Honestly it feels like what I, or many of my colleagues would do if given the assignment. Take the current front page, or a summary of the top tropes or recurring topics, revise them for 1 or 2 steps of technical progress and call it a day. It isn't assignment to predict the future, it is an assignment to predict HN, which is a narrower thing.

Right, because you would read the teacher and realize they don't want you to actually complete the assignment to the letter. So you would do jokes in response to a request for prediction.