Ask Lemmy

I literally cannot think about it. We are tiny boats on the sea of aristocratic whims. I just wanna make sure my kids are fed and try to teach them to be good people. If I start to think about the greater picture, I spiral into very dark places. I constantly remind myself to focus on what I can control.

5-10 consecutive record breaking hot summers, each of which accompanied by headlines examining that scientists knew it would be bad, but not this bad!

...also some orchestrated drama to act as an excuse to initiate martial law, also acting as the justification to initiate Trump's 3rd and 4th terms.

I feel like people need to to wake up, just today I saw a 2-3 year old with a mobile phone scrolling what it seemed like TikTok, not to mention all the grown adults doing the same.

Regular people do not seem to know, care or believe how modern tech practices are destroying our lives, countless times I've been given the looks when commenting the topic, even when themselves admit how they hate how creepy and weird is that Instagram hears eveything they say and display and ad of their private conversation.

I think that first it has to get much worse for people living inside this bubble for other countries to start addopting european laws on digital rights and so on.

Not much will change. The US on the other hand may or may not go through major social and legal changes.

Which society? There are many societies on the Earth today, and I predict that some of them will experience relative peace, security and prosperity, while others will experience conflict and instability.

It's really hard to make predictions, but one thing I am certain about is that the pervasiveness of endless entertainment and distractions, in combination with the ease of outsourcing any mental effort to LLMs, will have significant effects on people's cognitive performance. Especially for young people who have the misfortune of never knowing a world without these things.

Another thing is climate change. At least for those of us living in the west, climate change is still limited to concerning news you read, a bit more heat in the summer, and a few more natural disasters than usual. There are effects, but we're not really affected yet. In 10 years, our lives will be significantly affected by the increasing heat and even more natural disasters. In other parts of the world, these things are already happening and they will be significantly worse in 10 years.

Obviously, solar energy is going to continue to grow. Less obviously, this will have a pretty significant effect on global economics. Countries that previously lacked domestic energy production now will suddenly have it. Countries highly reliant on fossil fuel exports will suddenly be less important. I think this will probably be the most significant change and it'll be for the better. Obviously global warming problems are on the horizon but over 5-10 years from now it'll still be comparatively small.

I personally don't see AI getting much better than it is now because it's starting to run out of how much it can do with existing data. It'll continue to be a useful tool for autocomplete and generating low-effort content, but otherwise won't rearrange society or build us dyson spheres or anything like some seem to expect. I don't see software technology doing anything especially great for a while and its role in the economy may shrink for the first time really since it started.

More speculatively, I'd guess we'll see more advancements in DNA and RNA technology that will make medicine more resemble programming rather than throwing stuff at the body and hoping it works. This will progress slowly, but in 5-10 years I think we'll be looking at some vaguely significant impact on common health problems. Other medical tech will be significant too - knowing someone who takes GLP-1s I think we've kind of missed celebrating how big a deal that is for some people.

Society as a whole - who knows, that's especially hard to predict. I tend to be optimistic that the current reactionary period will fade, having already used up its credibility. I worry though that we're getting better at exploiting human emotions and that can be used by the powerful to control masses. But when has that ever not been a factor? We've only relatively recently emerged from the era of divinely ordained kings, and mass literacy is still quite new in the grand scheme of things. Our society will continue to evolve, a bit inconsistently.

5-10 years isn't exactly that long so I don't expect more than "more of the same, but worse." AI will "improve," but energy demands will not be met to compensate for their draw, consumers will be forced to pay higher electricity bills because of it.

The US will more than likely face a huge economic disruption due to Mango Mussolini. I think most things will just be more of the same though.

Soviet style mass apartment complexes to combat homelessness but you have to download an app to get in and out, and the app collects and sells all your data. There's a concierge who does spot checks but they accept bribes in fresh fruit, vegetables and old N64 games.

The internets. Multiple internets, like different streaming services and you need to pay a subscription to each one to access all the websites.

Rail guns. Everyone will have a rail gun. It will be awesome.

What tech do you think is going to be introduced?

Designer pandemics

as someone who has worked in the tech field for well over 20 years at this point this is going to be a very controversial prediction and I imagine many won't agree with me but LLMs, at least in their current state, will go the way of the buffalo.

I've seen many tech fads come and go, library fads, device fads, concept fads, product fads, etc, etc, etc. in their current states many companies are now realizing that AI isn't speeding up their processes or production. What they see now is that they're slowing things down and creating massive tech debt. "Vibe coding" simply doesn't work and anyone who does it consistently at any company should be immediately fired. Many places are now hiring contractors to fix their AI created tech debt and I see that as a sort of temporary field to get into for freelancers. Advertise your services to repair damage done by AI. You'll get work. I get emails weekly from my contacts looking for someone to go into a place and refactor or replace what someone has "vibe coded" or simply allowed an AI to go buck wild on their base.

I see it pivoting away from tech things and focusing back on content creation. writing scripts, blog posts, ads, producing images and films, etc. Writing code or solving tech issues it has, across the board, gotten worse at. But even I'm not so sure about the content creation or it being a "digital assistant" there's A LOT of push back from the average user and consumer right now that simply don't want it.

I'm probably one of the few people that believe this but I feel they've just gotten worse and worse and people are now starting to wake up and realize they're all collectively shit and a waste of time and resources.

For society? Largely doom. Innovation is slowing as money is moved more into control than improvement and inequality will grow.

For tech, I think AR will be the next big thing and may get a foothold within 5-10 years. The main barriers right now are minimization and power storage. If technology like graphene super capacitors can finally bloom and computation chips continue to shrink and become more efficient, then I can see a sizable market of people willing to wear AR glasses for a more convenient smart phone experience.

Bad

AI-capitalism will progress. Internet will be 70% bots 30% humans. Culture will continue to degrade because of LLM, news will serve more fake news, doctors will serve false diagnosis, children will learn false history. At the same time technical knowledge will be more accessible due to LLM. As a result P2P and Linux will continue growth. Microsoft will publish it's first Linux distribution for corpo and gov. People will become more and more technical as robots will slowly take over their jobs. There will be even more poverty and inequality. First corporate owned country in Africa will be established (with a promise to people to become wealthy) where people will be corporate workers instead of citizens. At the same time space economy will have exponential growth. Lunar base will be established. New jobs will be introduced like lunar robots supervisor, lunar robot / drone operator. Jeff Bezos will start building house on the Moon.

War... all the idiotic actions from trump at a time where the world is very unstable, there is no other outcome than WWIII

Reporting and news will continue to move to streamers and YouTube and old news will die.

In the US, federal government systems will fail because of trumps policies and blue states will become even more independent, red states that are dependent heavily on federal funds will suffer.

Natural disasters will continue to increase in frequency and severity. Unfortunately at least in the US - people have been migrating to many of the most at risk areas because they are generally less expensive than safer areas, they will end up much worse off.

With a decrease in population growth and immigration, and deaths and retirement of boomers, in the US there will be shortages of labor, especially in fields like nursing, agriculture, and service industries. In many other countries, there are similar issues arising due to low population growth and limited immigration.

Unless there’s a serious depression This will continue to create a conflict between the billionaires who want to keep wages stagnant, and workers and unions who will have more power. We are continuing to see job growth and low unemployment in spite of the mess of tariffs and unstable government

I think independent and small businesses will actually do better in general than corporations if they create more stable and welcoming environments for employees, as well as creating better products that are less enshittified. In spite of everything, due to the internet, it is one of the easiest times in history to access information and tools to start your own business. And working for big companies and government is pretty awful right now.

I also think unfortunately we’re dealing with a major cultural transition as the systems built by boomers are failing but trying to do their worst to hold on as they go. In general, these systems no longer work for a large portion of the population, but those that hate change are in power. I worked in government and it was kind of like watching an incredibly slow train derailment. I think things are going to fall apart more before we rebuild unfortunately.

I don't expect things to change much where I live. I haven’t noticed any radical shifts over the past 15 years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. As for the broader Western world, I think it’ll continue along the trajectory it’s been on for the past decade or so - with the populist right gaining more ground as more people either feel disowned by the left or simply grow fed up with them.

The overall trend will probably still be toward more liberal attitudes, but since the goalposts keep moving, I don’t expect the gap between the two sides to get any narrower.

Beyond that, medicine will improve, technology will improve, and people’s lives will keep improving globally - as they have been, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. I’m not particularly worried about the future. It is what it is, and I’ll deal with it.

No one can answer this question with anything but speculation. If you enjoy the speculation that's fine, but just remember that no one here has a crystal ball and what they say is just a guess rooted in their own biases and lifestyle, no matter how well thought out it sounds.