Right now it seems like its “A.I.”. Still big now are the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Recently we had COVID 19.

What’s next?

    • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
      15·
      8 months ago

      There is a massive climate catastrophe before there is another even bigger climate catastrophe before considering climate action.

  • stoy@lemmy.zip
    693·
    8 months ago

    Looking at the U.S. political situation, fascism seems to be getting closer every day.

    In fact, if you look at a lot of other western nations, fascist ideas are springing up all over.

    If feels like the world is even more crazy than it used to be, and the current period of crazy started in 2016 with Brexit, then Trumps win snd presidency, rolling into covid, then Trump got ejected, Russia intencified the war in Ukraine, the Hamas shat the bed and now Israel is going batshit insane, oh and during the two last years, two social media sites have decided to just oblitirate most of their good content generators, X is just fucking over everything that was twitter, and Reddit is slowly imploding since the apicalypse.

    I just had a look on Wikipedia, and damn there has been a LOT of shit going down since the start of 2016…

    • teawrecks
      191·
      8 months ago

      The election of Trump in 2016 was the culmination of many factors from the previous 50 years, all of which lead to a very predictable outcome.

      • Reaganomics loosening regulation on corporations, lowering taxes on the wealthy, and defunding public education
      • Rush Limbaugh and Fox news fostering rural nationalism
      • the advent of the internet which allowed those people to find each other and exchange their poorly informed ideas
      • the perception that politicians were prioritizing “them” over “real Americans”
      • 9/11 and the resulting surveillance state and 24h sensationalist news cycle.

      By the time Obama was in office, Republicans and Democrats lived in different realities. Republicans just wanted someone who was willing to stand on stage and spout their version of reality, and Trump is the right combination of insecure and stupid to want to do that. He was an inevitable symptom of a decades long problem.

    • jkozaka@lemm.ee
      17·
      8 months ago

      Don’t forget Europe. Here, the far right is also racially motivated. My country’s (Portugal) far right party shot up in votes in the last election and has repeatedly villanized roma people. I hear the AfD is also pretty concerning.

    • Taalnazi@lemmy.worldNederlands
      42·
      8 months ago

      The ‘funny’ thing is that Trump never had won. He gained fewer votes than Hillary in 2016…

      Similarly, Bush imo is an illegitimate president, as he didn’t gain more votes than Al Gore.

      • teawrecks
        7·
        8 months ago

        Via the popular vote, yes. But in the US, the popular vote doesn’t decide anything. Should it? That’s a different question. The point is they won the election legitimately.

        We have work to do, but peddling election denial misinformation isn’t it.

      • mctoasterson@reddthat.com
        3·
        8 months ago

        You saying this has the same practical significance as pro-Trump people who think Biden “didn’t really win” in 2020.

        Which is to say zero.

        • Taalnazi@lemmy.worldNederlands
          2·
          8 months ago

          Difference is that my saying is based on a historically vested principle, simple as: one man, one vote. Instead of: your vote doesn’t count, only the oligarch’s does.

  • copd@lemmy.world
    271·
    8 months ago

    If you knew what’s coming next you could be a very very rich human. This is how the world works

    But to humour you, my guess is new portable energy storage systems. An increase in energy density

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    242·
    8 months ago

    I’ll keep adding to this as I think of more.

    Lemmy itself, hopefully. The Fediverse has the potential to take off because it’s here and it can’t really die.

    3D printed construction could be huge if they can get it to actually work well. That’s a big if, though.

    Perovskite solar cells look like they’re almost ready to commercialise.

    Grid storage batteries, if a good chemistry is found, could answer a trillion-dollar question.

    Whenever Apple gets the battery life on Vision Pros to a reasonable length, they’ll probably take off.

    AI ASICs, including those I assume such a headset would use. Some of them are actually analog, it’s pretty neat.

    Ocean mining looks set to be valuable, and is pretty much impossible to stop every country from doing.

    LLMs taking your fast-food order, and similar.

    On that note, support services to remotely unfuck LLM mistakes that 0.2% of the time they biff it.

    De-novo cultivation has been pretty successful, so you might start seeing weird new crops derived from wild plants become available, and start getting used as a cheap ingredient in stuff.

    Hydrogen-grown biomass is really interesting, and could take humanity another trophic level down. That’s probably too far off to count as “next”, though.

    Xenotransplantation.

    Cargo airships as an option somewhere in between ships and airplanes.

    3D printed aerospace parts have already made a difference, but I get the sense it’s not done. I don’t know what that means for you or me, exactly, if anything.

    I could totally see supersonic private jets happening. I really hope they won’t, though.

    On the note of technologies that kind of suck, postquantum cryptography will be a huge thing very soon.

    The hydrogen economy, if fossil fuels continue to phase out. I’ve seen some neat stuff about metal refining with it, including a paper where they were able to use toxic aluminum mining waste as a raw material.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        3·
        8 months ago

        The precise context I’ve heard about that in is drive-throughs.

        It could be other things, like answering phones in a more comprehensive way than existing automatic systems. Even book keeping. Really just anything simple or repetitive that’s conducted by natural language, and isn’t life-or-death (so probably no ER triage).

  • Alsjemenou@lemy.nlNederlands
    14·
    8 months ago

    America has a real problem if something very bad happens to Biden or Trump during the elections (or shortly after).

    The world has a problem when Trump is elected again. As he’s not known for keeping peace, or understanding international relations. In fact quite the opposite.

    So the next big thing really is the elections.

    …

    Notice though how certain massive events are barely registering here… Imagine a third of Americans threatened to lose their home… But that’s what’s currently happening in China through floods, and rain season still having to start. I would call that big, 120 million people isn’t nothing… In comparison, 7 million died from corona (out of 700 million confirmed cases)

    So this very much depends on your perspective and where on the planet you live.

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    8 months ago

    Well, there’s serious potential for the wars in Ukraine and Israel to spill over into their neighboring countries and spiral uncontrollably into WWIII.
    So although far from guaranteed, it’s absolutely a possibility.

  • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
    8·
    8 months ago

    We can’t be far off people realizing how good robotic chef arms are and someone like Samsung making one that we start seeing in midsized kitchens, after this home adoption will be rapid and have huge benefits for diet and cost of living as well as being far more environmentally friendly than preprapared food.

    It’ll probably use a trained Llama model (metas ai which is good at tasking) to translate requests and input data to a cooking model likely based on the one they always use for trackmania but I forget it’s name I think it’s Nvidias evolutionary one - it simulates the actions to evolve a solution before actuting motors - its impressively quick now even on a small processor and used in loads of stuff. The robotics is easy just a couple of continuous rotational servos and grasping mechanisms which are super common now.

    I don’t know if any of the currently existing ones will get the market spot, I expect like with mp3 players It’ll come down to a big name making an easy to use but feature limited version to capture the market.

    If anyone has questions happy to defend my assertion.

    • Tekhne@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      8 months ago

      I have questions. Is this something in use today? Who is manufacturing them? Is this something you’re personally familiar with or just aware of?

      • Daxtron2@startrek.website
        6·
        8 months ago

        I haven’t seen specifically cooking, but there have been quite a few papers about mixing task-instruction LLMs with task-execution robot arms (like they use in manufacturing) to perform simple tasks given only a plain English instruction. Eg, “pick up the red ball and place it in the blue bowl”. Very cool research but still very new.

      • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        8 months ago

        Yeah go on the YouTube rabbit hole of ‘cooking robot’ there are some really impressive ones - overpriced and not entirely practical but really good.

        All the actual sensor and control stuff is used in industrial and factory kitchens but built into linear assembly lines so putting that into a more multiuse tool is the challenge.

        I’m not personally familiar, just follow automation and robotics these are something I’ve been interested in for a while. It’s a prefect task for where automation and ai is at the moment.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      8 months ago

      How reliable are they, especially in edge cases? The word on the street has been that they’re still super dumb and we’re not automating blue-collar jobs like “chef” any time soon.

      • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        8 months ago

        Factory robots are incredibly graceful now and sensor systems are great at combining information into models, I would say that they’re almost certainly able to act safely - they’re not going to stab anyone by mistake, but might occasionally call for help locating a carrot or odd things until those small bugs are ironed out.

        I think fully multitasking robots are a way off because like self-drive there’s just so much complexity caused by small differences that accounting for it is endless, but an arm on a cooker with a prep area beside it would be restrained enough that solving the individual design issues would be manageable.

        I should say I’m not imagining it to be as good as the advert, the first ones will have fairly basic ingredients and dishes they support - probably a few thousand but missing various key dishes that are a bit too awkward. I’m Also imagining it’ll cook better than me but not upto my mums best.

        So I don’t think they’ll replace chef but we’re about to see a slew of task focused devices, probably in construction and similar fields. The chef focusing on the more creative and skilled elements while using them to chop, stir, make sauces or icing or whatever.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
          1·
          8 months ago

          Oh, an arm on a cooker and prep area isn’t quite what I thought you were talking about. A human employee would still have to be around to feed it ingredients, clean it, and deliver the food, then, so that’s more like an increment on top of the slicing machines and automatic ovens fast food joints already have.

          • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
            1·
            8 months ago

            They’ll probably call it something more impressive sounding and oversell it but it will be kinda revolutionary.

            When the trend of robots cooking from raw starts taking over the prepackaged and oven ready meals we’ll see real competition and innovation