A Look into the Future: The World Economic Forum’s Top Ten Technologies

At this year’s Annual Meeting of the New Champions, hosted by the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, the Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies choose the top ten technologies of 2016, based on their potential to transform industry and society. A diverse range of breakthrough technologies, including autonomous vehicles, natural language artificial intelligence, and next generation batteries, were examined in collaboration with Scientific American, highlighting advances that have the power to improve lives, transform industries, and safeguard the planet. The report also provides an opportunity to debate human, societal, economic, or environmental risks and concerns that the technologies may pose prior to widespread adoption. “The global community needs to come together and agree on common principles if our society is to reap the benefits and hedge the risks of these technologies,” said Dr. Bernard Meyerson, Chief Innovation Officer of IBM, and Chairman of the Meta-Council. In raising awareness about these technologies, moreover, the Council aims to address challenges in investment and regulation.

1. Autonomous Vehicles Shift Into High Gear: There are over three million truckers—the most common occupation in America—moving 9.2 billion tons of freight annually. Over 70% of all freight is moved by trucks. Self-driving cars are not only a novelty; they also have the potential to uproot how goods get to market. The long-term impact of autonomous vehicles on society is hard to predict, but also hard to overstate. The regulatory issue is perhaps the greatest concern, but with six states having authorized autonomous road vehicles—and more with plans to—this has not been an insurmountable barrier. Discussions are well underway among auto insurers and legislators about how to apportion liability and costs when self-driving cars get into crashes, as these inevitably will—although it is widely expected that these cars will prove to be much safer, on average, than driver-operated cars are today. The 20th Century saw the rise of the automobile, and with it one of the most important economic sectors by revenue. The 21st Century may have a similarly disruptive revolution in transportation.
2. The Internet of Things Goes Nano: The Internet of Things (IoT) is the infrastructure of the information society, comprised of physical devices with network connectivity to improve accuracy and efficiency (i.e. Fitbit). Experts estimate that the IoT will consist of 30 to 50 billion objects by 2020. Scientists are now shrinking sensors from millimeters or microns in size to the nanometer scale, small enough to circulate within living bodies and to mix directly into construction materials. This is a crucial first step toward an Internet of Nano Things (IoNT) that could take medicine, energy efficiency, and many other sectors to a whole new dimension. With regard to medicine, simple biocomputers will use DNA and/or proteins to recognize specific chemical targets, store a few bits of information, and then report their status by changing color or emitting some other easily detectable signal. How the immune system will respond to these devices is still being tested. Beyond medicine, such cellular nanosensors could find many uses in agriculture and drug manufacturing. Because they are so small, nanosensors can collect information from millions of different points, which are sent to external devices that then integrate the data to generate incredibly detailed maps.

3. Next Generation Batteries Ramp Up Capacity: In many places, renewables are relegated to niche roles because of the lack of an affordable, reliable technology to store the excess energy that is made when conditions are ideal, and to release the power onto the grid as demand picks up. Better batteries could solve this problem, enabling emissions-free renewables to grow even faster—and making it easier to bring reliable electricity to the 1.2 billion people who currently live without it. For people who currently have no access to the grid—no light to work by at night, no Internet to mine for information, no power to do the washing or to irrigate the crops—the combination of renewable generation and grid-scale batteries is utterly transformative, a potent antidote for poverty. But better batteries also hold enormous promise for the rich world as it struggles to meet the formidable challenge of removing most carbon emissions from electricity generation within the next few decades—and doing so at the same time that demand for electricity is growing.

4. Open AI Ecosystem: Personal assistants are a luxury of the super elite, yet with major improvements in artificial intelligence systems, that might not be the case for long. Previous attempts—notably Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s OK Google, and Amazon’s Echo services—are proprietary, making it hard for entrepreneurs to extend with new features, and their useful skills are limited. Up to now, machines have been largely oblivious to the details of our work, our bodies, and our lives: context. A human PA knows when you are interruptible, stressed, bored, tired, or hungry; the PA knows who and what is important to you, and also what you would prefer to avoid. AI systems are gaining the ability to acquire and interpret contextual cues so that they can gain these skills as well. Vendors will try to use such systems to influence our purchase choices: how consumers react to this dilemma will determine the success or failure of the industry.

5. Optogenetics Lights Up Therapeutic Neuroscience: Brains—especially the human brain—are overwhelmingly complex. To record neural activity, scientists use electrodes, but this is an imprecise method because it stimulates an entire region, not an individual brain cell, and does not distinguish between different types of brain cells. This is starting to change thanks to a 2005 breakthrough in the newly created field, optogenetics. The technique uses genetic engineering to make neurons respond to particular colors of light, allowing neuroscientists to be far more precise in their research. Built on research done in the 1970s on pigment proteins—known collectively as rhodopsins and encoded by the opsin gene family—these proteins work like light-activated ion pumps. With more precise measurements, medical quandaries like Parkinson’s disease have the potential to be studied more closely and, perhaps, cured.

6. Organs-On-Chips Allow New Views of Human Biology: Many important biological studies and practical drug tests can be done only by studying an organ as it operates, yet organs are too precious in transplants to be used for research. A new technology could fill this need by growing functional pieces of human organs in miniature, on microchips. So far, various groups have reported success making miniature models of the lung, liver, kidney, heart, bone marrow, and cornea. Possibly the most important application is in developing new medicines. Animal testing is not just controversial in the sense that activists decry abuse, but also in that animal trials rarely provide reliable insights into how humans will react to the same drug. Further down the line, miniature organs might be produced for personalized medicine, using stem cells derived from the patient to test in advance, and without harm, how they will react to a given treatment.

7. Perovskite Solar Cells Supercharge Electricity Production: Silicon solar cells, which have dominated the market thus far, suffer serious limitations. The first major limitation of silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells is that they are made from a material that is rarely found in nature in the pure, elemental form needed. While there is no shortage of silicon in the form of silicon dioxide (beach sand), it takes tremendous amounts of energy to get rid of the oxygen attached to it. Perovskites—a wide-ranging class of materials in which organic molecules made mostly of carbon and hydrogen bond with a metal such as lead and a halogen such as chlorine in a three-dimensional crystal lattice—can be made much more cheaply and with fewer emissions. Moreover, perovskites are lighter and less rigid than silicon solar cells, cutting the cost of installation. What is more, the efficiency of perovskites has increased dramatically, while silicon solar cells have not been able to increase efficiency beyond 25% for 15 years. Even a relatively small supply of these new cells could be bring solar power to remote locations that are not yet connected to any electrical grid.

8. Systems Metabolic Engineering Turns Microbes into Factories: The factories that make the products of modern life do so, by and large, out of chemicals of various kinds. Microbes arguably offer even more potential, in the long term, to make inexpensive materials in the incredible variety of properties that we now take for granted. Rather than digging the raw materials of modern life from the ground, we can instead “brew” them in giant bioreactors filled with living microorganisms. Price and performance are clearly the limiting factors to the widespread adoption of bio-based chemical production, and most current adoption is in expensive chemicals that are difficult to produce conventionally (i.e. biodegradable surgical sutures). As biochemical production scales up to large industrial use, it will be important to avoid both competing with food production for land use and also accidental releases of engineered microorganisms into the environment.

9. Blockchain Enhances Privacy, Security, and Conveyance of Data: The technology behind Bitcoin, Blockchain is a decentralized public ledger of transactions that no one person or company owns or controls. With copies of the blockchain scattered all over the planet, and encrypted using mathematical techniques, it is considered to be effectively tamper-proof. The potential of this technology, however, extends far beyond monetary transactions. Like the Internet, the blockchain is an open, global infrastructure upon which other technologies and applications can be built. And like the Internet, it allows people to bypass traditional intermediaries in their dealings with each other, thereby lowering or even eliminating transaction costs. By using the blockchain, individuals can exchange money or purchase insurance securely without a bank account, even across national borders. Furthermore, Blockchain technology lets strangers record simple, enforceable contracts without a lawyer, and it makes it possible to sell real estate, event tickets, stocks, and almost any other kind of property or right without a broker. Wholehearted adoption of blockchain would disrupt the white-collar workforce in a way that has not happened for decades.

10. Two-Dimensional Materials Create New Tools for Technologists: A new class of materials are emerging with far-reaching potential. Known as two-dimensional materials, this class of lattice-like layers—combined like Legos to build complex materials—may be to the 21st century what steel and silicon was to the 20th. Mixing and matching these ultrathin compounds—each with unique optical, mechanical, and electrical properties—may produce tailored materials optimized for a wide range of functions. Graphene, made of a flat sheet of carbon, has immense promise. Stronger than steel, harder than diamond, lighter than almost anything, transparent, flexible, and an ultrafast electrical conductor, graphene has it all. Initially more costly than gold, graphene has tumbled in price thanks to improved production technologies. Graphene recently became cheap enough to incorporate in water filters, which makes purification more affordable. It will prove useful in bringing clean water to developing nations.