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.
Unfortunately, the "climate action" will be massive scale climate based migration from folks fleeing drought or rising oceans.
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.
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.
Pogs are due for a huge comeback (along with all things 1990s).
WASAAAAAAAAAAA~!
-AAAAAAAAAA-
-AAAAAAAA-
Maybe another yoyo comeback?
I'd actually be down for Billie Eilish leading the charge on grunge 2.0. We need angry rock music to criticize this shitty world.
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!
If you knew what's coming next you could be a very very rich human. This is how the world works
But to humour you, my guess is new portable energy storage systems. An increase in energy density
One can only hope it's something that positive...
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 saying "fetch" as in
That's SO fetch!
Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen! it's not going to happen!
That sounds streets ahead!
Iodine tablets
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.
Well, there's serious potential for the wars in Ukraine and Israel to spill over into their neighboring countries and spiral uncontrollably into WWIII.
So although far from guaranteed, it's absolutely a possibility.
We can't be far off people realizing how good robotic chef arms are and someone like Samsung making one that we start seeing in midsized kitchens, after this home adoption will be rapid and have huge benefits for diet and cost of living as well as being far more environmentally friendly than preprapared food.
It'll probably use a trained Llama model (metas ai which is good at tasking) to translate requests and input data to a cooking model likely based on the one they always use for trackmania but I forget it's name I think it's Nvidias evolutionary one - it simulates the actions to evolve a solution before actuting motors - its impressively quick now even on a small processor and used in loads of stuff. The robotics is easy just a couple of continuous rotational servos and grasping mechanisms which are super common now.
I don't know if any of the currently existing ones will get the market spot, I expect like with mp3 players It'll come down to a big name making an easy to use but feature limited version to capture the market.
If anyone has questions happy to defend my assertion.
I have questions. Is this something in use today? Who is manufacturing them? Is this something you're personally familiar with or just aware of?
I haven't seen specifically cooking, but there have been quite a few papers about mixing task-instruction LLMs with task-execution robot arms (like they use in manufacturing) to perform simple tasks given only a plain English instruction. Eg, "pick up the red ball and place it in the blue bowl". Very cool research but still very new.
If it's not one thing, it's another.
Flared trouser biosuits?
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.
Spaghetti strainers that also work as hats!
Hats made of poop. It’s such a winner. Get in on on the cutting edge of fashion while you can.
The most chic ones are made from your own production plus random dog poo you find locally. Plus some grass for structural strength.
It's still very much AI for a while. The current incarnation is still in relative infancy, and will only continue to get more capable and disruptive. We're starting to see the integration with robotics, this is only going to become more significant with time.
It's likely that the next big thing will be a consequence of AI.
The current AI boom is all based on a single paper from about 7 years ago, and has been achieved by just throwing more and more computing power at it. There has been basically no meaningful architecture improvements in that time and we are already seeing substantial fall off from throwing more power at the problem. I don't think its a given at all that we are close to the kind of disruption you are predicting.
I don't understand this deliberately pessimistic perspective I keep seeing around AI development that stubbornly ignores every other technological development in history. Even just considering the singular transformer architecture, we're still seeing significant and novel improvement. In just a couple years we've watched the technology go from basic predictive text to high quality image and even video generation, now to real time robotics control.
The transformer architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible. The notion that the basic technology staying the same is an indication of stagnation is as ridiculous as if you said the same of transistors half a century ago. Most of the improvement we see in the near future will be through recursive and multi-modal applications, meta-architechtural developments that don't require the core technology to change at all.
I see AI as something that will go the way of VR or cryptocurrencies or self-driving cars, it won't fully go away but people will realize that it is not suitable for nearly the number of use cases or improving as quickly as it was claimed it would and will sort of forget about it in most of the areas where it is not really improving anything.
I think A.I and sufficiently good robotics will bring back class society to those countries that don't currectly have it. Elite will become more powerful, corporate power will surpass governments, rest of humanity will wallow in poverty, since they no longer have leverage in society. Whole world will become corporate driven banana republic.
Soooooo Borderlands?
...and if things in Ukraine get really silly. Fallout.
Drone warfare.
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