My Predictions for 2019

Listed in no particular order, the big things I expect to happen by 2019 :

- Augmented Reality goes very mainstream. This means location-aware systems and "check-in" services like 'Facebook Places' and 'Foursquare' become more robust and popular, and eventually merge into the fledgling field of Augmented Reality browsers(like layar). For most people, this just means increasingly powerful and popular(to the point of being universal the way facebook is now) location-aware always-on apps on their smart phones. For a minority of business people and techies, there will be 'display glasses' as well with Augmented Reality, widgets, and location-aware information overlaid over normal vision. (we may skip the display glasses and go straight to display contact lenses)

- Cars are increasingly electric and increasingly smart. By 2019 I'd bet that at least 20% of the car market in most of the industrial world is all-electric, and most new cars will have very advanced "smart" features such as automated parking, adaptive cruise control, swerve avoidance, etc. Top-end luxury cars will have intelligent cruise control systems capable of almost completely automated driving on highways and freeways

- A universal open standard for social networking technology, means that virtually the entire population of the developed world are linked into what becomes a new branch of the Internet in and of itself, The Social Web. (Facebook, Google, twitter, Myspace, etc, all interconnect their data via a unified open standard that has standard privacy controls and whatnot. This is what finally ushers in the 'Semantic Web', since it becomes possible for anyone to write software that can leverage this universal social graph. More than ever, the Internet acts more like a single interconnected machine and database than a lose network of networks. (the combination of a universal Social Web with the Augmented Reality stuff is hugely powerful and I could write for hours about the implications of it if I had the energy ;)

- Materials science goes nuts and we start to see practical applications for things developed after 2005. By the second half of the decade we start to see practical results in battery tech, construction materials, super conducting, metamaterials, etc, etc, etc. The sorts of new stuff not really seen since the introduction of composite materials in the 70's and 80's or the introduction of plastics and whatnot early in the 20th century.

- Practical application of all the crazy medical/bio stuff developed in the lab from 2000 to 2010. Growing organ replacements becomes common for certain organs, various stem-cell derived regenerative treatments become available which means actual cures for lots things by the end of this decade.(Aids, Diabetes and other things like this are finally outright cured or at least made into little more than a nuisance) Brain/machine interfaces combined with cybernetric limbs, slick exoskeletons, and spinal nerve cell regeneration gives paralyzed people varying amounts of real mobility. By 2019, some people with "locked-in syndrome" will be able to speak, use a computer, and even have limited mobility at least for a few test subjects. The term "formerly paralyzed" or "formerly handicapped" will start to see common use. Nerve damage in general starts to become treatable to varying degrees. A combination of various treatments and therapies means that the lethality of cancer and heart disease drops by at least 50% between 2010 and 2019. (and possibly a lot more than 50%). Vision-restoring implants are as common and useful as today's cochlear implants are for the hearing impaired. Profound total-blindness is now rare and total-deafness is virtually eliminated.(in the developed world)

- The DIY "maker" revolution will be in full force, with home 3D printers/fabs becoming commonplace for small business people, artists, and various sorts of hobbyists and tinkerers. A whole new class of independent entrepreneurship and small and medium sized business will have arisen by 2019 involving local assembly of products from parts "printed out" by desktop or industrial-scale fabs. Also, for the first time in 100 years independent inventors/tinkerers working out of a garage or small shop will be able to do meaningful research and hardware development that competes with the big boys. (just like Apple and Google arose out of garages, we may see new big-name metal-bending/hardware/manufacturing companies arise out of garages. Companies that don't exist right now may be competing with the big boys or even toppling them in the areas of car manufacture and other big time industries by 2019

- 3D is not a fad. It sticks around and gets better, and by 2015 or so you no longer need the 3D glasses since displays capable of rendering 3D images without the use of goggles will be mainstream. This could be the death knell of the Movie Theater since they're banking on 3D movies to power them into the future but why would people go to a Theater and have to wear the 3D glasses when they can stay home and watch the 3D movie on their 70 inch 3D TV that doesn't require glasses(or your 100 inch or bigger TV by 2019)? Movie Theaters in general may be as rare as drive-in movie places already are.

The theater will survive mainly as the venue for live-action plays, musicals, opera, going back to its roots in other words.

- Brick and mortar places that specialize in selling media are DEAD and gone by 2015 and no one misses them. (By "media" I mean movies, books, music, etc, anything that can be consumed digitally) Possible exception of a few nostalgic used book stores and the like, little boutique type places on tourist areas, etc.

- telepresence becomes a real thing and not something occasionally used in offices. Video conferencing will be so cheap(thanks to increasing bandwidth and lowering costs of video conferencing hardware) and ubiquitous that it wouldn't be unusual for someone to have an always-on video-conference connection with a co-worker, family member, etc. That is, you have a large monitor dedicated primarily to having an always-on video conference line with that person so can "virtually share a room".

- paper really is finally going away as a commonly used medium to store written information. Even things like taking notes or post-it notes have been replaced by dirt-cheap e-ink pads of various sorts. Even a lot of the legacy base of paperwork gathering dust in cabinets and archives is getting steadily scanned in. (the post office may only be operating 3 or 4 days a week by 2019 as snail mail gradually dies)

- Theres are software agents that can pass the classical Turing Test by 2019, but most people reject the notion that this makes the software intelligent. Its just considered "social adaptation/simulation/conversation" software. And there is not yet human-level general purpose AI. (but there is really really good weak-AI everywhere and really good voice control software and really good machine translation and dictation, etc.). There are some projects trying to put it all together into a full fledged strong-AI but they aren't quite there yet)

- Private Space activity Taking off. We'll have fairly regular sub-orbital tourism, several private space stations(hotels and research stations leased to governments), virtually complete privatization of orbital launch services around the globe, real infrastructure like automated satellite repair and re-fueling tugs, on-orbit fuel depot, etc, before 2019. By 2019, I'd expected serious private efforts underway for lunar and mars missions.(probably the customers will be national space programs and maybe a couple billionaires who'd like to visit the Moon or Mars)

- Towards the end of 2019 there is a fierce debate as to the accuracy of Kurzweil's predictions for2019 ;) (though in spirit and in a macro-sense the large majority of the predictions bear out. where he is wrong, he is wrong for social/market/fashion reasons and not because the tech isn't possible) FREX, we might not have AI-based personal assistants that are tied to an animated avatar - not because it isn't possible to make them, but because there just isn't a demand for them.

- There are a sizable number of 70 year old baby boomers who have multiple re-grown organs, stem cell rejuvenated organs, regenerative treatments for immune systems and nervous system and metabolic systems, medical implants of various sorts, etc. The phrase "70 is the new 60" is quite commonly heard and is taken seriously

- A few hard core trans-humanists, calling themselves cyborgs, are aggressively having implants hooked into their brains to augment memory, add new senses, etc. (but most such devices by far are used for medical reasons)

- By 2019, many transhumanist and techie types are starting to assert that we are IN the "singularity" but this is not commonly agreed with even among techies and no one can even agree on what the "singularity" is anyway.