I predict the 2020's will turn out to be the most difficult-to-predict decade yet. The predictions of the OP in my mind fail to account for several yet-to-mature disruptive technologies that will potentially transform our society to the degree the Internet and web have. The only prediction I'll make is in the domain where I work:
By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing device (glasses, contacts, perhaps neurological etc) all day which allow software to proxy most aspects of their visual and audio perception, perhaps more.
Among the many results of this change, the most profound will be the loss of physical co-presence as a factor for interacting with other people. People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
The technical miracle aside, this will cause a fundamental shift in the way we think about what it means to "be" with other people -- the dependence upon physical co-locality will be no longer something we place highly in our mental model for spending time with others, other than children.
This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
I suspect, perhaps hope, that the dominating result will be that, in combination with new forms of media based upon these new technological marvels, we will be able to greatly reduce or eliminate the tribalist tendencies we have for one another when those 'others' are out-of-reach for us to talk with, hug, dance with, and learn from.
In 2030, you'll be able to hug anyone on Earth instantly, and that's something to be optimistic about.
The internet is already a huge step up in communication from 20 years ago. Turns out people use that to find ideologically likeminded people meaning tribalist movements everywhere are stronger now than before internet came along. 90's were full of optimism about how tribalism could be overcome that is completely vanished now.
From the same technological situation you describe I can only think of how people would use that only to further isolate themselves. At least today, physical location sometimes dictate you have to interact with people outside of your own social class and background. What you describe could reduce that, making every one retreat even further into their echo chamber.
People already live in close proximity to millions in cities. They generally don't hug each other; more fixated on rushing past each other, avoiding eye contact.
Humans just aren't made for having 7 billion friends...
Yet in these same cities people meet in places, and have the positive experiences we often define as being human. Consider how many of these are currently possible to have through the Internet, and how likely that is to change if social presence and shared spatial awareness are deliverable remotely.
The greatest institutions, large and small (schools, libraries, churches, etc) all orbit the constraints of physical coproximity. If even a modest set of these experiences can have a true digital analog that replicated it decoupled from physical copresence, the opportunity for these kinds of institutions to form at a whole higher level, across great tribal boundaries, seems high.
It’s hard or impossible to make specific, concrete predictions on a ten year timeline. But my view is that the 20’s will see a radical departure from physical copresence mitigating human activity, and we will all agree that this change happened in 2030. I hope that people capitalizing on it build good social systems to bring out the best in people and replicate what we have learned from our best institutions and examples of positive human gathering.
I guess what I'm saying is that many people had that exact same hope, for the same reason, 20 years ago -- and that hope ended up being extremely wrong; the exact opposite of what actually happened.
Of course we cannot extrapolate. Noone can know. But are there any specific reasons why the ongoing tide of political, ideological, social polarization would suddenly turn around?
You say "across great tribal boundaries". To me, physical proximity seems to be the main thing left now that still counteracts tribal boundaries.
Can you provide examples/scenarios perhaps?
As my counter-example, I just moved out to the country-side. As a result, I start to now see different opinions in my Facebook feed from when I lived in a city, simply due to Facebook-friending new people due to physical proximity. Due to this influx of "random" impulses in my Facebook feed, I think am likely to have less polarized views politically (I can see different friends arguing both sides of a topic) than if physical proximity didn't play a role in who I friended.
The Internet had temperately killed technical clubs like HAM radio, wood working shops etc., as people got into coding and could collaborate remotely. Around 2008 lots of Makerspaces started to open, but not nearly enough, the maker movement has stalled though.
We need to rethink the ways schools operate, from 8am-3pm they can be for kids. After 4pm they can be adult learning hubs, maker spaces, DIY bicycle repair shops etc.
I think libraries are a better fit than public schools, and some already have maker spaces, seed banks or gardens, and opportunities for continuing education. With funding provided by a dedicated library district (which is increasingly common) in addition to private foundation support, these institutions can have a significant positive impact in the communities they serve.
School are normally significantly larger and mostly unused outside of their normal operating hours. Realistically it shouldn't be an either or thing but rather both.
Ham Radio is far from dead, and it isn't a "technical club". It is an activity with many varied subinterests from public service to exploration of extremely efficient low-power communication modes to bouncing signals off the moon. There are 750,000 licensed amateur radio opeators in the United States.
Beaming in might be popular for some use cases, however physical presence will still be the gold standard. VR/AR will always represent a big drop in information density compared to reality. In human conversation even a 75ms lag would be noticeable compared to real-time. I highly doubt looking at a vr projections eyes can match the same intensity as looking at a real person’s. Also, VR completely removes items such as touch and smell.
How much data does a human 6 feet away from you project to you? How much of that data enters your conscious? How much enters your subconscious? With Moore’s law dying we can’t hope to match that amount of information, much less accurately record and transport it in real time. Lossy capture and output mechanisms will still be present in a decade.
I think framing face-to-face vs remote copresence as a hierarchy is a poor mental model. Existing remote communication media can be equally effective as face to face in very narrow, specific contexts. My argument isn’t so much that remote embodied communication will be a panacea, but that it will radically shift the constraints around copresence for a wide variety of contexts. Ultimately, face to face will be vastly superior for some contexts, but I would not underestimate how far that set will drop proportionally over the next decade. And it certainly seems possible that new forms of communication may become only possible in a virtual context, much like the very one we are participating in right now.
> People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
This made me laugh. We haven't even figured out how to do telephone conferences reliably. I'm still waiting for a telco that does not have the obligatory "You're breaking up" or "I cannot see the screenshare" or "Oh sorry, my microphone was still on mute" or whatever somewhere in between.
Teleconferencing has issues not due to technical issues typically. Though that was common up to relatively recent history, modern audio and video teleconferencing software seems reliable and robust. The main deficiency, which can not be mitigated through technology, is the low bandwidth for human communication it has, which yields a lot of the dynamics you mention. Simple things like turn taking and taking awareness of the emotional states of others is largely impossible to do well vs in person using these tools.
This is a well researched area, and embodied communication through VR/AR stands poised to solve many of these deficiencies by allowing the expression of non verbal cues, body language, spatial referencing, etc.
> This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
Careful. I remember reading similar sentiments about the web in the 90's. Turns out it's true, to a degree, but also unleased all the misinformation we see today. I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I had a coworker that worked on the fraud team at Second Life. He said the engineers ran the place and would work on stuff that was technically interesting to them, rather than working on stuff that users wanted or needed. That probably didn't help.
> I can imagine something similar in the future where you can't tell what's real, not only news, but also what you see in front of you.
I'd argue that this is the situation humanity has been in forever, to varying degrees, mainly for the former (the news), but also the latter.
What I hope to see is a greater realization of this, and willingness to consider the degree to which this affects disagreement and polarization (ie: perhaps the situation isn't that our ideological opponents are idiots, but rather the situation is more complex than we perceive).
A coworker and I were discussing this trend as it relates to the physical workspace. We imagined a psuedo-virtual cubical which you can “decorate” in any theme you’d like - jungle, sci-fi, steampunk, tropical beach, etc. - which would be rendered by your coworkers’ AR wearables/implants.
My favorite concept of that discussion was virtual guardians to protect your flow - look, you can interrupt that developer but you’re gonna have to defeat his virtual dragon first.
I, for one, make my physical workspace disappear from my view as much as possible. When I'm at my desk, 99% of what I see is my screen, 1% goes for the occasional look at the tea cup.
What's the deal with this videogamey bullshit you're proposing? Why would anyone want to participate in this?
First thing I'm doing is installing an adblocker/augblocker to byoass this sort of thing.
Dude, it’s to prevent people from interrupting you when you’re trying to work. It would literally be designed to keep shitty coworkers like you away from my desk.
I don't want to annoy people/be annoyed, either: if you want to be left alone, put up a sign. But you can't force people to participate in a virtual fantasy dragon battle- they'll just refuse and look at you weird!
Steam achievement unlocked: <insert whatever is in your imagination here lol>
Indie games are gonna get a lot weirder... pray for our overloaded dopamine receptors and shriveled serotonin ones. Pornhub will probably roll out their own game store steam clone lol
While its correct that telecommunication will become much important at work, i dont see why people will be stuck in VR outside work. If all work is remote, why would anyone choose to live away from loved ones?
This is a good point — the elimination of physical co presence as a requirement for most forms of interaction other than intimate ones may lead to a world where people physically return to be nearest their kin, and interact with all other institutions they are in remotely (not just work, but for school, entertainment, worship, etc)
What are your thoughts considering that VR was supposed to be the next big thing in the 90s already (at least from what I remember hearing...) and what are your thoughts regarding human chemistry?
The tech track towards full perceptual override in this current generation of VR is fairly well understood and has been on track, though slightly delayed, for approx 7 years now, with the current Oculus Quest device being the best available, and something many of us in the industry felt was almost a dream possibility a few short years ago. So I'm fairly optimistic that the tech will mature to a point where it is effortless to have fully convincing perceptual software proxying all day in 10 years.
I think the bigger unknown questions are around the impact of this technology. It seems hard to understate how much of a change it will be, particularly if there is a path towards young people being able to use it at a young age.
The problem with all these predictions about VR taking over, is they seem to pretend that visual sense is the Holy Grail of VR immersion we've all been waiting for. But that's a far cry from what was imagined in The Lawnmower Man or The Matrix. In reality we have 4 other senses to take care of first.
In the mean time you just have a display that obstructs your view and which can't be tolerated for more than a couple of hours.
Think farther. In ten years incident photons and sound pressures to your senses will likely be possible to fully software modulate. The other senses I agree are harder to speculate about, but on a ten year horizon imagining the existing status quo of form factor and method (headsets) is the wrong way to think about it. Likely these things will be effectively invisible or weightless. At the ten year point I’m imagining these to be lightweight over-eye lenses/goggles or even contact form factor. The analog would be legacy, large headphones vs modern earbuds.
By the end of the decade, most people will be wearing some kind of immersive computing device (glasses, contacts, perhaps neurological etc) all day which allow software to proxy most aspects of their visual and audio perception, perhaps more.
Among the many results of this change, the most profound will be the loss of physical co-presence as a factor for interacting with other people. People will routinely 'beam in' each other (similar to FaceTime conceptually, but with no visual or auditory perceptual deficiency vs being together in person) in varying contexts for varying purposes.
The technical miracle aside, this will cause a fundamental shift in the way we think about what it means to "be" with other people -- the dependence upon physical co-locality will be no longer something we place highly in our mental model for spending time with others, other than children.
This will affect nearly every industry in terms of economics, some sectors potentially catastrophically like long distance transportation, but the biggest effect will be degree to which we will become able to empathize with others around the world and create novel, deeply impactful forms of interacting with others in a physical and emotional sense.
I suspect, perhaps hope, that the dominating result will be that, in combination with new forms of media based upon these new technological marvels, we will be able to greatly reduce or eliminate the tribalist tendencies we have for one another when those 'others' are out-of-reach for us to talk with, hug, dance with, and learn from.
In 2030, you'll be able to hug anyone on Earth instantly, and that's something to be optimistic about.