Again.. electronics and something else...

One huge thing that has changed will definetely be fusion power that mankind has harnessed. That is also one of the reasons for the lunar mission. Helium-3 is really the best way to keep the process going.

In sports one might mention Hockey Champions League. It might have became as big as footballs Champions League is nowdays. Also you really shouldn't forget about political incidents (Like Ilkka Kanerva's text messaging scandal). Althought they mibht not be relevant to the Demo, in the actual film the political athmosphere of 2018 should be shown in either "TV document" or in background headlines etc..

Everyday electronics and something else...

-Touchscreens is a must. Especially with public computers.
-Cellphones have not changed a lot from what they are today. Perhaps just new models. There might be a faster wireless communication protocol than today.
-Internet is everywhere.
-There are still a lot of gasoline powered cars. The change is not that fast, although fuelcell powered cars are much more common than today.
-USA is still occupying Middle East (the reason being still about the publicly terrorists, but really about oil), but there are violent riots in the US agains military operations. The return-to-moon-program is one way to turn the heads of US citicens to something else.
-There has been a revolution in China mostly because Tibet-incident. A lot of civil wars.

Food riots

Due to increasing cost of oil, more biofuel is being made for replacement - ethanol, vegetable oil etc. However, this means less food being produced at higher cost as well.

The poor, uneducated people everywhere in the world are in trouble. If they were poor in 2008, they sure are poorer in 2018, as now food is triple as costly or more. Some countries have had major wars because of this even, as they simply cannot buy food, and people are starving. But even in the most wealthy countries the problem is obvious for the poorest ones.

In the cities we can see wealthy business people, who have a job. But going to the less controlled suburbs, there are lots of unhappy people in desperation for basic daily survival. No wonder they gather in various places and plan mutiny. Riots take place at times, and robbery is increasing.

At daylight in citi centres nothing could be better. No robber risks himself in the crossfire of thousands of control cameras. Even suburbs don't look that dangerous at daytime, because the police sure has got its equipment up-to-date and is more efficient than ever. But suburbs at night... Wearing a wrong style scarf or carrying a pompous suitcase - you are risking your life!

realtime total situational awareness for the military

Tracking of real world data into a 3d model of an area and augmented reality technologies have had great advances as of late with the ever increasing processing power of modern computers.

Bear in mind that all this is real time, today.
There are some even more impressive videos but i can't find a link at the moment.

One practical and quite feasible use of this within the next ten years would be instantaneous situational awareness for all soldiers in a unit.
For example; a unit is entering an unknown area..
Their helmets are fitted with small cameras that send the video to a remote processing station.
There a 3d model of the area is formed and human beings in the picture identified.
Other soldiers not seeing this would get a translucent wireframe presentation of surveyed areas and people seen by any member of the unit would be seen by all.

And the usual consumer applications aswell, ofcourse.
I'm sure nintendo will be among the first to come up with something.
And Google is planning something with entire cities i'm sure will be integrated into google earth at some point.

Active surface and printed electronics

The nanotechnology and stuff is fun. Here is some technology which might come even faster. Printed electronics provide means to produce low cost surfaces with animations and some games on items like posters with animation (like in Harry Potter) and milk cartons with cows jumping around or some tic-tac-toe games.

More about the technology in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_electronics

IBM's five year innovations

Guys at IBM have visioned stuff like mobile phone shopping/clothing consultant, remote home appliance control and notifications ("this is your coffee machine, I'm still cooking"), widely adopted Internet/Broadband over Power Lines (BPL), and cars like the new Volvo that automatically keeps its distance to the next car.
Dear Santa... I would also like spamfree email, reusable digital paper, well-working projected keyboard, and LCD projector built in a mobile phone like the Microvision PicoP.
The article: http://www.physorg.com/news117213808.html

Computers of the future

Just came across this article of future laptops:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9070158

Lot of those images where reminding me of the "I, Robot" movie with shiny surfaces.

I started to think about what the devices could be in 2018. The trend seem to be towards touch interfaces where the screen can act as keyboard and the input mechanisms are more versatile. One trends seem to be the adaptability of the device i.e. you can use the device as normal laptop, but when turning it on sideways it suddenly is a centerfold of a magazine. last but not least at least when thinking of visual image of movies are intelligent and self healing materials. Bullet holes in the computer surfaces could heal by them selves :)

Incapacitating microwave guns

Another page from the "oh yeah, they're testing it already" playbook: microwave guns for crowd control. Use them to make the target hear voices (Frey effect, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect) or up their body heat.

A report on the US Army's actual research @ http://www.freedomfchs.com/usarmyrptonmicrowavefx.pdf

Targeted marketing

One thing which seems to be the trend is targeting the advertisements better. I.e. the marketing tries to find out the preferences and profiles of people and marketing things according to these to people. One aspect of these is the location of the person. Google is already good at this. The ads are based on your queries and if you are using google mail you get ads which are based on the content of your mail. I guess Minority Report got the idea quite nicely the idea.

Maybe an example could illustrate the idea. So if you walk close to a shoe shop e.g. the shop systems could identify you based on the mobile phone signal and according to previous visit the shop already knows your shoe size. The result would be that they would send you a message like "We have a nice pair of shoes just your size 46 only 99 EUR" with a nice picture etc.

And then imagine the cacophony if your are walking down a street full of shops. Kind of scary. Goodbye silence ..

Another aspect of this is all kind of free services paid by ad revenues. E.g. you could call for free, but in return you would need to every now and the listen to some commercial announcements and these would be based also the user profile.

Noise!

As we have seen communication change from land phones to mobile phones and the nature of mobile communication extend to the area of video conferencing, multimedia and internet it could be conluded that the nature of mobile devices and their usage would develop further. The progress would result in even smaller devices, perhaps even small implants which would be embedded under the skin and would be controlled via a small control surface. Or how about this. It's the Nokia Morph Concept featured very recently on Youtube:

An idea presented to me by my friend Timo Keränen: Private transport would be regulated for decreased pollution. The bulk of citizens use public transportation in cities for daily business and pleasure.

As a response to Jalmari Raippalinna's shot: Silent Appliances would sound like a nice course for future techology. But according to what I've read and what I've come to understand, it is an optimistic scenario, the reality might be the opposite. There might not be enough interest in the market for low noise technology for things to quiet down. Combining that with the fact that everything man made is growing and expanding - Population and cities grow, the number of noise sources come greater and greater - one would come to the conclusion that the future is actually a VERY NOISY and a hectic place which afflicts more anxiety than calmness.