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.

      • 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).