mostlyobvious

2023 Predictions

8 min read

Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628

The most interesting thing IMO was to look at 2022 predictions and see how those turned out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236 From a quick skim, alkonaut seems to have done the best job to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29747250

Sometimes short-term predictions seem like a bit of a pointless exercise since so many things are driven by chance, but still, it can be a useful tool to confirm/disprove your priors, especially if you can correctly point to why you were wrong, so looking forward to revisit in a year.

On geo-politics the things I have been paying the most attention to:

  • China will suffer immensely over the next few months from COVID. The zero-COVID policy is permamently done for, replaced apparently with a rip the band-aid off approach. With reports of 250M infections in just Dec 2022, I expect deaths to total in the millions in 2023 (2-3M?), although we won’t really know the numbers for sure as officially published numbers will be absurdly low. There will be short term labor/manufacturing interruptions, although I don’t expect supply chain disruptions to be as bad as the first year of the pandemic. I’d expect a tight labor market to lead to the same inflation and recession combo happening around the world, and add in potentially a debt shock and collapse of the housing bubble. Between COVID and excess caution from watching how Ukraine has played out, I’d expect Taiwan to be pushed off the plate for 2023, although if military force starts massing, all bets are off.
  • On Ukraine, Russia will continue its strategic strikes on civilian infrastructure to try to grind Ukraine down, but I expect Ukraine will continue to strike back into Russian airspace and regain territory into the Spring. I think it’s likely that both Ukraine and Russia will stage major offensives shortly after the new year, although I believe Ukraine will strike first. At this point, I don’t see Ukraine settling for anything less than reclamation of all of its invaded territories (from 2014 on). Whether they will do this I think will hinge on how Russia’s first offensive of the year goes. If I were to make a call, I think that Russia will fail and will withdraw all its forces from Ukraine in 2023, and also that Putin will no longer be in power by the end of 2023.
  • Trump will continue to not face consequences for any of his actions and will prepare (poorly) to run for President in 2024 again.
  • Global average temperature will continue to climb:

OK, enough geopolitics, let’s talk tech:

  • Twitter - oh, well, still somewhat political I suppose. Elon Musk will continue running Twitter into the ground, and will start suffering serious downtime and incidents in the first few months of the year. In the meantime, users will continue to flow to Mastodon (now well past critical mass and I believe the de facto replacement for most early adopters) as well as other competitors (Post, etc). I believe that Musk will be forced to sell Twitter at a loss in 2023, especially as his continued public missteps will continue to tank Twitter revenue and Tesla stock prices. Tesla may itself be forced to merge/be acquired as his leveraged financing reaches dangerous levels.
  • More on ActivityPub. Besides Mozilla, Tumblr, I believe one of the large tech giants, most likely Google or Apple will roll out an ActivityPub instance in 2023. It’s free real estate, after all. Regardless, the network will continue growing and clients will improve. I will put an outside bet that a Mastodon fork or other ActivityPub-based competitor will gain traction by providing a significantly better UX and/or a more sustainable business model.
  • Both LLM (Large Language Models) tools like ChatGPT and Image Synthesis like Stable Diffusion are extremely disruptive technologies. While 2022 has seen these treated largely as toys/curiosities, I believe that 2023 will see these technologies being employed in earnest in a number of production use cases. 2023 should see the release of GPT4, which by all accounts is going to be monumental. It’s hard to adequately express what the impact on society will be. Maybe something along the lines of the invention of flying shuttle and the cotton gin for the Industrial Revolution?
    • A little bit of a side-track, but I believe that extant work in the blockchain space on digital identity, sybil resistance, proof of humanity, chain of custody in an adversarial environment is going to take much higher prominence in light of rapidly advancing/indistinguishable-from-human-created text and visual output.
    • Someone mentioned low-background steel as a metaphor for pre-LLM text corpuses. An interesting thing to think about…
  • Speaking of which, I’ve been keeping close tabs on crypto for a decade now. Crypto is not going away, and from a technology perspective, it is IMO stronger than ever. The first deployed blockchain (Bitcoin) still churns away. It’s basic crypto-economic theses still seem to be holding (and I don’t expect that to stop in 2023, although it’s fast approaching a cryptoeconomic cliff). In the meantime, the development of a composable ecosystem (based around Ethereum and EVM) of networks, dapps, and smart contract protocols with a full stack of financial primitives has now been proven to work, running entirely on proof of stake. Ethereum now settles almost 10X the value as Bitcoin, processes 10-20X the transactions across its networks, and has an exciting development roadmap.
  • The last area of tech that I pay a significant amount of attention to is XR. I fully expect 2023 to be a pretty interesting year for hardware, with both Apple and Samsung slated to introduce MR devices (likely in 2H around when WWDC rolls around?). The Lynx R1 is also finally getting ready to ship. I have a Quest Pro and have been building a little OpenXR/WebXR app in Godot, but I’m still waiting for at least a 2X in pixel density for better text rendering (which I don’t think is coming in 2023). I don’t see any VR/AR killer app in 2023 driving increased mass adoption of HMDs.

Like many people, I’m paying less attention to COVID these days, but my current take:

  • COVID won’t go away (hyperendemicity), although 2023 will be a continuation of 2022 where most people will try to pretend that it has.
    • I’ll make a prediction that there will be a breakout of an immune-evasive variant in the global south in mid-2023.
    • There will be global/multi-national approval of intranasal/mucosal vaccines (see also) (eg, BBV154/iNCOVACC, Ad5-nCoV) that will provide near-sterilizing immunity by the end of 2023
    • Related, but there will be a blockbuster announcement of positive human results of an mRNA vaccine, either as a universal flu vaccine, an HIV vaccine, or for cancer treatment.

A long time ago, I used to do more of this type of thing: