Right now it seems like its “A.I.”. Still big now are the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Recently we had COVID 19.
What’s next?
I’ll keep adding to this as I think of more.
Lemmy itself, hopefully. The Fediverse has the potential to take off because it’s here and it can’t really die.
3D printed construction could be huge if they can get it to actually work well. That’s a big if, though.
Perovskite solar cells look like they’re almost ready to commercialise.
Grid storage batteries, if a good chemistry is found, could answer a trillion-dollar question.
Whenever Apple gets the battery life on Vision Pros to a reasonable length, they’ll probably take off.
AI ASICs, including those I assume such a headset would use. Some of them are actually analog, it’s pretty neat.
Ocean mining looks set to be valuable, and is pretty much impossible to stop every country from doing.
LLMs taking your fast-food order, and similar.
On that note, support services to remotely unfuck LLM mistakes that 0.2% of the time they biff it.
De-novo cultivation has been pretty successful, so you might start seeing weird new crops derived from wild plants become available, and start getting used as a cheap ingredient in stuff.
Hydrogen-grown biomass is really interesting, and could take humanity another trophic level down. That’s probably too far off to count as “next”, though.
Xenotransplantation.
Cargo airships as an option somewhere in between ships and airplanes.
3D printed aerospace parts have already made a difference, but I get the sense it’s not done. I don’t know what that means for you or me, exactly, if anything.
I could totally see supersonic private jets happening. I really hope they won’t, though.
On the note of technologies that kind of suck, postquantum cryptography will be a huge thing very soon.
The hydrogen economy, if fossil fuels continue to phase out. I’ve seen some neat stuff about metal refining with it, including a paper where they were able to use toxic aluminum mining waste as a raw material.
Having LLM taking orders seems superfluous when ordering kiosks already exist
The precise context I’ve heard about that in is drive-throughs.
It could be other things, like answering phones in a more comprehensive way than existing automatic systems. Even book keeping. Really just anything simple or repetitive that’s conducted by natural language, and isn’t life-or-death (so probably no ER triage).
If you knew what’s coming next you could be a very very rich human. This is how the world works
But to humour you, my guess is new portable energy storage systems. An increase in energy density
One can only hope it’s something that positive…
Yay, better hand grenades!
You’ve heard of A.I. but how about B.J.s? They are the future.
Bartificial Jintelligence
eat my shorts
B is the next letter after A, J is the next letter after I. BJ is the logical next step after AI
I think A.I and sufficiently good robotics will bring back class society to those countries that don’t currectly have it. Elite will become more powerful, corporate power will surpass governments, rest of humanity will wallow in poverty, since they no longer have leverage in society. Whole world will become corporate driven banana republic.
Soooooo Borderlands?
…and if things in Ukraine get really silly. Fallout.
This is what I think too. Disaster capitalism + surveillance capitalism + massive resource competition due to climate change = neofeudalism.
Bird flu just jumped a couple of species barriers as well.
Far more likely they’ll erode class systems in countries that do have them by enabling everyone to have the same educational access, healthcare, etc.
I know a lot of people want everything to be bad for some reason but I think you’re gong to be disappointed with how beneficial they are, just like the people who hated autolooms couldn’t even imagine a world where poor people can afford nice clothes so ai haters today will be blown away by the huge social benefits of the technology as it evolves.
Hats made of poop. It’s such a winner. Get in on on the cutting edge of fashion while you can.
The most chic ones are made from your own production plus random dog poo you find locally. Plus some grass for structural strength.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Pogs are due for a huge comeback (along with all things 1990s).
WASAAAAAAAAAAA~!
-AAAAAAAAAA-
-AAAAAAAA-
Maybe another yoyo comeback?
I’d actually be down for Billie Eilish leading the charge on grunge 2.0. We need angry rock music to criticize this shitty world.
I’m ready for a new yo-yo craze 1996-8 was the last great resurgence
We need angry rock music to criticize this shitty world.
Absolutely.
It’s still very much AI for a while. The current incarnation is still in relative infancy, and will only continue to get more capable and disruptive. We’re starting to see the integration with robotics, this is only going to become more significant with time.
It’s likely that the next big thing will be a consequence of AI.
The current AI boom is all based on a single paper from about 7 years ago, and has been achieved by just throwing more and more computing power at it. There has been basically no meaningful architecture improvements in that time and we are already seeing substantial fall off from throwing more power at the problem. I don’t think its a given at all that we are close to the kind of disruption you are predicting.
I see AI as something that will go the way of VR or cryptocurrencies or self-driving cars, it won’t fully go away but people will realize that it is not suitable for nearly the number of use cases or improving as quickly as it was claimed it would and will sort of forget about it in most of the areas where it is not really improving anything.
AI is currently being used in both the wars OP mentioned.
Its primary use is always going to be in Surveillance Capitalism. The idea we can get nice things from it is mainly a consolation prize.
I mean yes I can now get AI to draw me a picture or write me an editorial. But meanwhile the IDF can get AI to choose people to kill and use the Wheres Daddy AI program to tell them when someone is at home so they can deliberately bomb him with his family.
So yeah it isn’t much for consumers but it’s not going away for use on us.
I don’t understand this deliberately pessimistic perspective I keep seeing around AI development that stubbornly ignores every other technological development in history. Even just considering the singular transformer architecture, we’re still seeing significant and novel improvement. In just a couple years we’ve watched the technology go from basic predictive text to high quality image and even video generation, now to real time robotics control.
The transformer architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible. The notion that the basic technology staying the same is an indication of stagnation is as ridiculous as if you said the same of transistors half a century ago. Most of the improvement we see in the near future will be through recursive and multi-modal applications, meta-architechtural developments that don’t require the core technology to change at all.
Which paper is that?
“The internet has reached the peak of its usability and will never progress much past it’s current level”
This is you in 1997.
The Witcher 4
poor gta fans
Clean Water wars
Daddy why is the water red?
Personal quantum computers, and maybe virtual reality with artificial intelligence combined.
Personal quantum computers would be truely useless. They break specific kinds of encryption, and simulate other quantum systems. Other than that, nobody’s been able to devise a way to make them do much practical work.
Really, it’s unfortunate they were named that, because they’re only like computers if you have a solid background in computing to understand the analogy. “Quantum emulator” or “programmable quantum system” might be a better word that wouldn’t make people think it’s the next semiconductor node. Alas, I have no time machine to fix it.
Maybe useless to you. I’ll definitely find use for it. And cracking encryption is a huge plus. Quantum computers have been around for a long time and in use there are all sorts of software and even special OS for it just not for public use for obvious reasons.
Bro, do you even know a Kronecker product from a discrete log? You’ll find a use my ass. And now you’re in with a super secret group of quantum computer users. Are you sending ninjas after me next?
Looking at the U.S. political situation, fascism seems to be getting closer every day.
In fact, if you look at a lot of other western nations, fascist ideas are springing up all over.
If feels like the world is even more crazy than it used to be, and the current period of crazy started in 2016 with Brexit, then Trumps win snd presidency, rolling into covid, then Trump got ejected, Russia intencified the war in Ukraine, the Hamas shat the bed and now Israel is going batshit insane, oh and during the two last years, two social media sites have decided to just oblitirate most of their good content generators, X is just fucking over everything that was twitter, and Reddit is slowly imploding since the apicalypse.
I just had a look on Wikipedia, and damn there has been a LOT of shit going down since the start of 2016…
The election of Trump in 2016 was the culmination of many factors from the previous 50 years, all of which lead to a very predictable outcome.
- Reaganomics loosening regulation on corporations, lowering taxes on the wealthy, and defunding public education
- Rush Limbaugh and Fox news fostering rural nationalism
- the advent of the internet which allowed those people to find each other and exchange their poorly informed ideas
- the perception that politicians were prioritizing “them” over “real Americans”
- 9/11 and the resulting surveillance state and 24h sensationalist news cycle.
By the time Obama was in office, Republicans and Democrats lived in different realities. Republicans just wanted someone who was willing to stand on stage and spout their version of reality, and Trump is the right combination of insecure and stupid to want to do that. He was an inevitable symptom of a decades long problem.
Don’t forget Europe. Here, the far right is also racially motivated. My country’s (Portugal) far right party shot up in votes in the last election and has repeatedly villanized roma people. I hear the AfD is also pretty concerning.
Spain is a minority led liberal government because of all the gains the far right has made.
The ‘funny’ thing is that Trump never had won. He gained fewer votes than Hillary in 2016…
Similarly, Bush imo is an illegitimate president, as he didn’t gain more votes than Al Gore.
You saying this has the same practical significance as pro-Trump people who think Biden “didn’t really win” in 2020.
Which is to say zero.
Difference is that my saying is based on a historically vested principle, simple as: one man, one vote. Instead of: your vote doesn’t count, only the oligarch’s does.
Via the popular vote, yes. But in the US, the popular vote doesn’t decide anything. Should it? That’s a different question. The point is they won the election legitimately.
We have work to do, but peddling election denial misinformation isn’t it.
It should be climate action. Not saying it will be - just that it should be.
There is a massive climate catastrophe before there is another even bigger climate catastrophe before considering climate action.
Unfortunately, the “climate action” will be massive scale climate based migration from folks fleeing drought or rising oceans.
Flared trouser biosuits?
Push for digital IDs and CBDCs…
More please
Try this: https://sociable.co/
