Which will explode in the near future in your opinion and why?
Cryptocurrencies. It has the potential to finally overthrow the old financial order and empower end users to…
BWAHAHA. Sorry. I can’t even write this crap as a joke.
At first I was like…uh… heh
Machine learning as a programming paradigm. There is a lot of potential still in my main mind of simplifying AI training and using it to solve simple tasks.
Distributed AI and its potential to help here is a big one too. Projects like petals.ml and hivemind come to mind, but so does projects like open assistant showing what volunteers can build
3D printing. We are entering an era where we cannot mass produce anymore. We will have to rely on repairs. And 3D printing is an excellent way to replace broken parts of what we buy.
Open source hardware can easily become the norm. If your product comes with a 3D plan of every parts of it then it should be promoted by governments, by reducing taxes on your product for example. On top of that this technology can easily be used locally.
There’s a fair amount of waste involved in 3D printing (support structures for example), as well as expertise needed to figure out tolerances and quirks of an individual printer. There’s also an argument that we need improvements in 3D printing that would allow us to use metal (sintering) instead of plastic (extruding or UV exposure) both for sustainability and structural reasons.
I’d agree that 3D printing has a much higher potential than it currently is used for, but let’s not pretend it’s a cure-all for consumerism.