Technology predictions for the next couple of decades

The title says it all really. This thread is for people to make and discuss prediction about the direction of technological development over the next couple of decades.

My predictions -

Moore’s law will finally be overturned by both physical limitations as well as reduced demand from home consumers for faster hardware. Instead, information technology progress will increasingly be driven by clever software and hardware design.

Intellectual property rights will become vitally important in research and development. Western software and hardware developers will become increasingly disadvantaged by patents that restrict their ability to innovate, and that much of the rest of the world are free to effectively ignore. Meanwhile their finished products will be freely taken. Slow recognition of the problem and lack of obvious solutions will turn this into a major economic issue.

Many other industries will be adversely affected by the ease by which their products can be stolen, but will eventually find ways to adapt.

3D prototyping and printing is a product in search of a problem, if it can find a niche for itself in the short term, increased research funding will turn it into something massive.

There will be a brief augmented reality fad, but there will be a short term backlash as people get sick of seeing giant glowing penises floating in space everywhere they go. Google will develop a refined version using their mapping software as a base, bring their eventual world domination one step closer.

Videophones and flying cars will still fail to take off :smiley:

Warfare will increasingly become the realm of the drone, but the necessity to have actual soldiers on the ground will prevent this producing the predicted reduction in casualties. There may be a scandal in the US as it turns out that the drones developed by the military industrial complex at the cost of billions of dollars perform poorly compared to commercial and home brew robotics.

Lasers will finally appear on the battlefield, but will also become a weapon of choice for terrorism, their potential to maim in a particularly horrifying way, ubiquitous presence in entertainment products, and easy untraced commercial sourcing may well turn into something very nasty indeed.

Cybernetic technology will leap out of the cyberpunk novel into reality far quicker than most people will expect as recent research into brain implant control, heavy government funding into prosthesis research, and abundance of young healthy maimed soldiers to practice on will pay dividends.

Brain output/input implants and thought controlled computer interfaces have the potential to radically transform society in the long term. Anti scientific feelings and squeamishness about the technology will probably prevent this from happening in the short term, at least in western democracies.

There is the potential for effective anti ageing and dementia drugs. No one will adequately consider the social implications until it is too late to keep a lid on them.

People will lose interest in nanotechnology very quickly when the predicted grey goo apocalypse and invisibility cloaks fail to appear. But the research in this area will have a huge impact on the less sexy batteries, motors, fuel cells, electronics, and construction materials that everything else will hinge on.

I’ve been saying the same thing about consumer’s not needing/wanting faster processors for 20 years, and I have been wrong. There seems to be no end of ways to “waste” cycles through more layers of abstraction. sexier graphics, larger media formats, etc. Of course now that I’ve made that prediction it will be wrong too.

I like your take on IP, I think that may well happen. I think that very soon the nexus of technology development will move to China and India. There are lots of students to be trained, cultures that value education and hard work, and huge market opportunities. The fact that educated Indians and Chinese also speak English, and educated Americans are usually not fluent in anything other than English, will make it harder for Americans to compete.

I see 3D printers coming down in price and being made into toys (think creepy crawlies without the smell).

I predict an all electric economy. Wind, solar, tides, hydro, coal, natural gas, and nuclear will all play a role in adding power to the grid for cars to use. Natural gas may still be used for home heating though.

We will give up trying to address global warming because any changes that the US and Europe can make will be dwarfed by the increasing demand generated by China and India as they move towards a western lifestyle.

Since you said “decades”, I think we will see directed energy weapons, but they will still be so large and cumbersome that they will need to be mounted on vehicles and aircraft. Primarily for use against aircraft, infantry and soft vehicles. IOW too big, maintenance intensive and restricted to be an effective weapon for terrorists.
I think the business world will continue to be more decentralized. More “cloud computing”. More telecommuters. More independent contractors and consultants. Video teleconferencing will become more popular. More widespread use of intelligent business decision making systems.

You mean, 2020s-style death rays?

Voice interaction with HAL-type AI will be common. It wouldn’t be as intelligent as HAL and wouldn’t pass the Turing test but within specific domains the interaction would be quite natural. This AI will be availabe to you everywhere: in your home, in your car, on your phone or laptop/tablet. With your permission it will have access to your detailed preferences, social networks etc. It will continuously interact with other systems and give you information you need depending on your location and preferences.

Self driving or nearly self driving cars. They will not fly.

Biometric IDs that tie multiple accounts to you. No need for a specific physical MasterCard, you will be identified and will either use your default account or choose from a list of accounts you have as to which will be billed.

Real-time high-def video over wireless.

Printers and copiers will still jam every third time you try and use them.

Do you realize half of these things have already happened?

As far as IP, I’ll take a stab that it becomes, if anything, even more of a big deal than it is now. If 3D printers become common, sales for cheap plastic products will fall. However, there will be a huge demand for the schematics of cheap plastic products. You won’t buy say plastic hooks, instead you’ll hop online and buy a pattern for plastic hooks then print out however many you need. The general business model will be to purchase the right to print X amount of an item. If you need more in the future, you have to purchase the right to print more. Fights over who owns that pattern and how much control they have over it will be the new front of the IP battleground. DRM will be a HUGE deal.

This will also drive fashion to some extent. Let the masses have cheap plastic junk, the snobs will be spending $100 for a wooden hook just because it is obviously not printed out. Small items made of wood or metal will become status symbols.

In 20 years I think it’s quite likely that biometrics along with smartphones will allow us to do away with cards, keys and cash altogether. It will be quite common for people to travel around with nothing other than a phone in their pocket. The technology exists today and it’s a matter of building reliable systems which everyone uses.

I don’t know how much patterns of simple objects will be available for sale. There will no doubt be open source repositories where 3d modelers produce anything you can imagine and it’s voted on by members of the community. “Hooks? There are 19 pages of wall hooks, do you want a specific holiday theme or architectural style?”

I predict cellphones pick up more and sensors and tools until they start to resemble tricorders.

Already cellphones have evolved into smart phones with numerous other uses such as portable media players, web tablets, GPS turn by turn navigation, address books, video chat, etc. Further they’re becoming more and more sophisticated. Already they have tend to have GPS, accelerometers, cameras, expandable storage, touch screens, qwerty keyboards bluetooth, etc… Further phones are being built that pico projectors, and tvs are being built with wifi connections to stream. Further Android 2.3 is rumored to have digital money functionality. You could actually use your phone like a credit card to buy things. I predict smart phones will turn into mobile swiss army knives, used in everything.
What does this all mean for you? Imagine waiting at the doctors watching a movie on your phone, the person waiting next to you comments it looks like a good movie so you use your phone’s pico projector to project it onto the wall and everyone watches it. About 45 minutes in you realize the parking meter is getting empty so you remotely put a little more money in it.

After the appointment you walk down to a nearby store for a pop, paying electronically with your phone. On the way back you see your car is being stolen, as the thief drives off you whip out your phone and remotely turn off your car. After the police come you drive home, turning on your car with your phone and streaming your music off your phone to the car radio. The car’s on board computer also streams data to the phone about the car’s health. A check engine notification pops up on your phone detailing what component of the car caused the check engine light to show up. It’s nothing major so you continue home, go inside and finish watching your movie on the tv as it’s streamed off your phone.

Another prediction:
The actual drive home is piloted by the car. The car drives it’s self, but it’ll be a while before the systems are robust enough and trusted enough to not still require a human licensed driver supervising. Think of it as enhanced cruise control. It steers, breaks, speeds up, stops, and plans the route. You just watch and make sure it doesn’t do something stupid.

More specifically, as the technology broadens what can be built with it, all property rights will become intellectual property rights: with the associated pros and cons (DRM, large “public domain/open source” repositories, piracy, etc.). Assuming ubiquity and reasonable cost on such things, theft of physical items will probably see a corresponding decrease. The potential to bring the whole world up to a first-world standard of living will increase with the technology’s availablilty (imagine, for example, what a machine that could make UV water sterilizers–pretty much just plastic and some simple electronics–could do for the world.)

In 20 years I think a paperless home and office will largely be a reality. Electronic paper which is foldable and easy to read will be used instead along with tablets and large screens. Microsoft has a great video which shows how this would work. Paper would still be used as a backup and for decorative purposes but it will be possible to live an almost completely paperless life if you wish.

“Many other industries will be adversely affected by the ease by which their products can be stolen, but will eventually find ways to adapt”

Have you read about the German company that is marketing ceramic nano ID particles?
You mix them in with your plastic at such a small dosage that it doesn’t affect the processing or properties. If you find what you think is a knock off you burn off the plastic and check the code on the particles. No particles= illegal copy. They say it is a way to give every product its own “DNA”.

The prospects of space will be mixed; ambitious manned programs for lunar or martian exploration probably won’t come to pass, but commercial access to suborbital and LEO space will be broad enough to become a true free-market industry, rather than the semi-private with government subsidies model we have now. Exoplanetary science will be able to state with confidence how rare or common earthlike planets are in our region of the galaxy.

Mobile devices will eventually be their own servers, hosting an open-source format for social networking. Intermediary networking sites like Facebook won’t be necessary.

Quantum computing will not be viable yet, but will have moved from purely proof-of-concept lab experiments to very early prototypes.

Aircraft carriers will be useful in peacetime as mobile airbases but will be tacictly regarded as unable to survive an actual shooting war. A semi-robotic “mule” will be available to help infantry units carry supplies and ammo. In response to aerial drones a small cheap short range SAM adequate to shoot them down will be developed.

I’ve been going on about manual driving becoming illegal in my lifetime, for years now.

We are NOT where I predicted we would be ten years ago. We are much farther ahead and the rate of progress keeps increasing.

The end of increased processor speed has already happened, as power constraints have forced new processors to be multiple core. Single thread performance hasn’t improved much for a while, but throughput may seem to have improved as all the stuff you run in parallel gets its own CPU. A limited number of things will be parallelized, but we haven’t made that much progress in this area since I took it in the mid-70s.

What we will see is the move to smart phones for most applications not needing a keyboard or large screen. My Droid already does an excellent job of understanding my speech. In a few years we all will be bluetoothed forever, and the software on the smart phones will get smart enough to be really helpful, in understanding where we are, where we are going, and anticipating needs. It will tell you when your next meeting is, where it is, remind you of items on your to-do list, and remind you of when it is time to eat and which dishes in a restaurant you go to you liked last time - it will also look up specials for you. Instead of 10% of us wandering the streets talking to themselves almost everyone will.

Don’t underestimate parallelism though, it’s all around you. Google, Ebay and other services all use racks of thousands of servers rather than just a few really fast ones. Graphics processors are highly parallel and more and more programs are using hardware accelerated graphics, even for trivial stuff like making the UI have shadows, reflections, 3-D effects, etc.

I’m involved in the design of microprocessors doing multi-threading. However the transaction sort of parallelism is exactly the type I said was simple for home machines, and which does not require a lot of single thread performance. GPUs implement parallelism for a nice special case. There have been many papers, and even some companies, founded on the premise that these architectures could be used for more general processing jobs. And they can, but people doing this run into the same problems I mentioned.

Carrying a boarding pass (even if it is on “smart paper”)? I can already use my smart phone as a boarding pass!