We are in interesting times. The web is mature, we have fast PCs, reasonable broadband speed and small mobile phones that do lots, 3D TV and pretty realistic computer games. I often envy my 16 year old daughter and wish I was just growing up now.

Each decade brings a new batch of technology. Some is just incremental upgrades, other stuff is brand new. The next decade will be very exciting. There are a number of areas where breakthroughs will change our lives and one blog article is far too short to go into them all. The highlight for me is augmented reality. Just starting now, it has huge potential.

Augmented reality, or AR is the technology for overlaying the real world with computer generated data. Think of Robocop or Terminator. The ideas aren't new, they've mostly been around 20 years, but it is only now we are starting to get the ability to actually do it. The stuff we have now that just gives you tiny graphics on your mobile is a poor glimpse of what is to come. Imagine being able to superimpose high resolution 3d imagery onto the world as you see it without having to look at a mobile display. That is what is coming. The apps are being written, and empires already being plotted.

AR is about converging the real, virtual and on-line worlds. Every area of the web, TV, gaming, retailing and socialising can be linked to the physical geographic world, and vice versa. So we can add data, create new applications and services, new channels for marketing, or just use it to make the real world look prettier. The key breakthrough needed for this to really take off is the head up display, we already have accurate positioning, voice and gesture recognition and most of the other components needed. Video visors already exists but are opaque, or only cover a fraction of the field of view. We need semi-transparent visors that let you see the real world but can overlay high quality graphics on it. In 18 months to 2 years, we will see the first ones coming on the market, and by 10 years time, they will be very good indeed. In fact, we probably won't need any other kinds of display then.

Some interesting things happen once you get augmented reality. You can delete ugly people and replace them with more attractive ones. You can remove corporate logos or anything else you don't want to see. You can add virtual appearances to buildings so that they can appear differently to people with different architectural tastes. You could see avatars instead of people, so people can also appear differently depending who is looking. I could fill a book with examples, but lets stop here and say it will be a very big deal.

Towards the end of the 10 years, video visors will start being replaced by active contact lenses that do the same things, but in contact lenses.

During the next decade, our computers will get a lot smarter. They are very likely to catch up with people in most areas we think of as needing intelligence, hard to believe looking at today's, but entirely reasonable to expect. The doom-monger looks at that and talks about unemployment. I look at it and think of the new renaissance it will enable. Thinks about it. Today you buy a PC and it lets you do work that would have taken ages before. In ten years it will also do a lot of the thinking for you too as well as making extremely intuitive tools that add very powerful AI to your own ability. So we could all write music Mozart would have been proud of, or make books or movies or software that only the elite could do today. Smart computers could dehumanise us by doing the work and letting us be lazy. But it is more likely we will use them to add to our creativity and productivity, so they will enhance our humanity, not reduce it. I hope.

Energy will progress too. Ten years will bring far better understanding of our environment, so today's squabbles about climate change will be long gone, we will have cheap solar energy, shale gas, algae biofuels, possibly even thorium based nuclear, so will be charging into an era of energy glut, having lived through a decade of threatened shortages. Our new cars will mostly be hybrids or electric, many owned by fleet companies that use them to store energy from renewables, to be used when the wind drops and the sun is not shining. And many automatically driven cars will be entering the market.

Ten years is a long time.

Political use of social media is probably the final big highlight to include in a short piece. It was famously used in the embryonic stages of the middle east uprising, but that is nothing compared to what we should expect as cybernations begin to rise over the next decade. Governments will try to clamp down by closing internet links, but in a decade, we will also have lots of tiny devices that communicate directly with each other, providing hop by hop networks that span continents and bypass the internet. It would be very hard to stop such networks, and people will use them to organise actions frequently. With links to their ultra-smart PCs that enhance their capability, politics too will shift into a new era.

There will be abundant stimuli of course. Young people in the West will not appreciate picking up the bills from their ancestors, and inter-generational conflict is likely to begin. Automation will change the balance of power between the ordinary and the smart. Environmental issues, human rights, well-being for women and dozens of other issues will link people together across geographic boundaries. Thankfully, I am a technology futurist and will stick to the capability. I am not brave enough to speculate much on the new order that may eventually result from all the squabbles and empire building.

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