Ask HN: What's NH's opinion of the next big thing in tech?
What does everyone think the next big innovation that will be widely adopted be? Be sure to put your time horizon into the discussion so we can tell when you think it will occur.
15 comments
It's still the early days of the internet when it comes to small business. Fully 40% lack a Facebook page or website and 60% lack having both. The vast majority of brick and mortar businesses to not allow online sales nor have even a mechanism for people to view actual inventory on a digital medium of some kind.
If you're looking for the next big tech opportunity it's in helping businesses with fewer than 50 employees expand their reach outside of the 10 mile radius around their physical locations.
If you're looking for the next big tech opportunity it's in helping businesses with fewer than 50 employees expand their reach outside of the 10 mile radius around their physical locations.
That's a very interesting concept, for sure. Never really thought about small business and the internet.
Are those real stats or guess?
Real. I ran enterprise sales for a very very large web host and these are figures we commissioned. Lots of other data in there too, like how 6,000,000 people on earth received money in 2015 for providing a digital service or some kind. A number expected to grow to 20 million by 2020.
Tech detox, I increasingly see people lamenting the invasiveness of tech in their lives and wanting an escape from some of it
I don't know about the next big innovations that will be widely adopted, but I think I know that if the following innovations happen, they will probably be widely adopted...
- Applications that aren't slow: "In a world where an app opens right when you click on it".
- Fast websites: type in the url, hit enter, and you're in. You click on a link, and voilà..
- Split second boots.
- Chrome not killing my computer when opening too many tabs (I used to open 120+ I think with Firefox).
- Make sbt not download the whole internet (yes, cache and all).
- Printers that actually print when I want to. Also make printing in black not require other colors.
- Automatic transmission cars that don't do a jerk motion when they stop.
- Universal cartridge format.
- Time tracking app that magically monitors what you do during the day without your intervention and can show you a treemap. Over the years, you can learn something.
- A huge dataset on every company and human that was ever formed and its life through success or failure. Maybe we can learn from that.
- A way to encode and distill the whole human knowledge. A graph of "knowledge" of sorts.
- Peer review that works.
- Time management, cognition, meta-cognition, deliberate practice, empathy, cognitive biases, and how memory works lessons in primary school.
- Voice calls on (Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger) that sound like a phone call.
- A way to simulate your life with varying parameters and find a path to a desirable outcome.
- Natural computation: A billion objects falling don't require nature to spin up more VMs to handle all their trajectories and write a Medium post about how it did it. Physics seems to handle great loads, concurrent events, several processes mutating the same object simultaneously, out of the box. A computer that does that.
- Applications that aren't slow: "In a world where an app opens right when you click on it".
- Fast websites: type in the url, hit enter, and you're in. You click on a link, and voilà..
- Split second boots.
- Chrome not killing my computer when opening too many tabs (I used to open 120+ I think with Firefox).
- Make sbt not download the whole internet (yes, cache and all).
- Printers that actually print when I want to. Also make printing in black not require other colors.
- Automatic transmission cars that don't do a jerk motion when they stop.
- Universal cartridge format.
- Time tracking app that magically monitors what you do during the day without your intervention and can show you a treemap. Over the years, you can learn something.
- A huge dataset on every company and human that was ever formed and its life through success or failure. Maybe we can learn from that.
- A way to encode and distill the whole human knowledge. A graph of "knowledge" of sorts.
- Peer review that works.
- Time management, cognition, meta-cognition, deliberate practice, empathy, cognitive biases, and how memory works lessons in primary school.
- Voice calls on (Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger) that sound like a phone call.
- A way to simulate your life with varying parameters and find a path to a desirable outcome.
- Natural computation: A billion objects falling don't require nature to spin up more VMs to handle all their trajectories and write a Medium post about how it did it. Physics seems to handle great loads, concurrent events, several processes mutating the same object simultaneously, out of the box. A computer that does that.
On the topic of SBT: https://www.lihaoyi.com/mill/, a response to http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/SowhatswrongwithSBT.html
Honestly I feel our political and economic structure need to change to reflect new tech. Democratic republic and capitalism as we know it.
The age of information seems to have become a breeding ground for misinformation. I don't really mean "fake news", but deceptive, plausible, half true news. This had made democracy a little... weird lately, especially in an era you can deliver different news to someone based on their location.
Our economic system has been based on supply and demand. But what if we basically have unlimited supply, as is the case with software? AI is going to hit hard here, with it being smart enough to replace all minimum wage foreign labor. A lot of governments are experimenting with basic income in their own way.
We've also had this weird effect where a small company can raise millions in investment and seriously threaten well-established companies within a decade.
These changes will take a while to hit, at least a decade. But I think the moves will have an impact on what kind of tech emerges.
The age of information seems to have become a breeding ground for misinformation. I don't really mean "fake news", but deceptive, plausible, half true news. This had made democracy a little... weird lately, especially in an era you can deliver different news to someone based on their location.
Our economic system has been based on supply and demand. But what if we basically have unlimited supply, as is the case with software? AI is going to hit hard here, with it being smart enough to replace all minimum wage foreign labor. A lot of governments are experimenting with basic income in their own way.
We've also had this weird effect where a small company can raise millions in investment and seriously threaten well-established companies within a decade.
These changes will take a while to hit, at least a decade. But I think the moves will have an impact on what kind of tech emerges.
Ditto this one, though perhaps from a slightly different angle.
Consider when most of our economic and political systems were first founded. Information was sparse. Game theory wasn't even a thing yet. None of the founding fathers (of our nation or any other) could have possibly fathomed the sort of interactions happening today.
At some point, we're going to have to face the fact that, over the years, the underlying rules of how things works has shifted but that the laws on the books haven't matched.
Consider when most of our economic and political systems were first founded. Information was sparse. Game theory wasn't even a thing yet. None of the founding fathers (of our nation or any other) could have possibly fathomed the sort of interactions happening today.
At some point, we're going to have to face the fact that, over the years, the underlying rules of how things works has shifted but that the laws on the books haven't matched.
Please tech gods, make personal jetpacks a thing. I would pay $50,000.
They're currently about $275,000 and I only know of one on this Earth. Also jet fuel is expensive.
They're currently about $275,000 and I only know of one on this Earth. Also jet fuel is expensive.
*HN's (sorry for the nitpick)
Boring answer, but for me I'd bet on self-driving cars that you can hail via Uber type platforms.
Not a boring answer in the slightest. I can definitely see self-driving cars going mainstream at some point. I think self-driving trucks doing long-haul transport will go mainstream but the driver will still be required due to driving laws most likely.
The IOTA project http://www.iota.org is a dystopian mess at the moment but ternary computing, the internet of everything, the tangle paradigm instead of blockchain and fee-less transactions are what many are dreaming of and possibly at hand even before quantum computing (therefore sooner than later).
5G and next generation GPS.