It’s often difficult to keep up with the rapidly developing
technology industry, as new items and groundbreaking technologies are
introduced to the market almost on a daily basis.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging
Technologies identifies recent key trends in technological change in its
annual list of Top 10 Emerging Technologies. By highlighting the most
important technological breakthroughs, the Council aims to raise
awareness of their potential and contribute to closing gaps in
investment, regulation and public understanding. For 2014, the Council
identified ten new technologies that could reshape our society in the
future.
1. Body-adapted Wearable Electronics
The sector is shifting beyond external wearables like wristbands or
clip-on devices to “body-adapted” electronics that further push the
ever-shifting boundary between humans and technology.The new generation
of wearables are typically tiny, packed with a wide range of sensors and
a feedback system, and camouflaged to make their use less intrusive and
more socially acceptable
2. Nanostructured Carbon Composites
New techniques to nanostructure carbon fibres for novel composites
are showing the potential in vehicle manufacture to reduce the weight of
cars by 10% or more. Lighter cars need less fuel to operate, increasing
the efficiency of moving people and goods and reducing greenhouse gas
emissions.
3. Mining Metals from Desalination Brine
As freshwater continues to dwindle, desalinating seawater has emerged
as an option. New processes using catalyst-assisted chemistry raise the
possibility of extracting lithium, magnesium and uranium, as well as
the more common sodium, calcium and potassium elements, from reject
desalination brine as a resource to be harvested for valuable
materials at a cost, that may eventually become competitive with
land-based mining of ores or lake deposits.
4. Grid-scale Electricity Storage
There are signs that a range of new technologies is getting closer to
cracking. Some, such as flow batteries may, in the future, be able to
store liquid chemical energy in large quantities analogous to the
storage of coal and gas. Various solid battery options are also
competing to store electricity in sufficiently energy-dense and cheaply
available materials. Newly invented graphene supercapacitors offer the
possibility of extremely rapid charging and discharging over many tens
of thousands of cycles.
5. Nanowire Lithium-ion Batteries
Batteries are critically important in many aspects of modern life. Lithium-ion batteries, such as
iphone backup battery life ,
which
offer good energy density are routinely packed into mobile phones and
laptops. Over the last year, researchers have developed possible
solutions that involve the creation of silicon nanowires or
nanoparticles. Able to fully charge more quickly, and produce 30%-40%
more electricity than today’s lithium-ion batteries, this next
generation of batteries could help transform the electric car market and
allow the storage of solar electricity at the household scale.
Silicon-anode batteries are expected to begin to ship in smartphones
within the next two years.
6. Screenless Display
This field saw rapid progress in 2013 and appears set for imminent
breakthroughs of scalable deployment of screenless display. Various
companies have made significant breakthroughs in the field, including
virtual reality headsets, bionic contact lenses, the development of
mobile phones for the elderly and partially blind people, and
hologram-like videos without the need for moving parts or glasses.
7. Human Microbiome Therapeutics
Attention is being focused on the gut microbiome and its role in
diseases ranging from infections to obesity, diabetes and inflammatory
bowel disease. It is increasingly understood that antibiotic treatments
that destroy gut flora can result in complications such as Clostridium
difficile infections, which can in rare cases lead to life-threatening
complications. On the other hand, a new generation of therapeutics
comprising a subset of microbes found in healthy gut are under clinical
development with a
view to improving medical treatments.
8. RNA-based Therapeutics
Developments in basic Ribonucleic acid (RNA) science, synthesis
technology, and in vivo delivery i.e. in a living organism, ”are
combining to enable a new generation of RNA-based drugs that can
attenuate the abundance of natural proteins, or allow for the in vivo
production of optimized, therapeutic proteins. Working in collaboration
with large pharmaceutical companies and academia, several private
companies that aim to offer RNA-based treatments have been launched.
9. Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics)
Smartphones contain a rich record of people’s activities, including
who they know (contact lists, social networking apps), who they talk to
(call logs, text logs, e-mails), where they go (GPS, Wi-Fi, and
geo-tagged photos) and what they do (apps we use, accelerometer
data). Using this data, and specialized machine-learning algorithms,
detailed and predictive models about people and their behaviors can be
built to help with urban planning, personalized medicine, sustainability
and medical diagnosis.
10. Brain-computer Interfaces
The ability to control a computer using only the power of the mind is
closer than one might think. Brain-computer interfaces, where computers
can read and interpret signals directly from the brain, have already
achieved clinical success in allowing quadriplegics, those suffering
‘locked-in syndrome’ or people who have had a stroke to move their own
wheelchairs or even drink coffee from a cup by controlling the action of
a robotic arm with their brain waves. In addition, direct brain
implants have helped restore partial vision to people who have lost
their sight.
