Trends Identified
Information and Communications Technology
By 2040 it is likely that the majority of the global population will find it difficult to ‘turn the outside world off’. ICT is likely to be so pervasive that people could be permanently connected to local or global networks, with inherent challenges to civil liberties. Even amongst those who make an explicit life-style choice to remain detached, choosing to be disconnected may be considered suspicious behaviour. There are a number of socio-economic trends that will lead to pervasive ICT including: a widening global economy, greater cultural assimilation and awareness of technology, and a steady reduction in the unit cost of ICT associated goods. The pervasiveness of ICT will be enhanced by the advent of more common functionality, supported by global service provision and developments in infrastructure, such as cloud computing.235 The related trend of convergence will be driven by manufacturers trying to find a competitive advantage over their rivals by merging more functions into a limited range of smaller devices. ICT investment will also be driven by new business models that help sustain the insertion of new technologies. Significant changes are likely to be observed in applications, mobile devices, and tailored information and interaction modes rather than in infrastructure. Constrained investment in infrastructure will be perceived as a factor that stifles innovation in the developed world, but arguably less so in the developing world, which has the potential to ‘leap-frog’ a generation of fixed infrastructure technologies. In addition, there will be far-reaching improvements in processing power and data storage236 resulting from innovations such as spintronics237 in silicon. Improved architectures enabled by advances in grid computing, photonics and possibly quantum computing (which may increase processing capabilities by 100 billion times), are also likely to lead to more intensive, diverse and perverse applications. Wearable and implanted wireless ICT is likely to become available to all that can afford it.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Network Growth
Technological advances, and a greater understanding of social, physical and virtual network behaviour, will converge to drive new types of network architecture and applications. These will be increasingly accessed by remote and distributed means. Technology applications such as those supporting social networking will continue to reconfigure and enable new social models and means of interacting. This will raise fundamental issues about privacy, security, legal frameworks and the mechanisms for influence. The rate of growth of hardware development is unlikely to reduce before 2020, and software technology may fail to keep pace with these advances, contributing to an increasing proportion of major project failures. The growth of many networks is unlikely to be governed by top-down planning; such growth is likely to occur in a decentralised manner, often analogous to nature. In order to improve effectiveness and reduce vulnerability increased understanding of network topology and nodal behaviour, including people, will be required. There will be changes in network technology driven by: the need to improve end-to-end security; the requirement to support large numbers of Internet-enabled devices; and the ability to directly convert from optical to wireless connectivity. The evolution of ICT devices will be driven by their increasingly wide range of applications and rising demand by society. Increased Internet penetration across the globe, particularly in heavily populated areas, will influence Internet content and ownership.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Advances in Simulation
Advances in social science, behavioural science and mathematical modelling will combine, leading to more informed decision making. Advanced processing techniques and computational power will permit a more comprehensive level of modelling, potentially enabling more effective pattern recognition. This is likely to improve the identification, representation and explanation of systems and processes. As a result, simulation will become an increasingly powerful tool to aid policy and decision makers. Simulation will also blur the line between virtual and real environments.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Virtual Databases
Networks will undergo continual evolution of form not just scale. For example, incremental development of the ‘semantic web’ will occur, enabling machines to recognise, identify, capture, manipulate and interpret data with minimal or no human intervention. The semantic web, and associated technologies, will effectively create an integrated data store, with an unprecedented level of access that can be exploited by reasoning techniques to provide more sophisticated forms of analysis. The exploitation of these techniques may expose hitherto unseen patterns, interactions and associations, with potentially wide-ranging, unforeseen and unpredictable consequences. Sophisticated data-mining tools will include automatic data reduction/filtering along with automated algorithmic analysis to enable faster access to relevant information. Virtual Knowledge Bases will store knowledge extracted from traditional documents or messages within large meta-data (database) structures, and in logical formats that intelligent software can interpret. Virtual Knowledge Bases will provide: improved searching and alerts to stored information; the ability to answer questions across the whole knowledge store in near natural language form; and automated situation reports on demand and in response to events to enhance situational awareness.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
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
Biotechnology
Biotechnology encompasses a wide range of issues entailing the biological modification of organisms and non-living materials to develop new properties, which have application in medicine, food science and agriculture, and industrial manufacturing. Developments in biotechnology are likely to be swift as indicated by the significant increase in global biotech revenues ($23 billion in 2000 to $50 billion in 2005) and the purchase by large pharmaceutical companies of ‘biotech’ firms in order to secure the most effective avenues for future drug development.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Advances in Material Science
The design and manufacture of materials at the molecular level will result in ‘designer’ materials, with in-built capabilities to sense and modify their behaviour or functionality, introducing a new manufacturing paradigm. Most advances are likely to occur where material science combines with, or adopts, principles employed with other innovative disciplines including electronics, nanotechnology and biology.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
New Energy Technology
New sources of power generation will become commercially available and viable before 2040. Out to 2020, while advances may be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, the efficient use and management of power will increasingly be a key driver, particularly for the design of new devices. Hybridisation, along with fuel additives and smart design, will improve the energy efficiency of engines. Smart, conformal designs for low-power systems for efficient charge recovery, and the use of power scavenging techniques, will be examples of potential innovation. For short periods of operation, batteries are likely to remain the preferred power source; however, as energy demands increase, improved fuel cells adapted to suit the operating environment may become the preferred option for longer operations. Nonetheless, demand for traditional lithium-ion type batteries, will increase due to an increased uptake of hybrid and electric vehicles
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology focuses on manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale, generally at less than 100 nanometres in size. At this size, and using other scientific disciplines, the characteristics of matter can be changed. This will create new and unique properties with profound and diverse applications. Advances in nanotechnology, at the interdisciplinary frontier where physics, chemistry and biology meet, will be a key enabler of technological advance, involving: new additives and coatings; materials and sensor development; and medical treatments and heath diagnosis.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence
Autonomous Systems and Robotics
As the information revolution continues, there will be a pervasive and dramatic growth in the role of unmanned, autonomous and intelligent systems. These systems will range in size from meshes of small sensors and personalised robots, which replicate human behaviour and appearance, to a cooperative plethora of intelligent networks or swarms of environmental-based platforms, with the power to act without human authorisation and direction.
2010
Global strategic trends - out to 2040
UK, Ministry of Defence