Technology that will change the world.

What technologies are on the horizon which will change the world?

I'd like to restrict this to things which are actually on the horizon, so science fiction stuff like faster than light travel or brain-computer interfaces or AI (unless you can show that they are close) don't really count.

I can think of two at the moment, that will happen soon.

The first one is when full human genome sequencing will become so cheap that everybody can have it done.

This article here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/200...

Is interesting and shows the history of it, and predicts prices will come down rapidly over the next decade or so.

Just imagine, any medical study, or social study, or sports study, or pretty much anything, will be able to cheaply and easily do a detailed analysis of the DNA of every single person involved. I think this will lead to a huge leap forward in our understanding of dna as correlations will leap out of the data, where before people have had to search for specific genes.

Imagine the new information you could get by comparing the entire DNA of hundreds of thousands of people?

I predict that this could lead to major increases in life expectancy, of like 20-30 years... anyone who is genetically predisposed to any disease will be able to take pre-emptive action for a start, but honestly, I think the implications are endless.

My second one, is a bit unusual, but I think it will be when data storage methods become good enough, combined with increased battery life, for people to run total video and audio recordings of their life. Combine this with some intelligent text and speech recognition software and search (probably provided by Google) and suddenly no one will ever need to forget a conversation they had, a place they've been to, and book they have read, a tv show they have watched. An entire life's worth of data stored and search able on something quite similar to a mobile phone...

So, what do you think? Are my two rubbish? What else can you think of?