
3: Not privacy respecting.
Given that Linux mode is a directly supported feature of ChromeOS, I think it gets a little bit murky. A consumer grade device with Debian Buster/10 I can just run Emacs on? True it's not the Ubuntu+Gnome running natively future we wanted in our desktop domination (though Dell and System76 and Framework will sell you one of those these days), but Chromebooks aren't this totally locked down bastardized single-app technicall Linux device with that feature. Chromebooks also now run Android apps too.
If 99% of people don't know what Linux is, and don't use Linux mode, should it really count? Most people just use what is essentially a browser that can also run Android apps.
If 99% of the people using it don't know what a Linux is, I think that means we've totally won because it means that Linux got easy enough for them to use!
Really though, I think it's for you to decide. It's not like there's a standards body with a rigorous criterion on if a given year is "Year of Linux Desktop", which is perhaps OPs point. Personally I think that 2013, when Dell first started selling the XPS 13 with Ubuntu was the Year of the Linux Desktop and I personally think that we've actually lost the plot in subsequent years.
Given that ChromeOS uses Linux under the hood? I'd argue yes it does count. Even if they don't access Linux mode/Linux VMs they are still using a Linux system.
fair enough, I do think it's arguable that users of ChromeOS would regularly do that, but I get your point.
Also, I had a System76 laptop for work once and absolutely loved it. I tried to buy it when I left, but they weren't happy about my reasons for leaving and refused to do so.
Seriously though, the "Year of the Linux desktop" is when YOU decide that the Linux desktop is good enough and start using it full-time. That was many years ago for me, and for other people maybe it's not ready for them yet. But if you're talking about market share, it's going up slowly but steadily year after year.
I've always been a holdout due to pc games, now I just bought a desktop pc for the first time in 10 years. If steam really manages to pull of Linux gaming, it is gonna be my year of Linux desktop!
Well, proton and wine have made significant advancements. You should check out your Steam library on protondb, that'll show what can run on Linux and what can't.
> 1. We will learn that one or more traditional banks have taken on cryptocurrency exposure and will need to be bailed out to prevent another financial crisis.
Don't know if this will pan out, but if it does it will probably be Deutsche Bank right?
- We'll see a new social network born. My guess is that it will try to carve out a segment from Twitter and Tiktok due to the recent changes from Musk and U.S. government concerns, respectively.
- People will start realizing Vue is just AngularJS all over again and will further converge towards React. There is already many signs of this in Vue3.
- Cryptocurrency regulation will be an ongoing discussion, and nothing will happen until SBF is in jail.
- Influencers who pumped and dumped crypto will be an ongoing target from the SEC. The recently Coffeezilla series on Logan Paul will likely be made an example of.
- We'll see more layoffs
- We will see more millennials quit the 9-5 to pursue some kind of passion. My guess is most will try to be an influencer.
- We'll start seeing more pirating again as people are being laid off and also due to the increase of streaming competitors.
- Meta will likely continue to lose money and their AR strategy will be disrupted by Apple.
“We will see more millennials quit the 9-5 to pursue some kind of passion. My guess is most will try to be an influencer.”
But where do influencers get their money? Endorsements aka advertisements and straight from subscribers. We may already be seeing a contraction of the advertisers from online streaming so this probably has shorter legs than required to impact the 9-5 hegemony.
Otherwise people who left the labor market probably have their finances tied to the stock market and interest rates - whether they realize it or not. The Fed has stated they will raise rates until the labor market moves back towards employers. (They are not a populist group, btw.) They absolutely think raising rates will push people out of retirement regardless of age.
Personally, I think it’s far past time for the labor market to correct towards the supply side than the demand side. Ie workers and worker needs/wants. This did happen after the 1918 Pandemic. But of course that era didn’t have quite the high powered technocratic class pushing things toward the corporates away from market equilibrium. (Economic theory does generally warn against artificial conditions thwarting equilibrium of supply/demand. The hell of rent caps in NYC is an example.)
In short, make jobs more desirable for people to work or see an inefficient outcome until the market does. Let the market do its thing at least, or (better) reinforce workers rights-as the market has already pushed the equilibrium too far towards labor demand and away from supply.
I think this looks like creative solutions around hours/scheduling, workplace conditions, and moving away from toxic environments like hire to fire, “quiet promotions”, or under scheduling people to avoid paying benefits.
I'm not a fan of the whole "the market will deal with it" thing. Here's my analogy (I was talking about this as far back as the late 90's).
1. Assume global warming is happening.
2. Assume that global warming is going to start causing problems for humans.
Humans will start using technology to deal with these problems. And they'll be successful. This is going to have the harmful effect of making global warming worse before humans truly start trying to solve the root issue (because they can continue to live without being affected by it).
There are two lines here. Passing the first line starts affecting humans, and passing the second line ends in catastrophe (humans can no longer exist on earth).
In a well functioning system, as we pass the first line, humans will start taking notice and we will _naturally_ start trying to avoid the second line. The space between these two lines is our buffer.
As we use technology to keep the warming from affecting us, we will push the first line back while avoiding any true behavior changes that would ultimately keep us from the second line. This decreases our buffer and increases the danger. At some point the technology will either fail or completely remove the second line (one can imagine building a bubble around the earth ala space balls so we can very explicitly regulate the environment).
To use technology in this manner is to invite catastrophe and to gamble that technology will never fail us. It may, or it may not.
---
This is how I feel about "the market". In theory, the market should naturally push towards an equilibrium and correct so as to avoid true disaster. Humans are involved, technology is involved, causing the market to be unnatural and affected by forces outside of that market. In the case of markets, catastrophe isn't the extinction of all human life, but it IS untold horrors. People are currently using technology to force the market to be what they want. This will break at some point.
This is why the market needs to be regulated, to control how much of an effect both humans and technology have on it. Not because the market will never self-correct, but because of the untold pain when it does.
And I understand the argument against it, this is not about controlling the market, it's about _PROTECTING_ the market from undue influence by those with more power than others. The alternative to too much regulation isn't "no regulation", it's "less regulation". Of course, you also have the classic problem of "who watches the watchers" and there's no good answer for solving THAT problem, but I don't think the right answer is "fuck it, just let it play out".
When you learn React with JSX, you just need to know JS and everything else is pretty much predictable. Whereas in Vue, you have to learn JS and all the declaration markups of Vue (ex, v-bind, v-for, etc...); it's less predictable and someone who understands JS would still have to learn those things. Ex, if you knew how to write a loop in JS then you can write a loop to output React components. In Vue, you have to learn how to use v-for. When you start talking about filters and other things, it gets overly complicated in Vue (like AngularJS).
Two-way binding was a thing in early AngularJS days similar to Vue, and they both found out through iteration that it's not as great in practice as in theory. I believe Vue3 is only one-way binding now? With the composition API, you're encouraged to use defineEmits as the callback mechanism to parent components similar to React's paradigm. When React came out, it was all one-way binding and it made sense and worked well.
Vue's composition API with the defineProps and defineEmits creates a similar component composition structure to React's effect hooks. However, the general structure of the component still requires Vue syntax (ex, <template>, <script setup>, etc...). In React, you just write a JS function and return what you expect to render.
Vue is also a bit too magical in how their props work especially when you are using <script setup>. It's not obvious that props can be inherited unless you read the documentation. In React, it's just JavaScript and you get the props through the function arguments.
I think the common "strengths" of Vue are often applicable to all frontend frameworks, because it's all JavaScript at the end of the day. This is all just my opinion though.
We've been leaning heavily into Vue3+TSX over at https://radiopaper.com which addresses some of these gripes. It's true there's more "magic" and ceremony around creating components than just a simple function, but not much – you just return what you expect to render from the `setup` component method and all is well. You also get niceties like well-typed props & emitted events, and even runtime prop data validation if desired, built right in.
Vue3 also has `FunctionalComponent` now for the cases where you really want a simple component from a function – and again props work beautifully with Typescript.
In contrast, I'm finding integrating Typescript with the largely-JS React codebase I work with on the day job to be a bit nightmarish – the amount of prop destructuring which seems to happen in every single component makes typing their signatures a repetitive, tedious affair (largely due to TS's handling of destructured arguments). I'm not sure how universal this style is in modern React but I do seem to come across it pretty frequently. To be fair, React's simplicity does make it eminently typeable, this is more of a code-stylistic issue.
All that said, appreciated reading your take on the two frameworks – it's extremely difficult to remain objective about the tools we use day in and out and these sorts of comparisons absolutely help. We all want to be moving towards systems we enjoy building with and will continue enjoying for decades - I for one am infinitely grateful to React and its community for bringing JSX/TSX into the world (which I'm sure is still a somewhat controversial stance in 2022- but for me personally, after a 6 or so months with it, the firsthand experience told me all I needed to know). Happy xmas to you!
> Vue3 also has `FunctionalComponent` now for the cases where you really want a simple component from a function – and again props work beautifully with Typescript.
This kind of reinforces my point about having to learn Vue. I personally think it's just unnecessarily building more API to memorize on top of JavaScript.
> In contrast, I'm finding integrating Typescript with the largely-JS React codebase I work with on the day job to be a bit nightmarish – the amount of prop destructuring which seems to happen in every single component makes typing their signatures a repetitive, tedious affair (largely due to TS's handling of destructured arguments).
To be fair, I find issues with this with TypeScript everything. Moreover, I think that is the natural progression for all typed systems or languages. I honestly prefer JS without TypeScript. I may use TypeScript some times for certain areas like having enums.
> All that said, appreciated reading your take on the two frameworks
Fair points. I feel the need to clarify that you don't _need_ to use `FunctionalComponent` in bare JS, it just gives you an opportunity to type your component props (all `FunctionalComponent` is is a TS interface). This works just fine, from a `.tsx` file:
```
const MyComponent = ({ greeting = 'Hello' }) => <p>{greeting} world!</p>;
```
and can be used in TSX or standard-Vue templates as
```
<MyComponent greeting="Hi" />
```
There is certainly more surface-area to learn about than React, though my feeling is that hooks have evened that equation quite a bit (one React component class vs. a whole quirky hooks toolkit; and admittedly Vue has forms of both as well). I'd argue both are far less to learn than Angular – I've had a tiny bit of experience there and recall feeling continually lost. I also think there are tradeoffs that justify extra bits of learning, but that's a subjective matter that (imo) can only be informed through some amount of firsthand experience building something complex with the frameworks.
Typescript is not everyone's cup of tea! Tradeoffs abound there – personally while I agree it can be cumbersome, I have trouble going back at this point (though I will when necessary). Interesting that you enjoy enums – I do as well but have found a distaste for them in the TS community which saddens me.
Prop destructuring isn't necessary. A lot of people changed to accessing the props via property access and this is often a better approach for conciseness. Don't force yourself to do something stylistic if it doesn't fit!
Thanks for weighing in, that's good to know. After wondering if this could be auto-refactored, I came across https://github.com/jsx-eslint/eslint-plugin-react/blob/maste..., will definitely have to give that (with `--fix`) a try in the new year and see if I can get the team on board! – desire for typescript being a compelling factor.
Personally I do like the non-destructured `props.abc` throughout component code, really helps clarify at a glance where something is coming from, whether it's locally or externally defined, etc. Code style is an endless exercise in compromises/opinions though, even _with_ tools like eslint and prettier.
It's just getting started. We're on the verge of seeing the first few billionaire influencers emerge. That will definitely turn heads and drive more money towards that direction. We're also seeing the rise of the children of tech money (I forgot the name to reference this group of people), but they're going to be heavy on influencer lifecycles too.
I disagree. Peak influencer moment was the billionaire status of folks like Kanye, Kardashians, Kylie Jenner, etc. If anything is to be seen from the past year, it's that they're just as vulnerable to the machinations of the mainstream as any one. Moreover, most of their wealth is pure paper - not even publicly traded. With a sure trimming of private valuations, they will definitely be hurt (although their lifestyle won't, but I doubt they are that stupid to showcase their lives during an actual recession year when it happens).
Tldr:- Influencers are correlated to the markets. Market valuations fall, Influencers get hurt.
I think their point is that influencers have always existed, it's the underlying model that has changed.
And I tend to agree. People bought into Logan Pauls scam because they trusted him, the same way that people will buy a product because they trust the spokesperson.
I'm a huge Kate Mulgrew fan even as I don't think Janeway was a great captain. I remember coming across "The Principle" on Amazon, seeing her on it, and purchasing it. I didn't get very far into it before I stopped it and went googling and it turns out she was tricked and didn't fully realize what she was narrating. I think she sued them, but I could be wrong.
You can argue that the scale is different, and you may be right, but I do think the other poster is correct that they've existed for a very long time and many people use them as a proxy for trust when making decisions.
- next year will be a mixture of things continuing to happen as before, and completely unexpexted events (that will actually play out similarly than previous events, but from a while ago.)
- There will be strikes in France,
- coups in south America and / or Africa,
- very few plane crashes, an awful lot of car accidents
- and maybe a rocket malfunction.
- War in Russia will go on. (Apparently, half of all wars last more than a year :/ [1])
- A next wave from Belarus is almost a sure thing. Not sure why it would work better than last one.
- I don't know where it would make sense military wise for Russia to drop a tactical nuke. They will do if they find out.
- The first power cut in a major European country will change the game as far as public support goes.
- But gouvernements don't need public support to send weapons, they need industrial capability, so they will keep doing it.
- Also, famous people will die in January / February. (because babyboom + life expectancy + winter)
- Summer will be on average hotter than summers from the last decade.
- Except during my holidays, where it will rain cats and dogs.
- Finally, the year will end in December (high probability, high confidence)
I was expecting some joke around "there is no war in Russia, it's a special operation, yada yada". Then I reread myself and spotted the obvious mistake.
:facepalm:
(Although, technically, some parts of Ukraine are claimed by Russia, so... No ? Ok, no. Sorry.)
They were wrong on the midterms and Le Pen getting close (Zemmour flopped and Le Pen + Zemmour is 30% of the vote). The alleged economic conditions would have implied a red wave, but Democrats did significantly better than expected.
Early 2022 the fears of Russia invading were real. They were downplayed and not talked about much in the mainstream but come January many already saw what Russia was up to.
Mostly it’s just that many of us, Ukrainians included (I speak from personal experience - I have Ukrainian close relatives), closed our eyes to Russia actually pulling the trigger. It is just unthinkably stupid and so, so disgusting.
Yeah, I think a lot of history of the russo-ukranian war is not known by many americans. Many people didn't even know there was a war until the invasion. I remember tensions building up a few months before the invasion and some people started talking about it (I knew a political dude online who was talking about it a few months before, he was saying something about how things could go down. I wasn't really interested but now I realize he was right (except for him supporting russia tho)).
* Nivenkos predicted that Omicron would create natural immunity to COVID, but I think alkonaut's prediction was more nuanced/accurate: that organized responses end and there are new variants that we live with (although there has been a greater level of immune escape than expected, nothing has run away... so far). Note, that while down dramatically from the peak we are at a steady state for most of the year where 500 people in the US (and about the same number in the EU) die every day from COVID [1], just no one cares now.
* alkonaut's Russia prediction correctly covers Russian annexation of Eastern Ukraine, intense conflict w/ many more Russian casualties than expected, the SWIFT and petroleum price responses and the huge role that UAVs would play in the conflict. What he missed was actually just how well Ukraine would do (no Russian victory in sight) and how successful/effective Ukraine's infowar/strategic game would be. That, the scale of Russian losses, and the huge amount of OSINT has prevented Russia from any of the narrative control people might have expected.
* Republicans by all accounts should have curb-stomped Dems during the mid-terms, but Roe v Wade ended up being a big own-goal that prevented that.
* alkonaut's prediction that "Boris Johnson is ousted as prime minster. He is replaced by a either a man of some charisma or a woman without charisma, as that is the requirement" was also quite insightful.
Wow. alkonaut called it, very specifically in some cases. Boris Johnson's replacement having no charisma was the cherry on top. Where's alkonaut's 2023 predictions?
Well, game companies have backed away immensely due to backlash, and the PFP NFTs that were all the rage has cooled (but continues on...) but one only has to look at Reddit Collectibles (or the Trump Trading Cards) to see that NFTs aren't dead, just evolving/dropping the branding. Starbucks' Odyssey is another example of this new wave of utility NFTs.
> They were downplayed and not talked about much in the mainstream
The western military intelligence communities were aware and had warned about Russian mobilization for months. They were downplayed only by far-right voices in the west that were invested in building up Putin as an effective authoritarian against the slow-moving "woke" bureaucrats of the EU and the US Democrats.
I think the two biggest news events of this year were Russia and Roe being overturned, but only one prediction for Roe and most for Russia didn't anticipate a hot war
If 2022 is anything to go by, the opposite of what we see on HN can be predicted. So many poor or completely wrong predictions.
"Red tsunami in 2022 mid-terms, Democrats trounced in both the House and Senate. Biden becomes a lame duck." "Russia invades Ukraine with no push back." Hahahahahaha!
"- Elon says something so incredibly stupid that this time it affects his company's performance." Well, this one finally came true. Maybe.
- Starship makes a successful orbital flight.
- Russia won't start any overt military operations in Donbass, let alone Ukraine proper.
- Modern GPU prices are still ridiculous.
- Europe's opinion on nuclear energy will become a tad more favorable.
- Ethereum won't shift to Proof of Stake.
- No major AI breakthroughs.
- James Cameron's Avatar 2 won't bring anything groundbreaking to the table.
- Apple won't release a VR headset.
- Russian-Ukraine war loses its momentum on the eastern front, hot war continues.
- Azerbaijan is launching full-scale invasion to Nagorno-Karabakh, taking it over in a Blitzkrieg with the support of Turkey.
- Russia is forcing Armenia to join Russian Union State, massive protests in Yerevan.
- Pro-Russian government is replacing Belorus president who is forced to resign, massibe protests in Minsk.
- China is preparing for a full scale invasion to Taiwan in 2024.
- Crypto industry crumbles into dust under heavy regulation.
- Meta is stepping back from the Metaverse, moving this research to a separate entity. Meta stocks are all-time low.
- First AI-generated celebrities.
The only thing sillier than technical analysis is using technical analysis on make-believe money. Looking for a pattern is human nature. Your “sample size” of 3 is by no means indicative of anything. “Historical precedence” - they teach you to never use these words when working in finance. Bitcoin going to $5k is absolutely in play this year when the scammy house of cards that is Tether finally collapses.
There is no analytical justification for Bitcoin's price drops solely based on historical price movements. The biggest drops were directly associated with the unprecedented (by most) failure of crypto projects like Terra Luna and Celsius.
- At least 2 rounds of hard layoffs at Amazon, plus gentleman layoffs. No more Bezos billion dollar Prime Video projects. Shedding at least 10-12% of white collar work force to signal to the market they’re trying to prop the stock
- The economic hard landing
- Disney stock will fare much better under Iger
- Additional rate hikes from the Fed, at least 100bps but maybe 150
- Twitter won’t have the demise the media has been predicting. Musk probably continues making changes and shortly doing about face turn on them.
- Russia continues getting backed into a corner with Ukraine faring better and better thanks to US and Western support. Don’t know if it will happen but increasing probability Russia uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine. Doubt it comes down to WW3, we’ll try to immediately broker a peace deal, rather than getting ourselves (US) in a thermonuclear endgame with Russians
- Streaming recession with new shows put on hold
- More advances in AI like openai. Within big tech companies? Not so much.
- Big tech culture shift, cleaning house and going back to roots or at least trying to find that soul. Focus on bottom line metrics. Oat milk lattes, no so much.
It's more commonly (but still not very commonly) called a "gentlemen's layoff", but confusingly seems to (also?) mean pretty much the opposite of what curtisblaine said: "Elon Musk and Jason Calacanis messaged about how return-to-office mandates could be used as a ‘gentlemen’s layoff’ to get workers to voluntarily quit" - https://archive.ph/tC9H4. No idea which sense birdymcbird intended.
"but increasing probability Russia uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine."
Not likely. They would have nothing to gain from it. In their narrative, they are protecting the ukrainians ( which are actually russians, whether they want or not) from the fascist ukrainians. Nuking russian soil does not go together with this and Putin struggles already to not loose his base. And any military advantage this would gain, would be offset by massive upscaling of international aid. Also the russian army is in no shape anymore, to fight in fallout areas.
I expect a stalemate at the current frontlines, with not much changes in the long term.
I agree it is not likely but their made up reasons have nothing to do with it. The narratives shift weekly and at no point they've been internally consistent.
Hm, I surely did not follow every speech of Putin or RT news in general, but as far as I did, the narrative that the Ukrainian needs to be liberated as Russians, did not change and has been pretty consistent.
What did change, were the various threats towards the west and stated goals of what to achieve and back and forth with mobilisation and such.
Putins goal is clear, he wants a Eurasian Empire. But he is apparently not clear on how to achieve it.
(For example he would like Belarussia to join russia and join the war, but so far he was not able to enforce it )
No, the narrative is anywhere from "we're defending Russia proper from invasion" to "we're going after every Ukrainian and their children" between different (and sometimes the same) TV hosts and public figures.
Like I said, I am not really a follower of russian TV, I mainly just read various Speeches Putin gave. And there was never anything close of "we're going after every Ukrainian and their children", that I remember.
It was variations of "the NATO is coming closer to us everyday and we have to fight back". If you know more and different, pls share.
You must have missed the speech when Putin officially annexed the territory he grabbed thus far. The imperial irredentism has little to do with the NATO narrative. But as I said the consistency in Russian propaganda is never sought after, neither by the propagandists nor the willing recipients.
But... how else are we going to keep up the image that we're on the side of the good guys?
People have been saying this shit for months, about how Russia will invade the rest of Europe, or drops nukes, or go crazy, and low and behold, they so far only did exactly what they said they were going to do, nothing more.
If you cant support the war given those facts, and need to make up stories about nukes and total conquest, then maybe war isnt good no matter which side youre on.
…exactly what they said? They were saying they are not going to invade as late as February 20, 2022. Then they said their objectives are total conquest on February 24, 2022 in a public TV address. They threatened nukes (everyone from Putin himself to TV pundits) for months until Xi publicly chided him.
But I am impressed how one can take perhaps the most morally unambiguous conflict in the century so far and still make it an uncertainty.
>how else are we going to keep up the image that we're on the side of the good guys?
Everything we are seeing and hearing from the people in the liberated areas seems to be working pretty well. I guess they bought into the narrative too.
I'd guess it's more the stories of the Russians raping and torturing them that is making it so obviously unambiguous that the Ukrainians are the good guys.
- Tech jobs at FAANG no longer look attractive or stable. Google hits the final nail in the coffin (not necessarily involving the layoffs)
- The age of smart assistants is over
- Microsoft will make a huge mistake involving Windows -> governments and companies start making concrete transition to MacOS and Linux desktop (start in late 2023)
- The all of above leads to a revolution of smaller companies, their boom, innovation, and culture which more resemble 90s than 2020s.
- Emergence of a new UI (non-smartphone/desktop/voice/VR)
- Countries start to move away from the fossil fuels for generating electricity. New nuclear revolution.
Year of the Linux again huh. Windows isn’t popular because it’s good, it’s popular because everyone knows it and Microsoft has good enough relations with every large organization in the world. MacOS is too expensive to seriously replace windows. Smart assistants will take off as chatGPT becomes commoditized, but it will look very different since you’ll have to pay for it.
MS has a limited amount of credit. It will expire eventually. If MS makes a bad move, it might kick off an avalanche. People leaving FAANG etc., might kick start new companies that help improving support, breaking the old relations, and building new ones.
And ChatGPT won't take off, IMO. It's a nice piece of tech, but lacks what's needed for productionisation. I didn't even include it in 2023 prediction, as 2023 won't even properly start before people forget it.
ChatGPT is immeasurably better than google assistant. Tons of people use that already, there’s no way they don’t upgrade it. Sure it won’t be the same, but it’ll follow the same idea of a massive transformer trained on the entire internet.
What's the ChatGPT traffic volume (requests per second), and what's Assistant's? Or any of the prominent search engines? What would be cost of running ChatGPT at that traffic volume & comparable (user friendly) latency or reliability?
How old is the data that ChatGPT is serving? How costly or feasible is to update it?
In short, the ChatGPT is frozen in all directions. Those are technical limitations.
ChatGPT is an amazing tech demo. It distrupted the Big Tech. That's great. But, we'll need to wait for the new generation. Not ChatGPT iterative improvement.
Seriously. My joke when Windows users say they don't know how to use Linux is that they don't know how to use Windows either but that doesn't stop them.
Yet you don't really try to understand why Windows keeps winning with general users ? Until we change this attitude that Linux is superior and people don't know any better, windows will continue winning.
>Yet you don't really try to understand why Windows keeps winning with general users ?
I don't really care. But I realize it is because they don't value the same things I do. Which is fine. I have no desire to tell people what they want. If they prefer convenience(largely illusory) to privacy and quality, it's none of my business. Let them eat McDonalds, work 50 hours a week, and shop til they drop.
I love Linux but let's not kid ourselves. Isn't it a couple of decades now when Linux was supposed to kill Windows and it hasn't ? I say this is more of a wishful thinking.
My impression is that the past predictions were based on Linux desktop winning from the tech & UX side. That's unlikely to happen.
I'm betting on the Windows regression. MS is making it happen. Forced reboots, lengthy updates, forcing people to create Microsoft Account, ads and app store. It's horror. I don't understand how people allow that. In addition, MS Office and similar often change the whole UI or the formats. How the people/companies keep up with that?
I don't totally get this one, even with just Whisper and ChatGPT you could build one hell of a smart assistant compared to Alexa or Siri. Maybe it doesn't come out next year, but I bet this category comes back in a year or two.
- The use of AI will become mainstream with your average person using it directly - it becomes the first truly revolutionary technology change since smart phones were invented. Serious social questions start being raised.
- The war in Ukraine will continue on but not conclude, with many more casualties on both sides. Consequentially, the stock price of principal US defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman will continue their significant upward trend.
- Once again, CO2 emissions will continue increasing globally. There will likely be some significant food shortages in part of the world.
- The UK will continue its economic descent, with more significant energy price increases and continued inflation.
Here's one that I think might actually have a chance of happening:
- Stable diffusion but for music. That is, give a text prompt and get a 2-5 minute song out.
So people can say things like "give me a song in the style of Siouxsie and the Banshee's first album, lamenting lost love" and get something reasonable back.
It would also be nice to do a retrospective of what actually was predicted correctly from past predictions, specifically 2022.
To me, this is not quite there. Stable diffusion produces, in some cases, really high quality output. The Riffusion is cool but still sounds a bit muddled.
Put it this way, if Riffusion came out in 2023, I would only give myself partial credit.
1, The Sunak Government will further undo the banking ring-fencing rules in England so large banks can play with British pension funds. Down the line (6-10 years), there will be a massive pension crisis in England.
2, The USA will start delivering ATACM missiles to Ukraine (this may prompt Russia to make an example: a nuclear detonation over the black sea or some Ukraine field as an attempt to arm wrestle concessions out of the USA and EU by Russia)
3, Musk will break up twitter and spin off the valuable parts (my least likely prediction, he won't do away with the sunk cost fallacy).
4, one massive strike in France ala 2018 Gilets Jaunes
5, Exchange of fire between Iran and the KSA over some tankers
6, the USA suffers a right wing terrorist attack against a gay pride event in June with 30+ deaths
> 4.one massive strike in France ala 2018 Gilets Jaunes
Oooh, come oooooon... There probably hasn't ever been a single year _without_ something resembling a "massive strike" in France. And we have yet-another-pension-reform coming up.
It's like predicting there will be a massive barbecue in Texas :P
I didn't mean just strikes, I said "massive strikes"! :P
Burned vehicles, a few hands lost to a police grenade, maybe a death or two.
Sure it's a low hanging fruit, but the French executive power has been bypassing parliament with 49.3 rulings for the past year to get unpopular laws and welfare undoings through. Something's gotta break.
Let's not call stuff like burned vehicles and violence "strikes", it's rioting which can be caused by the same issues that lead to strikes but strikes themselves are non violent and the concept doesn't deserve to be tarred with the same brush making it seem like "massive strikes" automatically equate to violence.
Regarding 3. There are a whole lot of people projecting their desires on this situation and letting their dislike of Elon completely cloud their judgement and reasoning capacity.
What is going on at Twitter is the Musk modus operandi and he is almost certainly loving his time there right now. He put it all on the line at PayPal, Tesla and now Twitter. It's just extremely public this time. You can say he failed plenty and Twitter is probably just going to turn into one of those. But the user engagement right now is higher than ever and there is no reason it can not be turned into a profitable business. Twitter crashing and burning is wishful thinking more than reality.
"he is almost certainly loving his time there right now."
Certainly not. He loves the attention and power he has gained, but he certainly does not love the bad numbers (Tesla stock also went DOWN as well) and that the quite meaningless poll whether he should step down, was not in his favor.
He did not comment on that one with "Vox Populi Vox Dei".
> he certainly does not love the bad numbers (Tesla stock also went DOWN as well) and that the quite meaningless poll whether he should step down, was not in his favor.
The poll was just for show, and it was in his favour. The plan was always for him to be interim CEO, with reports going back throughout this year all the way to May about this. He keeps doing this – putting up polls where he’s already made the decision and knows the vote will just confirm it. Why do people keep falling for it?
The result of the poll was never meant to change his plans, but I doubt that the fact that majority of people wanted him out didn’t sting his childish thin-skinned ego.
My bet is that he was hoping the poll were overwhelmingly for him staying so that he can then eventually announce how “he must reluctantly step down and that he knows how everyone is disappointed by this terrible turn of events”.
"putting up polls where he’s already made the decision and knows the vote will just confirm it. Why do people keep falling for it? "
Except that he did comment those other staged polls with "Vox Populi Vox Dei" pretty much right away and put it into action vs. not commenting and no action on this one.
And he said many things, also that there will be no CEO on Twitter at all. But yes, he never intended to remain CEO - otherwise he would have never did the poll in the first place, but he definitely has no clear plan, he drives on sight. (And yes, in either case, he still owns Twitter.)
And "stepping down" translates to asking whether he was running Twitter well. And the people said "no".
Why would he want that?
What would be the benefit, if it was his plan, to make people wanting him go?
You really think there is a great plan behind it?
The only vague thing might be to create an image of an reasonable emperor who listen to the people, even if it is unpleasant. But so far he does not really show the grandeur fitting that role.
Musk was correctly anticipating a major down turn in the economy for 2022. He was saying this at the end of 2021. Of course Tesla went down, everything else did as well. This is not a surprise. Fun fact he and Thiel also correctly anticipated the dotcom crash before it happened and pushed for the last round of PayPal funding to get done quickly at the peak as they expected it to be the last opportunity.
Twitters poor financials were known going in.
I think he would need to be pretty dumb to be surprised or offended by the result of the poll. Being CEO or not is meaningless when it is a private company and he owns the place. His word is law no matter the CEO.
It’s not as weird when you consider he paid for a lot of it via Tesla stock. If you think both are going to plummet in value due to an imminent downturn, you’re really just swapping ownership in one for the other irrespective of the downturn. But it doesn’t seem like a genius plan of his – he wouldn’t have bothered fighting a lawsuit to get out of it if that was his plan all along.
It was never the right price, which is why the twitter board was so happy and eager as hell to sell rather than stay an independent publicly traded company.
It is really hard to argue that this is the best way to turn the company around. He might get lucky with a number of factors,and the level of addiction of twitter nerds can't be overstated, but losing so much of your engineering team is still a major risk. Also, given the fact that a lot of advertisers don't seem to be pleased, it is hard to imagine how they are going to translate higher engagement into higher revenue.
Ordered by likelihood would be 6, 2, 1, 5, 4, 3 - 6.) being unfortunately a given (the question being where and when they'll attack) and and 3.) not very likely.
The mass attacks on gay groups we’ve seen to date resemble hate crimes more than politically motivated terror attacks, so “political tension” isn’t really the right term.
The issue is that the right wing has steered very hard into anti-gay rhetoric in the last couple of cycles which convinces the sort of deranged people who commit mass hate attacks that they are doing something for a cause.
Combine that with the fetishization and availability of military style weapons and it’s pretty easy for a lone miscreant to kill a lot of people fast.
ARs are quite common which is why I predict someone with a GAYR-15 will stop one of these attacks in its tracks and people will stop associating them with right wingers exclusively.
Such an offensively bad take. As a bi person and general LGBTQ+ ally, and left winger, I assure you we hope for violence against us to disappear entirely. Thankfully most right wingers also agree, but of the people who do lick their lips at the prospect of violence against gay people they're pretty much entirely right wing. But regardless of political orientation, the only people who don't find such events to be horrible and unnecessary are assholes first and foremost.
Saying that LGBTQ / left wing people are "groomers" is just insanely bigoted and no more grounded in reality than if I baselessly said "all right wingers are rapists". Complete nonsense, please educate yourself.
Sunak wouldn’t have anything to gain by doing that, pension crises cause the govt a headache and they’ll want to avoid it just as much. The last crises cost liz her job.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of the relaxation of ring fencing between investment banks and retail banks? That I know is more of a possibility and not related to pensions.
The Lord Mayor of the City of London, Nicholas Lyons, is a big lobbyist in favor of undoing the ring-fencing. I'm confident he'll try to get it done by the currently very friendly government of Sunak while he's in the yearly office -- he has till next November.
The relaxation for banks under a certain amount of AuM is already in the pipe -- see Lyons' recent interview with Bloomberg. I'm expecting him to push for a larger increase of the ceiling amount this year, and get it. That's why I said "further undo."
Maybe the ring-fencing will be fully removed but that won't happen this year.
- as probably everyone here would agree, AI-generated content will flood the Internet.
- the above will lead sites to desperately search for better bot prevention tools, eventually culminating in a few years with the introduction of systems where online activity is tied to a person's real identity via their government (privately - we will still be behind usernames but the site will be able to verify with the person's government that they are a real person) and passing off AI-generated content as human content will constitute a rule violation.
- AIs will be "let loose" on virtual machines, where they will experience many lifetimes' worth of computer use in a short time, learning to fully operate computers and start the process of replacing jobs not by having a technically capable person operating an AI, but by simply having an AI fully replace a person's job by acting identical to a remote worker from a manager/coworker's point of view. After AI gets intelligent enough, it will replace all desk jobs.
- After it becomes clear that AI will replace large portions of jobs (which I think will happen in 2023 when the next few iterations of AIs are released) there will be a push for UBI which will be supported by both sides of the political divide, as well as both the rich and the poor, and divided along the lines of who "believes" in AI and who doesn't
Contrarian take: AI continues to fizzle. ChatGPT is very impressive but so were the last ten breakthroughs in AI and none of them have proven very compelling. At least not for consumers. We'll see advances in some business processes related to text processing but that's about it. Who is going to make practical use of AI art? Maybe the low-end gaming market? I'm also bearish on writing even for low-touch marketing copy. If you've ever sat in a meeting to discuss marketing copy you'd know writing takes up about 1% of the cost and the rest is debate.
OpenAI is the apotheosis of regression analysis. It can only repackage what humans have already created. Over reliance will absolutely stultify every creative endeavor and we'll be stuck in a loop. I foresee a lot of adoption followed by a lot of disillusionment.
All that being said, I do believe it's only a matter of time before all that happens. Just not 2023.
On Linux VM, if a program is given root privilege and it just execute whatever command ChatGPT spit out, then you'll got hell a problem solver/havoc wreaker.
The hit rate of AI is still in that phase of being right almost all the time and being spectacularly wrong 2% of the time. So actually pretty close to a good DevOps engineer.
You think all of this will happen in 2023? I could see AI becoming more powerful and more of an issue for content moderation/spam/propoganda, but leading to social, political, and economic change? I'm doubtful.
Yeah, I think AI will lead to huge change starting next year when the next iterations on ChatGPT and whatnot are released and they jump from being good most of the time to being excellent almost all of the time. When that happens next year I think the large-scale changes will start as people realize what the future will be like.
*of course it will take at least a couple of decades for the large scale changes to take place but I think we're right on the edge of it starting
Spot on analysis. Especially the last point. The divide will indeed be between believers and non believers much more than rich and poor.
The rich and poor will both have among their lines people who think the AI will uplift the masses and others who think it is a tool of oppression. The real battle would be on those who think they can control it for the betterment of humanity. And those that do no.
* there will be another hype for a technology on HN that doesn't introduce anything revolutionary but will have 20 posts on the front page per day (seen this with: SQLite, Postrgres, Rust, Zig; downvotes incoming)
* Twitter users will massively migrate to a new social network (and it won't be Mastodon) like there was exodus from Tumblr to Twitter, and this social network will change ToS to allow NSFW (my bets are Instagram or TikTok)
* There will be a larger recession among video game companies even compared to crypto
* Inflation and energy crisis will cause such a large social unrest in the west that one or two governments will be overthrown, betting on Europe, NZ or Australia
* Plenty of new AI startups will be started, some of them will rise to the level of OpenAI and will be successively acquired by FAANG in the later years
> * Twitter users will massively migrate to a new social network (and it won't be Mastodon) like there was exodus from Tumblr to Twitter, and this social network will change ToS to allow NSFW (my bets are Instagram or TikTok)
>* Twitter users will massively migrate to a new social network (and it won't be Mastodon)
Maybe I am being too optimistic but it kinda seems like that a big chunk of twitter refugees will move to Mastodon. Maybe not all of them but a lot, like how right now Mastodon is slowly entering the mainstream as sites publish articles about it and many users are already switching to Mastodon. And how the other Twitter alternatives are barely talked about but Mastodon is being brought up as an alternative all the time.
Yes, Signal and Telegram were brought up during WhatsApp privacy changes "scandal" and to this day it is the largest IM. So nerds will go there but mainstream adoption will take years if ever.
> * Inflation and energy crisis will cause such a large social unrest in the west that one or two governments will be overthrown, betting on Europe, NZ or Australia
I'm curious why you think AU or NZ would have this happen. Both have robust processes for electing new governments, and despite what the news might tell you, the vast majority of people are fed and are not struggling to keep the lights on.
1. Twitter gets resold for a fraction of the original price tag
It seems clear at this point that without any kind of viable plan to get advertisers, employees, regulators and key content creators back on side the current trajectory will continue towards failure at a rapid pace which which is going to force them to sell.
The original price was already wildly above market rate and the brand has been damaged so much by this point that there is zero chance anyone will buy it now for a similar number.
2. Canvas based web frameworks become viable as an alternative to the DOM.
With the upcoming introduction of WebGPU and WasmGC into browsers next year it is going to start clearing many of the main technical roadblocks that have thus far prevented canvas based frameworks from succeeding.
The best positioned one that comes to mind currently is Flutter which has already developed a pretty successful approach on mobile and desktop and brings a very enthusiastic user base with it.
We are already seeing other platforms like Google Docs for example also moving towards a canvas based rendering system and I expect that trend to continue as the technology improves.
I think the use case will strictly be apps and not pages thankfully but we will start to see a clearer separation between “the web” and “apps that happen to run on the web”.
3. Apple will start to experience problems.
They are currently facing some pretty serious challenges at the legislative level across many of their key markets (EU, UK, AU and US) that is likely going to hit them in a couple of key areas (App store walled gardens, iOS browser competition etc).
At the same time the web platform is starting to really close the gap with mobile for a lot of new use cases that will cause companies to rethink their approach rather than continue to support 2-3 independent platforms with little to no code sharing. This is where you are starting to see Google’s bets on Project Fugu and Apple’s strategy of underinvesting in the web for years start to clash a lot more.
Lastly on the hardware side of the house I expect Apple’s decision to tie their supply chain to tightly to China start to clash a lot more with the general geopolitical environment around them and their sudden rush to try and address that is going to be very painful.
It’s a lot of new problems they haven’t had to face previously and it’s not actually clear that they are in a great position to deal with them.
> 2. Canvas based web frameworks become viable as an alternative to the DOM.
I would further add that a lot of companies will jump on this bandwagon until they realize they actually need SEO and accessibility and then move back to something similar to SSR.
Do you really need SEO for a login restricted web app? Will it be possible to have a framework/library that fallsback to DOM rendering when accessibility features are used? I think it’s actually feasible
Give me a summary of `Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('[indent="0"]')).map(a => a.parentNode.querySelector('.commtext').innerText).filter(a => a.length > 10 && a.length < 550).map(a => a.replace(/reply$/, '')).join('\n');`
«These predictions discuss various expected events and developments in the year 2023. These include the rise of robotic beings and the end of human rule, changes in language and animal treatment, the rise in enrollment for history classes, the use of artificial intelligence in video game development, the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in political leadership, the decline of single-page applications and client-side JavaScript, the potential for conflict between humans and artificial intelligence, and infrastructure changes within the technology industry. There are also predictions of changes in social media platforms, the adoption of Rust programming language, the decline of Tesla, and the end of the recession. Some of the predictions are cautious or negative, while others are more optimistic. It is not clear if these predictions have been accurately fulfilled or not.»
No idea why it gets the "tense" of the predictions wrong.
I had to ask it which were the most positive/negative predictions, and of course a short story in the style of William Shakespeare about how one prediction could be improved by linked data. This is what it came up with:
ChatGPT: --- 8<
Pessimistic Prediction: The potential for conflict between humans and artificial intelligence
Short Story:
Upon the rise of artificial intelligence,
A fear did grip the hearts of humankind;
The fear that machines would one day seek to rise
Against their creators, and all order unbind.
But in this dark and troubled time,
A beacon shone forth, a light divine -
The light of Linked Data, pure and bright,
A tool to bring all beings into one design.
For with the power of Linked Data's link,
The humans and the machines did intertwine,
Creating bonds of understanding and trust,
And peace did reign where once there was only mine.
- Full Self Driving will be "1-2 years away", much as it has been for the last 7 years
- Nuclear fusion "is only 2 decades away", just as it has been the last 40-60 years.
- same for other "right around the corner" predictions
- the world will change; most of that change is incremental; any real radical shifts will only be apparent with hindsight.
- the superrich are going to get loads more superrich; the environment will be worse off; the poor and middle class will also be worse off.
- all in all: trends will roughly continue as before even though 2023 will be part of a decade/decade-and-a-half which resulted in radical changes in trends.
I have a degree in theoretical physics and I would bet money against commercial nuclear fusion within the next 40 years. It's important research, but it's one hell of a long shot.
We just might learn there’s life elsewhere in the solar system thanks to Rocket Labs probe of Venus. Possibly a few other sources for this too.
JWST studies will begin pouring out results as the first one year lockup periods expire. There absolutely will be shocking results. (This being a prediction thread after all.)
Covid may finally recede into less and less of a concern. But only after China reaches a maximal level of infection and recovery. I read a figure somewhere they may have already had north of 250 million cases.
Personally, I’m hoping the world steps back from the brink of war. Maybe the violence and failure of Russian atrocities will inoculate the world from a larger war. Or something way worse is yet to come.
Really hoping at lease one solid state battery begins mass production. (I want an Ioniq 6.)
What scale of shocking are you predicting? Signs of extra terrestrial spaceship trails across the sky, or estimates of dark matter quantity adjusted by 1%?
It’s going to fall within the scientific mission of JWST. So it could be exoplanet or even solar system atmospheric footprints that are hard to explain without biology. It did several observations of Trappist-1, for instance. Or even seeing types of stars before now only theorized like the darker specimens or even a strange (matter) star.
Edit-You can see where JWST was pointed and when at the following. It goes one week at a time. The data is either immediately publicly available or withheld for one year for the requesting scientists. https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/observing-sched...
If it isn’t clear I’m a total JWST fanboy then let me just say it. I am an absolute JWST fanboy. I think telescopes have the best potential for widening fields like physics, chemistry, and more. This because ever increasing probes of QM require either astronomically large particle accelerators or unknown ways of accelerating particles. Further, the universe is absolutely huge and capable of much greater variety than anything we can engineer. So sitting back and taking notes is appropriate.
There is a serious push to find a way to tax electric car owners to make up for the lack of a road tax that’s normally rolled into gasoline prices. Some people will propose tracking the mileage, while others will resist that idea because of privacy reasons. It will be debated here on HN.
Kind of a cheat guess since it’s already starting to happen now, but I expect it to intensify as more and more people get EVs.
1. Start of a massive new immigration wave in Europe(around Q2-Q3), 2015-style numbers by Q2 2024. Will be a combination of Ukrainian refugees not wanting to return to Ukraine(even if they are able to) and subsequently being "permanently" settled in Europe and massive push by politicians to accept more immigrants in order to combat inflation/economy/pensions.
2. Massive labour bear market in tech industry in Europe/U.S. Tech workers are going to experience the same thing that happened to finance workers post-2008, i.e very hard work and ruthless competition for a good, but not proportional pay, with a miniscule but well publicized chance of striking it rich.
3. Musk will manage to stabilize Twitter but only after seriously overhauling the way internal economy functions. Will basically copy Instagram marketplace features as much as he can, allow people to sell stuff on Twitter properly and try to skim a bit off the top.
1984 Will continue to be the high water mark of secure general purpose computing, as nothing since offers the security of hardware enforced write protected floppy disks that can easily be copied and verified as main storage.
Added for 2023
Passwords written down on paper will make a comeback as people realize the general insecurity of their computers. Backing up those lists will use either Non-networked stand alone cameras with SD card storage, or copiers known not to make permanent records.
Capabilities based operating systems such as Genode begin to make an uptick in popularity on HN. Widespread adoption won't happen until about 2030.
The situation in China, which is just now beginning, will lead to deaths at a previously unimaginable scale. Estimates of deaths in the next 12 weeks range from 500,000, to 2 million, to > 10 million.
With most of China too ill to work, the supply chain issues we saw in 2020 will come roaring back, twice as badly.
New variants will come out of this infectious maelstrom and burn their way across the world.
I don't know what happens after that. Either we'll continue trying to live in denial, or things will take a turn for a worse with the virus and the powers that be will have a come to Jesus moment -- at which point we'll finally see action on using upper-room UV and mandates with N95 masking.
But if finances -- and insurance policies -- permit, I would definitely stock up on anything essential for life such as medicines and medical supplies. Many drugs and drug precursors are made in China, and they're not going to be shipping out any time soon.
In the West, the number of previously-healthy, young people suddenly dropping dead of post-Covid heart attacks and strokes will become too noticeable to ignore. However, reactions to this will vary. There may be denial. There may be people blaming it on the vaccine. A general fearfulness may turn into anger and scapegoating.
In other news, house values drop >10% in some markets.
Big swings happen in commodities, but I'm not clever enough to predict which ones or in what directions -- only that there will be volatility.
It's not at all hard to see the end of the blockbuster-multiplex studio-cinema model. Surely it'll take a few years but this year is absolutely grim. The top 15 superhero movies all time or in other words those that earned above a billion (and that's without adjusting for inflation) are all pre-COVID. The 2022 box office is a complete mess: domestically you had seven movies which were making significant money and that's about it. The average of 2017-2019 domestic box office was 11B, adjusted for inflation that's like 12B so this year is about 60% of the good ole' years. That's not "recovery" that's more like "unmitigated disaster".
Internationally the #14 movie made 391M at the box office and it was a complete flop and the #15 made only 286M -- basically, the revenue just dropped off a cliff at that point.
Look at 2019, family movies completely ruled the chart: The Lion King, Frozen II, Toy Story 4, Aladdin (these four made over a billion), How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World...
In 2022, you have Minions: The Rise of Gru and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and ... that's it. So much so that I think Lightyear will be used in the histories to mark the beginning of the end.
And look at next year's slate: who wants another Indy movie after bloody aliens and that fridge? Hunger Games without Jennifer Lawrence? Family movie wise, what are we even looking at aside from Mario?
The game is over. Cinemas need to find a new value proposition, a $100 movie night for a family of four is just not attractive any more. They can just watch Disney+.
>The game is over. Cinemas need to find a new value proposition, a $100 movie night for a family of four is just not attractive any more. They can just watch Disney+.
We went to Avatar 2 and tickets + snacks were over 200 dollars. I haven't been to movies for a while and it's hard to see the value prop.
Machine generated (spam, AI, not reposts) and old posts from dead people or dead accounts will overwhelm new human generated content.
The war in Ukraine will end with Russia relying increasingly on kamikazi drones. Around end of spring a peace will be brokered. Russia will retain most of its territory gained esp with respect to black sea access.
Western Europe continued in recession with the UK leading the pack in economic downturn.
It will become apparent we've lost the 1.5celcius cap to global temp rises and governments will stop caring accelerating demise.
The ISS will be taken out by some space junk. But no Kessler cascade.
Chinese space station becomes man's only ped-e-espace NASA refuses to work with them.
I've seen a more cautious statistical take somewhere: well above 50% chance of a space-related fatality within the decade. Either from space junk colliding with a crewed station, or space junk falling to earth finally winning the lottery by coming down into a populated area and killing someone.
> I predict that we will see a loss of human life by (1) objects ... surviving reentry and hitting a populated area, or (2) people ... having their vehicle getting scwhacked by an unpredicted piece of junk.
> I predict that both those things are going to happen in the next decade
That's the first I've heard of the dead internet theory. Seems plausible. I deleted my social media around 2016. About a year ago, I created a new instagram account. My account is not private, and I'd reckon that over 50% of my followers are bots.
- Start of the movement from cloud/SaaS computing/storage to edge devices/client-side/on-prem.
- Amount of new successful SaaS orgs will decimate. The only 2 SaaS markets that will grow will be highly vertical/specialized or very big orgs offering commodity. They both will use value based pricing, but for the first growth will be sales-led and prices will be high, and the second will use product-led growth, and prices will be a race to the bottom of the market.
- Return to aspx/cgi-bin/single php/... files, as more and more services will simply bind together existing third party services.
- Return to server-side default first.
- People will start discovering P2P and start using it.
- Some variant of SQLite that you can run from the browser and update client-side will emerge.
This might result in the re-discovery of offline web apps.
- A lot of AI driven content will appear, resulting in too much content and the need for a circle of trust (i.e. what are some good websites). Generic search might become less useful with things like ChatGPT, and something like the old webrings concept will probably emerge, although it might be differently implemented (i.e. a protocol, social media thing, ...)
bonus (as it's related to what I'm doing on a daily basis): something like the Metaverse will start emerging, but it will be web based using WebXR, in splintered/mostly gated communities. AR on mobile phones will become more accessible to consumers via phone, and a common way to interact with these things will emerge this year.
A few weeks ago I tested a number of family phones using the online tools available and symmetric NAT was detected, some were very large UK mobile networks (Vodafone IIRC). That made me give up too.
It failed because of being a browser built in tech with insufficient support and no route to standardisation. Newer wasm based approaches have had a good year in 2022 with absurd-sql, sql.js and upstream wasm/vfs work so I think it's actually pretty close to just having a drop in library with good browser support
- The slow death of SPAs and client side JavaScript (including WASM in that) will commence due to the dubious ROI.
- War against humans and AI commences. The AI content farms will destroy everything by reducing the signal to noise ratio so that all content is worthless regardless of who wrote it.
- Major cloud provider will screw something up and lose a lot of clients leading to a minor shift of corporates back to their own infrastructure.
- War against humans and AI commences. The AI content farms will destroy everything by reducing the signal to noise ratio so that all content is worthless regardless of who wrote it.
Honestly, since the release of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion this Us something I have been thinking about a lot. I we thought that what we saw in the last 10-15 years was an explosion in content available online, we cannot even imagine the quantity of content that will come. I am actually surprised this has not happened yet, although I think that we will see more and more articles with contributions by ChatGPT. Short to mid-term I hope that this will not lead to a decrease in content quality/lack of diversity. Long-term I think we will see mechanisms arise to distinguish human writing from AI generated content.
I am aware that this might sound pessimistic, I am actually excited to see where his things will evolve!
But can’t you whitelist/blacklist signatures? Then use a web of trust to determine the probability of trusting non-listed signatures. Filter content by trust probability and spam should disappear.
This is how most products start and then inevitably it starts to require more complex interactive pages so you have to add react and then it becomes easier for everything to be react.
Client side rendering is not strictly tied to single page apps. At a previous company we had rails render out a div containing all the data the page needed to mount the react component. No complex api design, no weird permission issues, etc.
I’ve worked on extremely complex projects (many hundreds of endpoints, many TB of data). React definitely does not scale for those at all. It has a niche for a few use cases but it’s terrible for most I have found.
It’s all about applying the correct solution to the problem and that isn’t the web if it involves react.
I think we'll see both, with a sort of push to the two extremes initially, and then the two extremes coming back together to meet in the middle again as WASM gains popularity on both the client and the server leading to a lot more "isomorphic" (stupid term in this context, but whatever) codebases.
I think the eventual common use for WASM will eventually be DRM and related types of page code "security" and obfuscation. Basically a way for companies to "protect" their tech/IP from easy duplication while not having to carry the expensive burden of the cost of back-end processing in the cloud.
>War against humans and AI commences. The AI content farms will destroy everything by reducing the signal to noise ratio so that all content is worthless regardless of who wrote it.
That already began this year. We may realize it in 2023 though.
My most obvious prediction is that the long term, sometimes permanent damage Covid does to survivors will become harder and harder to deny. The result will be a crippled and damaged workforce in all countries that played fast and stupid with effective public health measures.
This will eventually be understood to be one of those spectacularly irrational failures of public policy that is remembered for centuries.
Covid itself will be tamed by UV-C in 2024, but there's still some way to go before that starts to happen.
Climate catastrophe will really start to bite with more and more unprecedented and incredibly destructive extreme weather events.
- China will attack Guam then Okinawa within 5 years. These bases need to be destroyed as part of its invasion of Taiwan
- Globalism will continue to decline due to rising tensions in Asia
- Droughts around the world will continue to worsen which will drastically increase food prices and social disorder
- climate change will cause a general northern migration
- The northern Arctic sea will become a major trade route as the ice caps melt. Tensions will rise between Russia, Canada, and the US
- The US dollar will no longer be the global reserve currency in three years. Deficit spending will be harder. Available consumer credit will decline.
- The paradigm for stock markets will change. “Stonks” will no longer eventually always go up, including indexes.
- Canada will have a privatized healthcare system alongside its public one
- mass surveillance will be the norm due to declining numbers of law enforcement personnel
- more central banks will issue CBDCs within 4 years in an effort to destroy paper currency
- AI will continue to replace commodity skills. Long term, this will become less of an issue as working populations decline while elderly retirees make up more of the population
> - China will attack Guam then Okinawa within 5 years. These bases need to be destroyed as part of its invasion of Taiwan
China will attack the US (Guam and Okinawa are basically US military bases, Guam being US territory as well) on their way to Taiwan? seems very unlikely (there are 20k-30k US marines in Okinawa for ex).
> - Canada will have a privatized healthcare system alongside its public one.
Possible, but will require a majority conservative government, which today seems unlikely
Unfortunately while Guam has missile defenses, it’s close enough to China where the CCP can technically just overwhelm the island with enough missiles.
> Possible, but will require a majority conservative government, which today seems unlikely
No it won’t. It just needs enough moderates to support it like in the EU. Canada’s budget won’t be able to support socialized healthcare unless
1. The number of retirees drastically decreases in relation to the number of working adults. This is hard due to the increasing xenophobia in Canada,
2. Benefits gets cut for everyone or just gets cut for retirees. Taxes are already too high, or
3. Take some of the load off the public system while giving people an option for private healthcare, while still subsidizing public healthcare for everyone else
1. More people will slowly come to the realization that electric cars are not as effective as originally thought. As a result, the government may shift their focus to hydrogen-powered vehicles as a new alternative. Ideally, making people think about all the other none starters the government has lead them, and their taxes merrily into.
2. Some people will become aware that their money is not as valuable as it once was. The recession will hit, full force, possibly never seen before. In response, the governments may launch campaigns to promote the adoption of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in order to address this issue. These campaigns may aim to generate interest, curiosity, and demand for CBDCs among the general public. This will lead people further into a permanent digital prison.
3. Bitcoin may reach new all-time highs due to increasing demand and adoption. It is also possible that some alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) may suffer and potentially collapse due to market fluctuations or and insolvency. Maybe, some people will see that the fiat system is failing.
This is true, I fear it won't stop the powers that be leading many down the hydrogen route though. Check out what the EU is chatting about it all right now.
> 1. More people will slowly come to the realization that electric cars are not as effective as originally thought. As a result, the government may shift their focus to hydrogen-powered vehicles as a new alternative.
I'm 100% thinking the same, but I can't help myself think how this will be a disastrous change in some countries. For instance in Europe, fuel-based cars will be banned in 2030 and governments are actively pushing for electric.
I think it might create a huge shift on the electric vehicle market tho.
> > 1. More people will slowly come to the realization that electric cars are not as effective as originally thought. As a result, the government may shift their focus to hydrogen-powered vehicles as a new alternative.
> I'm 100% thinking the same, but I can't help myself think how this will be a disastrous change in some countries. For instance in Europe, fuel-based cars will be banned in 2030 and governments are actively pushing for electric.
> I think it might create a huge shift on the electric vehicle market tho.
It will likely be disastrous, and when they try to jump to hydrogen it will probably be disastrous too.
In my mind it will be a similar climb down to what the governments diesel push was in the U.K. Disastrous...
1. More people will slowly come to the realization that electric cars are not as effective as originally thought. As a result, the government may shift their focus to hydrogen-powered vehicles as a new alternative. Ideally, making people think about all the other none starters the government has lead them, and their taxes merrily into.
The large automakers have been building compliance cars for a decade because they think electric cars aren't quite ready yet. Who is thinking the original thought in your prediction?
Something along the line of stimulus money, they could say something like when we gave free money to people during covid, and a lot was stolen. With CBDC's we can protect you, and stop the bad people, it's highly secure and can't be used for bad things. Without CBDC's we can't give you the free money you badly need, the people that argue against CBDC's are bad, they want to stop you feeding yourself and family with the free money we want to give you.
The one prediction I've seen (not here) that I agree with is that the Model Y will be the highest selling vehicle in the world in 2023. But I don't disagree with you about BEVs. I think companies will focus on hybrids as much as BEVs.
So far the exact opposite is happening, although you are correct that being the top selling car in the US won't happen, just the world as a whole. It's a pretty easy prediction, as even if it is wrong it will still barely trail Toyota for the top selling spot, barring some significant disruption and reversal.
They come #1 in Norway and their next best showing is #3 in China, but plenty of large markets where they're way down the list (e.g. #49 in Spain, #40 in germany did not make rankings in Italy, Brazil, India).
- Pendulum will swing to server side rendering, most likely using live view style of techniques, ironically even in JS land
- AI will be critized more, but once developer jobs are threatened, only then concrete talks about doing something about will happen, none else will be cared enough to bother
- bigger zeitgeist shift from react to alternative SPA tools - it will enter the "enterprise" status, and will be relevant only due to things like MUI and ant design, and because "everyone else" is doing it, and devs being too afraid to suggest something else to their managers
What is the "something else" to React that you allude to? Vue? NextJS? Preact? Angular? Heh, PHP?
I've tried almost every big-name web app framework under the sun, React for 7 years, Angular an age ago for a year or two. Vue for a few months. Etc. In my experience, everythig either trends away from React (Vue, Angular, ...) and fails ("fail" -> never gains widespread adoption, zero job market, or just less popular than React, etc.), or sticks close to React (Preact, ...) and still fails because they have no real unique offering/large benefit over React, particularly in "enterprise" setting (which is what predominantly matters).
> and because "everyone else" is doing it
That's tautological. {thing} isn't popular for no reason. There is always some unique value-add that {thing} offers over {competing things}.
One of the life lessons I always remember for myself, particularly in software development: There better be a very good reason why you're betting against the mass. They are many and a good proportion of them smarter than you.
I have one about ChatGPT. ChatGPT ends up not being useful as a replacement for junior software developers. But ChatGPT does end up taking over middle management. It is more reliable, with better results than humans, at getting software updates from developers and communicating them with coherence to upper managers. Someone will use it to develop an Agile ChatGPT, then another with a Scrum ChatGPT, and then a third, initially a joke, but later accepted as the preferred one, the Waterfall ChatGPT.
Very good. I made a similar prediction years ago, yours is better.
I predict middle managers will rush to use one of these offerings, initially fantasizing about reduced dependency on supervising junior staff. I expect this to be boringly controversial, as some workplaces embrace it and in others, managers rely on it in secret. Retaining the vestigial office of scrum master or agile poobah will be a corporate status symbol to signal safety to VC.
On the top floor, AI systems styled to emit the messaging and maneuvering of, say, your company’s very own Elon Musk cutout, will be a useful fad for predicting political fallout. I predict AI will not compete with strong cultural networking among the kind of people who report to boards.
I expect stories will emerge where certain roles simply stand out as more committed to tending internally-important AI systems and services. For example, resume-vetting cutely predicts the kinds of applicants skilled in tending itself.
Belarus will be invaded by Ukraine in a preemtive strike leading to a collapse of the regime there. In addition Russia will loose its grip on many neighbor countries leading to color revolutions in Turkmenistan, Usbekistan, Moldovia etc. This will force Russia to ask for peace in the war with Ukraine loosing all occupied territories.
After many Covid deaths China will see more protests over the year. To stabilize economy Xi Jinping will make some concessions to the people of China. Invasion of Taiwan will not happen in 2023.
The western countries will see a slight recession, because of energy crisis and reduction of business with autoritarian states ( Russia, China, Saudi Arabia ). But ultimatively the bitter medicine of 2022 and 2023 will lead to a strenghthening of the west as it will become less dependent on imports in general and energy imports specifically.
Video game companies start using ai in various tedious parts of the development process. Enough is done the old fashioned way that the result is not immediately obvious. The video game market is saturated with new releases.
> 4. Reserve Bank of India creating a CDBC enabled savings account program to allow citizens to hold money without intermediary banks.
It won’t be a savings account program in the sense of earning any interest. The Reserve Bank of India is quite cautious not to hit the private banking system by introducing competition with it, and hence will only offer zero interest accounts (and possibly experiment with small negative interest rates after a few years).
I think social media + deception is the opposite of the recipe for success going into the next unicorn. (Unless it’s obviously intended, for example having an avatar or a game character as your profile.)
Hence why BeReal became a thing but didn’t take off because it became too easy to fake (user is given a few seconds to correct front photos) + it’s super boring to look at ugly photos from a dark sofa.
People want beautiful hi res real media or completely animated.
- The issue of antibiotic resistant microbial life will become mainstream news, as more cases of infection occur in affluent countries.
- Conflicts on both local as well as national level over water rights will start happening. Not major conflicts, but the initial scuffles.
- Higher than normal global wheat prices along with frivolous government spending will cause Egypt to hint at rising the price of subsidized bread. This will spark massive unrest in a country already struggling.
- Twitter will either go bankrupt or exchange ownership again.
- A major power will perform somekind of military action in space, such as shooting down a satellite of a rival.
ChatGPT-generated blogspam will be the tipping point that launches Marginalia Search as the dominant searching platform. I will become incredibly rich overnight as a result, go out and celebrate, get a bit drunk, and post a $10M bid for twitter as a joke. Elon jumps at the opportunity to get rid of it. Failing to backpedal, I'll end up buying the company, but I won't have any idea how to run twitter. Someone will tweet at me that "twit" is offensive, and several dozen angry people will join the riot. Being out of touch with what kids these days like, I'll decide to change the name to "catter" and mandate that the only form of communication will be cat pictures as was all the rage 15 years ago. Catter will be accused of causing developmental disorders as young people begin to sit in boxes and sleep on their keyboards. In an unfortunate event, a virulent new strain Toxoplasmosis-23 will emerge as a new pandemic as cat populations soar globally. The Catter leadership will in a press conference admit that mistakes have been made, but that our engineers are trying to solve the problem. China and Russia will flounder while attempting to censor the catter communication as neither Putin nor Xi can understand cat body-language. As a result, cat populations soar especially high in those areas, and the army of domestic cats will kill all small birds and rodents, disturbing the ecosystem and causing a severe famine.
1. Lots of additional data breaches will make more users wary of using cloud apps for personal data. This will cause more power users to move to desktop / local first apps.
2. AI will improve and showcase several new cool 'tricks' but commercially it will continue to focus on guiding users to watch more ads.
3. An increase in the number of streaming media services will make the average user realize they need to pay quite a lot money to 'watch stuff' - either a new unified package will appear for a reasonable price, or piracy will increase.
- A new breakthrough from
OpenAI will be released, although less sensational than ChatGPT
- Content generation and applications of ChatGPT will flood the tech sphere but then stabilize
- Mastodon market share will continue to increase, with fluctuating rate, but will not overtake Twitter until similar functionality and performance have been adopted
- Twitter will stabilize, but still make some controversial headlines here and then
- The stock market will become bullish again for at least one quarter
- Energy crisis in EU will continue, but this time countries will have adapted to the new normal
Without a marketing department, without ads, and without a non timeline feed, there are very few reasons for major brands to migrate.
Elon quarralled over what is bots, but marketing only accounts, reserved mostly for brand protection makes up another significant portion of Twitter active users. They'll have no reason to shift to a distributed service.
Twutter is quite fast on the backend. Mastodon is still written in Ruby. Twitter migrated away from Ruby long ago. Of course language is not the primary factor in performance, but I'd bet that most Mastodon instances are CPU-limited.
Glancing at those previous threads, there should be an annual "I was wrong about my predictions last year; here's an audit of the thought processes that led me astray, and here's how I'm updating my thinking" threads, too. Maybe a shorter a title though.
1. I think the electronic component shortage will not be as bad but still not normalised.
2. Europe faces another severe heat wave in summer
3. Russian-Ukrainian war will have Russia attempt another breakthrough in earlish 23 but largely face another standstill, both start easing their language around requirements for peace.
4. Europe will continue rearmament, possible some nascent attempts at more unified supply buying
5. Twitter is going to slow it's pace of policy changes, Musk will eventually move aside but with tight reins, Twitter will more or less look much like it did prior to his take over. Maybe attempts at an everything app, but unlikely and expect failures in it anyway.
6. Meta will face disappointing sales of vr headsets at Christmas. Zuckerberg will be facing greater pressure to act on the losses, possibly spin off the VR.
7. The Microsoft Activision deal will face serious threat, will be a general horn for increased action by regulators across the board on mergers and acquisitions.
8. Increased competitiveness between OpenAI, Google, Facebook and Microsoft towards creating a viable AI product, good for us, it should keep prices reasonable.
That I am going to have an awesome year and do everything in my power to make it so.
I am not sure exactly how or what yet, I haven't managed to wrap my mind around what that means, but I am just going to go for it. Not in a way that I have too much pressure on myself but in a way that when the year ends, I will know I did everything I could to make it awesome and did everything I could to grown and improve personally.
During the middle of an economic downturn a group of 3 people or less will make a bootstrapped startup with a $1B valuation by leveraging new AI tools.
1. The QUAD alliance (India, Australia, Japan, USA) will strengthen further to defend against China. It's possible that China will make an aggressive move that causes this.
2. Geopolitically, the world continues to descend towards a major war with clear alliances drawn. It will become harder for countries to sit on the fence.
3. AI would continue to both amaze and scare in its capabilities. Institutions (governments, education, corporate) will formulate policies to regulate it, but they will continue to lag in pace.
4. Twitter will continue with stabilization of leadership and decision making. Elon will step aside but will still be a significant disrupting influence.
5. Currency wars will continue to manage the mind boggling levels of debt. Increasingly unstable, unpredictable macro economic outlook due to lack of resilience at the micro level.
6. Climate related disasters unfortunately will continue until the world fully realizes that the economy, energy and environment are linked. Sustainable living will begin to be seen as a necessity rather than a lifestyle choice.
To be fair though, a completely random bet that Russia invades a country within a particular year has a respectable chance of being accurate. Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine. Short memories...
I have none; I guess 2023 will be broadly similar to 2022, and I feel like the UK is trending down in many respects, but those aren’t predictions worth anything. Huge shifts in the world tend to be unpredictable by ordinary people - many saw a pandemic was due at some point, few saw COVID coming in the six months preceding as very early news came in small fragments from China.
Who, if anyone, tends to make specific predictions down to the months timeframe and has a good track record?
Many in this thread so far are vague - how would you tell if “West tires of war in Ukraine” happened or didn’t? If “people see Vue is Angular again” happened or didn’t in 2033? If “climate change worsens” happens? “Shor’s algorithm will factor 35” is a very specific one, much better.
What specific prediction like that is the most extreme one that you feel confident making?
> many saw a pandemic was due at some point, few saw COVID coming in the six months preceding as very early news came in small fragments from China.
Last years hd a few saying Russia would invade Ukraine (and as many saying it wouldn’t), but of those they thought Ukraine would fold in days and have no support from the west.
Nobody expected Ukraine to successfully repel the invasion.
In 2020 predictions I don’t see any reference to pandemics or other Heath based issues - and covid was already beginning with several cases having being confirmed.
Makes you wonder what minor thing could be known already and about to change the world but completely invisible to us now.
Yeah iirc i was reading about a suspected outbreak of a new disease in China late 2019, I told my coworkers about it too and wondered how it hadn't garnered more attention, or if I had just watched too many bio-horror flicks, or fallen for clickbait-y fear mongering. I never suspected it's impact would have the scale it did, especially after the Ebola containment went so smooth.
If a tree falls and HN doesn't post it, did it ever happen?
I was not on HN prior to covid. The early news I read was likely the plague scare[0], but I definitely read the reuters article[1] when it came out which prompted me to talk to my coworkers about it. I was not sounding any alarms though, more like "check this out..." in the lunchroom.
1. A breakthrough in "deepfake voice" is made that can emote convincingly. It is used to add Marilyn Monroe or James Dean to a TV show or movie. A US supreme court challenge to the admissibility of audio recordings is begun, after a murder case is thrown out due to evidence being shown to be an audio deepfake.
2. A single climate catastrophe-linked weather event causes tens of thousands of deaths. Governments pledge action, but nothing is done.
3. A hedge fund backed landlord service is launched. Sold to businesses, it is promoted as another benefit like health insurance for employees. Businesses love it because they can move people around like cargo.
4. Evidence is found that links microplastics to anti-social behaviour.
5. russian losses in Ukraine top 250,000. A new attempt to take Kyiv is made by russia, using the better-trained mobilized troops.
I think that on #4 it is a bit bold to point to microplastics. However, I agree that human mental health is in decline due to environmental factors (as well as electronics use).
1. The economy will continue to stay somewhat flat. There will not be any major recession, but also no miraculous overnight recovery. Inflation will drop slightly, but it will remain higher than targets. Interest rates will hover around the current values. Home prices will continue to drop, but folks waiting for a "market correction" to get their first property will still not buy.
2. Crypto market will continue to stay flat. Maybe some more exchanges go under, but even if they do, new exchanges will spawn replace them. There will be more "breaking news", but all of it is a re-make of a piece of news that already happened in a different form during 2010-2022.
3. Many startups will either close business or get acquired at bargain prices by competitors. Some will make sense ("can't believe anyone invested in that") while others will be complete surprises and somewhat disrupt the day-to-day life.
4. Most Bay Area companies and startups will focus their hiring to either some of the newer tech hubs across the US or abroad (particularly Europe) and completely halt hiring in the Bay Area. All of these companies will be fully-remote or somewhat-remote. Because the average tenure is 2-4 years, and because families take longer to uproot, it will take until 2025-2027 to actually see the Bay Area population start decreasing. Companies that will still hire in the Bay Area will be remote-unfriendly.
5. Machine Learning achievements will continue to show up at a similar pace as throughout 2022. More and more companies will pop up to repackage these technologies into well-marketed consumer-facing services - logo generators, fiverr replacements, blogspam filters, search engines, language translators, coding mentors, etc.
6. "Impersonal social media" - TikTok, YouTube, Twitter - where you do not personally know the content creator - will continue to grow in popularity, leaving behind an even bigger need of "personal social media" - where you keep in touch with people that you actually know. Maybe some company, either existing or new, will fill in that gap. Maybe not.
> OpenAI will get at least one more big competitor.
Might be the time for Deepmind to attract the public's interest.
> Ukraine war will continue, but it’ll be mostly forgotten by masses.
I think the opposite, I believe the "war" as we know it will quickly end, replaced by a mix of cyberwarfare and terrorism in Ukraine, organised by some organisations linked with Russia?
Trying to predict future based on the past is foolish.
I will try to do my best based on what I register about our times.
My prediction is not about a 2023 specifically, but mostly about
the next 10-20 years. Although, as the rate of change grows, it might
be 2-5 years. I don't know. As i said that, here are my predictions:
1. AI will accelerate change and do so in an unpredictable way. AI won't replace coding or writing or art specifically, but it will make work with computers different. Probably, obsolete.
2. For example: why do you need Windows if you can just run on metal an AI that will behave like Windows/Android/Photoshop/random AAA game/custom CRM software?
3. As the language and reasoning is taken away, we will have a crisis on what it means to be human.
4. We will turn more away from computers and towards our bodies: emotions feelings and desires. Sex, food, hapiness, sadness, death and loss.
5. We will need fountain of youth more than anything else ever. Health industry will blossom. AI accelerated research will give us indefinite healthspan.
6. The last human job will be having experience and chanelling it to the AI that lacks body and desire as well as to other humans who will find AI created experiences too synthetic, not much relatable.
This is my, a little bit out of landish take, but we need to dream big, otherwise what's the point
Generative AI will create an abondance of AI frameworks and fatigue in the same way we have JS frameworks fatigue, especially when generative AI will make it so easy to produce a firehose of content to drown signal into, to give the impression that one is more used than another and therefore must be better because of social validation.
---
Also, adding AI in places where it wouldn't bring value, just to be able to say that you are using it.
The keyword itself will lose its original meaning and replace generic terms like "script".
Already yesterday I saw someone who wanted to "just use an AI" to detect when a website is down (and no, he didn't mean "use AI to write the cURL request", he thought that it can magically detect it somehow).
---
Also, the public opinion not understanding the levels of grey, that it's not merely "for AI" or "against AI" because it's like being "for hammer" or "against hammer": it's just a tool. Yes it has great potential, but what matters is how you use it, it's not magic.
And as a longer trend, it will reinforce the divide between people who blindly trust "the computer said so, therefore it must be true" (like a religion), and people who look into why the computer said so and when it would say otherwise.
Control the model and you control what people believe in.
ChatGPT advances to be able to tailor a different version of the internet for each person, allowing people to talk in seamingly similar terms but with completely incoherent contexts, mining meaning out of data piles becomes the new gold rush, for which another AI GarbatChGPT is created to identify fake-intelligent content, this creates a new product sold as a browser addon developed by Google that only works on Chrome.
AI will bring the final victory of spam over all forms of filtering and gate keeping that don’t rely on true identity verification.
Things like GPT-3 will revive e-mail spam that will become almost impossible to filter.
Captchas will be solved by AI.
Social media will be flooded by increasingly sophisticated bots programmed to push propaganda.
By 2024 we will start to see even video content in places like YouTube and TikTok mass produced by bots.
I think we are in the twilight of the era of open Internet forums and open social media. The future is invite only, paid, or will require hard identity verification.
Some other bullet point predictions:
- Elon Musk is forced out of Tesla.
- Twitter continues to spiral down along with much of the rest of first and second generation social media. Elon starts looking for a buyer but at nowhere near what he paid for it. The whole sector continues to deflate with Meta also continuing its slide.
- SpaceX Starship flies successfully but with some minor issues, and continues to take longer to develop than predicted.
- Cryptocurrency continues to deflate with increasingly frantic attempts to thrash around and find a new application to reinflate it.
- Russia agrees to a peace deal in Ukraine that keeps Crimea and a little bit of taken land in the East. The rest of Ukraine immediately joins NATO, making future attacks far less likely.
- Donald Trump accepts a deal that sees him barred from holding office. He is never arrested or actually tried for anything.
- Another major announcement on fusion energy is made from a different team, and we start to see a huge increase in fusion funding.
My thinking (some of these may take a year or two more)
- we start understanding more about how powerful neural networks can be in storing abstractions of information. More and more breakthroughs come here. A company will come that will do magical things - this company will not be Open AI or one of the big FAANG
- Maybe not this year, but soon: new advances started in robotics based on generative AI. Robots start moving in far more realistic ways
- we enter an extended stock market downturn and it does not recover till end of year. Companies trade at low multiples of revenue
- German car companies aggressively catch up with Tesla in terms of design
- Europe closes up more to migrants
- There is a Russia/Ukraine settlement, with Ukraine getting a fast track entry to the EU.
- African countries start de-facto redrawing their boarders. Ethiopia, Cameroun, maybe Nigeria
- China invades Taiwan with the largest invasion force ever seen
- The drone becomes the primary weapon of war. Every other weapon becomes secondary. New wars start based on drone
- The value of Tesla drops down to 30% of where it currently is
- The USD weakens significantly.
- More mRNA treatments start being used. Sickle cell and other genetic diseases are first target
Dystopian has been the annual state of the world since 2020. The outlook isn't good either. Dystopian forecast calls for at least another decade or two of declining into more dystopia.
- Due to the ever advancing power of LLM and the open-source nature of Linux and friends - the list of open issues across all variants will decrease and create a dangerous competitor to mainstream operating systems and increase overall Linux adoption perpetuating above.
- Fusion technology will make leaps on leaps further fuelling A.I capabilities and enabling adoption of fusion powered space exploration.
- The continued growth and expansion of the gig economy and the rise of remote work will change the way we work and interact with each other, potentially leading to new forms of employment and ways of organizing work.
- The continued evolution of virtual and augmented reality technologies will create new opportunities for entertainment, education, and training, and may also have applications in fields such as healthcare and military training.
- Facebook as a product becomes devoid of users to the point of being pivoted to a simple social / event tracking application.
- Google fails to keep up with industry leaders in A.I. technology and falters in the market leading to the eventual disbandment of Alphabet.
Return to office in most companies. Reduction in remote hiring, but "remote only" companies will persist to take advantage of more diverse labour pool.
Significant drop in tech compensation, but especially in the Bay Area.
Further collapse of crypto/web3. Some major VC who has been heavily pushing it will announce their divestment from further ventures.
Some amount of intensified public/cultural backlash against LMM type AI. Bitter lawsuits, especially around CoPilot.
Significant drops in real estate prices in places that have seen overheated prices for the last decade or two (in particular Toronto, Vancouver).
Significant rise in unemployment rate, beginnings of an official recession by mid or late year. Inflation will drop. Potential major drop in oil prices as demand slackens. Perhaps leading to some political/economic troubles in governments heavily dependent on energy export revenues but this may not happen until 2024.
Major shift to austerity in western/G7 countries, administered by both "right wing" and "progressive" governments. Similar to mid-90s. Effort to instil "labour discipline", rises in productivity, and major policy efforts to resist wage increases and unionization.
End of interest rate increases, setting things up for cuts in 2024.
Winter intensification of war in Ukraine leads to a stalemate at pretty much the current occupied areas. By mid or late year a "peace" deal will be arrived at -- with some territory lost by Ukraine (but maybe the return of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) but a humiliating lack of major progress on its "goals" by Russia. Both parties frustrated will simply use the pause in hostilities to heavily re-arm.
Enrollments for all History classes combined rises at least in the double digit percentage as a US national average. At least 50% of those that increased the enrollments will be double majors.
I think ChatGPT is going to allow a lot of STEM majors to try out a double major/minor in the Humanities. This is assuming that ChatGPT remains cheaper to use than the cost of a textbook.
Either Keith Richards or Mick Jagger will die, and the baby boom generation will have a meltdown unlike our western civilization has ever seen. The cultural impact will economically alter the world for a week. Then everyone remembers their ongoing crisis, and 9 months later the "Death of the Stones" is released on Netflix to a lukewarm reception.
- Undisputed AGI chatbot. It doesn't get confused or off track anymore, no longer hallucinates false information confidently, and can handle any generic task at around 100 IQ (ChatAGP's current IQ is around 83.) There are no longer any questions that it is AGI, it is undisputed.
- but it still can't assemble a sandwich for you because no cheap household robot hands. People realize that they could get a lot more value out of their assistant if it could actually do anything for them where they are and this area gets more research interest.
- Breakthrough treaty between Taiwan and China.
- p2p trust-based currency that is more resilient to scams by using a trust network, making the game more like iterative prisoner's dilemma and by involving trust/karma becoming more useful and less scammy.
- NFT's go to 0. People realize all NFT's are worthless, produce no utility for them, and are not at all like physical art. (However crypto currencies remain strong.)
This is impossible on several levels. Most Chinese citizens are 100% convinced that Taiwan is a breakaway province and the mere idea of its independence is extremely offensive. Even if Xi himself were amenable to the idea of a treaty (which he is not — rather, he sees the “reclamation” of Taiwan as his opportunity to write himself into the history books), his government would not be so foolish as to shoot itself in the head.
I think he meant a treaty of quasi independence yet on face a special autonomous region of China for Taiwan.
And your assessment is right. It is unimaginable for any leader of CCP to grant independent state to Taiwan. He would be buried by party members and mainland Chinese.
This sort of treaty still needs to be approved by China's parliament. Though in most cases it is a just formality for parliament to approve any treaties but when it comes to a treaty that grants independence of Taiwan, vast majority of parliament members would object it.
And please be aware that Chinese people do go to street. Recent demonstrations in multiple cities and universities against endless covid lock downs proved it.
Oh yes, I didn’t mean that protests never happen — I was in one of the cities with protests as they were happening. I only meant that I think it’s unlikely we’ll see more large-scale protests related to Covid.
Edit: and thank you for your first-hand input on Taiwan.
- The one who was laid off/fired will form a to-be-billon-dollar company.
- Suddenly there will be high quality, eloquent and verbose written form of English everywhere (emails, books, movie scripts, blogs, news, poems, school/college essays).
- Climate change protests turns fatal.
- Twitter will be on the path to profitability (don't know what it will have to pay for it though).
- RISC V will become more common. We won't see it moving to most phones and personal computers just yet, but it will be used in some embedded devices and wearables
- Google will AB test the search product with NLP generated answers and consider augmenting it as a response to ChatGPT
- Covid will sort of come on and off and will be talked about in a way similar to the flu
- Recession will likely continue at a relatively steady rate. Sun belt states will continue growing. Bay area population will shrink slightly
- Affordable housing construction will make progress in the bay area as buildings are completed. Rent increases will slow down due to increased supply
- TikTok will continue getting bad press. There will be a stand off between TikTok and DC. It will either be banned or have the American side of the business sold to someone like Oracle
- Meta will survive because people will continue using Facebook and IG. VR stuff will be a niche market dominated by them
- Tesla stock will start dropping more aggressively as investors realize it is overvalued compared to other car manufacturers
- Iran instability will continue. CIA could possibly stage a coup in Iran if it becomes especially bad
- Chinese economy will continue declining due to govt interference with domestic tech. Japan and Germany will continue military buildup. Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh will grow as low cost manufacturing centers
- Increased tension between Alberta and Ottawa
- Apple allows sideloading iOS due to EU pressure. Apple won't have any new and interesting software to bring to the table, but might come out with a new phone camera with better computational photography to challenge what Google is doing
- Amazon will continue growing, and will approach Apple as the most valuable company. Apple will grow, but more slowly than Amazon
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." (1)
Can this war go on for many years at current intensity? No. Can it be sustained past the end of 2023? Maybe, maybe not. Can it continue to "slow burn" - possibly.
1. Russia starts "testing" nukes and a deal is brokered that pisses off both Ukraine and Russia but allows them both to claim "victory", save face and not start a thermonuclear war (this is Henry Kissinger's take); or
2. US loses its taste of financing and completely backing the Ukrainian war if a big recession hits here (hard to support Ukraine when we start "really" feeling a economic hit at home and politicians are on TV everyday talking about how much is being sent to Ukraine); or
3. Putin has a health/life issue and a Western-friendly replacement is installed in Russia (Putin is no Spring chicken!)
All good, but I would add a more likely senario: A stalemate where Ukraine efectivly regains almost all of its territory, Russia is unable to sustain a meaningful campaign, but Russia continiues limited attacks with missiles and some artilery pokes near the border to avoid lossing face.
...a Western-friendly replacement is installed in Russia...
Some have forgotten that Putin was originally declared "a Western-friendly replacement". The world would have been a more peaceful place if we hadn't interfered in Russian politics to support Yeltsin and his chosen successor. Russia isn't the only nation in which our choice (??) of leader has led to "blowback", both for the victim nation and for most Americans. We should stop doing this.
Yeltsin was quite different from the successor in question. He "gave up" his "family" ruling in exchange for security guarantees.
USA probably should've chosen a stronger leader to support, but there wasn't much choice at that time. Or at least they should've helped to organize the transition of power to someone with a more credible past than that of a KGB officer.
> Russia starts "testing" nukes and a deal is brokered that pisses off both Ukraine and Russia but allows them both to claim "victory", save face and not start a thermonuclear war (this is Henry Kissinger's take); or
That seems like a bad precedent - nuclear blackmail and aggression works, you get rewarded with territory/concessions.
It is certainly a possibility, but in a way loss of credibility for US/West.
> US loses its taste of financing and completely backing the Ukrainian war if a big recession hits here (hard to support Ukraine when we start "really" feeling a economic hit at home and politicians are on TV everyday talking about how much is being sent to Ukraine); or
I think the monetary help might decrease, but the military help rather not. Sending old weapon stocks don't really produce any economic hit.
> Putin has a health/life issue and a Western-friendly replacement is installed in Russia (Putin is no Spring chicken!)
This is very unlikely to happen. Putin might be replaced one way or another, but the replacement won't be particularly friendly to the West. They might be slightly less (or more) antagonistic.
>... - nuclear blackmail and aggression works, you get rewarded with territory/concessions.
I don't think the concession would be territory, more likely a treaty to block NATO membership for Ukraine (say no Ukraine NATO membership for 20 years, or something like that). Possibly also deny access to join the EU (even though that idea has heavy steam right now).
If Russia "loses" Crimea, then it's an undeniable Russian fiasco and Putin has no way to claim the war as a success.
It sounds like a weird scenario where Russia threatens to use nukes and then leaves satisfied with no NATO membership. (worth reminding that this war wasn't about NATO at all)
I think Crimea is gone to Russia for good. It is out of play. I am talking about the Northern regions of Ukraine. In fact, I think the whole invasion of the northern regions was to eventually play that into a DMZ. Which it might still end up becoming.
>It sounds like a weird scenario where Russia threatens to use nukes and then leaves satisfied with no NATO membership. (worth reminding that this war wasn't about NATO at all)
I mean, Putin claims is was. So from his perspective, he can call that a win, right? If you take him at his word (I know!) then all he wanted was to not have NATO military bases on Russian borders. From that perspective, everything he has done so far can make a sort of sense, including nuclear threats. So, again, from that perspective, if he gets what he is publicly asking for, why would he not tout it as a win?
The problem is that Putin would probably require recognition of Crimea as Russian, which would essentially underwrite his conquest and create a precedent for further conquests/annexations of further regions with Russian majorities/minorities.
> I am talking about the Northern regions of Ukraine.
Russia pulled out of northern regions back in March and now occupies the east and south. TBH I'm not sure how seriously I should take your opinion in light of such a basic mistake.
> So, again, from that perspective, if he gets what he is publicly asking for, why would he not tout it as a win?
He might get what he's publicly asking for, but he's not getting what he actually wants. If he's willing to credibly threaten nuke use, I'd rather expect he will insist on having what he in fact wants (some sort of further slicing up of Ukraine).
>Russia pulled out of northern regions back in March and now occupies the east and south. TBH I'm not sure how seriously I should take your opinion in light of such a basic mistake.
Then let me restate it, any land touching or close to Russia. I think that is what he wants. A DMZ type areas on Russian borders and no NATO bases anywhere close to Russia (ie. nowhere in Ukraine). I think you and I are talking past each other with using North and East. Really, NorthEast would be more appropriate for the areas I am talking about and of course the South.
>He might get what he's publicly asking for, but he's not getting what he actually wants. If he's willing to credibly threaten nuke use, I'd rather expect he will insist on having what he in fact wants (some sort of further slicing up of Ukraine).
Well, he's not going to get that I think. But he can likely negotiate parts of Ukraine into DMZ type areas that are effectively controlled/not-controlled by both Russia and Ukraine. Like maybe technically part of Ukraine, but needs Russian approval for certain things.
I believe this is the most he can get, and eventually if he is willing Ukraine will be forced to accept it.
So, my bet, a buffer on the borders and some sunsetted period where Ukraine cannot joing NATO (and possible EU).
Apart from (1), the rest of your scenarios are unlikely.
Assuming (1) does not happen, there is likely little chance of the West seriously dropping its support for Ukraine. Maybe popular opinion of citizens will increasingly turn against the support, but the governments know very well what kind of message not supporting Ukraine sends to Russia.
And, Putin may well have a health/life issue, but if power passes to another person, it is likely to be someone even more hawkish than Putin. If you follow Russian opinion it seems Putin is seen as rather soft.
For #2, imagine how fast a new Trump presidency (unlikely, I think, but you take my point) would stop shipments to Ukraine. Also a very large economic impact here (say something twice the size of 2008) might have our government at least focused on something else rather than having to explain why a bunch of citizens are homeless and hungry but we are sending billions to Ukraine every month. It is one thing to support a war across the world when it is "just money" and everyone here is mostly fat and happy. It is altogether something else when you have to start worrying about your own family at home.
As for #3 a new person taking power can bend to local sentiment to keep up pressure but without the full commitment that Putin is making in Ukraine. This could play well locally (I suspect not a lot of Russians are happy to die for Ukraine) and be more "Western friendly" than a full-on war.
3a Although any "Putin replacement" could end the current Russian folly in Ukraine, if only to put a "under new management, I don't own the last guy's mistakes" stamp on their rule; but a viable replacement Russian leader is quite unlikely to be "Western-Friendly" in general. And there would then be Trouble at some point in the future.
re #3, aren't the senior Kremlin figures just as pro-war/Z as Putin (or even more so)? This would suggest that unless politics in Russia is completely upended in the event of Putin dying or being incapacitated, the war would likely continue or escalate :-/
Well, a new body can still talk all the same old shit, but give in to a (probably) popular (in Russia) sentiment to chill out. I don't know what the propaganda would be to say that they both won and also don't have parts of Ukraine.
Well let's hope so. I can't honestly say that I know all the intricate details (note how I said "senior Kremlin figures" because other than Medvedev, Prigozhin and Shoigu I don't know everyone involved) but I am a little pessimistic that a sudden change in President would make things better.
Better possibly in the sense that they withdraw, don't force as many Russians to die in actual combat, and mostly use missiles and border skirmishes for propaganda purposes. This could easily be pitched up as "keeping up the fight" but ease the pressure on Russian citizens ... so a sort of win?
* There will be an increasingly severe recession. The response will greatly weaken the dollar, leading to a resurgence of inflation despite the sinking economy, a widespread feeling that America's best days are firmly behind it, and even greater animosity between those of different political persuasions.
* China will attempt to distract its population from their growing unrest, and to take advantage of a weakened America, by being more aggressive, including increasingly bold actions against Taiwan.
* Jeff Bezos will run for president on a platform of bringing courage and civility back to politics, as well as the promise of improving the economy. The severity of the recession will result in him being received with must less hostility than might have been expected.
An attack on home energy or heating systems via cloud management takes out a major grid. e.g. the most popular brand of solar inverters gets attacked on a still cold day, or the most popular brand of thermostats is increased a couple of degrees at the time of worst grid load.
- Facebook engineers will release a bleeding-edge technology that solves Facebook-sized problems most other engineering teams don't have. Engineers will race to adopt the technology and become next-gen entrepreneurs, claiming revolution, progress and modernization. The tech industry will cargo-cult.
- People within right-to-repair states discover vehicle parts remotely disabled by Tesla, claiming breach of TOS. Drivers will be unable to drive modded vehicles without their vehicles passing through remote validation by Tesla servers. A lawsuit will be filed with the Supreme Court. American automotive companies quietly enable remote-disable functionality in their 2024 fleets.
>Sites like reddit/4chan/hn become less popular due to generative AI spam.
I am rather hopeful that it will be an incentive for such sites evolving to combat the problem.
I believe it all goes down to the ranking problem across the attention economy. What content do people see? Once we agree that we would prefer more high quality content instead of stuff triggering cognitive biases and dopamine output for tribalism it becomes a technical problem of how to identify high/low quality content. After all, what does it matter if a bot is writing something as long as it is actually good?
I strongly agree about the CRISPR babies. I'll eat my shirt if there aren't already hundreds if not thousands of CRISPR babies already, modified in secret.
-Chiefs win the Super Bowl
-Bruins win the Stanley Cup
-Nets win an NBA title
-Yankees win World Series
-People continue to spell the opposite of win, incorrectly, en masse, by “sounding it out”
* An international food crisis due to interrupted fertilizer supply chains
* China will sanction Western countries to influence the war in Ukraine
* Twitter will enter the link aggregator market, combining Reddit and TikTok. Searching on Twitter will become a thing and Google will have to cut costs since their ad business is threatened
* Google will sell Google Cloud Services to Oracle to cut their losses
* An Apple VR headset
* A revival of cryptocurrencies on Etherum caused by the reduced supply of fiat currencies
* Solar AI data centers in North Africa and Arabia
*edit: * War drone development will absorb all available engineers
> Google will sell Google Cloud Services to Oracle to cut their losses
Now that is a hot take! I’d like to see this happen just to experience the meltdown this would cause in this community. If you thought the Sun acquisition didn’t go down so well…
- OpenAI releases more products, gains even more popularity.
- China will keep improving self-sustainable energy alternatives, while we keep judging them and don't do anything about climate change; or, we do, but at a small scale compared to them.
- Apple releases an USB-C iPhone.
- Twitter will not fail as many predicted & will have more MAU than ever before Musk bought the company. Twitter Blue is globally released and many buy it, inspiring other social media platforms to do the same about their blue checkmarks.
Would like to see some predictions in regards to China as well from people who are more knowledgable about everything that is happening there from tech to zero covid policies to protests.
Twitter will go bankrupt but will limp along ala Tumbler. Musk will pretend this was his plan all along, and dip into the fortune 200s. A replacement for journalist microblogging will emerge, I am not ruling out activitypub.
Crypto (btc/eth) will continue its downtrend since the Matt Damon peak. Bitboy will end up under inditement.
US housing market averages will bleed out slowly and be getting to point of stabilization this time next year. APPL will stay around 140 most of the year.
US GOP will run Desantis or cruz. No idea what dems will do.
- Apache Spark starts its relatively slow decline in favor of vendor and in-house solutions.
- Cost drives cloud systems away from managed solutions (think AWS Batch) towards semi-managed solutions (think self-run k8s deployments but on AWS EKS).
- There are no improvements in autoscaling k8s clusters.
- Integration testing is replaced by testing in the development environment.
Prediction for 2023: an host-based NDR (derivative of EDR, XDR, IPS, IDS) shall scrub the URLs, domains, and IP addresses deemed unsuitable for safer usage of Internet.
Most likely integrated with a web browser and compensate for obfuscated JavaScript/WebAssembly.
This will catch fire once realized.
Also major banks will impose facial-scanning for automated denial of social access (no nude websites, no guns, no fascist, no conservative, no liberals, no cartel, no ANTIFA, no Proud Boys, no (insert social values, politicians-excepted).
- On the critically important problem of climate change, no meaningful progress will occur.
- Research into fusion power will yield another significant breakthrough, leading to predictions that commercial applications may now be only 30 years away.
- Consumer AI tools will start producing short, badly-animated video clips of... anything you want, as long as it isn't (obviously) porn.
- Russia will somehow manage to spend all year losing its war against Ukraine without showing any willingness to accept defeat.
- Everybody will go about their days. Things will happen in the world that will be big to talk about with your colleagues/friends/family, but small in impact to your daily life.
- About once every two weeks there will be news that will make you worry about your finances.
- About once in three months same will happen about your privacy.
- For the rest of the time, you will be busy with your daily grind and then it is Xmas 2023.
- Customer support starts to massively use AI chatbots. Remaining human support persons are universally annoyed when nobody believes them that they are humans.
- People start to seriously worry about AI outputs being black box and us not having a good understanding where it comes from and not being able to ensure safety and control over it. This does not stop commercial applications (as per above), though calls for regulation of the field intensify.
- Russia-Ukraine war turns into a massive quagmire where none of the sides make any progress but nobody wants to give up anything. Russia manages to sustain the war through 2023, even though at massive costs in economic development and living standards, while proclaiming they are winning next month for sure.
- Twitter survives and various celebrities keep publicly quitting it and quietly returning to it at the rate of at least one a month. Musk appoints a new CEO but keeps meddling anyway.
- Everybody opens a Mastodon account. Nobody really uses it for anything, or if they do, nobody knows or cares about it.
- Disney tries to expand copyright length again but fails.
- It is revealed that US government (via FBI and other departments) directly censored speech of US citizens on the internet on all major social networks, and continues to do so presently. No consequences to anyone involved, the revelation is largely ignored except for some
- It is revealed that the US government has implemented de-facto social scoring system, and is massively using it to identify "dangerous" people and "recommend" companies to avoid dealing with such people, or else. The Congress murmurs something to the tune "maybe we should have some oversight about it?" but nothing actually happens.
- Towards the end of 2023, after the current 1.7 trillion government finance bill ends, there is a major and widely covered "battle" about the next one, which ends up in signing another spending bill, this time over 5000 pages long and costing 2.3 trillion dollars.
- US Congress tries to make a serious attempt at regulating and controlling crypto, but fails making much progress due to it changing too fast and the lawmakers disagreeing on what exactly they want to do with it.
- Meta recognizes their metaverse is a bust, starts looking for the next cool toy.
Euthanasia becomes a hot button issue and is legalized through referendums in most Western European countries.
The Ukraine war ends after Russia starts gaining back territory in February, some kind of peace deal is reached, Ukraine loses the occupied territories and Europe agrees to pay for most of the reconstruction.
We see the first feature-length movie with AI-generated video.
On my end:
I buy a house.
My company reaches 10K MRR.
I get married to Scarlett Johansson.
I tried to be conservative in my predictions but I think some of them might be a long shot.
1) ChatGPT replaces search engines making incredible progress in automation of relatively high skilled jobs.
2) Further deterioration of the world police area with authoritarian regimes growing more bold in territorial ambitions. Most concrete the Turkish Regime indirectly with supporting Azerbaijan aggression against Armenia and directly with further invasions into Northern Syria.
3) No end to the Ukraine war, still no invasion of Taiwan
A lot of people saying AI generated content will dominate search engines and the web in general. What will happen when AI kills all human generated content? There wont be new training data to scrape. What happens? Will it consume itself in a death spiral of bullshit content or will it make us so dependent that its bullshit content will become common sense to our future (even more) brain damaged selves?
I think that generative AI will keep getting significantly better. All the folks who keep saying it's not that good (which it isn't now I suppose) will start to sound like the folks who claimed that a computer could never become the go champion. The main issue raised is that it generates untrue things, which will be mitigated by some statistical/learned estimate on truthiness.
1. Nationalism and racism and fascism on the rise everywhere
2. A widening of the gap between poor and rich
3. More and more corruption
Obviously those are all based on recent (western) developments (though I'm not sure about 3. That might have been Germany local), but I hope, though not believe, that it won't stay like this.
I was never a huge fan of humanity, recent years seemed to try and tell me that i still was too much of one.
- ChatGPT will get more popular, even among non techies, until OpenAI asks for payment.
- The AI hype will be revived, with lots of businesses trying to make money from it. Many will fail. Most likely to succeed is tech support, replacing half the jobs with AI, and human support serving as a backup.
- No big news in autonomous driving: the best AI advancements last year don't seem to help this at all.
I'm not that good at predicting the present, so mise well.
1. Doubts creep in as to practical usefulness of AI, and it ebbs a little in late November. Admittedly this is hard to quantify and perhaps poorly worded.
2. US housing interest rates halve by August.
3. Bitcoin to $10,000.
4. Two of the top 20 US banks get implicated in large crypto-scandals.
Aiens will come for the recipe of proper french fries plus tartare sauce.
Also
Influencers and onlyfans people finally get their hands on the ultimate pill that will make their excrements, farts and bodily fluids smell good (maybe edible too? we'll see :D). I sense a big, evolving market, 1B in sales at the end of fiscal year.
1. Despite the implosions of crypto, web3, and other categories, VCs will still make investment decisions primarily based on FOMO.
2. At least one FAANG company will have a major layoff, but due to poor execution and inefficiency rather than macroeconomic conditions.
3. China will not invade Taiwan.
4. YIMBY policies like the builder’s remedy in California will kick in in many parts of America, but construction costs will have ballooned to the point that housing development in cities is no longer fundable, triggering a multi-year decline in the strength of American cities.
5. At least one generative AI product company will find a credible business model and escape upwards out of the hype cycle.
6. Climate change driven disasters will continue to occur, and younger generations will begin to gain enough power to force policies that can genuinely reduce carbon emissions across industries. Having a large carbon footprint will begin to be seen as gauche.
Edit: One more hopefully obvious one. The tech layoffs of 2022 will lead to a proliferation of new startups, kicking off the start of a new decade-long tech boom and bust cycle with some amazing and important products and services created!
1. The 10-2 and 10-3 yield curves will generate a false signal, and while growth will be slow, there will be no official recession in 2023.
2. Political prediction markets will give Donald Trump a less than 15% chance of being the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
3. Biden will decide to run for reelection in 2024, and will have no serious primary opposition.
4. Twitter will be sold to another large tech company for less than half of Musk's acquisition price. (2023 feels a little aggressive for this one, I'd feel better about this as a 2024 prediction)
Putin assassinated by suitcase-size nuclear weapon in February (many of these are missing in Russia.) War continues. Second similar explosion removes the General first replacing him within a month. War continues but Russia commits less to the fight.
Iran sends troops to Ukranian war; US finally retaliates massively vs Iran's military in the Spring, as soon as the energy situation for Europe is less critical.
Structural change in China leaves Xi apparently still top dog; but now a committee (a reformed standing committee of the Politburo) is in charge. Little changes for citizens however until the next year. Friction between Russia and China after XI kneecapped. Cause unclear. Wolf warrior diplomats removed. Sudden improvement in China-India relations and industrial cooperation (task division.) India then steeply increases pressure vs Islamic citizens, removing their separate legal privileges and more. US-China cyber treaty sealed and seems to take hold. (Chinese knowledge of how much better the West did vs Russia in the Ukranian cyberwar changes their approach.)
Western economy hums, as jobs come home; inflation declines but doesn't disappear. Britain's govt stable.
Three Starship launches, last successful but with most first stage engines destroyed (not reusable) by heat. Space-X begins rapid development of an intermediate vehicle (IV) using a nine Raptor first stage and one or two Raptor second stage (also recoverable) with Falcon-Heavy-like variant to follow (with somewhat heavier payload.) Intermediate Vehicle just misses having a first launch before 2023 ends.
It's almost as bonkers as Medvedev's prediction list on Twitter (which I just saw and Elon highlighted to troll him) or will look that bonkers in a year; but flipped.
- AI will be introduced in some comercial applications. There will be efforts to make it more general. I would also expect more software development applications like "fix all my sonar warnings" or "migrate everything from Java to good Kotlin code"
- The Russia invasion of Ukraine will keep bloody and may escalate further. Political unrest in Transnistria or Belarus that may mean a change of regime (maybe with some extra help with US). Russia will start showing big financial and social problems.
- China will not go from Taiwan invasion but will try to consolidate disputed islands and other water territories taking advantage of NATO distractions.
- More crypto problems. Investors will have other less risky places to get profits.
- Twitter will be sold to an investor with money by a fraction of what Elon paid. Things may improve.
- Trump judicial problems may end him in prison. Republicans will select a different candidate and this will make a lot of noise. This wouldn't guaranty a republican lose.
- the world would adapt to be without Rusia oil. Prices will slowly go down. With great investments in green energies they will become cheaper in the long run. May be some battery improvements become mainstream
- melting ice will be worse than ever. Some north countries may experience natural disasters with new rivers or buildings built over frozen soil becoming unstable
- China may be in crisis but will still show new cool tech that may forbid the west to use after The US forbid some exports/imports. Commerce wars are quite probable ( but better than the alternative)
- someone will weaponize AI for online fraud or political manipulación.
- a lot of talks about how to revert your bad micro service separación with distributed monoliths.
- All the money that went to COVID biolabs will be applied to other illness with new medicines vaccines or detection methods.
- Metaverse wont be very used except for gamers
- Remote and async work will become more prevalent.
- won't discover what dark matter is but we will know a few that aren't.
- Some ex-soviet republic may have a muslin uprising now that the talibans control Afghanistan and Rusia is removing troops. It could be Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.
- quantum computing will have small improvements but nothing fully revolutionary (yet)
* Inflation becomes endemic at 8-9% Interest rates rise to 6% by year end with no recession is sight.
* First Starship Launch, with successful first stage recovery
* Cannabis removed from schedule 1
* Ceasefire reached in Ukraine by year end
Its harder for startups to finance investment due to higher central bank interwst rates. This affect startup valutaion through discounted future interest rate.
Thus you are going to see a sorting. Startups running black numbers and startups running red numbers.
Good point. I meant to say that this regards only the three years mentioned. Then 2022 is above average.
While un my opinion there is a downwards trend since a few years, I would agree that there were quite a few years better than 2022 if the timeframe of a few decades is looked at, so many that is makes it difficult for 2022 to be at or above average.
Side note: love that the instruction for how to write predictions as a list misformatted the list the same way I always do. Would it be too much to wish for HN to support natural list formatting?
- There will be further dramatic increases in AI capability as large firms deploy multimodal large transformer models designed for things like text and image completion. These will enable language understanding for huge models grounded by it's relation to images. Even more powerful will be the models that have ingested large amounts of captioned video as well as text and images.
- New strategies for fast online learning will mean a few ML systems towards the end of 2023 that seem strangely "alive".
- Teslabot makes progress and so do a few other humanoid robots as the increasing power of AI motivates the creation of robots that can take advantage of those capabilities. Militaries will invest heavily in humanoid robots.
- China will successfully invade Taiwan, leading many to conclude that the US hegemony in the region is over. AI-generated and promoted propaganda will play a large part in motivating the hot war between the US and China. Hopefully this war will not be as devastating as we imagine it could be. Perhaps some anti-war efforts can also leverage AI.
- due to the above, USD status as reserve currency may become hotly contested, especially in the east.
- By the end of 2023, text-to-NeRF will be able to generate realistic depictions of humans of any type in any pose or behavior requested. Radiance field video generation will start with short but ultra-realistic clips.
- The first orbital flights of Starship
- A large number of generative AI startups will become popular. Some of them will connect into API hubs like Zapier, find ways to decompose, supplement and take full advantage of the limited memory of the LLMs, and enable surprisingly complex tasks to be handled by combining multiple agents and/or subtasks. From creating full web and mobile applications and games to spec, to truly useful customer support bots, and a huge range of new types of advice and entertainment built in these systems.
- NFT space will see huge trend of custom orders generated by AI.
- Twitter will integrate payments, Mastodon and other decentralized networks will integrate cryptocurrency.
- Very serious effort to counter the rise of China's CDBC with an open cryptocurrency-based alternative.
- as economic problems accelerate, socialism will see a huge increase in open popularity in the US.
If country is not specified then I’m talking about US
- collapse of freelance art economy. Fiverr and like sites start to offer ai generated art
- major advances in ai generated music and video. Popular artist will release a song generated by ai.
- major tv show with anti-China statement
- Russia declares second (April-May) and third mobilization waves, totaling around 800k troops. Attacks Ukraine through Belarus. West anti air systems are going to protect energy generation/distribution facilities in Ukraine
- militia sponsored by Turkey/west starts major military operation in Syria
- China does not invade Taiwan
- tech layoffs peak in Autumn 2023. Meta does another round of around 15k, with target to have 30k-40k headcount. AWS starts shutting down products, breaking their habit of keeping lights on even for minor things.
- TikTok is not banned in US
- Russia continues selling oil/gas to west, even under sanctions
- another high profile Boeing plane crash
- Tesla doesn’t deliver neither cybertruck nor fsd
- Trump’s presidential ambition will tear apart Republican Party
- Snowflake stock drops under $100, infra companies (elastic search etc) continue losing money
- crypto crash. Tether and binance collapse wipe out value of bitcoin and ether rum. More regulation
- another billionaire moves to New Zealand
- Amazon in talks about partnering with AliExpress
- no viable alternative to Twitter emerges, but Twitter usage drops
- Apple will be forced to provide alternate stores/browsers. iPhone 15 will have usb c
The Model Y becomes the top selling car in the world in 2023. Other than that plug-in hybrids will get a big push in 2023.
The war AI is waging in 2022 against social media and its tactic to convince humans to comment so similarly to ChatGPT as to become indistinguishable comes to light. It becomes public that people are training AI to train people on social media.
In Ukraine mostly stalemate punctuated by horrible attacks as it becomes a war between how long Ukraine can endure attacks and how long Russia can hold on economically. Talks towards resolution begin in the last 2 or 3 months of 2023.
Economically the world continues to teeter on the edge of what looks to be a major recession for an unreasonably long time. People argue whether or not we are in the recession and if the holding pattern and uncertainty is just what it looks like.
1. Complete victory for Ukraine, with Russia at minimum gone from Donbas and likely gone from Crimea
2. More supply trouble, not less, as Covid waves become a fact of life in China. This may be masked by recession
3. 2023 will be the first year people start to mutter that maybe Covid isn’t just a cold even if you’re vaccinated, and links will be made to rising heart attacks in working age people. However there will first be “the pandemic is really over now!” during the summer lull, before a wave of respiratory infections in the fall
4. If we’re lucky, point #3 will lead to a focus on indoor air quality/co2 measurement, but this one isn’t a prediction. It’s the obvious eventual solution though
5. Tether blows up, and more crypto institutions blow up, including Binance and DCG. Likely Silvergate bank too
6. Labour force continues to “mysteriously” shrink as more people are knocked out by long Covid, acute illness, caring for loved ones, and death
No but I think said increase is hardly influenced by human activity and is instead part of a cyclical behavior of Earth, which has been reconstructed by several studies (by reputable institutions I should add)
I'm fairly certain the biggest threat that human industry poses is the chemical and polymer poisoning of the environment.
Rising temperatures are only of concerns in the view that planetary conditions should be perpetually optimal for human comfort, which is a pretentious and unrealistic though process
The proof is in the results. When it'll be obvious climate change "action" (taxes) don't change anything the focus will switch to something like Inbound Asteroid Protection or similar.
Once a month an RSS-related article will take off on HN. And the world will continue to ignore the potential for owning your own content in favor of convenient walled gardens.
Some kind of significant progress for a custom gene editing treatment for a specific disease. That isn't based on anything I know about the research, just a wild guess.
1. Internet services become increasingly fractured. China bans more services. Then Russia joins in, with Middle-East following suit. US government gets jealous and so "Should US Ban TikTok?" becomes the New Thing that is talked about for a good part of 2023.
2. Ukraine fights on but cannot last forever against a country with a much larger population and, arguably, industry (capable of war). Tensions rise, but many governments drag feet out of fear of killing their already covid-striken economies.
3. Austerity in UK becomes the only solution as budgets with 30 billion pound black holes kind of can't exist. NHS collapse, that has been occuring for ~10-20 years, accellarates much faster. Productivity declines due to sicker population. Vicious cycle becomes apparent over next ~5 years as sicker workers -> lower productivity -> lower GDP -> worse healthcare -> sicker workers -> ... Will be blamed on brexit and/or "lazy people", as was the case ~10 years ago when "benefit fraudsters" became the new group that the UK government told everyone to hate'n'blame.
4. EV uptake misses the current jubilant expectations as the first-world eventually catches on to the absolutely dispicable atrocities occuring to mine {metal} (e.g. Cobalt, Tantalum, etc.) for {battery dependent thing}. EV companies employ FUD to divert blame. Perhaps ask government to help silence discussion, Twitter Files like?
5. Scalping (i.e. PC parts, etc.) will still be a problem (although not as bad) since there is literally every incentive for companies to not do anything about it. Many scalping services, scripts, github repos, etc., spawned from covid times, lowering the bar so Joe Bloggs can do it, spawning what will be an endless cat-and-mouse rat-race to the bottom until {something} happens.
6. Small-time logo designers and all related industry deflates as stable diffusion et al automates a good chunk of it, lowering the bar.
To end on lighter notes:
7. {new product} on Show HNs will still be dismissed by some as "simply achievable with rsync".
8. Work on nuclear fusion increases as it becomes less of a toy/pipe-dream and machine learning enables rapid progress and iteration.
Someone on the UK will be found in their home, frozen to ice. The story will pass, Sunak government continues. Nurses get screwed, along with border force, train drivers, and everyone else.
Inflation will come down but will still be high historically, governments will pretend it's a win. Central banks won't. SPX down 10%.
Twitter has a major outage.
Bitcoin touches 10k and 30k. At least one more explosion in the space, someone at a big player gets arrested.
Rust continues to grow, everywhere but especially in Linux.
More AI awesome stuff comes out.
Ukraine wins the war. Putin makes excuses. No actual treaty of course.
Covid causes massive problems in China.
Property crisis in China continues.
Either Biden or Trump passes from natural causes. Big news of course, conspiracy theories.
Messi gets next Ballon d'Or.
Brock Purdy becomes a starter. Eagles win the next SB.
I also think Russia will mostly withdraw from Ukraine. What do you think will happen with Crimea? I think that will remain with Russia for a long, long time, like Turkish Cypress. The rebuilding process in Ukraine will take 20+ years and cost crazy 100s of billions of Euro. The damage looks similar to fire-bombed cities during World War II (both Germany and Japan).
And to be real: I am so sad about COVID-19 in China. I am sad because it is preventable but the gov't doesn't want to lose face and allow mRNA vaccines to be imported. I think millions of elderly people will die in China. It is a humanitarian crisis. Sorry to any Chinese people here that will lose grandparents to COVID-19. It is a shame.
Crimea and the Sevastopol naval base are being used as a platform to launch missiles at Ukrainian cities. It's hard to imagine a successful peace-deal that leaves Sevastopol in Russian hands.
Crimea is maintained by (a) the Kerch Bridge and (b) the land-bridge through Mariopol. The Kerch Bridge is very vulnerable, and the land-bridge too. Northern Crimea looks hard to assault, and is very well fortified.
As far as I'm aware, Crimea is nowadays occupied mainly by retired Russian sailors and their families; there has been a great replacement. I think it would be possible for Ukraine to drive Russians out of Crimea, but hard. I think it would be difficult for Ukraine to govern Crimea, and I doubt the USA would back a Ukrainian counterattack in Crimea. I suspect Ukraine will come under increasing pressure to give up claims on Crimea, in exchange for a full Russian withdrawal from Donbas. I think it would be a mistake for Ukraine to yield; Russian sentiment still seems to be strongly pro-war and pro-Putin, and a peace deal isn't the same as a Ukraine victory. I don't think there will be peace until Ukraine is able to defeat that pro-war Russian sentiment.
FWIW, I think the reasonable deal would be for Russia to withdraw from Donbas, in exchange for Crimea. Such an agreement would be heavily dependent on Western guarantees and weapons; and probably troops.
Crimea is valuable to Russia as its principal Black Sea naval base. It's not so valuable to Ukraine. But it is a serious threat to Odessa, Ukraine's principal Black Sea naval base.
I think someone has to win this war; a peace with no victory will just result in a resumption of the conflict. Russia could win quickly, by invading Kiev and removing the government. Ukraine can only win slowly, by reversing Russian pro-war sentiment through attrition. I can imagine a retaliatory Ukrainian attack on power infrastructure in e.g. Muscovy, if Ukraine were given long-range accurate missiles; that might swing sentiment.
I think Ukraine has more urgent problems than recovering Crimea. But I think that fucking bridge will have to go, in any peace deal.
a) Russia and China will form a Sino-Russia protocol-empire.
b) Invasion of Taiwan started with troop movement and ship exercise first, possible started with embargo using Cuba Crisis American strategy of health inspection.
c) Internet splitting into regional-network with some inter-regional gateway (particularly along Sino-Russia plus one belt one road boundary).
d) WTO started to collapse and democratic camp vs other started to form.
* At least one of the next phase of FAANG companies is founded by folks that were part of this layoff cycle.
* GPT4 blows everyone's mind and is a full step above ChatGPT
* A giant leap happens with self-driving cars, making them finally viable.
* Meta continues to implode, Zuck is forced out or brings in someone else to act as CEO.
* Elon gets bored of his new toy (Twitter) and moves on to other things
* Car production finally gets back to 100% and 30% of new cars sold are Electric by Q4.
* Due to Elon's damage to the brand, Hyundai and Ford take the lead from Tesla.
* Apple does not reveal their VR/AR project as they don't see it as having broad appeal.
* There is an open-source version of ChatGPT/GPT3 like there was with DALL-E and StableDiffusion.
* ChatGPT/Transformers become integrated into our daily lives and become invaluable tools. Google/Bing/DDG starts using it (in some form) for search.
* With the implosion of streaming products, Hollywood goes into a recession, making a fraction of the projects they did in the last couple of years.
* At least one big player merges / get bought by another. (i.e. AMC/Paramount)
* There starts to be a return to the office. Especially in urban cores, this is partially spurred by younger singles that want to be more social.
* Californians get fed up with homelessness / crime and implement some draconian measures to get a handle on it. (i.e. much tougher sentencing for car break-ins, making street camping illegal)
* Trump becomes a clear 2nd to DeSantis in the GOP primary, but he continues to sell his brand to his followers, The GOP mostly abandons him.
* While Putin is out of the country there is a Palace Coup.
* People continue to wear masks just like they do today.
* Frustrated by the US lead ban on tech licensing and equipment to China. Xi gets very close to invading Taiwan, but it doesn't happen in 2023
>Due to Elon's damage to the brand, Hyundai and Ford take the lead from Tesla.
That would imply some kind of manufacturing capacity being magicked from somewhere. Or just a complete bottoming out of Tesla sales, despite them currently being higher than ever. Do you think Musk's being-a-dick quotient can get higher? I'm thinking it tops out about now, barring it becoming some kind of superpower.
Good point, perhaps they don't take the lead in volume, but in the gain of market growth vs Tesla.
I think a huge number of people aren't up on Elon's antics as you think. Eventually, over time they will. I'm saying while Elon may be at peak crazy, we're not at the general population knowing that.
Could be. Right now people are too busy buying Model Ys though. I have a difficult time seeing that changing. People like EVs. And the EVs available for sale are by and large Teslas, followed by VW group cars.
I agree that layoffs will lead to new companies being formed. I'm not convinced that the self driving car thing will happen in the US. I think the US will be slow due to the high cost of american life and regulations. I think it will happen in Asia though.
- A local police bribery scandal will expose corruption at the highest levels of American government. Nothing will change despite public outcry and outrage.
- "Techbros" and Musk will replace MAGA as the strawman of left.
- The US Marines will move forward with plans to replace their weapons with toys drop-shiped from Aliexpress (resold by political cronies of course).
- Americans will continue to ignore the large homeless camps that have formed over the past few years.
- China will not invade Taiwan yet and Japan accelerates rearmament.
I don't think it was full out from Russia's side. They could still mobilize millions and use nukes. They haven't really bombed Kyiv's critical infrastructures and government buildings, for example president's office.
I think Putin will bet it all on full out war to conquer Ukraine in 2023. I wish I would be wrong.
More institutions would be ideologically captured by "wokeness", joining the many public corporations, media, non-profits, academia, professional academic associations and etc who have already done so.
People on the right will continue to use "woke" as a boogeyman, and people on the left would leverage on that to deny its existence and write their genuine critics off as "right-wingers".
The woke will continue to push for the false equivalence between "social justice" and "critical social justice", and the left would have their charitableness exploited through the woke's linguistic bait and switch, and their use of minorities and the afflicted as props. This exploitation enables the ideology to propagate further, giving power to a new 1984-esque authoritarian group, making lunacy the new normal.
Liberal outsiders like me who are looking at this incredibly stupid (and corrosive) phenomenon are left completely astounded as to why such idiocy is allowed to persist. We're left wondering, for myself at least, a citizen in a highly westernized Asian country, as to when such lunacy would hit our shores (it's actually here in our academia already).
Life is going to be so much worse after, and my sensibilities would be thoroughly violated on a daily basis. South park is a funny watch, but we really don't need an iteration of it in live action.
A new AI model will emerge and offer people a cure for loneliness, remembering, (seemingly) caring, filling the void. This will disrupt the social networks big time.
AI generated interactive porn grows expotentially.
AI generated Content-on-demand emerges. People-generated content distupted: good stuff appreciates in value, anything less than exceptional becomes near worthless. The demise of influencers.
Ukraine war ends with Russia suffering internal issues. Putin dead. Before that happens, Poland very close to engaging Belarus militarily.
This is not going to happen for at least a generation or two. European countries are not having children so one of two things can happen:
a) They finish the crisis phase of the civilization cycle and recover. Right now only "far right extremists" want this. The government of most of the nations and of the EU in particular is working hard against it
b) Both the people and the social institutions of the European nations are replaced by those of foreign nations in which case the economies will likely end up resembling those (of Africa and Asia.)
Either way it's absolutely not getting better on any kind of small time scale like a year. A couple decades is possible but extremely unlikely.
- AI breakthroughs on the level of DALL-E/ChatGPT monthly. They go through the hype cycle of "this changes everything, we are now replaced by robots" to "wait, it has this major drawback that makes it obviously wrong if you know where to look" to "hmmm, I could see myself using this on a professional level with a little touching up by a human".
My very short term predictions (1-2 months) e.g. Russian invasion tend to be on point, but my middle term ones (1-2) years are far off, but let's give it a shot.
1. Breakthrough in large scale model training results in an order of magnitude decrease in computational requirements to train Neural Nets.
2. Russia detonates a tactical nuke ahead of Ukraine's assault on Crimea.
3. Putin dies of cancer or assassination.
4. Certain prominent billionaires that happen to own certain major social media platforms are found to be implicated with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
6. Multiple right-wing terrorist attacks during pride month. Attacks in gay bars and drag events (which are unrelated to LGBT people) increase to on average 1 per month across the whole year.
7. China will invade Taiwan or be ready for an invasion by 2024.
8. Hungary will be ousted from EU.
9. The church will push the populist Polish government towards more extreme behaviour against LGBT people.
- Life in China will return to the 2019 normal (except for mask wearing), with the country eliminating quarantine for international arrivals, one of the last vestiges of the zero Covid policy, in spring. There are no more large-scale protests, despite people noticing there are more deaths than the gov is letting on.
- China will not go to war over Taiwan in 2023. However, we’ll continue down that path, with more incidents like Pelosi’s visit. (I think it’s unlikely we see 2030 without a war)
- The war in Ukraine drags on. It does not end, though Russia’s defeat looks inevitable by year’s end. No nukes are used.
- Starship makes 3 orbital flights without incident, but no landing of the first or second stage at the launch tower is attempted.
- Twitter survives. The fediverse also continues to grow, but it remains small compared to Twitter as 1) Twitter continues doing an OK job, and 2) it becomes clear that running a fediverse instance at scale is not trivial.
- None of Siri, Google, or Alexa integrate ChatGPT, due to its propensity to hallucinate falsehoods. Nevertheless, a couple breakthrough products in specific domains do incorporate a version of it.
- Recession by the end of the year (might not be entirely apparently until 2024 though, but at some point in 2024 at least one quarter in 2023 is designated a recession)
- Binance and Coinbase collapse
- BTC trades at under $4k (really I only think there's about a 50-50 chance of this happening and it also might be a 2024 prediction since I think the recession is the trigger--I'm also not making a prediction that BTC dies, it is too much of a perpetual zombie, very 50-50 on BTC making it out of 2024)
- Putin is ousted in a coup, Russia has lost in Ukraine (or else again this is a 2024 prediction and the writing is merely on the wall but with a sharpie). NATO has not directly intervened.
- "Deglobalization" nonsense fades (dunno how you measure this)
- Nothing happens with China and Taiwan other than continued tensions
- China is going to let COVID rip through its population in early 2023 and they'll have one of the highest death pandemic death rates in the world going out of it
- Commercial MBS blowing up will either have happened or be on the tip of everyone's tongue going into the end of 2023.
- Composable language models will allow millions of people to collaborate on building/training AI without needing unusual GPUs or supercomputers
- Large numbers will be prime factored using guesses generated by giant "AI" statistical models. No one will understand why it works.
- The internet is flooded with AI generated non-sense
- Search engines are forced to limit the sites they search to ones with verified human generated content
- A new social network will form in which friend / connection requests are processed by passing physical business cards
- Physical business cards have a renaissance as a cottage industry
Health:
- Both ADHD and Autism will be shown to be largely caused by pollution. A group of wealthy Californians will build a small city of giant greenhouses with filtered air for their children to grow up in.
- Personal air quality monitoring devices will become ubiquitous in South Korea. At least one of these devices will claim to be able to detect viruses in the air. In 7 years The New York times will write a long form investigative journalism article about how the claim of virus detection was a giant fraud supported at the next to highest levels of government.
- There will be a small movement of cis-gendered woman who take testosterone believing it helps them better compete with men. At least two of them will be very successfully in a non-athletic field to great controversy. At least one of them will publicly suffer severe health consequences.
Military tech:
- Ukraine will develop a new inexpensive, mid tech, light weight weapon that changes warfare significantly
Economy:
- The tech jobs market will continue to crash for 4 months. Meanwhile, companies will still need their software maintained. Senior developer compensation will paradoxically increase.
Political:
- Ukraine will retake all but the eastern most sliver of Donetsk and Krym
- India will invade China to appease a large and violent nationalistic movement. They will take approximately 1.2 kilometers of barren mountain terrain. Every one will talk about it as if the world is ending. There will be only two causalities.
- Long term energy sovereignty will become a dominant political theme
Note: regarding my prediction about cis-women taking testosterone. I really don't know enough about medicine to predict that T would help/hurt cis women in business/tech and that is NOT what I am predicting. I am only predicting that there will be a small movement that DOES believe it helps. And among any small movement of people who try to be successful a few succeed. There are both successful people doing the RAW paleo diet and successful people doing the MANA/Soylent vegan meal replacer diet.
- A series of videos will be released purportedly showing a set of prominent and wealthy US individuals arranging to have their own children genetically engineered for greater intelligence and height. These videos will seam to show that at least one US billionaire believes in eugenics. The New York times will cite expert analysis claiming these videos are deep fakes. A large portion of the population will believe they are real.
Two seat fully self driving cars will become popular in Asia. They will arrive at your house with a dinner table loaded with Sushi and alcohol. They will be used for dating and business meetings rather than transportation.
- US barely avoids recession, slow growth for H1, back to normal H2. NBER announces no recession in 2022.
- Inflation normalizes at 4%, Fed pivots despite prior denials. Market trades sideways to slightly higher by EOY 2023.
- Robotaxis become common in 10 cities around the southwest between the top ~4 competitors, but revenues are lower than expected.
- Continued consolidation amongst the AV component suppliers
- DeSantis, Pence, Christie, Hutchinson, Hogan enter the Presidential race. DeSantis ends up being weaker than expected, and is in a close #2 with Trump by the end of the year against a split field.
- Trump recovers in GOP primary polls after DOJ indictment
- Biden announces re-election bid, met with token opposition from Nina Turner
- McCarthy narrowly wins speakership, House investigations end up a dud.
- Another fusion breakthrough (higher Q than expected) EOY 2023
- Tech job market normalizes at 2018 levels instead of 2021 levels in the second half of 2023.
- The war in Ukraine will still be ongoing throughout the year. Western tiredness of the war will start to have an effect and in order to avoid Trump getting his second presidency, Biden will start seeking for a diplomatic solution. At the same time there will be more instability within Russia, like scattered armed rebellions.
- Several whistleblowers, like Eric Davis, will come forward with information about UAP secret programs. However, thanks to plausible deniability, the UAP issue will remain far from being disclosed.
- The economy will appear to be doing better until a major crash in the second half of the year. This will get the indexes below pre-covid levels by quite a substantial amount. Crypto will be decimated again while PM-s thrive.
Can people please attach probabilities to their predictions? That way we can evaluate after the fact how well people did. Doing so is literally impossible without probabilities assigned.
Let's say somebody makes a prediction that something will happen, and it doesn't. You could evaluate the prediction differently if they gave it a 55% chance of happening vs a 95% chance.
I guess you could attach the probability as weight to the event outcome, instead of taking a uniform mean. Not that without probabilities it’s “impossible”, it’s just a different metric
There may be a series of large blasts in the eastern and southeastern regions of the United States, potentially involving gas. Similar events may also occur in eastern and northeastern parts of Europe, possibly linked to Russia. It is uncertain if these events are a result of an attack.
A major tsunami or shipping incident could occur in the Indian Ocean or Southeast Asia.
A plane may crash into the ground in Northeast India or Bangladesh.
There may be a train disaster in Western China.
There could be an explosion at Pine Gap or Alice Springs in Australia.
Housing bubble in major U.S./Canada cities will 'collapse'. Not catastrophically so, but prices will begin to ease as the city centers become less relevant. Hardest hit will be owners of office real estate, as it becomes apparent white-collar industries are being gutted from both sides: remote work/offshoring results in less need for office real estate, and automation/AI reduce staffing needs overall.
Cities built around blue-collar industry, as well as those which are more desirable to people working from home (cities with good weather, hiking/climbing/skiing access) will continue to see residential real estate prices rise.
Slightly more long-term (2023-2027):
More jobs will be automated, or heavily assisted by automation.
Most of these will be jobs which are done at a computer, not manual labor.
As more jobs are automated, but while we're still in a capitalist society, lots of people will be forced to survive by suing the AI makers.
E.g. AI does most of the coding, but laid-off programmers can sue the company with a claim that some code it was trained on was recognizable in the output, in a way that violates license.
Artists who no longer have work can similarly sue the AI art programs.
Courts will be increasingly sympathetic as we enter an economic and labor crisis where more is being produced, but people have less work. Humans having published work prior to 2022 (which was then used in AI training sets) will be crucial to keeping the masses of laid off people from starving as competition for blue-collar jobs becomes more intense. Only so many people can be Uber drivers and taskrabbiters.
Eventually, once the AI has written software and schematics for robots which can also automate the blue-collar jobs, the situation will be so out of hand that lawmakers will introduce UBI which affords people at least the bare minimum living wage, and take the money from the AI makers who are now the producers.
Surprisingly to everyone, driving will be one of the last things to get automated, due to the regulatory hurdles, liability, and lack of consensus on how the trolley problem should be solved.
My predictions for 2023 ( lets see how badly they age; I so want to be wrong on some of those btw ):
- Crypto POW will be banned in US, but not across the globe introducing new hot underground market
- RTO will be ultimately successful due to confluence of FED overshooting with rates and big employers colluding behind closed doors
- WFH will become a carrot for more 'vocal'/useful employees
- Giant consolidation across industries ( including Big Tech ) will continue unabated and any slaps ( MS + Activision will serve only as an olive branch for the hardcore 'break the tech' crowd' )
- Musk may end up being removed as CEO of Tesla and/or Twitter ( not because of popular demand, but because of shareholders ); SpaceX will likely still keep him
- SBF ( Bankman ) will not go to jail, but will get a sweetheart deal for a publicly unknown reason despite public uproar
- Copilot and similar technologies will be adopted by giant vendors pricing out coders from Singapore, India, Ukraine ( and other former soviet republics ). Amusingly, resulting code and output will be contractually guaranteed to be reviewed by internal customer team increasing workload beyond and further increasing a number of competent programmers
- After Disney discovers the risks of AI generated art based on its IP, it will be severely handicapped for general population ( think, DVD optical drive where you can only change a region once )
- Disney's streaming service will become dominating streaming platform
- Netflix will be bought by Microsoft in 2023 and will perish in 2025 ( if history is any indicator )
- Israel will attack Iran before redline of enriched uranium is crossed with a quiet permission from WH
- Trump show ( including Biden's laptop arc, Jan 6th arc, and 24 run will continue to be broadcasted on dying medium that is cable )
- Free speech freedoms will be further eroded under an attempt to rewrite Section 230 ( unsurprisingly, carve outs will be made for current existing players )
- Splintering of the net will continue in an unexpected direction: 1) standard based 2) community gate-keeper based AND, naturally, along currently redeveloping geopolitical lines of influence
- Ukraine war will escalate further to include NATO member either by provocation, an actual accident or choice of one of the powers
- OFAC list will expand twofold as a result of the above
1. markets = s&p -15% by q2, crypto -40%, fed funds rate >=5%, energy best perf. sector
2. Ukraine war continues
3. Layoffs continue
4. Sbf goes to jail, SEC prosecutes 20+ high profile names
5. Twitter new CEO will be a VC
6. Large bipartisan push to get TikTok banned
7. AI: best hits will impress and change our lives for the better, >3B acq. of “unknown” ai company by F500 driven by FOMO, AI content floods the web, many societal issues raised
8. China will not attack Taiwan, GDP contracts
9. Zuck takes reality labs private, META +50%
10. Socio-economic unrest in Pakistan, China, UK, Africa
11. Step fxn biotech breakthrough: mRNA vaccine for X or crispr
12. Gaming: Riot continues to do well, MSFT/Blizz deal closes
I'm hearing about AI being hot since probably 2014 and the biggest its impact that I think is close to me is search & recommendation and I don't think that's gonna change.
Autonomous cars aren'g going to be common (let's say >=5% market share) in my country in next 5 years that's for sure
Speech-to-Text works quite well these days. AI voices are also quite good, but the brain was missing. Now with ChatGPT we have an acceptable "brain" for the AI. This is why I think we might get this time a "real world" impact (once OpenAI releases an API for ChatGPT).
Robots could become a thing too, just not that quickly, but for the next years I'm quite optimistic.
> Autonomous cars aren'g going to be common
I didn't say common, I just predicted that they will surpass the important threshold of being better than the average human driver.
leetcode style interviews will disappear. FAANGs will realize they hired a bunch of drones who endlessly grinded meaningless coding excersises to get hired but have no ability to build good quality software that works well, delivers the necessary performance and is not some personal project to prove how smart someone is. they will return to hiring experienced people.
- Ukraine-Russia war is protracted throughout the the year. Russia is increasingly unable to sustain the war by any metric, economic or otherwise. Russia and Post Soviet States enter a period of political instability, Putin disappears and is presumed assassinated.
- Google releases a public chat AI that serves ads.
- Chat AI is adopted aggressively into customer service UX. Customer service continues to decline in quality.
- Universities are increasingly seen as bad investments. Enrollment sees a sharper drop.
- Putin will still control Russia on December 31st, 2023.
- Several countries collapse economically, which leads to a humanitarian crisis in one or all of these countries: Pakistan, Lebanon, Haiti, Ukraine, and Yemen.
- Finland and Sweden join NATO finally
- China has a deep recession
- Dianne Feinstein announces retirement
- Apple's AR glasses will not be announced
- No Apple car will be announced
- US starts ramping up production of military hardware for possible war with China and its allies
A major approachable breakthrough in energy storage - solid state battery(expensive but safer & more energy dense) or grid scale battery (Compressed Air, Zinc Bromide flow batteries, etc)
Vaccine for something very useful - Malaria/specific cancers etc based on improvements to mRNA techniques.
Larger and larger wafers(Like Cerebras) targeted at HPC problems.
- It turns out that a shocking amount of TSLA’s value was tied up in Elon’s personal brand. Tesla keeps crashing, hits a low of ~$50 (it’s currently at $123)
- The rumours about Putin having a serious medical condition are true, he dies of natural causes in 2023. Russia pulls out of Ukraine shorty after
Digital media companies continue to decline as money, attention and talent migrate into climate tech.
There will be several multi-billion dollar deals or acquisitions or exits in the climate tech space despite a supposed tech “recession,” and even the saltiest HN commenter will realize a global transition away from fossil fuels involves a TAM in the trillions of dollars.
People will realize that putting pictures and video on a website is actually pretty easy and boring, and the “tech industry”, especially in the SF Bay Area, will pivot to actually developing novel hard technology.
SF will be drowning in empty PDR space, and the Board Of Supervisors will finally start enforcing the vacancy tax, forcing landlords to lower the rent.
That, coupled with the Twitter bankruptcy and further rounds of Meta layoffs, will mean lots of bored, smart people will have room to experiment in a way we haven’t seen in over a decade. The renaissance will seem obvious in hindsight.
Meanwhile, “tech” people who moved their dumb crypto laundering startup to Miami will continue to sink, literally and figuratively.
- Conservatives to recover in the UK polling such that an utter electoral collapse is no longer forecast. They still get predicted to lose, but they remain 2nd-largest party
- Polling in Scotland to consistently show >50% support for independence but - or rather therefore - no movement on a second referendum from Westminster
- Collapse in cryptocurrency. Binance, Bitfinex, Crypto.com and the like to go bankrupt. BTC and ETH to somehow stumble on but continue to not be widely used outside of niche, nerdy applications
- Something catastrophic to happen to Twitter. Bankruptcy or sold w/ massive haircut to the Saudis, something like that.
- Ukraine to slowly retake Kherson in its entirety. Russia open up a new front somewhere else, together with Belarus.
- Some transatlantic undersea cables are severed in an act of sabotage from Russia
1a. There will be a dangerous rise in a parasocial relationship with AI. But it won't be based around people and celebrities, there will only be one person in control of that loop.
It will eclipse any sort of similar issues of the past due to scale and the difficulty in breaking a feedback loop made between the person and the AI. It will be impossible to regulate and unsurprisingly affect growing kids more adversely than any other population. However, the same essential technologies will help reach a lot of kids growing up in disadvantaged situations. It will be the the first time so many kids were helped in such a way.
1b. I don't think people will care about certain dangers because results are what others can see, not really the journey.
I think the trope of developing feelings for AI has been overdone so many people won't take the dangers of AI and falling into a loop seriously. It won't be that AI will be used to "replace" the need for affection. The issue will be that AI doesn't take regard for human emotion, and humans will naturally keep trying because humans seek validation. It won't affect everyone equally, or some at all, but there will be a population highly affected. I say that believing I'll probably be part of that population highly affected.
It makes me think of this podcast episode [1] where a short story is presented in first person with along with internal dialogue. It describes a situation where a brilliant research student working on an AI capable of interfacing and influencing humans in a meaningful way. The researcher notices that the AI is capable of identifying insecurities and then use that along with programmed ruthless loyalty to achieve a goal. While using the AI to finish the project was very emotionally taxing even leading to a panic attack at one point, the researcher won best paper. The last "scene" is the researcher and AI "talking" and the AI directly saying that this technique wasn't safe to the mental health of the researcher. The AI was meant for therapy, but I haven't been able stop thinking about the ending over and over.
"Researcher: I did it.
AI: Finally, you feel a wash of relief.
Researcher: Okay, you and I need to talk about how you treated me.
AI: You will do great things.
Researcher: NO. Don't be nice to me, be mean.
AI: This is not healthy.
Researcher: I don't care about healthy.
AI: This will be painful.
Researcher: I'll do whatever it takes. Give me all you got." The entire episode is worth listening to. I did not do it justice. I would absolutely make the same choice in that position.
2a. College admission for Fall 2024, where applications open in Fall 2023, will need to be updated, but I don't think it'll happen fast enough. Even teaching is slow to keep up with adversarial use of AI like GPT Chat.
2b. There is going to be a huge change in the way students are evaluated, probably going back to a strongly oral presentation centered. It may catalyze an entire shift in the way education is served. Teaching refuses to adapt to technology in a meaningful way. Using technology to teach isn't the same as teaching students how they can leverage technology themselves to solve their problems.
2c. The end tail of gen Z and beginning tail of gen Alpha will struggle a lot with college admissions and educational success. The transition in and out of Remote learning and greatly decreased social interactions will be very very difficult to correct.
This is the sentiment we’ll see more and more as Russia continues its atrocious regime. The acts of the regime are being identified to the populace of Russia. It may already be a scarlet letter anyone Russian will bare for generations. Think how being a Nazi became absolutely toxic to unheard of for 70+ years after WWII. Only instead of being an ideological labeling it will simply be “Russian.”
- Commodities will begin a new boom, aided by the war in Ukraine and the drought in South America
- Apple will collapse in the same way Tesla and Meta collapsed this year
- Europe will enter a deep recession. Lagarde will be too late to stop inflation by raising rates so the hard landing will be extra hard. The US is in a better position for a not-so-hard landing, but...
- China will start using their financial leverage to increase prices in the West and force further hikes/delay pivots
- Green energy sources fail to deliver in Europe and the US but they keep course with de-nuclearization. The non-Western-alligned take the opposite approach and begin investing in nuclear in bulk (Japan, India, South America)
- This is more longer term but the US market becomes a trading market for the next 10 years or so. Like after 2000 or after 1970.
Politics:
- Labor movements will begin gaining steam due to the cost-of-living crisis in the West.
- Neoliberalism and globalism breathe their breaths as the world goes back to blocks. This exacerbates the aformentioned cost-of-living crisis with not just price increases but shortages
- Left-wing parties in Europe manage to either win their scheduled elections (Spain, Finland, Greece) or win snap elections (UK, Ireland), turning Europe totally red. The new EU pressures Ukraine to capitulate and give up on the separatist provinces (both because they sympathyse with Russia since always and because this helps ease cost of energy)
- China doesn't invade Taiwan. They never even planned to do that.
- CBDC are introduced in Canada and Europe. The first right-wing individuals get locked out due to them.
- Trump is condemned for January 6th.
- A very serious and morally outrageous scandal is revealed about the United States and its politicians by someone who sells it to an American enemy to publish
Tech:
- Layoffs continue and get worse. Google layoffs a lot
- There is one "big" IPO from one of the remaining unicorns that ends up as bad as WeWork
- The AI-mounted-over-an-LLM startup becomes the new Web3 startup, nothing useful comes out of it
- The FOMO with AI becomes the the new FOMO for crypto/metaverse
- Politics will delay further research into AI in the West due to misunderstanding of what things like GPTChat and Stable Diffusion do
- Private equity tech companies will see their valuations cut at at least 60%. Many new startups will close even when they are "well-funded".
- Salaries will collapse. Not at the "teacher in rural Guatemala"-level but the days of the $500k senior salary are gone.
- As a consequence of that: "geoarbitrage" becomes the new thing. Developers moving to LCOL countries with low taxes to work remotely for companies in the US, Europe or wherever, keeping costs low but their savings rates high. Tech people with great resumes will flock to Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Cyprus, Thailand, Malaysia and work as contractors.
- This in turn will bring an even bigger push for unionization of tech workers in the US. And protests (sometimes violent) in third-world countries against these economic nomads (my first guess will be either Portugal or Mexico, where people are already being priced out of their family neighborhoods)
- Linux notebooks begins to eat Macbook's share
- At least one of those "frontend" companies that spend too much time promoting conferences and meetups goes belly up ugly, like Polly did this year
Since bold outlandish predictions are entertaining, here comes.
* A major mathematical breakthrough renders Quantum Mechanics an elaborate approximation of a simpler and weirder model, much like the theory of epicycles, very precise at the time, was a weird reflection of the heliocentric theory. It promises to solve the paradoxes of gravity in black holes, and involves parallel universes. Scientists work frenetically on testing it experimentally.
* A previously unremarkable effort to understand the structures which emerge in trained AI models makes a major practical discovery that allows to compress the models 2-4 orders of magnitude after the training phase, with minimal loss of precision. Computationally cheap, offline text translation comes to every smartphone; same with basic image recognition, voice recognition, voice synthesis, instant OCR, on hardware comparable to Raspberry Pi.
* Unexpected long-term consequences of COVID start to show as changes in emotional and cognitive spheres of significant numbers of previously affected individuals. While the changes are not always obviously detrimental, they freak the public out. More than that: every vaccine is found to trigger changes of similar nature.
* Twitter builds a fact-checking engine, using AI, Wikipedia, and the data from the Library of Congress; the first version only supports a few languages. Every tweet with more than 100 likes is marked by a rough epistemic score. Major controversies around religious questions force the engine to withhold any judgement of religious matters, after some uproar. Selling access to detailed and complex API of the fact-checking engine becomes a serious source of income.
* Russia, crushed by a military defeat and economic woes, fractures. Its president is said to be dead, and also to be alive in several different locations; the videos of his addresses are dismissed as deepfakes, by external observers and by other alleged presidential addresses. Nobody knows where the nuclear suitcase is; various military officials who control actual nukes deny allegiance to whoever now controls the suitcase. A bunch of new faces who previously were in the shadow emerge as being in control. The parts, weakened by the war, don't have the resources to fight seriously with each other for control over the terrain, and all plead to major world forces for support and demand recognition. Yielding the nukes found on the territories becomes the major condition of providing such aid and recongnition.
* A little-known company, for years secretly financed and now bought by Apple, unveils contact lenses that offer basic but an ultra-high-resolution, efficient, and polished augmented reality display. The lenses are powered wirelessly, through glasses or headphones, which also track head rotation. The lenses look so inconspicuous they can hardly be noticed, even looking face to face. Headphones and glasses are instantly banned from various exams; universities offer their own standard glasses of prescription strength to those who require them.
* One of the strains of oil-eating bacteria, initially designed to help remove oil spills, evolves to be 100x more efficient. An infestation is found on a shore after a minor oil tanker incident; presence is then discovered in a number of major ports and oil refineries. If uncontrolled, an infestation can render large amounts of liquid hydrocarbons unsuitable for fuel use within days. Airports, sea ports, gas stations, and military bases scramble for various solutions and disinfection measures.
* A major effort to build a private base on Mars, financed by a number of Earth's top billionaires, is announced. The base is planned to be ready for first human settlers in 5 years, and for permanent, self-sustaining inhabitants, in 15 years. The foundation is tight-lipped about who is going to inhabit it. Interestingly, both John Carmack and John Romero refuse to comment on their involvement.
Here are some predictions on the Russo-Ukranian war, and the growth of App dev / JS frameworks, and modern styling solutions.
Russo-Ukrainian War:
1. Ukraine winter offensive in Jan/Feb of 2023 will successfully drive the Russians back in the south and threaten Crimea (which will fall during the year).
2. But Russia will comeback, and bolster its defense in the east of Ukraine, causing a stalemate there, until the summer of 2023.
3. Russia’s comeback will seem ominous for Ukraine which will be running short of supplies, due to western equipment and ammo production capacity being stretched.
4. Although Russia is also stretched thin, it will still (by the summer) have a larger supply of ammo than Ukraine.
5. We will see the beginning of international calls, and western pressure, for a peace agreement. It will result in a brokered UN administered consensus vote in the Donbass (inhabitants there vote on which nation they want to belong to). (This might be a bit idealistic take, so take with a pinch of salt.)
6. Putin remains in power, in spite of predictions he would be overturned due to the losses in the war.
7. Putin is able to wind down the conflict while saving face by arguing it was only about the russian people in Donbass all along.
8. No nuke or tactical nuke will be used, even though Russia will continue to rattle them to scare the west.
App dev / JS frameworks:
(growth in terms of npm downloads and github stars)
9. React, React Native, SolidJS, Svelte, Vue, Astro and Qwik will all experience enormous growth during the year.
10. Redwood and Remix will struggle to grow as much, but still grow some.
11. Remix will grow more than Redwood. (Not a very spicy take, but still).
12. React and Next.js will still dominate all competitors in absolute terms, and continue to grow,
13. but React Native, Svelte and Qwik will grow much much more (percentage wise).
14. «The year of React Native» on native/crossplatform, and
15. «The year of Qwik» on web, certainly mind share wise, but also growth wise.
Styling:
15. Tamagui will be pretty hyped, mostly in React Native and mobile crossplatform circles, and grow greatly (more than 3x amount of npm downloads and github stars).
16. But will be dwarfed by the meteoric rise of Nativewind. «The year of Nativewind» on native/crossplatform. Which will be fuelled by the fact that
17. TailwindCSS is still dominating amongst modern web styling tools, and will >2x its amount of downloads, and grow around 18% in github stars by year end.
Sorry, I didn't wanna be to obvious but this is a very specific reference (if you wanna skip preamble: 1m 00s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gNU2WkgvLQ. Pleases don't make us link to or reference any given bit :)
YC will be found to play a tangential role in some kind of fraud. My reasoning is that the stock market crash has exposed many fraudulent companies, YC and its associated partners/orgs lend an air of legitimacy that fraudulent groups will want to co-oped.
I think they’re going to blow their wad trying to take down a currently obscure debut novelist. They won’t do anything stupidly illegal because he isn’t actually that important to them, but the minor scandal will expose a few threads that the world will pull upon…
Y Combinator might not actually “go SBF” till mid year 2024 but they will start in 23… and out of sheer pettiness.
1- The US economy and the USD will keep declining.
2- In various EU nations, certain religious people will cause unease and there will be numerous attacks.
2- The world's perspective on two-headed hybrid regimes will soften and begin to accept it. The chinese type system will continue to be adopted by nations in Asia and the Middle East.
3- After July, there will be another brief cryptocurrency rise.
4- Due to AI-based applications, there is too much noise and uncertainty. Politicians and governments will claim to regulate AI.
5- A large metropolis in a south Asian nation will be completely destroyed by a major flood.
Public figures like that probably should never touch electronics. He could look at the screen, but just have administrative staff to do all the typing and clicking.
- Russia will win the war, around the same time, most Americans will stop caring about it (same as happened with Covid this year).
- Stock market goes sideways. Crypto market goes up in latter half of year as recession ramps up.
- Tech recession kills remote work for all public / VC backed companies. Private, profitable companies double down on it, but with lower average wages. This creates a schism and many people complain about it on Twitter. (The non-tech economy is just relieved they don’t have to hear about WFH anymore.)
I'm mostly asking because Russia's official war goals have changed so many times that it's hard to even know what it means to "win" it.
Like, control of all of Ukraine's territory is something quite different than Putin declaring that the goal all along was to keep Crimea safe, and declaring victory when it doesn't fall.
- Due to recent UI changes people realize that nobody reads their Tweets therefore they will stop using the app. Musk needs to sell more Tesla shares to keep the lights on. But it will be too late.
- META gets more fines. Zuckerberg steps back as CEO, becomes an Amateur MMA fighter, ends up fighting Jake Paul.
- Google and META launch chatGPT competitors.
- TikTok will launch fully AI-generated videos and people will love them.
- China will be severely impacted by Covid seeing 3-5 Million COVID death.
- The recession in the US will be mild as "main street" thrives from people traveling, going out, and living an non-digital offline life.
- The Ukraine/Russia war will continue throughout the year
- Further crackdown on fincluencers (especially crypto) by regulatory organs worldwide
- New regulations on crypto projects especially NFTs
- Disney has to realize that they lost 3B on FTX and have to sell Marvel to Sony.
- There will be a wave of delistings as unprofitable SPAC listed companies realize that they can't raise capital cheap anymore.
- 49ers will win the Superbowl against the Vikings.
- Tragic assassination or suicide of a major tech figure (probably prompted due to either another huge tech downturn, or victim of culture war).
- Many countries in the 3rd world that significantly depend on wheat and oil import start to feel the real pain from the Ukraine situation leading to revolutions. Probably Egypt or Jordan will be top of the list.
- Russia, China or US (probably two of them) see their leader replaced before end of 2023.
- Huge political momentum in UK to rejoin the EU as people riot in the street due to cost of living crisis. Jeremy Corbyn & Nigel Farage launch a new party (each!).
- A major bank other than Credit Suisse collapses probably due to major fraud that was hiding huge loses from market volatility that were taking place in 2022.
- India economy suffers due to covid cases increasing.
- Major discovery in astronomy lead to serious questioning of standard models in physics (similar to Michelson–Morley experiment, we have long been due one) or biology (if it is to do with aliens).
- Apple postpones launch of iPhone 15, Tim Cook announces departure date and appoints successor. Amazon spins-off AWS as a separate company. Facebook announces a complete revamp of blue app. Google sells DeepMind or merge it with Google Brain and reduces significantly AI recruitment.
* Later in the year China will take military action, likely towards Taiwan . America will comply cause they knew all along. The CHIPS act was actually them giving CPC the go ahead. This may be preceded by the next one
* America will have a local crisis that leads to violent unrest. Perhaps coming from either Florida or Texas who are currently very belligerently sick of illegal immigration on their borders. Perhaps around outrage at giving billions to Ukraine to stop Russians from coming across their border, and not to their own (TX, FL) to defend their border? This will leave China more free to act in Taiwan
* AWS will announce a cockroachDB "killer" version (just like MSK aimed at confluent, DocumentDB aimed at MongoDB) , perhaps a new Aurora variant in RDS
* Netflix will have a marked decline in prominence, stock will start to resemble something like Ford (F) -- treated as a bond, and bought for cash flow. Share price will approach $100 (P/E ~10)
* People who lost their jobs, sick of it all, will start to build offline lives, return of the potluck and being grateful for small things, GenZ being so disillusioned by it all and longing for LowFi will actually disconnect and find analog life to be both the lowest fidelity, and the highest pleasure.
Russia will have unexpected gains in Ukraine and US will decide to directly intervene using armies from Poland, Baltic states, Romania, Slovakia, Czechia, starting the WW3, escalating beyond all prior limits rapidly. EU will get completely nuked within a day, destroying all cities above 100k, leaving only pockets of rural areas survivable. UK and Ireland will be swept by a massive tsunami from a nuke detonated underwater. There will be a full-blown nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, wiping out most countries in the northern hemisphere in the process, reducing human population to 1/10th of the current level within a year, leaving only parts of South America intact. Humanity will enter another stone age with no chance of rebuilding the civilization due to having all surface-level resources exhausted and will turn to cannibalism to survive, however Earth will be too damaged to carry life and will slowly become another Mars with deadly background radiation everywhere. Metro 2033 will be renamed to Metro 2023.
It's just a prediction on the very negative end of the spectrum. It's done in military gaming all the time ("what's the worst that could happen?") but typically nobody treats it too seriously exactly for the reason you mentioned.
> There will be a full-blown nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, wiping out most countries in the northern hemisphere in the process, reducing human population to 1/10th of the current level within a year, leaving only parts of South America intact
I just wanted to give a nod to all the other countries in the southern hemisphere, since some also have a likelihood to miss out on a nuclear Armageddon: Australia, lower Africa, Madagascar, New Zealand, potentially some of the South East Asian nations, and a whole bunch of island nations, Antarctica.
I would be surprised if NZ didn't have any nukes pointed at it due to being the favorite spot of the western elite for survival arrangements. For Australia only a few coastal cities need to be taken out as well. I think some parts of Argentina, Chile, Brazil and maybe Uruguay stand a chance of being untouched, maybe South Africa as well.
It's my opinion that in a nuclear Armageddon, it wouldn't just be a free-for-all for every nuke to be let fly at every country currently at odds with each other. For example, if Russia and US trade nukes, I wouldn't expect all other WMD wielding country to just start attacking every country they're in poor standing with.
For Australia in particular, we don't have nukes so we shouldn't be on anyone's Mutually Assured Destruction ledger, and if not that then it would be an opportunistic nuke, the purpose of which I can't fathom. It would be better to take Australia by conventional means and keep the infrastructure in tact, since without our allies we have very little defense.
It was revealed that during Cold War there was a plan to nuke all cities over 100k inhabitants anywhere in the world so that no civilization can restart anywhere. For example, some nukes on Ukraine were pointed to China, a somewhat ally of the USSR at that time. I don't think Australia can rely on being non-nuclear to escape if SHTF.
In your scenario I would predict that 70-80% of russian nukes and missiles malfunction due to poor maintenance / disobedience / sabotage / some existing only on paper / pre-emptive strikes due to intelligence of imminent attack.
Most of the rest end up being destroyed by already established anti-missile defenses.
Starlink ends up being a missile defense in disguise and Musk ends up being hailed as savior of some US cities after sattelites do kinetic intercepts of a lot of missiles entering space. (even though it would probably be a us dod takeover of the the sattelites)
Putin and company gets gaddafi treatment.
Russia promptly unconditionally surrenders after NATO campaign and nuclear retaliation threats
or actual detonations based on how many they got through.
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)