The expected future is economic growth. Humanity invents and improves many things and people will live better lives. But even in upside scenarios not everything will be getting better. There is a subset of future use cases for technology out there that are both practically inevitable and at the very least disquieting to imagine.
Also, it will be fun to write about them before they become too mainstream.
First, we have the inevitable results of improving drone technology combined with parental paranoia. The combination leads to children tracking drones. The ability to watch children 24/7 without actually having to follow them wherever they go will be a luxury at first only claimed by the upper middle class. They are too poor for full time nannies but rich enough to afford the latest gadget. A drone that follows their kids can let parents watch them from afar, notify the parents when the kids interact with strangers or even give automatic verbal warnings to children who are playing too close to traffic.
Now, given that we already have children on leashes this might not seem like such a big step. Infact, a drone following a child from a safe distance is probably preferable to a leash in every single way. But beyond desensitizing a generation to the surveillance state, these drones are only going to make helicopter parents more paranoid. This is because everything happening will be videotaped, and this will include the inevitable tragedies. In 15 years, if an alligator gets a toddler it won't just be national news, there will be video of the attack itself. The unecessary culture of paranoia that surrounds child rearing in our society is only going to get worse. And drone cameras stalking kids will have a part in that.
Next, we have personal bots. Right now, bots are being automated to do all sorts of customer relationship management. It is only a matter of time until bots are available that are designed to mimic your writing patterns and interact with your friends for when you don't have time. Maybe it will only be to keep social media profiles active - wishing people happy birthday or commenting on life events to help those who find themselves with less time for social media. But its use will eventually spread.
Some conversations might end up feeling like fake voicemail hoaxes, or at the very least there will be some people who use bots to an extent where we won't we won't know for sure if we've gotten through to the real person. But perhaps worse than either of those will be the friends who use their bots to spam their network far too frequently. Today we get spam email from there people, but tomorrow we'll get personalized spam that if treated as spam will desensitize us to text conversation that we would consider to be very real today. (Hat tip to @garvinandrew)
Finally, we have virtual reality and augmented reality. Just like Brazil has been the country of the future, virtual reality has been the entertainment technology of the future. Unlike Brazil, many people are starting to think that virtual reality's time is near. If not with this generation, then we are only a few generations away. This brings us a step closer to Nozick's thought experiment of the Experience Machine. Infact, good virtual reality would be more addictive than Nozick's machine since it would not have to be preprogrammed. People already choose to shut themselves off from the physical world, and as the "Shut out reality" option gets more advanced more and more people will choose this option.
Augmented reality holds a lot of promise. The ability to overlay information will make many jobs much easier. Skilled workers will save time and make fewer mistakes while inexperienced workers who know how to interface with augmented reality will be able to replicate the work of the highly skilled.
Once the technology to discreetly utilize augmented reality in social settings is available then improving facial recognition technology means forgetting names or the context by which you know someone will be a thing of the past. But that's not the only thing that you will know about other strangers in the room. Not only might it be possible to know someone's employment history, but those interested in filtering people based on which political candidates they've donated to or whether they have made comments that are deemed not acceptable can avoid undesirables without having to talk to them.
Our society is getting more and more partisan. There aren't many Trump supporters trying to make friends with Clinton supporters in today's world, and Clinton supporters are more likely to boycott the Trump fan's business than try to befriend a stranger who is a known fan. If this pattern doesn't change before ubiquitous augmented reality combines with facial recognition software then our social lives will get far more tribal.
In the midst of all of these bleak predictions, I can only be sure of one thing: There is something worse that I left out.