Great questions! But I’m not much of a futurologist, I’m afraid. I know where my own interests lie, and what I’d like to dig deeper into (procedurally-driven world-building and story-telling) but if I could guess what would be hot or interesting to a large number of people, I’d already be writing a book about it! 
As for Ruby itself, I’d love to see how it might become more appealing to data scientists and machine learning researchers. Python fills that niche very, very capably, but as I mentioned in the interview, it’s not my favorite language. My previous job was writing machine learning algorithms in JavaScript, but I would have been over the moon if Ruby had been a serious option!