Ask HN: What is the most important tech trend?

If the FAA gets it's act together then drones (aka flying personal butlers) could certainly be it. The disruption they could bring to delivery, courier, security, tourism, gaming, etc could be huge.

Also, self-driving cars (if they reached a reasonable price-point in the next few years) could have pretty profound effects on ridesharing, delivery, parking, congestion, etc. Could be a major quality-of-life changer for people in big cities.

But overall I think the most-important technology will be batteries. Long-lasting, fast-charging, small, powerful, cheap, recyclable batteries will be crucial to so many hardware-based industries. They are truly the stepping stone to many futuristic tech-trends.

Internationalisation. In the next few years there are going to be a billion or so new internet users who'll want content and eCommerce, but they'll mostly be on low-powered, low-bandwidth smartphones. That particular market is very poorly catered at the moment. There are some players out there, but there's going to be room for a lot more. Essentially the size of the internet user base is going to double.

Everyone is saying that Javascript is the world's most popular language, or at least soon will be.

That saddens me as I do not care for it at all. It's not like I can't learn how to code in JS, but to do so I find quite unrewarding.

I don't see 3D printing being commercially interesting for at least another few years. For anything you really seriously want a custom-made part for, you'd want a metal part made by an experienced machinist with a CNC mill. I expect 3D printers will get there someday but not soon.

Drones, quite likely there are many uses for them other than snapping pictures of white house lawn.

Bitcoin, maybe. In the long run, definitely. There is a specific limit to how many bitcoins can ever be mined. At the same time, more merchants are accepting them. Without a doubt, the dollar price of a coin will increase. I do not know yet - I haven't really checked - whether i'd expect bitcoin to do better than what I could do by investing in stocks, bonds or commodities, but in the long run I expect they would do better.

Distributed...PC's, "broadband", and mobile are early iterations of a ubiquitous computing mesh. This is not so much the internet of things but human controlled computing...that's where the margins are, not in industrial commodities. The next big thing will provide people with more computational power and more reach.

From a mainstream consumer software startup's standpoint I'm pretty sure adoption of mobile is still the biggest trend. The last 10 years was about everyone starting to have "smartphones" and mobile internet access. Now it's about society adjusting to "mobile" and doing more with their phones. Just look at Snapchat, Periscope or how people use Messenger. We definitely have at least 5 more years of major innovation in mobile usage. I think we're only about to hit the "early-majority" stage.

A lot smart folks are trying to figure out the AI space > http://www.wsj.com/article_email/artificial-intelligence-exp...

The growth of messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, which reflects a preference for communicating with smaller groups of contacts more frequently, in contrast with the one-to-many mode of communication popularized by social networks like Facebook and Twitter

Sensor networks. Interconnected intelligent self-adjusting self-responding devices. A marketplace of data generators and data consumers. Summarizing mountain of data, text, articles, detecting trends and responding.

Group housing may become popular when we get AI surveillance that can watch over the common areas and identify abusers. But that's probably more than 5 years out.

The car as a platform. Self-driving cars means cars will provide entertainment, news, and a work environment.

Robots