We're starting to see a flurry of innovative user interface devices. Touch was just the beginning, we now have finger tracking, muscle flex detection, Kinect, Google Glass etc - some convergence of these technologies could result in an über-interface.

Another big area to consider is how we're going to deal with the avalanche of information that we're slowly all coming under. I use Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, HN, Instagram etc and I want ways to bring all of the relevant news to the surface. Technology that understands my interests and can help me to find not just what has become popular but also to discover interesting things that others haven't yet and share it with them whilst still respecting my privacy.

These are just what I'm personally excited about, but I think what we're really starting to see now is compartmentalisation and niche areas with high-specificity each getting their focus groups, not simply a case of "lowest-hanging fruit" - although there is a lot of that as more and more people get involved in trying to be a part of 'the next big thing'. It's more likely to be YOUR next big thing as opposed to THE next big thing.

So there is no longer that one overarching emergent technology anymore simply because the democratisation of all the previous technologies is enabling more and more people to focus on the finer details, improving their little corner of the sandbox.

To get involved, pick a niche that you're interested in and see if the skills you already have can be adapted in any way to mesh with any new technologies. Or look for problems that may not yet have been found and work to solve them. One of these could become your next big thing.

Meta-Materials, BioTech, Quantum Computing & 3D Printing - together these will allow us to create new and diverse physical products.

Meta-Materials - Look to graphene, aerographite, graphene-gel, carbon-nanotubes etc. there are some pretty awesome new materials scientists are coming up with and their potential uses are too diverse to list.

Bio-Tech - There was an article here on HN a few weeks ago about Medi-Gel, a substance that can close severe wounds in no-time. We can read the visual input from a persons eye-balls by scanning the brain. We can (kinda) integrate digital cameras directly into the brain (with limited resolution). We can grow cells (potentially organs) in labs. We can make mechanical hearts. We're about to embark on mapping the human brain. Nanotechnology, etc...

Quantum Computing - I know I may get laughed off HN for this one, but give it time, it may happen. Imagine if that computing power was packed into smaller devices, perhaps even combined with some of the tech discussed here. There's even speculation that the NSA have built a Quantum computer - which is theory could crack ciphers in times orders of magnitudes faster than todays super-computing technology.

3D Printing - This may seem like old-hat news with the recent advent of the hobbyist 3D Printing scene but consider that businesses have been using stereolithography techniques on a much-improved larger scale with better resolution. In theory, we could in the near future 3D print large scale objects in short-spaces of time using a mixture of materials.

I agree with b0ttler0cket, the common-view these days is that most software engineering is less innovation and more iteration. I think most of the premises and ideas behind writing software have largely been the same for the past 30 years and in our most recent years we've seen how combining cutting edge physical technologies has created new marketplaces for never before thought of products. Software just helps integrate and automate that new hardware.

The next big thing won't be the next big thing until it is obviously was the next big thing. It may be more productive to focus on a problem and see how far you could make progress on it. If you make enough progress, it becomes the next big thing. For example, I've been dreaming about speeding up software development. There are a lot of pieces of that puzzle across tools, project management, training, etc. I think about it a lot and over time through my career I want to explore all sorts of ways to go faster and faster. Years from now, I'm sure software developers will say how slow things used to be just like we surely can make comparisons to the past of punch card computing and manual memory management.

In terms of watching the future unfold as a spectator, perhaps self-driving cars or 3-D printers are the next big thing.

You may be overly pessimistic about what today feels like in comparison to some imagined golden age. Back then felt a lot like today, actually.

I think relevant fields are healthcare, energy and food. All of those are hard to attack by startups or individuals.

Being of the age now where I can spend money on stuff I'd like to see (and build myself):

- more personalized health care, cheap high resolution MRIs, cheap signal processing for any vital sign that can be measured with cheapl sensors, large anonymous databases that can map my data into what might be wrong with me

- swarms of drones for fun and profit, especially if we can build the equivalent of a wireless sensor network funded by many individually owned drones. Not sure how this could pay off, though.

The next big field is going to be Potatoes, son.

(But in all seriousness, the reason you see low-hanging-fruit being picked is because everyone is still trying to figure out how best to employ the internet - you're seeing microeconomies rising and falling at a rapid pace, innovation both thriving and being stifled - there's a lot of flux at the moment. When everything clicks into place, it's possible that everyone will need to be an entrepreneur in their own way.)

I have a hunch that it's going to be about getting useful and relevant information out of big data. Analyzing 'Big Data' using techniques from machine learning is getting a lot of hype, as it is starting to prove itself as a powerful predictive tool. Companies that will be big in the future will take advantage of these techniques to solve major problems in education, healthcare, robotics, etc.

That's the now, not the future.

>"If you were web-savvy in the late 90s and early 00s you could have created online payment systems, web stores, a search engine, or a social network."

Brin/Page, Bezos (or Graham/Morris), Musk...these weren't just people with web saavy. They all had advanced degrees or for Bezos "just" a Princeton degree and eight years on Wall Street.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay, 1971

Certainly realtime stuff for dynamic data.

Instead of trying to predict "what" will come next, you should be asking: what are the commonalities? what will stay the same? what can you envision becoming simplified?

- augmented reality driven by cheap, fast devices

- super pervasive technology. your phone is your computer...or is your computer your phone...?

- mesh networks and/or global wireless

technical answer: [backbone] models is the new DOM

non-technical: app networks formed by much smaller, more open apps loosely connected into swarming alliances

people: as software eats the world, there will emerge a class of blue collar coders, see http://dashes.com/anil/2012/10/the-blue-collar-coder.html

(b0ttler0cket):

What's the next big thing? It may not be all that hard to perceive. You're on Hacker News so you may be biased immediately to think it has something directly to do with programming and computers. Take a step back from that first, and you can immediately think of a couple.

1. Privacy/advertisements. (how are people going to sell things to us?)

2. Press/print materials. (print? it's gonna be old news right? save the trees?)

3. Security (everything's in the open now. how do we adjust? how do we protect information?)

4. Health (we shouldn't have as many problems as we do)

5. Transportation (our cities are getting bigger and "rural" is a word that basically means "hard to transport to.")

6. Environment (our environment is imminently approaching toxic and uninhabitable levels of pollution)

7. Energy (our resources are rapidly and imminently depleting)

8. Economics (crypto-what?)

9. Architecture (these buildings need to get way higher and more sophisticated. we're going to hit 9B ppl soon. rural chinese farmers are swarming to the cities (read that in an article). it's the worldwide trend. the buildings of the future:the buildings of today::the buildings of today:17th century colonial houses)

10. Engineering (okay, so a transatlantic underwater tunnel would be the single highest costing thing humankind would have ever attempted. even still, what more can we do? is the San-Francisco bridge et al. the best we got?)

11. Education (this is covered by every politician and so should be self-explanatory. more wide-spread systems of education. online is a start, but I read in an article (I think posted on HN) that the drop out rate is too high.)

12. Food (more people, more crops. more crops, more transportation, more oil, more livestock, more energy expended. Not to mention, bio-engineered food that produces more vitamins/essential nutrients - depending on who you ask, this is either a blessing or a curse)

I feel like categorization is helpful here. You ask for the next big thing, but that question is so enormous. One person could say one thing, but how could another person argue against it being the next biggest? Is there a metric with which we can compare impact? And impact on what? Society? Businesses? Individual people? Microorganisms? I think if you categorize like this you'll have a much easier time thinking and ranking ideas. Comparing the next ideas in architecture and the next ideas in food development is quintessential apples and oranges. Here we're making it so that we can make better subjective judgments about what's a more important idea.

Robotics or Virtual Reality

the future is always among us. just see around! the correct answer is:

space