Technology prediction for 2018

Bubbles of bitcoin, blockchain, machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence and more

People usually appreciate me for my predictions on technologies. As I already noted our team will quickly hit the edge case for any use cases and that's supposed to be the reason for my better prediction rate. And so, here are my predictions…

Bitcoin bubble

When Bitcoin became talk of the town/industry, I informed my boss and colleagues that I find no real use case for this digital currency--except in underground markets like drugs, etc. In fiat currencies, there is at least a way to take legal route, in case, if you've transferred the money and not received the goods. But, in Bitcoin, this is not possible at all as it is not a legal currency. So, if there is no trust, the chances that other person can cheat you by not sending the goods and or not transferring bitcoins after receiving goods.
My stand above vindicated by the article Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

Blockchain bubble

Some overwhelmed people even told me that the Blockchain, the underlying technology behind Bitcoin will become huge hit. I'm highly skeptical from the initial stage itself. The only advantage of Blockchain in my opinion is its ability to provide immutable public ledger/database--but at very high cost (of mining). I think, people who're betting on Blockchain for such security feature will move back to PGP kind of public-private key encryption mechanism.

Machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence bubbles

In 2017, these buzz words became popular. These technologies were projected as serious human replacements. When I checked these technologies, I have noticed that these are far from perfect and at least now they can't replace people. My stand is vindicated by the interview of Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Software Engineer working at Google Brain, in which he said:
I mean, this is my opinion. We are nowhere near matching human intelligence. I mean, the machine learning systems that we're using are very, very simplistic, and don't work at all. In fact, I have a blog post about my residency, in which I enumerate all the difficulties there are in developing these models. I think people who don't work in the field have this idea that you can kind of take this model and push some data through it, and it's just going to work. But that's not the case. These things are very finicky and not well understood, and it takes many, many months of careful tweaking and experiments to get even the most modest results.

Google based SEO bubble

I had my strong skepticism in SEO from the initial stage itself. As a Google user, I'm very much happy with its instant answers, instant lyrics display, etc--within Google's result page and without taking to any websites. But, from a vendor/website point of view, it will be a big letdown as Google is hijacking all contents and web. So, in my point of view, people will look for alternate source of traffic.

Back to idea-based startups and MVPs

So, I believe in this year, people will renew their interest in short term MVPs (Minimum Viable Product) and so there may be more idea based companies like AirBnB be coming up.

Better instant auto-magic REST API server technology

Unfortunately, this is one of the tiring aspects of webdeving. Current SPA (Single Page Application) approach is over 7-years old, but still we don't have a solid Rails-like framework/technology to build REST API server. As noted in the Restyaboard wishlist in GitHub, I'm eagerly waiting for one auto-magic REST API server technology and hoping for one in this year.

Multi platform React Native Starter Kits to take the lead

We already have few React Native Starter Kits such as react-native-nw-react-calculator, ReactNativeUniversal, react-native-web-fiber-boilerplate, react-native-desktop, React Native for OS X, React Native for macOS, React Native plugin for Universal Windows Platform (UWP)  that can target Android, iOS, Web and also Desktop. I hope that it will evolve to bring more standardization. I also believe and wish that such multi platform starter kit gets a WYSIWYG IDE for React Native.