I think this post is attracting such vitriol because it has the condition reversed - rather than saying "What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years" - it's probably more accurate to say "A significant portion of the new activities people do 10 years from now will have had their origins in a smart person's weekend project".
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his newest book Antifragile. He makes a sort of evolutionary argument - people who are actively trying to invent the future must necessarily focus on what they think will be desired or necessary. But predicting the future is nearly impossible! So the huge masses of non-teleological tinkerers - considered as a whole - who simply work on what they enjoy for its own sake, have the advantage. In other words, any particular tinkerer will probably not invent the future, but the odds are good that eventually someone will stumble onto something.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his newest book Antifragile. He makes a sort of evolutionary argument - people who are actively trying to invent the future must necessarily focus on what they think will be desired or necessary. But predicting the future is nearly impossible! So the huge masses of non-teleological tinkerers - considered as a whole - who simply work on what they enjoy for its own sake, have the advantage. In other words, any particular tinkerer will probably not invent the future, but the odds are good that eventually someone will stumble onto something.