Get ready for therapy by text message, new silicon chip architectures and personalized fertility services.

Those are a few of the hot technology trends that will take off in the next few years, according to five venture capitalists on a panel Thursday night in Silicon Valley. They made their predictions at the locally popular Top 10 Tech Trends event held annually for the past 21 years by the Churchill Club, which hosts forums with business executives, entrepreneurs, financiers and thinkers.

Trends are a dime a dozen, especially at the center of the VC universe on Sand Hill Road. What’s supposed to set these apart are, first, that they shouldn’t be obvious and, second, that they will see explosive growth or impact in three to five years. Not surprisingly, both rules are routinely broken at the event, and probably more than a few did this year too.

On the panel (below, left to right) were Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures in a return engagement, Lauren Kolodny of Aspect Ventures, Jeff Crowe of Norwest Venture Partners, Navin Chaddha of Mayfield Fund and Brian Ascher of Venrock. Moderating were Forbes Media Chief Executive Mike Federle and Forbes Publisher Rich Karlgaard.

The way the event works is that the several hundred local executives and managers in the audience are polled in real time on what they think of the predictions, a process that went digital years ago via polling apps. But the panelists vote on each other’s ideas too, and that process remains stubbornly analog: They hold up paddles with green on one side for thumbs-up and red on the other for thumbs-down.

With that setup, here’s what the VCs said they expect to see, along with what they and the audience thought of the ideas:

1. The rise of functional medicine

This idea, from Lynn, builds on the idea that nearly half of U.S. adults are obese or nearly obese. Functional medicine is the answer, divining how and why the illness happened in the first place, not just “putting a pill on it.” There’s also a direct connection between the gut and the brain, she noted. So there’s likely to be even more personalized supplements rooted in science.

The verdict on the panel: two green paddles and two red ones. Kolodny, a green paddle, said this makes a ton of sense, because personalized data makes this approach interesting and doable. Skeptic Crowe agreed there’s a lot to say for it, but he thought the pace of change in the medical community is so slow that it won’t happen very soon. Chaddha, also a skeptic, said the technology exists and a lot of companies will go after it, but it’s just hard to change consumer behavior as well, especially if the insurer isn’t paying — and if it is, it will need proof. Not least, people just still want to eat and do things that aren’t healthy for them. Ascher, who likes the idea, said he thinks it works, with some companies already starting to offer this kind of thing.

Lynn acknowledged that people do eat bad things, meaning mostly sugar. But Headspace, Goop and a bunch of others starting to offer these products are already valued at a billion dollars each.

The audience? About 55% liked it, 45% didn’t.

2. Flexible fertility management will become mainstream

Kolodny made the case that as women have families later to stay in the workforce and more same-sex couples start families, there will be huge demand for more flexible and personalized fertility services. Women who wait to have children earn 5% more every year they wait into their 30s. But fertility treatments are very expensive today; one cycle of in-vitro fertilization costs $15,000 and up. There will even be financing for this, like 529s for fertility, and companies will see the advantage of providing these benefits. In summary, the biological clock won’t matter as much.

The panel: green paddles down the line, though with caveats. Chaddha said this is much-needed, the only uncertainties being what the business model is and how employers will offer the services. Crowe thinks it’s a national imperative given that Russia and Spain are seeing economic problems from falling fertility. Lynn wanted to love it, thus the green paddle (unless she meant to show red), but hasn’t seen it happening yet and doesn’t see the trend building yet; just one word: Alabama (with its restrictive new anti-abortion law).

The audience again was favorable, a little over 55% positive.

3. Physical space: the final frontier

There will be some major changes in how we use space, Crowe contended. He said it’s not obvious because nothing in real estate has really changed in many decades. These are trillion-dollar industries, but now changes in building design, software and more portend big changes. Millennials will live in purpose-built city buildings with a smaller individual footprint but more common areas. There will be lots of virtual decorating of rooms — cheaper security, too, with $20 motion sensors and more technology.

Panelists split. Ascher, a red paddle, said there has already been massive change and the really hard parts have a lot of friction. He doesn’t want to do something as important as selling a house in three clicks. Green paddle Chaddha said the innovation has been on the digital side, but not on the physical side, or at least millennials have been struggling to make housing work, for one. Kolodny thought there could be an inflection point happening, with companies such as Opendoor (in which Crowe’s firm has invested). Lynn was a skeptic because millennial behavior changes when they have kids and they want an asset as their home, though she likes the co-living angle.

Crowe responded this is a trend that is already happening in the middle of the country, such as in Phoenix and San Antonio. Some 20% to 30% of homes will be bought and sold this way in five years, he predicted.

The audience also split about 50-50.

4. Biology as technology will save lives and reinvent trillion-dollar industries

Chaddha said this is science coming back to Silicon Valley. The biggest problem today is that consumption worldwide is depleting resources yet mortality is increasing. But we are entering a golden era of biology with CRISPR, bioprinting, clean fuels, synthetic foods and more.

Panel: three red, one green. Lynn would love science to come to the Valley but she thought this is simply going to take time, especially at large scale. Kolodny, the one supporter, was on the fence, but though she conceded most of this is more than five years out, she saw the success of Impossible Foods Inc., the nonmeat-burger company, as a sign of things to come. Crowe and Ascher also questioned the timing, noting that the Food and Drug Administration takes a long time to approve things like this, and there’s also a lot of biology we just don’t know enough about yet for all of this to take off soon.

Chaddha pointed out that some of this will happen overseas sooner than here.

The audience was much more positive; 60% liked the idea.

5. VR-AI-bioelectric wearables will program our emotions in healthful and intentional ways

Ascher pointed to smartphones and social networks causing all sorts of problems because they’re so addictive. Smart entrepreneurs will take this experience to create products optimized for mental health, he predicted. Wearables will hack us into states of happiness and peak performance and flow. We’ll start using these devices as daily habits like yoga. Think Deepak Chopra meets “Ready Player One.”

Three reds, one green from the panel. Lynn, the sole optimist here, noted Headspace again, as well as the Calm app, as things people will pay for. Kolodny disagreed with the whole notion, saying wearables are the antithesis of mindfulness. Also, their adoption has flattened in the last couple of years. Crowe thought we all just need to go outside and take a walk in the park. So did Chaddha, adding that wearables are still too clunky and expensive, so he didn’t see what company is poised to make this happen within five years.

Ascher’s response: What he meant here is 15 minutes a day in an immersive environment as a reset, not an all-day activity, which would indeed be creepy.

Sorry, Brian, the audience hated it. Some 70% voted thumbs-down.

6. Distributed workforces will become the norm

Thanks to collaboration software such as Zoom, Notion, Slack and the like, this old idea will finally become the preferred way to get work done, Lynn contended. Also, people are really happy telecommuting. And a couple of other drivers: It’s really hard to find talent, so it needs to be found everywhere, and co-working spaces are becoming very common.

Three greens, one red. Crowe said the idea fits with demographic and other trends, his only quibble that he thinks it’s here already and therefore pretty obvious. Ascher, the one red, said that obviousness is why he voted thumbs-down, because it’s already happening. Chaddha felt the same, but he noted that many U.S. companies are still a ways off from really embracing this. Indeed, Kolodny said the technology is certainly there and has been for awhile (she knows since she worked on Google Apps for business at Google LLC), but the difference is the technology hubs popping up all over the world.

Lynn’s response: It’s not as obvious as it seems because right now, most companies are just using overseas teams to scale up. But now we’re starting to see entire core engineering, marketing and accounting functions 100% remote.

Audience: A mild affirmation with about 53% positive.

7. A democratized network of trust

A massive network of verified identity will makes our digital activities more seamless and secure, Kolodny predicted. Online brokers are failing as arbiters of trust. Sometimes caregivers have criminal records, there are rampant data breaches such as Equifax’s, and intermediaries such as Facebook Inc. are losing trust. Zero-trust security, computer vision and other technologies will make better identity verification possible.

Or not: The panel votes three reds, one green. The one thumbs-up, Crowe, said this is indeed a massive problem that we must solve. In the next five years? Not sure. But things like blockchain will help a lot. Chaddha agreed it needs to be solved, but we’ve tried everything and little has worked except regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and governments are slow to act. Ascher and Lynn agreed it’s a timing issue, plus it’s a hard problem for consumer to grok.

Kolodny agreed that the solution is not yet obvious, but argued that shorter-term, verified work credentials, background checks and the like can be addressed by technology today.

The audience? Pretty much the same as the panelists, with 61% not seeing it.

8. Digital technology makes positive inroads into mental health

Heavy use of smartphones and our always-on culture will be fought back against by, of all things, digital technology, Crowe said. Mental health issues often require immediate care that’s hard to get, especially since nobody really want to talk about it, least of all with employers and insurers. Texting with remote therapists is already a thing, he said, and it’s as effective as talking to a therapist, at a quarter of the cost. It was just rolled out as a benefit in the last month to Google employees. Machine learning analyzing the (anonymized) texts will help figure out what works in a therapeutic setting.

The votes: three reds, one green. Lynn, the only green paddle, said this ties back to the utility of functional medicine. For Kolodny, though, human contact is so important for care that delaying it with texting is scary to her. Chaddha acknowledged the problem and the technology exist, but he argued that digital devices are the problems, not the solution. Also, who’s going to pay for this, consumers or insurers? Ditto for Ascher: Telemedicine adoption rates are low, he noted.

Crowe pushed back, saying his psychologist wife had the same reaction, but his daughter, now studying psychology, said it will happen. This is not videoconferencing with your therapist, he said, and it’s actually happening today. All the big insurance companies are signing up, he added.

The audience was split but mildly positive at 54%.

9. The renaissance of silicon will create industry giants

With the end of Moore’s Law, new chips are required for a cloud-native, data-dominated world in which machine learning is the key thing they need to do, according to Chaddha. In this world, a single kind of chip, the central processing unit like Intel Corp.’s, can’t solve these problems. We’re going to see a flowering of silicon architectures again, he contends. He cited a company making a “data processing unit,” among other things. Even Intel has been buying up other chipmakers with these new architectures.

The panel, though, was split. Naysayer Lynn said very few people in the room probably remember the “silicon” in the Valley, and it’s too expensive to make them here (though to be fair, Chaddha didn’t address manufacturing). Naysayer No. 2 Kolodny acknowledged the need for these new kinds of chips, but she thinks the big businesses in silicon technology will be built on the software side. Crowe, who liked the idea, said he invested in a low-power chip for the “internet of things,” so he sees it happening, though he doesn’t think they’ll be Intel’s size. Ascher agreed, saying it’s back to the future.

Chaddha responded that this innovation isn’t just about startups. Amazon.com Inc., Google, Facebook, Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. are all building chips, because they’re reaching the limits of what CPUs can do.

The audience loved this: About 79% voted thumbs-up.

10. Federal defense and intelligence budgets will dramatically unlock for startups

Big tech companies such as Google and Microsoft are held back by picketing employees and thus can’t fill the needs, according to Ascher. Cyberattacks are an existential threat to democracy, for one, he noted, but traditional defense contractors such as Raytheon, Lockheed Grumman and the like don’t do world-class software.

Three greens, one red on the panel. Chaddha liked the idea because it’s a big need and will create opportunities, but will it be the startups or the big cloud providers and integrators? Crowe voted red for precisely the same reasons: It’s really hard for startups to penetrate this world against entrenched defense contractors and consulting companies. Kolodny said she’s right between those views, and defense contractors will continue to own the market, but there are plenty of opportunities for startups to sell cutting-edge technologies such as deep fake detection to the big contractors. Indeed, Lynn is already seeing startups addressing this.

Ascher argued that the times are changing: Look at upstart Palantir Technologies Inc., which has made big inroads with its big-data analytics. Lynn added, in fact, that now the government is looking to replace Palantir, indicating a government openness to new startups.

Some 70% of the audience liked this idea.

And the winner is…

New chips! Not surprisingly, a lot of people in Silicon Valley like the idea of the fundamental element of the region staging a comeback, at least on the design and software if not the manufacturing side.

For coming up with the winning trend, Chaddha won a magic wizard’s wand made by a company called Acme — really. That’s how they roll at this event.

So now you know what’s coming, or at least what VC are willing to invest too much money in. How did the prognostications stack up?

Well, at least some aren’t the usual stuff we’ve heard about, such as autonomous cars and robots, space stuff and Chinese dominance. But it’s doubtful a good chunk of them will happen anytime soon, if at all. The emphasis on health in a couple of cases is understandable and even desirable, but anything that involves governmental oversight won’t happen quickly. Same goes for startups hoping to crack the defense establishment.

Still, new chip architectures aside, a good number of these trends are based less on technology breakthroughs themselves than on their application to emerging demographic, political and other trends. Perhaps that’s an indication that venture capitalists and the startups they help are moving past obsessing about shiny technology objects to applying those innovations to real-world needs. We can always hope.

Image: Bru-nO/Pixabay