What Animals Will Trend in 2016?

This year, rather than writing our own predictions, we decided to have Motherboard interview each other.

I am the lucky one that got to pick Motherboard editor-in-chief Derek Mead's brain about the future. Derek also happens to have a zoology degree, making him uniquely qualified to ruminate on what will replace goats as the hot animal of 2016. Our conversation ventured into depressing territory at times, but from batteries to hacking to driverless cars, Derek's predictions seem pretty damn on the nose.

MEG NEAL: A lot of people expect the Next Big Thing in 2016 will be VR with the commercial release of Oculus—what do you think will be the tech that surprises everyone and blows up even bigger?
DEREK MEAD: Okay, so I think VR will be the big thing this year because it's the tech that's most obviously ready to emerge from its hype cocoon in a big way. But if I must add to that, I'd first go with batteries. I hate batteries because new developments and promises are always on the horizon and they always fail, but seeing the rise of distributed home storage is exciting, and I think will have bigger ramifications than we realize right now.

Our energy grid (or grids, rather) is super wasteful and while smart grids have been on the horizon for ages, distributed storage gives the opportunity to do really cool tricks with renewable energy storage and off-peak power utilization that doesn't require completely redoing our national energy infrastructure.

I really hope that's true, a battery breakthrough. And also wireless charging so we can stop living in a sea of cords like savages.
Oh god I hate cords. Somehow I'm getting MORE cords, this is fucked.

Which of Google's moonshots do you think will actually see some promising progress? Or the most?
I think the easy answer for Google is autonomous cars, if that's even a moonshot at this point. We already saw the announcement today that GM put $500 million into Lyft, and there's no doubt that we'll see some major autonomous vehicle breakthroughs this year. I previously predicted that this year we'll see the first fatality that involves a self-driving car, which is macabre I suppose but I'm really curious to see how the ramifications play out.

What I *want* to see though is with Project Loon, which we've haven't heard about lately. Facebook's Free Basics has been getting way more attention, which makes me think Google might try to make a bit of a splash this year, but I'm still unsure of how the project could actually play out because it feels a bit more like a thought exercise than anything else. Still, getting open access to the (truly) open web is a crucial goal for the globe, and after a year in which the digital divide didn't get as much attention as it should, I'm hoping we'll see more movement this year.

I've said something similar about hacking, that security won't be taken seriously enough until there's a death or people lose a ton of money. Which leads to the question what do you think will be the next big thing/company to see a major hack?
What kind of death?

Like a consumer.
Oh yeah, there we go. Then we'd be crossing the Rubicon!

I think the big hack isn't going to be a company this year. Companies are going to get hacked constantly and we're all boned. Use a credit card, not a debit card, online, change your passwords, and don't say anything embarrassing in your chat app of choice.

The real hacking story of 2016 is going to be infrastructure. It's not new, but no one's really processed it yet. To go back a bit, think about how insane Stuxnet is, really: A virus sent all over the world in the hopes of eventually making its way into industrial software that eventually controls Iranian centrifuges. The capability there is insane. Now it looks like Ukrainian power plants were hacked and shut down, and key infrastructure in the US has been compromised in the past, and that's just what little we know.

Yeah it's super scary to think about.
Is this interview a bummer?

Oh man I should ask a positive question huh? What is the best robot?
The best robot would be one that washes my dishes because honestly I'm getting pretty tired of doing it. I never realized how spoiled I was back when I was a young man in California with a garage and a dishwasher, but here we are in Brooklyn in 2016 and I can't even get a garbage disposal.

Second best bot is the woman on Tinder who was definitely not a bot, but at the time I was convinced she was because she was far out of my league. I asked her if she was a bot and I never got a response, whoops.

Who do you predict will win the presidential election and what would that mean for hot-button tech issues like privacy and security and encryption?
I think the best odds right now are for Hillary Clinton because she has strongest political infrastructure, and I don't expect much to change. Lip service about internet access while municipal fiber efforts still get trampled and so on. For whatever reason, tech policy remains of extremely low import in the 2016 discussions, and everyone running debates so far has had their heads too far up their asses to look at the big picture of how tech is reshaping our nation. Anyway!

What are you stoked for this year, looking forward to seeing?
I am really excited to see whether or not the new Formula 1 technical regulations will make the cars louder, as I'm planning on attending a race.

Should I say something that sounds sorta smart too? I'm looking forward to seeing the re-stratification of media as more and more outlets realize the "cover everything" approach is producing increasingly diminishing returns.

The point of flooding the zone is to create a deep lake of knowledge for your readers to gleefully jetski across, but flooding _all_ zones with an inch of water produces little more than soggy, smelly carpets.

I can't think of a better note to end this interview on than jetskis and smelly carpets.
Is that the most tortured analogy possible? I hope so.

Ask me what animals I think will be trending this year.

What animals do you think will be trending this year?
So I think in 2015 we saw goats resurgent in the zeitgeist, and otters have been hot for those in the know.

But while goats are cute I suppose, and otters are DEFINITELY cute, neither of them are all that compelling on an emotional-intelligence level, nor is either a weird icon. People like animals that have strange shapes because it's a reminder of how weird and beautiful the animal world is. It's why you remember a triceratops and not, say, a camptosaur.

So for 2016 I think we're going to see the return of raccoons, which have funny faces and cute little hands and which are ridiculously smart. (Dark horse pick here is the closely related coatimundi, which I'm partial to.)

I'd also bet my hat that anteaters make a comeback this year because they have delightful coloring and those amazing noses, and it's been awhile since anteaters were in the limelight despite them being objectively excellent.

My sleeper pick is the scorpion because of some sort of resurgent 90s Gwen Stefani tough-but-posi-IDGAF attitude whose scent is wafting on the winds of cool at the moment, probably as a response to how ratball 2015 was.

This is the best.