The top 10 coming tech trends, from five top tech investors

Designers will succeed programmers as the kings of Silicon Valley, machines will become as smart as humans, and ambient computing will supplant smartphones in the next few years. Those are three of the top 10 trends coming in technology, according to five venture capitalists who made their predictions Wednesday night at a local Silicon Valley institution. The Top 10 Tech Trends event has been held annually for the past 18 years by the Churchill Club, which hosts forums with tech's top executives, financiers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers. The criteria for the trends are that they must not be obvious and that they will take off within five years, though both rules are frequently broken. Few of the predictions directly involved traditional enterprise computing, which customarily is focused on the nearer-term trends, but virtually all of them are enabled by heavyweight enterprise technologies.