That's not the future, it's what is standard in ML application engineering. For example, a good portion of classification systems use models based on ImageNet, VGG, Ngram or AlexNet and then fine tune the last (or last few) layers.
Transfer learning is an old and well known technique and is used ubiquitously. [1]
Transfer learning is an old and well known technique and is used ubiquitously. [1]
[1]http://cs231n.github.io/transfer-learning/