I wouldn't worry too much about the future of hacking. As an example, HAR 2009 is going on right now. Take a look at the program:

https://har2009.org/program/events.en.html

I've been to the previous edition and let me tell you, there's plenty of tinkering and subverting going on in there.

Here's a selection: "Eyeborg project", "Protheses for $50 instead of $250.000", "Electrical enginering with free/libre open source software", "DNS Security In The Broadest Sense", "A workshop on the ethics of piracy"