Researchers at Microsoft labs are predicting the advancements expected to surface next year, and even look ahead to ten years from now. In a blog post, Microsoft provides a collection of predictions from 16 leading thinkers within the company's Technology and Research organization.

Here are the highlights for 2016 and 2026:

2016

• During 2016, Microsoft says we will see the emergence of new silicon architectures that are tuned to the intensive workloads of machine learning, offering a major performance boost over GPUs.
• Interesting new applications of depth camera technology are coming on mobile phones.
• Successful and large-scale inclusion of specialized compute acceleration in the cloud, which will enable large gains in big data workloads, bioinformatics, high-performance computing and many other important verticals.
• Reconfigurable computing (i.e. FPGAs) go mainstream in the datacenter, as a first-class compute accelerator.
  
• Stylus-based drawing, annotation and note-taking will assume a broadly supported and appropriate place in the mosaic of how we interact with digital devices.
  
• The age of digital baubles, do-dads and planned obsolescence will begin to fade, and the focus of industry and consumers will shift from technology, per se, to enhanced human experience, values and potential.
  
• Online conversations will increasingly be mediated by conversation assistants who will help us laugh and be more productive. This will lead us to question and blur the way we think about our computers, phones and our memories and relationships.
  
• More kids’ first jobs will be virtual rather than in a physical place. Over time, this will cause us to rethink the way we work, and the way we design our physical cities, neighborhoods and local communities.
  
• Every data science program will have a data ethics curriculum, giving greater understanding the human implications of large-scale data collection and experimentation (and ideally producing greater fairness and protection from forms of data discrimination).
• We begin to build due process protections inside big data systems that influence health care, housing and employment decisions.
• There will be continued rapid progress in natural language processing based on deep learning methods and machine translation performance may be set by attention-based sequence learning techniques based on deep learning.
  
• Artificial Intelligence technologies are used pervasively by ordinary people in their daily lives.
• The usage of interdisciplinary technologies designed to extend and improve the lives of patients with complicated diseases.
• 2016 will be the year that video distribution on the Web will overtake TV broadcast. More people in China will watch the Olympics through the Web than through TV. Video analytics technology as offered by Project Oxford will facilitate more intelligent video processing in the cloud.
  
• A visible advance in computational intelligence will be the advent of fluid, multi-step conversational dialog with machines—which will be noticeably more natural and competent than the speech interactions we’ve have had with computers and smartphones to date.
  
• Cheap, long range, low-power sensors and radios will enable an exponential acceleration of environmental monitoring and create the foundations for unparalleled access to information about the planet.
  
• The key cryptographic technology advance in 2016 will be the demonstration of an end-to-end encrypted TLS connection using quantum-resistant public-key algorithms for both key exchange (for confidentiality) and digital signatures (for authentication). The coming advent of quantum computers of reasonable size over the next 15 years will necessitate the migration of all our existing public-key cryptosystems to new quantum-resistant algorithms, and a quantum-resistant TLS (used for every https:// secure Web connection) is the first step.
  
• 2016 will be the year that continued advances in quantum computing will draw broad attention to the threat it represents to all of today’s widely used public-key cryptosystems – the cryptography that underlies electronic commerce and secure communications on the Internet. The security community will begin planning the migration to new 'quantum-resistant' public-key cryptosystems for which quantum computers provide no computational advantage.
  
• We will see the start of a new generation of systems solutions that guarantee security even if the operating system or other infrastructure gets compromised by hackers.
  
• 2016 will be the year that a new generation of security solutions based on trusted hardware (such as Intel SGX and comparable features from other hardware vendors) starts to hit the marketplace, transforming how we think about security.
  
• The confirmation and demonstration of a topological qubit will be a key technology breakthrough for quantum computing in 2016.

2026

• Looking forward to 2026, Microsoft says we will have ubiquitous, human-quality translation among all European languages, thereby eliminating the language barrier throughout Europe.
  
• A partial shift away from von Neumann computing for computation-intensive workloads, resulting in massive cost efficiencies and reduced latencies. This shift will enable many advances in deep personalization, such as intelligent computing assistants.
  
• Every kid who goes to school will learn to code and create the kinds of experiences we use every day.
• AI agents like XiaoIce will feel so real and play such a central, trusted role in our lives that we will require them to have the same ethical and legal relationships that we have with doctors, lawyers and therapists.
• Deep learning will advance to match or exceed human-level AI competence in several major areas of speech and vision, and possibly in some areas of cognitive functions as well.
• Ten years from now, cancer will be a solved problem thanks to interdisciplinary, ground-breaking approaches that will enable researchers and clinicians to compute driver mechanisms of cancer, as well as to understand, detect, diagnose and treat patients at an individual level.
  
• The fusion of atoms and bits, as envisioned with HoloLens, will become commonplace so that people can have digitally augmented experiences in education, shopping, traveling and interactions with people and things.
  
• While advances in AI will have profound influences in such areas as transportation, healthcare and personal empowerment. The most important uses of AI will be in the sciences, where intelligent systems will supercharge scientific discovery and enable major scientific breakthroughs in such areas as energy, biology and medicine.
  
• By 2026 computing will be ubiquitous in natural environments, providing a digital dashboard on the state of nature that allows us to continuously monitor the pulse of life on earth.
• Hopefully by 2026 we will have deployed a new quantum-resistant public-key cryptosystem in all of our in-use security protocols and will be well on the way to deprecating a few remaining quantum-vulnerable cryptosystems. Ideally, if we do it properly, the migration will make all of our communications secure against attacks using quantum computers but otherwise have no impact on a person’s daily computing experience.
• Over the next 10 years, the major breakthrough of economics will be in applications of market design, which improves the efficiency of markets using a combination of game theory, economics and algorithm design.
• The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system vendors will continue. The stakes will be raised high enough that security and privacy will become a differentiator with which device and cloud platforms will be sold. This will fuel major advances in all layers of the system stack ranging from (1) application layer in terms of machine learning techniques which preserve privacy and fairness, (2) system architectures that guarantee isolation of user data and detect intrusions and compromises using advanced machine learning, and (3) new hardware features and new cryptography, which enable such system architectures.
• In 2026, we’ll be able to connect to a quantum computer through the cloud to seek solutions to problems that we cannot solve with today’s classical computers, in particular the simulation of physical systems for chemistry and materials science. Imagine being able to more efficiently produce artificial fertilizer or extract waste carbon from the air.