Allow me to make my list of broad predictions that doesn't have to do with gadgets. I expect near-term singularity so my list is pre-singularity, 2040ish going

Allow me to make my list of broad predictions that doesn't have to do with gadgets. I expect near-term singularity so my list is pre-singularity, 2040ish going by Ray Kurzweil, could be earlier or later. 1. Massive Population growth, 50-100 billion people on the planet. Not due to natural population growth (which will collapse), but due to cloning and factory production of humans. It seems unimaginable in today's US political climate but there are other countries in the world which do not have the same moral qualms. 2. Incredibly improved education / work assignment systems. Today we go through a K-12 system + many years of tertiary education in order to gain a general education that's only somewhat suited for the tasks we're going to do. The advent of internet based education means we're going to be able to closely target the training with the job in an incredibly efficient way. This does not mean that people will lose general knowledge or become stupider. It means competence and work satisfaction will increase, and people's ability to hop careers will increase, leading to more diversity in people's lives. 3. Biological immortality or close to it. The same technology that enables cloning will enable replacement body parts for every part of the body. Diseases like Parking-sons will be cured. 4. AI everywhere. Today weak, specific, non-generalized AI run things like warehouses and farms. Tomorrow they'll run transportation, buildings, restaurants and wal-mart, datacenters, factories that build widgets and factories that build factories, write and grade test questions, predict what we'll do and help us do them before we need to ala Google Now. In short AI will be ubiquitous and very very useful if not quite generalized. 5. Huge risk-taking. People are going to experiment, try new and dangerous things, in incredibly exciting ways, if only because we have a huge amount of people. 6. Humongous innovation and economic growth. I'm talking 50-100% annual growth. Today US (and much of the world's) economic growth is so low because of our slowness to embrace new technology and rejection of important technology. This will change, if only because of global competition. 7. Most people will be volunteers in the work of building things, and that work will be done exclusively in virtual realities. Most products will be tested out and deployed first in virtual worlds before being printed into the physical world. 8. Most people will be thought of as "unemployed" by today's standards but they'll feel that they are gainfully employed and deserve oodles of money (and they'll be right). 9. The currency of choice will not be the USD (nor the Yuan nor Euro). 10. I don't know if Mars will be terraformed yet but if it is or we have huge colonies then the population estimate could be at 2x what I said in #1.