12 new tech trends that VC investors say will completely change life and business in the next four years

Here's the lineup: David Cowan, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners Sarah Guo, General Partner, Greylock Partners Nicole Quinn, Consumer Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners Tomasz Tunguz, Partner, Redpoint Ventures Mike Vernal, Partner, Sequoia Capital

Driven by high-growth companies building a better ecosystem for space travel, the human species is closer than ever before to colonizing Mars and beyond. Cowan believes that someday soon, companies in mining, manufacturing, media, tourism, energy, defense, and more, will be able to buy off-the-shelf products and services for extraterrestrial travel that will help expand their businesses beyond Earth.

"Today if your business is a global business, that may not be enough. You have to think bigger," Cowan said.

Self-driving cars. Electric scooters. Algorithms that set delivery trucks' routes.

The changing ways that people and goods move from point to point will have massive second-order effects, according to Guo. For example, she suggested that as ride-sharing and self-driving cars become more popular, not only will people buy fewer cars, but they might also move into homes outside of typical commuting distance.

"If the last decade was much about mobile apps, much of the next decade will be about real-world mobility," Guo said.

An estimated 781 million adults over the age of 15 are illiterate. Quinn predicts that people who can't read will have easier access to the internet, for shopping and accessing information through, voice platforms like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri.

"Voice is a platform that I think could bring everyone online," Quinn said.

The proliferation of fake news, doctored photos and videos, even Google's Assistant, which can impersonate a human making a telephone call, worry one tech investor.

"What is real? What is authentic? What is genuine? All those questions are increasingly difficult to discern," Tunguz said.

He imagines that a new class of software will arise that aims to verify the authenticity of any piece of content. He added that blockchain technologies have a role to play.

Vernal, who said he recently returned from a trip to China, expects the world's most populous country to soon overtake the US in areas like artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. He cited the use of facial-recognition technology in China, where surveillance cameras are used to catch jaywalkers, find fugitives, and let people pay for goods and services, as evidence of the country's advancements in AI.

"For better or worse, I think the Chinese government is walking in lockstep toward innovation," Vernal said.

Most voice bots today — think Amazon's Alexa or Microsoft's Cortana — are designed for a question-and-answer format. But that's not the way most people talk.

Cowan predicts that digital assistants will get better by having us create more of them. A voice bot might be highly trained in a specific focus area, like making a dinner reservation, and when the user asks Amazon's Alexa to book dinner for two, Cowan can imagine Alexa routing the request to the bot trained for that task.

"When that happens, app interfaces will be as obsolete as applications," Cowan said.

Smart cameras are blanketing the world, from the 170 million surveillance cameras in China used for tracking its citizens to the ones in the iPhoneX used for unlocking the device. These cameras bring new levels of convenience, but Guo warns that if people know they're being watched, they might also change behaviors — for better or worse.

Guo said it's not unreasonable to imagine a world where surveillance cameras and individuals rate people based on good social citizenship, not unlike in the season three premiere of Netflix's "Black Mirror." An individual's ranking might determine whether they have access to a loan and at what interest rate, according to Guo.

"There's a saying, 'You are who you are when no one's watching.' But I think we're going to be watched all the time," Guo said. "I know I'm going to change as a driver if all the cars around me are going to be rating my politeness and safety all the time."

The line between online and offline worlds is thinning, according to Quinn. In retail, brands like Everlane and Allbirds are using a one-two punch of an e-commerce site and a rich brick-and-mortar experience to capture customers wherever they are. Quinn sees this combined approach transforming everything from dating apps to fitness classes, and says that people will no longer distinguish between what is online and offline.

"There's one person in my life that knows literally everything about me. And it's not my wife," Tunguz said. "It's Google. Google knows where I am right now. It knows what I watch. It's seen every one of my photos. It's seen my children grown up."

According to Tunguz, Google has built a "data oligopoly," because of its ability to harvest massive amounts of data from users and because of a lack of regulations in tech. The era of tech-friendly civic policies may be coming to an end, Tunguz said.

"In the future — and soon — I believe there's going to be a strong anti-tech wave, that the safe harbor laws that allowed these companies [like Google] to grow early this millennium will change, and that regulation will happen," he added.

There's a tremendous amount of venture capital flowing into self-driving vehicles, and Cowan believes that investment will create a robotics renaissance by 2021.

He predicts that engineers graduating from top universities and entrepreneurs will leave the crowded self-driving car race for opportunities in adjacent industries, such as robotics. The venture dollars will follow, and those individuals will fuel innovation in trucking, mining, warehouse management, and agriculture, according to Cowan.