Or will it be something most people have never heard of yet? Thoughts/ predictions?
* "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
Another AI winter
Another VR winter
Another hype-cycle of home automation
Another hype-cycle of growing teeth
Fundamentally new tech takes 20-30 years to come to market - especially if it really does change things (government regulatory regimes, infrastructure, how we live).
Now Moore's Law isn't giving us shallow victories any more, there is opportunity for deeper changes, that properly absorb and apply its past advances.
Right now, we are undergoing a re-orientation of our political systems, in the sense of how democracy operates without a traditional press; the continuing march of multi-nationals being more powerful than sovereign states; the hyper-concentration of wealth (due to the means of production no longer being land, nor labour, but technology). Social systems are a kind of "technology".
The central question of this technological change will be: why do the hyper-wealthy need people?
The most surprising technology will be new mathematics - not TB machine proofs, but quite simple and basic ones, akin to the positional number system, algebra, calculus. They will analyse complex systems, like Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics; the operation of deep learning networks; internet and traffic congestion; and cortical organization. They won't give magical results, but they will offer a new point of view, that some will experience as magical.
This is what concerns me. They already apply their wealth and organizations to treating the general public as a farm they cultivate. They shape the educational, tax, media, and legal structure in their favor quite successfully today. With the technological advancements in media development and their hold over education policy, tomorrow has a terrifying forecast unless some educational miracle of critical thought occurs.
AR a really close second, but I think people will be a little bit more ready for it given prevalence in sci-fi and experience of rapid computer & graphics progress in our lifetime. So it's easier to "expect" a world of Pokemon Go on steroids in your AR glasses than it is, say, one where a boutique offshore firm is offering to give your baby the ability to see into the infrared spectrum or something.
I can't find the source, but I heard on a manager tools podcast that ~50 years ago they surveyed professionals about the future of flight. There was a ton of predictions about crazy concepts, but the winner was "bigger planes going more places"
This is also kind of a fun read: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions
I'm old enough to have lived through the Drexlerian nanotechnology mania, and the Kurzweilian exponentialism mania, so I've learned to be extremely skeptical about anyone predicting earth-shattering advances in any field of technology in a mere decade's time. (The Singularity is not just over the horizon. Stop. You're not going to live for a thousand years or upload your mind to a computer. Just stop.)
My prediction is 2027 will be almost indistinguishable from 2017, if we're lucky, i.e., barring nuclear war or some CRISPR-crafted super-virus. However, if I had to choose a technology surprise for ten years from now it would involve being unlucky, i.e., the Loss of Everything Good due to an overwhelming tide of cyberterrorists and cybercriminals. I think few people (including me) fully appreciate how much destruction and chaos could be wrought, and how difficult it could be to protect our vital systems, so in that sense it would catch a lot of people by surprise.
The optimistic technology outlook for 2027 is petabyte thumb drives, 16K televisions, 8G wireless, cheaper solar cells, and marginally better medical scanners. It's a pretty uninspiring list, and none of it is surprising.
That's my hope. Please let there be no surprising technology in 10 years. Because the chances of a good surprise are vastly outweighed by the odds of bad ones.
10 years ago in 2007 I would have been surprised if we had a car that could drive itself, or a way to edit fairly specific genes.
Is that really a thing though? I keep hearing about it, articles saying that the first human to reach 300 years of age is already born etc. But is all this true? Of all things mentioned so far (AI, VR, AR, fusion power..), this is the one I have the hardest time imagining. Going from ~90 to 300 in 10 years is a huge leap compared to even the ~40 to 90 years leap of 200 years ago and today.
Do you have some trustworthy reading material on the subject?
It would also grant us the ability to much more effectively monitor our mental state. I bet it could be extremely helpful in combating anxiety and promoting mindfulness.
But 10 years time? We could be seeing the beginning of the end of TVs, smartphones, cinema, social media, etc. as we know it today. VR arcade warehouses popping up in many places. Perhaps even starting to impact the layouts of newly architected houses to have less walls, focus more on wide one-story dwellings (but stacked on top of each other) and more open space to roam wide in virtual reality.
We will see gradual incremental improvement in specialised AIs for things like voice, face and character recognition. We will see an increased usage of AI and AI based technologies to improve efficiency and assist the humans in decision making. But it will not put nearly as many people out of jobs as some people suggest.
I agree the effects on number of jobs will be smaller than people are predicting. It won't be mass unemployment.
On the other hand, people need to realize how sensitive the job market really is. Typical unemployment in the US is 4-5% in the last 10 years. If 1% of the workforce is put out of work by new technology, something I feel is very likely, that's a 20% increase in unemployment. If it gets much larger, even maybe 8-9%, there could absolutely be mass riots and outrage.
The point is, job markets are like marriage/dating markets. They aren't smooth, they're something almost everyone wants, so even tiny little changes (like NYC's surplus of women) have dramatic, nonlinear effects. I don't think people appreciate what a "butterfly effect" this will have if, say, 10-20% of truckers (the most popular occupation in many states) are put out of work. That's an instant, large-scale political event.
EDIT Source: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/unemployment-rate-and-u-6-...
The part that annoys me is this backdrop of "machines are going to be doing everything and no one is going to have anything to do".
When in reality it's going to be an assistant next to the existing people, increasing efficiency. Like farming tools for a farmer, or auto-pilot for a pilot, or robo-equipment for a surgeon.
I often hear from non-programmers and non-technical people who somehow seem convinced that AI is some kind of dark magic that is going to kick in at some point and everything is going to be magically solved by it.
Unfortunately, from my experience, the turnaround from finding an innovative new material to actually using it in real products is absurdly long.
A second guess, or a guess for second place, would be artificial general intelligence (AGI) if and only if someone or some team or project gets going on that problem and has some good, basic, enabling ideas.
I have some ideas, but since they really are just architectural or heuristic and not mathematical and not in code I can make only wild guesses for how good the ideas are.
A third guess, or a guess for third place, is my startup and its crucial core enabling technology, i.e., some original applied math I derived based on some advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Why? In broad terms the core technology of the startup makes some powerful progress on meaning. Is this progress full AGI? Nope. Does the progress fully solve the problem of meaning? Nope. To repeat, IMHO the progress is "powerful".
Is the technology widely applicable? The range of applications should be somewhat wider than the application of my startup, e.g., as some core technology in some infrastructure for some more applications, but for now my original applied math is proprietary and in my startup is locked up and invisible in my server farm.
Why third in this list? Because it doesn't deserve first or second, but, if people like the results of my applied math and what I've programmed, then my startup can well become a big thing, big enough to be third on this list in a few years.
Gee, today I'm wrestling with Microsoft's NTBACKUP. So, today it's grunt work!
The problem is the lack of understanding and ability to engineer non-trivial things. (Most GMOs are just Glyphosate resistant or have the BT gene).
I guess we will deepen our understanding but still not be able to change big things for the next decades
Then applications to agriculture, medicine, etc. might come along in a nice stream.
Still, of course, it stands to be a very long line of work to figure out much about how DNA causes a human actually to "work".
- it's much easier for more people to become investors, since buying coins/tokens will become increasingly easier and common.
- you won't need to be located at a specific startup hub to launch successful business, because it's so much easier to get investment from around the world.
- it has a great approach for solving the "network effect", where no one can challenge the major players with strong networks, by providing strong incentives for early adopters to join and grow their networks (either by buying very cheap tokens, or producing content that will render them "free money").
- it enables the creation of new business models that might disrupt (ugh, sorry) several existing industries, due to how they solve the trust issue between parties that have no reason to trust each other without a central controller entity. Some are calling this next wave of startups the "Web 3.0".
Sure, it looks like the wild west now, and there are all sorts of problems from scams to scalability issues, but maturity might be only a matter of time.
Also, it seems about time for another psychedelic revival / breakthrough, so don't count out research on psychoactive plants and compounds (if that counts as tech per your metric).
Are you working in this field?
10 years from now will look surprisingly similar to present day. Political lobbying will continue (and worsen) to stifle innovation and even iteration. We'll still have a single choice in ISP. Broadband speeds will still be ridiculously slow in most parts of the country. Driverless trucks will only just be getting a foothold, and people will still be wondering where the driverless cars are. Managers will still expect "butts in chairs", so WFH will still not be an option for most. We were talking about encryption backdoors in the 90's (clipper chip), we're still talking about them now and we'll be talking about them in 10 years.
It will be hotter outside.
10 years, is... just not that far away.
There were MP3 players before the iPod, but they weren't taking off quite yet. Then Jobs came, and the iPod changed the music market. And then changed the smartphone market. Google Glass was a good first mass market prototype, Microsoft seems to be going in the right direction with Hololens, but we all know it's not quite there yet. Whoever manages to figure out what the magic combination is for an AR headset that gets massive adoption, will usher in the next UI/portable computing revolution.
Also, what about human-computer interfaces? (communicating with your smartphone and receiving responses using only thoughts)
The powerful governments in the world won't let crypto be means for money laundering, tax evasion, moving lots of money across country boundaries secretly, undisclosed assets, inheritance and gifts without taxes, etc.
It may be that the important, remaining, applications will be for cases of contracts, secure communications, etc.