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.
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.
Okay, 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 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.
I think they just rolled out tools that allow you to do development on mobile actually. I forget where I read about it though.
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.
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.
Everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets but isn’t able to use them to their full potential.
Android Desktop is actually pretty nice, the thing that makes it useless is that basically no android apps have desktop mode or hotkeys and mouse support (Chrome is half-assed and Firefox is wearing assless chaps) plus a lot of standard I-just-want-linux things are going to be wonky. If you’re considing buying any hard-ware for the purpose of Android Desktop, you’re almost always better off buying a laptop at the same $100-$400 price.
It makes no sense to think about the future of technology while ignoring one of the biggest technological developments to date. Whatever you think of AI, it’s necessarily going to shape every aspect of technological development going forward.
One example I can give you off top of my head is that traditional user interfaces will likely be going away. There’s no need to have a complex UI the user has to learn to navigate when you can just use language to describe what you want. You will just ask the agent to find whatever information you need, and present it in a specific way to you. Think of it as having a personal secretary who compiles information for you, and makes presentations.
I personally don’t care about AI and am tired of hearing about this, I made this post and specifically put no AI to hear about anything else
I’m just pointing out that it makes little sense to talk about how technology will develop in the next 5 years while ignoring the biggest factor that will drive the direction of technological development.
Makes plenty of sense, itll still develop in other directions, only vibe coder bros think it’ll encompass anything and everything or that it should. If you want to talk about machine learning in medicine go for it, generative Ai is boring to talk about, I don’t care for it, you have infinite threads to talk about it why choose this one. There are infinite topics in this world that can be covered without ai needing to be spoken about.
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.
Imo you can’t not include the use of AI anymore
In discussions? Sure, you can. I’m not acting like it won’t exist, it just doesn’t need to be talked about 24/7, other tech exists and will continue to progress too.
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
AR is not dead but it will take much longer than expected to be as light and comfortable as a pair of sunglasses.
I’m hoping to see a lot of progress in display tech. We’ve already seen first transparent screens but there is still work to be done. I would love to let my monitors „disappear“ when not in use. Also flexible displays are maturing, this could get interesting.
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.
Year of the linux desktop for sure
I think a phone might light on fire if you try to use it like a Linux desktop
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.
