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?
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.
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.
Pogs are due for a huge comeback (along with all things 1990s).
WASAAAAAAAAAAA~!
-AAAAAAAAAA-
Clean Water wars
It still could happen, but so far it’s proven overhyped.
Probably more forest fires and other climate problems this summer.
Israel and Hamas unite over a shared love of falafels. You heard it here first, folks!
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).
The saying “fetch” as in
That’s SO fetch!
Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! it’s not going to happen!
That’s way too far-fetched!
That sounds streets ahead!
Iodine tablets
Energy generation evolution I suppose. We are reaching the limit of how we generate energy. Need that Dyson Sphere for real.
Are we? There’s still plenty of space for solar and wind. Including large battery installations for cities. It doesn’t really feel like we’re hitting a limit there anytime soon.
We are not. Not yet, anyway; energy growth has been exponential historically, so it might “only” be a century.
Even if we had limitless energy, though, Earth can only radiate so much heat. I’ve seen it calculated as 400 years of growth max, generously. Before then we have to just stop growing, or leave Earth. All that to say fusion is probably the last energy tech we’ll ever need.
We can’t even make good battery for EVs…
Stationary batteries with no limit on weight or even temperature should be way easier. It just comes down to how much easier exactly. If someone finds a cheap enough chemistry that is the next big thing.
Failing that, pumped water or air energy storage is decent, if a bit more awkward to install.
Right now I could buy an EV with 520km range for 36k€. It’s rapidly getting better.
Now tell me how long do you need to charge that from 0 to 100%? 🤭
You do know EV sales stall because of that, right? And the concern of battery lifespan.
You do realize most people charge at home? It doesn’t matter how long it takes when the car is just sitting there (you’ll even save time compared to driving to the gas station).
Manufacturers also give 7+ years warranty on batteries by now, but even after 10 years a battery doesn’t just break, you only lose a few percent of range (if this wasn’t already calculated into the buffer, depends on the car).
You do know EV sales stall because of that, right?
In what fantasy world are you living? EVs just hit an all-times sales record last year. This is for the US, but it’s similar all over the world:
You know people’s biggest limitation when purchasing is EV range compared to fossil fuel right?
Last year? What year is it now?
No, it’s not. Most people, even in the US, can easily use the range. You don’t go to a cross country roadtrip every day.
You drive to work, go grocery shopping, drive home and that’s usually it. A range of 400km+ with new EVs is easily enough. Or do you drive to the gas station every 2 days with your current car?
And even if you go on a roadtrip, after driving for 4 hours you might want to take a break anyway.
You do realize there is no data available for the future? We aren’t there yet.
America has a real problem if something very bad happens to Biden or Trump during the elections (or shortly after).
The world has a problem when Trump is elected again. As he’s not known for keeping peace, or understanding international relations. In fact quite the opposite.
So the next big thing really is the elections.
…
Notice though how certain massive events are barely registering here… Imagine a third of Americans threatened to lose their home… But that’s what’s currently happening in China through floods, and rain season still having to start. I would call that big, 120 million people isn’t nothing… In comparison, 7 million died from corona (out of 700 million confirmed cases)
So this very much depends on your perspective and where on the planet you live.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
The Witcher 4
Spaghetti strainers that also work as hats!
Flared trouser biosuits?