If it doesn't happen within 10 years, there's some reason why it's not going to happen. Y ou can see where this could lead. Warehouses might know what is in them. Your refrigerator might know when it's running low on beer and could go online to order more. But we are physical beings, and both the human race and the human economy depend on the movement of physical objects around the world.
Plenty remains to be worked out.
In the medium term, there are complex issues that involve allocating the radio spectrum and setting standards. Privacy issues are still more daunting, since it seems more than a little creepy to know that your beer bottles and your refrigerator may be telling some company about your drinking habits. For generations, packages and containers and pallets have been valuable because their contents have been valuable. With radio tagging, the conveyance becomes an information carrier in its own right, a quantum of data. The real story of the new economy is not its noisy elbowing-aside of the old economy, but its quiet obliteration of the very distinction between old and new, as the universes of things and data converge.