Emerging technologies, such as nuclear power and renewable energy, could replace legacy technologies. The major categories are energy, transportation, information technology, biotechnology, robotics, and materials science. Cheap and efficient solar cells, nuclear fusion, and biofuel production are among the technologies that could revolutionize global energy production. Other emerging technologies include artificial intelligence, machine translation, personal genomics, household robotics, and smarter materials. However, some emerging technologies may not live up to the hype.
Emerging technologies are technologies in their infancy or adolescence that some observers consider likely candidates to partially or completely replace legacy technologies. For example, some futurists believe that nuclear power – both fusion and fission – and renewable energies will completely replace the burning of fossil fuels. This would be a very interesting result, as it would provide us with electricity without contributing to global warming. It should be noted that some emerging technologies and their impacts are more speculative than others and have varying degrees of support among experts. For example, futurists in the 1950s predicted flying cars and lunar cities by the year 2000, but that never happened.
The major emerging technologies can be divided into roughly six categories: energy technologies, transportation, information technology, biotechnology, robotics, and materials science. The most talked about are energy technologies, so we’ll start with those.
For decades, portions of the Western world have realized that burning fossil fuels won’t work in the long run. Therefore, millions of man-hours have been invested in the search for alternative energy sources, but to date these represent only 10% of the global energy budget. The best alternative energy supplier is nuclear, followed by biomass combustion. Emerging technologies that could revolutionize global energy production and storage include cheap and efficient solar cells, nuclear fusion, biofuel production from synthetic microbes, and nanowire batteries.
Another target area for emerging technologies is transportation. First on the list, of course, would be the flying car, but there are many transportation technologies that could have a major impact on humanity. Cheap space access would be one, probably via a space elevator, Space Blimp, or some kind of skyhook. More trivially, electric cars would be nice, even if without widespread methods of post-fossil fuel power generation, they would still consume coal or gas, albeit indirectly. For more advanced aircraft, scramjets could be game-changing: These air-breathing engines could allow a plane to travel from New York to Sydney in three hours.
Another possible incubation ground for emerging technologies is information technology. The Internet has obviously revolutionized the way the developed world works and lives over the past two decades, and it continues to do so. Every investor is looking for the next Google, and it seems only a matter of time before such a company emerges, backing what is now an emerging technology. Possibilities include artificial intelligence, machine translation, computer vision, semantic web, 3D optical data storage, wearable computing, 3D displays, 3D printing, and many more.
Other industries that are seeing emerging technologies include biotechnology, robotics, and materials science. In biotechnology it is moving towards personal genomics and synthetic life. In robotics, it appears that the long-awaited revolution in household robotics may actually take place, while in materials science, scientists are developing materials that are tougher and smarter than before, such as fullerenes and metamaterials. The future looks bright, but it’s hard to predict what will live up to the hype and what will be nothing but disappointment.
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