The key to scripting is having a fairly extensive library of routine operations, easy to use lists and hashmaps, and a runtime that can ideally fit in a shebang. There's no reason you can't do this with C. You just have to learn the first hard truth of C, abandon the standard library. To that end, stdb is kind of that, Sean Barrett's standard library.
Always look ahead to the extraction phase of the capital cycle. How are they going to get their money out. The two they'll likely reach for given the last few decades of software business models will likely be selling your inputs and selling space in the outputs. It'll be interesting to watch how this capability evolves over the next few years and who will pay the most for each.
New attack pathology. There's been a lot of physical device vulnerabilities over the last decade. Things we've mostly been discounting because they required wireless proximity to exploit. We have just figured out how to weaponize this. Imagine first collecting a router based botnet, then using that to spray exploits on routers based on IP geolocation to compromise a bunch of people in a rough geographic area.
Fairly timely piece given the current lecture series. I'm actually kind of excited by what lies beyond our digital tech obsession. I wonder what will hold our collective imagination once we see tech for the self-licking ice cream cone it tends to be.