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Technology Innovation Areas For 2025
Kyle Spector writes "A global futurist research firm convened an expert panel to forecast the major areas and potential advances in technology innovation through the year 2025. This blog entry contains the full list of 12 areas and some details about each, including personalized medicine, distributed energy, pervasive computing, and nanomaterials."
The list is so general that it is bound to be accurate to a certain degree. Also, I seriously doubt that even the brightest and knowledgeable people can predict the really revolutionary stuff that's going to happen. I mean, back in 1989, how many (few?) people could envision the Internet in its current form? Certain societal advances are so revolutionary and disruptive that we cannot even begin to imagine them.
/Modern society is evil!/We must go back to nature!/ thinking.
Not that any of this means that the predicted future isn't amazing and great for mankind, of course. What's really encouraging is the focus on health and the environment. Advances in (bio) medicine, improved water purification, carbon management and engineered agriculture will arguably save and improve the lives of millions of human beings lessen mankind's impact on the environment. And it's all thanks to technology, and not
Most driving is done because:
It costs less than the cost of public transport.
Goes at exactly the time you want it to
Allows you to take lots of luggage
Is often quicker (especially when companired to busses)
and goes from your house and travels very close to the location you want to be at.
You don't have to stand or sit next to someone you don't want to
runs through the night.
Until public transport can do all that it's never going to catch on.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
This list looks 18 years into the future, if we look back 18 years, it takes us to 1989. In 1989 practically nobody had predicted the web or its implications. A single development, and yet the implications of it are profound and are still in progress.
The thing about technology is that it develops at a different rate to the social changes it causes. For instance, the social impact of the web is still happening and is likely to continue for a couple of decades, even if web technology doesn't change much. Why? Because people that grow up with a technology behave differently that those that didn't, so the profound social changes sometimes only happen when children grow up and enter active society.
Art is the mathematics of emotion
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
However, I'm not sure about 'It costs less than the cost of public transport'. If you already have a car/automobile then there is a good chance that a given journey will be cheaper than public transport - especially if more than one person is making the journey. However, my experience in the UK suggests that if you book plane/train far enough in advance you can often get prices cheaper than a car journey (especially considering fuel prices over here.)
If you don't need a car, then doing without one entirely is almost certainly going to be cheaper. I don't have a car and spend probably 600 to 800 GB pounds a year on public transport (excluding any long distance holiday flights for which I wouldn't use a car). Given that I couldn't repair a car myself, I doubt that I could run a car for this (when you include fuel, wear and tear, insurance, tax, MOT, depreciation, interest on a loan etc).
I think it depends on who you are and where you live. For example, if you're a good American living in New York, and you go out and buy a 2008 Ford F-250, you'll spend about $46,000 in 5 years. That gives you ~$9,000 each year (forget time value and all that for the moment). Compare that with getting the 30-day unlimited ride MetroCard for $76 ($38 for reduced fare), it costs only ~$900 a year. You have ~$8,000 left to take a plane or taxi or rent a car to go wherever subway or buses don't go.