British Telecom has given their expectations to the future and produced a number of timelines, that should give ideas about when we can expect tecgnology to evolve. I found this when I was trying to answer my parents question "When can we expect to buy a robot for doing household work like cooking, cleaning and helping us" - as far as I can see from the BT whitepaper, this should occur around 2012-2020. so this could actually be relevant for my parents.
I do personally not beleve that things is going to evolve that fast. I think that they are 20-30% to optimistic about their timelines. You can download the report here :-)
The article is also located on the BT homepage.
BT has a Futurolist which write quite a few interesting things about what he expects of the future - see Ian Pearsons articles.