The idea that online friends are somehow less “real” or “meaningful” than meatspace ones.
That change is coming hard and fast today. One generation and the feeling will be gone.
The death penalty.
Privacy.
People will still demand a large degree of privacy in their own homes. However, any expectation of privacy outside of the home will be considered quaint and almost charming in its naivite. There will be a Big Brother - but he will be largely checked by thousands of Little Brothers with their video cell phones and whatchamallits and gizmos and Watch Dog groups and so on. Society will become a fishbowl with almost nowhere to hide.
In response to this, people will very strongly protect the right of privacy in their own homes. However, the lack of privacy in the outside world will not be seen as an overwhelmingly bad thing. In fact, it will largely be accepted and desired; the idea will be that everybody is a Watcher, and the Watchers are all watching the Watchers, and very little Bad Stuff happens without it being discovered. At least, less Bad Stuff happens than in the bad old days before a video camera on every streetcorner.
Will?
I am photographed/videoed at ATMS, railway stations, trains, buses, taxis, shopping malls, my workplace, and my car is photographed at intersections and on freeways. And this has been the case for at least ten or fifteen years now.
And pretty much everything I do has a paper trail.
Go from city A to C? Fly, and “they” know I flew through passenger records. Drive, and if my bank statement shows a petrol purchase at city B, they know I drove.
The fact that money is more important than people. 
The 50/60/70/80 or more hour work week. The idea that money and success are more important than time.
The whole glitterai/paparzi aspect of pop culture.
As others have said, the whole gay marriage thing. The idea that religious people can influence common sense and morality for the rest of us.
Mutual Assured Destruction was the good option?
But how much does that matter, normally ? How much of that is ever given more than a cursory glance by someone, if that ? In the future, advances in software and computing power will make identifying things and people of interest much easier, along with correlating patterns of behavior and association. And it will be available to more people.
BlackKnight gave the best case scenario result of all this; there are others. Such as the possibility of society becoming as stagnant and rigid as an isolated village where no one dares do anything but conform, because they are always being watched. Or the fact that bigots can find the people they hate no matter how they hide leading to an orgy of harassment and violence, and retaliatory violence, with the cops unable to stop it because of the sheer number of people involved. Or society breaking down entirely, until it can no longer create such a “goldfish bowl”’. Or the creation of an unbeatable tyranny that watches you literally every moment; yes, the can do that now, sort of, but not very well; organizations like the East German Stasi were literally overwhelmed by the sheer mass of data they collected. And so on.
Travelling to the workplace every day. In particular, everyone travelling at the same peak-commuting rush hour.
The idea that anyone can have children without any regard to sanity, stability, or responsibility.
Incarceration. The idea that people just locked up criminals from long stretches of time, instead of reprogramming them like civilized people.
Privacy outside the home, as noted above.
Resistance to new forms of assisted reproduction and therapies, such as cloning, genetic therapy, and stem cell therapy.
People looking at old age and death as an inevitable, even in some cases desirable thing.
Psychology will go the way of leeches, bloodletting and the balancing of humors.
I think people in the future will be amazed at how we underfunded our nation’s public schools.
I think our sensational style of journalism is going to look as dated as television commercials from the 50s- fakey and overdone. People in the future will watch newscasts and NOT BELIEVE we ever took most network news programs seriously. Well, maybe 60 minutes.
Likewise, the way that we obtain news about politics, and what the media decides to focus on. Howard Dean’s squeal, for example? It’ll be seen as ridiculous and idiotic that people heard Howard Dean’s 10-second scream 20,000 times a day but nothing about his platforms.
That this is the age of anti-depressants. Everyone is on an anti-depressant. Ours as a culture that thinks medication is the key to happiness. This is not to say that there aren’t legitimate biological reasons for anti-depressants for some people, but the sheer percentage of people in this nation who are on them sends, IMHO, a big message about our culture.
The study of the mind will be obsolete?
2girls1cup.
Plastic surgery. One day we’re gonna look back and think how barbaric it was to peel off faces and reattach them, stick saline filled bags in the body, and scrape out fat from under then skin.
Also (and this may get me flamed), sex change operations. Mutilating functioning human parts because of the current rigidity of gender roles. I see it being no big deal in the future to choose what ever style of dress or appearence you want without feeling it necessary to slice off parts to conform to a preconcieved notion of what bodies go with what clothing.
You misunderstand the purpose of a sex-change operation. The patients are not cross-dressers, they have a fundamental disconnect between the sex they feel that they are, and the equipment they were born with.
I should’ve clarified, I meant more in a clinical sense. I think psychology may be a discipline that is studied, like philosophy, or religion, but in my little dystopian view of the future, I’m guessing behavior will be controlled chemically …or by whatever replaces microchips. /quaintly paranoyde prognostication
I think it’ll go in precisely the opposite direction. Plastic surgery is daily becoming easier, cheaper, and more effective. This will lead to an ever increasing view of the body as a malleable canvas for self-expression. The idea that people would go through their entire lives with exactly the same bodies they were born with will seem quaint and provincial. Eventually, this attitude will expand to include the entire concept of a fixed gender, with many people switching back and forth between sexes several times over the course of a life time, and others picking and choosing which sexual attributes they want installed, without regard for “traditional” human physiology.
No I totally understand that. But I believe the reason it causes such distress and disconnect is because people are forced to choose one role or the other and their only option to alleviate that stress, in this day and age, is to have extremely invasive surgery. Male cross-dressers still want to be men but enjoy dressing as women as a hobby. Male transsexuals would like to live as women; I’d like to see them having the option to live as women without feeling it necessary to get a potentionally mutilating operation.
I’m not really interested in hijacking the thread but I believe there are far fewer male to female sex change operation seekers because it is relatively easy for a woman to live almost completely as a man. I also realize my opinion does correspond with the popular viewpoint on transsexuality and I’ve only come to this opinion in the last few years, particularly after reading of Body Integrity Disorder cases, many of whose sufferes state their discomfort with their appearances and thier desire to make their “outside match the inside” in precisely the same language as potential sex change operation seekers.
I kind of hope somebody our descendants will be appalled to think there were once legions of people who would have sex with strangers for money, and that there were legions of people willing to pay a stranger to sex them up.