I think ar might be a dead dream in its current state, I always thought wed have proper ar glasses by now because I fell for Magic Leaps Marketting, not sure if it’ll come anytime soon.
What I do believe is coming is the resurgence of computers through mobile phones. Everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets but isn’t able to use them to their full potential. I wouldn’t be suprised if android pushed out a proper android desktop experience letting android users get the full linux desktop experience when plugged into a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
Phone performance is stronger than the average laptops/netbooks from 10 years age and they run linux fine for everyday use. Feels like a missed opportunity if someone doesn’t drop a phone or os that lets you take advantage of modern hardwares capability. They could advertise it to families, mo more buying a pc for school, just get them hardware for their existing device, it can already do everything. Schools could use lapdocks, or tabletdocks, that could force school parental controls on devices while at school and still let them use it for their education while in class.
(obviously not everyone has a phone but that frees up resources for the kids that dont, if the kids that do can use cheaper docks with their exisitnt hardware)
- Phones won’t start including a Linux desktop.
- Browser apps will be a thing of the past, you’ll need to install either a mobile or desktop app to use YouTube or Netflix or whatever.
- Sites like YouTube will also probably remove the subscriptions feed (which only like 1-2% of people use).
- Vendor lock-in efforts will be more forceful.
- I think more people will start touching grass.
And putting AI aside is a bit weird since it’s the big news story so:
- Companies will replace workers with generative AI, and as a result essential services will be worse (but more profitable).
- Generative AI will outside of the above be used as a (low-reliability but low-effort) search engine, for memes, and in animation.
Things will remain as they are for now. People in control don’t want you to look away from your phone.
AR is coming around a bit but the innovations I have been following with it are less individual consumer based. The absolutely crazy one my company was trying to implement was for an area that deals with fairly dangerous chemicals and had a lot of complex piping so with the glasses they would be synced to the equipment so you could track pipes, see through walls, and see plant conditions while just wearing some AR glasses.
I know they have also talked about trying to do something similar in surgical fields as well
I personally think the cost to make a good AR interface is just way to expensive to justify the consumer market right now, like for our AR system if it stopped a single incorrect discharge it would mostly pay for itself as that could be millions of dollars/ loss of life but for an average person who might use it to see overlays of fun fact esque things while they walk around a $1000/mo cost just doesn’t make sense
Y’know how things have mostly gotten worse for the past five years, with most innovation going towards corporate control, and nearly all tech services moving towards enshittification?
Yeah five more years of that.
I actually feel like they’ve beat the heck out of the 5 before that. GDPR is a thing, and Windows increasingly isn’t.
AI may well be done it’s explosive growth anyway. Assume all my predictions in that case are “x existing application continues to expand”.
I actually think AR is still coming - it just needs really specialised hardware to work and have acceptable battery life.
The issue with mobile OSs on desktop is that they’re designed to depend on conventional OSs right now. There’s no way to develop an Android app on Android, and debugging your Android from itself is possible, but only as a hack.
On to my own predictions. I’m limiting this to computers, not all technology, which I think was intended.
The fediverse slowly grows.
Geopolitics significantly weakens the US tech monopolies. FOSS benefits, although they probably are replaced by more commercial platforms for the most part.
More likely than not somebody actually mandates cryptography backdoors. It’s a boondoggle, although it might not fully unravel in the window given.
There’s a chance crytographically-significant quantum computing comes early and causes pandemonium. Bitcoin becomes (nearly?) worthless.
Okay, I will mention one AI thing. It’s going to find a place in rendering pipelines for videogames.
The trend to heterogeneous computing continues. Analog and reversible chips become part of the mix.
Nix-type immutable systems become daily driveable.
I think they just rolled out tools that allow you to do development on mobile actually. I forget where I read about it though.
Oh really? I’ll have to go looking for that. Not being able to easily hack things on my phone is a PITA.
I used to spend all day daydreaming about ai in class back in middleschool/highschool, magic leap had me thinking we were days away from virtual cod/harry potter dueling, real life yugioh, pokemon go had me thinking glasses were a year away lol. I’ve just needed to give up on AR for my own sanity, It’s the one thing that feels magical when it comes to tech still and gets me delusional/overhyped. Reality would just be ads everywhere.
We’ll pay more for less in terms of software, and we’ll pay more for more in terms of hardware, but nearly everybody would happily buy less. For example, the cheapest phones will be $1k+ but with unused bells and whistles, and there will be a subscription paywall to use Google maps.
We’ll have less privacy and security. Our devices will be used to spy on us even more than now.
PlayStation 6 will come out. The next Xbox will have a really fucking stupid name. Call of Duty will be a 250GB game.
It will become more feasible to implement battery tech in your home. Generators will give way to a big battery for power outages. Areas with variable power rates will see people supplement their home power with battery during the day and charge them back up at night. EV adoption will continue to rise. Self driving tech will not change in a meaningful way. Fusion power will be commercially implemented, but barely break even, which is fine because that’s how new tech takes early steps to optimize.
China will be far and away ahead of the US in terms of infrastructure, daily consumer tech, and overall happiness. The US will pretend otherwise and launch a targeted propaganda campaign to keep its people too dumb and busy to notice how badly they’re getting fucked. But even worse than now, though.
Healthcare tech will expand. But not in the US. Not for the working class, anyway. Measles outbreaks will come in waves. Flu and a new covid strain will be devastating within 18 months. Polio will pop back up like measles currently is. Maybe TB too. Mental health will continue to get stigmatized if not fully ignored.
Physical media will be basically gone. Disc drives will as rare as actual audio CDs are in everyday life.
Lab grown meat will be more affordable, and it will bring a culture war with it.
Maybe in the US but rest of the world has access to budget Chinese smartphones .
I could see apple maps and google colluding, both dropping paywalls same year
I’ve been trying to use organic maps more often
Think companies will track us in our homes using wifi and well just have to accept it, like they track our actions on websites, where we click and look
idk physical drives have gotten real cheap and plentiful, but I do trust the cloud more than myself and thats always getting cheaper
We will see more and more ridiculous subscriptions. I’m talking about $200+ a month. It could be cloud services (AI or not) streaming bundle, phone plan, car entertainment plan, etc.
Top 10% accounts for 50% of consumer spending. This trend only gets worse, and soon enough, companies will stop caring about poor people and tailor their services to the rich.
trigger happy police drones - I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Real Cop ™
Probably contains “AI”, though.
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Restrictive OSs and stuff will become the new normal, essentially stripping us of our freedom, more things will become 1st Party only and moving your data will be even harder than ever, essentially becoming cultural houses, basically what apple has already done
linux is getting a push due to windows becoming more and more abusive with how they force you to use a certain ui filled with ads and ai bs
problem is everybody is on phones now, and its even more locked down and complicated on that side.
Big tech will try and create a cartel to make open source less usable. Google is already pushing Manifest V3 to make development of browsers extensions more difficult, Microsoft could try and use TPM to only allow running “certified” software, and that could be the end of OpenSource as we know it
Its really easy to be honest, you just have to slowly take away everything and give them choices, and they will be so occupied with discussing what they want to choose, they will not even notice how we slowly strangle them
Windows update: you can no longer move the start button position people get crazy Windows update: UI improvement, now you can customize the start button position
In the meanwhile: recall, more spying, microsoft account and internet connection required for installation
I don’t think much will change in 5 years that is not AI.
Everything is focused on AI right now. So just more powerful hardware that is geared towards running ai is all I think that will happen.
AR is pretty much dead on arrival for at least a decade because everyone willing to make the tech to back it up wants to give you a walled garden of ads (like replacing billboards with their own adds, adding animated ads to whatever blank surface you see, and whatever app you’re using) and the only people who are willing to buy it at >$1000, 1>lbs, and early adopter quality only want it for business/hacker/utilitarian/gamer/influencer reasons who have a very low tolerance for ads and login-with-your-big-brother-account-walls meaning the supply/demand chart is like 5 total sales for actual Homo Economicus.
I think it will keep following the cycles of “Make small gadget larger —> Make larger gadget smaller —> Make small gadget larger again …” and “Turn several gadgets into one —> Turn one gadget into several —> Turn several gadgets into one again …” to make sure you have to replace your gadgets for new gadgets at regular intervals. They probably will find some new annoying feature to add to all your appliances once everything from your phone to your kitchen sink has a touchscreen and a WIFI connection.
if you have one device they could just sell you infinite subs to upgrade it, instead of hardware you rent hardware over your high speed internet, offloading resources, like video editors where rendering takes place in the cloud with that feature built in being served by google not a third party
Open source devices will become more mainstream as a push back by consumers against enshitifcation, privacy invasion, disposable products, ever rising subscription costs.
Not just things like phones and laptops but things like mice, keyboards, headphones, even tvs and kitchen appliances. I know some of these are possible now, I use a ploppy trackball and qmk based keyboards but a wider spread of these across the home and more than just hobbyists like myself.
Large chunks will be 3D printed, moving the large component parts of manufacting to the local area. Plus things will be endlessly fixable and upgradable.
The thing is, injection molding is just dummy cheap at scale. If you have a significant run of open source hardware it still makes sense.
Chips are also pretty impossible to make at small scale, so you have to account for that. To date it’s possible to find a decent chipset, but I worry it might not always be.
All of which is true but it doesn’t matter if the product is crippled by the designer. Whole point of my model is that you are the designer so its only shit if you are.
Yeah, I’m not saying proprietary enshittified hardware is good, lol.
And I think that at some point enough people will have had enough that they take on production of that themselves via open source projects.
Sure, some will always be driven by cost, thats never going to change, but self sustainability will become more desirable as main stream brands, not just temu tat, drops in quality.
Less bulky wearable technology, I hope.
I really like my dumb watch and have yet to find a wearable – that isn’t a watch – that isn’t clumsy or bulky
