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."

Comments

consultants ?

[polar red]

The site reads a bit like the site of a hot-air factury.
from their front-page 'Social Technologies is a global research and consulting firm specializing in the integration of foresight, strategy, and innovation.' djeezes.

On energy, they say nothing about renewable energy like solar or wind, while it's clear even to me that solar will take a very big part of the production in the next years.

transportation : 'personal transportation coordinated through wireless computer networks,' I think they're spot-on. In 2025, nobody will be allowed to steer vehicles anymore. (currently there are more deaths per year on the road than you wanna know)

Re:consultants ?

[Slashidiot]

Well, they don't name renewable energy as such, but when they refer to "Distributed energy", they are clearly meaning solar and wind (and others), as one of the things about those energy sources is that it's hard to create a big central that produces most of the energy needed, but it's easy to have bits of electricity generation here and there, saving in line losses.

About in 2025 nobody steering any vehicles anymore, I'm still waiting for my year 2000 flying car, good luck with your self steered 2025 car. Truth is, we are still VERY far from having those type of cars, and will probably never happen. What will happen (and is already happening) is that sensors and electronics will make driving far easier. For example, on the latest models of BMW, you have cruise control that keeps safety distance, on screen radar that let you see position of objects when parking, the steering wheel vibrates if you are on cruise control and go out of your lane, and many more cute things like those.

But for the moment we are quite far from letting the car drive itself, as it's really difficult to control all variables and preview all unexpected things that could go wrong. I'm not saying a human will do them better than a computer, but when the self steered car appears, it'd better be 100% safe, as people don't like to put their lives on a computer's hands.

Utopia or Dystopia?

[owlnation]

Security and Tracking

As an inmate of the UK, can I suggest that those of you who live in other countries begin fighting these "advances" before they ever happen? You do not want this to be your future. In the UK we already have some of it as our present, and it is run by corrupt and incompetent politicians. What's currently happening in the UK is a warning to you all. This is no Utopia. There won't be any British flying cars.

In 2025...

[doyoulikeworms]

We'll look back on how naively optimistic we were. I remember there was an article back in 2000 about what a group of so-called futurists in the '50's predicted the year 2000 to be like. The only one that was right was "Television in Every Classroom."

very western, very expensive

[petes_PoV]

The only item on the list that will affect the vast majority (including the 1/3rd of the population that has no electricity) is universal water. Even that presumes there's some rainfall for the filtration to work on.

If you want major breakthroughs for the "other" 90% of the world they'll have to cost less than $10 to the end-user.

When all these pundits (and their audiences) start thinking in those terms, that'll be a real breakthrough

P.S. My suggestion for the list would be a viable neural interface.

sounds reasonable, but not much to read

[zappepcs]

Necessity is still the mother of invention. All you have to do is look at problems that will not be solved next year, and think a little bit about it, you too can be a futurist. I'm not saying you will be great at it, but you can be a futurist. Being able to predict likely future trends used to be something useful and difficult to do. With the advent of the Internet, you have a veritable research facility in your home. What? you need to know about materials engineering? Google it bro! Oh, need to know about animal husbandry? Google it bro! At no previous time in man's history has so much information been available to so many people. I really am saddened to see that such is left out of the loop on how the future is going to look.

We are currently at some point of compromise between where society was when the original Star Trek was written, and where it predicts we will eventually go. The world has become much more flat, as they say, with regard to commerce, news, politics, and many other things. None of this seems to be affecting technology predictions. Well, I'll make a prediction; the things I've just mentioned will have a far greater impact on future technology than people generally give credence to.

Look at the results of what some of the current technology will bring: Health insurance industry upheaval with bio-tech innovations; big pharma industry upset with open source style medicines; auto insurance upheaval with computer driven vehicles; in general, all of the current trend in innovation is about to upset the big business apple cart. Trouble with this is not that things will change, but that third and second world countries are better poised to take advantage of it as it happens. Big businesses will fight tooth and nail to keep their stranglehold on their markets with the same determination that we have seen the **AA use. There is no good that can come from this.

I also predict that business will change in general. There will be polarization of business practices. Simply opening a company with one cash cow will not be good enough. There will be more vertical integration of business as well as more single mom-n-pop salons. Walmart and their ilk will crumble under their own weight. That seems to contradict what I said of vertical integration, but it does not. There will be more self reliance in business as technology becomes more important, and wise CEO's will see that they need in-house expertise rather than simply paying someone else to do what they can no longer trust another company to do for them. As the world becomes more flat, and regulation of industries becomes more equalized, it will not be possible for some huge multinationals to remain that way. Yes, shrinking profits is what is ahead for the globe.

It will take only one invention to upset the entire global economy, say for instance, free fuel. Hydrogen power for free or very cheap and made open source would destabilize a huge section of the global economy. None of these 'futurists' seem to get any of that in their predictions.... ?