Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963520

by alehul • 7 years ago

2 1 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

api• 7 years ago

If truth means relatively strongly held contrarian opinion I'll give you the science and tech ones. These vary in terms of how contrarian they are.

Phones are "done." There will be more innovation around the edges but little major innovation. Sales will continue to plateau and fall as there is no need to upgrade. Desktop will experience a minor renaissance as people realize mobile OSes and platforms aren't fully displacing it, though they will continue to displace it at the low end.

Biology harnesses quantum information systems (not necessarily anything like the QC we might build) at the cellular level up. True GAI will require QC. Present AI remains nothing more than glorified curve fitting with big models.

Quantum computing will have non-cryptographic applications first in areas like optimization, molecular simulation, etc. It will take longer for QC to seriously threaten ECC and RSA with larger key sizes due to how many qubits are needed and unexpected performance bottlenecks scaling e.g. Shor's algorithm. (I would still recommend PQ crypto if your adversary is a nation state or someone else with huge pockets.)

Cryptocurrency will disappoint in the short term but will be huge in the long term. But... this does not mean present day coins will retain their value any more than we still search with Altavista and Lycos.

Solar power will continue to grow but its contribution will plateau no higher than 50% max of the global energy mix. We will not phase out carbon heavy power without nuclear. Grid scale storage beyond load leveling will remain economically non-competitive with fossil fuels unless there are major chemistry or manufacturing.

Ask HN: What important truth do few people agree with you on?

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