That prediction never works. Or, maybe it works for the parts of the culture which aren’t changing much, but there’s always some big new thing. The 00s had the war on terror, the 90s had the Internet, the 80s had the end of Soviet communism, the 70s had the oil crisis, the 60s had their cultural revolution, the 50s had the nuclear arms race, the 40s had a world war…

Yes, 3D has always been “just around the corner”. This time I think it’s really coming, albeit in a few more years. One driving force is that cinemas are going 3D in a major way and so people are getting used to the idea. Also you really need HD to do 3D, and of course that’s big now with TVs. Still, having to wear glasses to watch it is a pain, so my guess is that people will have their TV in normal mode and then just switch to 3D when they’re really watching something like a sports match, movie or 3D game.

As for the computing demands, they don’t change all that much. The internal model of the game remains the same, the only difference is that the 3D graphics system has to now produce images from two points of view for the stereoscopic effect. This doubles the demands on the graphics card, but that’s it.

In 15-25 years I think we will have the hardware to simulate a system the size of the brain, however we won’t be able to scan a brain in enough detail to make it work. We’ll have the overall wiring diagram for a brain, but we won’t know many basic things like the strength of the synapses from that. Of course, 25 years is a long time, and maybe much better scanning methods will come along. But my guess is that we still won’t be able to do it by then.

This is the whole point about the Singularity: does the exponentiality of progress beats the decay in marginal returns?
I think not, energy wise (second law of thermodynamics) the bottom line is always negative, we squander “gratuitous” energy just for the fun of it.
But this doesn’t mean we should not enjoy the fun.

I think the cost for producing photo-realistic video games would be enormous. Already games can be pretty expensive to develop. The cycle for introducing new game systems is also taking longer now. We probably won’t see a playstation 4 or xbox 720 for a while. Maybe not until 2015 or later. Even when they do come out, most companies may not take advantage of the computing capacity (due to expenses). I don’t necessarily believe there will be a market collapse for GPU’s, however there will be diminishing returns to more computing power.

What about TV’s coming to market that can be viewed in 3-dimensions without the need for glasses? There are a bunch of companies that are working on this already. A lot of this tech could fuel the need for more powerful graphics cards (or computational power) and hard drive capacity. Perhaps the next generation of video games will take advantage of the 3-D TV’s. It doesn’t seem improbable that you couldn’t see these in the next 5 to 10 years. Although it is true that 3-D TV’s are something that have been “just around the corner” for decades. However, people like James Cameron are pushing the technology (at least on the production side), so it may be more likely to happen.

I think it is probable that we could get a connectome of the human brain within 4 to 7 years. A connectome is only part of the story, however. Henry Markram believes a whole brain simulation is possible to do within 10 years, but 10 to 20 years seems more likely to me.

Consider sound: most people can hear the difference between uncompressed music and the mp3 quality you typically get from downloaded music. Yet the difference is small enough that the vast majority of people don’t care.

Machine translation and face recognition are difficult things to make predictions about. Currently computers can do these things quite well, but not nearly perfectly. To eliminate the remaining few percent of errors would seem to require a major breakthrough. For example, near perfect translation would require the computer to understand the nature of the the world. In other words, we may not truly solve these problems until we have something quite close to AGI. Before this point, for most tasks trained humans are cheaper, more reliable and more accurate.

My guess is that machine translation and face recognition will improve and increase in usage, but their application will remain limited to certain situations where errors aren’t very important.

I didn’t predict anything bio because I don’t feel that I know it well enough to predict anything about it (in case that wasn’t clear).

Bio fuels already do work in Brazil.

Yeah, 3D head glasses would be a big deal, and they might happen. But it’s one of those things that seems obvious but years and years go by and they don’t improve much. If they do take off, then 3D graphics might have some more life. Otherwise I think it will show significant diminishing value at 10x current high end levels of performance.

Your bet doesn’t really reflect my prediction: the market can collapse and there still be these graphics cards in high end gaming PCs.

I also predict a sudden rise of wellness, anti-aging and personalized medicine clinics.

The biggest short term life changing innovation is easy to predict and it’s already happening: Internet via wi-fi or cellular network everywhere and all people carring a super smartphone every time. This can bring a sudden rise of collective intelligence.