Trends Identified
Eat a printed dinner in your printed home
It’s early evening and you pull the car into the drive of your new home that was erected in just two days. Since it is your wife’s birthday, you are clutching a personalised gold necklace that you picked up from the printer. For dinner tonight, you won’t need to do any chopping or peeling – ingredients just go straight into your kitchen fabricator.
2011
Seven technologies to disrupt the next decade
NewScientist
Boosted brainpower
It’s already common to use drugs to boost brainpower (whether it’s coffee, or something stronger, like modafinil), and most of the developed world now relies on their smartphones as an ‘externalised’ memory – but let’s extrapolate that out a few decades. Imagine targeted pharmaceuticals that make us think faster than currently possible, and technological implants that help us concentrate beyond normal human ability for hours or days, for example – these advances are already well underway in laboratories around the world. The question it raises is: what happens to those that cannot afford such enhancements? Could it widen inequality, and allow the rich to get richer? Then there’s also the legal and ethical issues: it’s acceptable to drink a coffee before you sit an exam, but is it ok to use an implant or a smart drug? The challenges posed by intelligence enhancement are only just emerging.
2017
10 grand challenges we’ll face by 2050
The BBC
Transport: 'There will be more automated cars'
It's not difficult to predict how our transport infrastructure will look in 25 years' time – it can take decades to construct a high-speed rail line or a motorway, so we know now what's in store. But there will be radical changes in how we think about transport. The technology of information and communication networks is changing rapidly and internet and mobile developments are helping make our journeys more seamless. Queues at St Pancras station or Heathrow airport when the infrastructure can't cope for whatever reason should become a thing of the past, but these challenges, while they might appear trivial, are significant because it's not easy to organise large-scale information systems. The instinct to travel is innate within us, but we will have to do it in a more carbonefficient way. It's hard to be precise, but I think we'll be cycling and walking more; in crowded urban areas we may see travelators – which we see in airports already – and more scooters. There will be more automated cars, like the ones Google has recently been testing. These driverless cars will be safer, but when accidents do happen, they may be on the scale of airline disasters. Personal jetpacks will, I think, remain a niche choice.
2011
20 predictions for the next 25 years
The Guardian
The rise and rise of emerging markets
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the 21st century will be marked by the dominance of emerging markets. Already a force to reckon with, emerging markets will in the next years become equal competitors with mature markets and command more economic and political power. As trade and investment occur across emerging markets, newly emerging markets will flourish. An explosive combination of large, young increasingly educated and urban populations with greater levels of disposable income (e.g., in Indonesia) and (or) natural resources (e.g., in Nigeria) is propelling newly emerging markets forward. The latter have provided the more established emerging markste with investment opportunities.
2010
Business Redefined - A look at the global trends that are changing the world of business
EY
Behavioural and Cognitive Science
It will be more difficult to quantify the direct application of advances in cognitive science than it is in nanotechnology or biotechnology. However, indications are that certain interdisciplinary advances, such as neuro-imaging technologies, may make the mapping of brain activity with behaviour more reliable. Modelling techniques are likely to become more powerful and increasingly capable of more accurately understanding the complexity of human behaviour and performance at various scales, and over different time constants.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
The UK economy: 'The popular revolt against bankers will become impossible to resist'
It will be a second financial crisis in the 2010s – probably sooner than later – that will prove to be the remaking of Britain. Confronted by a second trillion-pound bank bailout in less than 10 years, it will be impossible for the City and wider banking system to resist reform. The popular revolt against bankers, their current business model in which neglect of the real economy is embedded and the scale of their bonuses – all to be underwritten by bailouts from taxpayers – will become irresistible. The consequent rebalancing of the British economy, already underway, will intensify.Britain, in thrall to finance since 1945, will break free – spearheading a second Industrial Revolution.In 2035, there is thus a good prospect that Britain will be the most populous (our birth rate will be one the highest in Europe), dynamic and richest European country, the key state in a reconfigured EU. Our leading universities will become powerhouses of innovation, world centres in exploiting the approaching avalanche of scientific and technological breakthroughs. A reformed financial system will allow British entrepreneurs to get the committed financial backing they need, becoming the capitalist leaders in Europe. And, after a century of trying, Britain will at last build itself a system for developing apprentices and technicians that is no longer the Cinderella of the education system.It will not be plain sailing. Massive political turbulence in China and its conflict with the US will define part of the next 25 years – and there will be a period when the world trading and financial system retreats from openness.How far beggar-my-neighbour competitive devaluations and protection will develop is hard to predict, but protectionist trends are there for all to see. Commodity prices will go much higher and there will be shortages of key minerals, energy, water and some basic foodstuffs. The paradox is that this will be good news for Britain. It will force the state to reengage with the economy and to build a matrix of institutions that will support innovation and investment, rather as it did between 1931 and 1950. New Labour began this process tremulously in its last year in office; the coalition government is following through. These will be lean years for the traditional Conservative right, but whether it will be a liberal One Nation Tory party, ongoing coalition governments or the Labour party that will be the political beneficiary is not yet sure. The key point is that those 20 years in the middle of the 20th century witnessed great industrial creativity and an unsung economic renaissance until the country fell progressively under the stultifying grip of the City of London. My guess is that the same, against a similarly turbulent global background, is about to happen again. My caveat is if the City remains strong, in which case economic decline and social division will escalate.
2011
20 predictions for the next 25 years
The Guardian
Real-time DevOps
IT organizations need to better respond to business needs with speed and agility. IT can likely improve the quality of its products and services by standardizing and automating environment, build, release, and configuration management—using tools like deployment managers, virtualization, continuous integration servers, and automated build verification testing. Popular in the agile world, DevOps capabilities are growing in many IT organizations with either waterfall or agile methodologies.
2014
Tech trends 2014 - Inspiring Disruption
Deloitte
Autonomic platforms - Building blocks for labor-less IT
IT may soon become a self-managing service provider without technical limitations of capacity, performance, and scale. By adopting a “build once, deploy anywhere” approach, retooled IT workforces—working with new architectures built upon virtualized assets, containers, and advanced management and monitoring tools—could seamlessly move workloads among traditional on-premises stacks, private cloud platforms, and public cloud services.
2016
Tech trends 2016 - innovating in the digital era
Deloitte
PaaS-enabled agility
IT leaders must look beyond cloud debates to pinpoint the business processes and applications that will matter most to their organizations—and that are best suited to a platform-as-a-service model. PaaS is not just a tool for squeezing cost out of IT; it will provide an environment that can support rapid evolution for key business processes that need continuous change.
2012
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Accenture
Cities of Flows and the Spectre of the Sustainable City
It is vitally important to recognise that planetary urbanisation is one of the main drivers of the ecological predicament the world is in. Indeed, the ‘sustainability’ of contemporary urban life – understood as the expanded reproduction of its socio-physical form and functioning – accounts for 80% of the world’s resource use, of global ecological degradation, and of the world’s waste. What I wish to foreground in this contribution is that these urban roots that structure global socio- ecological flows and the feeble techno-managerial attempts to produce more ‘sustainable’ forms of urban living actually are customarily ignored by both researchers and policy-makers, while it is precisely these socio-metabolic flows that continue to sharpen the combined and uneven socio-ecological patterning that marks contemporary urbanisation dynamics.
2016
Shaping the future
European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS)