Curious what ya'll think is a major trend right now that we should be following and tracking, that might be big in 3-5-10 years.
Previously, you saw people living in hubs like SF and NYC for the high salary and high prestige jobs. But when those jobs are available from anywhere, all of a sudden the "lifestyle cities" like Boulder, Boise, Chattanooga, etc. start to look a whole lot better. You no longer have to sacrifice the high-prestige career to live in a lower cost-of-living area with access to outdoors activities.
This is going to exacerbate the divide between the haves – who can bounce from city to city, chasing the best lifestyle at all times, enabled by their remote work – and the have-nots, who are tied to one physical location because of their jobs.
Historic costs[2]:
- Space Shuttle: $41,000/kg (24.4 t, ~$1B)
- Delta IV Heavy: $14,600/kg (24 t, $350M)
- Falcon Heavy 2R: $1,700/kg (57 t, $95M)
A good first product to make in zero G is ZBLAN, fiber optics so clear that they require up to 100x fewer repeaters than ordinary fiber[3], lightweight and very high value.
[1] https://wccftech.com/spacex-launch-costs-down-musk/
[2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-put-1-kilo-in...
[3] https://www.issnationallab.org/blog/taking-zblan-optical-fib...
We've been indoctrinated from an early age to be productive, to schedule every moment, to sacrifice sleep, to always be learning, building, networking, searching and improving.
The covid19 lockdown is showing many people the benefits of disconnecting, de-scheduling, refusing or ignoring invitations, and being still with our thoughts for hours or days at a time, producing nothing of tangible economic value.
- Self-hosting. A hugely growing movement to host server-side software yourself (on a cloud provider or at home). De-platforming is not possible unless ordinary citizens can host applications on the internet, rather than being relegated to being "clients". Server software needs to be distributed as much as client software, and no re-invention of the wheel is necessary (ie: no blockchain required). I am biased here as I am the founder of a startup focusing on exactly this potential future.
* https://laravel-livewire.com
* https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view
* https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blazor
edit: added blazor
I truly believe that these kind of things bring happiness and stability.
It's been mostly going sideways since 2008, now it's trending down.
This changes everything. It's like a bear market for culture.
Notice companies like Bolt Threads, Impossible foods, Zymergen, and why they are different. And if/when they actually start winning they’ll dramatically change the entire landscape.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/01/13/795988512/china-to-test-digit...
Maybe some trend on how to [annotate and bookmark][3] content online you find interesting in your own collected notes.
Speaking of some note taking, there's method called [Zettelkasten][4] and a trend software is called [Roam Research][5]. It is currently trending invite only software besides new mail provider ["Hey"][6].
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[2]: https://indieweb.org/webmention
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23227186
[4]: https://blog.viktomas.com/posts/slip-box/
[5]: https://roamresearch.com/
[6]: https://hey.com/
I also think unlike software it will take very few of those new technologies to change how we live in a huge way.
There are some incredible advances being made in many areas of photonics, including in everything from how to perform computations on chip (which are marked improvements over how were trying to do this back in the 90s, to little success) [0] all the way to how to construct tiny, ultrafast on-chip lasers for Lidar [1], all the way to how to do in-vivo measurement of quantities of certain compounds (which is useful for things like diabetes monitoring among many, many other things) [2]. There are also the usual applications to AR/VR as we've recently also seen [3], and other medical uses like chip-sized particle accelerators for therapy [4]. The classic other use case, for further in the future, is as a quantum computational platform [5].
The problem is that, like many physics fields, photonics is really, really damned technical and unintuitive (and I say this as a mathematician who works in the field!), so it's very hard to simply take a glance at it and know the benefits. On the other hand, I think this is where a huge amount of innovations in the next 2-5-10 years will be coming from and it's really going to change how we view and interact with the world.
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Note: I've mixed in both papers and popular descriptions of much of the work, but either can be found for all of the things I've stated above!
[0] https://www.osapublishing.org/prj/abstract.cfm?uri=prj-1-1-1
[1] https://phys.org/news/2020-04-key-component-autonomous-cars....
[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7782291
[3] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200603151151.h...
[4] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3mgn5/scientists-built-a...
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41578-018-0008-9?proof=true...
I personally know people who have been affected by this or witnessed this first hand in well known media companies and more recently at a casino.
Most were laid off and replaced with contractors, but in some cases the media people and their respective departments were demoted to freelance workers. In doing this, companies avoid covering benefits, unemployment insurance, liability costs, paid time off, etc. They're also off the hook when it comes to traditional working hours/days. At least one person has said that working 7 days a week tends to be the norm for them.
The casino employees have been threatened with layoffs if they did not return to work during the pandemic. Those who were laid off have been replaced by contractors.
It wouldn't be all that surprising if this became more prevalent across industries.
Some are self-explanatory (server side rendering), while others I would have no idea how to get started in (space manufacturing). There's value in merely observing trends, but if I want to be actively involved... how do I get started?
We need a fundamental reassessment of our impact on the environment and planet, and how to reshape our economies and lifestyle to avert climate warming, more severe hurricane and wildfire seasons.
There’s so much human ingenuity and i believe we can overcome these challenges.. but despite all the technological advancements, we still know so little of how our planet and climate work.
We think we are the apex predator, and yet we’re still held hostage by an invisible virus.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021999118307125
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.07587
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04385
[4] https://www.pnas.org/content/113/15/3932It's already happening with meat made from plants, but going further, you shouldn't need a cow to make milk, or a fruit tree for orange juice, or even a whole wheat grass for flour.
Indie hackers - the last 5 or so years is the first time I’ve seen a lot of info laid out for this group to thrive. The traditional business and startup advice doesn’t apply directly. Expect to see a lot more people doing this as they get dissatisfied from work or just need a bit of extra income.
Netflix and other networks raising awareness of social issues and kind of being in charge of what social issues get to be covered and what don’t. Related is education from Netflix instead of other sources.
Online universities becoming the de facto way to get a degree and people opting for those kind of degrees to cut costs and get a job. So study CS or Stats rather than Chemistry (which requires a lab). Non remote degrees seen as an upper middle class luxury and will get more expensive.
Autonomous cars are a difficult problem, autonomous drones are much simpler.
Package delivery, food delivery, air taxis, and a lot of previously cost prohibitive applications as well.
The cost and complexity of a drone is low, and an airbag should mitigate much of the risk.
We should rethink various jobs and activities, in the angle of "usefulness" or "toxicity". Consider advertisement, entertainment, luxury, tourism, skiing, golf, air-travel, .. even space industry as well since it's mentioned in comments here for example on one side, and permacultures, remote-work, environment-friendly transports, environmental-friendly leisure and sports,.. on the other side
I'm not saying we should live like thousands years ago, no, we should just try to stop wasting and harming our limited environment and ourselves as well, with this consumerism frenzy of products and services
I (try to) extract relevant trends, micro-trends and some edge cases from daily news.
Picture this, instead of leaving your house to work (or go to school) you put on your headset and enter your work/school environment immediately. This solves the problems of travelling (time wasted, environmental impact, etc.) as well as being physically isolated. Most of this type of activity is performed sitting down so VR is a good fit.
It's not even particularity expensive or technologically difficult, especially if you work in an office job. Instead of requiring a large, expensive monitor (or multiple monitors) you can use a VR rig to have as many monitors as you wish. I can imagine being very productive in such a world. I'm already doing all of my inter-personal contact using video conferencing and VR would only make that better; I love the idea of not having to worry what my hair looks like or trying to remember not to pick my nose while I'm on camera.
I think education would see major benefits of VR, especially as you have to isolate everyone anyway. My wife is an educator and next year's teaching environment is radically different than previous years. The current plans include having kids staying in one classroom all day, reducing free time, no large groups for anything (field day, pep rally, etc.) However, if you embrace VR you can take the whole class on a field trip to every museum on Earth, dig deep into science (this Magic School Bus), or even meet with kids from other countries. This is all (relatively) cheap and easy to do.
This all said, there are definitely opportunities to make VR better and cheaper. Right now, it can be expensive on the individual level to get a good set up, but if you factor in office space costs the price looks more reasonable. Add in advances in light projection and head tracking hardware I think the price begins to plummet and the quality gets better and better.
People aren't just not paying their rent and mortgages in the US - they're not paying their student loans at an alarming rate.
You can repossess homes - you cannot repossess knowledge.
Shameless plug: I have started a YouTube channel on this topic:
https://youtube.com/parttimelarry
The interest has been huge, lots of Robinhood traders and beginning Python programmers want to make trading bots and learn how to apply technical analysis and indicators. With trades being commission free and documented API's like Alpaca, it is very easy to get up and running.
The covid 19 lockdown has given us a lot of time to ponder about life. We have ML/AI encroaching on regular work. What can we do when all the routine jobs are automated? I think create is the answer. Artists and inventors start creating.
(A/K/A unintended consequences.)
It's an algebra which unifies linear algebra with quaternions and tensors.
My implementation in Julia is at https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl
We have a chat community of geometric algebra enthusiasts at https://bivector.net
Specifically, post-covid personal reckonings and a desire for the essential, remote work causing an upper-middle flight from cities and a change in business culture that advantages agile and literate workers, sadly more political polarization with popular reaction only just beginning, a milennial demographic baby bust, a wave of cultural nostalgia, privacy and anonymity as a super-luxury, a weird VC boom as sidelined cash looks for tangible assets, universal basic income experiments and disposable income for the previously poor who buy aspirational goods, late middle aged GenX getting boomer property and cash inheritances, post-covid restaurant and service business reboot after prior ones went out of business as someone has to serve the demand.
Those are the basic ones.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...