[Darth-Apple]

I'm gonna go on a wild one here, and try and see what the general consensus is for what the world will be like ten years from now. It will be interesting to see how our predictions stack up. Try to be realistic. Nobody thought the cell phone/iPhone would have taken off the way that it did.

My prediction is that laptops and tablets will evolve considerably. We already use tablets extensively, but their use will outpace actual laptops and computers. We will be carrying around super thin devices (thinner than what we have now) that are running operating systems advanced enough to do graphics design, audio work, development and programming, etc. 

Windows will make another big flop after Windows 10, and once again try to get involved in the mobile sector. 10 years from now, they will have failed, and likely will be focusing on Cloud hosting and services as their main source of revenue. 

I also think cars will go back to slightly more classic look (much like websites started using square borders instead of rounded corners again). The interiors will be very nice. The exteriors will be (slightly) more boxy once again. But who knows on this one... Who knows.

What are your predictions? Who knows. Ten years from now, we will probably look back on this thread and see how it all stacked up.

[Lain]

I mean I'd predict most of this within the next year or so given how things are moving along now.
Microsoft never really pulled out of the mobile market, especially given how good the Surface Pro is. I mean, it doesn't sell nearly as well as the Macbook or iPad Pro, but definitely a solid contender and for the price is actually a reasonable alternative given how fast they are.
And they already get most of their income from Cloud services and specialized contracts. Just recently they were bidding on building the U.S. Army's 'war cloud' or whatever. For most tech companies they don't get money from consumers, just organizations that want to buy the product by the thousands.

Android has the largest OS market share worldwide already too, as seen on https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
So mobile has already outpaced laptops and of course desktops as well.
So honestly I'd give it no more than three years to develop complete mobile workstations that aren't laptops. If companies decide to start adopting and manufacturing RISC-V devices, that will probably come sooner.

That being said about everything that's ultra-thin, that might be a possibility in ten years. But realistically, those won't really be available to the average consumer because of hefty price tags. Remember how expensive the first computers were in exchange for processing power, at least by today's standards? Almost no one had a desktop for at least a decade until the Apple II came out, and perhaps hobbyists who just wanted to write games on their Z80 Amstrad Pluses. I don't think that will be any different when ultra-thin devices finally come out. I mean, they're only developing folding screens now and if you fold it too fast the whole d*** thing breaks.

But before that happens, we'll need actual consumer-grade graphene, probably. I hear articles almost every month about some 'new affordable graphene manufacturing solution developed by scientists that makes graphene 70x faster than normal' or whatever, and I've been hearing it every month for the last five years. It's going nowhere from what I can tell and is at best a concept, but a neat concept nonetheless.

So yeah, here are my (very general) predictions for the next ten years:

Politics:

Code:

- EU will collapse because Germany will not want to support the Eastern Bloc any more, and Germany funds the whole operation basically.
- Or, at the very least, the Eastern Bloc will be kicked out.
- The world in general will be in complete economic war constantly, primarily between the U.S., Canada, Middle-East, and China. Nothing new there, we're always at basically a stalemate anyway.
- Don't think there will be any major war, though.
- More 'chaos candidates' being voted into power, like Trump was. Whole fiesta.

Technology:

Code:

- Ultra-thin devices, maybe (reliant on graphene development)
- Give me a petabyte microSD card already you f***
- More Mars missions and perhaps using robots to build automated factories or something. No colonization, though.
- RISC-V adoption and manufacturing as an x86 replacement.
- OpenPiton too, maybe, but only for enterprises or massive cloud companies that need to scale up to 250000 cores to handle all the bloat included in software nowadays.

Economy:

Code:

- The whole computer science field is going to collapse like the dotcom bubble because the market is flooded with BOOTCAMP brainlets who can't write fizzbuzz.
- The big tech companies will continue going up in stocks.
- Crypto will still be a thing, but have an even more negative connotation because of govt. propaganda. Most altcoins will likely die as well, especially since most of the 'finished' projects have no real use.
- Cashless society
- Crypto that isn't decentralized will be the common form of currency (band-owned, Facebook Libra, etc.)

Society:

Code:

- Will be under constant oppression by government
- Likely something along the lines of 'not real communism' again, especially when everything goes to shit from economic warfare.
- Third-parties will be silenced more than ever for pushing anything that might make a certain company look bad. Think: the prozac lawsuit after the study was released by a third-party showing that prozac drastically increases suicidal thoughts. Except it'll be about ADHD kids getting f*** up by whatever drugs they're on while their brains are developing.
- More mental issues will be 'diagnosed' to force people to take more meds and sedate the masses.
- The Google and Amazon botnets will be entirely unavoidable.
- This isn't the cyberpunk dystopia I wanted what the f*** I wanted to break into megacorps through sewer tunnels and liberate the people :'(

Yeah, I'm not very optimistic about society or politics as a whole.
That's not to say that we can't turn it around, but this really is the direction things are going right now, and there aren't any signs of turning it around at the moment. We'll be needing a huge revolution of people smashing their Amazon Alexa and Google Home's and telling doctors to f*** off with all the prescriptions.

But I've tried telling people about all the bad shit that those 'virtual assistants' do like recording people while they have sex, or how 23andMe steals your genome data for possible racial/genetic targetting in the future, but people seem to just not care.

Oh well.

[Guardian]

I don't even want to know...

Technologically its going to be nuts. Society... Lain's on the right track with a bunch of it. If we continue on our current path politically, I do see the US coming precipitously close to another civil war, but its going to be cities against the rural part of the country.

[Darth-Apple]

As soon as someone pulls the nuclear bomb out again, all hell will break loose. So far, the world has been good about preventing that from happening. When a country such as North Korea starts threatening to do it, the whole world backs itself against that nation. Everyone seems to understand, for the most part.

Technologically, I don't think we'll have "paper thin" tablets, but probably tablets thinner than what we have now. I'm thinking a milimeter or two maybe. Very thin, but not impossibly thin. We'll probably be storing terabytes on Micro SD cards (as lain mentioned). Petabytes... in ten years, not so sure. Maybe, but for what? 4K has been a thing for a while, and yes, everyone's jumping on the bandwagon with it, but we already have HD that is so crisp that the eye can hardly tell.

Yes, there are 4K phone screens. But Apple has never jumped on that bandwagon, and they've been smart for it. The companies that do the most innovation seem to have a grasp of appropriate limits. I do think 4K video will become more used with time (and probably 8K to some extent by then) and AI storage requirements will be hefty... But those will probably be the most storage-intensive things that we have.

Besides that, who knows. There is probably some huge innovation that's right around the corner, that nobody can really predict yet.

[SpookyZalost]

3D printers with the ability to take in recyclables are one tech I know is going to exist very soon, because I'm not the only one working on it XD

Making them affordable and able to be in every home like a toaster is the challenge.