No Stupid Questions

I think it will become easier and easier to generate content tailored to individuals and all that noise will make it harder for human created content to pierce through, until it becomes too impractical to create and distribute content. Then it will take some kind of quiet revolution where everyone starts rejecting all forms of technology as overstimulating, and move towards simple communication devices to try and connect with each other.

It will get increasingly locked down due to authoritarianism and corporate capture. Small pockets like the Fediverse persist, but it becomes harder and harder to use as regulators impose laws on more technology.

The internet is still relatively new. The generations that don't understand it still govern.

I think the millennials will be its last hope, because they remember the world without it, were young enough to understand it when it became popular and aren't yet old enough to have forgotten how much more fun it used to be.

If that nostalgia finds its way into meaningful regulations, it'd be nice.

If you think the human race as a collective organism, the internet is the nervous system. Suddenly we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we feel pain through it, we form collective thoughts and organize actions.

We have collective intrusive thoughts and impulses, we store our memories there and we train it to anticipate and predict using prior knowledge and reasoning, as we do.

We need to take care of it and feed it correct information or it'll become erratic and stagnant.

I predict it'll be splintered into pieces and from them something new will emerge.

Tech in general is peaking in performance and and so it must differentiate in features to be competitive

It will reach a point where storage capability is so massive and yet physically very small we will all be carrying a copy of the ‘internet’ around with us and it will constantly be synching across all devices.

It will be boring eventually like a toy that you've played with too much for most people.

Either we quickly find a way to undo the damage government regulation has done to it in the last ~10 years, or we lose all the good it could do for society forever because the coming generations won't know what they're missing. :(

Manipulation

For general consumers? Probably complete industry collapse and regression. Specialized industries and national security use will continue to develop, but broad market access is going to likely stagnate for a decade at least if not more.

It has become too accessible and thus will be censored and restricted to the point of ceasing to be useful in the next 5-10 years.

Personal computing is being chipped away and the goal seems clear to force everyone into cloud computing or something similar to it in the very near future.

Both businesses and governments benefit from this move.

Businesses want control over your data and what you can and cannot do. Allowing you to use open source projects causes too much disruption to their business models to continue to allow that. SaaS is a much better model for them to continue to grow and maintain their presence over your choices and wallet and wall you into their garden and this would allow them to do that indefinitely in some cases. Even for gaming companies like Nintendo, it would be best for everyone to only ever use approved hardware. Allowing emulators is a hit to their goals and if a business like Microsoft owns the virtual computer you use, then they can refuse to allow emulators to run on their computers used for cloud computing at Nintendo's request, whether willingly or by force.

The exception I see to that is a business like Apple that relies heavily on selling you new hardware as often as they can. Just one more device and also ensuring you stay up to date with the latest hardware. I’m not exactly sure how a business like theirs benefits from the reduction of personal computing, but they’re not doing much to fight these advances. Perhaps they see themselves selling us the hardware clients that serve no other purpose than to connect to the virtual computers.

Governments like it because businesses cave to their demands. Damn be the Constitution and other laws that purposely limit their overreach into your life. They just get the company to do it for them and override your freedom to choose. See covid and ICE. Both political spectrums are doing it for different reasons but likely with the same common goal at the end of the line.

Shortages like the RAM and GPU shortage greatly favor this push and causes consumers to view cloud computing in a more favorable light. At least, that’s what they hope for, but it’s difficult to do that when cloud computing and AI are the reason you’re lacking new hardware and it’s not for another more justifiable reason.

It seems inevitable at this point as they keep trying to force it.

The next tech industry crash will probably take out all the big platforms because they never really figured out how to make money, and self-hosting will take over as Basic Hardware capabilities have been improving all the while, the software to host servers and get through NAT jail have improved, and Regulatory crap like porn bands and age verification have given a decisive Edge to platforms too small to be effectively censored passed a whack-a-mole level short of extreme censorship which even then can be bypassed with wireless or wired Mesh networking.

Think about it, feature wise what does reddit do that Lemmy or piefed can't? Plex is the best way to stream already. Hosting a website is also trivial now when it used to be a big deal that Apache web server existed in the first place.

seems like the current trend is consolidation - it will be more expensive and less accessible to own your own computer or run your own servers, programs will continue to bloat and require more expensive hardware (see LLMs for example), and this will all lead to greater consolidation under fewer and fewer entities

the ruling meta-regime is in the process of enforcing the non-ruling-classes into an inescapable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon & enforcing learned-helplessness on all they can.

Feudalism, unbreakable.

ONLY right-technology, right-law, right-regulation, etc, CAN make human-lives be worth-living in a world where technology distorts so potently as ours now does.

Unless you/someone finds the one who can coerce a meaningful portion of our world to do the right-action/right-speech/right-law/right-technology thing, all the way through,* then .. feudalism's our epitaph.

Social-pressure's incapable of coercing such regimes, so is "political-will"/whim.

East-Germany, but "perfect", is our fate, unless someone breaks the undertow/trend, soon.

_ /\ _

When brain-computer interfaces are perfected our minds will be networked with computers and each other. The concept of privacy will seem very quaint to or children's children.

Resistance is futile.