What is the next "big thing"?

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...

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.
- Spain is a minority led liberal government because of all the gains the far right has made.
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.

It should be climate action. Not saying it will be - just that it should be.

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

Pogs are due for a huge comeback (along with all things 1990s).

WASAAAAAAAAAAA~!
- -AAAAAAAAAA-

I'll keep adding to this if 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.

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.

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

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

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

Having LLM taking orders seems superfluous when ordering kiosks already exist
- 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).

Israel and Hamas unite over a shared love of falafels. You heard it here first, folks!

I'll just leave this here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H56lxmdUD1M

Clean Water wars

Daddy why is the water red?

The saying "fetch" as in

That's SO fetch!

That sounds streets ahead!
That's way too far-fetched!

Hats made of poop. It’s such a winner. Get in on on the cutting edge of fashion while you can.

The most chic ones are made from your own production plus random dog poo you find locally. Plus some grass for structural strength.

Spaghetti strainers that also work as hats!

https://www.spaghettimonster.org/2018/10/18/pastafarian-headgear-statement/
Old news.

Probably more forest fires and other climate problems this summer.

Iodine tablets

It's still very much AI for a while. The current incarnation is still in relative infancy, and will only continue to get more capable and disruptive. We're starting to see the integration with robotics, this is only going to become more significant with time.

It's likely that the next big thing will be a consequence of AI.

The current AI boom is all based on a single paper from about 7 years ago, and has been achieved by just throwing more and more computing power at it. There has been basically no meaningful architecture improvements in that time and we are already seeing substantial fall off from throwing more power at the problem. I don't think its a given at all that we are close to the kind of disruption you are predicting.
- "The internet has reached the peak of its usability and will never progress much past it's current level"
  This is you in 1997.
- I don't understand this deliberately pessimistic perspective I keep seeing around AI development that stubbornly ignores every other technological development in history. Even just considering the singular transformer architecture, we're still seeing significant and novel improvement. In just a couple years we've watched the technology go from basic predictive text to high quality image and even video generation, now to real time robotics control.
  The transformer architecture is incredibly powerful and flexible. The notion that the basic technology staying the same is an indication of stagnation is as ridiculous as if you said the same of transistors half a century ago. Most of the improvement we see in the near future will be through recursive and multi-modal applications, meta-architechtural developments that don't require the core technology to change at all.
- Which paper is that?

You've heard of A.I. but how about B.J.s? They are the future.

Bartificial Jintelligence

I think A.I and sufficiently good robotics will bring back class society to those countries that don't currectly have it. Elite will become more powerful, corporate power will surpass governments, rest of humanity will wallow in poverty, since they no longer have leverage in society. Whole world will become corporate driven banana republic.

Far more likely they'll erode class systems in countries that do have them by enabling everyone to have the same educational access, healthcare, etc.
I know a lot of people want everything to be bad for some reason but I think you're gong to be disappointed with how beneficial they are, just like the people who hated autolooms couldn't even imagine a world where poor people can afford nice clothes so ai haters today will be blown away by the huge social benefits of the technology as it evolves.
Soooooo Borderlands?

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

One can only hope it's something that positive...

Personal quantum computers, and maybe virtual reality with artificial intelligence combined.

Personal quantum computers would be truely useless. They break specific kinds of encryption, and simulate other quantum systems. Other than that, nobody's been able to devise a way to make them do much practical work.
Really, it's unfortunate they were named that, because they're only like computers if you have a solid background in computing to understand the analogy. "Quantum emulator" or "programmable quantum system" might be a better word that wouldn't make people think it's the next semiconductor node. Alas, I have no time machine to fix it.
- Maybe useless to you. I’ll definitely find use for it. And cracking encryption is a huge plus. Quantum computers have been around for a long time and in use there are all sorts of software and even special OS for it just not for public use for obvious reasons.

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.

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.
- 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.
forget its* name
Nvidia's* evolutionary one
it's* impressively quick

Push for digital IDs and CBDCs...

More please
- Try this: https://sociable.co/

Energy generation evolution I suppose. We are reaching the limit of how we generate energy. Need that Dyson Sphere for real.

Are we? There's still plenty of space for solar and wind. Including large battery installations for cities. It doesn't really feel like we're hitting a limit there anytime soon.
- We can't even make good battery for EVs....

Addressing many common diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, PCOS, depression, anxiety, and ADHD. All of these are metabolic diseases that were rare in human populations around the world just 50 years ago.

Contrary to what the US's department of agriculture says (that we should eat mostly plants via the Food Pyramid/MyPlate) starting in the late '70s, it turns out that the human species has evolved over >2 million years to hunt animals. Of the three macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats), we should be getting most of our calories from fats via fatty meats.

The growing popularity and success of ketogenic diets (especially the carnivore diet) in reversing many metabolic diseases once thought to be incurable and attributed to age is a sign that humans have finally rediscovered our species-appropriate diet.