Ask HN: Predictions on what will be the most surprising technology in 10 years?

I often read articles talking about the next big thing in the short term (2-4 years), but thinking about the Bill Gates 2-year-10-year quote* has me wondering about 10 years from now: Will the most surprising thing be an expansion of an already rising technology? (AI, blockchain, biotech, nanotech, AR,...)

Or will it be something most people have never heard of yet? Thoughts/ predictions?

* "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."

Genetic / biotech stuff, driven by CRISPR. All the ones you mentioned, except nanotech maybe, are pretty locked in to create massive changes. I think the bio stuff will be the most "surprising", not least because it's harder to to write believable breathless hype about it. Not to say there won't be plenty of attempts, but I feel like the public is a little more inoculated against wild health/medical claims than "killer AI" or "$100k bitcoin", which is both a good thing and more likely to create surprise when a few of them turn out to be true.

AR a really close second, but I think people will be a little bit more ready for it given prevalence in sci-fi and experience of rapid computer & graphics progress in our lifetime. So it's easier to "expect" a world of Pokemon Go on steroids in your AR glasses than it is, say, one where a boutique offshore firm is offering to give your baby the ability to see into the infrared spectrum or something.

3d printing. My buddy works at a major American industrial manufacturer and the work he describes is fascinating. They're slowly starting to take on bigger and bigger chunks of the overall business as their capabilities grow and different business units discover them. I can only begin to imagine the host of fields that will be affected by the ability to do really nifty agile experimentation with physical products.

New materials. The search space in materials science is so impossibly huge that it's an endless source of surprises. The last ceramics hype cycle was about 20 years ago, so we're due for another one. Maybe room-temperature ceramic superconductors?

I'd vote for by CRISPR and the rest of bio-technology, e.g., as in Eric Lander and his MIT lectures at YouTube, for, my guesses, better crops, healthier farm animals, attacking insects, e.g., mosquitoes, attacking causes of infections, for curing some of the remaining difficult diseases, especially cancer.

A second guess, or a guess for second place, would be artificial general intelligence (AGI) if and only if someone or some team or project gets going on that problem and has some good, basic, enabling ideas.

I have some ideas, but since they really are just architectural or heuristic and not mathematical and not in code I can make only wild guesses for how good the ideas are.

A third guess, or a guess for third place, is my startup and its crucial core enabling technology, i.e., some original applied math I derived based on some advanced pure/applied math prerequisites. Why? In broad terms the core technology of the startup makes some powerful progress on meaning. Is this progress full AGI? Nope. Does the progress fully solve the problem of meaning? Nope. To repeat, IMHO the progress is "powerful".

Is the technology widely applicable? The range of applications should be somewhat wider than the application of my startup, e.g., as some core technology in some infrastructure for some more applications, but for now my original applied math is proprietary and in my startup is locked up and invisible in my server farm.

Why third in this list? Because it doesn't deserve first or second, but, if people like the results of my applied math and what I've programmed, then my startup can well become a big thing, big enough to be third on this list in a few years.

Gee, today I'm wrestling with Microsoft's NTBACKUP. So, today it's grunt work!