Trends Identified
Moving from gasoline engines to hybrids and electric.
The power behind transportation is changing. Both electric and hybrid engines will become more common. Energy exchanges between homes and cars using smart grids and “smart homes” technologies will become possible. Fossil fuels may be supplemented with diesel or bioethanol produced locally in bioreactors. The use of light, strong nanomaterials, including nanocarbon, in conjunction with more efficient and longer-range engines and batteries, means vehicles will be safer, weigh less and go farther. The availability of stronger and more heat-tolerant nanomaterials may allow higher running temperatures and more energy-efficient engines. Regardless of mode (airplane, rail, ship or personal car), vehicle
2013
Metascan 3 emerging technologies
Canada, Policy Horizons Canada
The redistribution of geostrategic power.
The predominance of NATO and the West is likely to be increasingly challenged by emerging and resurgent powers.
2017
Strategic foresight analysis
NATO
Going Viral
The previous chapter looked at the emotional and psychological impact of the multiple transformations the world is undergoing. This chapter considers another set of threats being shaped by global transformations: biological pathogens. Changes in how we live have increased the risk of a devastating outbreak occurring naturally, while emerging technologies make it increasingly easy for new biological threats to be manufactured and released—either deliberately or by accident.
2019
The Global Risks Report 2019 14th Edition
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Geospatial Technology
The process of gathering and analyzing geographical data to understand the locational patterns of a subject has become prevalent.
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
Digitization
The proliferation of new mobile technologies, the rise of the Internet of Things, reliance on sensor and wearable technologies, and increased reliance on digital interaction has shifted the world from an analog to a digital one.
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
Unmanned aerial vehicles/ Drones
The proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – commonly known as drones – that are easy to use and low cost is leading to their widespread deployment in aerial inspection tasks, mapping physical and social phenomena, providing unmanned cargo deliveries, and taking aerial photography and video. There is a clear opportunity to transform the way development organisations collect and deliver data and physical objects, enabling these tasks to be undertaken faster, safer, cheaper, more efficiently and more accurately than ever before.
2016
Ten Frontier Technologies for International Development
Institute of Development Studies (IDS)
Workforce Reimagined: Collaboration at the intersection of humans and machines
The push to go digital is amplifying the need for humans and machines to do more, together. Advances in natural interfaces, wearable devices, and smart machines will present new opportunities for companies to empower their workers through technology. This will also surface new challenges in managing a collaborative workforce composed of both people and machines. Successful businesses will recognize the benefits of human talent and intelligent technology working side by side in collaboration—and they will embrace them both as critical members of the reimagined workforce.
2015
Accenture Technology Vision 2015
Accenture
Quantified Self (Predictive Analytics)
The quantified-self movement has existed for many years as a collaboration of people collecting continual data on their everyday activities in order to make better choices about their health and behaviour. But, with today’s Internet of Things, the movement has begun to come into its own and have a wider impact. 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 geotagged 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 behaviours can be built to help with urban planning, personalized medicine, sustainability and medical diagnosis. For example, a team at Carnegie Mellon University has been looking at how to use smartphone data to predict the onset of depression by modelling changes in sleep behaviours and social relationships over time. In another example, the Livehoods project, large quantities of geotagged data created by people’s smartphones (using software such as Instagram and Foursquare) and crawled from the Web have allowed researchers to understand the patterns of movement through urban spaces. In recent years, sensors have become cheap and increasingly ubiquitous as more manufacturers include them in their products to understand consumer behaviour and avoid the need for expensive market research. For example, cars can record every aspect of a person’s driving habits, and this information can be shown in smartphone apps or used as big data in urban planning or traffic management. As the trend continues towards extensive data gathering to track every aspect of people’s lives, the challenge becomes how to use this information optimally, and how to reconcile it with privacy and other social concerns.
2014
Top 10 emerging technologies for 2014
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Informatics for adding value to information
The quantity of information now available to individuals and organizations is unprecedented in human history, and the rate of information generation continues to grow exponentially. Yet, the sheer volume of information is in danger of creating more noise than value, and as a result limiting its effective use. Innovations in how information is organized, mined and processed hold the key to filtering out the noise and using the growing wealth of global information to address emerging challenges.
2012
The top 10 emerging technologies for 2012
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Commercial Drones
The race is on!
2017
Top 50 Emerging Technologies 2017
Frost & Sullivan