Tiny brains will be embedded in everything, our bodies’ own microbes will prevent the next plague, and the Trump administration will sue Amazon.com Inc. and other tech giants for antitrust violations.

Those are three of the hottest trends coming in technology in the next five years, according to five venture capitalists who made their predictions Wednesday night in Silicon Valley. They did so at the popular Top 10 Tech Trends event held annually for the past 19 years by the Churchill Club, which hosts forums with tech’s top executives, financiers, entrepreneurs and thinkers.

The criteria for the trends are simple: They must not be obvious and they will take off within five years. Both rules, it must be said, are frequently broken at the event, where fellow panelists and the audience vote on how likely they are to come to pass.

The panel included Mike Abbott, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Steve Jurvetson, partner at DFJ; Rebecca Lynn, co-founder and general partner at Canvas Ventures; Sarah Tavel, partner at Benchmark; and Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital. Moderating were Quentin Hardy, the former New York Times enterprise technology writer who recently joined Google Cloud as head of editorial, and Mike Perlis, chief executive of Forbes Media.

The polling of the audience of several hundred execs and managers on what they think of the predictions went digital years ago, but the panelists’ votes remain charmingly analog: They held up paddles with green on one side for yea and red on the other for nay. Here’s what the VCs expect to see, along with what they and the audience thought of their ideas.

1. Redefining education from the how to the what

Emotional intelligence will be the primary mode of interaction. Abbott said companies such as Udacity will lead the use of technology to remake education. Virtual reality could change education radically. And artificial intelligence will help determine the best of human-to-human interaction as well.

The panelists held up three red paddles and one green one. Tavel thinks VR isn’t going to have an impact in the next five years. Jurvetson agreed, and also wondered why AI will really help education, which has so much inertia that things won’t change that fast. Abbott countered that kids are going to access content in an entirely new way, however it happens. But only 36 percent of the audience agreed with him.

2. The revival of voice

Jurvetson said there’s a renaissance of voice as an interface in our everyday lives, thanks to deep learning and, before long, near-zero-power chips will usher in always-on devices that hear you and respond in real time. This will also get the majority of the world online.

Three green paddles, one halfway. Abbott said it’s less about voice than new methods of interactions with computers. Lynn said it’s rather too obvious and has already happened, so it’s not exactly a future trend. Jurvetson said the proliferation of new devices will make voice all the more useful; tell your Roomba to stop instead of having to reach down and press a button. We’re seeing the signs of it now, but it has only just started, he said. Some 78 percent of the audience was with him.

3. Preventing the plague

We will see a rise in microbiome engineering, using the microbes in our own body, to create therapies, contended Lynn. She said antibiotics are running out of steam and creating superbugs. Even tooth removal could be a life-and-death operation. But microbiome engineering and phage science could prevent all these problems.

Three greens, one red. Abbott said the underlying problem is overprescription of antibiotics by doctors under pressure from parents. We also don’t understand microbiomes very well, he said. Jurvetson, who waved red, said five years is too soon, especially since the Food & Drug Administration can take 10 years to approve drugs. Also, he added, this is a complex ecosystem problem that will take longer to understand. Tung, however, thinks some solutions could be found in the next five years. Lynn said the FDA will expedite this if plagues or antibiotic resistance becomes a crisis. The audience was evenly split, slightly more disagreeing.

4. A startup with IPO prospects will start as an ICO

Tavel said initial coin offerings are the next Kickstarter. But instead of buying a device, you are buying coins or tokens in a new blockchain project and therefore have an incentive to help the product succeed, unlike at Kickstarter. Some $331 million has been put into these projects, she pointed out, contending that we will see some Oculuses come out of this.

Three reds, one halfway. Tung, the halfway, said he likes the idea but an ICO for a startup instead of an IPO seems unlikely in the next five years. Lynn said she doesn’t see it going mainstream. To Jurvetson, Kickstarter wasn’t all that big a tech trend in the first place so much as a finance trend, but the bigger issues are lack of trust in bitcoin and smart contracts to ensure trust are not quite there yet. Tavel rebutted by saying Kickstarter was a launchpad for companies leveraging big tech trends. There are already billions of dollars in market value being created in blockchain, she noted. Audience: No go. Only 29 percent agreed.

5. Food production will be revolutionized globally

Indoor farming and new plant-based foods are emerging and will be important in the next five years to feed a still growing population especially as they move to cities, said Tung, who noted that China is ground zero here. LED lights are way cheaper and brighter, so it’s now possible to produce vegetables and potentially fruits in less than a month instead of several months.

Three greens and one halfway. The halfway, Lynn, said she came from a farm, and although the tech is there, she thinks the rollout will be much slower than five years (though she joked that plague may help reduce the need). Tavel agreed, partly because the payback on lights and equipment, at more than four years, too long: “It’s just really hard to compete against the sun.” Jurvetson said this can work for specialty foods like arugula, but not beef (or even corn, I’d say), so it won’t make a dent in global production. Well, those paddles looked green, but most of the panel seemed pessimistic. The audience liked it, though; 62 percent agree with Tung.

6. Rise of DNA applications due to low-cost sequencing

Abbott said it’s only a couple hundred dollars to sequence a genome, where it used to be $100,000. A smart toilet could analyze fecal matter to improve diagnostic choices, among other things. I didn’t catch it all and apparently Jurvetson didn’t either (see below).

One red, three halfways. Tung said it’s logical but not in five years. Lynn, the red paddle, said 80 percent of health care costs can be solved by people losing 15 to 20 pounds, so the impact of treating DNA-based diseases is marginal. Jurvetson said he’s just not sure this stuff is more important than, say, neonatal tools or changing the FDA or health insurance systems. Abbott rebutted Jurvetson by bringing up his wife’s breast cancer, which he said a 23andMe DNA workup could have prevented. Close to two-thirds of the audience agreed with him.

7. The deep edge

The embedding of inference engineering, neural nets and tiny brains in everything: Jurvetson, who highlighted deep learning several years ago as it was just taking off, said he now sees everything happening at the edge, enabled by tiny electronic brains. He invested in Mythic, which designs very low-power processors that could enable this. It’s especially key because data has gravity, so it’s too expensive to send everything to the cloud for AI work. In a sense, he said, we’re recapitulating our biology.

Two greens, two halfways. Abbott said he likes the idea, but the challenge is the training data needed to make the neural models work. Tavel said it sounds great, but you don’t actually need it; what are the use cases? Lynn is an Internet of Things skeptic; she wants to rip the Nest out of her wall because it’s too hard to change temperature if someone has changed it on their phone. Jurvetson responded the key is moving intelligence to the edge so it doesn’t take so long to crunch the data, which makes many of those pie-in-the-sky talking toasters more useful. But he said training data is an issue, meaning it may not be a startup game. Eighty percent of the audience loved this idea.

8. Breaking up is hard to do

Trump will bring antitrust suits against Amazon and won’t stop there: Lynn said Amazon’s low-price tactics force rivals out of business. And it’s not just Trump; Hillary Clinton put out a paper on how tech giants needed to be reined in. So a clampdown or breakup of Amazon, and by extension other tech giants, could happen under any political regime.

Four red paddles! For one, said Tavel, Russia doesn’t care about Amazon. Also, Trump will never do something after Hillary. Jurvetson said it’s more political than tech, but in any case, Trump doing something doesn’t mean the courts will go that way. Plus, breaking up Amazon into a bunch of Baby Amazons won’t really change anything. For Abbott’s part, Amazon’s organizations are already structured independently, so a breakup wouldn’t really hurt it. Lynn, who is a lawyer, said the fact is, Amazon is scared to death. Internal emails must refer only to market “segments,” not “markets,” to avoid outside perception that it dominates entire markets. Audience? Wow, more than 80 percent disagreed. With characteristic dryness, Hardy said it’s now apparent that Silicon Valley is not in favor of populist initiatives.

9. A billion-dollar outcome will be built on understanding the microbiome

In fact, Tavel said, there could be many companies with billion-dollar outcomes. Microbiomes are three pounds of the average adult’s weight, and we’ve been killing them with poor diet and antibiotics, she said. They have much more impact than we realize on obesity and other issues. Big data and deep learning can unlock the opportunities from the microbiome, she said.

Two reds, two halfway, one uncertain. Abbott said there will be advances in this area, though he said the research points more to correlation than causation from the microbiome. Jurvetson said Seres Health, which made microbiome treatments, went public in 2015 but the trials failed — point being that this will be really hard to make successful. Lynn said she simply isn’t sure pharma can make a buck on it, so treatments may not get developed even if they work because it’s not profitable. Tavel argued back that correlation is a big fat finger pointing to some kind of causation. And one company failing? That happens all the time and doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The audience was split about 50-50, maybe a few more positive.

10. Retail stores will become showrooms and VR experiences

Tung said Amazon and Alibaba are incredible machines, and many malls and stores are closing. Malls will become community service centers instead, he said.

Two reds, one green and a halfway. Abbott, waving green, said we’re still social animals so that won’t go away in one generation. Jurvetson said he swears this was a 1990s trend, noting that malls have been shifting for a long time; this is simply another real estate allocation. Lynn, the halfway, said she believes this is already happening, so it’s maybe too obvious. Tavel, the other red, said consumers don’t really want the VR experience for shopping. Tung noted that GGV was an early investor in Alibaba in 2003, and in China malls are closing. A little over half the audience agreed with Tung.

So now you know what’s coming in five years — or not, in some cases. But it’s certainly what is grabbing venture capitalists’ attention.

Oh, and there was an overall audience winner: Deep edge narrowly edged out revival of voice — both of them from tech-trends event veteran Jurvetson. So once again, he won in a rout. A couple of years ago, his prize was a wizard’s cape. This time, he got a snazzy-looking wand. Not that he needs it.

The full video is now up on YouTube:

Image: GDJ/Pixabay