Predict the future

[Legend]

I think it's fun to write down what we expect the world to look like in 5-10 and 10-20 years.

1. True humanoid robots will become common. We are already at the point where these things are crazy good in labs:

In the next 5-10 years, these will be helping in disasters and industrial things. Battery power is the big limit for real world applications and we seem to be getting "good enough." A bit later than that or in rare cases we'll also see humanoid robots interfacing with humans in more public places. They'll be kinda a novelty vs non-humanoid robots but I think they'll still be used.

2. Automation will continue to happen and cause a long term economic boom comparable to the industrial revolution. Almost everything becomes cheaper to produce and industries can expand faster than a traditional work force would enable. I worry society will be slow adapting to this change and it'll cause a lot of people a lot of problems but hopefully that's minimized.

3. AI personal assistants will become standard and awesome. They'll be Siri like programs always watching and listening during our day to day lives. For example when people talk in person about future plans, the AI automatically adds these plans to its calendar. Then if in the future you seem to forget and start to schedule something for the same time, it can speak up and remind you about the scheduling conflict. Siri and Alexa wait for you to interact with them, but these future AI programs will be actively monitoring your life for ways to help you. Might start to appear in phones around 2020 but I think it'll take longer for them to be more accepted and less buggy. Eventually they'll be like non-imaginary imaginary friends.

4. Both a moon and a Mars colony/base will be formed towards the end of the 2020s. In space manufacturing will also become standard in the 2030s for things that benefit from zero g. I'm hopeful that human bases would spread throughout the solar system like an infection, but it's also reasonable to think the Mars colony will be a money drain that stops further expansion.

5. Video games for next gen will have tons of focus put on physics and interactivity between systems. The Last Guardian and Zelda Breadth of the Wild seem to be at the start of this new trend. Assassin's Creed Origins with its fire physics is another example. Currently it's standard for devs to avoid invisible walls in games but I think game devs of the future will avoid "artificial" walls in games: restrictions that exist even though in real life they wouldn't. That's assuming loot boxes don't cause an industry collapse.

6. Jet packs will become useful in real world situations. I don't think there's that large of a market for them, but they're moving out of the sci fi world. Drones will also work to carry humans around as battery tech increases. Also I expect drones to become a standard tool of automation for tasks that don't require heavy lifting. Use them to paint and clean large structures. Have swappable battery packs so they can return to the home station and swap in a new one. Will be cheap and versatile alternatives to humanoid robots. Pick up trash and smaller roadkill along highways when mated with a self driving car for example.

7. Augmented reality glasses will not become popular for day to day use. Even once they're small and sleek, I don't think people will want to wear devices on their heads all day long. Glasses killed off 3D TVs and those weren't half as bad. Instead people will continue to use their phone screens as those get better and better. Will not project screens onto our wrists or into the air like holograms. That tech will not be feasible anytime soon. Instead the big "future tech" that'll slowly become common is smart phone screens that can be illuminated by natural light similar to eBook readers. They'll look way better during full sun and have a "magic" like feeling which could speed up their adoption. Would still function as traditional screens too. Maybe ~10 years from now.

8. Quantum gravity and dark energy will not be solved by 2025. Gravity wave detecting telescopes will be a big thing and a space interferometer will be built in the 2020s. Additionally more non traditional telescopes will be set up in space due to the decreased cost to get there. This will include telescopes with large star shades and using light interference instead of a lense. James Webb Space Telescope will not find any proof of alien life, but will find tons and tons of planets that are just like Earth. Our solar system is far from special.

9.  People will still be waiting for VizionEck to release.


I'll continue to come back to this thread and post updates and new things I think I've noticed. Post your own predictions!

[the-pi-guy]

I was thinking to make some similar ones.  

Humanoid robots in the next 20 years.  

Automation is a big mystery in my mind.  I suspect in the short run, it'll be a boon.  After that it'll hurt the economy.  Society will be too slow to react, and there will be a lot of job loss.  After that, it'll stabilize and be a pro again.  

[Legend]

Two more from me.


10. Most disabilities will have very little impact on people's lives. Prosthetic limbs will be cheap and almost as functional as the real things. Just like glasses and contacts today, they'll feel minor and not considered defining features of the people that use them. Surgical amputations will be thought of as major events but not necessarily negative events. It'll be no different then getting bones and joints replaced by mechanics today. Blind people will see through cameras. At first this will be to augment their lives and describe in English what is seen, but eventually the camera images will be pumped directly into the brain. Mute people will have kinect like trackers that can translate sign language in real time, allowing them to communicate with anyone. Similarly, deaf people will have AR glasses that can put in writing all the sounds they're hearing. Eventually this too could be pumped directly into the brain.

Prosthetic limbs are already right at the edge of being this advanced. I'd give them another decade to become cheap enough to become common and the 2030's will be when they become standard. Robot advancements will be the big thing pushing this tech forward.

Apps are already in testing for assisting blind people. The software will be good enough within a couple years but it'll take a bit longer for it to migrate from a phone app to a headset with cameras. I'd guess 5 years before the first serious prototypes and another 5 years before it becomes popular as a smartphone add on. A few decades are needed before the cameras connect directly to the brain and skip converting it to audio.

Sign language translating is also already in testing. The software is almost good enough when using high quality finger tracking cameras. For specialized uses like with video calling on a laptop, this could be popular really soon. For day to day use, finger tracking hardware is the thing holding it back. I could see this taking a long time, around a decade or so, since I don't know of many other fields that would help push this tech. VR could do it, sensors in headset track hands and fingers to put them in game, or VR could focus on gamers holding controllers or wearing gloves.

Audio to text will be in the 2020's. It's pretty simple and already exists in simple versions. Another decade and it should be very high quality.


11. All cities and densely populated areas will become zoo like with their animals. Wild animals will be killed off and 100% eradicated from the cities since they cause tons of problems for society. In their place, monitored animals will be added to keep parks and places pleasing to the public. Squirrels could be sterile, teeth filed, and have invisible fences like some dogs. Pigeons, hawks, rabbits, etc. would all be the same. This may sound ludicrous, but it's exactly how plants are today. Every bush, shrub, tree, and grass in a city is placed there and controlled. It requires an incredible amount of maintenance but we like the look so we do it anyway.

This is much much farther future than my other predictions but I expect we'll see it starting before the end of our lifetimes.

[the-pi-guy]

10 is a good prediction.  
11 kinda scares me.  

[Cute Pikachu]

That 11 prediction is terrifying.

[Legend]

10 is a good prediction.  
11 kinda scares me.  

That 11 prediction is terrifying.

Yeah it's unnatural feeling.

My dad is an entomologist and my brother has an environmental horticulture degree so without their perspectives I would have never thought about it.


Plus it'd be a lot nicer for the animals.

[the-pi-guy]

This is a prediction that I don't really think will happen, but I hope it does.  

I predict that movies and TV shows will be replaced with interactive media.  The benefit here is that AI will basically be able to tailor the experience to the audience.  

People can still watch their shows as before.  But people would have more effect on what they watch.  

I'm only like 10% sure this is likely to happen.  

[Legend]

Well it has been ~7 years. I'm really shocked that I nailed all my predictions except the video game one! How is it that I got my own industry wrong yet I got everything else right!?

Will need to give it more time to see how the rest of my predictions go. My phone screen one is the only one that looks a bit iffy to me. Still might happen but there hasn't been any development in that direction. Prediction #9 will hopefully be wrong one of these decades  

Similarly, deaf people will have AR glasses that can put in writing all the sounds they're hearing

Hearview revolutionary Al-powered smart glasses for deaf people that provide real-time captions to conversations or movies

 pic.twitter.com/VBbpKlVhqD

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) October 13, 2024

Just amazing to see this tech become real.


Here are more predictions to entertain future me.

12. 2028 is the year that you will be able to fall asleep in your own personal car and have it drive you practically anywhere within the lower 48. Pretty boring prediction but since I'm giving an exact year maybe it'll be interesting.

13. Neural nets do manage full intelligence. It won't be for a while and it won't be with current architectures, but they'll pull it off. I am defining full intelligence as almost all mathematicians being out of jobs, that sort of thing. Ask the AI to solve something and it will be able to solve it with enough compute time. Let's say 2035-2040, giving myself a small window so I can look silly when I get it wrong.

14. The halting problem will be solved. If you don't know, this is a paradox that states it is impossible to always calculate if a computer will finish processing its input. My prediction is that we will find hacks that work around the problem without technically violating it. Maybe that will come in the form of adding probability so we're not a true turing machine, maybe it will come from squishing the impossible answers into such a small box that they can practically be ignored. Either way, collatz conjecture solved by 2050.

P=NP will also turn out to be true, but again I think it might involve cheating a little bit. Main point is that people in the future will consider it true in practical ways. Spicy so I'm not including a date but this is also far future.

Riemann hypothesis will be proven between 2030 and 2040. Might be true, might be false, might be proved to be unknowable. Not predicting which.

15. Slow death will not be a thing for people with proper healthcare and lifestyles. I expect people to still die of old age and of course accidents will be unavoidable, but I predict gene editing and other technologies will solve practically all non emergency issues. Hopefully the tech isn't exclusively pre-birth stuff like embryo selection because I'd love to benefit as I grow old. Will be gradual and probably hard to notice the trend in the moment but I'll predict this is sooner than later. Say people born in 10-20 years.

16. We will learn how to talk with animals. They won't have much to say, they're just dumb animals, but it'll still be cool. ~10 years for the first animal language (different groups of the same species have their own language, so progress could be slow expanding to more animals).

*Every single example of a talking/communicating animal has been faked or exaggerated. We have done a pretty good job at learning parts of animal languages but it is still very primitive and there is a lot more work to be done.

17. PS6 games will be very similar to PS5 games. I've learned my mistake. But as I said in another thread a while ago, I think PS6 or PS6 Pro will "solve" the rendering equation. Graphics will be truly photorealistic either from Dreams/nerf like render engines or DLSS like AI filters. Plenty of improvements will still be possible but games will stop looking like games.

18. 2028 first manned landing on the Moon since Apollo. 2033 first manned landing on Mars. Both using Starship. SLS cancelled after Artemis 3. Space stuff right now is hard to predict since Starship will grow exponentially. It could be launching weekly next year, or it could be struggling with reuse for a long time. Once it is flying regularly it will still take some time to prepare it for a manned Moon landing. After that it would be pretty easy to prepare it for a Mars landing but the crew has to stay alive once they get there and prepping that will take time too.

19. VR stays niche until it can hack into the nervous system. I like VR and it's going to keep getting better for the 0.1% of society that uses it, but there's really no good solution to feet and hands. Everything has drawbacks and even if we get cheap body suits and omni treadmills, that's way too much of an investment (time, space, physical exertion, etc.). The only way VR has lasting mainstream success is if a person can sit down on a couch yet feel like they're walking with their own legs and touching stuff with their own hands. So that'll be very far future unless some other element of society has already integrated electronics into our brains. ~2075

20. Fusion power will actually finally start working within the next 20 years. However by the time it is actually powering homes, it won't be cost effective with power generation methods already in use.

21. Living alien life is discovered on Mars, Venus, Triton, and most of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We will discover that life is incredibly common in the universe and also find it in tons of other solar systems. It'll all be relatively simple though and pretty quickly it'll be boring.

It may have taken only 200 million years for life to first appear on Earth. Absolute worst case scenario is that it took 1 billion years since that's the oldest fossil. Mars and Venus both had giant water oceans and ideal conditions comparable to Earth at the exact same time life was first appearing. Unless the Moon is mandatory for abiogenesis, it is easy to predict life started/existed on all three planets back then. Eukaryotes took a lot longer to develop, about 1 to 2 billion years. That's a long time period so who knows if Earth got lucky or if that was a gradual process we could expect to also occur elsewhere. Either way, extremophiles on Venus and Mars could have adapted to their changing climates and still be alive today.

Europa likely has bigger oceans than Earth. It's covered by an ice sheet so maybe life could never start there but our arctic oceans are teeming with life. Other moons have similar stories so why couldn't life have evolved/transplanted there too? Europa clipper in 2030 will tell us more.

22. Lab grown meat, at least comparable to the current stuff being developed, never becomes popular. Fake meat is kinda close in quality and I predict that will get better faster than lab meat becomes cheap. Simultaneously I think real meat will become a bit less popular but the quality will explode. Genetically engineer every individual cow and chicken to be healthy and make perfect meat vs prioritizing quantity.

23. Electronic clothing becomes standard. It won't be plasticky like in sci fi movies, it'll be nice feeling fabric with integrated circuits. Graphic tees will be animated, plain clothes may change color throughout the day, etc. And yes, cheaper shirts will have ads pop up from time to time.


#8 Addendum
String theory will not be correct. It may still have useful math here and there but it's not the correct model for the universe. Exotic dark matter and a form of modified gravity will turn out correct. Dark energy will turn out to be mostly incorrect. Future people might still call it dark energy but it won't be the version we're used to today. Quantum gravity will be solved but it'll require a large rework of both physics and math. My real big spicy prediction here is that we will tame the big bang and understand its origins by 2055.


I didn't research these as much as my op predictions so I expect the hit rate to be worse. They are mostly just random things I've thought about in recent months.

[the-pi-guy]

Probably agreed on #19. I think VR will take off more if we get to the glasses stage though.

#14 kind of bothers me with the halting problem. Where do you expect it to get better?
The halting problem is mathematically proven, and there are already "partial solutions". A lot of these things are doable, but we just know that it's not possible to do it perfectly for every input.

[kitler53]

#1 - AI's only real use is for thieves and conartists to trick and decieve people.   people's trust in society will become even more distrustful.

#2 - Climate change will lead to famine.

#3 - #1 and #2 will lead to the collapse of modern society.   there will be a decline in the human population of at least 75%.   most current scientific knowledge will be lost.

[Legend]

Probably agreed on #19. I think VR will take off more if we get to the glasses stage though.

#14 kind of bothers me with the halting problem. Where do you expect it to get better?
The halting problem is mathematically proven, and there are already "partial solutions". A lot of these things are doable, but we just know that it's not possible to do it perfectly for every input.

For example Busy Beaver of 5 was just recently solved. It took 35 years to prove that no states halted after 47,176,870 steps. I predict that problems like this will make more and more progress and it'll stop being interesting to ask if any given program halts or not. We'll have the tools in place to either calculate that answer or we'll have the tools to say that that specific program cannot have a solution.

[nnodley]

#1 - AI's only real use is for thieves and conartists to trick and decieve people.   people's trust in society will become even more distrustful.

#2 - Climate change will lead to famine.

#3 - #1 and #2 will lead to the collapse of modern society.   there will be a decline in the human population of at least 75%.   most current scientific knowledge will be lost.

Just waiting for the day the internet has to go bye bye cause AI overtook everything.

But so many other things might happen before that that cause the downfall of humanity beyond repair(which some may argue we are getting close or are passed).

[kitler53]

Just waiting for the day the internet has to go bye bye cause AI overtook everything.

But so many other things might happen before that that cause the downfall of humanity beyond repair(which some may argue we are getting close or are passed).

AI on it's own wouldn't take down society imo.   AI biggest benefits are to authoritarians like Russia China and their ability to monitor and manipulate humans.   AI on it's own will lead to a loss of human freedoms.

It's climate change that will kill us.   population collapse can be seen in nature from time to time.   it will happen to us.  it has happened to us before.