I believe that the future will look more like the past. One thing I'm almost certain we'll see less and less of is gadgets. Smartphones, computers, things lik

I believe that the future will look more like the past. One thing I'm almost certain we'll see less and less of is gadgets. Smartphones, computers, things like that will all go inside your head (if you're willing, and most everyone will be). Soon we will become tired of living in houses with blank walls upon which are projected whatever we want and, because we can do so, will revert back to more ancient styles of architecture and furnishings (with a couple of blank walls or two). Your stove may look like a wood burning stove, and your fridge may look like a 50's model. Why? Because when almost EVERYTHING is 3D printed to your specifications, people are free to make things that function in a modern way but look like what they want them to look, rather than how the manufacturer's marketing department deems they should look. I think transport will be dominated by self-driving vehicles, but again: think of individual styles. I predict quite a few autonomous "horseless coaches" driving around our cities. Speaking of cities... My hope is that high speed network access will be everywhere, and population densities will equalize as more and more people prefer to live a rural life even while they do cutting edge professional or academic work. There will still be slums and there will still be poor people, but I think that the majority of people who live in cities will do so because they really want to. Further out, I can see even things like traditional healthcare completely disappear. Sure, we may always have emergency trauma centers and doctors, but it's not to hard to fathom a time where a colony of self-replicating bio-robots and ongoing genetic engineering work 24 hours a day inside your body to keep it healthy and let you know of any real trouble before it becomes serious. This is not to say that all these predictions will come true, only that the disappearance of electronic gadgets into the mind and into fabrics, paint, and the air seems inevitable, as does the radical differentiation of physical things like furniture, houses, and vehicles that will certainly come from the 3D printing/replication revolution (if that occurs).