Can you believe we are nearing the halfway point of the 2010’s? We’ve left the iconic science fiction years of 1984, 2001, and 2010 far behind and find ourselves in a world that looks startlingly like what was just science fiction in the recent past. While smartphones and tablets made the tricorder of “Star Trek” more and more real over the past five years, the emerging technologies of today promise to change our world in larger and more potentially scary ways. Here are five future tech predictions for 2015, many of which speak to a very different world:

If the Tim Cook era at Apple has shown us one thing it is that there is only one Steve Jobs. During Jobs’ second stint with the venerable computing powerhouse he released three category-changing products – the iPod, iPhone, and iPad – in less than 15 years. In between there were so many remarkable moments, from the original iMac and Macbook Air, to the “Think different.” advertising campaign. Now, there has not been a single really exciting release under Tim Cook and instead we have the awkward corporatization of U2 and continued incompetence in the cloud. In 2015, for the first time in almost a decade, the spiritual mantle of cool in technology will shift from Apple to one or more of companies like Google, Amazon, Samsung, or perhaps even — gulp — Microsoft.

Cyborgs have been around for decades in the form of people with health care devices like pacemakers. However it is only in recent years, most popularly with the emergence of Oscar Pistorious as an Olympic-caliber athlete, that “cyborgs” begin to approximate science fiction books and movies are becoming part of our lives. The combination of synthetic biology with computing devices that report on or even enhance how our minds and bodies function are already starting to trickle out more and more prototypes and products that you and I can buy today that make us look like a sci-fi villain.

In some Amazon warehouses around the world your order from the e-commerce juggernaut is being picked not by people but by drones. And Amazon is just one of the leading tech companies investing in drone development and deployment. There are already efforts by tech lobbyists on Capitol Hill to allow drones to be operating out in the world for things like direct home delivery, bypassing companies like UPS. This is rightfully running into government opposition, but it is only a matter of time before money and power lead to wide-scale drone deployment out in the real world is at least prototyped. I predict that will happen in 2015.

As reflected in recent publications like Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” and Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men,” there are significant gender shifts in the workforce of today and tomorrow. At the same time, the “good ol’ boys” network remains proudly in place as evidenced by a variety of inputs including the recent #GamerGate scandal in computer gaming and articles about misogyny and sexual harassment in the Silicon Valley VC community. A focus on and distaste for unfriendly environments for women will continue to increase – particularly in the tech community.

Have you seen the robotic cheetah produced by MIT can move, run, and jump in ways that would look to you an awful lot like an actual cheetah? Robotics has undergone a steady evolution from the clumsy personal assistant that wished Burt Young a happy birthday, to the Roomba that cleans our room for us, to robots like Watson that are primarily the mind as opposed to the body. Now, the robots coming out of laboratories are functionally realistic in sometimes breathtaking ways. Expect to see more stories about these creatures of our near future in the year ahead.

The world is changing rapidly, in ways that will make it look evermore like something out of an author’s imagination. 2015 is another year during which recent science fiction will become more of our reality.