Latency worries me, though. Bandwidth has been improving a lot faster than latency for a while now. For always-on augmented reality, I think that we're going to need some seriously more power-efficient computing so we can do latency-limited tasks locally. (Also, communication takes energy too -- often more than computation.)

Good news on that, by the way: modern embedded computer architecture and manufacturing techniques are going in the right direction for this. 3D integration will allow shorter wires, making all digital logic much more power efficient. Network-on-chip architectures will make it easier to incorporate special-purpose hardware for image recognition and such. And if you stick the memory right on top of your processor, that goes a long way to speeding it up and cutting down on energy used per operation. If you want to get even more radical, you could try something like bit-serial asynchronous processors (PDF) or something even stranger.

</nerding-out>

Agree on the trend, but I'd put significant odds on some (as yet unexpected) trend being "the largest area of impact" in retrospect.

My second prediction is that the largest area of impact from technological change over the next decade will come from increasing communications bandwidth.

And distributed to more people. >60% of people will have at least 1 Mb/s internet access by 2020 (75%).

Do you have any ideas about how the scale of the impact from various different technological changes should be measured in this context? As far as I know, there is no standard metric for this. So, I am not clear about what you mean.

http://predictionbook.com/predictions/1662