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
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.