Trends Identified
How “Social” is Social Media?
The roots of the social media phenomenon as a societal paradigm are fascinating. In the late 90s, the dispersion of the internet and home PCs became the new means of communication, and provided inspiration for experimentation with how we as humans connect and express ourselves. The hype was immense – as today’s older millennials will remember - basic messaging boards and forums became interactive networks where internet users gained a voice of their own.
2019
Trends 19
GlobalWebIndex
Long-term weather forecasts with long lead times
The role of long-term weather forecasting with a large lead time and a success rate exceeding climate forecasts will grow in environmental forecasting (in particular, dangerous natural phenomena) and economic planning (natural resources and economic risks affected by the climate, trends in climate dependent economic sectors, etc.), which will in turn contribute to the achievement of sustainable development and the security of the country.
2016
Russia 2030: science and technology foresight
Russia, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
Autonomous Robots/Drones/ Vehicles – The Rise of the Machine
The robotics market is highly dynamic now, companies outside the classical robotics market invest and with China, a new international player has emerged. Hardware costs will go down and light-weight materials and 3D printing will allow to create new and cheaper models faster than before. Battery and energy efficiency will be a decisive factor. Robots are now able to learn and they have gained flexibility, speed, and manual finesse. The advances in data processing will free robots from former computing restraints. Advanced sensors, voice recognition, and machine learning algorithms will drive the interactivity of robot and human-robot collaboration will make major breakthroughs including voice, face, emotional and behavioral recognition. For now, robots have no broad understanding of the context nor the environment and they do not understand complex human behavior. Empathy seems to be out of scope for now but would have with big implications for employment and the future of work and life. Industrial robots will increasingly use intelligent features such as predictive analytics, self-learning and swarm behavior. Developments are adaptive robots with scanning and sensor technologies, 3D printing, high level semantics, collaboration with operator and new human-machine interfaces. Professional service robots will mostly found in medical, field, and entertainment but increasingly in classical services such as butler, kiosk, service robot. The ratio of connected and autonomous cars will rise fast. Nontraditional tech companies are gaining traction in the very technology that makes cars run, such as driver assistance systems, dashboard functions and autonomous driving and mapping. Drones in all variants are now a stable technology with demand rising mainly around agriculture use cases, delivery, remote maintenance as well as asset and inventory tracking. Personal robots are developed for household/daily care, assisting functions, and multipurpose work. They still have problems with most daily tasks, which will need an-other 10 years of development.
2018
Trend Report 2018 - Emerging Technology Trends
SAP
The nature of conflict is changing.
The risk of conflict will increase due to diverging interests among major powers, an expanding terror threat, continued instability in weak states, and the spread of lethal, disruptive technologies. Disrupting societies will become more common, with long- range precision weapons, cyber, and robotic systems to target infrastructure from afar, and more accessible technology to create weapons of mass destruction.
2017
Global Trends: The Paradox of Progress
USA, US National Intelligence Council
The next billion consumers
The rising wealth of emerging economies will continue to bring a broader range of consumption goods to huge numbers of new consumers. More of them will cross the critical annual household income threshold of $5,000, planting them in the ranks of the “global middle class” and enabling more discretionary spending. Although still considerably poorer than the middle-class consumers in the advanced economies, their vast numbers and increasing ability to devote more income to a broader range of goods and services will create an enormous new market. Estimated contribution to global GDP by 2020: $10 trillion.
2011
The great eight: Trillion-dollar growth trends to 2020
Bain and Company
Middle-class progress
The rising tide of progress has not lifted all boats equally. Globalization and automation are polarizing the labor market, with more on the way as expanding machine-learning capabilities increase the automatability of a wide range of tasks in developed and emerging markets alike (Exhibit 8). As middle-wage workers are displaced, many are forced to “trade down,” reducing their income and putting pressure on existing lower wage workers. There is also widening earnings disparity. Workers with advanced degrees have generally seen their earnings rise, while wages for those with only high-school diplomas have stagnated, and wages for those who do not hold a high-school diploma have declined. Youth unemployment has reached 50 percent or more in several major developed economies
2017
The global forces inspiring a new narrative of progress
McKinsey
Autonomous Vehicles
The rise of the automobile transformed modern society. It changed where we live, what we buy, how we work, and who we call friends. As cars and trucks became commonplace, they created whole classes of jobs and made other professions obsolete. We are now on the cusp of an equally transformative technological shift in transportation: from vehicles driven by humans to vehicles that drive themselves. The long-term impact of autonomous vehicles on society is hard to predict, but also hard to overstate. The only certainty is that wherever this technology becomes ubiquitous, life will be different than it was. Google and other companies have been testing self-driving cars for several years now, with good success. These autos process vast amounts of sensory data from on-board radars, cameras, ultrasonic range-finders, GPS, and stored maps to navigate routes through ever more complex and rapidly changing traffic situations without any human involvement. Consumer use of vehicles with autonomous capabilities, however, is just beginning. Adoption will proceed gradually, through the steady implementation of increasingly intelligent safety and convenience features in otherwise ordinary cars. Some models, for example, already offer hands-off parallel parking, automatic lane-keeping, emergency braking, or even semi-autonomous cruise control. Last October, Tesla Motors made available a software package that enables a limited form of self-driving operation for owners of its vehicles to download. This trend is likely to continue as such technology matures and as legal and regulatory barriers start to fall. A half-dozen states have already authorized autonomous road vehicles, and more have plans to do so. Discussions are well underway among auto insurers and legislators about how to apportion liability and costs when self-driving cars get into crashes, as they inevitably will—although it is widely expected that these cars will prove to be much safer, on average, than driver-operated cars are today. There is plenty of room for improvement on that front. In the United States, crashes and collisions claim more than 30,000 lives and cause some 2.3 million injuries annually. Self-driving systems may have bugs—the software that runs them is complicated—but they are free from the myriad distractions and risk-taking behaviors that are the most common causes of crashes today. In the near term, semi-autonomous safety systems that engage only to prevent accidents, but that otherwise leave the driver in charge, will also likely reduce the human cost of driving significantly. Far more profound transformations will follow once cars and trucks can be trusted to pilot themselves routinely—even with no one inside. Exclusive car ownership could then cease to be the necessity of modern living that it is today for so many people. Shared cars and driverless taxi and delivery services could become the norm. This transition might help the aged and infirm—an increasing fraction of the population—to “age in place” more gracefully. Shared programmable vehicles could reduce the need for local parking structures, reduce congestion by preventing accidents and enabling safe travel at higher speeds and closer following distances, and unlock numerous secondary benefits. Like every technology, autonomous vehicles will involve drawbacks as well. In some distant day, commercial driving may no longer be a sustainable career. Shared vehicles raise some thorny privacy and security concerns. In some regions, increased affordability of car access may greatly exacerbate traffic and pollution problems rather than easing them. But the many benefits of self-driving cars and trucks are so compelling that their widespread adoption is a question of when, not if.
2016
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2016
World Economic Forum (WEF)
Social Media
The rise of social media as a dominant channel/platform for communication has led to new forms of rapid connectivity and interaction across the global landscape (e.g., Arab Spring, the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook groups for Syrian refugees).
2017
Beyond the Noise- The Megatrends of Tomorrow’s World
Deloitte
Populism: From Backlash to Framing the Future
The rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic is one of the defining social, political and economic phenomena of the current era.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)