What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working.

The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It's wasted time and effort for something that is cookie cutter in functionality and limited in scope (vast majority of web).

Some of them provide collaboration tools, development environment and experts on call which is neat.

Add ease of outsourcing, too. The employer doesn't have to worry about maintenance once the product is finished. Many good platforms will allow you an easy migration path and better security controls. That comes at a vendor lock in. That's the price but given the life expectancy of smaller companies and startups, it may as well be worth it.

One idea I've had (heavily influenced by The Diamond Age, I must admit) - a premium video game experience where NPCs you meet are sometimes voiced/acted by actors hired real-time on-demand with face or even body mocap. The NPCs revert back to regular AI versions if an actor is unable to be hired at that time. The player could interact by speaking with their own voice, naturally role-playing the scene. This would of course be astonishingly expensive, but people are clearly willing to spend a lot of money on video games these days so there might be a market. You could create the company providing the real-time on-demand acting service to whatever game company wants to integrate with your services, either contracting or hiring actors to wait around for requests. They could even work from home if their internet setup is good enough.

Reasons this sector might take off: recent greater consumer spending on video games (especially with the pandemic) & their normalization as a field of entertainment, recent greater consumer spending on online services where you pay to interact with actors (although they're all of the, er, amorous type), and the growing popularity of mixed reality driven by the release of Half Life: Alyx.

Augmented Reality. Apple seems poised to release some AR Glasses based on the patents they've been registering and the investment they've made in the ARKit framework. This will probably become another iPhone-like platform for developing apps on, and will likely present opportunities like the early days of the App Store.

There's a cool project trending on Github right now showing how magic-like some of the technology in this space is: https://github.com/cyrildiagne/ar-cutpaste

I think small to mid scale farm ag-tech is going to become huge in the next decade. We already see large industrial farms making use of more and more tech what happens when that tech scale shrinks down.

Electric aircraft for shorter trips instead of trains. The battery energy density still needs to improve somewhat but that is happening.

They’d allow for serving more direct (point to point) routes than trains as the infrastructure cost is so much lower than laying and maintaining tracks. Rail serving high volume routes still makes sense, especially while electric plans remain relatively small.

It's worth understanding the kind of disruption you mean - product to product, or product to commodity. Simon Wardley has a blog with lots of posts about this.

Also his free book about Wardley Mapping is useful for understanding the phase changes of bespoke to warring products to commodity.

For specific ideas, see "Figure 2 - Wars" in this Simon Wardley blog post (written five years ago, diagram is I think ten years old so you can validate early parts of it): https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/02/on-two-forms-of-disrupt...

We're currently just come through war phase (when there's fierce competition to own commodity versions and lots of new innovation gets built on top) of Big Data.

From the diagram, the next wars Simon reckons should happen about now (and I can't find a post where he explains how he made that diagram) are:

  * Sensor as a Service (think radically better health or environment sensors, detecting important trace molecules cheaply)
  * Robotics (I guess think Ocado warehouses, or Shenzhen factories)
  * Currency (digital can change this in ways other than Bitcoin, depending on your politics too)

Then the phase after that in 5-10 years time are:

  * Internet of Things (I'm guessing by then the microcomputers might be *so* cheap and network *so* easy they literally go in everything)
  * Immersive (VR/AR I think)
  * 3D printing (it's not very good or cheap yet, it will be)
  * Genetic Engineering, GMO
  * Social Change (not clear what this means, but certainly you can look around the world and see the demand)

You can look for yourself for more.

For slightly longer term, worth knowing the word "spime" as something to head for as well.

Distributed IT/office that services remote workers in their homes.

Pay a fee and you get access to a pool of desks, chairs, computers, and an IT/office staff to come to your house and maintain it and set it up.

In that vein: tooling to manage remote workers.

A potential game changer in the 3D printing space is Rapid Liquid Printing or (RLP). Why is it exciting? Normal 3D printers have to build from the ground up, one layer at a time. It wastes a lot of energy and time because the print head paths are restricted to one plane. In RLP, by contrast, prints are made in a bath of gelatin, the printer head is freely able to move in 3 dimensions allowing it to take the most direct path to form prints. No wasted movement = less time and more structurally sound parts.

RLP was developed by MIT a few years back and I haven't heard much from it since. Maybe that will change over the next few years. https://selfassemblylab.mit.edu/rapid-liquid-printing

Neural input devices could become a thing in the next few years. I, for one, would love to have a wearable which could translate neural signals into text and directional input - in lieu of a keyboard and mouse. My inevitable carpal tunnel could stop advancing.

Thanks to newly available hardware like MyoWare, affordable neural sensors have become available to garage tinkerers. I think it's simply a matter of time before we're all interfacing with our computers and phones via wearables. http://www.advancertechnologies.com/p/myoware.html

Space tech, things for mars. (Elon is going to need a lot of help)

VR development. It really hasn’t hit mainstream yet and when it changes how we work that could be huge.

I think AI based procedural generation of games. Seeing how good gpt3 is getting this seems like it could be huge.

AI based personalized education. Have you seen how well gpt3 can explain concepts? Could something like that also evaluate your understanding, come up with custom learning plans?

Video games of some sort, where the game map is a 1:1 replica of the real world using streamed GIS data.

The new microsoft flight simulator is already kinda there.

Using AI to identify breakout technology or trends that are set to go mainstream.

The benefit is that the operators of said technology can 'invest' in that bandwagon and reap piggy-back profits, while mitigating the inherent risk of actually developing those technologies or trends from scratch.

Hombrew advanced material fabrication (especially with graphene)

Open lab equipment. Open Sensor designs.

Privacy - Duck Duck Go may overtake Google at some point.

Better Email management tools, use existing transport but allow you to manage 1,000 to 10,000 inbound messages in an hour of work. Note: this is not mean to offer encouragement for more to send 10,000 outbound messages or fall into Uncanny Valley of Email Automation (see https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2015/03/25/the-uncanny-valley-...)

IoT / Mirror World / Smart City / Digital Twin / Cyberspace is everting Sensors are woven into more of the natural world and the built world. Opportunities for services and better management and governance of natural and built world. Implications for Privacy. See https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2017/04/19/cyberspace-everts-i...

Disaster mitigation products and services. Tools that enable better management of things that go bad. Nat disasters are obvious but also think ransomware, medical disasters, covid of course. Think insurance but also detection, contact mapping, probability models for fires, resource dispatching, hedging for financial impact, remediation planning.

Disasters seem to be regrettably a growth market these days.

Threads like this is cause 2/3rds of it will end up being “what’s something that folks have heard about in the news but hasn’t gotten big (enough for more press) yet”.

Rephrased, this question is also more of a product-market fit one (“which market exists/will exist but doesn’t have its demand satisfied yet”), whereas a lot of answers are focused on the tech.

X-as-a-service platforms that allow companies to perform segments of their oprations either with ease, or outsource it.

It's been the big thing for a while, but still continues to grow.

Basically, these are tools to make it faster and faster to spin up a business from scratch, by allowing those companies to focus more on the product itself rather than refactorable non-essentials. They may also offer value-added features such as "network effect" ability to optimize that packaged solutions, or a platform that allows them to provide quicker no code/low code Analytics to identify trends to be able to make business decisions accordingly.

Examples of companies that do this.

* AWS (infrastructure) * Salesforce * Azure * Pagerduty * Splunk * DevOps as a service companies * HR as a service

Also, I recommend not caring about what's new, hot, and shiny; it's best to really understand market fit, and market potential; and build something "useful"

Social media retirement services.

Existing technology business models will be adapted and re-launched as services which are coupled to cryptocurrency tokens.

Also, we may see the rise of cryptocurrency communities which attempt to manipulate company insiders and governments to gain control of the proceeds of production to drive the value of their cryptocurrencies. Private property rights will be eroded (due to lack of enforcement and increasing systemic corruption) and so cryptocurrency, which offers a cryptographic means of ownership (which does not rely on law), will gain increasing significance.

The proceeds of production will no longer go to shareholders, they will be diverted to cryptocurrency holders. The shareholders who embrace this mindset of moving profits to cryptocurrencies will see their ownership stake of company profits increase at the expense of those who resist this shift. In the end, nobody will want to own stocks since they will no longer yield profits. Corporations will behave like non-profits; the profits will be funneled to cryptocurrencies.

All of this will be completely legal and almost everyone will support it. In 10 years, this will be completely obvious.

We are in a post-scarcity economy. Wealth creation will have little to do with productivity and everything to do with redefinition and redistribution of existing ownership rights. We will see cryptographic ownership rights surpass legal ownership rights. Once this new, highly fluid, decentralized financial infrastructure is firmly in place, the transfer of wealth will end up facilitating a new wave of massive decentralized productivity with a stronger focus on social principles.

Starlink+Drones.

People using apps like cashapp to ditch traditional banks leading to loans and other financial activity to be done over these newer apps.

Check out https://practicum.substack.com and also this Twitter thread of futurist sites https://threader.app/thread/1296654041569570819

Generically engineered plants for the home

Beyond meat, fake milk, etc.

Web 3/Dweb minus the crypto built on IPFS (or something similar).

I believe many developers will soon come to realize that you don't need a blockchain to build most decentralized applications. Products like like Google Docs, social networks, messaging app, etc don't depend on a proof of stake, and we shouldn't be running miners to power such simple operations. All these applications need isa decentralized form of message distribution and log storage paired with public-key cryptography in order to build a CRDT log. I understand why IPFS in itself at first glance often seems over-hyped, since it is essentially just a hyper-distributed caching layer. However, I highly recommend looking at technologies built on top of it like [OrbitDB](https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db) and [Textile](https://textile.io/). When they work reliably, their API is as easy if not easier than other "server-less" products like Firebase or Parse to use. Once libraries like these become mature, I believe the way we build software will be flipped on its head within 10-15 years to be completely client focused with minimal backend infrastructure.

The main advantages I see are:

* Increased reliability. This allows developers to remove almost all of their centralized servers and rely instead on a common infrastructure and protocol.

* Much simpler codebases and infrastructure. You only need to write a frontend for most applications. Building on u/searchableguy's comment: I can see no/low code tooling really taking off with decentralized-first applications, since there is no need to manage a complicated backend infrastructure with vendor lock-in.

* Real-time by default. Since IPFS databases run off of CRDT logs which rely on realtime syncing of new operations, they are benefit from immediate updates at all times – even when not connected to the main swarm out in the boonies. * Offline-first by default.

* Cost/resource efficiency. No technology is magical, but [this](https://withblue.ink/2019/03/20/hugo-and-ipfs-how-this-blog-...) article from March is an early real world demonstration of how well this technology works already.

* Transport agnostic. It's completely feasible to have your watch, your phone, and your laptop have their IPFS nodes connected over Bluetooth, but never have to worry about if and how they're connected together since IPFS takes care of handling that P2P connectivity automatically. Instead of writing code that says "my watch created a reminder, upload this to the cloud for my laptop and also tell my phone this happened if we're connected," I can just write "my watch created a reminder, broadcast this operation to the IPFS network" and your phone and laptop will automatically receive this update.

* Security. The less that is stored on centralized servers, the better. While OrbitDB is not built to work off an encrypted database yet (it's in the roadmap for v1), Textile already is. Having everything be encrypted by default and optionally never leaving my device has many advantages.

The main challenges I see blocking this from going mainstream:

* Reliability still feels like the early days of the internet. The database-level libraries are still young, IPFS is slow/unreliable at times, and browser support is fairly strong but still has a way to go, and native mobile/native support is nonexistent.

* Filecoin is not ready yet. You still need to run your own IPFS node/swarm in order to do anything serious. Existing pinning services can only go so far if you're working with something like OrbitDB.

* Education. Security is of upmost important when designing technologies like this, so developers need to understand how a CRDT log works, how to build with merge conflicts in mind, and how to write/manage custom ACL for complex interactions. It also takes a different way of thinking to design networks like this.

* Reliability and security audits.

* Transport protocols. At the moment, many of the advantages of P2P over things like Bluetooth have not been realized yet since the IPFS core is still where most of the development is focused at the moment.

* Cross-platform support. IPFS only has an official Go and JavaScript node implementation with a Rust implementation in the works. While Go has become fairly portable in recent years, it still has a very bloated runtime that doesn't embed well on mobile and web. Once we have a reliable Rust port and some OrbitDB-like Rust-based libraries ports, I suspect we'll start seeing ergonomic mobile and web APIs that bind to these popping up.

To be clear, I'm not saying centralized servers will vanish in to thin air. There are many tasks like indexing large amounts of data that are incredibly difficult and not beneficial to build on a distributed network. The decentralized web – if done right – will make developers' lives much easier for many common applications, but there should not be a need to port things that aren't practical to run on the Dweb.

[Edit: Formatting]

There is some potential for commodity hardware with AI to spawn some innovation in the maker space.

Rapid tests you can do at home for a variety of viral illnesses, initially for COVID-19, but expanding to a wider variety of viruses and virus types. Being able to track viruses in real-time will become a priority to attempt to thwart future pandemics.

Human body sensors -> API -> ML for diagnostics, neural control, etc.

Smart Tattoos. Color E-ink displays. Eventually: holographic VR.

SpaceX's Starlink + Increasing acceptance of remote work = A significant shift away from congested cities towards more rural areas

Open agriculture.

In the crypto world there is a lot of hype around DeFi (decentralised finance) like everything in crypto it a mix of good technical ideas, lots of marketing bd, and a host of obnoxious bros. At the heart of it though there are really interesting things around liquidity.

I will be boring now and say that Cloud services will continue to expand, it's effectively a tax on doing work on the internet and start-ups love using cloud, the idea of maintaining your own servers is considered silly unless their is some particular reason to. I expect to see growth of 20% yoy in that sector for the top 3 players. Azure, GCP and AWS.

Personal home servers

Deep learning will continue to surprise

webassembly

Specialized Accounting / Bookkeeping Services.

Film photography.

Asteroid mining.

Elysium

Honestly, why would anyone share a good idea here? I get it that ideas are cheap, but if someone actually thinks they have slam dunk they're not going to share it on HN.