I don't think we've reached the pinnacle just yet. If anything, I feel like we've only scratched the surface. But I can see a transition on the horizon and I'm not fully sure what that would be. I feel like it's yet another case of Charles H. Duell's famous "Everything that can be invented has been invented" quote from the late 19-th century. I basically grew up on the internet, starting from when I was six in 1994. And in those 27 years the internet has changed multiple times and each time I heard people saying "this is it, this is as good as it will ever get". The semantics of the word "good" aside, they were always proven wrong. The internet created an economy that is almost independent from the real world. Starting from the early emails, the first online payments, then it was web 2.0, bandwidth caught up to the demand, then it was the whole smartphone-social network-streaming services pack. Perhaps an unpopular opinion but AI never picked up and was almost killed off by an artificially blown out hype from marketing side. Just try and remember what the HN frontpage used to look like 4-5 years ago - a good 30% of all posts were AI related. At this point in time there could be weeks without anything on the subject. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly interesting field with a lot of potential but I don't think it is/will be the next big thing. The cryptocurrency thing really caught me off guard to be honest and I would have never imagined that it would be such a big deal. If anything I was willing to bet more on AI than crypto but here we are. As far as NFT I'm incredibly skeptical and I can't see this going anywhere. I'm equally skeptical about metaverses - that sounds plain stupid if you ask me.
Two things I'm keeping my eyes open for however:
1. IoT. Much beyond your wifi enabled light bulbs crap. Low power microcontrollers and sensors are dirt cheap and are opening a whole new world. Also 3d printing has come a long way and is very easily accessible to most people. Prototyping and developing small, low powered devices has never been this accessible. Just to give you an idea, this[1] entire section of my shelf in my office has probably set me back less than 200 euros and there's 3 times more stuff which has gone into different projects already from those 200 euros. The one thing missing are standards for communication and interfacing with those devices because as we stand right now, it's more or less every man for himself. IoT is a gold mine not just for smart homes but for manufacturing, distribution and infrastructure - the amounts of things that can be built is insane.
2. It is related to the first point and I might be a bit biased here/geeking out but... Space. This is something I've been investing a lot of time in lately and have been researching/thinking about prototypes. I was absolutely blown away by how accessible it is to launch your own micro satellite into the thermosphere. As it turns out, you could do that for less than a five figure. Of course you'd need to go through an absolute nightmare of paperwork, regulations, licenses and whatnot but... The number of companies that are working in that field is incredibly small. Shameless plug in here - if anyone is interested in giving me a hand on a (mostly) open source project in that area, do contact me(email in profile).
Two things I'm keeping my eyes open for however:
1. IoT. Much beyond your wifi enabled light bulbs crap. Low power microcontrollers and sensors are dirt cheap and are opening a whole new world. Also 3d printing has come a long way and is very easily accessible to most people. Prototyping and developing small, low powered devices has never been this accessible. Just to give you an idea, this[1] entire section of my shelf in my office has probably set me back less than 200 euros and there's 3 times more stuff which has gone into different projects already from those 200 euros. The one thing missing are standards for communication and interfacing with those devices because as we stand right now, it's more or less every man for himself. IoT is a gold mine not just for smart homes but for manufacturing, distribution and infrastructure - the amounts of things that can be built is insane.
2. It is related to the first point and I might be a bit biased here/geeking out but... Space. This is something I've been investing a lot of time in lately and have been researching/thinking about prototypes. I was absolutely blown away by how accessible it is to launch your own micro satellite into the thermosphere. As it turns out, you could do that for less than a five figure. Of course you'd need to go through an absolute nightmare of paperwork, regulations, licenses and whatnot but... The number of companies that are working in that field is incredibly small. Shameless plug in here - if anyone is interested in giving me a hand on a (mostly) open source project in that area, do contact me(email in profile).
[1] https://i.imgur.com/XRRmpwd.jpg