Cyberwar (ugh, that term) has become white hot after a nuclear reactor meltdown in Russia where every adversary blames each other and America blames Russia for a false flag operation. Packets are now blocked from entering/exiting entire countries unless you have a special permit. Like with radio/tv in Cold War I, everyone begins suspecting spies and government malware in their computers. People increasingly huddle for safety in walled gardens like Facebook, rarely venturing out to unknown sites.
Node/js experiences a huge exodus of maturing developers seeking a more professional, rigorous language, leaving behind massive codebases of poorly-written and completely undocumented code and over 3 million node package libraries with varying dependency issues. Javascript has become so popular worldwide that Americans barely make mimimum wage coding in it.
Ethereum still struggles to find any devs who can understand how the fuck their entire platform is supposed to work despite an additional white paper being published.
Microsoft admits no one wants a windows phone and retreats from the mobile market, dooming themselves to simply dominating the dismal "legacy" desktop world only inhabited by developers, people too poor to afford a mobile phone, enterprise customers, and call support centers. Open Sourcing .Net winds up causing large amounts of developers to learn Linux, and they develop a taste for it. C# developers are recognized for their overall brilliance and steadfastness and paid 500K/yr salaries by all employers. (OK, that's a wish, not a prediction)
VR has completely polarized the planet between "pukers" and "players". Thousands die every year from VR-wasting disease brought on by malnutrition and lack of sleep from being fully immersed for weeks on end.
TechCrunch collapses under the weight of it's hideously poor commenters and a management sex scandal.
Self-Driving cars get off to a rocky start, as normal drivers everywhere attempt to run them off the road to "test" their safety.
NoSql replaces Not-NoSql so quickly people begin dropping it from their resume as a skill.
Which doesn't help, because Facebook is used as a vector to install advanced persistent threats on peoples' computers.
The sharing economy will be governed by protocols. Decentralization will be standard. Companies like Ethereum and OpenBazaar as well as the Bitcoin protocol are already being used/leveraged for this. It will be standard. 1. Decentralized authority will be used for most things and will destroy the power distance between individuals and regulators stripping their power. These protocols provide privacy, authority and identity by design and the gov’t can’t do anything about it. 2. Government won’t matter much This is basically the affect of trrend one. When decentralized protocols become common place there will be no way for government to enforce regulations. Some of this is good and some is bad. On balance it is good. They can still stop people from doing bad things in the physical world, but not govern and collect your communications, interlope into network governance and stop being the world’s sysadmin. Centralized authorities will prosper servicing things like DNS naming authorities, identity, licensing, communications, financial transactions, legal transaction, wills deeds etc.
2. Everyone will realize uber is a logistics company. Uber is building teams to for autopilot and self-driving tech right now. They have a “Math Department” to create algorithims and heuristics for prediction. They know that ridesharing p2p is something that can only last ~10 years. They will be the first people to do interstate logsitics and transport with self-driving vehicles. They will be the level 3 or cogent to Amazon’s comcast/verison. By this I mean that Uber will handle 90% of long distance supply chain hubs and Amazon will be the last-mile provider.
- Speech recognition has acquired acceptable (par with human) accuracy. This has been a great boon for the digitally excluded. It has also increased the relative prevalence of text based commands in the operating system, not that too many people notice.
- CNC machines that can operate on anything strong now require a license, it was too easy to make guns with them and on balance governments decided that was the important thing.
- VR headsets have failed to gain market share. They were neat, but only if you stayed in one place. Elite Dangerous and co' weren't able to support a physical product of that cost by themselves. There are some fantastic applications of the technology, but you need to find an old headset to play.
- Linux is still waiting for it's year of the desktop and still looks like a poor knock-off of Windows.
- Turing complete systems aren't banned yet, but it looks increasingly likely as phones and tablets start to dominate the marketplace.
Driverless cars will still not be available for use by consumers, as the flow of edge cases which completely confuse the cars is continuous.
WebAssembly becomes popular, js finally has alternatives.
Self driving cars are popular.
Google launches some sort of robotic/AI product.