In your opinion, which attractive or mystifying technological concepts or advancement will never become popular?

This is specific to my domain, and a bit tangential to your question, but I'm going to put it out there anyway. It's not that I think digital learning won't be popular (it will be and already is)--I just think it won't be anywhere near what it's hyped up to be. Education in the United States is exploding right now with ed tech companies all purporting that their products are better ways to teach kids. The running joke among my colleages is that we won't make it to retirement not because the job sucks but because we'll be fully replaced by computers then.

I do think that will happen, for the record. We as teachers are already pressured to give our students increasingly more screen time and remove ourselves from their educations (referred to as "blended learning"), and this will no doubt accelerate. That said, most of the ed tech curriculum delivery platforms right now are pretty poor. They boil down to some very simple behavior modification paired with flexible content delivery (called "differentiation" in teaching). This is treated as revolutionary because it's alleged to increase student engagement (usually through some form of gamification) and tailor content to student's individual ability levels, so that all students are working in their zones of proximal development at all times. Optimal learning for all! Or so they say.

While these types of platforms can serve some purpose, particularly in building and reinforcing particular functional skills, they're acutely terrible for all other aspects of education: big picture thinking, experimentation, making connections, asking questions, risk taking, social skills, self-identification, self-expression, self-reflection, synthesis, etc. Nevertheless, with the current climate of American education being focused on achievement data, these platforms get treated like they're the holy grails of quality education. The problem here, outside of obvious pedagogical concerns, is that this moves even more of education under the thumb of for-profit companies.

These are a dime a dozen in education right now--venture-capital backed "solutions" to the "crisis" of education. They're going to win, and they're going to do it on the propaganda of buzzwords and promises, but they're not going to be the educational cure-all we want. At best they'll help build some skills in students, but they won't revolutionize education because success at their stated goals will render them obsolete. If the technology creates self-directed learners, then students won't need the technology anymore. This goes against the profit motive, and these companies will never give up their userbase easily--especially when you consider that ed tech is yet another source of invasive (and very lucrative) behavioral data for some very data-hungry companies.

The more we let companies dictate how we teach, the worse it'll be for education overall, but the prevailing winds all point toward this as an inevitable outcome in the US. Expect to see tons of "revolutionary" ed tech platforms in the coming years, especially once VR takes off. I'm not saying there isn't a lot of cool stuff you can do with technology in the classroom, just that the classroom of the future will likely be more limited and stunted than anyone wants to admit.

AI in the sense that many futurists imagine it will play out. I’ve recently seen claims that AI will be creating art superior to humans in the next few decades. Personally I seriously doubt AI art will ever be critically superior to human art.

Even taking that film Her as an example. It was a decent story but the actual scientific elements seemed completely fantastic and speculative to me. Guess I just prefer Philip Dick style speculation.

An end-user-programmable desktop environment / operating system. It would've been the greatest productivity tool, but it'll neve become popular because we're going towards more locked-down, more isolated apps.

I'm talking about Emacs-level programmability. Say you right-click your clock applet on your system tray and edit the source code. Instead of apps having their own toolboxes, there are system wide toolboxes, and you compose documents---pictures, text, rich-text, etc.---using them. Each tool's source can be edited. Everything has hooks. There is a big, well-maintained manual, and every symbol has nice docstrings. There are many ways for apps to communicate. The language is interpreted but JIT compiled, so editing the code is interactive, but it performs well too. Everything, every name is public, there are variables to change everything, and to read everything.

It is like Unix, but everything is not a file, everything is a symbol, i.e. a variable or a function.

I am sure this is similar to the system the Smalltalk-and-descendants folks want. I'd rather have a Lisp, but well.

In a system like this writing up a little app would be rather easy, and making extended versions of apps even easier. Just like Emacs' modes and derived modes.

Emacs gives me a half-arsed, rather limited version of this, and that's why I love it. When I look at awesomewm, it is kinda similar too, and I'm considering a switch from i3 to it because of that. Mac OS has Applescript which apparently allows you to automate some stuff, but nothing near the power I desire.

It is funny that @CALICO is talking about brain-computer interfaces when I, as a programmer, can't modify my system volume applet to mute when I middle-click on the icon, without jumping way too many hoops... or can't easily make Firefox show the profile name in the titlebar... or can't easily decide which key does what on my computer (and it is way better on GNU/Linux than it is on Windows, IDK the Mac story)... and the list goes on and on.

Any time a billionnaire comes up with some fancy new transport system that will replace buses/trains I just think "No, many other billionnaires have come before you and have tried to """revolutionise""" the transport system but haven't"

Think about the whole Elon Musk boring company idea of digging a hole underneath the ground and letting cars be glided along that way. So first of all there is already stuff underneath the ground like piping for water and gas and so on, so there has to be considerable effort to make sure the new transport system doesn't collide with existing infrastructure.

This is further compounded when we think of the targeted areas big cities. Not only do they have more of these basic infrastructure, but they most likely already have an underground transit system. So this idea is already somewhat pointless because big cities are the places where they could do with better public transport.

Even then, lets assume all this is sorted out, lets take into consideration how cars will rejoin and merge into existing traffic. For example in the video the loop thing, the car is raised up onto the road and it joins traffic like normal - except in this situation the traffic is pretty low. What happens when the traffic is standstill - how long are these cars going to stay there or are they going to merge onto traffic and remain in standstill? One could assume the cars would just pile up and now we've got the old problem but with a newer system.

The only thing that will improve public transport is increased funding into existing infrastructure and changing existing transport routes for efficiency rather than building new attempts on top of existing public transport.

Flying cars have long been promised, but ultimately just don't make a lot of sense. They have the advantage of reducing congestion and allow direct A > B travel (eg. across a lake), but there's so many roadblocks (heh) that make them unfeasible. Technological, regulatory, and maybe cultural. Sad as it is, they aren't likely to be a thing in my lifetime.

Blimps and massive air ships, it would be so awesome to go on slow cruses through the skies, awesome vistas. Can't think of a cooler mode of transport.

Shame our atmosphere is not thicker, we could totally have had this steampunk staple a reality.

Fingers crossed we colonise Venus's clouds in a reasonable timeframe.

My nomination is cashlessness. The infrastructure necessary for cashless transactions will never be deployable in remote/wild areas, and yet the economies in those places (along with the places themselves) will not disappear nor diminish in popularity among folks who have lots of money and influence to spend. I'd also put forward that having those kinds of areas around are not only inevitable (much like the drug trade), but also useful to society at large.

Biometric Verification. It won't ever be popular, but it will be widespread. Human verification will race with AI advancements until We're over-run with Turing Test beaters that can't be stopped. First the biometrics will be hacked by humans with the help of technology and then the tech will outpace the humans to the point where it is beyond our control. Some would say this is happening now, and I wouldn't disagree.

A hydrogen economy. The idea is already stating to look retrofuturistic, with the exception of people remembering every couple years that fuel cell cars technically exist.

The long and short of it is that hydrogen is a nightmare to store and work with, it has to be generated by energy intensive and inefficient processes, and there's practically nothing it does chemically that can't be done better and easier by something else.