Prediction: What will be the future of photography?

To me the photography market lies somewhat between your two examples of aviation and computers.

The latter of those two is obviously the most rapidly devolping area of technology post WW2 and really shows little sign of getting near its limates. Aviation on the other hand as you say has not advanced massively in many key areas for decades, often because its dealing with technology pushing up agenst physical limates.

The sensor side of photography seems somewhat closer to a PC benefiting for the ever greater performance and miniturisation but it does seem to be pushing up agensgt physical limates more in terms of light collection. The optics side is clearly pushing up agenst these limates even more with size limates on lenses and resolution limates for a certain sensor size.

Combined I suspect those issues mean that larger sensors are likely here to stay and that the lenses these sensors will need are likely to remain large aswell. That to me also makes it seem likely that the DLR form factor to support thse lenses(larger zooms anyway) will also survive and if you've got the form factor my question would be why lose the mirror? The progression I'd like to see would be a move towards some kind of hybrid viewfinder ala Fuji giving potentially the best of both worlds.

At the higher end the more obvious move towards mirrorless for me actually seems to be medium format, your dealing with a market where cameras are very large and one that does not tend to focus on zooms or longer lenses aswell as having less focus on quick AF performance. When it comes to film non SLR MF cameras faired far better than 35mm film ones with rangefinders taking up much of the market for I'd guess those reasons.