Original question by @dil@lemmy.zip
I think ar might be a dead dream in its current state, I always thought wed have proper ar glasses by now because I fell for Magic Leaps Marketting, not sure if it’ll come anytime soon.
What I do believe is coming is the resurgence of computers through mobile phones. Everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets but isn’t able to use them to their full potential. I wouldn’t be suprised if android pushed out a proper android desktop experience letting android users get the full linux desktop experience when plugged into a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
Phone performance is stronger than the average laptops/netbooks from 10 years age and they run linux fine for everyday use. Feels like a missed opportunity if someone doesn’t drop a phone or os that lets you take advantage of modern hardwares capability. They could advertise it to families, mo more buying a pc for school, just get them hardware for their existing device, it can already do everything. Schools could use lapdocks, or tabletdocks, that could force school parental controls on devices while at school and still let them use it for their education while in class.
(obviously not everyone has a phone but that frees up resources for the kids that dont, if the kids that do can use cheaper docks with their exisitnt hardware)
More enshittification, more rent-seeking by locking pedestrian features behind monthly subscriptions, …
Innovation is stone cold dead, no one is trying to create anything new anymore, they’re all just trying to MaXiMizE ShAreHolDeR VaLuE while cutting costs.
Over the next 5 years I don’t see anything positive in tech and I see myself largely disconnecting from it.
Ironically I’m optimistic about the next 50 years, just I don’t see anything good happening right now.
Cone join us on the Linux side. See just how deep the Free and Open Source rabbit hole will go.
I feel like Apple and Microsoft are going to make their computers just dumb terminals that only access a cloud operating system.
I’d say two things :
- more enshitifcation of private companies
- more progress in libre and open source software (fediverse, desktop Linux, even desktop freebsd)
- I wish Europe could become a greater sponsor of OSS instead of always buying American software that can’t respect GDPR
More encroachment on privacy and subscriptions from corpo tech monopolies that should be broken up, solar tech continuing to grow and replace other energy sector tech for consumer and industrial tier systems, material science advanced to increase battery capacity and charge rates, more software & hardware development tools for phones and non traditional computer/laptop devices, more variety in digital keyboards on phones built for swipe/auto complete and correct instead of traditional qwerty
Down.
With the amount of bots and fake profiles on the web, I think there will be a greater push for user verification, maybe a centralized form of virtual ID.
More efforts to make and perfect self-driving vehicles.
Gene editing as a more widespread solution to illnesses and defects.
Yeah I fully expect a government mandated id system for all online platforms. First it’ll be argued it is necessary to allow the platforms to remain free of liability for hosting whatever their posters submit - then it’ll be mandatory to even access those platforms for viewing - then it’ll be pushed onto the ISP level.
I believe in 5 years, we’ll be able to sculpt wheels out of stone.
This isn’t so much what I think will happen but what I hope will happen.
A lot of CPU’s are moving to on-die RAM so the RAM is closer physically to the CPU, reducing the time it takes to travel between the two, increasing RAM speed.
The downside to this is you can’t upgrade your RAM and there will be less on-die RAM than traditional RAM.
Currently, with traditional RAM, computers use a portion of hard drive space for something called “swap” which is space for when RAM runs out of usable address space to offload some data to until it needs that data again.
I’d like to see the rise of on-die RAM along with traditional RAM where traditional RAM becomes more of a “swap” for the on-die RAM. This allows for upgrade-able RAM to still exist while also leveraging the speed of on-die RAM.
Yo dawg, I heard you like RAM…
This is pretty much an extra cache layer, right? Can’t hurt
Yeah it’s what made the M1 macs so blisteringly fast compared to everything else at the time
I thought that was because of more efficient arm instructions
Screw us always more, why?
Ignoring AI, making custom hardware has become a lot cheaper - 3D printers are cheaper, PCB manufacturing is cheaper, etc.
So hopefully we’ll see a big increase in innovation and competition there too.
I think AR and VR are actually progressing at a reasonable pace, tech like the apple vision pro and the bigscreen beyond are beginning to converge to a comfortable and powerful experience and AR will be better supported by a platform like the vision pro than by any previous major industrial AI offerings like the hololens. I think in the short term people will move to external compute on a puck worn on the waist much like the battery of the vision pro was but with all or most of the compute power.
I think BEVs will continue to advance, without even considering a major technological breakthrough I expect they will out-range many ICE vehicles very soon. If solid state truly goes commercial scale it will be even sooner.
Mobile phones I actually think are stagnating. You’re right that there’s more power in them than necessary these days. Batteries get bigger and cameras get better but not much else changes. Interested to see where they go.
I think generally speaking, we’ve been in a computer tech boom for decades, driven by the growth of computers going back to the 80s. The internet and smartphones just grew out of that.
Unfortunately I think we’re running out of new stuff to compute and newer technologies seem to be a bit week on the “problem being solved” end of things. Most likely what we’ve come to think of as tech will take a back seat to technologies with more room to grow, I’m guessing biotech in particular will be the next big thing.
No - the last two decades have shown that just because you can’t invent new stuff to solve, you can throw hardware at solving existing problems less efficiently. We’ll continue to get more and more horsepower just so we can run js.node garbage instead of letting software devs actually make things well.
Video games with apparently sentient NPCs.
Custom ARM SoCs from AMD and Nvidia for laptops, tablets and handheld consoles, running customized Linux to avoid Microsoft’s fees.
YouTube switches to unskipable server-side ads injection directly into the original video stream, rendering adblockers ineffective. Others soon follow.
Mainstream media starts releasing news in TikTok style videos where the bottom half of the screen plays random Minecraft / satisfying to watch slop.
End to end encrypted communication is quietly outlawed following some terrorist attack, using national security fearmongering. You’ve got nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
China inevitably invades Taiwan, TSMC burns their fabs down to protect their IP. Samsung and Intel fabs become the most cutting edge process nodes on next cycle, China catches up, profits go up all around.
Google kills Search and now Gemini is their only search engine. Others soon follow.
Video games with apparently sentient NPCs.
I reeealllly want this. Throw an LLM behind the NPCs ffs. Give each of them a list of goals and let us interact with them in a more free formed manner.
Apple just demoed exactly that, running fully on-device:
Awhile back I read a trilogy of books called “The Iron Harvest.” Going in, I didn’t really buy the premise, but book 1 was on sale for either free or around a dollar. The premise was a near future where privacy ceased to exist. People had figured out how to make it so people could experience any past event through the eyes as a person who was there. They couldn’t change anything, but they could be in the moment as the person participating in it. I wound buying all three books.
In the past 5 or so years, I’m believing the premise more and more. What little privacy we still have will continue to be eroded away.
For another interesting take on privacy in the future, take a look at Brian K Vaughn’s The Private Eye graphic novel.
In that world, everyone’s privacy was lost “when the cloud burst”, revealing every private kink, writing, messages, etc for everyone including the rich and powerful. The response was a hard turn towards absolute privacy via avatars.
Plus the art style is great.
Another interesting exploration is in Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter. New technology allows creating light-passing micro-wormholes at any location (and time!), erasing privacy nearly entirely. At first, tabloids run wild with “shocking” photos of famous people, but eventually the hype dies. There are people who outright do lewd things in public (“anyone can see me at any time anyway”), some go about their life as usual, and some join secret groups who meet in the dark and use touch language for the deaf-blind.
