What is the most potentially-revolutionary software currently being developed?

JavaScript. Seriously. Been saying it (and getting laughed at for it) ever since Node first hit the scene.

NOTE: I initially wrote this post before I was aware of GPT-3. See the "rhetoric" bullet below.

I'm surprised to see so many narrow examples mentioned here: some CSS library, some JS framework, some project management app.

By "revolutionary", I'm thinking about software with the potential to profoundly impact life. This can be in established fields, or in emerging ones. I'm pretty sure there are efforts underway to build each of the examples below; we may just not know about them yet.

• machine learning - autoML
• law - deep-learning digital attorney able to find the most appropriate legal precedent in a matter of minutes, vastly outsmarting human lawyers
• politics - liquid democracy, or other voting systems solving the one-person-one-vote problem
• rhetoric - argument-making software able to persuade anyone on any controversial topic with a mix of flawless logic, appeal to emotion, and plain abuse of reasoning fallacies. This can have immense implications on politics, far beyond what fake news and social media manipulations have had, even at the current state of technology. UPDATE post GPT-3 and Neuralink: imagine a leader whose brain is connected to Neuralink and can come up with a brilliant, convincing, fact-checked, (counter)argument to anything, better than Gary Shapiro and the Limitless protagonist. Society is not ready to openly accept AI-based governance, even though we are already at the mercy of various algorithms deciding loan interest rates and whatnot. In 20-50 years, a charismatic leader with hidden wireless access to the successor to several generations of GPT-3 like algorithms, can plausibly take over the world.
• molecular biology - figuring out protein folding
• blockchain - encrypted storage of surveillance data (CCTV footage, Internet traffic etc.), whose decryption can only be done with a combination of keys from the owner of the data source and the authorities, and such decryption is permanently marked and visible in the blockchain. This would legitimize surveillance because the use of the data would be revealed.
• prediction markets - Augur looks promising
• SAFE Network - decentralized, autonomous and encrypted web
• transportation - cheap self-driving modules
• weather - high-accuracy weather prediction compensating for chaotic system effects
• BCIs - intepreting subvocalizations for silent computing, AI software to decode brain waves in general
• synthetic biology - iGEM, GenoCAD, and other tools

Palantir. I will not comment, whether this is good or bad but it's adoption rate is increasing steadily.

This software is old hat but i think streamer and especially IRL streamers using 5G and mobile broadcasting are going to change everything about entertainment. Musicians are forced to cultivate an online presence to perform and i've been enjoying a lot of live music from the comfort of my home.

The ability to deep fake audio and video

flutter.dev

I would say it is reasonml and revery ui and the application that will lead the revolution will be onivim 2. Native performance and cross-platform, what's better than this ? Well it's like typescript syntax

reasonml.github.io/

outrunlabs.com/revery/

github.com/onivim/oni2

Anything in the CRISPR space.

None

I think projects like Cloud9, Coder, and Google Stadia point the way to drastically changing how people interact with computing.

Truly collaborative work, helped brought to the mainstream by successes like Google docs are going to be big I think in changing how software is delivered and used.

So I've been working on Scoped JS as part of the CHTML suite - a set of new DOM features that finally lets us author the UI in plain HTML. Scoped JS is the part that lets us add behaviour to markup. It enables us bind application data to any part of the UI, and most-importantly, keeps that part of the UI in sync with application data/state. While this is the same problem every UI framwork tries to solve, there is this major difference in the HOW.

• Unlike other approaches that are based on some own-made syntax (mustache-like string interpolation, attribute-based directives, JSX, etc) that must be compiled, this approach is raw HTML and JS.
  

  <body>
    <div id="alert">
      <script type="text/scoped-js">
        this.innerHTML = message;
        this.addEventListener('click', () => this.remove());
      </script>
    </div>
  </body>
  

  ...
  

  let msg = {message: 'Success!'};
  document.querySelector('#alert').bind(msg);
  // #alert will also remain in sync with the msg scope object.
  

  (You could even author all of this on the fly on the browser and see it work. CHTML is the Web-Native UI component technology that works at platform level, contrasting the high abstractions, the compile step, and the rest of the over engineering of current frameworks.)

• While we traditionally call DOM elements from JavaScript code, Scoped JS lets us place that code right on the elements that need it. We can all stop worrying about CSS selectors by simply scoping a JS snippet.

• The zero bloat proposition! With Scoped JS there is no need to build a JavaScript class just to implement a simple alert component. Additionally, since every HTML now comes with it's own Scoped script, each page gets to work with just what it needs to work. And this is some inherent code splitting.

The Scoped JS technology itself is regular JavaScript that runs scoped to its containing element, featuring automatic observability on the given variables in scope.

So this I consider one good innovation that could have a major impact. Your thoughts, though.

MaidSafe with their SAFE Network
safenetwork.tech/

Think a distributed operating system, think zero boundaries, think privacy. Think censorship resistent. That's what Maidsafe can achieve with their SAFE network.

It's basically the next generation of the internet going way beyond where cloud services are now. Basically providing services that run on a multitude of machines regardless if they're operating in a data center or privately owned.

It will also feature a payment system through SafeCoin, safenetwork.tech/safecoin/

Projects like these are creating the future

...Linux on the Desktop? :)

But seriously, there is probably some kind of revolutionary but unsexy improvement to medical equipment or something along those lines that will never reach the top of social media. I don't know anything about such fields so I'm just gonna do some tunnel visioning and think about what would be revolutionary to me.

Somewhere there is a team working on the "real" solution to the "put my code on the internet and run it" problem. Not Kubernetes and not Heroku. Something that "just works" and will solve the programming devops problem for simple projects for good. It will be self-hosted and all you have to do to scale it is pull the slider or something. And no, that is not what Kubernetes is. I said simple! That'd be pretty good.

tailwindCSS + purgeCSS still stands a good idea. While the idea inherited from atomic CSS, writing your own CSS's is not easy.

1) wasm+wasi.

A good proxy for impact is to take time and perspective into consideration. One could argue that Docker was revolutionary, and it was, but for perspective the creator of Docker is quoted for saying he would have never needed to invent docker has wasm+wasi existed at the time

Solomon Hykes

@solomonstre

If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to created Docker. That's how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing. A standardized system interface was the missing link. Let's hope WASI is up to the task! twitter.com/linclark/statu…

20:39 PM - 27 Mar 2019

Lin Clark @linclark

WebAssembly running outside the web has a huge future. And that future gets one giant leap closer today with... 📢 Announcing WASI: A system interface for running WebAssembly outside the web (and inside it too) https://t.co/HdEAZAyqYu

694 1691

Likewise kubernetes is also great but maybe anchored to the period when wasm+wasi had not existed. Kubernetes was definitely revolutionary for the time of Docker.

Wasm+wasi technologies are still early in thier lifetime but will likely change many technology spaces in the near future in way that were not possible prior.

2) Rustlang.

It's has a slower adoption curve than some other programming languages but has consistently proven to be effective at solving and preventing problems not possible in other languages that exist today.

This is of particular importance where security is of interest and efficiency of energy consumption where the future of earths environment and natural non renewable resources are of interest! Rustlang tends to run more efficiently and cheapy than other language runtimes which economical benefits that would be difficult to achieve otherwise - aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-f...