Edge have published the responses to their annual question for 2009:
What will change everything?
What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?
Among the many answers, Richard Dawkins considers how human ‘speciesism’ might be challenged by the production of a human-chimp chimera, Marti Hearst predicts the decline of the written word in favour of audio and video communications, and Oliver Morton suggests that geoengineering (i.e. “deliberate changes in the way the climate system works”) may be used in order to curb the effects of global warming, when the ineffectiveness of emission reduction becomes apparent.
Many of these predictions would not necessarily be welcome by most: luckily for them, as Steven Pinker makes clear in his own answer, predictions of the future have a significant tendency to be completely wrong.