| (b0ttler0cket): What's the next big thing? It may not be all that hard to perceive. You're on Hacker News so you may be biased immediately to think it has something directly to do with programming and computers. Take a step back from that first, and you can immediately think of a couple. 1. Privacy/advertisements. (how are people going to sell things to us?) 2. Press/print materials. (print? it's gonna be old news right? save the trees?) 3. Security (everything's in the open now. how do we adjust? how do we protect information?) 4. Health (we shouldn't have as many problems as we do) 5. Transportation (our cities are getting bigger and "rural" is a word that basically means "hard to transport to.") 6. Environment (our environment is imminently approaching toxic and uninhabitable levels of pollution) 7. Energy (our resources are rapidly and imminently depleting) 8. Economics (crypto-what?) 9. Architecture (these buildings need to get way higher and more sophisticated. we're going to hit 9B ppl soon. rural chinese farmers are swarming to the cities (read that in an article). it's the worldwide trend. the buildings of the future:the buildings of today::the buildings of today:17th century colonial houses) 10. Engineering (okay, so a transatlantic underwater tunnel would be the single highest costing thing humankind would have ever attempted. even still, what more can we do? is the San-Francisco bridge et al. the best we got?) 11. Education (this is covered by every politician and so should be self-explanatory. more wide-spread systems of education. online is a start, but I read in an article (I think posted on HN) that the drop out rate is too high.) 12. Food (more people, more crops. more crops, more transportation, more oil, more livestock, more energy expended. Not to mention, bio-engineered food that produces more vitamins/essential nutrients - depending on who you ask, this is either a blessing or a curse) I feel like categorization is helpful here. You ask for the next big thing, but that question is so enormous. One person could say one thing, but how could another person argue against it being the next biggest? Is there a metric with which we can compare impact? And impact on what? Society? Businesses? Individual people? Microorganisms? I think if you categorize like this you'll have a much easier time thinking and ranking ideas. Comparing the next ideas in architecture and the next ideas in food development is quintessential apples and oranges. Here we're making it so that we can make better subjective judgments about what's a more important idea. |