Prediction: What will be the future of photography?

Way to miss the point entirely. Still, at least this time you actually had a good point, so I'll reply to it:

For any nascent technology to surpass in market share an older, competing technology, all you need is to provide a better value to most users. 35mm SLRs for instance didn't "beat [rangefinders and medium format cameras] in every real way that matters", not throughout their entire operating lives; rangefinders were always superior in low-light performance thanks to their ultra-fast lenses and lack of a moving mirror, while medium format film had much smoother grain and tonalities and benefitted from the same improvements 35mm film did, it's just 35mm SLRs were cheaper to shoot than medium format, were more flexible than rangefinders, supported increasing amounts of automatization, and eventually that was enough to gain a sufficient foothold on the amateur and professional markets to delegate their competition to increasingly smaller niches.

You'd note as well rangefinders and medium format film cameras still continue being made, because technologies seldom really "die"---it's just, like MS-DOS and the cassette tape, most people don't even know they ever existed. So no, the SLR won't die, not from mirrorless and not from anything else. But it might just go into obsolescence, and we might just be seeing the first glimpses of that.

Does it matter? I guess it would, for some, but I don't think it'd be a great loss. Greater cameras have descended into obscurity, and greater still were born into it; I don't think Phase One has ever made a product within the economical limits of the normal amateur.

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