10 new tech trends that VC investors say will completely change life and business in the next 4 years

black mirror future tech trends 4

Each year, the Churchill Club, a 32-year-old thought-leadership organization based in Silicon Valley, hosts a debate among some of the leading, and most opinionated, tech and business luminaries. This year, five venture capitalists from Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and other top firms laid out their predictions for which nonobvious tech trends would emerge with the potential for explosive growth around 2021.

That's just a few years away, and according to these tech industry insiders there will be some pretty big changes between now and then. At the 20th annual Top 10 Tech Trends debate in May, we learned that investors are brimming with optimism — and just a bit of fear — over what's to come in tech.

We've republished their predictions here in full.

Here are the 10 tech trends to expect:

Here's the lineup:

David Cowan, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners

Sarah Guo, general partner, Greylock Partners

Nicole Quinn, consumer partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Tomasz Tunguz, partner, Redpoint Ventures

Mike Vernal, partner, Sequoia Capital

Driven by high-growth companies building a better ecosystem for space travel, the human species is closer than ever before to colonizing Mars and beyond. Cowan believes that someday soon, companies in mining, manufacturing, media, tourism, energy, defense, and more will be able to buy off-the-shelf products and services for extraterrestrial travel that will help expand their businesses beyond Earth.

"Today if your business is a global business, that may not be enough. You have to think bigger," Cowan said.

Self-driving cars. Electric scooters. Algorithms that set delivery trucks' routes.

The changing ways people and goods move from point to point will have massive second-order effects, according to Guo. For example, she suggested that as self-driving cars and car-sharing become more popular, not only will people buy fewer cars, but they may also move into homes outside typical commuting distance.

"If the last decade was much about mobile apps, much of the next decade will be about real-world mobility," Guo said.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider