Near Future Predictions

Unfortunately, I do not think that the near future will be as technologically advanced as I hope it will be. I think that my ideal job will be a highly aesthetically pleasing and also advanced form of interface design, but whether or not that is what I will actually go on to do remains to be seen.
I feel that corporations and government are inseperable with one another today and that new laws need to be introduced to protect human rights against their influence. Hopefully as the relationships between the two become more publically visible (governments being sponsored by Starbucks, etc), laws will be enacted to help protect citizens from being taken advantage of (any more than we already are).
I think that larger percentages of the population will become disillusioned with religion, and the smaller population of people who are enthusiastically religious will become even more radical and righteous in response to this.
I can truly only hope that fashion and style in the United States will improve. Flip flops are not appropriate footwear beyond a spa or bathroom, and pajamas should never be worn in public. I hope one day to have a nice shade of gray skin and fiberoptic hair. I think it would also really help if a variety of unusual looking alien races were discovered, and people could broaden their horizon of what they find to be truly “unusual” looking. The concept of race will be close to obsolete, and gender identity will become recognize by a majority as something different than biological sex.
Biomedical engineering has been making major breakthroughs for disabled people to perform various tasks with the help of technology, including transmitting images directly to the visual cortex of people’s brains and bypassing eyes entirely. This will allow for browsing of the net without actually using our eyeballs! Hooray!
3-d Printers will become extremely common, and handmade items will become considered luxury items. Computers will replicate and spritz various aromas when playing video games and doing other simulation activities in order to add another layer of realism. Cybercrime will soon become a Big Deal. I think if cars get any smaller, they may just become a hard plastic body shaped shell that one straps themelves into and is propelled by a motor down the street. Universal currency and RFID chipped identification cards issued by the federal government are likely, no matter how depressing.
As far as fun stuff goes, I hope that there are real life LARP games like SPOOKS mentioning in Halting State. I think simulation will become more intense, realistic, and play a much bigger role in society than was ever expected. It will be used for education as well as recreation. Perhaps the beginnings of quantum transportation, which we are seeing today with quantum computer, can be used to transmit more than data through space.
If I could pick one invention which I think would play one of the largest roles in future society, I would pick the Holosuite. With a perfectly realistic 3d simulation that one can be trained to do a large variety of things with, I think it would improve the quality of most everything in our society, from healthcare to mechanics. People would be able to be taught almost any skill from software.