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Technology Innovation Areas For 2025

Posted by kdawson on from the i-just-want-my-rocket-car dept.

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."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Evolutions, not Revolutions by Aminion · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    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 /Modern society is evil!/We must go back to nature!/ thinking.

    1. Re:Evolutions, not Revolutions by Gr8Apes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Envisioning the internet as it is today back in 89 would most likely have predicted today's internet in about another 10 years. It's only the speed, not the internet itself, that would have been hard to predict. Most of the things done on the internet today already existed in some form back in 89, some far before then. Email (and IM,SMS), the Web (a combination of FTP repositories, WAIS, Archie, Gopher, and USENET with a better interface), streaming media/video conferencing. And as for P2P, the internet started with people sharing things off of their systems available to all, became somewhat centralized due to the explosion of end users, and now is moving back to a decentralized format again.

      The major surprise was the speed of cabling and price drops in hardware, making internet access ubiquitous.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  2. Re:consultants ? by oliverthered · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. Social impact of technology by pubjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.