Since 2006, IBM has predicted what technological advances the next five years will bring as part of its "5 in 5" series, and this year the company says that by 2017 the technology to read brain impulses will have advanced to the point where you could conceivably have a baseball hat that reads your mind and transmits your thoughts to your smartphone. This sounds great, but the recent "Project Black Mirror" Siri hack / hoax brought some attention to thought-controlled computing and it sounds like this technology is still much more than five years away. 

IBM's also making some other bold claims, like human-created energy powering houses and biometric profiles replacing passwords — it sounds a little crazy, but the company claims to have a good track record: in 2006 it foresaw the internet enabling remote healthcare for patients and doctors alike, and in 2008 it predicted the rise of speech recognition and voice-activated technology that can respond to and learn from user input.