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Tech

Things We’re Absolutely Positively Sure Will Happen in 2015*

*Like, probably.
This is the most forward-looking relevant stock image we could find. Image: Shutterstock

​Another turn of the year, another slew of predictions for what the near future holds. But the more optimistic forecasts have the paradoxical effect of express less excitement about the next year and more disappointment over the preceding 365 days. Hopes and dreams are recycled and repackaged with extended deadlines; this year we'll finally achieve the future we've been waiting for. This will be the year 3D printing properly takes off. This will be the year of the Internet of Things. This will be the year of wearable tech. For real this time.

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To cut through the grand claims and baseless speculation, here are our predictions of things we're absolutely, positively sure are going to happen in 2015. Maybe.

You will be overcharged for your Uber on New Year's morning.

That's not speculation; Uber actually sent a heads-up to users warning that revellers travelling to and from New Year's Eve parties will push demand—and prices—way up. In a blog post, the company wrote that it expected the highest prices to hit from 12.30 to 2.30, and advised riders to use the app "as soon as the ball drops after midnight," or later in the morning.

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An email from the Uber London team extended that period to 4.30 (perhaps Londoners just party longer?), and said that an average ride at 2 AM could cost over £75 ($117). That's because of Uber's surge pricing, which hikes up the cost of a ride when there's more demand, a model Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick has explained is to entice more drivers out to meet the number of passengers all wishing to travel at the same time.

- Victoria Turk

Social media controversies will continue their reign of terror

An errant tweet from a politician, or a journalist, or an actor, or random teenager will, once again, become a topic of great discussion and of many thinkpieces. CNN might even talk about it. Sometimes this controversy will be worth discussing, other times it'll just take our minds off of some horrific war overseas or the myriad other problems we like to pretend aren't there.

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- Jason Koebler

There will be cyberwar, and it will be confusing

The real lesson from the Sony hack, aside from learning to never say anything sensitive in any email ever, is that we still have no clear guidelines for when and where a cyberwar actually starts. (As an aside, I'm going to just drop this Joseph Cox tweet here.) The FBI was quick to blame North Korea, setting the US up for some sort of cyber-showdown (or maybe it already started), which the bureau has since walked back.

The point is that out of whoever hacked Sony, there's a nonzero possibility that a random person—perhaps one not even connected to the original hacks—managed to convince the US that a foreign nation was the perpetrator. Forget a regular state-on-state battle, this is astounding. On the internet, no one knows you're a dog, even if you're masquerading as a sabre-rattling aggressor.

- Derek Mead

A horrifically underwhelming Kickstarter will be hyped to high heaven

Oh how I can't wait for the day when a seemingly affordable solar powered jetpack shows up on Kickstarter and everyone writes about how we're living in the future. Not like, the social media and smartphones future, ​but the flying cars and jetpacks and teleportation future. THIS IS WHAT WE WERE ALL PROMISED, we'll say. And then, it turns out, the jetpack actually only carries a mouse and it has to be within a specially formulated jetpack park and it lasts for 14 seconds and oh, yeah, it doesn't ship til 2017.

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- Jason Koebler

An Ello killer will finally emerge 

​It's hard to remember a time before the Ello revolution that wiped our social media landscape clean, but signs of the social network's decline are written on the wall just like…like something else.

Anyway, unique visits to the site declined from 275,000 in October to 125,000 in November 2014—a drop of 54 percent. It seems the giant is stumbling and vulnerable. What could supplant Ello though? Would consumers be attracted by an easier interface, even if it meant that revenue for engineering it was raised through selling both ads and consumer data? If the massive success of Ello is any indication, definitely not.

- Benjamin Richmond

Prognosticators gonna prognosticate

We really have no idea what the hell is going to happen next year, but I feel pretty safe in saying that some Big Thinkers are going to say things just to rile people up. Elon Musk might say we're all going to be driving Teslas to the Hyperloop Station that's going to shoot us DIRECTLY to our thorium-powered Martian colony where we'll eat locally grown vegan 3D-printed food BY NEXT YEAR and people are gonna eat that shit up. Because, as much as we like when dumb people make predictions for the future, we love when smart people with means do the same.

Here's to a wildly speculative 2015, everyone.

- Jason Koebler