Foresight Alliance | “It’s all smart kitchens and talking bikes these days.”

We’ve moved into Q4, the end of the year, where here in the Northern Hemisphere the air is turning crisp (oh wait, it’s still 82 degrees in mid-September), the leaves are falling (well, those not incinerated in wildfires) and end-of-year trends pieces are dropping. The Wall Street Journal is one of the first out of the gate this season with “10 Biggest Tech Trends to Come—from Talking Bikes to Tile TVs” which purports to be a look at technology developments coming in the next decade.

We find skepticism as well as creativity useful to our clients as we help them build their own visions of the future, so I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at what those interviewed by the WSJ thought was to come.

Dinner won’t get burnt

“The oven of the future will basically give you microwave convenience with restaurant quality and ultimate control,” said Dave Arnold, inventor and an owner of the Booker and Dax food science development company. You can currently find this tech—“super forced-air convection, steam injection, and very accurate temperature control, all run by incredibly smart microprocessors”—only in ultra-premium equipment.

Ah, new kitchen gadgets—I would have called this “Livin’ Sous-Vida Loca.” You won’t get fired for going all-in on forecasting new kitchen tech—unless you count the Juicero bros. But this seems incremental, particularly for a 10-year forecast, especially one billed as “biggest” trends.

Pills will diagnose us

While wearable devices like Fitbits or the new Amazon Halo obsessively track health-related data, the future of health tracking “will take place inside the body,” said Lucas Werthein, founder and head of tech and production for the innovation consultancy Cactus. “With widespread use of nanotechnology, people will be able to swallow a pill and have every aspect of their health analyzed in real-time.”

Ten years is not a lot of time. (I just said 10 years was a long time above. Do I contradict myself? I do. I contain multitudes.) What is a long time is 20 years, which is at least how long the idea of ingestible sensors for health tracking have been discussed. Will the next decade finally be the decade when this technology becomes used widely by patients and consumers? Maybe. But also think on this—How many people today are worried, if not convinced, that COVID-19 is a plot by Bill Gates and the Illuminati to microchip all of us for whatever nefarious purpose? Now, imagine trying to sell ingestible health tech monitoring in this market climate. <King George the Third voice> Good Luck!

Bikes will talk back

As e-bikes and scooters replace cars in the urban infrastructure, they’ll offer riders info as detailed as that on car dashboards, likely via augmented reality (AR), said Shabazz Stuart, founder of Oonee, maker of secure bike and scooter parking pods. Bonus: “Your bike will be able to communicate with you what it needs, like if your tires are low, or your gears are messed up,” he said.

This one is a headscratcher. How many people need to be told their bicycle tires are flat? Anyone who bikes on the regular will know just by shifting something is off with their gears. I can see this being useful to bike share companies for monitoring the status of their fleets, but as a consumer tech, this seems superfluous.

We’ll be visionaries

Extreme camera technologies might well be embedded in your phone, AR glasses or even optical implants, giving you “superhuman vision, like X-rays in your eyes,” said Ramesh Raskar, founder of the Camera Culture Group at MIT. Other innovations? You could “read a book without opening it,” he said. Or see through fog while you ride your talking bike home.

Like kitchen gadgets, this seems more iterating around the edges of a concept, than anything revolutionary. Also, the AR/VR revolution has been around the corner for a decade, always on the edge of breaking through, but never quite making it. Consumer reluctance to wear glasses (RIP Google Glass, home 3D televisions) is another hindering factor. Note, this list was written before Apple’s September 2020 product event, which rumors to feature some kind of AR application. Perhaps readers in 2029 are reading this via their AR device. Hi!

Tile TVs will take over

Today’s flatscreens will look like off-the-rack suits compared to the bespoke fit of fine-pitch LED tiles, said Chris Smith, principal of tech consultants at TheCoTeam. These small, ultra-high-def screens can be seamlessly joined in any configuration. We’ll be able, he said, to “create something that covers the entire surface area or visual plane of a space,” much bigger than a 100-inch traditional screen. “Imagine that the display in resting state is wallpaper.”

This is a reasonable idea about tech development, albeit happening on a tight timeline. The transition of television from high-end electronic device to commoditized flat screen monitor shows that this is likely to happen. And I’m excited about it. What? I’m not a knee-jerk crank. Sometimes I think a cool thing is a cool thing.

We’ll all eat smarter

Plates that use sensors and artificial intelligence will “show diners information they need to stay safe,” said Linda Pouliot, co-founder of Neato and Dishcraft Robotics. “Smart Plates” would be able to detect bacteria and viruses, show how fresh food is and test for allergens like peanuts. “It can even show calories, but we probably won’t add that feature to a dessert plate.”

I see this play-out as less analysis on plates (among other problems, how do you account for chemical reactions that take place as food ingredients are mixed and cooked?) and more at the purchase level with better information about provenance and supply chain of food. In fact, as grocery stores get deeper into customer data and tracking purchases (Hello Amazon grocery play, whatever that will be) it seems that having all the data on the food you just bought sent to you directly (or made available immediately, say via a link to a site with your purchase histories) will be a more feasible expression of this concept.

We’ll use our heads

Someday soonish, we’ll be able to accomplish simple tech tasks like scrolling through pictures, paying at the grocery store or choosing a response to a text with mind control. Earbuds or other compact wearables will replace the tangles of wires and stacks of sensors currently needed for any brain-computer interfaces.

Ten years is too soon; for one thing, the objections to the ingestible pill (#2 above) are in play here as well, and more directly. If people are worried about being controlled by billionaires via an ingestible pill, mind control tech has an even taller hill to climb.

Pond scum will fuel cars

While Charity Everett, a storyteller and “future weaver” who works with AR foresees tech continuing to infiltrate cars, she’s most excited by what might infiltrate gas tanks: algae. “Any fossil fuel you burn is generally an aged form of algae,” she said. “When you cut out millions of years of aging and instead get that fuel straight from the source, you have a fuel that is literally green.”

Ten years is way too short of time to see this come to fruition at any scale. Just look at how little progress electric and hybrid vehicles have made in the past decade. Yes, a tremendous amount of progress from the point of zero, but still nowhere near dominance of auto fleets. Still, like the tile-panel TVs, this is an idea I like and think has promise, and so it would be great to see any amount of progress in this direction.

A bright future is ahead

An LED bulb purchased today might not need changing for a decade. By that time illumination might come from lasers, diffused via mirrors or fiber optics. The headlights of some BMW i8s currently use this enlightening tech, but in time it will go from stark autobahn illumination to the cozy glow of a bedside lamp.

There are still anti-LED, pro-incandescent bulb lobbies active today successfully keeping us from a full transition to LED lights. The move to next-gen lighting may be limited to the example given: high-end cars and perhaps luxury housing.

But sorry, no jetpacks

Forget zipping past traffic. Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the Vertical Flight Society, said commuters may soon be able to hop over it. He sees eVTOLs—electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft—becoming part of the urban skyscape, as airport shuttles, emergency medical transport and air taxis. As for the perennial dream of jetpacks? “Too noisy, and too limited of range.”

*Sigh* Just like every newspaper story about comic books has to have “Biff!” “Pow!” in the headline, so too does any story on future tech trends have to mention jetpacks or flying cars. My forecast is that this will be true in 10 years’ time.

Also worth noting at this point are missing technologies or goods needed to address some of the problems or needs that will play out in the next decade. It’s not as sexy as fancy kitchens, but where is the tech for a large elderly and aging population? The article and interviewees cited here steered away from anything related to climate change. Where are the temporary emergency shelters in a go-bag? It’s fun to think about sensors on plates, but what about the technologies to help keep people from being tracked by sensors and cameras? Above all, AI and automation will drive so many technological changes, yet only lurk in the background of a few of the items on this list.