One question I ask a lot of folks I interview is what $PROJECT_X looks like three to five (sometimes 10) years from now. Very few people answer that question without some hemming and hawing.

Enter Andy Pavlo, Associate Professor of Databaseology at Carnegie Mellon, throwing his hat in the ring on the future of databases 50 years (!) from now:

The role of humans as database administrators will cease to exist. These future systems will be too complex for a human to reason about. DBMSs will finally be completely autonomous and self-healing. Again, the tighter coupling between programming frameworks and DBMSs will allow the system to make better decisions on how to organize data, provision resources, and optimize execution than human-generated planning.

That is just one of roughly eight things Andy predicts. Fun to think about, if nothing else.