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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."
1. Penis enlargement
2. Hair regeneration
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
What a conjob
"# With the initial mapping of the human genome, scientists are moving rapidly toward the following likely breakthroughs for gene-based products and services:
* creation of an individual's genome map for a retail price of less than $1,000
This was announced last week...no waiting. Come on down.
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
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.
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
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.... ?
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