What near-future tech do you think has most potential to enhance or speed up game design?

Not to diminish them, but I don't mean VR or AR in this post.

Being a responsible, modern citizen, every time I see some new technology which is going to flame Fake News or influence some future election, I wonder how it might be applied to videogames.

I look at the progress of voice synthesis and wonder how much easier it might be for devs to simply add voice-work to large amounts of texts in future games. Original Sin II gets a Games Master for all that descriptive prose. The Elder Scrolls libraries come to life. And I imagine you might be able to choose your preferred voice.

More technically difficult I imagine, but I look at the already top-notch uses of Deepfakes and wonder how this might help speed up, and improve on, capturing the likenesses of real-world actors within videogames.

And that's not even touching on what modders might be able to do to existing games, once these tools become easier to use.

How right or wrong am I, more knowledgeable people; and what other tech is on the horizon which might come to impact the games we play in the coming years?

Direct brain interfaces. They already exist, although they're pretty primitive so far. Probably they have a while to go before they will work consistently enough for games, at least not without a lot of training required, but I'd try it just for the novelty.

Quantum computing. The possibilities are endless assuming we (by "we" I mean physicists and computer scientists) can figure out how to make and actually use them. From my extremely basic (probably wrong) understanding, everything in a normal computer is binary bits - 1 or 0, but with quantum computing, it can be 1, 0, or a qbit which is 1 and 0 together, and that can be stacked up to 2, 4, or 8 times over to make another qbit.

So in general it will be able to do things that regular computers simply can't do due to being limited to just birany 1 and 0, but it will also be extremely powerful as well.

I think procedural generation could get better. At the moment, it pretty much means endless amounts of repeated, empty environments.

If entire universes could be generated with vast variations in environments and civilisations that actually make sense, crossed with procedurally generated missions/stories and AI with the voice synthesising tech you mentioned, there are literally endless possibilities for open world games.