This comment from the recent thread reflecting on HNers’ predictions from 2010 made me realize how little can change in a decade:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21942143

IMO, OP’s predictions may be safe, but that says more about reality than OP’s lack of imagination.

But note that looking for predictions that worked out leads you to “safe” predictions. I would like to see a list of things that were big that no one predicted. (Uber?)

You shouldn’t make outrageous predictions if you don’t sincerely believe they will become true though.

Otherwise you will get what we see in TV everyday. a bunch of people making outrageous predictions just to sound exciting. Then when the prediction comes true, they will claim all the credit. when it doesn’t, they will say “haha I was just kidding of course”

People should state predictions where their view of the probabilities differs from conventional wisdom. EG, if most people think there's a ~20% chance that level 5 SDCs will be available in 2030 and you think it's a 1% chance then that's a valid prediction, even though it's not that exciting to predict something won't happen. If people think there's a 0% chance of hoverboards and you think it's 10% then that's an interesting prediction, even though you still expect it not to happen.

Any serious prediction should include a probability estimate that differs from conventional probability estimates. Almost not one actually does this, because everyone is doing it wrong.

Thanks for the link, interesting read. Almost all predictions were spectacularly wrong.

>they aren't predictions at all

Sure they are, it's a nice counterpoint to the people who think in 10 years we'll have flying cars and a fully immersive VR matrix and nobody will have a real job since AI and robots will do everything for us.

Hardly a "nice counterpoint", it's the polar opposite and is merely stating that innovation will be near zero and the status quo will continue. It's possible to have an outcome between TOTAL innovation and ZERO innovation.

Innovation is a set of lumpy perturbations on a mostly-smooth status quo. That’s the counterpoint to these outlandish predictions seen in other comments.

The first two, autonomous cars and AI hype are pretty much the opposite of most of HN's opinion.

Vast majority of people here think self driving is over hyped.

The AI not leading to job displacement prediction is just silly, given that it's already leading to job loss.

> The AI not leading to job displacement prediction is just silly, given that it's already leading to job loss.

The prediction was about job loss, not displacement, and you are incorrect about the current state. Job displacement and job loss are two very different things. AI is leading to job displacement (less jobs in certain industries, but not necessarily overall reduction in jobs), it does not seem to be leading, so far, to job loss (less jobs overall). It's harder to tell if it is leading to a greater share of jobs with lower wages, which has similar economic and policy implications to it causing net job loss, because there are lots of confounding factors when looking at the dynamics of wage distribution.

A lot of AI fear is based around net job loss (which has not generally historically been associated with technological advancements), not mere job displacement (which is a common effect of technological advancements).

The fear is that jobs left to humans are those low level ones. Technology divide up the society into elites who control machines and labors who is controlled by machines. And gradually, the elites become less and less until the day we humans are all batteries.

Innovations like that need 15-20 years from a working prototype to mass adoption, so I agree with the prediction that we won't see it in the 20's yet.

It is like the persitence method for weather prediction - you can predict tomorrow's weather is same as today and you would be right a good number of times :P

But they are predictions. The commenter is saying these things will happen by 2030. Just because they’re popular doesn’t mean they’re not predictions or that there’s something wrong with them. If you want to write some crazy predictions you can do that yourself

I agree, the prediction is basically; "the status quo will continue"...

Generally a good prior.

A good part of them would have been great predictions to the past decade :)