I thought it would be fun to try making some predictions about the future. Maybe some of these will prove completely wrong… who knows, that’s the fun of it all 
SHORT TERM
Predictions which might come true within my own lifetime.
» New world superpowers will emerge and eclipse the United States.
How does the U.S. derive its position as a world power? More and more, it derives that position circularly from its existing position as a world power, and less and less by actually doing anything good for the world. Like a parent saying “Because I said so”, this authority is very fragile and won’t last.
» Books will disappear from libraries, which will become computer labs.
This is already visible on university campuses. Here at the Ohio State University, the Science and Engineering Library was recently eviscerated, whole floors of books evacuated to make room for computers, and they still aren’t adequately meeting the intense demand for internet terminals. With ebook reading technologies like Kindle and Nook emerging, actual paper books have less and less value every day, except maybe for doomsday archival purposes.
» Men will usurp the dating advantage of women
Within recent history, on average, young women have held a distinct advantage over young men in the dating world. They’re routinely put on a pedestal, they get away with treating their suitors most abusively– they are the spoiled sex, at least at bar and club. This derives from pre-women’s lib gender roles, which have become a thing of the past. Moving beyond the short term and into the longer term, women will eventually take the pedestal back, and then men will take it back again, and so on for all time.
MEDIUM TERM
Predictions which might come true by the time our great-grandchildren die.
» Universal Socialism (by today’s standards)
Social change is like the stock market cliche: it swerves left and right, at times even veering sharply right, but over very long periods of time, it always tends left. Fierce controversies of today (such as the U.S. Health Care Debate, which is really only controversial here in the U.S.) will seem silly to our descendants. I can just hear my grandchildren saying: “Wow, you had to pay for basic health care, Grampa? Did dinosaurs roam the earth back then?”
Of course, this isn’t to say the whole world will consider itself socialist. There will be new fierce controversies, ones we wouldn’t even take seriously today, like the universal right to free space travel.
» Physical currency will become a relic of the past.
» Monitor Goggles
However thin we manage to make them, computer monitors remain one of the bottlenecks in the quest for smaller gadgets. The obvious way around this is to replace the monitor with “glasses”.
LONG TERM
Predictions which may eventually come true, but with no specified upper bound on how long it will take.
» Employment rates drop permanently into the single digits.
This is an inevitable consequence of automation. As technology advances, human jobs become more and more sophisticated, fewer and fewer people can perform them, and yet the total value produced grows exponentially, even outstripping population itself. If any jobs remain at all, they’ll consist of repairing those robots who repair other robots, or programming the computers which program the computers which program everyday computers.
» “Impossibly” Deep Space Exploration
Physicists will devise brilliant loopholes around the speed of light barrier, allowing us to physically alter regions of space faster than it takes for light from our sun to reach them.
» Trivialization of Current Mathematics
New notation, terminology, and media will render currently cutting edge mathematics trivial. This is analogous to the way the conventions of basic algebra (together with easy access to pen and paper and calculators) make quadratic equations straightforward, whereas those equations were once cutting edge.
» Convergence of Languages
Gone are the treacherous journeys keeping cultures isolated from each other. In tiny steps over vast periods of time, different languages of the world will slowly converge into a single universal language.
FURTHER READING
How To Starve
The Overpopulation Myth
The Length of a Human Lifetime
Will World Languages Ever Merge?