What is the next age? (i.e., industrial age)

[Alan V]

I vote for "the age of renewable energies." We're running out of affordable fossil fuels this century. We need to switch because of climate change. So our technologies are going to change rapidly in the next several decades: power generation, transportation, appliances, food production, etc.

Genetics and robotics are just distracting toys in comparison.

[The Grand Nudger]

Genetics is instrumental to food production.

[Yonadav]

The Owned Era

[bennyboy]

Genetics is instrumental to food production.

It's funny you mention that.

I'm maybe the only person I know who is fully in support of GMO.  So long as there are sufficient controls for testing and so on, the idea that we can grow more nutritious food from dirt and sun is awesome.  I don't care if my desk-sized Vitamelon 3000™ ever existed in nature, so long as I enjoy eating it and it doesn't hurt me.

My biggest challenge will come with simulated meats, I think. Surely there's no ethical reason not to eat those, but I suspect I'll have a residual yuck factor.

[The Grand Nudger]

The confluence of genetics and agriculture has applications beyond food production, as well.  Recently, some folks up in iowa managed to engineer a tobacco plant with significantly boosted photosynthetic efficiency and uptake - which yes..promises more food....particularly in tobaccos relatives tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers...but can also be used to produce more clean energy.

I'm convinced that the way forward for us on this rock is to lean into biology hard. To prefer a biological solution to a tech solution wherever we can manage it. If nothing else, this would allow us to reallocate those limited and damaging resources that so many people are focused on eliminating. We could provide more of their benefits to a greater number of people while reducing their consumption.

Or..you know, we can keep throwing a metric ton of shit at every problem even when an ounce of something else would suffice. What could go wrong, right?

[Anomalocaris]

I vote for "the age of renewable energies."  We're running out of affordable fossil fuels this century.  We need to switch because of climate change.  So our technologies are going to change rapidly in the next several decades: power generation, transportation, appliances, food production, etc.  

Genetics and robotics are just distracting toys in comparison.

Renewable energy will hardly change human society on any scale similar to the original agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution.   It will be a relatively marginal change to how humans fulfill their basic long standing needs.

Genetics and robotics on the other hand will change humans themselves into something else all together with drastically different fundamental needs, not just how humans as largely the same as we have been for a few hundred thousand years a might change on the margins how we fulfill our long standing needs.

In a few hundred years, genetics and symbiotic robotics could easily change humans to th point that human society contain nothing that we would remotely consider calling humans today.

I think if we were last several thousand more years, majority of “human” society at the end of that period will no longer have any flesh and blood component, but consist of highly interconnected mentalities operating on and experiencing through future equivalent of a civilization spanning internet.

[Dr H]

The next age will be the Age of Aquarius, of course.

[Fake Messiah]

Right now we seem to be living in the Electronic Age.

I don't think so. I would call this age the Oil Age, because everything we have today we have because of oil: all sorts of energy (for travel, mining, growing food...), plastics, chemicals and even electricity (sure some of it comes from other sources but remove oil and with time even those sources will stop). I mean if we stopped using the oil then we would be going to the previous stage which was what? Steam Age? Iron Age? Muscle Age?

I hope next age will be Nuclear Fusion Age, meaning that "we" will not only get electricity from nuclear fusion but also creating materials by heating atoms of one kind until they become atoms of another kind (kind of what stars do today).

But maybe it becomes just Nuclear Fission Age with the development of better and safer nuclear reactors

[Anomalocaris]

Right now we seem to be living in the Electronic Age.

I don't think so. I would call this age the Oil Age, because everything we have today we have because of oil: all sorts of energy (for travel, mining, growing food...), plastics, chemicals and even electricity (sure some of it comes from other sources but remove oil and with time even those sources will stop). I mean if we stopped using the oil then we would be going to the previous stage which was what? Steam Age? Iron Age? Muscle Age?

I hope next age will be Nuclear Fusion Age, meaning that "we" will not only get electricity from nuclear fusion but also creating materials by heating atoms of one kind until they become atoms of another kind (kind of what stars do today).

But maybe it becomes just Nuclear Fission Age with the development of better and safer nuclear reactors

All the extractable energy from oil and coal were ultimately sourced from nuclear fusion, in the sun. So we already live in the nuclear fusion age, and our ancesters have been since the beginning of life on earth.

[Fake Messiah]

You know I remember back in 2012 I wrote on some forum that last decade (00s) was kind of a DVD decade (talking tech-wise) and that this decade (10s) will be about viral stars - and I guess I was right.
Looking into upcoming decade (20s) it seems that nothing significant will happen. I guess for the last two decades perhaps the only thing that was going on technologically were development of mobile phones and (mostly this decade) digitalization of information in a way that people are less and less buying books and even less movies on material media. So when it comes to mobile phones it seems they pretty much reach their peak. I don't see that anything significant will happen there like it was the smartphone - I mean sure there will be ones with more memory and better cameras but that negligible of how accessive and useful smartphone has become from last decade to this.
And when it comes to digitalization that will also continue, but let's face it there is already almost every book available on internet and people don't even buy movies in solid states.

What is the next big thing could be that could be compared to mobile phones? First of all it's the robotization like Robot butlers and self driving cars. Then perhaps next on the scale could be electric cars, next wave of energy harnessing technology, space exploration.

But none of those things will happen in the next decade. Robot butlers are at least decade away; switching to electric cars will continue but not significantly; when it comes to energy we could be witnessing changes on massive scales at least to renewable that we have today, but there aren't any mass policies for that (although some countries are planning to switch to renewable like GB and Germany and even China is constantly planning to do something) and not to mention new nuclear power plants that also seem far away unless there are some aggressive policies to develop them; and when it comes to space exploration there aren't any plans to send people to Mars or probes to dive into oceans of the moons that have them.

So it seems that on surface upcoming decade will be same-old same-old. But it will be preparation and development for the decades to come when we will have robot butlers that will wipe our asses for us.