8 Predictions for 2016: Drones, Mobile Pay & the Internet of Things

Will 2016 be the year people really start buying things with their phones? The year a hacker finally turns the lights off? Or a self-driving car causes an accident? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe some of these things won’t happen until January 2017 — the 12-month time horizon is pretty arbitrary — but these are the things that are listed in almost every prediction story about the new year.
While it might be silly to talk about 2016 guarantees, New Year’s Eve is always a natural time to think about the future, and the exercise of imagining what troubles we’ll soon confront is certainly worthwhile. So I’m not limiting this year’s predictions to the new calendar. Instead, I’m going to discuss what I think is “coming soon.”