From Usable Help, we find Seth Godin, marketing guru and (apparently) futurist, who makes some heady predictions about what will happen in the next five years:
Hard drive space is free
Wifi-like connections are everywhere
Connections speeds are 10 to 100 times faster
Everyone has a digital camera
Everyone carries a device that is sort of like a laptop, but cheap and tiny
He’s probably right about WiFi and the digital cameras, but I can’t see connection speeds increasing in the next five years–the infrastructure isn’t there. As for everyone carrying a laptop-type device (maybe like this one?), that’s unlikely. The US government projects that by 2007, only about 80% of homes will have any kind of computer. That number is increasing by about 2% a year, so the likelihood of everyone owning a laptop-type device is pretty low. In fact, I’ll be impressed if half the population of the US has a Palm or laptop-type device by then.
The last one in the the list is the most important, and the likeliest to be true: “Your current profession will either be gone or totally different.” Well, it will be true in IT. I think store clerks and longshoremen and the majority of the popuation will still do pretty much what they did five years ago. I might use my RFID-enabled key fob to buy my khakis from the Gap, but the retail role will remain the same.
Cross-posted to the under-used day-job blog.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I think connections will get faster – our phone company just launched a new high speed service – and most cable companies are moving to Docsis (including Shaw which has launched Extreme-i). 10 times faster internet – yeah I can actually see it in 5 years, even in 3 years. The infrastructure at this point is basically just addtional routers at the choke points – no need to string more lines to home that are already wired.
And the OqO computer – I would love to have that thing – looks great!
Regarding connection speeds, I think that if landline connections don’t make it, some future version of WiFi will.
Also, I think the idea of “personal computer” will be largely supplanted by something else: either a Swiss army knife handheld device like the Oqo, or an array of cheap, specialized devices that work together. Those will be as ubiquitous as cellular phones are becoming now, and actually are in other parts of the world.
Ultra-wide band looks promising to deliver gigabit speeds over the last mile. UWB looks like it might open up huge swaths of bandwidth, if it can get regulatory approval. Unfortunately, in the US it has been denied.