from Hacker News

Ask HN: In the next 5 years which markets will grow the most and why?

by zongitsrinzler on 5/20/17, 5:05 PM with 76 comments

• by Mz on 5/20/17, 6:39 PM

  Most people are terrible at predicting the future in this way. Some of the most accurate predictions sound like (or are) jokes at the time, like when JK Rowling was writing her first book as basically a "welfare mom." She did a lot of the writing while her baby napped at some eatery owned by friends/relatives. She would make jokes to the effect of "When my book gets famous, it will put your place on the map!" That basically all came true, from the book being famous to it making the place she wrote it famous too.

  But when you go back historically, predictions of what life would be like "now" all left out the world changing invention of computers and internet.

  There is a scene in the movie "The Graduate" where he is at a party and everyone is telling him what he should go into as his career because it will be big in the future. One person tells him "Plastics!" This was a joke at the time, a ridiculous statement. Years later, the plastics industry used that bit in a TV commercial.

  If you really, sincerely believe "The Future is all about X industry," you aren't telling people that on the internet. You are quietly behind the scenes buying more shares in X or getting training to work in X or otherwise trying to make sure you are the firstest with the mostest in X.

• by chauhankiran on 5/20/17, 6:09 PM

  I personally think the market of add-on or web browser's extension.

  Why? Because, web browser is second most software used after operating system by a normal computer users. If you are developer you use editor and web browser, if you are writer you use world processor and web browser, if you are market person you use trading software and web browser and so on. I mean web browser is something used by everyone.

  We have written applications ( for computer and mobile device ) for most useful sotware - operating system to reach out our users. Now, it is time to target next software used by everyone. You might create a website but it will only be there until user do not close that tab. But, with extension, you will be in constant connection with user.

  Currently thid market is uder estimate as many developer consider that it is not something that consider as programming. But, I think every website specific limit to connect users. and at that situation, add-ons will come to rescue.

• by pdog on 5/20/17, 5:48 PM

  Blockchain and cryptocoin markets will probably grow the most in the next five years.

  The total market cap for cryptocoins will grow from $50 billion today to $1+ trillion in the future.

• by sonink on 5/20/17, 7:28 PM

  India. Because it will go from 100mn internet users to 1200 mn, enabled by a massive 4G/fiber deployment currently underway.

• by BatFastard on 5/20/17, 6:42 PM

  AI in all its guises, such as self driving cars, virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, etc.

  Augmented Reality, I would suspect in a year or two we will have the first successful product.

  Services and entertainment for aging populations.

  Real estate auction services, Trump is going to have to sell of a lot after going to prison.

• by stock_toaster on 5/20/17, 6:44 PM

  Healthcare. Because a large portion of the population in the west (baby boomer generation) is getting older.

• by crypticlizard on 5/21/17, 8:03 PM

  Timescales are hard but...Ai will do mostly all of it and humans are being factored out. Humans will need not apply for real work, fake work could proliferate. Automation vertically integrated into robotic systems will prevail in mostly all sectors... Embodied AGI will autonomously operate under duress, capable of or superior to humans at warfare. This is already normal today to a lesser extent, but not publicly claimed by anyone. I believe this is so because a soldier never reveals his position. Superior Industries could be: computer hacking using AI, computers being used in new ways on a mass scale, super computer quantum computing, nanotechnology, organ replacement, DNA therapies, automated field doctors, 3d PTSD therapy machines, data thievery & recovery using AI. AI will cause crime sprees as new exploits using AI trump non-AI systems. Also, People plugging their brains into computers makes sense bc then we achieve intelligence upgrades.3d printers that print anything fast. Lifelong AI Buddies/monitors. Nostalgia Industries as old people feel really out of touch with the modern world. Propaganda and fake news bc they will be more effectively convincing bc AI. As AI really starts to prove itself superior People will question everything. Maybe we will want to colonize Mars bc it will make humans feel not obsolete. Who knows.

• by tyingq on 5/20/17, 7:54 PM

  Low cost cloud providers. No idea why there's not a low cost competitor to AWS, GCE, and Azure. And I don't mean just a VPS. Full service cloud with equivalents for EC2, ELB, S3, Lambda, etc.

• by zackmorris on 5/20/17, 9:07 PM

  Wrote a whole long response beginning with "my gut feeling is that markets are driven as much by politics as technology so Hacker News may not be the place to ask." Then said, man, that sucks.

  I'm hoping for a market to end all markets, where the product is money. You sign up with a company, it pays you. All anyone wants is cheap, cheaper, free. Getting paid tops that.

  So maybe solar panels are just getting competitive, but getting paid to put them on your roof, that's hot.

  Turo is hot.

  Universal basic income is hot. Maybe politicians don't have the imagination to make it happen, but we do. Secretly every employee in the world yearns to load the part of their job that even a monkey could do into a spreadsheet, go home, and still get paid. Given the permission to automate our own jobs, we’ll do it gladly and in large numbers. The only thing stopping us is really really, ridiculously rich people, and people with no imagination. Somehow we have to find a way to pay them as well, and keep paying them, no matter how much they don’t want to get paid.

• by dominotw on 5/20/17, 7:48 PM

  a reaction to technology overreach in ours lives. People are sick of their phones, laptops, sleep tracking, social media. We want to reclaim our mind back. There is place in LA that does Buddhist retreat where you sit in silence for 1 week, its booked 8 months in advance.

• by beagle3 on 5/20/17, 7:23 PM

  Person tracking.

  We're going through something similar to the industrial revolution, lots of people will lose their job to AI (or still be employed, but with significantly lower wages - even previously untouchable professions like lawyers, doctors and programmers).

  To avoid riots, these people will be fed either through existing welfare programs or new basic-income style ones. But the old guard will want to make sure they don't blow their money on hookers and blow and booze, so anyone who peddles "here's how we can figure out which of the welfare recipients is non-compliant with their spending habits" is going to make a killing.

  Sad, but inevitable in the current political climate.

• by espitia on 5/20/17, 7:37 PM

  The medical cannabis industry! - Science: as we pass the obstacles of regulation, more studies will be able to confirm (hopefully) what we suspect so far. - Zeitgeist of our times is "going green". - Damaged image of big pharma.

• by clio on 5/20/17, 9:06 PM

  The atheist generation will have grown up and begin to look for someone to tell them everything will be okay. It's a good opportunity to start a new religion.

  Also, some form of artificial companionship.

• by iamacynic on 5/20/17, 6:32 PM

  my three guesses (my company is in 1 of these areas):

  consumer internet privacy and security (think barracuda for the home market -- above and beyond a standard router/firewall possibly with active L7 features)

  consumer and enterprise storage management (they literally can't even make enough ssd's right now, people and companies are hoarding data and can't manage it effectively or reliably)

  rural and wilderness area wireless internet (people will start moving out of cities again and will want the same > 50 megabit low latency service).

• by westoque on 5/20/17, 7:29 PM

  Cryptocurrency.

  Have you sent someone money internationally before? How about across different banks? Typical transfers process at around 3-5 days. With the help of cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Steller and the like. Transfers happen in seconds. This will grow because now, banks will utilize this technology to get rid of the old one (Swift anyone?) and will save banks lots of time and money.

• by avaer on 5/20/17, 6:52 PM

  Some mode of online social interaction that seems ridiculous now but will seem obvious in retrospect. This will be milked for ads and acquired by a big player while me-toos nibble the ends in the aftermath.

  The market will grow from zero to millions in this time, but it will be entirely consumed by one of the big five and everyone will just think of it as a Google feature or something.

• by tmaly on 5/22/17, 12:56 AM

  I think food technology. As the worlds population grows, the demand for food and more productive ways to produce it will grow.

  I think semi-automated systems will become more automated using some of the AI that is in the news today.

  We may even see better automation on the programming front in terms of being able to create stuff.

  I think we will see more software and automation in government at all levels. There is drive to automate everything, but governments tend to be even slower than enterprise to adopt things given the budgetary process.

  Lastly, I think we will see some significant gains in genetic programming that come out of the CRISPR technique. If you recall the tech that allowed us to sequence the human genome was very slow at first. Eventually they developed faster techniques, and not you can sequence things an order of magnitude faster.

• by id122015 on 5/20/17, 7:16 PM

  There will be war. Anything that will protect us will do.

• by ParameterOne on 5/21/17, 1:26 AM

  Indexing. Who needs Google when you have your own index? And I don't know about you but I can't get passed 16 pages of search results on google even though it has billions of results for the search term "contact us" (have it set to 50 per page)

• by borplk on 5/22/17, 5:41 PM

  I will go ahead and make this prediction for the amusement of myself (hopefully) and others in 5 years. Here it comes:

  "AI will not become as big as people want to believe today."

• by AznHisoka on 5/20/17, 6:42 PM

  carpal tunnel syndrome specialists.

• by Existenceblinks on 5/20/17, 7:13 PM

  1) Weapon. Because of War. 2) Entertainment. Because of Pain.

• by nugget on 5/20/17, 8:08 PM

  Support for trade schools and skilled vocational pathways (and vocational entrepreneurship) in place of four year university education for all.

• by jayaram on 5/22/17, 7:07 PM

  I think in the next 5 years desktop applications are going to be a thing again. Frameworks like Qt, electron, nw.js and others have made it very easy for developers to create desktop applications.

• by richardw on 5/21/17, 12:29 PM

  VR. People living in a place/time/body they physically aren't. When I'm old I'd like to VR to all the places I missed out on visiting because I was working too hard. I won't be alone.

• by WalterBright on 5/20/17, 6:54 PM

  Health care. The boomers are entering their prime health care spending years, and Obamacare will engender huge industry profits from "spend all you want - someone else will pay the bill!".

• by tonyedgecombe on 5/21/17, 6:58 PM

  Anything to do with mitigating climate change, clearly we aren't going to do anything significant to stop it.

• by olalonde on 5/20/17, 7:47 PM

  Not a market per se, but there seems to be a lot of low hanging fruits related to machine learning.

• by atroll on 5/20/17, 7:01 PM

  im betting my pennies on real estate

• by alex_g on 5/22/17, 7:10 PM

  food automation, healthcare, learning/edu tech

• by NoCanDo on 5/20/17, 6:33 PM

  AI, because everything and their grandma needs to be smart.