20-Year Prospect
Is the 21st century a warm and fuzzy place, where we all get along and there's naught on the horizon but peace, tolerance, and love? No? Then we're confident FBI agents are here to stay.
We'd love for there to be no reason for the FBI to exist, for the Bureau to just close up shop and have everyone go home because crime, as a whole, has been solved. Unfortunately, that's never gonna happen. There's just too much for the FBI to do.
Thankfully, they'll have improvements in technology to help them do it. Enter the Next Generation Identification System, a database of bad guys that relies on facial recognition to get the job done. Whether it works every time is still up in the air, but developments may one day make it so the FBI can spot a criminal photobombing in the background of a Twitpic.
Whether the technology works or not, Special Agents are a critical part of America's security and law enforcement infrastructure. So long as there are criminals bent on doing their criminaling (not a real word), trusted federal agents can count on waking up to a job every morning.