Future Predictions

In the past I've made several predictions that were dismissed, at the time, as ludicrous, but have in fact come to fruition, like the importance of having dynamic environments in games and graphics engines that can handle it. So, here I present a complete list of all the computer-related or economic predictions I currently have, along with justification:

Speed becomes paramount to all mature markets: People have been ignoring speed for as long as they can, because its apparently rather difficult for programmers to properly optimize programs. This is fine in emerging markets because no one knows how fast things can go. However, the more mature a market gets, the faster the consumer will notice speed problems - even little ones. People are really impatient, and a program that successfully combines both ease of use and extremely fast calculations will win over a bloated, slow, feature-filled one. This has become markedly apparent in the current cycle of web applications, and will soon spill over into just about everything that we use.

Arguments against this usually say that a faster processor will make slow programs go away, and that algorithms are the only things that make significant speed differences. There are a lot of technical reasons I could go into concerning why this is wrong, but there's a much easier argument: Why have my programs gotten slower over the years as my processor speed has increased? Because programmers are getting too lazy. In fact, most of the speed increases over the years have been due to algorithmic optimizations, and yet... programs are still slow. The amount of speed you can now gain over properly building an architecture and optimizing your program is so incredibly large that it is noticeable even for comparatively large computational tasks, and hence represents an economic benefit that has yet to be exploited. It's a little more complicated then simply making fast programs, however, involving a combination of user friendliness, speed, and avoiding feature bloat. The myth that speed doesn't matter in programming, however, is about to start costing companies serious money if they continue to believe it.

Rasterization won't get replaced by ray-tracing: Or rather, it won't get replaced any time soon. There are a lot of incredibly annoying computational issues with raytracing, and a lot of them can actually be solved by combining both techniques. As a result, what will happen is a slow evolution, where ray-tracing will slowly work its way into rasterization pipelines, likely starting with variable density volumetric entities, until it eventually replaces rasterization altogether once we have more computational power then we know what to do with. This probably won't happen for another 20 years, though.

A lot of people argue that we can do impressive amounts of raytracing even with modern computing power, and that the increased parallelism in CPUs 20 years from now will result in feasible realtime raytracing engines that can compete with modern rasterization very well. There are two problems with this: The first is that they are ignoring the fact that rasterization itself also benefits from parallelism, and as such it's rendering quality will increase as computing power does. This usually leads into the second mistake: people argue that rasterization will simply hit a ceiling and be unable to get past it, and only raytracing can produce true photorealism. These people completely fail to understand just how much stuff can be efficiently accomplished using rasterization, and also do not understand how raytracing can be combined with rasterization to achieve almost the same amount of realism for a tiny fraction of the computing cost. Other people just don't understand how computationally expensive the tiny nuances of photorealism are.

Low-level languages will become even more important: Lots of people want low-level languages to vanish, but due to the above speed concerns, that simply isn't going to happen. However, business moves too fast for people to worry about low-level routines all the time, so what will happen is an increasing chasm between high speed low-level languages that are dependent on high-level languages to do complex tasks, while the high-level languages will be increasingly dependent on low-level libraries in order to deliver effective performance. Hence, language interoperability becomes incredibly important, because the programs of the future will likely be written in 2 or more languages. The ability to simply pick a language as a tool, choosing it based on what problem needs to be solved, will become invaluable. This is likely to happen very quickly, in just 5 or 10 years. At the same time, this increasingly wide division between high level and low level languages will create a vacuum that needs to be filled by...

Middle-level languages: A middle-level language will be a language that allows a programmer to quickly and efficiently write a method either in the style of low-level memory management, or high-level complexity management. This would likely be accomplished with something like D, where the programmer would be able to control and override the high-level garbage collectors and variable management whenever they desire, with little to no resistance from the language syntax. While many high-level languages today attempt to make some low-level functions available, it is often clumsy and far from complete. This language would act as an intermediate compromise between the necessary low level speed hogs and high level complexity management. This transition, however, is not going to happen for probably another 10 or 20 years, due to people needing to recognize that there is a schism in the first place, along with several engineering problems that must be confronted.

Education will soon fundamentally change: We've been using the same, outdated rote methods of teaching for almost 150 years, slapping on in-place attempts at more modern learning, trying to work such fundamentally incompatible methods into the existing framework that refuses to change. It is becoming so economically irrational for people to continue being schooled this way that the instant an alternative comes up, it will rapidly displace the existing system. This is already happening at a small level with Khan Academy, which I believe is precipitating a fundamental change in how we learn things. We aren't there yet and we probably won't be for say, 2-3 decades, but around that time we will see a huge shift in the educational paradigm.

Anti-authoritarianism becomes rampant: This one probably won't happen for a good 50 years, but the inklings of its beginnings have already shown up, primarily in Anonymous and the multiple middle-east government coups. Anonymous will end up being one of the most important social movements in modern history, as it matures from a group of pranksters into something that unites a large portion of humanity together. Governments will be forced to become more transparent and accountable, and debates about the effectiveness of representative democracy will rage in internet forums or whatever the future equivalent is. Part of this change will likely be influenced by a changing educational system that becomes much more effective at promoting critical thinking and individualistic problem solving skills. Extreme anti-authoritarianism, including anarchy, will become far more vocal and possibly less ignored by the public, but by necessity will remain fringe groups.

The economy will become both more capitalistic and more socialist: This is not a contradiction. The huge disparity between the wealthy and the poor is reaching such an absurd level in the United States that it has created an economic disparity that can be taken advantage of. At the same time, the most successful companies are already beginning to realize that increasing competition and other capitalistic values inside their own corporations results in far more productivity and efficiency (just look at what Larry Page is doing at Google). That means that capitalistic values will become more pronounced at smaller and smaller economic tiers, while the economy at large takes on a more socialistic approach to even out the wealth distribution. I have no idea when this will happen, because it is dependent on the two arguing political parties in the united states to realize that they both want the same wealth distribution. They just have to stop arguing and come to a compromise to try and do something about it.

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So there you have it, my predictions for the future. Some of them might be right, others might not, others might be influenced by me planning to directly instigate them, but hopefully this was an interesting read nonetheless.