When Bubbles Burst

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I belong to the IEEE as a professional organization. It's a huge organzation, encompassing areas of technology in every fathomable sector. Naturally I focus on telecommunications, but I also pay particular attention to the SIG watching the impact of technology on society.

In the broader view, the IEEE looks at every aspect of technology. Here's a snip from a recent article.

Bursting Tech Bubbles Before They Balloon
By Marina Gorbis and David Pescovitz
IEEE Fellows take a hard-nosed look at what technology is—and isn't—on the horizon
IEEE Fellows Survey
As our population ages and needs more care, there will be fewer young people to provide it. But don’t expect to fill the personnel gap with humanoid robotic nurses, say a majority of the more than 700 IEEE Fellows surveyed in a joint study by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and IEEE Spectrum.
The survey was conducted earlier this year to learn what developments IEEE Fellows expect in science and technology in the next 10 to 50 years. They ought to foresee such things better than most, because they have so much to do with bringing them about.
What other bubbles did the Fellows burst? Forget about being chauffeured to work by your car; the Fellows doubt that autonomous, self-driving cars will be in full commercial production anytime soon. And though they say Moore’s Law will someday finally yield to the laws of physics, slowing the increase in computer performance, the IEEE Fellows don’t expect to get around the problem by using quantum weirdness to perform calculations at fabulous speeds. Seventy-eight percent of respondents doubt that a commercial quantum computer will reach the market in the next 50 years. In short, the future is taking longer than expected to arrive.

I encourage those who are interested to follow the link and read, because there's much more. This survey also noted five themes that the IEEE fellows surveyed believe are the main thrust of science and technology over the next 50 years. There's a bit more on each of these in the article.

Computation and Bandwidth to Burn involves the shift of computing power and network connectivity from scarcity to utter abundance
Sensory Transformation hints at what happens when, as Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, puts it, “things start to think”
Lightweight Infrastructure is precisely the opposite of the railways, fiber-optic networks, centralized power distribution, and other massively expensive and complicated projects of the 20th century
Small World is what happens when nanotechnology starts to get real and is integrated with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and biosystems
Extending Biology is what results when a broad array of technologies, from genetic engineering to bioinformatics, are applied to create new life forms and reshape existing ones.