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Super high barriers to entry, governments are spending more and more but people are demanding better more efficient services and won't put up with waiting in line at the DMV forever. In defense, it's hard to see the applications and what to build from an outside view, hard to get contracts and permissions, and hard to compete with established co's like Boeing that have all of the relationships already.
At the moment most of the focus is around overlaying some virtual world in the real world, but I think that technologies like U1 chip being added to new Apple devices could be really interesting to allow objects in the physical world to better mesh with digital world.
Experimenting with live filters for Instagram could be an easy way to dip your toes into AR: https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/
Machine Learning is the hot thing right now. Just find an area you like, and apply it. Not sure what is after this.
You'll learn a ton of linear algebra as a side-effect of working with quantum computing, which is the foundation of lots of other fields of computer science, like graphics and AI. I'm confident that the pool of quantum programmers is effectively zero, and I wouldn't be surprised if AI spills over into the field and causes an explosion of demand for quantum programmers. By 2024, it might be a field where you can write your own paycheck.
Security and privacy. Demand for security folks is white-hot right now, and the need for better security products continues to grow. I've been seeing a lot of companies in adjacent spaces making headway into the security domain as well—ML assisted intrusion detection and cloud-centric security tooling come to mind. In a broader sense, I think more governments and regulatory bodies are starting to take cybersecurity m…
We have been living in the golden era of software industry, thanks to Moore's law. We were able to afford RISC (= general purpose CPU arch), general purpose operating systems, general purpose languages, general purpose databases etc all because the hardware was going to evolve and get faster anyway.
Now with Moore's law showing signs of death, the future for better computing would be domain driven stack. A quick thought experiment will be that: cloud applications will be written with cloud-friendly languages, using cloud friendly databases, on cloud-ready operating systems and processors that are architected for heavy cloud workloads. Much like how gaming was relying on custom stack for performance (GPUs, play station, X-box, etc)
The advent of TPUs by Google is a symptom of this pattern too. Of course, personal computers with general-purpose-everything will keep existing, but the business industry will start shifting towards domain driven stack slowly and steadily for obvious reasons.
An example might be in store retail analytics- a set up with a bunch of cameras that can detect what people are touching or otherwise interested in. It makes little sense to ship the video streams all the way back to a cloud provider, but orgs want the capability all the same.