Great topic Jamie - and welcome to Devtalk!

I think we are going to see a few cycles, with each iteration starting off relatively small and then becoming increasingly longer.

10, maybe 20,000 years from now, is it possible we may know everything there is to know? And by then we are more likely to have become the next version of humanity too? A self-enhanced species that may be more computer-like ourselves? (I definitely think we are still at a very primitive stage - compared to what we could eventually become.) Before we get to that stage, we will probably have self-writing programs/languages appear at some stage, where we simply stipulate a spec and all the hard work is done for us (so yeah, the first step may be creating AI tools as simple as it is now in creating a basic crud blog/site).

Shorter term (next 5 to 10 years) I think hardware is going to cause the first big split. Apple are most likely going to lead here and we can see evidence of this with the various hardware in iOS and macOS devices that their counterparts just don’t have - and to get the best out of these features it will probably become more important and maybe even necessary to use their own languages.

Open Source has changed and will probably continue to do so as well. I like how it’s enabled everyday people to make a living from doing something they are passionate about - even if, as you say, there is a capitalist element to it (I personally think it’s great people earning a living from doing something they love). In terms of organisations owning open source, I think it depends on the company and their intent - lots of people have written about ulterior motives of tech giants, and a lot of it may be true, but I think when there is a ‘decent’ company behind something (eg: Ericsson and Erlang) then this is a big plus point. Btw, speaking of decency - I actually met an Ericsson CEO many years ago while on a flight, he was sitting in the back of the plane (i.e not first class - even tho I could see there were plenty of spaces there) which I thought was nice and humble (or just smart - in a plane crash those sitting right at the back have a better chance of survival apparently!)

I think we may actually see more and more devices, apps and services at this level because more and more people want simpler devices that can’t as easily track or spy on them as much. I have certainly been thinking about this a lot recently, particularly how pervasive AI/ML is making things - owners of big platforms will be able to create a psychological profile about its users and this can be (and probably will be/probably already is being) abused.

We need better laws for this and a simple fix to this could be that apps should/may only be allowed to do what a reasonable person would expect of it. So for example, on a social network or dating app, the messages between users should be private (encrypted), their data, browsing, or app-usage details should not be sold or shared to outside companies, psychological profiles should not be created about users, etc

Margaret actually touched on this in her 2021 tech topics thread:

Where I’d like to see computing go and where it is probably going to go (at least to begin with) are probably quite distant - I’d like to see more ethics, and decent honest apps and companies, but unfortunately I think for the immediate future we will see more and more of the opposite. Companies will continue to abuse their power in order to control and manipulate users. I think as a species and especially those of us in tech, have to strive for principles higher than that of making money… hopefully after that everything else will start to fall into place

AWS is a good example of a giant built on top of this open source free labor.

In very tight regulated profession where you will be legally responsible for the code you write and may end-up in jail.

I work in the security space and even before that I seen that developers and business don’t put security as a first class citizen, instead is almost always an after thought.

How many software is out there that security is an opt-out? I mean the software is released with tight security controls in place and then you need to learn how to opt-out from them.

Changing the mindset of developers and business about security is very hard, and more often then not I get a lot of resistance and downplay for whatever I try to educate people on. They came back with a lot of different excuses and business/developers rationals about trade-offs and risk assessments, but all this reasons fly out of the window when they have a security incident.

So, the question is not if it will happen, but when will happen… software development will be strongly regulated by law, and you may end-up in jail because some code you wrote.

See this talk from Uncle Bob that touches the subject: